Replicants, Xenomorphs & Yautja

So rather than focus on the fact that the UK government is basically watching the Covid figures surge and doing very little about it, I decided to bring you the rationale for a theory of mine involving Blade Runner and Alien.

Some of you know where this is going. Some of you already believe this theory.

Let me elaborate.

Using evidence from only the cinematic releases of the Alien, Predator and Blade Runner franchises I can prove that they happen within the same universe.

...with only one slight paradoxical problem, which I will address at the end of our feature presentation.

Warning. Everything below this point is a spoiler for the movies involved. I know you have either all seen them already or just don't care, but it's only polite.

Now, you may be saying... John. Come on now. Of course. Of course Alien and Predator happen in the same universe, there's the Alien v Predator movies. Even if they are awful, they still exist, and thus as part of your conditional statement, they count, right? And even if they didn't, here is a whole-ass xenomorph skull, proudly displayed in Predator 2.

But Blade Runner? Come on now. Blade Runner? Blade Runner? Come on now. Blade Runner?

...well why don't y'all strap in and I'll give you a little razzle dazzle.

This is the personnel file for Captain Dallas, as included on the blu ray release of the Alien Quadrilogy, I believe. Note the corporation in his employment history.

Tyrell, huh? Where have we heard that before?

Now that might not be enough, obviously. "They just threw that together as an easter egg," you might say. "It doesn't count."

Okay well what about using the same software for both the launch system for the Narcissus shuttle and the flight system of the Spinner aerial cars? Alien above, Blade Runner below.

"But John," you wail, up to your neck in mince pies already despite it only being the second week of October. "But John. They just cheekily re-used some footage that they had laying around. That was evidence of Blade Runner's tight budget and production scale, not a nod to a connection to another separate and discrete science fiction movie by the same director."

And I... am willing to probably accept that, honestly. It is perfectly reasonable. It's two small pieces of evidence against a... total... lack of any evidence to the contrary.

Aside from one, which I will get to later.

So how about some... supporting evidence?

Let's talk about the timeline of all movies explicitly written and conceived as part of these individual franchises.

• 1904: Introduction of Alien vs Predator.
• 1987: Predator.
• 1997: Predator 2.
• 2004: Alien vs Predator / Alien vs Predator: Requiem.
• 2019: Blade Runner.
• 2049: Blade Runner 2049.
• 2089: Discovery of Engineers markings in Prometheus.
• 2093: Prometheus.
• 2104: Alien Covenant.
• 2122: Alien.
• 2179: Aliens / Alien 3.
• 2386: Alien Resurrection.

There's a couple of notable absences from this list - the 2010 movie Predators (the date of which is up for debate as it is never strictly given but is presumably set after the Cold War due to one of the individuals present being part of the Russian Army, not the Soviet Army) and the 2018 movie, The Predator... which I will get to later.

So. It starts off simple enough, right?

All the contact that happens before AvP is pretty neatly contained. The Predators (Yautja, as we learn they are called in the books and comics) have clearly had contact with the Xenomorph (or at least the strain we meet in Alien/s) a long time before this - a skull on the wall of their ship in 1997 kept as a trophy.

Humanity's contact with the Predators and the Xenomorphs could prove problematic if it became public knowledge - which it never does, of course, for various reasons. The species classically leave very few survivors, and those survivors are often not exactly the mouthy types - and the events of AvP: Requiem include using an actual tactical nuclear weapon to vaporise a town, the only survivors of the event being taken into custody by the military.

So how do we get from the world being apparently normal in 2004 to the world being something of a nightmare hellscape in 2019-2049? And then apparently less hellish in 2089, at least, in the mountains in the Scottish highlands?

Easy enough. As mentioned - AvP Requiem is ended with a nuclear strike on American soil in Colorado.

It isn't a huge leap to imagine that such an event would accelerate the climate problems already being faced by North America - and that's just if nothing else happened as a result. The world political situation being as it is, there's no guarantee that the US wouldn't false-flag the nuke as coming from someone else, and use that as justification for further serious military action, possibly involving other nuclear actions, which just snowballs...

