Alien Ressurection (1997); Friday Nov.27, 18:00, Zrinyi 14, room 411.

“Jeunet’s film thus finds a way of grafting two apparently opposed
or contradictory modes of reproduction onto one another. Cloning
suggests replication, qualitative indistinguishability, whereas
hybridity suggests the cultivation of difference, a new creation. In
Alien Resurrection, cloning engenders hybridity; even genetic replication
cannot suppress nature’s capacity for self-transformation and selfovercoming,
its evolutionary impulse. This film does not, then,
overcome Alien3’s attempted closure of the Alien series by resurrecting
either Ripley or her alien other – as if continuing (by contesting)  David Fincher’s theological understanding of the alien universe;
for (as Thomas’ sceptical probing of Jesus’ resurrected body implies)
the religious idea of resurrection incorporates precisely the bodily
continuity that cloning cannot provide. The title of Jeunet’s film
thus refers not to a resurrection of the alien species, or of that
species’ most intimate enemy; it rather characterizes its hybrid of
cloning and hybridity as an alien kind or species of resurrection –
as something uncannily other to any familiar religious idea of
death’s overcoming.”

Stephen Mulhall, On Film

 

Alien 3 (1992); Friday, November 20th, 18h, Zrinyi 14, room 411

“Of course, to attach a number as a superscript to a preceding
symbol typically denotes the result of a mathematical operation –
that of multiplying the symbol by itself a given number of times.
Applying this to Alien3, we get: Alien X Alien X Alien. What might
this indicate about the film thus named? To begin with, it
acknowledges that the film is dealing with the third generation of
the alien species (the alien stalking the convicts on Fiorina 161 is the
offspring of the alien queen ejected from the Sulaco, who was
herself the offspring of the alien queen who laid the eggs on LV
426), and it signals in advance that it will itself directly be concerned
with three aliens (the facehugger on the Sulaco, the alien offspring
of the convict’s dog, and the new alien queen). It further suggests
that the film takes itself to be a certain kind of intensification of
the Alien universe with which we are by now familiar: its nature
has been determined only by those elements present in the first film
in the series; all other (essentially extraneous) material has been
eliminated, and what results is a kind of condensation or sublimation
of the essence of the Alien universe. Beyond this, we
might recall that Alien3 could also be rendered ‘Alien cubed’ – and
think of the coming film’s unremitting emphasis upon various
attempts to confine its alien (in a toxic waste container, in a maze
of corridors, in a lead mould and ultimately in a sheath of supercooled
lead). The setting of these attempts – the oppressively
enclosed, maximum-security prison that is the film’s world, and
that is itself closed down in the film’s epilogue – only intensifies
the implication that Fincher’s primary preoccupation as a director
is with closure. His aim is not to open up the Alien series but to
shut it down; this step in its unfolding will be its last.”

Stephen Mulhall, “On Film”

Aliens (1986); Friday, November 13th, 6pm, Zrinyi 14, room 411

“This is, in fact, the key respect in which Aliens differs from its
cinematic source: it takes us back to the geographical (if not the
cosmic) source of the alien species, and it introduces us to two
aspects of its reproductive cycle about which Alien is silent, but
without which the alien species as such could not survive (the
cocooning of living human hosts in preparation for impregnation,4
and the mode or variant of alien life from which the eggs containing
the impregnating facehuggers themselves come) – that is, it uncovers the biological as well as the geographical source of
the alien species. And by forcing Ripley to confront what she is
trying to repress, and thereby forcing the Alien series to confront
what it has so far repressed about its eponymous protagonist,
Cameron presents himself as engaged in an essentially therapeutic
endeavour – one in which the reiteration of that which has been
repressed will bring release or liberation. It is as if Cameron takes
his own film as the necessary therapy of which his predecessor’s
central human character and the cinematic world in which she is
introduced both stand in need. He proposes, in short, to heal
both Ripley and the alien narrative universe, to cure them of that
which ails them; and it is in his understanding of what this
requires that Cameron makes manifest his deepest acknowledgement,
and his most radical subversion, of the underlying
logic of Scott’s prior film.”

Stephen Mulhall, On Film