Subject: Retrospective: Aliens (1986)

From: Paul McElligott <[email-masked]>
Date: 9 Aug 1999 17:26:14 GMT

Aliens

Starring Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser
Written, Produced and Directed by James Cameron.

Aliens represents a true rarity among movies, a sequel that not only
equals or even surpasses the original, but also one that stands alone as
work unto itself.  You could see this movie without knowing the first
ever existed.  Knowing the original allows you to enjoy the sequel on
other layers of course.

Weaver plays Ripley, the sole survivor of a mining ship whose crew was
wiped out by a previous unknown creature.  After killing the creature,
she climbed into a lifeboat and put herself into suspended animation. 
She stayed that way, drifting through space, for 57 years until she was
found.  Her story is discredited, however, and she is forced into menial
jobs.  However, a colony has been established on the planet where
Ripley's ship found the original alien and now contact has been lost
with that colony.  Ripley is invited to accompany a platoon of Marines
to the planet to investigate.  At first, Ripley resists, but the need to
purge herself of the nightmares that have been plaguing her sleep impels
her to confront her fears.

The gung-ho Marines arrive to find the colony deserted, with signs of
desperate fighting all around.  They also find carcasses of alien
"face-huggers," which plant the seed of the adult alien into human
hosts, and one lone survivor, a little girl named Newt.  An attempt to
locate and rescue the other colonists, however, leads most of the
Marines into an alien ambush and most of the platoon is wiped out.  The
few remaining survivors have to desperately fight off hundreds of aliens
while searching for a way off the planet.

Aliens is less of horror story, like the original, than a
straight-forward action story, and on that level it succeeds as well, if
not better than Alien did as a horror movie.  It represents the peak of
James Cameron's career so far, creatively speaking.  Those who only know
Cameron through Titanic might be surprised to note that yes, he really
can write, and he can also bring in a film for only $17 million, on time
and under budget.

For a film released in 1986, it was certainly not the norm to have a
female lead anchoring a science-fiction action film.  It's not even
common enough today.  That's what makes Sigourney Weaver's performance
so striking.  She can bring off a female action role without ever
calling undo attention to the fact that she is a woman.  Lesser
filmmakers would have felt it necessary to pepper the film with
self-conscious feminist rhetoric and lesser actress might have played it
self-consciously butch.

That wouldn't have worked in this film.  Aliens is, among all the macho
posturing of the marines, the high-tech weapons and furious gunplay,
ultimately a film about motherhood.  For those of you who have only seen
the theatrical release, I point you to the Special Edition, now
available on VHS and DVD.  It contains several scenes deleted from the
original release to shorten the running time.  The most critical of
these is early in the film, before the inquest, when Ripley finds out
that her daughter died of old age two years earlier.  This loss and
sense of failure drives the maternal interest that Ripley takes in the
newly orphaned Newt, and this sense of responsibility leads, I think, to
Ripley going from a shell-shocked basket-case at the beginning of the
film to the rock on which all the other characters wind up leaning.

The motherhood arc extends to the aliens too, when Ripley winds up face
to face with the alien queen, another mother who is now super-pissed at
Ripley for torching her nest.  This film reminds us that, although women
might be referred to as "the weaker sex," in much of nature, the female
is the more dangerous and ferocious gender because she is charged with
the protection of the young.

If you've never watched any of the Alien films, I recommend this one. 
It's far less gory than the first and far superior to the third and
fourth.

Reviewed by Paul McElligott