TV Review: Alien: Earth

What are little (robot) girls made of?

After half a century of increasingly questionable sequels, prequels and crossovers, there aren’t many scares left to extract from the iconic xenomorphs of Alien. But what can still be done with them is probe from new angles the questions the first film raised with regard to the rise of corporatocracy and the ways humans keep finding to predate on each other. In the case of the new TV series Alien: Earth, the most noticeable theme is the futility of subjecting life to a regime of property rights. You don’t truly own that which you can’t control, and you can’t control that which can set its own goals apart from yours. Even less can you be simultaneously a parent and an owner. You either help life grow or make it serve you.

Alien: Earth expands the worldbuilding of its franchise by adding more players to the dystopian corporate ecosystem: alongside Weyland-Yutani, i.e. the devil you know, we meet the newcomer Prodigy Corporation, which specializes in producing AI systems. We follow its immature founder, a narcissistic jerk with the most punchable face in the galaxy, for a handful of days preceding the planned launch of a service that promises to make human beings immortal by transferring their minds to artificial bodies. So far, this technology only works on children, because their minds are malleable enough. However, their new bodies have to be adult-shaped, because robots don’t grow. As you may imagine, this is a very disturbing, even traumatic experience for the first batch of kids recruited as testers.

Meanwhile, a Weyland-Yutani spaceship carrying specimens of xenomorph and other assorted adorables crash-lands on a city that happens to belong to Prodigy, so a legal battle ensues over who has the right to salvage however much is recoverable from the disaster. As it happens, Marcy, one of the kids who were put in those shiny robot bodies, has a brother who works as a first responder in that city, so she pleads with the Prodigy boss to be allowed to lead a rescue mission at the crash site. Her excuse is that it would give them a useful opportunity to test their new bodies in harsh conditions, but what she really wants is to reconnect with her brother, because the mind transfer project is an industry secret and, for all he knows, she’s dead.

Mayhem erupts soon enough, and a pants-coloring fright is had by all. Many throats are cut open, many limbs are impaled, many liters of blood are inadvisably conveyed from people’s interior to the same people’s exterior. Anyway, the Prodigy team manages, at no small cost, to get hold of a cargo of several xenomorph eggs (and other assorted adorables). You already know how the xenomorphs work. Much of the fun of the season lies in learning how each of the rest of the critters go about making breakfast out of any passing human. The breakout star is one spry little fellow that the Xenopedia tells me is called Trypanohyncha ocellus, but I’ve seen more fun people call it Optipus, and I personally prefer to call it Tentoculus. It’s adorable in exactly the wrong ways.

Once the team and their loot return to Prodigy headquarters, it’s time for the real drama. Some of the former kids are suddenly thrown into adult-sized responsibilities, while others are left to deal with adult-sized trauma on their own. It becomes clear that every step this company makes is calculated to feed the ego of the boss, who likes to project a personal image of a chaotic manchild so smart that everyone bores him, but his actual choices reveal the self-destructive reach of his arrogance. A game of mismatched agendas begins between full humans, humans with robotic bodies, and full robots, with the ending episodes adding a hundred more dimensions to the two original Alien films’ commentary on twisted forms of parenthood.

There are thin parts to this plot, but you easily forget about them when you watch the fantastic performances that this show boasts. The actors who have to play child characters in adult bodies prove great at speaking like children, moving like children, emoting like children. And the self-proclaimed genius who put them in that situation is deliciously detestable, ultimately revealed to have been a mistreated child who had to make adult decisions too soon but didn’t learn to break the cycle, and grew up to inflict a more sophisticated form of violence upon his substitute children. And I don’t even mean the obvious violence of separating a mind from its body (the transfer process requires killing the child), but the easier to disguise violence of turning people into instruments.

What with all the drama you can see this story has to offer, the most interesting relationship is the one that develops between the former kid Marcy and the xenomorphs. Her advanced electronic brain figures out how to communicate with them, and they become unexpected prison pals. It certainly helps that her body has no meat for it to munch on, but from her side of the dynamic, what connects them is that they’ve both been forcibly pulled out of the natural stream of life, and now they’re lost and vulnerable among people whose only sincere intention is to use them. Whereas the Alien movies showed us a being that usurps the role of offspring to prey on its lifegiver, the Prodigy Corporation is an impostor parent that preys on its children.

