Lately I’ve been thinking about Jurassic Park. These thoughts aren’t spontaneous. They’ve been forced inside me by the marketing forces that be, the world so rampantly preparing me for our next dinosaur adventure that I can’t help but fantasize, once again, about the creatures of simultaneous awe and terror which seem to endlessly feed the imaginations of film makers everywhere.

Jurassic World might be right around the corner, there’s something else going on ticking on my mind. Dinosaurs existed. They were real. That’s why the first Jurassic Park was so damn good, because it lingers so close to reality.

This is reality, folks.

In movies, though, they’ve inspired a host of other creatures, never real, yet nevertheless affecting in their own way. For a filmmaker, overcoming the hurdle of convincing an audience that a creature is real is made infinitely more difficult by the fact that it never existed in the first place. Still we grasp so tightly onto some of these big guys.

I want to know why they matter, and how they came to matter, in the context of their relation to dinosaurs, literally our original monsters, as represented in Jurassic Park. Like the historical beasts, these fictional ones are intelligent, but not anthropomorphic. They’re uncontrollable, but not without purpose. They reflect on humanity, but they’re beasts. Consider this a game, of sorts. How do these movie monsters build on the real-world image of the dinosaur, and how do they divert from it? Let’s start with the most blatantly obvious bad-ass ever to challenge your understanding of scale.

WARNING: Spoilers Served up on Over-sized Platters

Godzilla

A behemoth in more ways than one, Godzilla is the monster on the horizon so large you can’t avoid seeing it. He looms by simply showing his face, and demolishes by simply walking. Of complete and utter dominance in the food chain, of near-apocalyptic indestructibility, Godzilla is somehow a force lacking in the malevolence movie goers assume in a creature that needs a mile-wide panoramic to show in full. He is, miraculously, a force of good. Godzilla is nature, and man’s inability to control it. That should remind you of Jurassic Park, because that is Jurassic Park.

The potential utopia imagined by John Hammond, the white-suited creator of the park, never comes to fruition for just one reason: nature finds a way to break free. Godzilla, especially as depicted in last year’s American film, performs the ultimate balancing act by awakening from the sea to fell the only two predators on the planet that pose a threat to him. Humans benefit, of course, with the peace brought on by the existence of only one force too great for them too handle.

Hammond could never accept this. In his journey control the dinosaurs, themselves representative of a dominant force in Earth’s true history, Hammond’s vision fell to utter ruin. So, in this way, Godzilla represents the collective presence of all the Jurassic Park dinosaurs, only he’s so utterly humongous as to never even tempt the humans to exert their control over his will.

Toothless

I debated including the true star of both How to Train Your Dragon and How to Train Your Dragon 2 on this list. There’s such a strong personality in the character of Toothless, it prevents you from distilling his presence down into just one thematic purpose. We’ll try anyway. He’s a dragon that’s actually a stray dog.

Our understanding of Toothless evolves in perfect thematic stride with the first movie. He appears as a shadow in the night sky, erupting devilish bursts of fiery energy from his gut. He’s a demon. But, later, he’s wounded and grounded. The shroud lifted, a friendly face appears. It wasn’t like we assumed him to be. As he transitions from mysterious and terrifying to adorable and endearing, the resident vikings slowly come to understand the outlier dragons as much more than the natural enemy, and eventually they become natural friends. It’s a kid’s movie, but the heart of it is strong. Know, before you act.

Eventually, we know Toothless to be an intelligent, emotive creature capable of an empathy matching that of his human counterparts. I’m going out on a limb here, but I want to say that’s the equivalent of Chris Pratt’s raptor pack to be seen in Jurassic World. If they do it right, we should be crying when one of them falls to the big bad dino. In any case, there’s also the question of respect at play in both stories. Respect what you don’t know as much as what you do. Jeff Goldblum is the equivalent dinosaur in that equation.

Cloverfield

If Godzilla is nature, then the Cloverfield monster is chaos. From the moment it crash-lands into America’s beating heart, New York City, calamity ensues without a moments recession. The true image of the Coverfield monster isn’t the beast itself; it’s this:

Liberty and freedom literally beheaded, civilization torn in half, an invisible, inescapable force of destruction.

