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Today: Josephine Riesman, New York Times bestselling author of Ringmaster and True Believer. Issue No. 379Talking 'Aliens vs. Avengers'
Josephine Riesman Talking 'Aliens vs. Avengers'A new installment of the 46-year-old Alien(s) franchise will debut on FX this week: Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth. I haven't seen it yet, but even if it sucks, this has been a good twelve months for Xenomorphs. No, not because of Alien: Romulus!—because of Aliens vs. Avengers, the recently concluded four-issue Marvel Comics miniseries from writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Esad Ribic. It’s a work of genius, compellingly integrating classic Aliens tropes with Marvel characters and even figures from the much-panned movies Promethus and Alien: Covenant—all in the name of slagging on Marvel, Disney, Fox, and the whole enterprise of geek culture. I discussed the comic and the franchise with my friend Rhi Olivaw, who is a writer, director, and artist based in the U.K., as well as the only person in my social circles (or possibly anyone’s) who will go to bat for Prometheus. Our condensed conversation is below. Josephine Riesman: Tell me about your Alien experience. That makes it sound like you were abducted, but when did you first get exposed to that stuff? Rhi Olivaw: I think it might’ve been one of the classic “I saw it on TV when I came downstairs” things. I had friends who had parents with very liberal media approaches. So during, like, 2000 and whatever, when the Alien vs. Predator films were dropping, all of my friends were seeing that shit. They were also seeing all of the other slasher movies. So I watched Alien for the first time in… I think it was 2007. My parents had obtained the quadrilogy box set, and I was like, “Alright, I want to watch this.” Very few films in my life I have ever been shown actively by my parents, which is a weird way to put it, but you know what I mean. I don’t have a movie that my dad was like, “You’ve got to see this.”  REALLY Hurt. [Screenshot from Alien (1979) via YouTube] JR: Your parents were presenting it to you? RO: Yeah. It was very much like, “We’re going to watch that. We’re going to make sure you don’t, like, freak the fuck out,” and I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen. JR: Wow. And it was the first Alien. RO: Yeah, yeah, we did it in order. We also—because the quadrilogy box set was the first one that had directors’ cuts, so I very quickly powered through every version of every film. JR: Wow! I didn’t know there was an alternate cut of Resurrection, but that doesn’t surprise me. RO: It’s not actually very different? So my general assessment is: Alien, superior film in its original cut, Aliens, director’s cut better, Alien 3, we all know the assembly cut’s great. Resurrection—you can’t gild a turnip. It’s got good ideas! It’s got good ideas. I find the whole cycle of the original four Alien movies very, very fascinating, ’cuz it’s rape trauma in space, solace in the divine motherhood—all of that goes to shit, so you find solace in the diabolous masculine. The guys on the prison colony all have two Y chromosomes! They are literally man plus! JR: Oh, that’s right! You’re right! It’s… it’s almost sort of a proto trans thing, except it’s in the other direction! They’re, like, extra—they transed into being ultra-men. Men-plus. RO: Yeah. And then synthesis. Resurrection, while it’s not very good, is still ultimately, you know—you’ve achieved synthesis with your trauma! JR: Wow! I like that. That’s good. It’s not executed as well as you’re describing it, but I like it. RO: I didn’t have a slow coming-around moment with Prometheus. I went in and was like, “I understand what you’re trying to say, Ridley Scott. I think you need to get help, but I like what you’ve got”—insanely, breathlessly brilliant movie that felt… You know, I like the movies in franchises that go, “Fuck you. We’re going to do what we want to do.” It feels good. JR: Take it like I make it, you know? RO: Yeah! Ridley Scott coming in and going, “Okay, well, what kind of God allows a big scary rape monster to walk around? Wait a minute, am I that God? What does that say about me?” JR: Right, right. RO: And bringing in much of his Blade Runner obsessions. That’s an interesting one. By the way, as a side note, I am too young to get Blade Runner. JR: Really? What do you mean? RO: I never had to go through the cycle of, “There’s a good version out there.” I got the Blu-ray and I was like, “I’m just going to watch the good one. You know, I don’t have to suffer through a really bad one with a voiceover and that.” JR: Right, right, right. And there’s part of it—so you’re saying part of the magic of a movie like that is you get to imagine the