Finding innovative ways to address the core questions that define a franchise is a challenging trick to pull off. Alien: Earth passes stellarly the prequel test that Alien: Romulus failed and that Andor taught the master class on, in that it doesn’t resort to shoehorned references to tickle viewers’ nostalgia buttons. Instead, it creates its own space in the franchise and grows from there.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Alien: Romulus is OK, and that's not OK

After the... ahem, headscratchable choices in the Alien prequels, a course correction was supposed to do more than rehash the exact same original formula

Unwary team visits inadvisable place. Inadvisable place has toothy critters. Toothy critters munch on unwary team. Yummy! Final girl survives. The end.

I get that many viewers were disappointed in Prometheus and Covenant, but that doesn't mean we should settle for the bare minimum. Alien: Romulus, a film burdened by the masses' anxious expectation to finally see a good Alien movie for the first time in decades, but also burdened by the curse of being plotwise an inconsequential interquel, fulfills exactly what was required of it. The problem is that it doesn't do anything beyond that. The beats of a monster/slasher/space/survival adventure are followed to the letter, the supporting characters recite their lines one by one before dutifully becoming xenomorph chow, the topic of robot rights is addressed with less lip service than plausible deniability, and characterization is kept at just enough thickness above cardboard to prevent this film from being reclassified as stop-motion.

I'm not saying Romulus doesn't have its moments. There's nothing to complain about re: visual spectacle. The shots of the characters' spaceship moving around the falling station convey a good sense of relative positions and sizes, the mandatory explosions are dosed responsibly, the interior lighting matches the emotional tone of each scene, the background planetary rings are a gorgeous sight, and the xenomorphs look as threatening as they should (even though a real-life biologist can nitpick their tendency to pose dramatically as not believably predatorlike). For the ends of a people-eating monster movie that aims to reliably jump-scare you for two hours, Romulus does the job.

But we should be asking more of an Alien movie. The themes of nature refusing to be controlled by human ambition; the fear and uncertainty inherent in motherhood; the way workplace exploitation resembles predatory violence; the impersonal cruelty of corporate calculations; the horror of forced pregnancy; the open questions about robot morality; the symbolic mirroring between the classical Marxist analysis of people alienated from their production and the franchise's repeated image of victims alienated from their reproduction—all the key preoccupations that define the Alien series are present in Romulus at the level of mere allusion without development.

The closest that Romulus gets to an interesting exploration of the canonical themes of Alien is the subplot where the robot gets a temporary upgrade with another robot's knowledge and personality. The robots aren't useful to the xenomorph breeding strategy of incubating their young inside living hosts, but having another digital consciousness in your head, supplanting your motivations and controlling your choices, comes quite close. And yet, the resolution of this subplot goes nowhere. The robot has a Blue Screen of Death, the upgrade is uninstalled, and all is back to normal. What's that I hear you mutter in grumpy tones? Character growth? Never heard of it!

As I said, the strength of Romulus is in its spectacle. But even this is delivered unevenly. There's a wonderfully tense scene near the end with xenomorph blood floating in zero gravity, but it comes immediately after a very silly fight where an entire herd of supposedly deadly xenomorphs gets dispatched in quick succession à la whack-a-mole. Soon after that, we get the predictable arrival of Chekhov's fetus and another extended fight that feels superfluous in a movie that should have ended by that point. It's a repeat of other fights we've already seen in other Alien entries.

And that's the final sin of Romulus: it's too reverent. Just like the catastrophic misfire that was The Rise of Skywalker, the Alien franchise under Disney control is now overeager to please old fans of the original movies and apologize for the audacity of the recent ones. Visual and spoken callbacks are thrown at the viewer for the instant dopamine rush, regardless of whether they make sense in their new context. And that's without getting to the ghoulish recycling of a dead actor's face with a Mummy Returns level of care.

If we don't count Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (and by all means, let's not count it), Fede Álvarez is the first Alien director whose childhood coincided with the first Alien movies, and his attitude toward their legacy is noticeably deferential. Being a relatively younger director tasked with reviving a legendary franchise, it's understandable that he has created a cast of YA stock characters who venture into the ruins of the Nostromo expedition. As if to reinforce the point, what these newcomers find is the mess left by their predecessors' attempts to experiment with the alien.

