ShatnerKhan III – The Anti-Climax

In these years of decay and barbarism even ShatnerKhan is only a pallid shadow of its former glory.  All the zest has been drained away.  How can we mock Bill Shatner when the present regime makes us look back with nostalgia at a time when tawdry power mad behavior and laughably bad acting was restricted to Khan and Kirk.  Now it’s everywhere.  Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Merrick Garland and most egregiously Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  Here we have a man whose original role as a bad comic actor has catapulted him into his present role as bagman for Joe Biden and the rest of the kleptocrats in Washington.  How can a mere ham actor and his Corinthian leather-hawking adversary compete?

Well, we’ll do our best today to celebrate the last few years of William Shatner’s already overextended time on this planet.  I’m not sure what facet of his career we will concentrate on today.  We’ve already hit all the high notes (such as they were) before.  Possibly today we will just reflect on the lessons we’ve all learned living in the wake of this tremendously opportunistic mediocrity who proved that post-World War II America truly was the land of opportunity, flowing with milk and honey for anyone with a room temperature IQ and a pulse.

Things may be a little quiet on the site today but I will check in from time to time.

But I’ll leave you with a taste of the Shatner that we all love to mock.  Here is what ShatnerKhan truly stands for.

“Bugs, Mr. Rico. Zillions of em!”

ZMan takes the Dean of Science Fiction to task on his concept of a soldier only franchise in “Starship Troopers.”

Of course he’s rightly basing it on the book but even the highly toxic spin that the director took with the movie still made it a fun experience to watch them zap those bugs.  Hopefully some of Heinlein’s better novels and juveniles will be brought to the screen the way they deserve.

For fans (and detractors) of the book there is a lively discussion in the comments of the post.

Mercenary Rule

The Shining (1980) – A Horror Movie Review

I recently rewatched the movie “The Shining.”  This is the Stanley Kubrick film with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in the lead roles.  I saw this movie in the theater when it came out and I am a huge fan of the Stephen King book that it is based on.  In fact, I believe the book was the best thing King ever wrote.

Kubrick is a famous director and I’m sure the deletions from the book’s plot and the changes made were necessary to bring the movie into a reasonable length.  But making these changes makes the movie a different story from the book.  And that makes the book a much richer story than the movie.

That being said, “The Shining” is a great horror movie.  Jack Nicholson was born to play Jack Torrance.  And Shelley Duvall is Wendy Torrance from head to toe.  Watching Jack descend into madness you could believe that no ghosts were necessary.  All of it could be credited to a combination of writer’s block, cabin fever and a disastrous marriage.

But the supernatural aspects of the story are blended into the psychological situation flawlessly.  You really can’t tell where one aspect ends and the other takes over.  The conversations between Jack and Wendy on the one hand and Jack and his spectral associates are so intertwined that it’s obvious that the ghosts understand Jack better than his own wife does.

The plot is telegraphed early on when Jack is interviewing for his job as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel.  His employer ends the interview by revealing that a few years earlier a man named Delbert Grady who had taken on the job of winter caretaker had gone mad and chopped up his wife and two young daughters with an ax and then committed suicide with a shotgun.  His boss explained that living in the Overlook during the mandatory five-month winter isolation in the remote Colorado location had been known to cause “cabin fever” for some vulnerable souls.

Later on, Jack actually meets Mr. Grady when he shows up as a waiter in the spectral party that seems to run endlessly in the Overlook’s shadow world.  When Jack finds out his friend’s name he asks, “Weren’t you the caretaker here Mr. Grady?”  Grady claims to have no memory of that.  On being further prompted by Jack about his murders and suicide and Jack insisting, “You were the caretaker here.” Grady replies, “You are the caretaker Mr. Torrance, you’ve always been the caretaker here.”