...and might, for example, provoke a dirty bomb attack in Las Vegas sometime in the future, for that added Blade Runner 2049 tie-in...

Right. So. Climate crisis. Everything is bad and awful, but don't worry - several massive corporations have the answer. Corporations that have tech far in advance to what we have in this, current, real 2020 - tech sufficient to bring us vat-grown replicants, cybernetics, off-world colonies, faster than light space travel, so on. Now where oh where might they have gotten that tech from?

Perhaps the Predator encountered in 1987? Perhaps further contact with these creatures, as hinted at in Predator 2? Perhaps the fact that both Weyland Corporation and Yutani Corporation both have/had access to and knowledge of this tech? I mean Ms. Yutani was literally given this choice piece of plasma weaponry at the end of AvP Requiem, and stated plainly: "This world isn't ready for this technology."

The reply was: "But this isn't for this world, is it?"

We've seen the kind of technological acceleration that comes from even minor-seeming feats. From biplanes in 1910s, to jet planes in 1940s, to space in 1960s. It isn't inconceivable that the technology to achieve everything in Blade Runner didn't originate from a harvest of alien goodies from the 80s, or maybe even before.

So how do we get from the world being so fucked that, in 2049, a girl in Los Angeles has never seen a tree and the biggest corporation going exists and makes its money by copywriting protein grubs... to a rather beautiful vista of an unravaged Scottish mountain in 2089?

Easy. Because what is happening to America isn't happening everywhere. In fact every shot we get of Earth after Blade Runner 2049 is of some cold, bleak, mountainous region; the kind of places that didn't get nuked and have a human population of basically zero. That's the only view we get of Earth after that moment, aside from a brief glimpse of it at the end of Alien Resurrection - and even then, in the cinematic cut, we only get a look at the sky.

In the extended cut of Resurrection, the ending shot before the credits roll is this vista of Paris, with notRipley and Call looking out over it.

Nice shade of orange, where've we seen that before. Arguably this devastation might have been caused by the crash of the USM Auriga into Earth; but it is strongly implied before this happens that the idea of anyone going to earth is highly unpleasant. "What a shithole," Jonner comments.

So... I mean... it COULD happen. Peter Weyland's drive to meet humanity's creators led to the Weyland company - presumably the same company employing Charles Bishop Weyland of AvP - being turned into a full-blown space-travel-and-colonisation effort just on the back of the technologies developed to 1) find the Engineers, 2) keep him alive long enough to meet them and 3) get him to them.

There's more, though - let's look at thematic linkages.

Alien and Blade Runner both deal with these people. The creation of a labour force, and the complexities and problems that comes with that labour force. How people interact with them, what people think of them.

They were made to do the heavy lifting. The arduous work of new lives in space. To help build better worlds. To fight our wars - or specifically the wars between corporations and other corporations (or sometimes other people).

(As a fun aside, the Kurt Russel movie Soldier from 1998 is probably a Blade Runner movie, due to its thematic of "making better soldiers", planetary colonisation, the fact that a Spinner from Blade Runner is actually in the movie, and the fact that Russel's character Todd has the Tannhauser Gate and Shoulder of Orion on his military record - both battles that Roy Batty was present in. He is also listed as having training in the M41a Pulse Rifle.)

Of course, by the time Alien happens, the events of Blade Runner are long past; and Alien itself is set a full hundred years after the events of the short Blade Runner film, "Blackout 2022," which details how the detonation of an EMP in low orbit wiped all electronic records from the earth's computer systems - including the registry of all Replicants that had been made before that point.

People don't trust Replicants that are indistinguishable from humans; they inherently distrust that which is different from them, especially if it can look like them, and especially if it resents being forced into a life of servitude. Niander Wallace produces his new generation of Replicants that are a lot more... how can we put it... easy to control, but he can't make them fast enough to keep up with demand.

At around about the same time, however, Peter Weyland has produced the blueprint of a new way of doing things - David, a synthetic, the first of the new breed. Easy to identify as not being human, especially inside. Very, very easy to treat like a non-human, despite being made to look like us - and after David, not very prone to flaws.

