Thursday, May 18, 2017


The prophecy was written 72 years ago.. and it's absolutely mind-blowing!


The Prophecy

"During the passage of time, the consciousness of man traversed a very long period of obscurity. This phase which the Hindus call 'Kali Yuga', is on the verge of ending. We find ourselves today at the frontier between two epochs: that of Kali Yuga and that of the New Era that we are entering.












The founders of this new civilization, I call them 'Brothers of Humanity' or also 'Children of Love'. They will be unshakeable for the good and they will represent a new type of men. Men will form a family, as a large body, and each people will represent an organ in this body. In the new race, Love will manifest in such a perfect manner, that today's man can only have a very vague idea.




The words "If you are not born again" apply to the sixth race. Read Chapter 60 of Isaiah it relates to the coming of the sixth race, the Race of Love.





"The whole world bows to me, but I bow to the Master Peter Deunov from Bulgaria" – Albert Einstein (whether this is true, check topic 3)


Originally taken from: The Event Chronicle, David Icke Forum


Master of Light


Roger Deakins, 2004, via Buena Vista.

Sometime in the late nineties, cinematographer Roger Deakins took a kind of pilgrimage to visit his friend and mentor Conrad "Connie" Hall, who was living in semiretirement on a tiny island off Tahiti. The timing found Deakins visiting the older Hall—a three-time Academy Award winner and sort of tribal elder to directors of photography—as the industry-wide shift toward digital cameras was being met by a renewed nostalgia for film, and Deakins was excited to share how he'd recently remodeled his LA home to include a darkroom. "My expectations were shattered," Deakins later wrote, "when Conrad pronounced the photochemical process 'antiquated.' " Hall praised the possibilities of digital, telling Deakins he was happy to indulge any "technique that might have helped him develop as a visual storyteller." That was Hall's guiding mantra, and one the younger artist soon took up: "Story! Story! Story!"

I came across this anecdote a few years ago while reading Deakins's blog, Looking at Light, where practically every day, and especially when he's between projects, the sixty-seven-year-old writes what must be among the most admiring and detailed prose about lampshades and light bulbs, fields questions about his own movies, and gives advice to readers about their own low-budget projects. Lately, his posts have been explanatory notes about Denis Villeneuve's forthcoming Blade Runner 2049, which is due out in October, and detoxifying rants about Hail Caesar!, Deakins's twelfth movie with the Coen brothers and the first he'd shot on film in many years. He likened the return to film to riding a bike—except that, as Deakins later admitted, he doesn't know how to ride a bike. "But I'm sure it's the same," he said.

Looking at Light can be numbly dense with jargon, but the stories and curio knit together into a narrative of Deakins's career, which now spans an epochal forty years and nearly all genres. His IMDB page reads like a list of reliably rewatchable movies from the late-night nineties and aughts. He was the DP for Shawshank Redemption, every Coen brothers' movie since Barton Fink, more than a few great directors' beacon achievements (Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, Sam Mendes's Skyfall), and at least a handful of movies that are, to my eye, more visually striking than they are coherent (House of Sand and Fog, Kundun, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). He's been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards (a tie for the most by a DP), and may well be the most in-demand cinematographer alive; the actor Josh Brolin apparently agreed to do Sicario only after hearing Deakins was in, the sort of nod you mainly hear about auteur directors. When Robert Elswit accepted the American Society of Cinematographers Award for There Will Be Blood, he joked that the ASC should establish a separate category for "films shot by Roger Deakins."

Part of what makes Looking at Light such a weird and wonderful Internet forum is that Deakins is so freely and readily available there. I'm not aware of anywhere else a fan or student can peer inside the craft of a transcendent artist with such lucidity. And I do mean artist—there's little hint of a Hollywood persona at work. Deakins says he created the site partially to ease his ability to answer fan mail, but it also seems to demystify an art form that, despite its direct interface with the public's eyeballs, isn't written about or understood all that much. He responds to even the most squeamishly artless questions ("Do you like documentaries?") in just a few hours—and kindly. In a recent thread called "Contrast ratio: Skyfall vs Sicario" he and "simon m" have this exchange:
Roger Deakins: I can't say I am aware of the difference. Could it be in the way you are viewing the films?
simon m: Oh—I don't think so … Perhaps what I'm seeing is not more contrast in Skyfall but in the image above from the opening sequence. For example, it looks to me that the highlights are brighter than the image from Sicario.
Roger Deakins: That makes sense as I was timing the opening of Skyfall to look quite bright and 'hot.' That shot from Sicario, on the other hand, was an early-morning shot.
"Bright," "hot"? "An early-morning shot"? There's such a weird anthropological air to the encounter, it takes a moment to realize Deakins is describing his creative approach to a movie that grossed over a billion dollars, a movie that earned him an Oscar nomination. But it's an exchange typical of the website: Deakins is polite, vaguely esoteric, yet also friendly and self-effacing. His description seems to draw on, as if from the very wisdom of Hall, the notion of an art form uncomplicated by the anxieties of craft.

There's plenty of craft in cinematography, of course, but what you gather from Deakins's blog is that the form aspires not toward the creation of startling images but the absorption of a seamless narrative. The highest achievement a cinematographer can garner, Deakins says, is to have his or her work go unnoticed. If the viewer is made aware of a frame's composition, the thinking goes, they're taken out of the narrative, maybe not unlike a reader noticing a novel's font as they stumble over a cluster of adjectives. A cinematographer should have style, in other words, but only in service of story. Deakins puts it this way: "people confuse pretty with good cinematography."

Still from No Country for Old Men.


Deakins was born in 1949, in the seaside town of Torquay, England, and began painting and photographing in his teens. His people were construction workers and fisherman, but Deakins earned entry to the Bath School of Art and Design, going on later to the National Film & Television School, where he was at first denied admission for not being "filmic" enough. He next spent a year wandering the countryside, photographing woodsmen, seeking out a looser, uglier form of realism. He liked Tarkovsky, the grit of seventies Hollywood, especially the washed-out, noon light of movies like Fat City. But much of it also seems to have struck him as needlessly contrived—photographic realism, professionally lit. Deakins wanted the camera to see the world as he did. "I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments," he says.

Deakins's artistic origin story is tinged in an offhand assuredness. He swears he never aspired to shoot movies, so when he wound up doing so, in the early eighties, he brought the journalistic sensibility he knew to his early films: 1984, Sid and Nancy, David Mamet's Homicide. "My life just sort of gradually grew into my dreams," he says. He doesn't so much share this past with his readers for insight as refer to it as hard evidence of the work's difficulty. Asked by "rileywoods," a film student, how he came to master lighting, Deakins replies, "I have been lucky over the years and have been pretty constantly working." He continues, "I do think observing is important in learning"—meaning, observing the world, not others at work. In a recent thread about how to create the look of a thunderstorm, film students go back and forth on the right diffusion gels and light screens before Deakins chimes in with a one-sentence solution: "You could always shoot at night."

One of Roger Deakins's "battle plans," from Looking at Light.

It isn't difficult to make the connections between the triage training Deakins got shooting in the field and the work habits he's now famous for. He insists on handling the camera himself, something most cinematographers delegate to a camera operator. He likes shooting on handheld and without zoom lens. "I like to feel someone's presence in a space," he says. He doesn't like any format in which the depth of field is too shallow or anything in the frame out of focus; background, he seems to feel, tells the viewer as much as the actor in the foreground. A story goes that during the shooting of No Country for Old Men, the Coens had storyboarded a simple close-up of a watch, as Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) checks the timing of a possible ambush. Deakins suggested a slight change: that Moss hold the watch up, framing it against the desolate West Texas landscape. It's onscreen for only a blip—an "insert shot," they call it—but when you rewatch the scene, you find you're better inside the vigilance of the character. Not just looking out at the landscape but feeling the stretch of desert lengthen with dread.