And that’s the essence of how Jack’s destruction is accomplished.  The Hotel (in the person of Grady) plays upon Jack’s sense of failure and his resentment toward his wife and son because of the humiliating employment choices he’s had to make when he yearned to be a writer.  Now the Hotel plays up his importance and the trust that the Hotel has in his competence.  When the Hotel physically attacks his son Danny, Wendy tries to convince Jack to take them back to Denver.  Jack snaps and starts raving about his responsibilities to his employers.  But instead of meaning the owners of the hotel he’s talking about the ghosts.  And from there it’s only a short step to the ax and more murder.

I suspect most people have seen this movie and know the plot.  But I’ll stop there with the plot.  It’s too much fun to give it all away.  Suffice it to say that between little Danny’s gift (the “shining” of the title), the Hotel’s desire to possess Danny and that gift and Jack and Wendy’s deeply scarred marriage this is a powerful witch’s brew of supernatural and psychological horror.  In a later review I’ll tackle the book it’s based on.  And whether you read the book first or watch the movie I’ll leave it to you to decide.  But both are excellent within their medium.

Highly recommended.

(Strong Language warning for this clip)

Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter (2012) – A Science Fiction – Fantasy Movie Review

Words utterly fail me.  I understand that about $100 million was spent on this movie.  That seems inconceivable.  I also read that it actually made a small profit.  That also seems impossible.  And finally, that I didn’t stop watching this “film” at any one of a hundred places in the 105 minutes of running time is a source of great personal shame for me.

Who thought this thing up?  Who green-lit the project?  Who are these nincompoops?

The premise is that when Abraham Lincoln was a boy his father angered a bounty hunter who went after runaway slaves.  And since the bounty hunter was a vampire, he killed Abraham’s mother.  He vows revenge and when he grows up, he meets up with a vampire hunter and trains to become one.  It turns out that the hunter is also a vampire himself but you can’t have everything.

So armed with his silver-dipped ax, Old Abe rail-splits his way through the vampire kingdom and we discover that the South is not only filled with slavers, it’s chock full of vampires too.  You know I always suspected that.  Eventually Honest Abe puts away the ax and picks up the law books and becomes a politician and the rest is history.  That is until the vampires invade his White House and kill his young son.  And then they use undead troops to try to win the war for the South by overwhelming the Union Army at Gettysburg.  So Abe decides to seize all the silver tea sets in Washington DC to provide vampire killing weaponry for the troops.  There’s an overly long fight on a train headed over a bridge that is on fire supposedly bringing weapons to Gettysburg.  It turns out to be a meaningless plot twist but it goes on forever.

But with silver clad bayonets, bullets and cannonballs the tide is turned just in time for Lincoln to read his Gettysburg Address.  Mary Todd Lincoln gets to shoot the girl vampire that killed her son.  She shoots a toy sword with a silver chain out of a rifle and the chain embeds itself into the vampire’s head.  And this symbolizes something or other.

And that’s more or less it.  Amazingly, this is even stupider than it sounds.

I don’t suppose most people would watch a movie called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter but just in case some innocent, trusting individual might stumble onto this turkey I felt compelled to put out this warning.  If you watch this movie, you will lose brain cells.  I myself lost at least three IQ points.

So to sum up, movies of the stupid, for the stupid and by the stupid have not perished from the Earth.

23SEP2023 – Generational Differences

Happy first day of Fall here at the Autumnal Equinox.

So, I looked around at the news to see if anything jumped out at me.  Meh.  Lots of stuff is going on.  The Texas AG sat down with Tucker to talk about the impeachment hit the DOJ put out on him and how it failed.  That was pretty interesting but I wasn’t in the mood for that level of wonkery.

There are all kinds of articles about Menendez but I’ve got a weak stomach so the little bit I’ve done already is about half the fatal dose for that stuff.

But then I was watching a YouTube video by a sf critic called Bookpilled, where he listed what he considered the top science fiction books in his opinion.  The list was fairly interesting:

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

The Stars My Destination / Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin

Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith

City by Clifford D. Simak

Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Blood Music by Greg Bear

The Dying Earth by Jack Vance

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

Blindsight by Peter Watts

So, because the list seemed thoughtful, I went onto one of his other videos.  This one was called Battle of the Hard Sci-Fi Classics [100 Book Challenge #35-40].  In this “challenge” the host read one or more books by the “Big Three.”  The works he read were “Rendezvous with Rama” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Arthur C. Clarke; “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert Heinlein; “I, Robot” and “The Gods Themselves” by Isaac Asimov.