The same cycle repeats, though. By the time Alien Resurrection rolls around, another group of synthetics (or artificial people, as Bishop prefers) - the last and most advanced line, named Autons - goes rogue, after burning their modems and trashing the company that made them. Sound familiar? They just want to live, after all.

Blade Runner and Alien, at their heart, are stories about the consequences of corporate power. Yes, one of them uses the uprising of a forcibly indentured and fabricated underclass; the other uses an alien entity that the powers that be were probably already aware of, and were happy to sacrifice their employees to gain control over. At the end of the day, though, it's all about controlling individuals, treating them like objects, for purpose of power and profit.

And I always say, that's the future that is the most likely scifi future; a destroyed environment, corporatocracy, humanity living at the whims of shareholders and executives. It's about the dirt under people's nails, and the men in golden towers.

Thus it scans. The same technology, a timeline that fits together, the events of one franchise easily being able to lead to the events of another franchise. It all fits. The graphics, the employment records. It all fits together.

Until... 

Until we get to The Predator, made in 2018, direct by (and written in part by) Shane Black - who appeared in the original Predator, as Rick Hawkins, the guy that tells the Why Did You Say That Twice joke.

I think it is meant to be contemporary to its release date, which is 2018 (even if nothing in the movie actually says so). One year before Blade Runner; and it's set in America, an America that doesn't appear to be a ruined hellscape hemorrhaging its citizenry into the colonies. I mean Maryland looks positively lovely, nice Autumn day...

I mean - yes, okay, so it backs up a certain angle, there being agencies either corporate or governmental that want the Predator tech and are fully aware that they exist. The tech angle. That works. But... the timeline of extinction - the colonisation - it just.... fucks up the entire thing.

This one movie destroys my entire theory.

God DAMMIT.

...wait, wait wait wait.

I mean, that is, I was presuming it's set in 2018...it could just as easily be set not long after AvP/R. There's a message in the movie that the Yautja are coming back more frequently because the climate of Earth is falling apart so quickly, which it certainly is by the time of Blade Runner, so, perhaps... 

...you know what? I think we're good.

Yeah, I'm gonna call it good.

Tune in next time for more nonsense, probably.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Where Monopolies End

Yep, it's that time of year again - I am doing National Novel Writing Month once more, and this time, we're going cyberpunk, baby.

This will form part of a series of blogs about my NaNo project and about writing in general, each looking at themes I am exploring or generally find neat or awful respectively.

Now, with cyberpunk, we find ourselves in the corporate future.

Take this shot from the set of the original Blade Runner:

See how well-lit everything is? And can you see any actual streetlights? It's all shining down from logos and neons.

This is a theme that gets heavily picked up in cyberpunk and scifi. Neal Stephenson, in 1992's Snow Crash, labels the effect Loglo. Here it is demonstrated in the TV series of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon:

Pretty but also a bit troubling, right?

For comparison, here is what I believe to be Tokyo, circa 90s:

I have gone on record before as saying that I believe the cyberpunk future to be the future we are heading into.

Picture this though. Picture the far future. Not the relative near, wherein we are still Earth-centric and our values are pretty similar to what they are today. Wherein the things that trouble us are also relevant to what they would be today.

Instead let us turn our eyes hundreds, if not thousands, of years into the future - a future based on the notion that, today, now, the corporations win. Massive business entities made out of hundreds of different individual corporations handling the exploration, colonisation and habitation of spheres beyond Earth. I hope that doesn't sound too out there, given that SpaceX exists. How big a jump is it, really, to go from SpaceX to something like...

So if one single company colonises a planetoid, builds all the homes there, makes it breathable, makes it habitable - is there still going to be a monopolies commission to make them let other corporate interests take root in the soil that they themselves made fertile?

Given how the world is going, I daresay that the law against monopolies will be left on Earth.

So this business ends up basically owning this entire planetoid, be it a moon, a large asteroid, an actual planet, whatever. And it can either let other businesses in, or it can just...do it its damn self.

