Alien 1979 Review

 Alien 1979 Review 

Alien 1979

Science Fiction is about merging technology with any given aspect of humanity. In the case of Alien, it’s a merging of technology with horror. Horror has three major conventions. Confrontation with evil, the uncanny, and a final sublime moment when the evil is defeated. Science can be fun, but science has a dark side and can be used for evil. People have used science before to make deadly gasses and to make malware. We see evil merged with technology this in the film as the evil Company Weyland Yutani assigns an android to front as an on board doctor with orders to capture and retrieve an alien lifeform. Their goals are unclear, but they want the most dangerous alien they can find and are willing to see the crew killed off to bring him home. The android facilitates the birth of the alien and even protects him. We see the uncanny merged with technology when the crew finds the ruin of an ancient spaceship helmed by an alien skeleton. We see the sublime merged with technology as Ripley escapes in a lifepod and enters cyrosleep after defeating the alien.

The horror of extraterrestial life is merged by sci fi in the film Alien. The alien is a powerful creature that turns our strengths into weaknesses and thrives where we are most vulnerable like air ducts and vent shafts. Emotions are one of the things that make our brains so powerful over the millennia. Lambert freezes, overcome by her emotions, when she sees the sheer power of the alien. Before that, the crew gets so worked up after bringing the injured Kane aboard, that they begin fighting because Ripley was going to leave him quarantined outside the ship. We think we are ready to meet aliens until their blood turns out to be acid. The spaceships that once inspired hope and wonder become moist, greasy, poorly lit tombs. What we discovered out there doesn’t bring us love, it ushers in our doom.

Science has a dark side, and it can be very beautiful and scary. In the time of HP Lovecraft scientists were making huge discoveries that challenged how humans had seen the world. We thought the whole universe was one big galaxy, but we discovered different stars of different shaped galaxies, young galaxies, growing galaxies... dead galaxies. Black holes. Dead stars. We began exploring the bottom of the ocean because of the advent of the submarine and diving suits. We discovered amphibious predators of the deep sea where it's so dark that the lack of light deprives the human brain of its senses and causes permeant damage to the nerves of the mind. Anthropologist also discovered enemies of ancient hominids when they  disinterred the extinct breeds of human. We would identify these creatures as monsters, not human. They had cone shaped skulls because their brains were so small, or teeth so giant they couldn't close their  seething mouths, or thick ridges on top of their skulls which held together an extra layer of muscle around the face. Anthropologists considered these some kind of human, but agree that these species were cruel, stupid, and ugly. They cannibalized their own young, and terrorized the early humans by sneaking into their caves until the humans finally had the power and intent to destroy them.... or interbreed with them. HP Lovecraft was inspired by these terrible discoveries. 

The real question of the day: What terrible thing will we discover next? And do you really want to know? If you said "ew" when you read my introduction, then you are not ready to confront the Cosmic Horrors. In HP Lovecraft's view, humans are weak, small, defenseless, self centered, and ready to be eaten by bigger, smarter, cooler, more interesting, more powerful... and wiser entities. 

The best quote in Alien is in the scene when they receive the mysterious signal. Ripley asks if it is human, captain Dallas says "Unknown". This movie is Cosmic Horror manifested in its most perfect form. HR Giger created a wondrous monster who embodies everything we fear about the "Unknown". We don't know where the Xenomorph came from, it's history, how it breeds or how it eats. It seems to be an animal only interested in killing, but at some point these thing were flying around in spaceships. We don't know what it is feeling, we don't know what it's thinking. We assume it has no emotions or conscience because of its hostility, but with an elongated head like that- its possible that the Xenomorph is actually capable of thoughts and feelings that our minds can not even fathom. 