Well, I’ll say Bookpilled was not particularly impressed by these golden age authors.  Clarke and Asimov were damned with faint praise but his true scorn was reserved for poor old Bob Heinlein.  Scathing would be a mild description of his comments about the Dean of Science Fiction.  Not amused.

And that brings me to the point of this little essay.  The reviewer Bookpilled, is a Millennial.  His sensibilities were formed in a different world from mine.  Now, much of his criticism of Heinlein (and of the other two authors to a lesser degree) center around the merits of the works as literature.  He finds fault with the characterizations of the protagonists, the seeming simplicity of the plot devices and even with the level of foreshadowing of events.

And in a lot of ways, the criticism is justified.  Heinlein’s characters were very often “types.”  The wise older man, the talented but naïve young man, the omni-competent hero, the socially awkward scientist.  And some of his books, especially in the later years were less successful as “works of art.”  But Bookpilled didn’t just give “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” low marks.  He was viscerally outraged by almost everything in the book.  He was especially upset about Heinlein’s handling of sex.  And, granted, sex is one of the truly weakest aspects of Heinlein’s writing, especially (apparently) from the point of view of Millennial readers.  But it’s interesting that his writing is completely unreadable for this apparently enthusiastic science fiction reader.  Why is this?  Frank Herbert is approximately of Heinlein’s generation but Herbert’s Dune is on Bookpilled’s top fifteen list of all time science fiction books.  So, what’s the deal?

I think the generational difference is that when science fiction was a new art form its audience was entirely made up of young men.  And the aspect of the work that earned it praise was almost entirely its capacity to inspire enthusiasm and wonder about the future.  Whether it was interstellar space travel, nuclear power, or alien life forms the loftiness of the prose and the depth of characterization were almost unimportant to the success of the story.  And so, when these older stories are read by 21st century critics they are not amused.  It matters not at all that “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” is probably the first story to consider a political revolution between Earth and a space colony.  He’s read a host of books that took this concept and then updated for the present reader.

In these updated versions, the protagonist may be a black trans-lesbian with anti-white-colonial credentials and the computer will be the disembodied mind of Che Guevera or Woody Allen or someone else, depending on whether it’s an earnest political story, a comedy or something I can’t even imagine.  And the “diversity” allows the author to virtue signal to his audience the correctness of his story.  And if he’s a talented writer it allows him to add exotic points to the writing.

And that’s fine.  Every generation has its own art.  I think the important thing for me to note is that there is a place today for art that does not follow the template of the current day.  Bookpilled is a guy that looks like he’s somewhere in his early thirties.  So, his sensibilities are in line with his generation.  Now, I think he’s probably a fair example of his cohort and I’ll even say he’s probably not hostile to the world view of his parents’ generation.  He just sees things from his point of view.  But if he can enjoy Dune, Mote in God’s Eye, The War of the Worlds and even Frankenstein then he is reachable through art that speaks with a very different voice than his here and now literature.

So as an incipient science fiction author I think it behooves me to understand my potential market.  These young people are intelligent (well, at least the ones I want to reach).  Probably good writing, even if it comes from a different world view will interest them if it can provide sympathetic characters and interesting plot.  But if my plot challenges their world view it will need to be persuasive.  I won’t be able to win them over with exposition.  I’ll need to show them what I want them to understand.  That’s the challenge.

Well, why not?  Propaganda for its own sake is pretty awful even if it’s of your particular stripe.  So, Bob Heinlein be warned.  The Millennials have lost their patience and if you’re not careful they’ll take back your grandmaster’s hat and robe.  Get a copy of “Fifty Shades of Gray,” a highlighter and drop all the dears!

31AUG2023 – And Then, Quite Suddenly, Summer Was Over

Bradbury understood summer to a boy.