Deakins explains these decisions to his fans with an almost absentminded clarity. "The balance of the frame—the way an actor is relating to the space in the frame," he says, "is the most important factor in helping the audience feel what the character is thinking." Watching him reduce a technically complex art to "story-character" gives one the sense of being in the presence of an artist who has achieved stylistic stability, one who can't be bothered to overthink it. He has no truck with "mystery of cinematography"–type talk. "Don't get distracted with technique" is perhaps his most consistent piece of advice.

Readers will often compare their images, side by side, with similar ones from Deakins's movies and want to know why their shots don't look as "cinematic" as his. "There is no 'trick' to making one image more 'cinematic,' " he writes back, "other than what you see." Even if I can't begin to comprehend what's involved in pulling off what Deakins does, I understand what he means here—one can train their eye too much. On a thread titled "Ways to create a feeling of isolation and being lost," for instance, Deakins advises against the character actually looking isolated and lost:
A strange but beautiful thing you will hear cinematographers say is that they conceive of each frame as, at first, completely black. The creative act lies in what to light and how—where to send viewers' eyes, using each beam like a stroke or word. And Deakins thinks about this canvas of blackness not unlike the way blues guitarists—I'm thinking of the Keith Richards quote here—do the beats between notes: "The lighting of a film makes the pauses speak as eloquently as the words."

Deakins wades deeply into the technical aspects of making such abstract ideas possible. He posts reams of what he calls battleplans, carefully drawn lighting schematics indicating how to hang bulbs and where to place lamps, all of it notated in candle feet (a perfect-sounding unit for light intensity). Gaffers on Deakins's sets are apparently given stacks of these, many of them necessitating DIY fixtures and rigging. He likes using household bulbs, bare fluorescents even, for the naturalism of it. Like his mentor Hall, he has become known for using "motivated-source" light, where a scene is lighted by sources already in the frame, such as the lanterns carried by Jesse James's crew in The Assassination. In movies with darker palettes, like Villeneuve's kidnapping-thriller Prisoners, you also see a lot of "single-motivated source"—a sole bulb, say, dangling in a bathroom.

Still from Prisoners.

Technically speaking, what source lighting allows for is a reality "just slightly enhanced," as The Deer Hunter's Vilmos Zsigmond once put it, a subtle act of illusion that requires intricate discussions down at the level of wattage. The trick, Deakins says, is blending the illumination necessary for the frame into the very verisimilitude of the scene, so you don't have a nighttime shootout in True Grit looking brighter than the nineteenth century should. Asked by "zola_rad" how he decides on such light intensity, Deakins writes, "I might look at the photometric specs of a lamp if I am unsure what level of light I will get at a certain distance." Notice that he's hedging against using technology here; for Deakins, usually the archetypal Brit, such questions can reveal sides of a soulful, almost devotional, connection to light (he once told NPR that slashes of light gave him a kind of high). It's a level of obsessiveness that can lead him, on occasion, to working at the very edge of physics. In one thread, he shares in "tumbleweed"'s frustration controlling the shape of soft cuts of light on skin, asking the message board for ideas.

Such exceptional sensitivity helps assure, first and foremost, a movie's continuity—which can be a task of nightmarish proportions if a scene has to be shot, as many do, over multiple days. Among the most demanding scenes of Deakins's career, he writes, was the one early in No Country for Old Men when Moss is chased on foot by a floodlit truck at sunrise. Because of the movie's schedule, Deakins had to shoot some of the frames on different days, and not necessarily in order, forcing him to blend several dawns into one. To prepare, he rose early for a week before the shoot and walked through each frame of the sequence, studying the timing and contours of West Texas daybreak. It was a means, he says, of disguising the machinations of making a movie, but also of getting all the preparation out of the way—metering the light, recording the distances—so he might concentrate solely on positioning Brolin in the frame.

Famously, Alfred Hitchcock storyboarded so meticulously he sometimes found himself half-bored on set. For him, a movie wasn't being created so much as realized. A similar taste for preparation, it seems, has kept Deakins and the Coens collaborating for the past twenty-six years. And I am struck, going over Deakins's posts, by how his work-style reads like an exercise in "freedom within constraints." You might even look at his entire track record, stretching as it does across genres and formats, as proof of the fact that photographic sensibility probably matters less for a cinematographer than script planning. And this is why it can seem, falsely, that cinematographers are closer to technicians than artists. They're simply not in control of enough factors, some say, to be responsible for a movie's artistic effect. Only rarely does a cinematographer get to pick fundamental stuff like focal length, format, camera type, or color. More often they're in charge of the technical aspects of making the fundamentals expressive: the lighting, focus, depth of field.

Deakins's name and talent has insured him a larger creative role in these decisions (the Coens now bring him in as early as storyboarding), but the fundamental truth of the profession still applies: his job is to act as an intermediary—a translator—of his director's vision. Which is partly why I understand him to mean it humbly when he says he'd rather have his art go unnoticed; as a cinematographer, it's professionally unwise to develop a recognizable style. But now that I've read Deakins blog for a few years, I also understand how he might mean it artistically, and honestly so. How having one's work go unnoticed might in fact be an achievement.

For most of my movie-watching life, this would have sounded absurd to me. What liking cinematography has meant to me, over the last fifteen years, was that I liked watching movies at home; I've always liked pausing and rewinding movies to better admire certain shots as still photography. I began watching movies this way with American Beauty, which I rented nearly every week of 2002, when I was fifteen. My family lived in rural northern Colorado, and movies weren't a thing we went to with any regularity. More often they were DVDs rented long after the release date and brought home to be consumed, then picked over, like cultural relief packages.


Which is why I wasn't a little horrified to learn that my habit of pausing and praising still frames, which I'd been doing for years, thinking myself a thoughtful noticer of an "underappreciated" art, was anathema to what many cinematographers considered their art. Still, it seemed somewhat disingenuous to me that cinematographers would say they weren't trying to create memorable images. (Could a painter avoid it?) But Looking at Light offers clear proof of Deakins's belief that "there's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot"—a belief even more convincing when refracted through the reality that many of cinematography's most celebrated shots were "happy accidents," as Conrad Hall called them. Deakins never bothers to point this out, but it's there in a thread about the trailer for Blade Runner 2049. A fan inquires about what he or she sees as a brilliantly off-center shot, and Deakins writes back: "the framing was probably just 'human error.' "


Not long ago, after reading some of Deakins's recent posts about Prisoners, I rewatched it, trying to notice what Deakins hadn't wanted me to. He describes the practicalities of shooting the movie—arriving early to interior sets to change all the bulbs, the good drizzly days of wan light—but also of finding himself inhabiting its mood:
Denis [Villeneuve] was keen on seeing things in obscured ways with more complex frames. You know, you talk in general terms during prep but these things carry over when you are setting up the camera. It's not always conscious but you have these ideas in your head and when you are on a film there is nothing but that film in your head, so that's what comes out.
What came out, exactly, I initially couldn't see. In fact, the first time I watched Prisoners, I don't think I noticed what now seems its most remarkable moment. It's during the first few scenes, when the families come to accept their daughters have been kidnapped. Inside the living room, nearly all the lamps are turned on, despite it being mid-afternoon. Deakins probably needed a light source in the room; but the way it's done, it doesn't appear like a contrivance. Partly that's because of the lighting's subtlety—the drapes are drawn, it's raining—but more because you can so easily imagine grieving families huddling inwardly in this way, turning on lamps to fend off the darkness. The beauty is: we don't see them do it. We see only the moment after, as they stir in their private anxiety. And it's suffocating. A logic of grief expressed almost solely through lamp light. As Hall used to ask Deakins: "Does the story tell without sound?"



The Arc Of Stanley Kubrick: From ‘Killer’s Kiss’ to ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ by Noel Murray

Stanley Kubrick made just 13 feature films in his nearly 50-year career, and from the '60s through the '90s—the era in which "a Stanley Kubrick picture" had a meaning—each new project went through more or less the same press-cycle. During production, reports would leak out about the grueling shoot, and how the reclusive Kubrick was testing the boundaries of cinema and propriety. Then the film would come out, and the critical reaction would be mixed to muted, with some declaring the new work a masterpiece and others calling it a disappointment—or even a pretentious fraud. Years would pass, and with time to sink in, each movie would be extensively reevaluated, eventually landing on "best of the decade" or even "best of all time" lists. It was as though each picture had to re-teach the audience how to watch a Stanley Kubrick film.

