"What is it about the Alien films? No other modern science-fiction film has inspired this level of termite-like deconstruction save perhaps Scott’s own Blade Runner, whose rain-soaked surfaces teem with postmodern theorists researching doctoral theses with titles like “American Exceptionalism and the Complicit Postcolonialism of Blade Runner” and “Data and Dick’s Deckard: Cyborg as Problematic Signifier.” This suggests that there is something about the rich, art-directed layer-cake of Ridley Scott productions that positively cries out for Greimasian semantic rectangles. “It has absolutely no message,” insisted Scott of the first Alien. “It works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror, and more terror.” Of all the things you can do with Scott’s alien beastie—be frightened by it, thrilled by it, repulsed by it—studying it seems the last thing on anybody’s mind, except of course Science Officer Ash, secretly eyeing it up for the company’s weapons division. When it comes to the burgeoning field of post-doctorate Alien study, Ash graduates summa cum lauda. Study is all he wants to do."