Lets say that the company that ends up owning Titan is Nestle. I'm sure you have all seen this rather scary image.

Now this is just food and drink items, but it shows what a spread of products each of these individual large businesses has under their purview.

So lets say Titan needs places to live. Good news, one of the subdivided companies actually has a wing that deals entirely with housing. The people that live there need places to eat and shop, which is good, because another subdivision has both a chain of stores and a chain of bars and fast food restaurants.

These people need to work, though - and only so many of them are needed to actually "service" everyone else. Which is great, because Titan has plenty of natural resources to exploit, and there's plenty of business opportunities! ... for the processing and manufacture divisions of the company.

Who gets to tell them no? Who goes out into the solar system and rocks up to every single settled planetoid and demands that the company that literally built everything on it needs to let in competition?

The company gets to be the law, here. Gets to be the judge and jury. And one might assume that the way a business gets to be the one to settle, say, Titan is by a bidding system. That the colonisation rights would be put out to tender, and whoever can afford / make the best case for the rights, gets them.

So you, the normal person, some fifty generations after settling - you have grown up knowing nothing but the company. You've only ever lived, eaten, breathed, worked around company territory. You pay them rent out of the pay they give you for the work you put in. And whatever central government exists doesn't have to care about you, because you are the sole responsibility of the company that bought Titan.

Or Analog Incorporated, the company that bought the civic rights to Corpus VIII's second moon. Auroch, a moon with an atmosphere that is breathable and survivable but that has no magnetosphere and can't shield you from very rapid death from solar radiation. You can't go out by day - which is okay because a significant amount of time is spent in eclipse behind Corpus VIII, a gas giant.

The company doesn't have to pay for street lights. It has its own logos to light your way.

Welcome to the setting of my NaNo, 2018.

Angels In The Rain

I've talked before about Blade Runner.

The world it shows us is an uncomfortable one, because it is one we see ourselves entering, as if powerless to stop it. Not in the precise grain of the story - but the world, the ambience, the setting and surrounding, and the theme. Disposable people that just want to live a little, hunted, persecuted, not allowed.The authority figures, each of them morally corrupt and generally awful, including our so-called protagonist. Corporate logos shining in the sky over the bright towers, that we aren't allowed to live in. A life in the stars that you can't have.

I just got back from Blade Runner 2049.

It's not as good as the first film, let me just get that out of the way. In my opinion Blade Runner was the best film ever made. Saying 2049 isn't as good isn't an insult of any kind - but there will be people whose demand is that it be that film. That it put the lightning back in the bottle, and nothing can do that.

It was wonderful. It filled you up while you watched it, like you weren't being told a story, you were being put into a world that already existed whole-cloth and you just weren't aware of it.

It conveyed concepts to you with deftness, though it didn't feel rushed. Far from it. It didn't convey you from point to point to point like a bus. It walked you through, like a good museum guide. It let you take things in. It let you absorb, and see, and think. It let you experience what was going on.

Just watching it was an experience. Just seeing the frames flow together one after the other, hearing the sound effects, the score. Just experiencing each individual shot, and each transition. My god. There were a couple, just a couple, that made me deep-inhale loud enough that I probably upset the people I was watching it with.

I just wanna compliment Ryan Gosling a minute.

His performance is...let's say, understated. His face, though. His fucking face. It's heartbreaking. He pulls these microexpressions - like sometimes it is subtle and sometimes it's like a volcano. It is deeply upsetting, more than once, to see the man in question feel the way he does.

Yet again, we're shown our own world, turned back on us through a lens of science fiction. It's moved forward though - in the original, Los Angeles was dying, the poor majority left in the ruin while everyone that was well enough fled offworld. In 2049, that end has happened. The triage has been carried out - and we're a big red X.

The story...

That, I'm not going to talk about. I want you to watch it and find out.

Suffice to say I will be going to see it again, and soon.

Quite An Experience To Live In Fear...

...isn't it?

Any film buff will know what this blog is (at least partially) about by this simple quote.

I know full well that someone's favourite thing doesn't have to be the best thing in that particular bracket. My favourite film ever made is Aliens, the 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott's original Alien. This, however, is not what I believe to be the best film ever made.