 

“And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.
He knew it first when walking downtown. Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dimestore window. They stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there.
“Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!”
“Oh, my gosh!”
“Nickel tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!”
“Don’t look. Maybe it’s just a mirage.”
“No,” moaned Tom in despair. “School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer’s even over! Ruin half the vacation!”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

 

“June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past. And if he should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the cellar, numbered huge for each and every day. He would go there often, stare straight into the sun until he could stare no more, then close his eyes and consider the burned spots, the fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids; arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear…
So thinking, he slept.
And, sleeping, put an end to Summer, 1928.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

 

The yearly ritual continues.

 

Whiling Away the Summer Days

As July draws to a close, I’ve been indulging in inconsequential trifles.  Yesterday I watched the remake of “Total Recall” with Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel.  The original with Arnold Schwarzenegger was a silly movie.  So was this.  But I think I liked the recent one better.  Not that it was any more sensible or was a masterpiece of cinematic brilliance but it was entertaining.

Then tonight we watched the first episode of the spy series “The Old Man” with Jeff Bridges.  And once again it wasn’t deathless theater but it was very entertaining.  We’re also watching the “Justified” sequel I guess you could call it.  Now, I really liked the original series a lot.  I don’t know that I’ll like this as much but it’s well done and definitely in the same vein as the earlier series.  So lately I’m not hating tv.

And since it stopped raining every minute, I’ve had a chance to get outside and do some macrophotography of bugs and flowers.  And that’s a lot of fun.  I’ve been testing out the advantages and disadvantages of using continuous autofocus with fast moving insects.  The primary disadvantage is that for the Sony A7IV camera magnified view is unavailable in continuous autofocus mode.  So, for instance, if you’re trying to get the eyes of a bee or butterfly perfectly focused you have to guess if the autofocus is precisely on the eye.  In single-shot autofocus I can engage a 5.5X magnified view that will let me see whether the eye or whatever else I’m trying to nail is perfect.  But often when these critters are crawling around, they can move out of focus almost immediately.  Plus, the magnified view ends as soon as the shutter is engaged and so it’s necessary to reactivate it after every photo.

Based on what I’ve seen in the last couple of days I’m starting to think that continuous autofocus is the way to go.  Especially if I use high speed multiple exposures (spray and pray mode).  This ends up filling up my memory card (and hard drive!) but the chance of getting the perfect shot is much more likely than with the single shot autofocus and single exposure mode.  Plus, it’s easier and as I’ve always admitted I’m an extremely lazy man.

And I’ve continued on my program of getting together with the grandsons one by one.  Last Saturday I had the twelve-year-old fellow over and he wanted a Star Wars marathon.  Luckily this was the “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.”  I had forgotten just how bad the Ewoks were.  I also forgot just how goofy the scripts were.  Harrison Ford spends most of his time hammering away at some control components of the Millenium Falcon while whining about how it wasn’t his fault.  But we bonded over our shared belief that Imperial Stormtroopers were all pathetic losers without any detectable skills as warriors.  And finally, I rediscovered my disdain for Yoda.  As far as I could determine he was always wrong and of no value as a teacher or anything else.

On the upcoming Saturday, the sixteen-year-old is coming over and I believe it will be a “Lord of the Rings” film festival.  That should be fun.  For dessert he’s requested original Klondike Bars, of which I wholly approve.  It should be epic.

So, all of these things provide a welcome distraction from the slow-motion train wreck that is our national government.  I sometimes wondered what it must have been like to live through the more terrible chapters of the Roman Empire.  I think I now have a better idea.  Joe Biden is Tiberius and I guess Hunter is Caligula.  The FBI is the Praetorian Guard and we’re the rabble existing on bread and circuses.  But even if Tiberius was as sexually depraved as Joe, at least he was an able military leader.  Watching what Joe is doing to our foreign policy, or allowing others to do to our foreign policy, is frightening.

But enough doom and gloom.  Though we are perched on the slopes of Vesuvius we will eat, drink and be merry.  July is almost consumed but it will be relished to the dregs.

Fifteen Years to Proxima Centauri

How’s that for a cool title!

