Originally published at The Substream.
With the first film, Alien became a classic; with the second, for good or ill, Alien becomes a franchise. This is beside the point for me: what I find most rewarding about all four Alien films is the degree to which this series, in its every iteration (and like the creature itself) completely reinvents itself.
If Scott’s film inaugurated the series, it is Cameron’s film that writes the bible by which all subsequent exploitations of the concept – even those not within the Alien franchise itself – attempt to hew. He built a chassis for his story that would come to define what an Alien movie is, and in so doing – by pragmatic necessity, more than anything else – he expanded the universe. Cameron establishes a set of rules for the Alien, and for Ripley, which are in many ways the inverse of the drill-like relentlessness (and nihilism?) of Scott’s film; but if Alien was a locked room, Aliens is a universe, and universes can be platformed. Further, by rewriting the Alien book, Cameron did something far more significant for the series as a whole: he proved the book could be rewritten.
I can scarcely imagine the studio thinking here, but it remains impressive by any standard. With each Alien film, the producers hire a uniquely talented visualist as director (and, from a Hollywood perspective, he is always nearly untried – Cameron was a skinny Canadian kid straight off the set of the yet-unreleased Terminator!). The director is then turned loose on the frame of the Alien story, with no apparent shackles placed on the style of his exploit. In tooling my way through the Alien Anthology blu-ray set, I finally understood what I was looking at for the first time, because it’s right there in the title: “Anthology.” Anthologies are stories, sometimes of common purpose, which are otherwise generally unrelated. And so it is with the Alien films: it occurred to me quite forcefully that to watch the Alien franchise as a continuous story is, simply, a mistake. There are elements of narrative continuity between the four films, but each film is, prismatically, its own thing, subject to its own whims and rules, goals and views – and this is where the richness lies.
Aliens, as you know, is the war film. It’s a mainline pipe of the kind of action that the 80s, and only the 80s, were capable of generating, and coming to it as a pubescent boy, I went (of course) completely batshit about the thing. I was a sensitive kid – I would have to leave the room during the climax of Romancing the Stone, lest I witness Zolo’s hand being bitten off – but Aliens simultaneously attracted and revulsed me in a way that only a classically unromantic, brilliantly gory, action movie can at that age. In fact, my entry point to the entire Alien franchise was about as good as it can get: I came home late one night, turned on CityTV, and saw the Alien Queen rip Bishop in half, spewing – what? Milk? Cum? WTF? – in every direction. And so, for me, it began – a sickening, sweaty, dread-soaked fascination with the series, which had me scribbling Alien Queens in my schoolbooks and plotting with my friends about the replica Pulse Rifles we would soon build out of custom-carved blocks of resin. It was the 1980s. The world was awesome.
Aliens was part of the last, greatest era of what you might call “optical” fantasy filmmaking. Optical fantasy has the benefit of constraint. While I know there are things still beyond the means of the digital paintbox (like, for example, a 37-year-old Jeff Bridges), there is a perception of boundlessness in modern fantasy that is vertigo-inducing; photochemical fantasy movies felt like they belonged to a more coherent set of rules than anything we see onscreen nowadays. Matte paintings and optical composites might look like shit – and in Aliens, there are some doozies, like when Ripley and Newt are standing on that collapsing gantry, right before Bishop shows up in the drop-ship – but in a totally non-strategic way, their shoddiness was nearly part of their success. They couldn’t fool you. They could only encourage you to shut up, imagine your way through the shortcomings, and watch the damn movie.
But which movie? More than any other film in the series, Aliens provides the most vexing choice of theatrical cut vs. extended edition. The theatrical version of Aliens is lean, precise, and excellent; the filmic equivalent of a semi-automatic rifle burning off a clip. The extended cut is richer, bolder, and emotionally more rewarding; but it commits what I consider to be one of the great structural “mistakes” of any movie I’ve ever seen, by cutting to LV-426 before the fall of the colony.
Why does this matter? In pure screenwriting terms, this version of the cut makes more sense: show the colony’s before, to set up the disastrous after that the Colonial Marines will stumble into, a reel or two later. But cutting to Acheron at the start of the story nullifies the grand sense of discovery and the powerful sense of dread that shuttles the theatrical cut of Aliens through its first act; by staying with Ripley, we arrive back at the planet precisely when she does. Which, given what happens to Ripley in this Alien sequel, is important.
