S4E45.5: Alien

**November Kelly** (0:17)
Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond! I am November Kelly, I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorn and Devon.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:25)
Hello, listener!

**Devon** (0:27)
Cowabunga! How are we doing?
We got a real movie for you today.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:33)
So good.

**November Kelly** (0:33)
Respect for Cowabunga to a movie that I have been looking forward to for a long time, but I didn't think we were going to get around to until we got to sci-fi season or horror season. But no, no, because the thing about Alien is, it's a trucker movie. It's a trucker movie.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:53)
It's a trucker movie.

**Devon** (0:53)
They're space truckers.

**November Kelly** (0:55)
It's a trucker movie.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:55)
It's a trucker movie.

**November Kelly** (0:56)
We established this very, very early.

**Devon** (0:58)
This is effectively Black Dog, remain in space.

**Abigail Thorn** (1:02)
Black, wet, shiny dog.

**Devon** (1:04)
Yeah.

**November Kelly** (1:05)
Alien's one of those films where I sort of have... I'm feeling the pressure a little bit here, because it feels like everything that you could say about it has kind of been said.
And now it's like, well, I love hanging out with my friends and talking, but if you're asking me to say something new about this film, what do you want me to say? Sigourney Weaver's an attractive woman? Like, yes?

**Abigail Thorn** (1:31)
I'm with you on that. We could stake out a radically different position and just be like, it's shit, it's terrible, it's awful.

**Devon** (1:37)
We'll have difficulties with that. I will say, though, it is an assumption that this movie is good, this movie is like in the canon, it's in the stars and the constellations, but it did come out in 1979, and I'm pretty sure that the entire next generation will have skipped over it. This might be in the first, but like a bunch of zoomers are hearing people say, it's actually really good, like really good.

**Abigail Thorn** (1:58)
Go and watch Alien, the first one, yeah.

**Devon** (1:59)
Like it's actually good.

**November Kelly** (2:01)
There is no shame to having gone to the Kill James Bond film school, you know? Absolutely not. There is absolutely no sort of shame in this. It's one of the reasons why I really like film as a medium, is you can have heard about a film for the dumbest possible reasons, and it can, you know, you can come to it in all sorts of ways, and it can really, really move you. So yes, this is your recommendation. If you haven't seen Alien, if you're just like, eh, you know, whatever, because you've seen like, maybe Alien vs. Predator, Wildlands, or whatever, yeah, yeah, and you're just gonna have Adrian Brody having his legs scythed off or whatever on a green screen. No, no, no. Watch the original, because it's really, really good.

**Devon** (2:39)
Putting the steak out here.

**Abigail Thorn** (2:40)
Ridley Scott, Tom Scott's brother.

**Devon** (2:42)
Exactly.

**November Kelly** (2:44)
The thing about Ridley Scott as well...

**Devon** (2:46)
I don't want to be mean.

**Abigail Thorn** (2:47)
I'm in your chest.

**November Kelly** (2:51)
I am here.
No. The thing about Ridley Scott, and this has been said many, many times about Alien, like I said, I have a single novel observation about it, and you're just along for the ride with me, right? Or rather, I'm along for the ride with you. I'm inside your chest cavity, and I'm telling you that the thing about Ridley Scott is, he is locked in a quantum sort of, like, he's locked in a sine wave all the time between, like, woke and misogyny, and the frequency of that sine wave changes quite rapidly, even within the course of this film.

**Devon** (3:24)
That's definitely true, we could track that over the course of...

**November Kelly** (3:28)
There's legitimately a bit in this where I went, oh, he remembers he hates women in this shot.

**Abigail Thorn** (3:34)
Wait a minute!

**Devon** (3:35)
Yeah, no, I...

**Abigail Thorn** (3:37)
Because, famously, the main character Ripley, who was played by Sigourney Weaver, was originally written as a man, and then they were just like, it, she's great, we'll cast her.

**Devon** (3:46)
Yeah, what if we just cast a woman?

**November Kelly** (3:47)
They accidentally let women be in films. Yeah, yeah, and they forgot. And since then, you know, it's a long downhill, ever since, towards le cinéma du foid that we live in now.

**Abigail Thorn** (3:57)
And they forgot that every film that has a woman in it is a film about women. That's how that works.