You don’t need to see this thing to know it’s there, but the horror of that fact is you can’t ever know when it’s going to stumble in your way and totally muck up your day. A group of mid-twenty friends scramble through the city as skyscrapers fall around them, meeting their ends in equally horrible and random ways. Chaos is nature’s fuel, which makes the Cloverfield monster our T-Rex, through and through. You might just about see it coming. That means it’s too late.

Oh, and if the only reason you’re reading this is for the pictures; fine, here you go:

That’s the best I’m willing to do.

Gareth Edwards’ Monsters

On another about-face, we approach the lovers of the non-dinosaur road. Gareth Edwards was rewarded with the directorship of 2014’s Godzilla due very much to his directorial debut, Monsters. You might have finished Godzilla a little baffled at the titular character’s diminished screen time, but if you had seen Monsters beforehand, you’d understand Edwards’ thinking. He’s a designer of build-up, then explosive release. But when Godzilla ultimately spewed an irradiated beam of energy through a M.U.T.O.’s neck, Edwards’ own creations did something a little different. They mated.

After an entire movie of destruction and despair, our two human travelers come across two very non-human travelers. Turns out, when the military isn’t on the attack, they’re just animals like the rest of us. They seek companionship, maybe even love, and it’s our fear of them that turns them into monsters. The visual design is deliberately alien in an attempt to mask their alarming sensitivity until the very end. Pierce that veil of hostility and you see some humanity. Jurassic Park went for this moment high up in the trees, when three stranded survivors welcomed the passing-by of a feeding brontosaurus. It’s a moment of levity in a film of constant danger.

Xenomorph

Finally, somehow more terrifying than Godzilla at a mere hundredth of the scale, the Xenomorph of the Alien movies is adaptation at its most vicious. The raptor, in other words. Turning something so essential to our understanding of the world, adaptation and evolution, into something so primal to our fear of it, the dread of a smarter foe, is at the heart of both these creatures’ efficacy in suspense and fear. We’re a species that prides and thrives on intelligence. Introduce a physically superior hunter with an intelligence to match, and you’ve got a recipe for a franchise.

“Clever girl.”

Honorable Mentions

The Dragon that Mercifully Ended Reign of Fire in the Best Way Possible

Video Game Mention: Evolve, for the Hunt of It

Kanye

Grand Conclusion

In case you hadn’t already figured it out, this was all just a thinly concealed attempt to get you to watch Jurassic Park again. Also, dinosaurs are cool and Godzilla could eat them all.

Shadows of Jurassic Park: Top Non-Dinosaurs of the Big Screen

Wednesday, Neil Blomkamp, director three of the famed District 9, the sophomore slump Elysium and the upcoming, “I really can do it again” attempt, Chappie, seems to have courted 20th Century Fox into handing him the reigns on a future Alien movie. He confirmed as much through Instagram and Twitter.

Um… So I think it’s officially my next film. #alien

A photo posted by Brownsnout (@neillblomkamp) on Feb 18, 2015 at 3:55pm PST

The Instagram picture sits in line with the art he posted a couple of weeks ago about the project. His vision for the film includes the return of Ripely and Hicks. She may end up donning some kind of Xenomorph suit.

We wrote up our own piece on Blomkamp’s concept art for a new Alien movie. In that flurry of tweets he remarked that the film wasn’t happening, despite some effort toward conceptualization. Turns out, if you throw something at the internet and the internet catches with glee, big papa production company is going to take notice. And it didn’t even require a Kickstarter campaign.

Rest assured, it’s been confirmed from a variety of sources that this movie will not be Prometheus 2. That project still rests firmly in the hands of Ridely Scott, the guy responsible for the entire Alien franchise and the weird attempt to explain it all called Prometheus.

So what do we do with this news? From the internet’s collective reaction, people think Blomkamp is a natural fit for the franchise. He does sci-fi, he does aliens. Most of all, he’s put out some of the most visceral special effects in the history of cinema, and I say that without a hint of hyperbole. If you aren’t already convinced by District 9, check out this Halo short he produced during that tenuous time when he might have actually made the full video game adaptation.

