look, post-70s Alien movies (as in, the rest of them) can't get the corporate horror right because they don't get it in that *70's* way where the corporation is vast and distant and overwhelming, something u can never quite get in contact with -- kinda like an abusive parental figure
Robocop?
Do you think Alien Earth gets it right?
Alien Earth now has four competing corporations and its about various approaches to human immortality for some reason, the corporate intrigue delivered in weird expository dialogue where people who have worked for a company for years has apparently only now learned anything about it. so no
the film's not evin SUBTLE about this starting with Aliens, the corporation stuff is just Robocop and like, I like Robocop! but not in alien, no
Yeah, as soon as they put a face on the Corporation (Paul Reiser's character, Burke), it becomes smaller, more comprehensible, more easy to contextualize. It needs to be nameless and faceless and vast, not so much inimical to human life as completely indifferent to it in the pursuit of profit.
LIKE, the archetypal evil american corporation in the 70s was Bell as in Alexamder Graham Bell they had a govt authorized monopoly on ALL PHONES IN THE US THERE WAS "The Phone Company" AS IN THE ONE before cell phones, there was a huge *physicality* to the way we interacted with phones
this vast, unweildly, everpresent yet ever distant system tangling its way into our very lives the general uncomfortableness people had with it not only led to "phone hacking" (which predates computer hacking) but SEVERAL 70s thrillers about the people being murder via phone calls by Bell
Aliens was great but it was also in many ways the first step on the descent for the IP. Can't be helped when the original is absolutely perfect.
a vast, unknowable corporation is a perfect compliment to an unknowable threat from a vast unknowable cosmos
Kinda wonder if anyone has done The Corporation as cosmic horror, specifically? Ma Bell as Nylarthotep, an alien intelligence that seeks to maximize profit over all else and, if maximizing human suffering is part of that, all the better?
You get kind of a whiff of it in Alien or Brazil but idk if I can think of an example that has gone all-in on the concept.
Maybe less “maximize profits” but acting on the whims of a set of competing Vice Presidents who think they’re playing Game of Thrones but are really just fucking over random people below them