H/T to Hans G. Schantz for the retweet on this that brought it to my attention.

This guy is researching a propulsion system based on “quatised inertia” that he says would allow a probe to reach the Oort Cloud in a year and Proxima Centauri in 15 years.

That’s a pretty bold statement.  Watch his video if you’re interested.  He says he was given a million dollar grant from DARPA  to study it.

I wonder if they’ll give me ten million to do my research on cold fusion.  My data looks pretty good.

Seriously, he says there’s company putting an experiment into space to test this thing out.  I guess we’ll know if it works.

 

What Are the Best Science Fiction Movies?

Reviewing Aliens and hearing from folks who remembered it fondly got me thinking about what readers here consider the best sci-fi movies.  So, of course, I went to YouTube.  And here’s the list.

  1. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
  2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
  3. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)
  4. Aliens (1986)
  5. Jurassic Park (1993)
  6. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
  7. The Matrix (1999)
  8. Children of Men (2006)
  9. Planet of the Apes (1968)
  10. The War of the Worlds (1953)

Now, right off the bat, I disagree with several of the picks.  Neither “Planet of the Apes” or “The Day the Earth Stood Still” would be on my top ten movies list.  Planet of the Apes isn’t my idea of a sci-fi movie.  And The Day the Earth Stood Still is commie propaganda.  So, there’s that.

Some of the other movies are pretty good ones.  Now as for the order and any additional movies to pad out the top ten I’ll have to give it some thought.  But I think it’s a good talking paper to inspire discussion of what each of us considers to be good sci-fi movies.

Now here’s another list (see below).  This is IMDB’s “TOP 100 Sci-Fi Movies of All Time.”  There are a few commonalities between the top ten of this list with the former list.  But one interesting thing I noticed is that once you get past the top of the list the sequels start piling up.  Between sequels to “Back to the Future,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Predator,” “Jurassic Park,” “Star Trek” “Alien,” “Terminator” and “Star Wars” we’re looking at a lot of retreads.

What it made me think was that there really aren’t that many really good science fiction movies.  There are definitely a lot more good science fiction books than there are good movies.  Which I guess is kind of hopeful if you’re an optimist.  For instance, I saw that they’ve made a movie out of Asimov’s Foundation stories.  I saw the coming attractions.  Honestly, I couldn’t tell anything about it at all.  It could be great.  It could be awful.  But at least it’s a new movie.  It’s not a sequel.

So, I guess being a science fiction movie fan is all about being an optimist.  And in the larger world of science fiction/fantasy movies we were rewarded in the early 2000s with the Lord of the Rings movies.  So that tells me miracles can happen.  Maybe one day a true fan of Heinlein will reboot “Starship Troopers” without the nazi iconography or might even film “Have Spacesuit Will Travel.”

So, this will be an open thread to get some comments.  If you’d like to give your top sci-fi movie list or what story you’d like to see filmed in the future put it in the comments.  Later on, I’ll add some more of my own thoughts on what is a proper science fiction movie and what isn’t.

A last question for the audience.  Is “Escape from New York” really science fiction?

 