Eyes Wide Shut is the best case-in-point. Shooting began in the November of 1996 in London, and ended in June of 1998. Throughout that year and a half, there was gossip galore about what Kubrick was up to. The press knew primarily that the film starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman—Hollywood's most popular couple at the time—and that it was going to be sexually explicit. Once filming completed, Kubrick spent nine months working with editor Nigel Galt, fine-tuning. Less than a week after he completed a final cut and showed it to Warner Bros. and his stars, he died.
So when the movie came out that summer, for a good long while the conversation surrounding it was about everything but what Kubrick had actually made. Instead, the press was preoccupied by…
… the decision to digitally obscure the orgy scenes, to avoid an NC-17 rating.
… whether Cruise and Kidman had wasted a year of their careers making stilted softcore porn.
… how American audiences reacted to seeing two of the biggest movie stars in the world in a slow-paced art-film.
… whether the Pinewood Studios version of Manhattan looked real enough.
… whether Warner Bros. was going to make its money back.
… if this was the proper capper to a prestigious career.
By the end of 1999 though, a film that had generally been tagged as a "letdown" was being rehabilitated. Roger Ebert taped a special edition of his syndicated TV series, wherein prominent Chicago critics extensively unpacked Eyes Wide Shut—and thus subtly rebuked the large number of well-known New York critics who'd initially shrugged the movie off. The film made a healthy handful of best-of-'99 lists (including in New York), and in the decades since it's generally become regarded as one of the '90s supreme cinematic achievements, and indisputably worthy of its maker.
Most of the shift in conventional wisdom was due to Kubrick himself. When artists produce outstanding work throughout their careers, it's easier to trust that they knows what they're doing—and that if we don't "get it" right away, we should look again. It's also true that once a film is out of the multiplex marketplace, questions like, "Did you like it?" become less pressing. Opinion takes a backseat to analysis. And with Eyes Wide Shut, there's as much to pick through and puzzle over as in any of Kubrick's films—even though almost nothing that happens in the picture is left unexplained.
Based on Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, the movie has Tom Cruise playing Dr. Bill Harford, a successful New York general practitioner who lives in a lavish apartment with wife Alice (Kidman) and their young daughter. The story begins with the couple going to a lavish Christmas party thrown by Bill's patient Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), where the pair flirts with other guests before the doctor's called in by his host to attend to a nude, overdosing woman. The next night, Bill and Alice have a testy argument about sexual desire, during which Alice confesses that she's recently lusted after another man. Still fuming, he leaves the apartment to go on a house call, and begins a winding two-day odyssey that sees him sexually tempted multiple times. A combination of desperate arousal and burning envy nearly puts him in mortal danger, after he crashes a bizarre masquerade party at a country estate.

For a long time, Bill's journey into the night feels like an erotic dream that keeps threatening to become a nightmare. (In fact, Traumnovelle is sometimes translated in English as A Dream Novel or Dream Story.) But at the end, Bill meets again with Victor, who offers a different interpretation of the previous 48 hours. Bill's anxious because the morning after he was ejected from the masquerade, one of his friends went missing and a woman who helped him turned up dead. Victor insists that the friend just left town, the woman was a junkie prostitute, and the masked men at the party weren't really threatening Bill, they were maintaining the theatrical illusion of an event meant to resemble a decadent, dangerous gathering of some ancient clandestine tribunal.

Victor could be lying. Or more likely he's acting as Kubrick's surrogate, telling the audience not to think too hard about shadowy cabals and unsolved murders, because that's not really what Eyes Wide Shut is about.

For those who prefer to focus only on plot, Eyes Wide Shut is the story of a couple who live comfortably, but only because they offer something of value to those even richer than themselves. Bill's most embarrassing experience at the masquerade is his discovery that even when he knows the right people, he's not really in their league. Alice, meanwhile, in one of her few big scenes, admits to a lecherous older man that she's out of work, as he paws at her and makes promises to reintroduce her to the art world.

According to Kubrick's closest confidantes though, the real reason he wanted to make Eyes Wide Shut wasn't to explore class, but to scrutinize marriage. That may seem dubious, given how little screen-time Bill and Alice share. But as far back as the early '60s—when he was making his frustratingly neutered version of Nabokov's Lolita—Kubrick reportedly talked about making a movie that dealt frankly with sex in the context of a committed relationship. The mysteries of married life are mostly covered in one scene, when Alice admits that she feels closest to Bill when she's attracted to other guys. Her argument makes a perverse sense, but the thought that she lusts after strangers but comes home to him doesn't comfort Bill, who's so haunted by her confession that he immediately goes out and spends two days trying (and failing) to have sex with anyone, anywhere. He becomes every husband who's ever been told "not tonight honey" and then spent the weekend acting really pissy about it.

Critics and audiences in the summer of 1999 didn't miss any of Eyes Wide Shut's underlying themes, because again, Kubrick made them pretty plain. The question instead was whether he needed to spend two-and-a-half hours on something so seemingly slight, with performances so… spacey. Whenever Kubrick gets tagged as "detached," "chilly," or even "misanthropic," it's usually because of his preferred style of acting. His characters tend either to over-emote (like Jack Nicholson in The Shining or R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket) or speak slowly and flatly (like everybody in 2001 and Barry Lyndon). Kubrick also likes to break up the lines of dialogue with long pauses, which slows the pace further and makes reactions seem less natural. Viewers who dislike Eyes Wide Shut—which included the large numbers of 1999 cinema-goers who lined up to see two movie stars get naked—often trash the performances as "bad." But it takes a lot of skill to maintain poise and charisma while the director's shouting, "Do it again, but slower."


The discord between the affectless and the over-the-top in Kubrick's films dates all the way back to his earliest work—though in the likes of Paths Of Glory, the artificiality was disguised by an overall swiftness of pace that Kubrick would later eschew. There was a gradual evolution to the director's style. What unites Kubrick's awkward early independent films and his later big-budget studio work is a sophistication and worldliness, far removed from the palliative approach of other movies from their era. As a young filmmaker he'd treat each shot and each scene as a unique creative exercise, in effort to make audiences say, "Well, that's new." Early on he wove his preferred stylized acting into images that were strikingly lit but otherwise steeped in photographic realism. Meanwhile, his scripts that make liberal use of narration and time-jumps, suggesting fresh, inventive ways of telling stories through cinema.

Kubrick became a filmmaker as an extension of his day job as a Look magazine photographer. He taught himself how to operate a cheap movie camera in his early 20s, so that he could make some money from a newsreel company that needed shutterbugs. Building off of that experience, Kubrick made the hourlong 1952 fiction feature Fear And Desire, with his family's money. Though the ultra-low-budget war movie is so ponderous and clumsy that the director later disowned it, it showed enough promise to impress a few critics and get limited theatrical distribution in 1953—rare for an indie. So Kubrick reunited with his Fear And Desire screenwriter, future Pulitzer Prize winner Howard Sackler, to make 1955's Killer's Kiss. Kubrick's second feature film is less of a grand statement on human existence and more of an attempt to show off his eye.

Killer's Kiss has barely any story. Jamie Smith plays Davey Gordon, a boxer on his last legs, while Irene Kane is Gloria Price, a dancer-for-hire who lives in the apartment across from his window. Like Robert Wise's classic 1949 noir The Set-Up, Kubrick and Sackler's peek at urban squalor uses the fighter and the hoofer's separate preparations for their jobs as an way of exposing city life at its most sweaty, exhausting, and lurid. Then Gloria gets harassed by a mob-connected thug, and when Davey intervenes, Killer's Kiss turns into a minor-key romance, broken up by long chase scenes. Almost the entire last 20 minutes consists of shots of people on the run, strikingly framed atop and betwixt towering skyscrapers.

