00:00A living being sacrificing itself, disappearing into a mass of cells that will end up creating a perfect symbiosis with the environment.
00:08The endless cycle of life and death.
00:11This is what illustrates the introduction of Prometheus and it is what has been at the heart of the Alien saga since 1979.
00:18Questions about existence, its usefulness, its beauty and death, its violence, its fatality.
00:25The 7 films in this saga have the advantage of highlighting different universes, particularly visual ones, thanks to the 5 directors who have succeeded each other.
00:33One might then believe that all these films are very different from each other.
00:37Horror, action, thriller, fantasy.
00:41But yet, they share many themes that end up binding them together for better or for worse,
00:47forming a whole which perfectly illustrates the principle of creation and destruction.
00:52Sometimes to create, you must first destroy.
00:58What is striking about the first Alien directed by Ridley Scott is its darkness, its nihilism,
01:04its dark and disturbing settings and of course its bestiary.
01:08Because in this strange paradox, the film teems with life, with organic beings who have this violence in common.
01:14and a very tangible physical texture that you could almost touch through the screen.
01:22Of course, this is due to the fantastic design of the animatronics and costumes,
01:27but also to the brilliantly twisted mind of Hans-Rudy Giger, the visual creator of this universe.
01:33Whether dead or alive, the bodies appear larger than life,
01:36especially that of the monster, the alien, which will later be called Xenomorph.
01:41Designed as a death engine, with its sharp tail, double tongue and acidic blood,
01:47He will sow panic wherever he goes, killing left, right and centre, frightening anyone who can bleed.
01:53But the Xenomorph is also a being of fascination.
01:55From the first film, it is described by Hache as the perfect organism.
01:59And its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
02:02In the 1979 film, his existence is a mystery.
02:07What is it really? Where does it come from? Does it have a purpose?
02:10Or is he just following his primal instinct?
02:12In Aliens, the second installment of the saga,
02:15James Cameron comes to break this mystery by multiplying the Xenomorphs
02:18and showing them in a purely bestial, hierarchical light, not far from insects,
02:24their egg coming from an alien queen that he tries to protect.
02:26In David Fincher's Alien 3, he's just a monster worthy of the most ordinary slasher.
02:31and in the 4th, he gets the spotlight stolen by his hybrid cousin who we will talk about a little later.
02:36The Xenomorph will take a whole new direction in Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien Covenant.
02:41Here, there is no longer any question of a queen.
02:43Scott reshuffles the cards and explains to us that the Xenomorphs,
02:46in their most primitive form, were discovered by the Engineers.
02:50They brought them back to their planet and extracted a very dangerous black substance from it.
02:54which they will use as a weapon of destruction,
02:56but which will also paradoxically serve to create life and human beings on Earth.
03:01These human beings will in turn experience the principle of creation
03:04by manufacturing humanoid robots with consciousness,
03:07one of whom, David, will develop this awareness,
03:10feed his ego and realize that his creators are just weak and stupid beings.
03:15He will go in search of the perfect being and with the help of the remains of heat and the black liquid,
03:19He will create the Xenomorphs as we know them today.
03:22A monster that can only develop in the entrails of a living being.
03:25An endless cycle that Ridley Scott wants to highlight
03:28in order to demonstrate that creation is not an exact science,
03:31that sometimes coincidences, mistakes,
03:34can also be the origin of great things.
03:36If you are my creator,
03:40who is yours?
03:41The eternal question,
03:47which I hope we will answer together.
03:49Humans who go in search of their creators,
03:52full of hope,
03:53to realize that they are only imperfect and violent beings,
03:56in their image,
03:57and David who makes the same observation.
03:59Three types of living organisms
04:00who created imperfect beings,
04:02inevitably fueled by a desire for violence and death.
04:06Because in Alien,
04:08life and death very often come together.
04:10Without death, there is no life.
04:12From an egg comes a Facehugger,
04:13an arachnid whose existence consists of attaching itself to a living being
04:17and in turn lay an organism there before dying.
04:20The living being will then wake up
04:21before being killed by this organism,
04:24only way for him to be born.
04:25In Alien 3,
04:26Ripley realizes that she carries life within her,
04:28which instantly condemns her to death.
04:31She decides not to follow the natural cycle of things
04:33and sacrifices himself,
04:34arms crossed,
04:35in order to save humanity in some way,
04:37and kill the alien queen she carries within her.
04:39But after this very Christ-like sacrifice,
04:42the resurrection comes,
04:43in the fourth film directed by Jean-Pierre Genet.
04:46It takes morbid forms,
04:47since Ripley's clone is operational
04:49after the seventh attempt,
04:51revealing six other deformed life forms
04:53and unnatural,
04:54one of which is still alive,
04:56who begs to be finished off.
05:01A true museum of horror
05:05which underlines why playing God
05:06can have disastrous consequences.
05:08Although in this mass of creative madness,
05:11Ripley will bring out her maternal instinct
05:13and will become fond of
05:15for a monster born from the womb of an alien queen
05:17which she passed on to him with her DNA.
05:19A being called the Newborn,
05:21a hybrid that boasts a completely paradoxical design,
05:24since it is both monstrously disturbing,
05:26of unprecedented violence,
05:27but also very human,
05:28through his gaze,
05:30very gentle through his gestures.
05:31When he is killed by his own mother,
05:33we are both horrified and saddened.
05:35We read a real feeling of sadness in his eyes,
05:37and our feelings are completely turned upside down.
05:40One wonders if one should really feel empathy for this thing.
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