Alien: Romulus is exactly the return to form that you demanded if you found Prometheus and Covenant blasphemous to the spirit of the franchise. But Romulus has mistaken returning to form with staying frozen inside a stasis pod.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [film]: Alien: Covenant

In space, no one can hear you groan. 

Alien is one of my all-time favorite films, something I watch a couple times a year. It never gets old, because it's basically perfect. The science fiction is good, the horror is good--and they are really well integrated. That's rare in film. Most of the time, "science fiction" is just a backdrop for stories that are, in essence, horror or action films. But with Alien, the science fictional and the horrifying are equal partners. The keystone, if you will, is the discovery of an alien species on a distant planet--and the covert decision by Weyland Enterprises, owner of the Nostromo, to exploit--and if possible weaponize--the discovery. Then shit hits the fan.

In 2012, director Ridley Scott returned to the franchise he had launched with the prequel Prometheus, which tells the story of a starship crew seeking out the "Engineers," an alien species you'll recognize from the crash site at the beginning of Alien. Along with being terrible, Prometheus had the ignoble goal of literalizing the subtle metaphor represented by the Engineers in the 1979 film. There, the crashed spaceship--far more advanced than anything possessed by humans--warned of hubris in the face of the invasive xenomorph species. But, in Prometheus, the Engineers are transformed into blah blah kill the humans something something.

Alien: Covenant goes one step further in undermining the genius of Alien--this time by transforming the xenomorphs from reflection of the quintessentially human assumptions of mastery of nature into the science project of a mad android. To which all I can say is:

What.

The.

Fuck.

I'll never for the life of me understand why Hollywood directors can't leave well enough alone--like Han shooting first or making the Death Star vulnerability the deliberate ploy of a guilty engineer rather than embodiment of an empire's megalomania and arrogance. But this is far worse than those examples. At least Rogue One was a good film.

Alien: Covenant is not. After the first 45 minutes or so, it is entirely predictable, tedious and by the numbers rehash of every other monster survival film you've ever seen, including all previous entries in the Alien series. And as much as I love Michael Fassbender, David the android sucks.

This is made worse by the fact that, for the first 45 minutes, Alien: Covenant teases that it might actually be a pretty good science fiction film. There is real drama, related to the dangers of spaceflight, which is far more compelling than the sub-AVP crap it degenerates into. (At least AVP was funny!)

And so Alien: Covenant made me realize a few things. One, that there will never be another good Alien film, and certainly none directed by Ridley Scott. Two, that directors and film studios need to realize that science fiction is compelling in and of itself, but in order for that to be the case, "science fiction" needs to be more than just a setting for other kinds of films. That's not a dig at sci-fi/horror; it is a dig at a film industry that can't conceive of the sci-fi without the horror.


The Math

Baseline Assessment: 3/10.

Bonuses: +1 for a good first 45 minutes or so; +1 for Danny McBride was actually pretty good in a non-comedic role.

Penalties: -1 for but it was garbage from that point on; -1 for revising canon in a way that undermines some of the best themes of the original.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10. "Very little good I can say about this."


***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.

The Six Best Horror Movies (if you're a weenie)

I don't mind Halloween, in and of itself. There are costumes, booze, it's fall. All great things. But then every show and movie list is a non-stop gore fest and, folks, I do not do gore. Event Horizon might be a great movie, but I watched it from behind a pillow.

That's how I spend most horror movies (also out: GoT, Walking Dead, etc), and thus, most of October. So, in the event you are a weenie like me who does want to watch something creepy, I give you: The Six Best Horror Movies for Weenies.

A quick note, though: This isn't a joke list, where I just pick crappy horror movies. I am going for legitimate creep factor here, just without gore.

1. Psycho (1960). Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. While it gets credit for essentially jump-starting the gore-splattered slasher genre, Psycho is so much more than that. It s layers of creepiness, with one of the all-time great twists and, of course, brilliant directing from the master.

2. Alien (1979). Chloe has already written the definitive piece on why Alien is one of the best movies of all time. It relies on feelings of isolation and fear of the unseen to keep you on the edge of your seat, and your head spinning after the credits roll. It's okay, though, Aliens is also the best sequel ever, so you can keep the party going.