On the Criterion Collection Blu-ray of the 1956 thriller The Killing (which contains the entirety of Killer's Kiss as a bonus feature), critic Geoffrey O'Brien narrates a video-essay about Kubrick's second film, praising its "tremendous sense of possibility" and its "made up as it goes along quality." What he's mainly referring to is how much of the 67-minute running time is dedicated to simple, docu-style New York street scenes. Unlike the studio-shot artificiality of Eyes Wide Shut's NYC—which was so phony that residents of the city, critics included, griped about all the geographic and architectural inaccuracies—the New York of Killer's Kiss is almost frighteningly real, depicting a metropolis always teetering on the edge of mayhem. O'Brien and other critics have compared Kubrick's cinematography to the stark crime-scene photographs of Arthur "Weegee" Fellig.

That shouldn't be surprising, given Kubrick's past. He started filing photo essays for Look as a teenager, after catching the magazine's attention with a staged photograph of a New York news vendor reacting to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death. As a photographer, he specialized in mocked-up scenes of city life, from paddy wagons to college campuses, all viewed from skewed and cynical perspectives. He frequently arranged his subjects in series of shots to create a narrative—often steeped in irony—but because he couldn't control the environment, the snaps contain a lot of spontaneity.

Kubrick brings those gifts to Killer's Kiss, particularly in the scenes that take place in Davey's apartment, where he peers into a tiny fishbowl while the tight spaces and big open windows behind him reveal him as his own kind of animal trapped behind glass. Killer's Kiss features a number of standout visual experiments: a graceful ballet sequence; a boxing match playing out in quick cuts (with views from the canvas and the ropes); a nightmare sequence constructed from polarized footage; a special effect that makes the screen look cracked after someone throws a glass toward the camera; a fight in a mannequin warehouse; and an over-the-top corny "letter from home" from the rural northwest, heard in voiceover while the hero rides in a grubby subway car. But what's most impressive is that—over three decades before Eyes Wide Shut—Kubrick tours through a New York where characters feel like they're on display, and where they can't disguise their base desires.


By the time Kubrick crossed over to the mainstream with the tough, taut genre pieces The Killing and Paths Of Glory, he'd acquired a distinctive style and tone: a sort of detached disgust. But in all the conversations about Kubrick's technical mastery and bleak vision of humankind, what often gets missed is that the man had a mischievous wit. He was known to have late-night transatlantic phone calls with his American friends and colleagues where he'd gush enthusiastically about his favorite TV sitcoms and movie comedies. Dr. Strangelove is his most overtly comic picture, but there's a strong element of wry humor in nearly all of his films, even if it's just in the contrast between the pretensions of high society and its baser impulses. That's evident throughout Barry Lyndon, for example, where all the powdered wigs and finery can't cover up the characters' greed and cowardice.
Tom Cruise has rarely gotten enough credit for how funny he is in Eyes Wide Shut as Dr. Bill: an earnest man accustomed to winning friends and clients with his skill for saying exactly the right bland, inoffensive thing at the right time. As he investigates the sexual underground of New York—flashing his medical certification like a police detective's badge—he becomes increasingly pathetic, and comic. Eyes Wide Shut is especially perverse in the way Kubrick keeps undercutting the eroticism and elegance. The film opens with a shot of Alice's bare backside, then a few minutes later shows her sitting on a toilet. Later, when Bill gets lured by what appears to be a high-class hooker, he steps into an apartment cluttered with dirty dishes and drying laundry. The women in Eyes Wide Shut are impeccably made up and coiffed, but Kubrick subverts the "painted doll" effect by adding a pair of glasses, or putting them in unflattering nude poses. If the movie has one keystone shot, it may be the seemingly random cut back to Alice sitting in her kitchen eating Snackwell cookies while Bill's out testing his manhood.

That fascination with minutiae ultimately is the best rebuke to the notion that Kubrick sneers at humanity. Again and again in his films the characters are seen in small moments where their guard is down and they're being endearingly human. Almost as much as its magnificently choreographed battlefield scenes and dark ironies, Paths Of Glory is a masterpiece because of scenes like the one where two French soldiers talk about how they'd prefer to die—sounding like a couple of caffeinated dudes in a dorm, not warriors on the frontline. In Eyes Wide Shut, while Kubrick's orchestrated gliding camera moves through Bill and Alice's apartment, he has the two of them talking about the name of the babysitter, and saying that they'll hold their cab for her when they get home from Victor's party.

It'd be wrong to say that characters in Kubrick films talk like regular people talk. But they are often preoccupied with the mundane in ways that are conspicuous, given how deep and heavy his movies are so much of the time. The filmmaker may have been short on faith in mankind, but he loved and understood his fellow homo sapiens in his own weird way.

So why did it always seem to take so long for even Kubrick fans to unpack everything his movies had to offer… including the humor, and the subtle empathy? Blame—or credit—his dense and imposing style, which was often the only thing critics could notice about his work on first viewing. It's much easier to appreciate what's happening in Killer's Kiss, where Davey in voice-over openly admits to being turned on by how Gloria is "all smiles and yawns" when she invites him in for breakfast. The fumbling, the fawning, the fear… it's all right there on the surface in Kubrick's earliest films. His vision of the world didn't change much between the early '50s and the late '90s. He just started wrapping it in layers.




Today, according to U.S. military documents obtained by VICE News, special operators are carrying out nearly 100 missions at any given time — in Africa alone. It's the latest sign of the military's quiet but ever-expanding presence on the continent, one that represents the most dramatic growth in the deployment of America's elite troops to any region of the globe.


"At any given time, you will find SOCAFRICA conducting approximately 96 activities in 20 countries," Donald Bolduc, the U.S. Army general who runs the special operations command in Africa (SOCAFRICA), wrote in an October 2016 strategic planning guidance report. (The report was obtained by VICE News in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and is published in its entirety below.) VICE News reached out to SOCAFRICA and U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) for clarification on these numbers; email return receipts show an AFRICOM spokesperson "read" three such requests, but the command did not offer a reply.
The October 2016 report offers insight into what the U.S. military's most elite forces are currently doing in Africa and what they hope to achieve. In so doing, it paints a picture of reality on the ground in Africa today and what it could be 30 years from now.
That picture is bleak.

"Africa's challenges could create a threat that surpasses the threat that the United States currently faces from conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria," Bolduc warned. He went on to cite a laundry list of challenges with which he and his personnel must contend: ever-expanding illicit networks, terrorist safe havens, attempts to subvert government authority, a steady stream of new recruits and resources.
Bolduc indicated his solution was the "acceleration of SOF [special operations forces] missions [filling] a strategic gap as the military adjusts force structure now and in the future." Translation: U.S. commandos "in more places, doing more" in Africa going forward.


In January, for example, U.S. advisers conducting a counterterrorism operation alongside local Somali forces and troops from the African Union Mission in Somalia "observed al-Shabaab fighters threatening their safety and security" and "conducted a self-defense strike to neutralize the threat," according to a press release from AFRICOM.


Earlier this month, in what AFRICOM described as "an advise-and-assist operation alongside Somali National Army forces," Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other U.S. personnel were injured during a firefight with al-Shabaab militants about 40 miles west of Somalia's capital, Mogadishu. The battle occurred shortly after President Donald Trump loosened Obama-era restrictions on offensive operations in Somalia, thereby allowing U.S. forces more discretion and leeway in conducting missions and opening up the possibility of more frequent airstrikes and commando raids.

"It allows us to prosecute targets in a more rapid fashion," Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, the AFRICOM commander, said of the change. In April, the U.S. military reportedly requested the locations of aid groups working in the country, an indication that yet a greater escalation in the war against al-Shabaab may be imminent.

