Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction's Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise (Reel Spirituality Monograph)

The Alien films are perceived to be a fractured franchise each one loosely related to the others. They are nonlinear complicated convoluted: a collection of genre movies ranging from horror to war to farce. But on closer examination the threads that bind together these films are strong and undeniable. The series is a model of Catherine Kellers cosmology as a cycle of order out of chaos an illustration of her concept of evil as discreation. When viewed through the lens of Kellers Face of the Deep the Alien films resolve into a cohesive whole. The series becomes six views of the idea of evil-as-exploitation its origins and its consequences. Each film expands on the concept of evil set forth by its predecessors complicating that conception and retroactively enriching readings of the films that came before.