better version of the movie. RO: Yes. This is—I swear to God, this is the only time I’ll mention this, but this is what drives most Zack Snyder fans. JR: Yeah, yeah. ’Cuz they’re imagining what they think the movie would be. That is such a good point… yeah. RO: An imaginary movie can’t fail you. But yeah, Prometheus hit me like a ton of bricks. Just a nasty, nasty movie in a way that I get—really get behind, and I love that it’s this perverse nativity— JR: The scene that sticks with me from Prometheus was the abortion scene when she’s in the med pod saying “Abortion,” and “We don’t understand that request.” It’s like, of course fucking tech corporations are going to build a med pod that can’t do an abortion. It was a brilliant scene, and also, it’s brilliant because there’s no ambivalence about the need for the abortion. The movie is not hemming and hawing. It’s just, here is a necessary medical procedure that’s being denied to this woman, which I found kind of amazing to see in a major Hollywood movie. RO: It’s a movie about… all of these stacked ideas of, “What kind of God allows this, what kind of God am I, and what kind of parent, and if God is of the Father of us all, what kind of parent is that?” I find I can even forgive the absolute dumbassery of some of the characters because I’ve met very smart scientists, and outside of their given field, they’re not very smart. You know, I can accept that the biologist tries to deal with the snake vagina in a stupid way because he’s an a—because these are people—this is about arrogance! It’s a movie about arrogance and hubris! Of course he’s going to be like, “Yeah, I can handle this, ’cuz nothing bad can happen to me. Oops!” And it makes Covenant hit me so much harder than I think… I was prepared for? Covenant— JR: That’s exactly where I was leading. What’d you make of Covenant? RO: When I wrote my piece for GateCrashers about Covenant and Prometheus, I had been carrying in my head for a little while the thought that this is the first movie that Ridley Scott made after Tony Scott died. When you look at it that way, then, well, it’s about two fundamentally identical beings—one of whom is this mad, lunatic artist and the other of whom is just a regular Joe. But the regular Joe is the good one! You know. And there’s so many levels on there where I—Ridley Scott is working through some stuff here! JR: That’s very interesting. I hadn’t thought about it as being a grief movie. I saw that one with my now-spouse when we were just friends. We had this whole friend arrangement where—I was working for New York magazine, so I’d get a lot of like, “Do you want to come to this advance media screening of some shit movie?” And anytime it was a decent movie, or at least an interesting-looking movie that fell under the aegis of sci-fi or sort of geekery, I would call up my now-spouse and be like, “Hey, I can get a plus one to this free screening. Do you want to watch this?” So we watched a media screening of Alien: Covenant and… God, I’m trying to even remember what my impression was. I remember loving seeing Michael Fassbender kiss himself, which I kept… the whole movie, you’re just going like, “Are they going to do it? Is that actually going to happen?” My spouse is now saying, “That was the point of the movie for me,” and yeah, I think that was the point of the movie for me, too. Not just from a libidinal perspective, but look, Giger designed the original Alien. When it was written, it was like, what if—“how boy get pregnant?” So it’s a fundamentally libidinal franchise at a level that is hard to even really put into words. Again, to see that kind of self-cest on screen—you don’t really see self-cest on screen ever! Did you like it as much as Prometheus? RO: I like it—I think it’s a better movie than Prometheus, but I don’t enjoy it as much because it’s so relentlessly miserable. Covenant is so bleak, like—it is, without question, the darkest ending an Alien movie has ever had. JR: I don’t remember—what happens? Let me, here—he regurgitates two face hugger embryos, then assesses the slumbering colonist playing—oh God, that’s right. Yeah. RO: And it may never be picked up on again, and I think that’s good, actually! I like the open-ended nastiness of that. The first thing that happens in this movie, more or less, is they just immolate James Franco. JR: I mean, can you blame them, really? So Covenant ends in this bleak way that may never get picked up on, but I think maybe one of the closest things we’ll get to a direct sequel to that is Aliens vs. Avengers, which sort of picks up with the Davids having successfully destroyed an entire universe, which may well be that universe from Alien: Covenant. RO: I will—I mean, on my big list of notes, the opening thing is the brass balls on Hickman! JR: I know. RO: Open the whole comic with: It’s disappointing to expect one thing and get another entirely. JR: Yep. That’s my boy! That’s what he does! Every single comic that he reluctantly agrees to write for Marvel now is some kind of meta-commentary on whether either fan expectations or his employer or both— RO: Yeah. But in the context of Alien, the franchise, it’s also like, you know, precedent implies that this book will be splat-fest bug hunt good times, and it’s like, no, it’s a sequel to Prometheus and Covenant. JR: Yes, it is! RO: Movies that did the thing that Hickman is… describing in that opening scene.  