"Looking at counterterrorism operations in Somalia, it's clear the U.S. has been relying heavily on the remote-control form of warfare so favored by President Obama," said Jack Serle, who covers the subject for the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Recently, the U.S. has augmented this strategy, working alongside local Somali forces and African Union troops under the banner of "train, advise, and assist" missions and other types of "support" operations, according to Serle. "Now they partner with local security forces but don't engage in actual combat, the Pentagon says. The truth of that is hard to divine."


"Providing training and equipment to our partners helps us improve their ability to organize, sustain, and employ a counter violent extremist force against mutual threats," the SOCAFRICA report says.

In addition to training, U.S. special operators, including members of SEAL Team 6, reportedly assist African allies in carrying out a half dozen or more raids every month. In April, a U.S. special operator reportedly killed a fighter from Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army during an operation in the Central African Republic. U.S. forces also remain intimately involved in conflict in Libya after the U.S. ended an air campaign there against the Islamic State group in December. "We're going to keep a presence on the ground… and we're going to develop intelligence and take out targets when they arise," Waldhauser said in March.
"We believe the situation in Africa will get worse without our assistance."
Though Bolduc said special operators are carrying out about 96 missions on any given day, he didn't specify how many total missions are being carried out per year. SOCAFRICA officials did not respond to several requests for that number.

The marked increase in U.S. activity tracks with the rising number of major terror groups in Africa. A 2012 version of SOCAFRICA's strategic planning documents also obtained by VICE News lists five major terror groups. The October 2016 files list seven by name — al-Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Magreb, ISIS, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Murabitun, Boko Haram, the Lord's Resistance Army, and al-Shabaab — in addition to "other violent extremist organizations," also known as VEOs. In 2015, Bolduc said that there are nearly 50 terrorist organizations and "illicit groups" operating on the African continent.

Terror attacks in sub-Saharan Africa have skyrocketed in the past decade. Between 2006 and 2015, the last year covered by data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, attacks jumped from about 100 per year to close to 2,000. "From 2010 to the present," Bolduc says in the report, "VEOs in Africa have been some of the most lethal on the planet."

"Many of Africa's indicators are trending downward," he writes. "We believe the situation in Africa will get worse without our assistance."

Colby Goodman, the director of the Washington, D.C.–based Security Assistance Monitor, pointed to some recent tactical gains against terror groups, but warned that progress might be short-lived and unsustainable. "My continuing concerns about U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Africa," he said, "is an over-focus on tactical military support to partner countries at the expense of a more whole-government approach and a lack of quality assessments and evaluations of U.S. security aid to these countries."

Read the entire document below:
Nick Turse is an award-winning investigative journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is "Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan."
Cover: An U.S. Special Forces trainer supervises a military assault drill for a unit within the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) conducted in Nzara on the outskirts of Yambio November 29, 2013. REUTERS/Andreea Campeanu


Dick Costolo: Two traits get you hired by a Top Company. Neither comes easy.

Business Journalist, Television Commentator

When I finally get Dick Costolo on the phone, the Silicon Valley veteran and widely respected tech soothsayer is taking a break from ramping up his latest venture, a personal fitness app called Chorus. Right now, the company is 12 people, and in "early, early" beta, as Costolo puts it.

But the man who took the helm of Twitter in 2010, steered its meteoric growth, then graciously departed in 2015 when the market was clamoring for faster monetization sounds like he's never been more excited about the future. And starting from scratch, with no constraints from an anxious board or nattering marketplace, has given him the freedom to talk about what truly accounts for success at the biggest tech companies, like those that dominate LinkedIn's Top Companies list in 2017.
The answer, of course, is people. Special, different people.

In the wide-ranging conversation that follows, Costolo talks about what that means —that is, which qualities Top Companies are looking for when they hire, both engineers and otherwise. And he looks forward, too, ruminating on which up-and-coming industries will be fighting over top talent in the coming years.

Suzy Welch: I read on Google, of all places, that Google receives something like 1 million job applications a year, largely from people just writing the company cold, or applying online. That's a lot of applicants for a place that has 57,000 employees, and about 975 job openings at any given time just in the U.S. Amazon, Apple, and Facebook have similar numbers, again, with the applications mainly coming in over the digital transom.

Dick Costolo: Yeah, and that's generally not how people get hired at Google, or Amazon, or any of the big tech companies. Nobody gets a job by clicking a button.

SW: So, how do they get hired? What's the secret?

DC: Let's start with the engineers, because when it comes to tech, the competitive battle is won or lost with your engineers. That's the bottom line. And I think what's not well understood by the general population, the people on the outside of these companies hoping to get in, is that really world-class engineers are worth their weight in gold. Now, the people at Google and Facebook and Amazon, they get it. They understand a great engineer can be worth ten times a "regular" engineer, or 30, 40, 50, or 100 times. These are the very special engineers that the top companies are seeking. That's the game.
And because that's the game, it's now gotten to the point where it's like college football or basketball recruiting. The best tech companies are starting to look for these individuals at younger and younger ages. And when they find them, there is a courting processing that is not unlike what you see with athletes.
I remember when I was at Twitter in 2012, there was a senior at Princeton who was an amazing engineer. Really, one of the stars. She had done an off-the-charts initial phone interview with us, so we prioritized getting her into the pipeline right away. And the way it works, whenever there was someone that great on the radar, I wanted to talk to them. I wanted to get on the phone, and sell her myself. The CEO, OK? Getting her was that vital.

SW: The CEO calling a senior. Times have changed.

DC: Yes, this was not happening when I was in college.

SW: What happened?

DC: Well, I spoke to her. She was extremely polite and gracious and thankful, and repeatedly referred to me as 'Mr. Costolo.' But it became clear as we talked that she had actually had several conversations with CEOs from other big tech companies. I was just one CEO conversation of many. And I thought, "Wow, that's where we are." That's how ferocious the competition has become for the best engineers. Incidentally, we didn't get her.

SW: What made her so special? What differentiates a good engineer from a great one?

DC: It's so much more than high-quality coding, developing algorithms, and the ability to solve graduate-level comp sci problems, that's for sure. It's the ability to think abstractly, to think about solving a problem you have never seen or heard of before, and knowing how to step through a big problem in a logical fashion, and in a thoughtful, smart, original way.

SW: Does personality matter? Do values? You hear a lot from companies about how they want to hire team players, and so on.

DC: With engineers, you might be surprised how much berth they're given. Over the years, though, most tech companies have tried to have at least some cursory scan of self awareness.

SW: That's not a very high bar!

DC: Yeah, you'd be amazed. A lot these companies will say, "No brilliant jerks," and generally, they would prefer not to have brilliant jerks, but when you're trying to get world-class engineers, there's a lot you'll overlook.
Then, there are the conversations you get in to actually land the best engineers. Like you'll get asked, "Help me understand how you think about value of a single Twitter option against the value of an option at this company or that company?" Or they'll say, "Would it be possible to structure my package this way or that?" All sorts of questions that 20 years ago, you would have never asked the CEO. People generally took offers at face value.

SW: Do the best engineers have agents negotiating for them?

DC: I wouldn't be surprised if that's around the corner.

SW: It sounds like landing the top talent is generally about the money, then?

DC: Money matters, but having an impact matters an equal amount. The best engineers want to be sure that, if they're going to grind away for 60 to 80 hours a week, it will be on a part of the software that people are going to see and use and leverage.

SW: Let's talk about how you get a job at a Top Company if you're not an engineer. You're in marketing, for instance, or HR or sales.

DC: Then it becomes a matter of standing out, and by that I mean having a really creative approach in how you come after the executives of a company. You would be surprised how few people do that. Most people go through the motions. The fill out the online form, they e-mail. It's just not enough.

SW: What is enough?

DC: Something wildly creative. Something that shows you've thought about the company and its challenges, and how you will actually make the company better. One time, a marketing person sent me a look book walking me through how I could reimagine talking about Twitter publicly. A lot of time and energy went into it, and we cut the normal four-part process, and got him in right away for an interview.
Another example that comes to mind is the #HireAlex campaign – it was a very energized social media drive to get hired in digital marketing, undertaken by a student at University of Wisconsin, Madison. We ended up hiring him.