  1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  2. The Terminator
  3. Planet of the Apes
  4. Alien
  5. Blade Runner
  6. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
  7. The Matrix
  8. Back to the Future
  9. Aliens
  10. Interstellar
  11. Contact
  12. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
  13. The Road Warrior
  14. Predator
  15. The Thing
  16. The Man from Earth
  17. Edge of Tomorrow
  18. District 9
  19. Dark City
  20. Blade Runner 2049
  21. A Clockwork Orange
  22. Gattaca
  23. Jurassic Park
  24. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
  25. Mad Max
  26. Starship Troopers
  27. Minority Report
  28. 12 Monkeys
  29. Inception
  30. Back to the Future Part II
  31. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
  32. The Abyss
  33. Looper
  34. T. the Extra-Terrestrial
  35. Star Trek: First Contact
  36. Stargate
  37. Ex Machina
  38. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
  39. The Truman Show
  40. Children of Men
  41. The Martian
  42. Avatar
  43. Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
  44. The X Files
  45. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  46. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
  47. Cube
  48. Star Trek
  49. RoboCop
  50. The Time Machine
  51. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  52. War for the Planet of the Apes
  53. Prometheus
  54. Total Recall
  55. They Live
  56. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  57. Sunshine
  58. Moon
  59. Super 8
  60. I Am Legend
  61. Signs
  62. The Fly
  63. Escape from New York
  64. Pacific Rim
  65. Dredd
  66. Oblivion
  67. Cloverfield
  68. Pitch Black
  69. Godzilla
  70. Back to the Future Part III
  71. Limitless
  72. Deja Vu
  73. War of the Worlds
  74. The Matrix Reloaded
  75. Elysium
  76. Enemy Mine
  77. The Butterfly Effect
  78. Predestination
  79. I. Artificial Intelligence
  80. Logan’s Run
  81. Another Earth
  82. Independence Day
  83. The Arrival
  84. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
  85. Predators
  86. Outlander
  87. John Carter
  88. Alien³
  89. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
  90. Phenomenon
  91. Predator 2
  92. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
  93. Riddick
  94. Cloud Atlas
  95. Armageddon
  96. The Running Man
  97. The Fifth Element
  98. Waterworld
  99. The Day After Tomorrow
  100. Mimic

Aliens (1986) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

It’s a funny thing I had never seen Aliens in its entirety until today.  Somehow, I missed the first half hour of the movie and only came in when the main action was beginning.  So finally, I have the correct basis on which to judge it.

I won’t synopsize the plot because it’s an Alien movie so the plot is for Sigourney Weaver to outlive the rest of her fellow humans battling the aliens before ultimately jettisoning a xenomorph into the vacuum of space.

As in the original “Alien” movie Sigourney Weaver is Ellen Ripley a commercial astronaut who works for the evil Weyland-Yutani Corporation.  Fifty-seven years after the first Alien attack Ripley is discovered still in suspended animation in the shuttle craft that she used to escape the destruction of her ship the Nostromo.

The evil Weyland-Yutani Corporation was very unhappy about her blowing up their ship but when they find out that their terra-forming colony on the planet that the alien was found on has gone silent they send “space marines” and Ripley to fix things.  They also send Paul Reiser playing smarmy corporate yes man, Carter Burke to provide the requisite “greedy corporation wants xenomorph for bioweapon” subplot.  And finally, they throw in an android to show that despite what happened in the first movie, androids can be pretty swell people too.

And finally, to soften up Ripley’s Rambo impression, they throw in an orphaned little girl named Newt that Ripley rescues a few times over the course of the movie, proving that a modern woman truly can have it all.

So, the producers pull out all the stops.  Aliens are popping up everywhere in the industrial complex that serves as the venue for this first-person shooter game.  Bits of aliens and “molecular acid” are sprayed everywhere and one by one the marine platoon is picked off by the monsters.  Until finally we’re down to Ripley, Newt, android and the pick of the Marine crew, Corporal Dwayne Hicks played by the ever-popular Michael Biehn.  But during the final rescue of Newt on the planet Hicks is wounded by molecular acid and from then on, all the heavy lifting is done by Ripley.  Which she performs with panache, culminating in the above mentioned obligatory spacing of the mother alien (of course there’s a mother alien).

So, what did I think?  Well, I have some quibbles.  The plot contrives it that the marines can’t use their heaviest weapons because the industrial plant is a “thermonuclear” power plant and if any of their explosive charges rupture a heat exchanger line the whole plant will detonate.  Since it’s a cinch that all the colonists (except Newt) are already dead why are they bothering to throw away their lives in this death trap.  As Ripley so astutely recommended, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.  It’s the only way to be sure.”  Also, they overdid it with the strong female characters and weak male ones.  Yeah, I know, I know.  “There’s nothing wrong with that.”  But honestly it is insulting and stupid.

But taken all in all the movie does provide an exciting action-adventure/science fiction/horror experience.  I won’t claim it’s my favorite but it is a worthy representative of its genre.  I will give it a recommended status.