A new, weekly series, wherein two HHH writers wax inconsequentially on the finer details of a science fiction universe. For our intial foray into the Outer Rim of hamhanded symbolism and three-breasted prostitutes, we have chosen Ridley Scott's Alien.
Joe:
If the Star Wars movies are a cornfed Kansan sorority sister sloppily proffering her tits on Girls Gone Wild, the Aliens movies are a single raised Natalie Portman eyebrow. The former anxiously shows us everything she’s got, not quite sexy, fully aware that in 15 years she’ll be obese and her husband will trade her wedding zirconia for two Oxycontin (BURN Lucasarts cash-ins). The latter connotes wild and confident possibility; you’ll still be thinking about her 20 years later. Exhibit A: the Space Jockey. Probably the all-time sweetest unexplained filmic extraterrestrial, the pictured-above Space Jockey actually makes its appearance long before H.R. Geiger’s titular creation, as crew members of the Nostromo explore a derelict alien spacecraft after crash landing on LV-426 (no I didn’t have to look that up, losers). Long dead, and with a hole in its chest the size of some serious foreshadowing, the Space Jockey is also absolutely enormous and seated, pilot-like, at the base of some massive dark phallus of technology. Is it a canon? A telescope? A rudder? Is this Space Jockey the only one of its kind? What do they eat? Does each one get his (or her!?) own boomerang shaped spacecraft? Can they love? Why does the ship have an endless grotto full of facehugger eggs? Are the Space Jockeys using them as biological weapons in a galaxy-spanning megawar which makes World War Two look like a nonfatal knife fight? I don’t know, you don’t know; everybody wins.
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