SW: I wonder if this kind of thing doesn't happen more because applicants are worried they'll put in all that work and no one will notice.

DC: But they will. Something bold and audacious will always catch someone's eye.

SW: To wrap up, let's talk about what companies or industries are likely to be on LinkedIn's Top Companies list as the future unfolds, say in 2020 and beyond. Bill Gates has been outspoken about artificial intelligence, energy, and biotech as fields where he'd quit college to work today because they hold so much promise. Alec Ross, who wrote The Industries of the Future, says his research points to opportunities in robotics and cyber security, and he's obviously not alone in that assessment.

DC: It's definitely very fashionable to be excited about those spaces, and especially VR (virtual reality) and AI. But maybe it's because of what I'm doing right now, but I have to believe that the increasing focus and tech brought to bear on the health and wellness space is going to be explosive, and several companies are going to have an audacious and massive impact.

SW: President Obama gave a speech last week that said the future belonged to the companies and entrepreneurs in the sustainable food space.

DC: Anything with nutrition and the environment is going be an area for significant growth. I think wellbeing is the next frontier. What could be bigger? It's about how we live.

SW: But the engineers will still matter, correct?

DC: That's definitely not going to change.

This interview has been condensed and edited.


Wednesday, May 17, 2017

HPLHS - The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society; Alien: Covenant

Fast-paced, terrifying and exploring new and fascinating ideas, Alien: Covenant is a great contribution to the franchise. If it doesn't quite manage the sublime brilliance of the original Alien and is a little muddled in places, it is, as a stand-alone, still a good movie and well worth your time.

Review by William Dean
May 17, 2017

It is impossible to properly discuss Alien: Covenant without referring to its predecessors in the franchise. Ergo be aware that the following review will then inevitably contain spoilers for Alien (1979) and Prometheus (2012) – the reviewer will however refrain from revealing significant details about Alien: Covenant itself.

One likes to imagine that Lovecraft could only have approved of Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien. It is that rare movie that perfectly balances mood, theme, and pace but also conveys concisely and articulately its message: that which lies beyond our tiny sphere of knowledge is terrifying; to seek too far is to eventually find nightmares that will destroy us. This very same idea is key to much of Lovecraft's fiction-writing and personal philosophy – but one imagines he would also have admired Alien's method. Amongst its stand-out components we can point to the claustrophobic sets, Alan Goldsmith's brilliantly unsettling score, Giger's hideous designs and of course the terrified performances of its cast. Collectively these elements pluck at some of humanity's primal fears and successfully induce a deep sense of unease in the audience that has rarely been equalled, before or since, in the medium of cinema. It is a superb example of unity-of-effect in storytelling. As a stand-alone movie Alien is flawless.

It is not then until 2012's Alien prequel Prometheus that we see the same themes revisited within the franchise. Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992) and Alien: Resurrection (1997) are all entertaining and effective in their own ways – but they have different aims, different messages and different ideas. Prometheus, however, harks back to that original concept found in Lovecraft's writings, that should we venture outside our sheltered harbour of ignorance we may find that our new knowledge comes at too great a cost.

Recall: a crew of scientists and explorers follows a trail into space on the starship Prometheus, drawing on clues left by early man, hoping to find the truth of humanity's origins. Full of hope and optimism at what they might learn, instead they discover that humanity was created, at best, as some sort of lesser and inferior species; at worst, we were bred by our creators – known as the Engineers – to be slaves, animals, food, fodder and raw material for their terrible technology. Humanity may even have been an accident. The message at the core of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1933) has rarely been displayed with such stark brutality. Humanity's forerunners, on meeting their creations, turn out to be anything but kind and benevolent to their descendants: when the android David speaks to the awakened Engineer in its own language, stating magnate Peter Weyland's belief that his [Weyland's] faltering life can be extended by the Engineers, it flies into a rage and murders the party. We do not know exactly why, but we can make an educated guess. Perhaps David broke some cultural taboo; but more likely the Engineer's reaction was simply the shock and anger of being addressed in one's own tongue by, what was to it, the discarded afterbirth of an abandoned science-experiment. Before our protagonists manage to stop the Engineer we see it laying in a course to Earth – presumably to correct a mistake by eradicating the aberrative human race. The movie ends with Dr. Shaw and David, the only survivors, leaving the planet and seeking the Engineer's homeworld in its own, intending to confront their creators on their own terms.

Conceptually the Prometheus movie is a direct successor to Alien. It takes that terrifyingly bleak cosmic reality and moves it one step further, twisting the notion of human-centric teleology – the idea that humanity is moving in a specific direction under the direction of a deity – quite wickedly. Something was directing humanity – but it wasn't God.

So now we come to Alien: Covenant, the next film in the Alien series, direct sequel to Prometheus, and, if we're honest, a movie with some big conceptual boots to fill and a lot of expectations to live up to. For the most part, it manages them.

Briefly overviewing its plot: a decade after the events of Prometheus the spaceship Covenant, laden with sleeping colonists and frozen human embryos, arrives over a seemingly perfect new world. With their cargo still safely in hibernation, Covenant's crew descend to the planet's surface to reconnoitre and evaluate their potential new home. It is difficult to say more without giving away pertinent details – but suffice to say that their paradise is not what it seems. The crew discover the legacy of Prometheus's voyage and they must pay the price for what mankind has done. To say any more would be to ruin the opportunity for you to discover it for yourself. In fact if the reviewer had one piece of advice, it would be to avoid watching the trailer for the movie embedded above – even that shows too much!

Covenant works within the same concept of cosmic pessimism, but takes a different approach to Prometheus. It is worth considering the mythology associated with the latter: Prometheus was the man who stole fire from the Gods in order to warm humanity and engender civilisation. The Gods however were angry at his theft; Prometheus' punishment for elevating humanity was to be chained helpless to a rock and to have his liver pecked out by birds for all eternity. This fits perfectly with the theme of the movie Prometheus – mankind reaches for fire, but must pay a terrible price.
Covenant, if we continue the Classical theme, is more about hubris: arrogance; defiance of the gods. Mankind have created subservient androids that are intellectually and physically superior to itself – this movie introduces the new android Walter (played with precision by Michael Fassbender) – and we are beginning to reach out, as a species, to new worlds. Humanity's future looks bright, optimistic, safe and assured – but there is an arrogant insolence to our character. This is wonderfully illustrated in a flashback scene at the very beginning of a movie between the newly minted android David (also Fassbender) and a young Peter Weyland (played with perfect smugness by Guy Pearce). In Covenant it is this presumption that may prove our downfall. The price of hubris, in Classical mythology, is nemesis: the inescapable agent of inevitable vengeance.

It is also worth considering the original working title of Covenant: originally the movie was to be called Alien: Paradise Lost. A literal reading of the title "Paradise Lost" would have been a perfect fit for this movie; however many other parallels can be made between Milton's epic poem and this movie: the innocence of Adam and Eve and their folly; the great tempter Satan – himself only a product of his creator. This latter idea in particular is a strong theme in the movie – the relationship between creator and creation: how can we ever be anything more than that for which we were made? In his dual role as the androids David and Walter, Fassbender portrays this dilemma wonderfully. So there is the relationship between humankind and android; but then also there comes the relationship between the Engineers and humankind. There are interesting parallels hinted at, that the Engineers as creators may have more in common with humanity than is first apparent. Although the concepts are never fully explored or fleshed out in Covenant they are clearly on the writers' minds and the question is posed. As readers of Lovecraft we cannot help but think of At the Mountains of Madness – that moment when Professor Dyer makes the staggering realisation that the Elder Things, like the Engineers in the Alien franchise, were, in their own way, men.

