Egg McGuffin, or the Xenomorph-or-Egg Paradox

The 1991-2 production of Alien 3 was by all accounts more of a slog than this photo of Sigourney Weaver and her tall, dark plus-one would suggest.

Here’s a Smithsonian piece wherein I put my lifelong independent study of xenobiology to good use by documenting curator Ryan Lintelman’s quest to sleuth out exactly which ALIEN flick the big prop egg in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. It’s not the first time I’ve recounted the tortured history of of Alien 3, a less imaginative exponent of the visual and thematic ideas that had made the first two pictures in the slime-dripping series so widely admired.

Handling the Fingering: Alien: Covenant, reviewed.

Katherine Waterston is more heavily armed than Sigourney Weaver was in her first xenomorph encounter. (Fox)

My fanboyish impulses mostly come out whenever there's a new ALIEN. Mostly.

I tried not to splash too much corrosive blood on the deck in my dissection of Alien: Covenant.

They mostly come out at night, mostly: ALIENS, briefly recalled on All Things Considered

Writer/director James Cameron with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn on the Pinewood Studios set of ALIENS circa 1985. (Fox)

I was thrilled to get an invitation from All Things Considered to blab briefly with the great Audie Cornish about one of my favorite movies on the 30th anniversary of its release: SpaceCamp. No, it was ALIENS. Duh. The segment aired at the very end of an ATC that started off with live audio of the "Roll Call Vote!" chant from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. They're coming out of the goddamn walls, just like Private Hudson said.

You can hear the segment here. I had more to say than they could use, but that's radio, and hey, this is a show primarily devoted to, you know, real news. One of the first pieces I ever wrote for NPR was largely about ALIENS. I have a narrow range of interests, I guess.

Prose and Retcons, or Don't Fear the Rewind, or Mulligans' Wake

"Well, everyone knows Ripley died on Fiornia-161. What this ALIEN movie presupposes is... maybe she didn't?"

I have a long, long "Exposition" essay up at The Dissolve today inspired by (uncertain) reports that District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's upcoming Alien movie may be a ret-con scenario that undoes the events of 1992's Alien-little-three, or Alien Cubed – anyway, the one where Ripley died. The piece is about retconning in fiction in general, and why it doesn't much impair my ability or inclination to suspend my disbelief at all.

If you're quite comfortable in your chair, and you're stout of heart and nerdy of temperament... Onward!

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Edge of Tomorrow and Noble Failures

Emily Blunt & Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow. One of the sharpest summer blockbusters in years didn't open.

The Bruce Willis caper comedy/vanity project Hudson Hawk lost something like $50 million. I loved it in 1991. I love it still.

Writer/producer James Cameron confers with director (and ex-spouse) Kathryn Bigelow on the set of 1995's Strange Days, an ambitious cyberpunk flop.

Frank Langella and Brandon Routh in Bryan Singer's too-gentle, too-emo Superman Returns.

The ambitious but doomed Alien 3, for which Sigourney Weaver was persuaded to shave her head. The making-of documentary Wreckage and Rage from the Alien Quadrilogy Blu-ray set is better than the film itself.

It's always a thrill to be invited back on Pop Culture Happy Hour. I joined Linda, Stephen, and Glen to talk about Edge of Tomorrow -- the best would-be summer blockbuster yet in a year that's already seen several strong ones -- and noble failures. We agreed on the B topic before Edge of Tomorrow opened to less-than-stellar business, despite near-universal acclaim from critics. I hope we didn't jinx it, because this is exactly the kind of shrewd, fresh, self-aware big movie that seems to be perennially in danger of extinction.

I'd been summoned to PCHH this time at least in part because of my enduring affection for the 1991 caper comedy/Bruce Willis vanity project Hudson Hawk. This is, to my mind, a creatively successful film that also just happened to lose something north of $50 million in 1991 dollars.

I always over-prepare when I'm invited on a podcast. I came in ready to talk about a few other movies big genre films whose reach exceeded their grasp: Kathryn Bigelow's ambitious social sci-fi Strange Days, Bryan Singer's way-emo Superman Returns (to which Man of Steel's shrugging, genocidal violence was, I'm convinced, a direct, and stupid, reaction), and Alien 3, the fascinating, troubled sequel that marked David Fincher's feature debut and that he refuses to talk about to this day. Of those three, only Strange Days was a big money-loser like Hudson Hawk was; the other two did okay but fell short of their aesthetic objectives. 

Anyway, we didn't get to any of those. I'd even jotted down a quote from Roger Ebert's four-star review of Strange Days to read on the air. Having come from a screening of Steve James' wonderful documentary Life Itself -- about Ebert's life, career, illness, and death -- just hours ago as I'm typing this, I'm doubly sorry I didn't get to. We didn't even get to everything I meant to say about Hudson Hawk. Hey, it's a discussion, not a lecture.

I'll correct one of those omissions right here: One of Hudson Hawk's villains, Caesar Mario, is a guy who had a chip on his shoulder because he's the lesser-known brother of a more famous gangster. This character is played by Frank Stallone. That's a good casting joke, there.

Recorded but cut for time was an acknowledgment -- initiated, would you believe, not by me but by my Pal-for-Life Glen -- about Edge of Tomorrow's homages to ALIENS both large and small, from the armored power suits to the gender-neutral division of action-hero labors between stars Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, to the presence of Bill Paxton, doing a hilarious 180-degree inversion of Private Hudson, his panicked, "Game over, Man!" Marine from ALIENS.

Also cut was my observation that I'm pretty sure this is the first time a live-action summer blockbuster has won the approval of the full PCHH panel in almost four years of this show. The only other one I can remember coming close was J.J. Abrams' Super 8, which only Glen disliked.

In 2011.

Listen above or listen here.

FURTHER READING: I wrote about Edge of Tomorrow and blockbuster fatigue, and about PG-13 vs. R-rated cine-violence, and about how seeing ALIENS on VHS 400 times as a kid set up expectations that the 2012 ALIEN prequel Prometheus could not possibly satisfy.

What Gravity Should've Learned from ALIENS

Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn in ALIENS. 

Sandra Bullock in Gravity. 

Admittedly, ALIENS is a film I've loved unconditionally since I was a kid. I need very little prompting to think about it, and only a little more prompting than that to write about it. But a deleted scene from that 27-year-old movie highlights what is, to me, the sole flaw in Alfonso Curaon's still-fantastic new space movie Gravity, and how audience expectations have changed in the generation since ALIENS. This is the subject of my first piece for Slate, which you can read here.