3. Predator (1987). Like Alien, Predator relies more on the feeling of being stalked by, well, a predator than sheer shock value. Gorier than the other on this list, what with flayed corpses here and there, it ends up being Arnie at his best vs on ugly mother... Also, Predators is vastly underrated, if more of an action movie than horror.

4. Sunshine (2007). If this belongs on a horror movie list is justifiably up for debate, but this isn't that horror movie list, so here we are. And just like its place on this list, there are people who love this movie, and those that hate it. It is certainly flawed, but the whole thing is beautifully nihilistic and claustrophobic. It is a movie that traps you right along with the crew and makes you feel completely hemmed in and hopeless. For that, I give it a spot on this list and almost forgive its stupid third act.

5. The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The best thing a horror movie can do, for my money, is stick with you and haunt you. This is that movie. A stunning film by any standard, with brilliant directing, acting and score, this movie haunts your dreams in ways Freddy can only wish for. There are no supernatural, immortal monsters or demons here, no inbred barely-human murder families, just a movie informed by real serial killers, and performances given by actors who studied the monsters they were imitating, and every bit of those shows and it's scarier than any made-up monster.

6. Les Diaboliques (1955) Editors note: This comes courtesy friend o' the blog E. Catherine Tobler, who told me about this movie, but I haven't seen it yet, but sounds too good to omit. Her words: I first saw Les Diaboliques when I was in junior high--every year, our art class was rewarded with a film we would probably otherwise never see. We knew nothing about it, so as the black and white images began to unfold, we could only imagine where we might go.

The story, set at boarding school on the outskirts of Paris, is one of horror, obsession, and revenge, the perfect thing to show junior high art students, right? Simone Signoret is flawless and cold, Vera Clouzot timid and hard. Wife and mistress conspire to kill the man who has overwhelmed their lives--but everyone is a devil and who may you trust in such a conspiracy? (Three may keep a secret if two are dead, thank you Ben Franklin.)

This film never shows you a thing all the way--the pool that shimmers in the school yard is a haze of sunlight, or a tangle of weeds and trash, never revealing what lurks beneath the water. That's always more frightening than seeing the monster, right--or is it? Because the monster in this film... Well. That'd be saying too much, and the film itself cautions viewers to not tell others what they have seen. A note: the 1996 remake is terrible, erasing all the wonder of the 1955 original. More Editors notes: remakes of good movies are always terrible.

Feel free to chime in with your favorite horror movies, gory or otherwise! And have a safe and happy Halloween, everyone.

-DESR
Dean is the author of the 3024AD series of science fiction stories (which should be on YOUR summer reading list). You can read his other ramblings and musings on a variety of topics (mostly writing) on his blog. When not holed up in his office
tweeting obnoxiously writing, he can be found watching or playing sports, or in his natural habitat of a bookstore.

Why This Matters: Alien

Why does something matter? What context surrounds it that makes it something to look more closely at? Here at Nerds, I recently pitched an idea to the lovely Powers That Be that would allow me to explore different influential pieces from SFF and horror. I wanted to look at specific episodes of shows, short stories, novels, movies, that have had some lasting effect whether it be to the genre, to pop culture, to different critical theories/lenses, to fandoms, and so on, to try to get at Why THIS Matters. A note on these posts: because I’ll be analyzing them from a variety of angles and contexts, there will most likely be spoilers within for the pieces that I am talking about. If you haven’t seen/read them and wish to, avoid the post and come back later.

For this inaugural Why This Matters, I’ll be looking at the film Alien. Why Alien for the first post, you may ask? Well, for one, it was one of the main reasons I wanted to do this series of posts in the first place. For two, it’s a damn good film. And for three, why not celebrate something with a strong female lead?

Alien, which came out in 1979, was written by Dan O’Bannon and directed by Ridley Scott.  Which, let’s pause for a second for a WTF moment (What the Filmmaker?!) to consider that Ridley Scott’s first three films were: The Duellists, Alien, and Bladerunner. He made three perfect films in a row. Let’s all applaud Scott for a second, and forget about certain later films. Okay, moving on, the plot of the film is probably familiar to almost anyone—even if they haven’t seen it (now would be a goodtime for me to shame a friend of mine—who claims to like sci-fi—publicly, but I’m not going to, because I’m above that). The Nostromo is a commercial spaceship that goes to a planet, investigating a mysterious signal, and ends up bringing back something very unwanted on to their ship. (There’s probably a direct correlation between the number of times I watched Alien/Aliens as a child and my phobia of parasites now, but I won’t linger on that.) The film then becomes basically a sci-fi version of And Then There Were None, as the crew members are picked off one-by-one. I once read, which has to be something apocryphal, that the film was pitched as: “Jaws in a haunted house in space.” And even if this is bogus, it actually serves as a pretty damn fine pitch because who wouldn’t want to watch that?

