I don’t really like Aliens.
This is what I meant in the previous Onslaught about The Alien Sequel That I Don’t Really Like That Might Not Be What You’re Thinking Of; when ranking the four, Aliens always comes fourth for me.
I don’t have too many overriding memories of Aliens. Whenever I’ve watched it, I’ve found it a bit of a slog, no matter which cut I sit down to watch; often, I get a bit dozy about two thirds of the way in. The theatrical cut leaves me wanting, in that there is so much character development lost and so many scenes excised that help the story make some kind of sense yet, in the Special Edition, all that extra material bloats the running time to an unwieldy two and a half hours and the additional character development and scenes to make the story make more sense aren’t really palpable enough to make it feel anything less than padded.
Generally, Aliens has always left me distinctly unsatisfied.
My first encounter with the movie was actually with the novelisation, by Alan Dean Foster, long before I was allowed anywhere near the film. I actually can’t remember if I saw Alien first or if Aliens was my introduction to that particular universe; I had a friend when I was a very young teenager who was obsessed with Aliens and his enthusiasm piqued my interest. I got hold of the novelisation, I think, from a jumble sale at the school where my Mum was a teacher; I also picked up an original 70’s copy of both Jaws by Peter Benchley and Star Wars by George Lucas. The novelisation of Aliens borrows heavily from the full shooting script, ergo the Special Edition of the movie, and so, when it came to watching the film at long last in its shortened, original theatrical cut, it really felt like there were huge, massive, vast chunks of story missing.
I didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as I thought I would because of that.
I did enjoy it, though. It seemed super cool to me, as a young teen. I even got some of the early 90’s action figures from Kenner, inexplicably aimed at kids, that had a really, really loose basis on the movie (which was always disappointing; I was a kid who never liked it when they released toys that weren’t close enough to what was in the movie or show they were based on…I mean how hard is it to get it right? We don’t want approximations of that vehicle or that character, we don’t Ripley dressed as Vasquez with a luminous pink facehugger, we want the actual thing!). It wasn’t until I was a bit older and fell so in love with Alien, that I started to actually take a dislike to the second movie and to start getting really annoyed when people claimed it to be so much better than the first.
(I think it’s the same reason people claim Costa is better than Starbucks; it’s the populist vote, not necessarily because it’s actually better.)
Aliens, probably, has more mass appeal than its predecessor. It’s an action movie. The reason I love Alien is because it is a seminal horror classic; the setting is science fiction, but the genre is essentially horror. It’s also subtly character driven to the point that, without those stunningly well realised characters, the film wouldn’t be anywhere near as powerful. It builds slowly, deliberately, creating a world, creating people, and upending both with this unexplained alien presence that destroys them all; Alien is a masterclass in direction, character and tension building. It’s the science fiction equivalent of Halloween.
Aliens is an action movie. If you remove Ripley and narrative references to the original, it could be a completely different universe. Nothing feels the same.
There is no tension in Aliens; in fact, narratively, there’s not a lot of flow in the Special Edition, because it takes an unutterably long time getting anywhere moving through some pretty obvious character beats. Conversely, the theatrical cut moves a bit faster but at the sake of narrative logic and character beats. There are no real scares, no jumps, no sweaty palms or concern for the characters; if you foreground Newt, alone, in deep water, under a grating with a wide angle behind her and beepy things on your tracker, you just know an Alien is going to rise out of the murk and nab her. The Element Of Surprise is dozing, off-stage, in its trailer.
The Marines are posited in a similar way to the crew of the Nostromo, as rough and ready humanised characters, more relatable than simple rank and file crew or military ciphers, but they never feel as real as the blue collar workers of the Nostromo. They are larger than life, perhaps deliberately, they are irritating and over the top, again perhaps deliberately, but they begin as and end up as little more than Alien fodder (and some of them you end up hoping they die sooner rather than later). They are the generic teen stock characters in the slasher movie, introduced in the broadest brush strokes, only to be killed off at the first opportunity.
The exception, through his underplaying, is Michael Biehn’s Hicks who, tellingly, survives until the very end. Epitomising the strong and silent type, Hicks forges a connection to Ripley largely through looks and small behaviours, but it never goes so far as to push their connection into some kind of romantic territory; it wouldn’t work in the context of the film beyond more than hints, it would introduce too precarious an element for Ripley’s character and her position — in this film — as action heroine.