Cover of AVA 4, by Esad Ribic JR: So what did you make of Alien vs. Avengers overall? RO: I loved it. I really liked it. There were moments that would have, in a lesser book, made me go, “Okay, you’ve given up.” You know, like, “Oh, we’ve got a super-duper red alien. I’ve never seen that before.” (I have seen that before.) But because that worked in concert with everything that Hickman is saying and doing, it didn’t bother me. Felt right. I am so obsessed with that opening scene as well, because it’s just laying it all on the table... makes me think of Grant Morrison having Captain Atom dissect his little dog. JR: Ohh, yeah! In Pax Americana. Yes. RO: Yeah! Because it’s got those—it’s the sense of energy [not totally sure this is what she says, talking a little too fast, probably doesn’t matter, flagging anyway] of, “Well, I took it apart to see how it worked.” JR: But you kill the thing the moment you take it apart. Exactly. Personally, I love that one of the last, like, the person or the… entity that ends up winning it for everybody in the end is the Alien ripoff, which is Venom! RO: Yeah. The way that Venom here is interpreted as the angel of death is so fascinating. You know, he’s just—he’s just a little shoulder devil for Miles Morales. That’s a great reveal! I did not see it coming, and I was very, very pleased to be like, to see that, ’cuz that just—that hits. The thing that keeps getting me is the scope and scale is the schemes of the Davids. JR: Right. Oh, God. The Davids are just terrifying in this. What do you make of where the Engineers and the Davids and the Xenomorphs sort of stand for as metaphors? Because Hickman very much deals in that sort of thing. RO: I feel it’s a similar level of metaphor to Secret Wars. But that thing, you know, the David—David is us! You look at David and you go, “Oh my God, it’s us.” JR: Yeah. David is us, the fans. Programmed by the franchise. RO: This is… David is the entitled child of a child of a child. JR: And a consumer! A word we use very innocently, but when you think about it, it sounds like a supervillain name, The Consumer, you know? RO: Yes. Galactus is—what is Galactus, if not— JR: A consumer! RO: Yeah, yeah. What really struck me was how unsubtle that is. This is an angry book. JR: Oh, it’s very angry. He’s very pissed off about a lot of things, as well you should be. RO: The line from Black Panther, you know, where he’s talking about building a golden empire, and instead it’ll be from ash and fire and bones of what he dared to dream—Hickman, the guy who’s constantly trying to remake the Marvel universe— JR: That’s right! The engineers are the, the—what do you think? They’re creators, or just another side of us? RO: Yeah. It’s this, this horrible… unholy triangle everyone’s in, this fan-creator-consumer trap. . JR: I love that. Well, the fan is the consumer, so the triangle is like, fan, actual corporate owner of the IP, and creator, in this constant dance of death. RO: And at various points, they all become indistinguishable. JR: Right. They all turn into this system that creates destruction and entropy. That’s what you end up with, is this dead—I mean, that’s what he, that’s what T’Challa is saying at the end: we’re in a dead universe where nothing new can grow. And I know people have been saying that about Marvel for a long time. I think new things will grow, probably, but right now we’re in this very fallow period because of the other thing that he’s commenting on, which is the very nature of the comic: Corporate synergy. You wouldn’t have Aliens in this comic, a decade ago. RO: I was going to say, on that note as well, the fact that Venom, the other thing about Venom being the vector of victory—we don’t defeat the parasitic consumptive horde by being individualists. You become a gestalt. You become this hybrid being, JR: Well, say more about that! I really like that. RO: People call Venom a parasite, but the word in the name is symbiote. Symbiotic creatures do not destroy the host. It’s a mutualistic exchange of whatever, and I really feel that that’s a thing the book is saying, is that we can’t beat the corporate machine, nor can we beat the endless horde of fans who