Talking 'Aliens vs. Avengers'
by Josephine Riesman
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.”
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.
Keep us breathing fire!
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