She points out that she isn’t a soldier, but she’s become just as hardened and gutsy as any of the Marines by the time they’ve discovered Newt and the Alien threat is real. Everything in the movie is based around Ripley’s loss as a mother, having been in hyper sleep for fifty seven years and missing her daughter growing up and, subsequently, dying of cancer. Newt replaces Amanda, this previously unheard of daughter. It gives Ripley a softer side and it gives her a maternal impulse and character drive; it is, in essence, the plot device that enables the entire movie to happen.
Aside from destroying the bugs, Aliens is about mothers and daughters. And somehow, for me, it’s way too cutesy for the subject matter and, whilst an admirable effort, still a very clumsy fit.
Sigourney Weaver plays it beautifully, as she always does. But the claustrophobia of Alien is opened up onto a much grander scale and the creature is entirely dumbed down to the point of a warrior ant and parallels are drawn that diminish its impact. As intriguing an idea as the Alien “hive” is and as epic a spectacle as the Alien Queen is, it’s never done anything for me other than lessen the impact of the creature, in comparison to its “perfect predator” status in the first film. The majority of the Aliens — and, I must say watching it this time round, you really don’t see them on screen much at all, I would be surprised if Alien Warrior appearances amount to more than five minutes of screen time — are simply there to open their maw and explode in a rain of acid to take out another Marine. They are the troops, just like the Marines, with the Queen as their Ripley, she protecting her eggs like Ripley protects the bloody irritating Newt-as-daughter-replacement, and somehow it’s all a little bit too neat and a little bit too obvious.
Screenwriting 101. Neatly packaged. With a bow on it.
The Special Edition does a good job of justifying why the hell Ripley would ever return to LV-426 (the theatrical cut, without some of the extra material, leaves it a bit more questionable) but the plot of the film, such as it is, largely echoes that of the first, with the company (now given a name, Weyland Yutani) desperate to get their hands on the creature and pretending they don’t but without the first film’s benefit of treating that whole thing as a mystery. The opening fifteen minutes gives me a nervous narrative twitch because it’s pointed out that hundreds of surveys have been done on the surface of the planet and they’ve never found a hostile lifeform nor the alien ship…yet as soon as Burke sends someone to the exact coordinates from the Nostromo shuttle’s flight recorder, they find that massive alien horseshoe and get their faces hugged and the proverbial Alien drool hits the proverbial colony cooling vent.
It’s all the company lying, we assume. Because if it’s not, it’s just really shoddy plotting. It’s not like the rest of the film is shy with its exposition (yes, Bishop, you) so why play coy here…?
Don’t get me wrong, Aliens isn’t a terrible film – it’s a great action movie, but it completely lacks the subtlety and intelligence of the first. It doesn’t have anything, tonally or narratively, in it that I would have looked for in a sequel to Alien.
It’s obviously plotted and makes far too much use of those moments that are basically A Series Of Unfortunate Events to enable the next chase sequence or exchange of gunfire, and I find that kinda wearying and tiresome (not to mention lazy…) in any action movie, especially when there’s two and a half hours of it…but that said, the movie does often rear up into entertaining territory:
The scene where Burke releases the two facehuggers into the Med Lab whilst Ripley and Newt are sleeping is brilliantly shot and almost captures some of the claustrophobia and intensity of the first film and is a real high point for the movie; similarly, the finale, from the moment Ripley enters the atmosphere processing plant alone to rescue Newt, directly mirrors the finale of Alien, with the same klaxon, the Mother-like voice counting down, tight corridors and blasts of escaping coolant, Ripley defeating the creature before it all explodes…and then having it stow away in her ship to get blasted out of an airlock so they can all go into hyper sleep.
Actually, it’s exactly the same finale. Just on a bigger scale.
Nah, I just don’t like Aliens much. I own it because it’s part of the boxset and I do feel a duty to watch it as part of the series, but only in rewatches of them in order, like this one.
In fact, this is probably the first in my Alphabetical Onslaught that, if it wasn’t part of a boxset…I probably wouldn’t own it…
I Have A Concern. 