Alien is generally regarded as
the best movie of its franchise, but I’d say that Aliens is
more culturally significant. Pretty much all follow-ups take their
queues from Aliens, with comics, novels and video games
typically focusing on heavily armed mercenaries or Colonial Marines.
Likewise, Alien rip-offs tend to involve heavily-armed
soldiers squaring off with the monster.
It’s not hard to see why that is.
Alien was not an easy story to tell effectively, and it worked
mainly because it had a great director and actors. A more
action-oriented film like Aliens is a safer bet. That said
though, the film might surprise someone who came into it having seen,
for example, Alien vs Predator. The movie has a slower pace
than almost any other action film I’ve ever seen, and it takes a
good hour for us to actually encounter the Xenomorphs.
That isn’t a bad thing though. The
movie felt very real. The characters aren’t generic cardboard
cutouts, but developed individuals who make plans, then scrap them
and go back to the drawing board when they don’t work. To me, the
most tense scenes are not the encounters with the Xenomorphs, but the
characters sitting around between encounters, planning their
strategies.
For anyone not familiar with the story:
Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, duh) wakes up, her escape pod having
drifted for 57 years after the events of Alien. The
Weyland-Yutani Company pretends to not believe her story of an Alien
organism killing the rest of the crew and forcing her to destroy the
ship. However, reports have come in of some missing colonists on the
asteroid the original Xenomorph came from, and the Company wants her
to help them “investigate.” They eventually convince her to go
back, with the promise that they’re going to exterminate any aliens
they find rather than abduct them for study. (After the first movie,
I’m sure that any viewer’s reaction to this claim is “Ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha!”)
If I do have a criticism of this movie,
it’s that Ripley borders on Mary Sue territory. She has no
military experience, yet is presented as the most competent person in
dealing with Xenomorphs based upon a single encounter. I can
understand this early in the film when it’s made clear that
Weyland-Yutani intentionally sabotaged the mission with an
incompetent officer. But after that officer becomes incapacitated, I
would expect the soldiers to step-up their game rather than fall into
line and obey Ripley’s every command. Even so, Ripley never comes
across as a superhero, just a little too competent. And Weaver’s
performance is good enough to sell it.
My favorite touch to the film is the
android Bishop (Lance Henriksen). Androids seem to be a high-point
in this series, with Ash, Bishop and David written and acted to be
three truly distinct characters. (Yes, I like Prometheus, and
I may write a rant about that someday.) I don’t think it’s ever
been definitively established (if it even could be) whether or not
androids in this universe feel emotions, but my personal inclination
is to believe that they do. I see each of these three as defined by
a different form of resentment for humans: Ash sees our morality as a
flawed, Bishop is annoyed at being viewed as an inferior despite his
untiring efforts to help humans, and David is furious that he’s
unable to act in accordance with his own wishes.
The two remaining things I probably
have to comment on are Newt (Carrie Henn) and the Alien Queen. Newt
is a girl orphaned by the Xenomorphs and protected by Ripley. As for
her, she’s a child in a movie who doesn’t annoy me, and for the
most part the actress is competent. Props to her. Good job.
The Alien Queen is just awesome.
Re-watching this movie, I was sitting in my own living room with the
lights on when Ripley encountered the Queen, and I still
nearly ran. Watching her wake up and slowly open her mouth is far
more frightening than any of the drones she sent out as you realize
just what it is that Ripley's up against.
Aliens is an awesome movie.
James Cameron is one of the greatest directors in Hollywood. Or a
least, he was before he started making movies about giant
Smurfs in Fern Gully. Debating which of the two films is better is
an exercise in futility, because it’s simply debating whether one
Masterpiece is better than another. And to do so is to miss the
point entirely.
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