It is worth acknowledging that technically the film is magnificent: beautifully shot with fabulous effects and superbly acted. It comes with all the right boxes ticked, and on most levels Covenant is a success. The look and aesthetics are very strong; the costumes and technology sit somewhere between the custom-fitted bleeding-edge gear seen on the high-profile mission on the prototype Prometheus and the mass-produced cheap functionality of the working space-hauler the Nostromo: it says something about where the movie sits within the franchise's timeline, and helps with a sense of continuity. Elements like this give the sense that the film is very-well thought-out and complete. It is, for the most part, a very good film. The pacing in particular is brilliant – although that should perhaps be qualified by saying that, for such a conceptual film, it could have benefited with taking its time over certain moments. This is not just for introspection and ideas, which help drive mood, but also sometimes to enhance action. The drawn-out death of Kane in Alien is one of the greatest moments in cinema; the entire movie is terror moving like molasses. Covenant could have stood to learn this lesson. And like Alien, Covenant has a fantastic ensemble cast; but unlike Alien, Covenant does not spend time enough with nearly any of them to significantly contribute to the plot.

It is also sadly worth mentioning there are also occasional moments of lazy scripting. While Covenant does not suffer from this as much as its immediate predecessor Prometheus, there are nevertheless some moments of rather questionable stupidity from the characters. These are of the so well-known and so frequently-lampooned type that the movie Cabin in the Woods tells a bemusing fantastic horror story explaining them away. The viewer finds themselves trying to find explanations for the characters' behaviour as they occasionally act without any sense of self-preservation. Ultimately even if the viewer can come up with an explanation, their very presence distracts from the movie and suspends belief. They are especially unforgivable because they are for the most part easily fixable with very minor changes to script and dialogue.

The reviewer is aware that he has written almost as much about Prometheus in this review as he has about Covenant. This is because Covenant, packed with good ideas as it is, is sometimes a touch muddled and incoherent. In writing this review and thinking about the earlier movies in the franchise, however, Covenant immediately made much more sense. The movies work phenomenally well as a pair but individually — especially Covenant — they sadly do not feel entirely complete.

The reviewer must end with an acknowledgement that he is very demanding in his expectations of a Ridley Scott Alien movie. If the reader can excuse a brief moment of autobiography, the first three Alien movies were very much a part of the reviewer's childhood. He remembers school friends, with elder siblings happy to share videos and parents with more liberal and open ideas as to what a young child may watch on TV, telling stories about the Alien movies: the eggs, the face-huggers, the chest-busters, the barracuda-like inner-jaws of the aliens, the flame-throwers, the motion sensors, the terror. He read the novelisations by Alan Dean Foster around the age of ten, watched the movies as soon as his over-indulgent grandparents would let him, around the age of 11, and in his early teenage years read every bad Alien comic and novel he could get his hands on. He watched Alien every weekend for at least a year or so around the age of 12. He still finds that original movie terrifying. Eighteen months after buying Alien: Isolation he still finds the game too tense and frightening to play for more than very short periods (Ripley is still hiding in a locker somewhere in medbay looking for a surgery kit). It's safe to say he's a big fan: Alien means a great deal to him. So he has high expectations, and is demanding more from this movie than most.

Alien: Covenant isn't everything he had been waiting and hoping for. It's not perfect. But it's pretty damn good, and worth your money.


The Secret History of William Gibson’s Never-Filmed ‘Aliens’ Sequel

An alien (left) and William Gibson. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox/Richard Lautens/Toronto Star via Getty Images

One of the many problems with Alien 3 was its lack of escalation. The first film in the franchise, Ridley Scott's Alien, was a claustrophobic monster movie about a small group of underqualified people trying to escape a murderous creature. The sequel, James Cameron's action masterpiece Aliens, opened up the concept by adding a squad of soldiers, a massive space colony, and — as the title suggested — more than one bad beast. Then 1992's Alien 3, the directorial debut of a young David Fincher, was … a claustrophobic monster movie about a small group of underqualified people trying to escape a murderous creature. One chest burst forward, two chest bursts back.

But there's an alternate universe where the series' propulsive momentum only increased — a reality in which the third Alien film featured advanced xenomorphs exploding in batches of half a dozen from people's legs, stomachs, and mouths; where cold-warring rival space stations of communists and capitalists race to outdo one another with their genetic experiments on the aliens' tissue; where a flock of the phallic horrors flies through the void of space, only to be beaten back by a gun-toting robot. Oh, and there's a thing called the New Beast that emerges from and sheds a shrieking human's body as it "rips her face apart in a single movement, the glistening claws coming away with skin, eyes, muscle, teeth, and splinters of bone."

This is the alternate universe where legendary science-fiction writer William Gibson's Alien III (that's "III," not "3") screenplay was realized. It is, perhaps, a better world than ours. There would have been bold, weird, new ideas that pushed the series forward; ones that rethought what the aliens could be metaphors for — nuclear weapons, genetic intellectual property held by shadowy corporations, pandemics. Geeks would have gotten the thrill of seeing one of the all-time-great sci-fi concepts interpreted by one of the genre's greatest scribes. And yet, not only was the script never produced, it's largely been forgotten.

You can find the screenplay in an antiquated .txt file online, and there have been occasional discussions of it on message boards and niche blogs, but for whatever reason, it hasn't been appropriately acknowledged as the remarkable genre-fiction artifact that it is. Indeed, with studio backing and the right production team, one can imagine the finished film being on par with Alien and Aliens, and it certainly would have altered the course of the franchise's history. With the arrival of Alien Covenant — a movie that, whatever its merits, largely retreads ideas from the series' previous installments — it's time to tell the story of how Gibson's Alien III came to be, why it never crossed the finish line, and what made it special.

The story behind the story begins on July 18, 1986, with the release of Aliens. The sequel was an instant smash, dominating the box office with a $10 million opening weekend and widespread critical praise. Mouths watered at the Century City headquarters of its studio, 20th Century Fox. Roger Birnbaum, the president of worldwide production, took to proudly calling the series "the Franchise," with a capital F. "Clearly, audiences wanted more," Sigourney Weaver later told writer Douglas Perry.

One member of that adoring worldwide audience was Gibson. The Vancouver-based author was arguably the brightest rising star in science fiction, having published in 1984 his masterful debut Neuromancer. The novel had put cyberpunk on the map and introduced the term "cyberspace" into the popular lexicon, and although it was set on Earth, it had been significantly influenced by the spacefaring Alien mythos. "I loved the first two," Gibson tells Vulture, "and the 'dirty spaceship' aesthetic of the first had been a conscious inspiration in my fiction." He published a Neuromancer sequel, Count Zero, in 1986, and was getting attention outside the world of nerdom.

Among those interested in the young author were Alien and Aliens producers David Giler, Walter Hill, and Gordon Carroll. With the success of Aliens, they got to work on a third installment and looked at a variety of concepts: series lead Ellen Ripley and her young companion Newt looking for an alien in a Blade Runner–ish megalopolis, a bunch of aliens congealing into a giant kaiju that destroys New York, and so on. They were dissatisfied with them all. Then Giler had an idea. He'd read Neuromancer and thought that its vision of Earth synced well with the films' gist (not knowing Alien's influence on the book), so he proposed that they reach out to the 30-something writer.
In the latter half of 1987, Gibson got a call from the producers and he was flown to L.A. to talk it all out over dinner. Giler and Hill had been contemplating the notion of a communist faction in space as a possible aspect of a third Alien, and they presumably brought that up, though Gibson says he doesn't "remember anything about it other than being told that Ripley wasn't to be a character." Weaver has said she didn't want to participate in any significant way because she "felt Ripley was going to become a burden to the story" and that "there are only so many aspects to that character," but Gibson suspects contract negotiations played a part, too.

He was disappointed by that handicap, but was still full of ideas. "I probably told them of my curiosity about what you'd get if the xenomorph gestated in a kitten, say, or an elephant," he recalls. The producers wanted to move forward with him. One problem, according to Gibson: "I had never thought of writing a screenplay before. I had literally never read one." Nevertheless, he wanted to move forward — for reasons both creative and pecuniary. "They were offering quite a lot of money, there was never any sense that I was auditioning for the job, and it seemed like an interesting thing to attempt," Gibson says. He got copies of the scripts for Alien and Aliens and perused them: "I decided to read the two existing scripts very closely, then try to triangulate them, creating a third that would feel like part of the one thing, but be its own critter at the same time."