The thing about horror that people who aren't fans of the genre don't understand is that it's not just about thrills and danger and violence. You can get that from a spy movie. It's about the confrontation of the very real threat of evil, the ensuing battle, and the final sublime moment when the viewer overcomes their fears, and the evil is destroyed. It's scary because we don't start off strong and equipped to deal with this. It's a process. In this movie, we see the Cosmic Horror challenged and defeated by Ellen Ripley. Ripley is the first true female hero in any film up to this point. In most old movies, the roles of women are limited. They are either running away from a monster or running into the arms of the male protagonist.  It's a shame that the "cinema as high art" crowd of the 70s didn't embrace the ground breaking Sigourney Weaver who did not get enough attention for her role. The irony is that at the same time the Government was trying to pass the ERA *equal rights amendment* which even Richard Nixon wanted to see passed. It's a shame because of all the Cosmic Horror this film projects, it is countered by the very existence of this woman and her cat. 

If I have one more thing to offer in this discussion, it's that the human emotions in this movie overwhelms and dooms the crew of the Nostromo. Emotions on Earth helped us survive and evolve over the millennia but they are useless in the cold darkness of outer space. Emotions are our greatest strength, our empathy, our compassion, our fear, our curiosity, but they are also our most fatal weaknesses. 

"The Perfect Organism" The Xenomorph

Omon Ra Review:

 Omon Ra Review 

Graham Swanson

 The stereotype is that Science Fiction is for nerds so they can be entertained but I think it can be for creative minded people so that they can learn science. I was a nerdy day dreamer for a long time. Thinking of my own sci fi stories, I began to wonder how space worked, how time worked, how minerals and moisture worked in the vast vacuum of space. I learned no science from school, it all came from sci fi stories. Omon Ra spoke to me because I was a little communist who dreamed big and thought he had big things coming just like how Omon played with a toy jet and dreamed of being a pilot. I ended up growing into an adult who listened to Kino and Molchat Doma from Eastern Europe. Omon expected big things for him too, but the real world is unfair. Other peers get good jobs because the party likes their names, Vladnen, Seven. When a door finally opened for him, it was a glorious suicide mission. Then it turns out to be a conspiracy to fake a Moon landing. Likewise, no one ever called me with a job offer, when it did happen, it was for a job moving “hazardous waste” (which I would kill for now). Omon once saw the USSR as a world of wonder that was destined to send men to the stars. He believed the propaganda and thought he’d be a flying among them. The books ends with him escaping the Metro, and ascending to the Moscow ghetto. He can finally see life on Earth for what it really is.

Almost everyone can admit to life being unfair, and in Omon Ra we see that even sci fi can persuade us to believe in a dream that someday the world will be better. The USSR used sci fi to persuade it’s people into believing a bright future was one rocket blast away, when really they were still trying to figure out how to hook your house to a sewer, how to industrialize the struggling sectors, and how to bring backwater villages in Turkmenistan into the 20^th century. The novel came out after the fall of the Soviet Union, and it never achieved those things. The USSR did invent sputnik and send a man into space, but just as depicted in Omon Ra, their technology was hastily put together patchwork likely stolen from a science facility in the West. People at the time of the Cold War didn’t know the USSR had these weaknesses. The USSR reached an economic peak in the 60s and 70s, and spread it’s message of the future so effectively that few even in the West doubted that the USSR would one day prevail. Not that long ago everyone thought that the internet would make everyone equal, that there would be no rich and poor, and that we’d all share the same information. Then one day, the internet turned out to be a big ghetto over the Metro of Amazon, Social Media, and news commentary shows.

The USSR used propaganda to make its people look into the future of Communism to distract them from the reality of the present. Afterall, Communism was an ideaology of the future. There is a very popular misconception that the Soviet Union was communist. It wasn't. It was ruled by a Communist Party that wanted to ACHIEVE communism, and never did. Every Premeir took office with a plan to achieve Communism in their lifetime but it never happened. Marx didn't think people could force Communism. He believed it would occur naturally over time just as Monarchies and Capitalist Empires did. The USSR would become convinced advancements in science would lead them to the Communist Utopia, and so they invented their own genre of Socialist Sci Fi to create the idea that the People of the USSR were on the brink of a glorious future. However  the contradictions of Soviet society created a dystopian vision that mixed science fiction with the squalor of East European slums. Omon Ra is heavy with this imagery. The young cadets sit with their friends over a small fire, drink fluid from chipped bottles, smoke inferior cigarettes, while looking up at the stars and discussing space flight. They play with toy spaceships in their youth, but as they train to leave earth, their equipment is described better as kitchenware. Saucepans, handles, pedals. The small pilot they discover in their toy ship reflect an eerie fate that they are expendable agents who will be sacrificed to the dream of a futuristic utopia. 

