Slobs, Blobs, and Aliens

This week in the magazine, David Denby reviews “Prometheus,” Ridley Scott’s prequel of sorts to the “Alien” series. Though Denby finds that “Scott’s craft is all-powerful,” a look back in the archive reveals that the first four installments of the franchise were greeted with less-than-glowing reviews in our pages.

“My health had far more to fear from boredom than from heart failure,” said Brendan Gill of 1979’s “Alien,” which was also directed by Scott. Gill saw the movie as no more than a battle between “slobs” (the crew of the Nostromo) and “blobs” (the creature). His analysis has a Seussian cadence:

A small yellow cat named Jones is aboard the Nostromo and survives several perilous encounters with the blob…. Surely a blob that plays hob with slobs and yet cannot outspat a cat isn’t worth our serious attention for long.

In 1986, Pauline Kael called James Cameron’s “Aliens” “an inflated example of formula gothic … more mechanical than the first film,” but she did single out Sigourney Weaver for praise:

With her great cheekbones, her marvelous physique, and her lightness of movement, Weaver seems to take over by natural authority and her strength as an actress. Her surprisingly small, tense mouth holds all the suspense in the story…. Weaver gives the movie a presence; without her it’s a B picture that lacks the subplots and corny characters that can make B pictures amusing.

Reviewing “Alien 3” in 1992, Terrence Rafferty noted, presciently, that “the conclusion of this picture doesn’t leave much room for a sequel. (Of course, a ‘prequel’ is always a possibility.)” Rafferty found fault with the director, David Fincher, who was making his feature-film debut:

A little old-fashioned moviemaking ingenuity might have kept this picture breathing to the end, but Fincher, an ace music-video director … doesn’t seem to have the skill to make even the simplest action sequence coherent, or the patience to give the audience the narrative information it needs. Although he’s a gifted imagemaker—the film is much livelier visually than Cameron’s installment—the striking images never quite add up.

Anthony Lane was equally unimpressed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Alien Resurrection” in 1997. He summed up the movie like this:

We’ve reached the fourth installment of the exploits of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), and by now the regular pattern of suspense has worn thin. The only real surprise is that Lieutenant Ripley has been around for nearly three hundred years and still hasn’t been promoted. No wonder she looks mad.

Lane was disappointed that, in his treatment of the monster, Jeunet did not follow the example set his predecessors:

Both Ridley Scott and James Cameron knew that the less we saw of the monster—the more we were tempted with brutal glimpses of jaw and claw—the scarier it became, whereas Jeunet opts for full-length shots, not realizing that an alien with stomping feet and swishing tail looks like just another T. rex. _The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.

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