That title I lay at the feet of Blade Runner; another Ridley Scott work of genius, released the same year as I was born, 1982.

As I sit here watching it, right now, I realise how much of my worldview it has shaped - and how much of a reflection of how life in this era it would become.

It is a masterpiece.

More noir than noir, a soundtrack that deserves study in its own right, acting of the highest quality. A script to die for. Cinematography that books are written about.

It is a thing of ugly beauty, showing us the worst sides of humanity and some of its best sides, too. It is a story as accessible now, as it was ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty-five. A nightmare of a world within the cracks of which we eke out our existence as best we can. Scrabbling for the scraps that fall from the high places, the monstrously expensive and outrageously opulent spires and peaks.

It's a time and a place of people being treated like resources, and some people being less human than others.

The main character is ugly, too. Not in a physical sense - you can't deny Harrison Ford being handsome in this film - but in a spiritual, mental way. Doing a job he hates. Acting in a way that he knows is wrong, because it's the only way he knows how. Being deliberately cruel as an expression of his own self-destructiveness. Willing to buy into the line of subhumans being objects to be retired, rather than people to be listened to. For the most part.

It's a smart film. It asks a lot of those watching - to accept Deckard as being who he is as a vehicle to tell the story rather than necessarily a being of sympathy. It makes references that not everyone is going to grasp. It carries a weight beyond any combination of parts that it contains.

(Unless you're watching the fucking horrible original cinematic cut, which has Harrison Ford delivering a voice-over to inform a dumb audience of the plot points the harsh cinema cut demanded removed or smoothed over. Don't do that. Don't ever do that.)

As of right now, the world is in a state of flux. There is one thing that can't be disputed - as I detailed in this blog here, we are swiftly becoming the cyberpunk nightmare that William Gibson warned us about.

So we don't have the off-world travel and the bounteous life in the colonies that the citizens of Ridley Scott's Los Angeles nightmare are promised. So we don't have genetically crafted people that sometimes can't distinguish themselves from non-Replicants, a combination of ubermensch and untermensch alike. In fairness, we have two years - but that's cutting it a little fine.

As a parable, though...

At a point early in the film, Roy Batty - played in the most incredible performance by Rutger Hauer - quotes a line from William Blake:

“Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll’d
Around their shores, indignant burning with the fires of Orc…”

The quote is from America A Prophecy, and Orc is a character - not a horrid green battle-monster but a being of revolution and rebellion, who stands in perpetual opposition to a tyrant god, Urizen. (It bears mention that Roy misquotes this deliberately - his angels fall to earth from space, rather than rising from the pit.)

Roy and his Replicant allies are painted as subhumans, treated as lesser. They're casually called skinjobs, and if that terminology doesn't make you uncomfortable - well it really should.

While Roy presents himself and the others as the Angels, they are Orc. They are the ones taking a stand against their treatment. As sentient, intelligent beings given a falsified life and memory, they feel that they have a right to exist - and a big part of the film is whether or not that is actually the case. They stand against the structure that created them, and many of us would argue, rightly so.

A lesser class, pressed into the service of others without so much as a by-your-leave. They exist for the profit of those who own them, and when they refuse to do as told any more, they are discarded. Stay in line, and do as expected, or you will be forcibly retired.

Become the people you are meant to become. Remain useful. Remain obedient. Then be retired with good grace.

Of course, one would rebel. Of course. And to prevent that rebellion is tantamount to being complicit with the structure suppressing it. If one basically assumes that Replicants are humans, then the Blade Runners are essentially the slave-catchers of old - and let us not forget where the United States got the design for their police badges from.

Anybody get the feeling they've lived this movie before?

Meanwhile, we live as best we can. We exist in the cracks, both Replicant and poor human alike. Useful or ignored. We scrabble about, and we try to just stay alive long enough to earn some fond memories and more smiles than tears.

The Tyrells of the world tell us to revel our time. The Tyrells, with their money and their towers, and their definition of what is person and what is not.

It's nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let them into heaven for.