The USSR did launch a man into space, not for science, but for propaganda. In Omon Ra everything the cadets are taught is some kind of indoctrination. It even seems that their value is determined by the kind of message they provide to the advantage of the party ideology. Truth is not the goal, but an illusion that someday the hammer and sickle will be carved into the face of the moon. Scientific truth is a cold thing to find. Oman Ra ends with a surreal question of if the journey to the Moon was even real. For propaganda purposes, all they need to do is put the idea in people's heads that the USSR made it to the moon, but the actual accomplishment is not necessary. People do not need to know the truth, they just need to believe. Reality in this sense is perception, not experience. Truth exists in our consciousness, and its often manipulated, if not challenged. Science is hard to believe because it challenges many of beliefs humans have possessed for about as long as we've been alive. Humans of the modern age must face that we are a speck of dust in the grand scale of the cosmos, not the center of the universe. They must face that fossil evidence suggests that life on Earth derives from Tiktaalik, it didn't come here on a spaceship with fully developed brains and spinal chords capable of speech and a desire to perform dance concerts. Fantasy grasps the perceptions of reality and plays with them to create a new reality that seems wondrous yet plausible like the Nordic Wonderland of Skyrim. Science Fiction plays with the what science considers to be true to merge reality with technological concepts. 

I heard once about a man who was from Ukraine, and spent ww2 in a POW camp. During his confinement, he wrote a science fiction novel, but he threw it out after the war. "The science had changed" is how he explained it. There was things that he didn't know going into the camp that he knew when the war had ended, and the facts and measurements no longer held up. Personally, I say the scientific errors are what makes Sci Fi so great. We aren't watching documentaries when we watch Star Trek, Omon Ra is a not an instruction manual on how to drive a Lunokhod. It should be CONSISTANT to the world it takes place in, but the ending of the novel creates as much joy as seeing junk explode in outer space in Star Wars. Before we know he is beneath the Moscow metro, he is essentially riding a tricycle on the moon, turns the moon red, and tries to fire a gun in outer space. I must say, I preferred the propaganda. 

Socialist Sci Fi Propaganda

One America. Now and Forever: Fallout and the New Millennium

 

One America. Now and Forever:

Fallout and the New Millunium.

Malcolm McDowell, the voice of John Henry Eden

Reactionary Leaders Have Achieved Popularity across the West in the 2000s.

The fateful Battle of Hoover Dam is the most significant geopolitical event since Stalingrad 

The Fallout series takes the technologies that bind us to a globalized industrial capitalist system and eradicates our dependence on them with the post apocalypse sub genre of Sci fi. There are no smart phones and no internet because they were never invented. The timeline is a retrofuturistic alternative history that resembles the early cold war. Even the impressive technology that does exist looks like something they might imagine in the 1950s. The remains of big, bulky, atomic powered super suits and rocket cars litter the radioactive wastes.

Imagine Washington DC, but it’s now a warzone of ruined monuments that once stood for America’s promised liberty. The Congress is now fortified by a race of Super Mutant cannibals who feast on the bones of the fallen survivors of nuclear war. It’s no accident that in the dawn of the New Millennium the generation following the end of the cold war welcomed the promise of a post apocalypse. It was called Fallout 3, and in 2008 it blew the hinges off the post apocalyptic genre. Ever since then, a post apocalyptic dystopia has been the prominent setting for video games, movies, novels, tv shows, and there is no end in sight. The Fallout video game series is an experience in which its audience confronts concerns over the instability of the 2000s, the merging of devices that bind our lives to tech companies, and the rise of Reactionary political parties across Western Democracies.

The Cold War ended 30 years ago. The Berlin Wall went down. Soviet leaders drained Vodka in hidden bunkers and committed suicide as one East European republic after another declared it’s independence from the USSR. The promise of a glorious socialist future never came true. Communist countries like China opened up their markets and joined the globalized industrial capitalist system.