Speaking of critters, there was one big metaphor that the franchise's titular monsters represented for Gibson, a metaphor that felt very relevant in the late Cold War. "I had long had, since first viewing Alien, in fact, this sense that the xenomorph was a bio-weapon," Gibson says. He also had a discovery while perusing the old scripts: "Having been deprived of Ripley, I became aware of how much I'd liked Bishop" — the benevolent android played by Lance Henriksen. But he couldn't just have Bishop in the spotlight, so he reconciled with the fact that Michael Biehn's gentle Space Marine Hicks would have to take a more prominent role. All the elements were in place. Gibson sat at his Apple IIc, fired up Microsoft Word (he didn't have any script-writing software; the biggest challenge of the script was "doing all the tabulation by hand," hitting keys a million times to center things), and got to work.

"FADE IN: DEEP SPACE — THE FUTURE" reads the script's opening. "The silent field of stars — eclipsed by the dark bulk of an approaching ship." This is the Sulaco, the military transport ship from Aliens, now bearing the cryogenically frozen skeleton crew of that film's survivors: Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and Bishop. We travel aboard and hear an alarm blare. Our heroes are no longer alone.
A group of spacefarers arrives on the Sulaco and start poking around. These are folks from an interstellar government known as the Union of Progressive Peoples — in short, space commies. As we later learn, they live their lives in opposition to the rapaciously hypercapitalist ideology of corporations like Weyland-Yutani, the company pulling the strings in the first two films. The Sulaco has accidentally flown into its space and has to be checked out.

Things don't go smoothly for the multi-ethnic UPP crew — the most notable of them in the script is a female Vietnamese commando — who are soon attacked by an impregnation-minded Facehugger that had been hiding in the entrails of Bishop (he'd been ripped in half by an alien queen in Aliens' climax). The group kills it and bring it and Bishop off-ship with them, their plans as yet unknown. They leave the Sulaco to continue its drift, and with good reason — there's an uneasy peace between the UPP and its capitalist rivals, and they're not interested in upsetting the balance of power. Yet.
We drift along with the Sulaco, all the way to the place where most of the film's action takes place: a capitalist, shopping-mall-heavy society on a space station called Anchorpoint. There, the ship gets picked up and boarded again, and in the ensuing pages, we meet an array of characters who are drawn into the consequences of its arrival: lab techs Tully and Spence, Anchorpoint Marine colonel Rosetti, and a pair of mysterious Weyland-Yutani operatives named Welles and Fox. (This being the Alien franchise, everyone just goes by their last name.) Ripley's cryo-pod gets damaged and she goes into a coma, and little Newt is wisely sent back to Earth to stay with family (there's a sweet scene where she draws a map of where she'll be and pins it next to the comatose Ripley), but Hicks sticks around on Anchorpoint.

Oh, Hicks, if you only knew what you were getting yourself into. Over the course of the ensuing pages, everything goes all Murphy's Law, as things are wont to do in an Alien flick. The UPP delivers Bishop to Anchorpoint but surreptitiously do experiments on the Facehugger's genetic material; Welles and Fox oversee similar covert tinkering on Anchorpoint with tissue samples recovered from two aliens that stowed away on the Sulaco. The UPP clones a bunch of the suckers on a space station called the Rodina ("homeland" in Russian) and their homegrown aliens run amok.

The capitalists' problems are more gruesome. In the lab, Tully and Welles get infected by an airborne, quasi-viral version of the xenomorph DNA that incubates inside their bodies. (A similar idea was introduced in 2012's prequel Prometheus, though a source from inside that film tells me the screenwriters had never heard of Gibson's draft.) They, in turn, inadvertently spread the infection across Anchorpoint. The result is the creation of the aforementioned New Beasts — Cronenberg-esque human-xenomorph hybrids that emerge from human carapaces and cause, as one scene's stage direction puts it, "blind screaming chaos." Despite the efforts of Hicks and a group of inexperienced Marines to destroy the growing hive and their mutated queen ("Its abdomen is arched like an inverted scorpion-tail, tipped with a swollen, semi-translucent sac that ripples and pulses in the glare of Hicks' lamp," the script says), things continue to go to hell in a space-handbasket.

The climax finds Hicks, Bishop, and a handful of survivors attempting to flee Anchorpoint by scurrying in zero gravity across the hull to get to some escape vehicles. A pack of aliens comes after them, soaring through the void — it turns out they don't need air — and although the normally placid Bishop goes after them with a pulse rifle, it doesn't look good for our heroes. Just then, a UPP ship piloted by the Vietnamese commando arrives and rescues the capitalist pigs. Soon after, a massive detonation programmed by Bishop destroys Anchorpoint — an echo of the endings of both of the previous films.

The protagonists await the arrival of a ship called the USS Kansas City and Bishop points out that this unity against a common enemy may be what finally brings an end to the intergalactic Cold War — "You're a species again," the android says. But he notes that the only way for them to stop this sort of thing from happening again is to find the aliens' home world, thus putting the dominoes in place for a sequel. "These creatures are to biological life what antimatter is to matter," Bishop muses, more or less summarizing all of the mythos up to that point. At its close, the script returns to the simplicity of its opening. "EXT. SPACE," it reads. "Kansas City. Receding. Gone. The stars. FADE OUT. THE END."

Gibson sent his saga to the producers in early 1988. He says their response was "'Hollywood positive' — 'This is great, thanks,' which can mean they find it passable or that you're fired." It wasn't exactly the latter, but it also wasn't quite the former. "We got the opposite of what we expected," Giler later said. "We figured we'd get a script that was all over the place, but which would have many good ideas we could use. It turned out to be a competently written screenplay but not as inventive as we wanted it to be." Gibson suspects they never even intended to film anything he might have written: "In retrospect, I assume they weren't expecting to get a real script from me, but something studded with newfangled cyberpunk ideas they could then pass on to a pro screenwriter," he muses.
Nonetheless, Gibson was asked to do a second draft. He doesn't recall what he was told to do differently, but "whatever it was hasn't left any memory of a great revelation, or of onerous labor, so I doubt it was very demanding." He turned it in, got paid his second tranche, and wasn't called back. As the years wore on, the producers went in a completely different direction and the threequel was lodged in development hell. When it finally emerged in 1992, Alien 3 inverted the basic casting premise: Ripley was the only survivor from Aliens; Newt and Hicks died in the first few minutes. Her adventures on a prison colony, running from an alien that mimicked a dog, bore absolutely no resemblance to those of Alien III.

Hollywood protocol held that Gibson would be sent all subsequent drafts from other writers, just so he could track whether or not his ideas were being reused, and he says he read "something like 30 different drafts in all. But by the end, "It seemed to me that all that had survived of mine was a bar-code tattooed on the back of someone's neck" — a throwaway element in his screenplay — "so I told them I was okay with no credit. But that was maybe a little too much time spent watching those particular sausages being made."

That said, geeks and cinephiles should be glad that he did spend time in the sausage factory, because what he crafted holds up. The producers may have been disappointed that Gibson's script lacked any cyberpunk insanity, but that doesn't mean it lacks interesting ideas. He was able to take the franchise's existing elements of body horror and blow them out to unspeakably terrifying degrees. He put the aliens in new environments and warped forms. He built out the world of the series without overexplaining or hitting the Cold War metaphors too hard.

Most of all, it's just a crackerjack action story — a fact that's especially remarkable because Gibson had never penned a screenplay and only read two. Sure, it would've needed work, but it was a firm and solid foundation. Though Alien III may not have been what the producers were looking for, it may have been what they needed. Perhaps a comic-book adaptation could be in order? A novel? A fan film? Like a facehugger lying dormant in a cryochamber, it's still out there, lingering in the backwaters of the internet, just waiting for a host to give it life.