So why is it important? What makes this film such an enduring classic? There are many angles to take to answer this. From the critical perspective of Monster Theory, the xenomorph in Alien is the ultimate depiction of “fear of the unknown.” It has extremely limited screen time and is mostly seen as something barely glimpsed, a blip on the screen that moves too fast. (This is something many contemporary horror films would do well to consider: often the scariest monster is the one the audience has in their head leading up to the reveal, not the one they actually see on the screen. Knowing impedes dread.) From the perspective of its place in SFF and film as a whole, it’s important for what it inspired. So many sci-fi books and films can make a direct link back to Alien—whether in their filming, their pacing, or their depiction of otherworldly horror. From the perspective of design alone, there are so many things to point to in how Cobb, Foss, and particularly Giger influenced our collective vision of space, spaceships, and alien lifeforms.

However, I’d like to make a different, more personal, argument for the importance of Alien. For me, one of the aspects of the film with the most impact lies in its protagonist—Ellen Ripley (portrayed magnificently by Sigourney Weaver). The expectation of filmgoers, particularly at this time, was that the hero of the film would be the ship’s captain, Dallas (played by Tom Skerritt). However, it is Ripley—the only voice of reason, as she tries to insist on protocol—who becomes our hero. And what an interesting hero. Yes, she is tough, but she also shows fear—as anyone in this situation would—and survives not because she kicks alien ass, but rather because she thinks through the situation at hand (other than perhaps in her saving of Jones—but who wouldn’t save that adorable cat?). She follows protocol, uses rational thought to solve the problems at hand, and ultimately is the only survivor because she used her brain rather than force. I mentioned earlier that Alien (and its sequel Aliens) were two of the movies I watched most growing up. Looking back, I can’t think of a better protagonist, to have wanted to emulate. Ripley isn’t a “strong female character” (and doesn’t fall into the traps that that particular trope so often falls into) she’s just a strong character period.

Microreview [video game]: Alien: Isolation

(Almost) Perfect organism.

I’m a huge fan of the Alien franchise. Alien is an amazing movie. The rest of them are mostly good for different reasons, but Alien is the true masterpiece. The video games based on the franchise, however, have largely focused on Aliens and beyond. It’s all marines, and pulse rifles, and “game over, man”, and usually predators too. The next most recent Alien franchise game was Aliens: Colonial Marines and it was a huge mess, but it was a straight-up action game. A bug hunt, if you will. It seemed like Sega had wasted a lot of money and time to make a game that couldn’t do any justice to the movies. Now, we have Alien: Isolation. Note the difference in title. Alien rather than Aliens. Isolation, not Marines.

There is but one alien. There are no colonial marines. There are no pulse rifles. This is a game that wants to recreate the suspense and horror of the original Alien. The game casts the player as Amanda Ripley. Amanda is the daughter of Ellen Ripley, the main character from the Alien series. Amanda’s an engineer and she joins a Weyland-Yutani crew to retrieve the flight recorder of the ship her mother disappeared from in Alien, the Nostromo, from the space station Sevastopol.

Sevastopol, from a cutscene

Isolation is a first-person game, but to call it a first-person shooter would be misleading. Sevastopol is inhabited with scared civilians, scavengers, maintenance androids (known as Working Joes), and an alien. Though the game provides a handful of weapons and constructable devices to combat these threats, in most cases, it’s a better idea to run and hide. In sharp contrast to every single other Alien game ever, this alien is invulnerable. It cannot be killed, only chased off or evaded. The androids are not invulnerable, but they are rather hard to kill. You will waste a lot of ammunition if you try to kill all of them. Fortunately, Sevastopol is littered with cabinets, lockers, and closets to hide in. The AI is not particularly hard to get away from, either. The alien has rather good vision and runs faster than Ripley, but the androids seemed particularly unaware of their surroundings. They were more of a threat in numbers. Human combatants seemed to have the awareness of the alien, speed of androids, and guns. In fact, I was rather put off early on in the game by the first encounter with hostile human enemies. I started the game on ‘hard’ difficulty, and as soon as anyone spotted me, I was riddled with bullets and reloading my save game. It happened about 10 times on the very first enemy encounter. I just couldn’t get around them sneakily. After I dialed the difficulty back down to medium, it was less of a problem.