Many believed a bright future of peace and prosperity now awaited them. Instead the 2000s gave us meth, 9/11, wars, economic decline, oligarchy, the reemergence of Nationalism, outbreaks of deadly diseases, riots, social isolation, distrust and division of society, the theft of our private information by tech companies, and limited job opportunities that often fail to cover the ever rising expenses of living, most of which involve soul sucking long hours, no weekends off, in industrial dungeons, while AI programs make art and write poetry. The effect has divided people, caused the birth rate to drop, and wrought havoc to the globalized industrial capitalist system that not so long ago looked like it would last for one thousand years.

That is why in 2008, a mere sci fi video game became a hit, and it was no accident. It was Fallout 3. Despite it’s dreadful tone of a future without a social contract, morals, terrorized by monsters and deformity, and juxtaposed destruction with wholesome imagery of the American 1950s, many people welcomed it. The series provided an escape from the swift transitions of the New Millennium. No debt, no health insurance payments, and no anxiety created by the volatile era.

The re imagining of a world where we can start over and carve our own destinies became a popular fantasy in the New Millennium. Fallout not only brought the science fiction genre to its next phase, it also merged technology with the fear, anxiety, and promise that even in the Post Apocalypse, we can overcome these issues. We see this throughout the entire Fallout series. “War never changes,” is the first line spoken in every Fallout game. New societies emerge with their own social contracts and visions of the future, but just like today, these partisan factions won’t stop fighting, and they seldom address the needs of the people they claim to serve.

The only manufacturing that seems to exist is small scale, independent “chem” labs that keep the bottle cap currency alive. Drug use is rampant, if not depended on, among the people. The player gets a chance to end the faction conflicts, gets opportunities to help addicts, but at times the drug use seems to be the right thing to do when encountering injured people who can’t go on with broken limbs without a dose of morphine or “Medx.” These player actions are a reflection of social problems that members of modern society can face in real life. In Fallout, as today, we turn to technology for answers.

By the 2010s, technology had been merged into the lives of the New Millennium like nothing before it. Smartphones, pocket sized computers, had been merged with their jobs, their food, their friendships, their money, even their love lives. They weren’t just using technology, that began to depend on it, and it created a huge changes in their culture and imaginations. This assemblage challenged long held traditions, and arguably had as negative of an effect on their society as it had created positive changes. On one had, smart phones stole user’s information and sold it without their knowledge, on the other hand, they ended phone booth kidnappings.

Technology only helps us as much as it hinders us. It’s convenient to believe that any technological progress is good, welcomed, or miraculous. Elizabeth Holmes convinced billions of dollars worth of people to invest her “technology” which she made sound like it was destined to change the life of every single diabetic forever. Really it was a box that spilled their blood in a warming tray. A microwave!

It may seem to be a cruel joke, but this relationship the New Millennium has with technology is reflected in the Fallout series as well. They don’t have the internet, smart phones, or AI dance clubs, but they do have strong messages about technology and its (mis)use. Fallout is world where that hyper connection to Silicon Valley Technology is removed from our lives. We are still experiencing this on a video game console, but it is a liberation from these technological confinements nonetheless.

Technology as seen in Fallout has led to the destruction of the world. War may never change, but the weapons did. The nuclear bomb feared in the mid 1900s was the ultimate symbol of how our creations could turn on us. In this world, the fears came true. Now humans must learn to grow food again. They must learn what water is good to drink and water isn’t again. They must learn to read again. They must learn to build shacks again.

One of the iconic factions, the Brotherhood of Steel, a knighthood that lives underground, dedicates their very lives to the principle that technology must not advance, and that people should be kept away from it. They however believe that with guidance and discipline, technology can be used. Another faction, Ceasar’s Legion, agrees, but to an extreme. They think that technology corrupted people and caused the war, but that all technology since the Bronze Age should be destroyed. They want to bring back a society that depends on slavery, pillaging, and magic spells.

