Friday, February 26, 2016

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #35 Aliens

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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