The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many parts of the world, including my own (sunny southern California), to a virtual standstill. My wife and I are both home right now in self-quarantine, and many conventions we’d planned to attend, such as WonderCon and others that I’d planned to cover for this site, have been indefinitely postponed or…
Tag: RidleyScott
For its 40th anniversary, “ALIEN” lands in New Jersey as a high school play!
Way back when I was in high school (right around the time of the first cave paintings) I was in our school’s drama club. Even though I had no real intention of ever becoming an actor (though one of my classmates did), it helped me build a little self-confidence and overcome a fear of public…
“ALIEN” (1979) is still a ‘perfect organism’ after 40 years…
Spring of 1979. A new, post-Star Wars, R-rated science fiction movie was in theatrical release, and it is to my great regret that, as then-12 year old kid, I didn’t see it in those days. Don’t get me wrong; I really really wanted to see it. I eagerly read every article about Ridley Scott’s scary…
ALIEN Covenant: In space, no one can hear you rip off your old ideas…
Just saw ALIEN Covenant this afternoon, and from the title of this blog entry you can probably surmise that I was less-than-dazzled by the latest offering from Sir Ridley Scott. Being a huge fan of Scott’s brilliant 1979 original “ALIEN,” his visually immersive “Blade Runner” (1982) and his spirited epic “The Martian” (2015) I was…
Where did the once-brilliant ALIEN franchise go so wrong?
With the imminent release of “ALIEN: Covenant” (coming in May) I wanted to discuss the ALIEN franchise in general. But I became more intrigued by this question: at what point did this once brilliant franchise go so wrong? The first two films are unabashed classics. As ALIENS director James Cameron has said, ‘the first movie…