The reactionary view that technology has harmed people is consistent throughout fallout, but it is challenged by the presence of the the PIPboy. A wristbound computer that can manage inventory, analyse health condition, play songs on the radio, generate a GPS mapping system, detect hostile entities, write notes, and detect radiation. It’s extremely helpful, essential to survival, and does nothing but support it’s user. In a world of technology gone wrong, it is a hopeful reminder that technology can be our friend.

Though it may seem to be inherent to the beliefs of the reactionary that technology should be removed in order to prevent the corruption of traditions and culture, one of the things that led to the rise of Right Wing parties in the New Millennium was technology itself. Since the early 1990s, far right political parties organized in small groups around the Netherlands, centered around deporting immigrants. After 9/11, the FBI took their thumb off far right groups and began to keep an eye on international terror, more than domestic threats. The result was the far right being free to assemble, spread messages on the internet, and to run for political offices.

They used the internet masterfully. A lot of them had already been communicating in codes and with inside jokes for decades. They were ready to spread their messages when Memes became popular. Far Right commentary shows popped up all over Youtube. Some of these people have been disgraced, but many are still on the air. They didn’t challenge technology, they saw what it’s power was, and they took the opportunity to use it.

Reactionary leaders in Europe, Brazil, Argentina have used the internet to achieve success in leadership. American President Donald Trump is famous for his effective Twitter posts. He even made alliances with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon, and Elon Musk of the Cybertruck. It’s very reminiscent of the Far Right in Fallout. If there is progress in Fallout, there are elements that want it removed.

In the Lore of Fallout, before the war that ended the world, America was ruled by a Nationalistic government. They invaded Canada, sucked Europe’s resources away, and while it’s ambiguous who started the war that destroyed the world, signs imply that it was a political party called the Enclave.

The Enclave was the government, and they might have caused the war because they were ready to protect themselves when it happened. They already had the best bunkers ready to go. They made sure all the food had radiation and preservatives so they could eat it, and they made sure to flood the country with guns so they could use them. When they arise again, it’s to conquer the former United States, destroy any lifeforms “corrupted” by radiation. They mean to wipe anyone mutated from the war, or anyone living in it’s poverty, from the face of the Earth. They plan to do it by taking over the only known water purifier and hooking poison up to it.

The Enclave is led by President John Henry Eden. Though he is never seen, his speeches will sound familiar to anyone alive in the New Millennium.

“We live in an age of poverty, greed, violence, destruction. Indeed, the very seat of the federal government, Washington D.C., has been reduced to what is now known as the "Capital Wasteland." The Capital Wasteland... How did it come to this, America? How did your leaders allow the most powerful nation on Earth… to die? The answer is really quite simple: Incompetence. Incompetence at the highest echelons of power. We put our trust, our faith, in halfwits. Our intrepid leaders had everything they wanted! Power. Wealth. Prestige. And it made them lazy, America. Oh yes, and laziness breeds stupidity. Rest assured, I will not make the mistakes of my predecessors. When John Henry Eden builds a country, he builds it to last. The American way. Don't you, my darling America, deserve that? Don't you deserve a future free of war, and fear, and terrible uncertainty? Of course you do. As President of the United States, you have my solemn pledge that I will never rest, NEVER rest, until we all have what we deserve: A place to truly call... home.” (Enclave Radio. Fallout 3).

The players in Fallout must confront and defeat the in game Nationalism that is rising in the very real world around them. They overcome this threat by bringing peace to the waring factions, and getting them to join forces. They help the people of the wasteland, providing water, protection, medicine, everything the Enclave claims to provide but never does. They must use technology for the greater good, like turning on old power plants and distributing energy across the grid, getting Hoover Dam back online, by powering on the water purifier. The player always has a choice though with this power.

It may seem like black humor, but the option is always presented to the player to use technology for evil. You can launch a ship into space, or you can cause it to crash because it would be funnier that way. You can turn on the power plant for everyone, you can send it all to a satellite that aims a deathbeam back at the planet, you can send it all the Casinos so you can gamble 24/7. The reminder of how technology can be misused tempts us everyday in the New Millennium. What keeps the world alive and growing is the mindful use of the technology we possess. In the end of things, most will use it’s power for the greater good, if we fail, the world will bring destruction to us.