Judging from this footage, Blomkamp isn’t afraid to veer away from the expected visual tone of a series. Chances are his derivation from the Halo epic warrior poses into a more believable, on-the-ground footage cinematography, was ultimately a factor in him dropping off the project. The way his Alien movie is coming along though, it looks like that kind of hurdle has already been jumped. That the Alien franchise has always focused on a group of survivors, rather than some epic space-faring tale, puts this deal in a rational light.

Aside from internet videos, you might as well jump right back into the Alien series, starting with a smart anthology purchase. There’s a lot of options out there. Here’s the best one:

View on Amazon

Amazon also has a combo pack with the anthology and a Prometheus blu-ray.

View on Amazon

There’s a great deal of extra content in the pack, including a Director’s Cut of the first film, voice-overs by a huge number of people, including directors Ridley Scott and James Cameron, storyboards, image galleries and on and on. It’s worth the asking price.

On the video game side of things, which I’m prone to examine, there’s just one recent game to pay attention to, and that’s Alien: Isolation. As the title suggests, the focus here is completely on creating the atmosphere of the first film, rather than attempt to emulate the space marine insanity of the second film as so many games have lazily attempted to do. Isolation is a master class in suspense and terror, though it does take a certain kind of engagement from the player. You’ll need to want to be scared to enjoy it. It also stars Ellen Ripely’s daughter as she tries to uncover the mystery of her mother’s disappearance. The story is considered official canon for the universe.

View on Amazon

The final bit of preparation you should do is watch a couple of Blomkamp films. None of the Alien films have been like any of the others, which is a unique thing in the world of movie franchises. All of the Transformers are virtually the same exact thing. The Fast and the Furious may have transformed itself into the Ocean’s Eleven of car movies halfway through, but Dominic Toretto’s refusal to change is what keeps that series going. Alien, on the other hand, has never held on to a director for more than one film, and has never rested on just one idea. That’s a great, great thing, especially when you bring someone with as much explosive creativity as Blomkamp.

Granted, Elysium was a horrendous, star-studded bust, which means it’s up to Chappie to reignite our faith in the man. One easily overlooked fact about his past movies: He and his wife, Terri Tatchell, wrote District 9 together. He wrote Elysium on his own. Tatchell is back for Chappie. If his third film proves even half as successful as his first, the Alien movie shouldn’t go forward with Tatchell’s involvement. The franchise, after all, is about a woman doing a man’s job. Chappie releases on March 6.

How to Properly React to the Confirmed Neil Blomkamp Alien Movie

Earlier this week we lamented the loss of a movie that never existed, a new Alien movie from Neill Blomkamp, by gallivanting through the web in search of random memorabilia. It was a joy. The final item of that list was a faux travel poster for one planet of particular importance in the Alien universe, LV-426. Though fictional, traveling to such a planet isn’t so far from the imaginations of many, especially the imaginations of people who work at NASA, that place that’s eventually going private under the leadership of a man named Charles Bishop Weyland.

In any case, NASA’s put out it’s own wonderfully inventive travel posters of exoplanets that actually do exist, yet are still unreachable by the average tourist.

Named for the NASA telescope that discovered it, Kepler-186f will always be the first planet discovered in the “habitable zone,” that distance from its own sun that suggests the potential for liquid water on the surface. These posters are part of an ongoing series out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the California Institute of Technology. The website, dubbed Planet Quest, is devoted to the search for habitable planets. It’s fitting, then, that this theoretically reddish planet (due to the wavelengths of its sun known to be redder than our own) should have its own poster.

According to the Planet Quest website as of publication date, NASA’s confirmed the existence 1,89 exoplanets (those outside our solar system), with another 3,199 candidates (those that need further evidence for official listing). Most of this is due to the Kepler telescope, which launched into orbit around the Earth in 2009. It was designed for the specific purpose of discovering other Earth-like planets.

The other two posters are just as fun, if not as nostalgic. The only thing left, really, is actually naming these things. We’ve definitely got some more Roman Gods left in the bank.

Some might feel satisfied with a Star Wars reference for Kepler-16b. Others might remember the planet from the only Vin Diesel movie that ever mattered, Pitch Black. And no, let’s not remember the sequels.