just want to eat and eat and eat. We don’t do that by being one thing. We do that by joining, you know—we have to join hands and make it work. JR: And realize that we’re part of this larger geek-osystem that cannot survive without… new ideas, empathy, love, but also, like you say, yeah, realizing that it’s not just you as the consumer demanding something. You’re part of a community. You’re in a symbiotic relationship, especially with the creators, and that’s Hickman as a creator going like, “I’m sort of sick of people telling me what I should do!” The symbiotic relationship of creator to consumer here is complicated, because fans have to be responded to in some way. But I think I like what you’re saying, that the only way out is by recognizing that symbiosis. RO: And there is a certain optimism too. It’s optimism on the back foot. It’s that—and it is, as they say in the first Avengers film, “We can’t save everyone. We’ll avenge them.” JR: Yeah. Well, that was amazing. At the very end—that line, which I thought was so silly in the context of Avengers 2012, but here really works. In Avengers 2012, you know that they’re going to win. Here, they do not win! So the idea of avenging the loss actually means something. RO: Precisely. There’s a weight to it. One thing that I really liked, one thing that stood out a couple of times was the shocking instances of violence, and I don’t mean by the xenomorphs. There were moments where we were reminded that David is a physically aggressive creature, which I fucking love. ’Cuz what always gets me in Covenant—I can cope with most of the film, but the bit where David is just straight up about to assault someone—like, it’s very obvious that that’s what’s in his head. “Does he have a dick?” Doesn’t matter. JR: Right? RO: But that energy, that this is a man, a thing, a person, or however we’re going to look at it, that just has this caged beast in his soul, but he’s never seen attacking people who can fight back. So him just… kicking over Tony in his wheelchair—so apropos. I can’t speak for what Ridley Scott had in his head. But to whatever extent, Prometheus and Covenant seem to exist as sort of in a similar space to The Matrix: Resurrections. JR: Go on. RO: The movies where the original person involved in this project is taking back the driving wheel and going, “I’m going to make what I want to make. I’m going to make everything very loud and unescapable and I’m also going to point out, over and over again, how much the people I work for suck.” JR: I was complaining about the fact that you have these corporate IP owners that are not the creators, but I’m going to contradict myself a little bit and say… part of the terrible magic of superhero fiction has been that you have these brilliant ideas people who get constrained, “edited.” And then you see the consequences when they do get total control—when most of them put out their creator-owned books, they either are shit, or they start out great, and then can’t go anywhere, or just go off into their own ass. There’s so many creators who come out of cape comics who just, I’m sorry to say, do their best work within that corporate IP, and I think it’s because of that terrible tension, you know, that’s being described in Aliens vs. Avengers. RO: No, it’s the tension that’s fascinating. To go back to the Alien world for a second, Hickman reminds me of the slime mold that you put in a box: the shapes it forms to get out of the box are so fascinating and intricate, but it almost doesn’t matter if it doesn’t get out of the box. JR: I love that. That’s great. Because that’s—that’s all you can do in this current franchise environment, to a certain extent, is try to escape the box in an interesting way, even if you fail. FIRE BREATHINGTomorrow is the long-awaited publication day of Hydra Osita Nwanevu’s new book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. If you were on the fence about buying this book right away, doubt no longer! 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🔥 CONGRATULATIONS STELLA 🔥for the tough love on the coiffure front, now inscribed in the ANNALS of HYDRANYM. Hydranym No. 12 will appear on FLAMING HYDRA tomorrow. Come back to play! MORE FIRE IN THE SKYIf you love this newsletter and the principles of press freedom and independence it supports, subscribe, donate, to FLAMING HYDRA.
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![Bluesky post by Rax King: dc i really wish i could be with you today but at the very least i can rep you and tell everyone in seattle how much i love you [reply post] in the midst of this fuckshit i feel obligated to declare, over and over again, that DC is the city of my heart no matter what a bunch of soulless golems inflict on it](https://flaminghydra.com/content/images/2025/08/image-23.png)