This mixture of threats lead to some interesting situations. If the alien was around, it could be exploited to clear a path. Most often, if I found hostile humans, I’d use a throwable or other tool to make some noise. It would attract the alien, who would summarily clear the room of all hostile humans. Then I could swoop in, pick ammo off of the bodies, and continue on my way. This never seemed to work with androids, though. I guess the alien didn’t care about them. This ambiguity also affected the constructable items. There are a lot, such as noisemakers, smoke grenades, EMP mines, molotovs, and others. There is no tutorial, which I appreciate, but it takes some practice to learn the usefulness of each item. I never found a situation where the flashbang would’ve been more useful than any of the others. This combined with a save point system to create a lot of tension, but also at least some unneeded frustration.

Some really incredible lighting and effects.

You can’t save anywhere, only at emergency terminals. These terminals helpfully beep continuously, so they’re easy to find. However, there is a delay between when you use it, and when the game saves. This means that if the alien is chasing you, you can’t run to the save point to save your progress before it impales you from behind. There were also a couple situations in which the next save point is far enough away that dying before you reach felt like a real loss of progress. A particular section had me navigating a stairwell while stopping to turn on lockdown systems. The stairwell was littered with androids, and the alien was lurking around. Combat makes noise, so engaging the androids meant also engaging the alien, which I was not equipped for at that point. I died more than a few times because I had gotten two of the three lockdown systems turned on, but an android stumbled across me, and the alien ate my face in the ensuing struggle.

So the AI isn’t great, the save points suck sometimes, and the story is thin, but Alien: Isolation is fantastic to play. All of the environments are ripped straight from Alien, and amazingly detailed. Sevastopol looks lived-in and falling apart. It almost decays in front of your eyes. Every work area is filled with tools and containers. One of the best parts of Alien is that the set design is amazing and it’s just as good in Alien: Isolation. Human enemies talk to each other. Working Joes mutter to themselves constantly. The alien hisses and crawls through vents. All of the screens and monitors and computer interfaces look perfectly early eighties. The environment in Isolation is unparalleled.

Spoiler alert: This isn't going to do anything to the alien.

This level of detail is also enhanced by the immersive controls. They’re fairly simple, but the game combines them in interesting ways. Door bars need to be removed, maintenance hatches need to be cut off with a torch, security systems need to be hacked. These are all done with two mouse keys, a use key, and the movement keys. You can look around while you’re performing most of these actions, so you can see if an android is approaching or if the alien is in the distance. Even though it was often too late to escape if you did notice such thing, being able to keep an eye out felt right for this game.

I love the eighties technology aesthetic in this game.

Most first-person games clock in under 10 hours. The bigger budget games can get even shorter, such as Call of Duty games. Alien: Isolation does no such thing. I clocked 15 hours into it. It may have gone on a little longer than it needed to, but I never felt like it was outstaying its welcome. In fact, the more I played, the more I wanted. After getting past the frustrating stairwell bit, I was hooked.

"I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality."

The bottom line is that, despite some minor flaws, Alien: Isolation is an amazing game, probably the best Alien franchise game ever.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 amazingly detailed environments, +1 Alien game that’s not a bug hunt, +1 immersive, sensible controls

Penalties: -1 dicey AI, -1 save point frustrations

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 (Well worth your time and attention)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Creative Assembly. Alien: Isolation [Sega, 2014]

Bonus DLC Review: I had a chance to play through the “Crew Expendable” and “Last Survivor” DLCs for Alien: Isolation before posting this review. These two DLCs are short (maybe 30 minutes each) but replicate some of the intense parts of Alien, taking place on the Nostromo and playing as members of the crew. It’s cool in the way that walking through a movie set is cool. The ship is lovingly recreated and there are audio logs from the crew scattered about. There’s not a ton of new game to play in here, but any Alien fan should play them.

