Some Thoughts on the 'Alien' Film Franchise & 'Prometheus'

Dir’s: Ridley Scott/James Cameron/David Fincher

Recently, my boyfriend showed me ‘Alien’ 1-3, since I had never seen them, before we saw ‘Prometheus’ at the cinema. What follows are some thoughts I had about the films; some things I liked and one major theory which is the result of my inability to repress my uber-feminist alter-ego. This theory kind of clubs the ‘Alien’ franchise with ‘Prometheus’, which I know isn’t strictly speaking a prequel, but the thematic similarities will, I think, excuse this. So, to be clear, this isn't really a 'review' as such, but rather a couple of ideas I wanted to write about.

One of the best things about this film is that it actually features a strong female protagonist, who isn’t restrained by stereotypes. In a typical horror film, the majority of the women characters are there to play the ‘pretty victim’, the ‘damsel in distress’ with more cleavage. They scream a lot, and only seem to be there to make any men who may rescue them look good (and to sleep with them out of gratitude). Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), however, kicks ass as potentially the first action heroine. She’s a really strong character, but she isn’t masculinised: she remains very feminine throughout the series, and in ‘Promethues’ Dr Elizabeth Shaw continues in this same tradition, drawing a direct parallel between the two films. Perhaps to emphasise her femininity, Ripley develops a maternal bond with Newt in ‘Aliens’, in a stark contrast the more masculine figures around her (the marines, and the military in general, being a hyper-masculine environment), who are more abrupt with the child.

I now want to discuss the alien itself. It is fundamentally a ‘horror’ creature, designed to intimidate humans to cause fear in the characters and in the audience. It does this, along with most of such creatures, through asserting physical dominance; it is bigger, faster, stronger and more ferocious than mankind. The way that the aliens differ, however, is in the way that they assert a sexual dominance over their victims in an horrifically violent manner. This isn’t particularly surprising if you research the art work of designer H. R. Giger, who designed the alien. His work is often highly sexualised, but also grotesque in that it deals with biomechanical creatures and distorted faces. It certainly adds an interesting dynamic, since the threat isn’t just about being killed, it’s about a sexual violation of the body; the face-hugger restrains the victim and inserts a tube down their throat which it uses to impregnate them, which is fundamentally an oral form of rape. The victim remains alive for a time, but their body is being used against their will by the alien to give it life, and they then have to wait for their inevitable death. The death itself is like a hideous perversion of birth, in that it bursts out of the victim, completely obliterating them, forfeiting their life, not for a new generation, but for a species whose only objective seems to be destruction.

This is a theme continued in the more recent ‘Prometheus’, as the sexual violation of these other creatures is made more explicit. When Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) becomes infected with what I’m going to refer to as ‘alien goo’, and subsequently has sex with Elizabeth Shaw (Naomi Rapace), he impregnates her with an alien foetus, which grows at a superhuman rate. In infecting her in this way, the sexual dominance of the alien is brought closer to home, since it’s now an anatomically correct form of rape, and also because it was done using a host. The sexual act itself may have been consensual, but it’s still a sexual violation in that the creature forcefully implants itself into her body. In infecting her in this way, the sexual dominance of the alien is brought closer to home, since it’s now an anatomically correct form of rape, and also because it was done using a familiar host, giving the whole experience an air of the uncanny.

 When she is denied an abortion, she has to hurriedly perform the procedure herself using a machine, which then leaves her face-to-face with the horrific thing that had been growing in her uterus. This has massive social implications, given that abortion is still today a controversial subject. There are those who believe that life is life, and that even in rape cases, abortions should be illegal. She needs to terminate her pregnancy because her body is being used to generate life for a creature put there against her will, and her terror at the prospect of it remaining inside her has huge echoes with real rape cases. Shaw’s case then becomes a pro-choice symbol for any woman who has been sexually violated, in that the life that is created by the attack is monstrous, emphasising the horror of real women in a similar situation.

The alien isn’t, however, a purely male sexual threat. The victims of the sexual attacks by the aliens are both male and female, thus rendering both human genders equally submissive, rather than falling into the trap of positioning the female as ‘weaker’. The main equaliser however, in terms of the sexual threat, came in ‘Prometheus’, when we finally see the face of a (giant) face-hugger. Whilst the probe it uses to impregnate its victims may be seen as phallic, its face looks like a huge vagina with tentacles and teeth. This effectively neutralises the gender of the alien as a sexual attacker, as it is resembles both male and female sexual organs in different ways, and both aspects form part of its sexual attack.

Now I’d like to move on to some of the techniques and technologies the film employs, which I think are a huge part of its success. The thing that I liked the most about these films is that for the most part, the creature is a guy in a really scary suit, moving in inhuman ways rather than just a computer generated picture of something scary. CGI is great technology, but when you’re acutely aware that the monster you’re supposed to be terrified of isn’t even vaguely ‘real’, it takes some of the terror out of it. In ‘Alien’, the monster might be a guy in a suit (and I know it will have been digitally enhanced in post-production), but it’s a physical entity, and that knowledge that there is something really there in the room with the actors makes it far easier for an audience to suspend their disbelief and accept it as a ‘real’ threat. And the best thing is, there was even an element of this in ‘Prometheus’ – it wasn’t left behind in the seventies when CGI wasn’t exactly a viable option.

Another positive point! These films don’t just assume ‘it’s the future, of course we’ll have faster than light travel!’, but come up with an alternative. When science fiction films (and novels) all decide on the same tropes, it becomes boring. In the ‘Alien’ universe, we don’t have jumps to warp-speed or the spooling up of FTL drives. They combat the problem of covering impossibly large distances in space differently, by placing the crew members into hypersleep, cryogenically freezing them so that they can cross the universe, and be re-awoken in the same youthful state without making Einstein frown. I like this idea primarily because I find it more believable. I would love to believe in the science fiction of travelling faster light, but it will only ever be a fiction. It’s physically impossible for a start. (Although I, along with many others, was briefly excited and subsequently disappointed by the incorrect readings at CERN of late). I’m not saying that we’ll be able to keep to the ‘Alien’ time-frames of space travel, or even that we’d get very far, but for some reason I find the ‘Alien’ model of long-distance space travel more acceptable. Maybe it’s because the writers didn’t just make the same assumptions about space travel as every other science fiction writer, so I’m giving them credit for not using the same, tired ‘deus ex machina’.