Cameron’s work with Ripley is universally praised and much discussed, but it bears a fresh appreciation nevertheless. Consider what he adds to the mythology here. Most blatantly, he adds motherhood; both via Ripley’s daughter, Amy, who does not appear in the theatrical cut, and through Newt, who of course does. Most skillfully, though, Cameron adds a metric ton of psychological freight that Ripley has to fight her way through to get back to LV-426, and ultimately, to achieve to that motherhood. If scribbling PTSD all over Ripley’s survival of Alien soaks the character in vulnerability that seems to undo much of Scott’s strengthening of her in the first film, it pays off brilliantly in the analysis of this film. Cameron is credited, almost fairly, with making Ripley Ripley. If, in doing so, he dents the delicate filigree overlaid on the character by Weaver and Scott – in the original film, quite importantly, Ripley never picks up a gun – Cameron succeeds in providing so much reason for Ripley to pick up that gun that he does what should generally be considered impossible: he takes a movie icon, and makes her even more of an icon.
And as it turns out, even evil bugs have mommies; the addition of the Alien Queen to the mythology is a neat way to solve the “how to make these aliens more badass than the last aliens” problem inherent to the sequel. (Aliens would be the last Alien film to do so.) Stan Winston’s creature design on the Queen is a satisfying adaptation of Giger, and his accomplishments with what is essentially a gigantic rod puppet are state-of-the-art, even today. To an extent,Aliens will always suffer by the cinematographic black hole that was the 1980s – movies from that decade are ugly, and whatever film stock was in vogue back then sucked at the colours and tones – but Adrian Biddle’s cinematography (beautifully, and quite revealingly, re-scanned for the blu-ray) pulls a great deal of rich detail out of the gooey bugs provided by Winston’s effect crew.
The motherhood cue is important, not only because it provides propulsion for Ripley’s entire arc, but because it literalizes the motherhood/nightmare thematics that run throughout the Alien series – one of the films’ few truly common elements, in fact. If the Alien movies seem predominantly preoccupied with sex, death, birth, motherhood, rape, and abortion – difficult themes, all – then Aliens somehow manages to rise above the darkness, providing these themes in their most digestible, and ultimately crowd-pleasing form. This is the coup of Ripley-as-trauma-survivor: it empathizes the character, to the audience in general but to women in particular, in a satisfyingly non-threatening way, while still providing enough energy to explain why, in a million years of reasons, Ripley would ever willingly return to LV-426.
The rest is just pulse-pounding macho action, in grand form. Of the four films, Aliens is the only one that is unassailably fun to watch, never stirring a contrary feeling or leaving an emotional low point unbalanced. Each set piece is gorgeously assembled and brilliantly paid off; the slaughterhouse melee on Sub Level Three as the Marines make their first, ill-advised foray into the base gives way to a huge Ripley moment, as she commandeers the APC for a rescue mission and, in so doing, becomes the leader that none of the male superiors (Burke, stooge; Apone, dead; Gorman, asshole) can be. There’s a beauty to Ripley’s appointment of Hicks to serve as the prime minister of her puppet regime. Yeah, he’s next up in the chain of command, but Corporal Hicks – with the bright red heart painted on his armour, for pity’s sake – answers only to Ripley.
And there’s Newt, the wild-haired ghost girl of the destroyed colony; and Bishop, the supremely capable and disconcertingly penitent android; and Hudson, a decade-straddling wiseass. And Burke, that shitstain. And Vasquez, who is such a profound and substantial concoction of smoke and mirrors that one wonders if Jenette Goldstein – feisty, maternal, goddamn brilliantly pretty Jenette Goldstein – actually played her, or if Vasquez was a demon of macha supremacy made magically flesh. Aliens struts out a brilliant, and deservedly memorable, ensemble all around – and all of them, of course, are killed or rendered useless over the course of the film, bringing us to a climax where it is, once again, only Ripley.
To say that the “the killer wasn’t dead!” end-tag has been done to death in the horror genre (even Alien took a swipe) is an understatement, yet the grand finale of Aliens might be its most appealing incarnation. Bishop saves the day; James Horner’s score coos appreciatively; and then the bitch sinks out of the drop ship and rips the droid in half. There is something in the fact that, even bisected, Bishop survives to witness what happens next that tells us, as an audience, that we are in for a treat: all eyes are on Ripley, and her kickass yella spaceframe. “Get away from her, you bitch!” is brilliant and fun and all, but for me, everything you need to know about Ripley is in her climbing out of that airlock, after she’s sent yet another xenomorph into the great beyond above LV-426. Here, the two films – Alien and Aliens – are one; the years between them and change of creative direction melt away. Ripley reaches her apogee, and sails off into a calm and certain night.
Tomorrow, the bitch is back. Join me for David Fincher’s first feature film, Alien3.
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