Microreview [book]: The Twelve, by Justin Cronin

The Meat

I don't know quite what to make of this book, or of my reaction to it. In most ways it's an excellent sequel—it delivers the same superb writing and engaging characters while, in fact, improving on one questionable aspect of the first book, The Passage, whose two giant halves fall to either side of a 100 year gap. In The Twelve, by contrast, that radical chronological break has been replaced with three distinct time frames, and occasional shuttling back and forth between them, which reduces the jarring sense of rupture book one delivered.

    All the key characters from book one return (except for Babcock!), and Cronin spices up the mix by adding a handful of no-longer-fully-human, not-quite-vampire creatures which one person, in a burst of insight, calls Renfield-esque. In other words, the mystical bond between vampire overlord and not fully turned Creepy Guy is explored at some length, in a very clever and engaging way.

   It all sounds good so far, right?  And it is—it's good. But not great, like The Passage (despite its flaws) was great. I wasn't moved (as much), nor was I gripped with the same neck-crunching force as emanated from the pages of book one. This was something of a puzzle to me, since most of this book's readily identifiable features seemed to equal, or in some cases outperform, the first book, so one could say book two is somehow slightly less than the sum of its parts.

   Vowing to solve the enigma of this book's slight disappointment, I considered all the usual suspects: a) how the very nature of sequels almost always precludes them surpassing the original (partly because the logic of the world established in book one constricts the parameters of where the story in potential sequels might go, and partly because authors, for obvious reasons, tend to put all their best ideas in their first book and consequently have to dig deep to produce anything like the raw brilliance of their initial effort), b) how an excellent first book creates impossible expectations for the sequel(s) in the minds of the readers, and c) how strong attachments to characters from book one mean that if any major life-changing (or –ending!) events befall these characters it might well alienate some readers who find their own lives in the toilet because of damage to their beloved (insert character name here). And sure enough, The Twelve does take moderate hits from all three of these areas, so that might explain part of why it seems not quite to have lived up to The Passage.

   It explains part, but not all, for as I thought more deeply about why I personally found it just slightly disappointing, a fourth reason popped into my head: the climax of book two, despite being a lot more exciting in visual description (it plays out a lot like a good action movie, in fact), is somehow less rewarding than that of book one. I can't say much more than that without "Dumbledore dies at the end"-ing it for you, but suffice it to say that the stakes in the final act, and even the scale of the challenge, seemed slightly ill conceived.  In the end, our heroes arguably accomplish more, and face a much more drawn out struggle to do so, but the world itself feels less menacing than that of book one (five years earlier), the possibility of human survival/victory much greater, which led to a problem of atmosphere.

   Remember Alien(s)? People argue back and forth about which was best, Alien or Aliens, but they're quite distinct; Alien has spine-tingling suspense, while Aliens brings edge-of-your-seat action and thrills. In some ways, the same thing is happening here with Cronin's work. (I just hope book three doesn't end up like Alien 3! We'll know we're in for an Alien 3 experience if all our favorite characters show up dead at the very beginning, I suppose.) 

The road that shouldn't ever be taken in sequels...

Anyway, the experience of reading book one was rather like watching Alien—one can imagine being in that place, being hunted, and knowing that no place exists beyond the monster's reach. This book, by contrast, brings an Aliens vibe, with excitement aplenty, yet without that pervasive sense of dread from the finely crafted mini-world of book one.

   Despite personally enjoying Aliens more than Alien, with Cronin's work the Aliens direction feels less successful, and The Passage (book one, that is) remains distinctly superior.  But if you're reading this, Mr. Cronin (and yes, I know the chances of that are slim), pleeease don't try an Alien 3 vibe for the threequel!

The Math

Objective assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for Cronin's fantastic prose (example: 'He still had the young person's predisposition to regard the world as a series of vaguely irritating problems created by people less cool and smart than he was'), +1 for scrapping the 100-year gap—or rather, yawning chasm—that bifurcated book one

Penalties: -1 for treating Amy and Alicia so callously (you'll see what I mean), -1 for the ending and for losing that sense of dread so painstakingly crafted with the Colony in The Passage

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 A mostly enjoyable experience

And read on for why statistically a 7/10 is actually waaay better than a C-!