Here at Ben’s we like to set you up with some sweet deals, and these posters are no exception. In fact, they’re the best deals ever: free. NASA’s versions of theses images are offered at staggeringly large sizes, ripe for the downloading and printing at your own convenience and customization. Maybe you should find a Kinko’s, if those still exist (they’re just FedEx’s now).

3 NASA Exoplanet Travel Posters That Should Be On Your Wall

Last week Neill Blomkamp, the dude who made the wonderful District 9 and the not-so-wonderful Elysium, posted a couple shots on Twitter of his ideas for another movie in the Alien franchise. It’s mostly concept art, and Blomkamp admitted there was never anything official about his Alien movie, but to say it didn’t pique the interest of hopeful fans would be an understatement. His particularly visceral sense for action sequences and special effects might have played handily into what many consider the most terrifying movie monster ever created.

Our last look at the creature in Prometheus, Ridely Scott’s oft-lambasted attempt to reenter the science fiction universe he himself spawned, proved more or less a failure in the eyes of the masses. Perhaps reuniting Ripley and Hicks, instead of the way Alien 3 decided to begin, was the way to go:

Here’s a solid rundown of everything in Blomkamp’s teaser. Unfortunately, the release of these pictures comes only as result of Blomkamp apparently giving up on the project.

Ps this has nothing to do with the studio. I just feel like I might do something else instead. In which case why not show some work-

— Neill Blomkamp (@NeillBlomkamp) January 2, 2015

And still we feel the loss. Let’s buy stuff to make up for the newly formed hole in our lives!

A USB-Powered Alien That Doesn’t Save Stuff

You might look at the following picture and assume this thing has some sort of computing utility. You’d be wrong.

$41 on Amazon

On the other hand, it’s a tiny little Xenomorph that sits on your monitor or desk and sticks its tongue out at you when you turn your computer on. Straight out of Japan, glamorized with a listing on Amazon of “USB Alien with Illuminated Tongue,” the little guy seems to have the exact right proportions to straddle the line between cute and authentic. There is one strange deviation from the creature’s designs: this one has two tails.

Alien Chestburster Plush

This one’s been around for a time now, but in the halls of Alien memorabilia, it’s an absolute classic. The reason for that isn’t so obvious.

$30 at Think Geek

This is about as adorable as something called a Chestburster is ever going to get. The best part, which was hinted at so cleverly before, is the wire channel along the inside of the snake-like body that you can use to pose your new lethal little buddy. Just try not to do the cliche thing and cut a hole in your shirt.

Deluxe Alien FaceHugger Mask

The progenitor of the Chestburster, the FaceHugger (thanks, by the way, unimaginative fan-base forced to fill in the lore blanks), has always been less an identifiable creature and more a complete horror show in animal form. It has one purpose and that’s to hug your face, beginning the slow and terrifying process of using your body’s natural functions to then create the thing that will inevitably explode out of said body. Naturally, it deserves to be a mask.

 $50 at Think Geek

If you aren’t planning a science-fiction/Shakespeare mash-up like the guy in the picture, don’t worry, the applications are at least a little closer to endless than none at all. Halloween, of course, comes to mind. But there’s also Easter, Christmas, Hanuka and the Fourth of July. When people ask, just put your head down and start stroking your face. They won’t ask again.

LV-426 Travel Poster

This image is a test. Put it on a wall, invite someone over. As this mysterious guest enters the room, allow his or her eyes to travel the decorum, hopping from one object to the next, taking in the spacial representation of none other than you. Those eyes will eventually meet the relatively ambiguous poster, “LV-426” plastered with importance and personal significance. Read this person’s reaction. Know this person. Know that this person can know you, can know what you know, can love what you love.

 $6 at All Posters

 Best of all, gaze upon the silhouette of a Xenomorph Before Christmas and know that you too can look up and see the same stars it can, on this very night. And sing to yourself. Perhaps it’s singing the same song too. Now stroke the FaceHugger mask on your face.

Alien Movie Memorabilia to Mourn Neill Blomkamp’s Alien Non-Movie