I've Outgrown...Aliens - Page 9

[hack].....[/need]

The Long, Hard Road to Loving Alien 3

 

It's been almost twenty years since the third film in this four-part trilogy was released. Oddly enough this is one of the first movie going experiences I can remember. I'm not sure what my mom was thinking at the time, as I was only seven years old, but it certainly stuck with me.

 

My formative years were spent watching horror, sci-fi and action films, and Aliens at that point was the cream of the crop. Recorded off of ABC (which was a strange cut that included the "Ripley's Daughter" scene and the Sentry Guns, but not Newt's family going to the Derelict) circa 1989, I wore that VHS copy down to the nub. Imagine my surprise when I sat down in that darkened theater to experience this thoroughly adult creation.

 

That's the strange thing about James Cameron's films: moreso than action films, they're ADVENTURE films. Aliens, in retrospect, has more in common with an Indiana Jones film or, dare I say it, Goonies (complete with screaming kid) in terms of tone. I'm not harshing Aliens, which I still love, but where once I thought it was timeless I have in recent times began to realize how thoroughly '80s it is.

 

My tastes have changed. Immediately following my first viewing of Alien 3, I decided to shun it for years. In its place I sought out something, anything, to replace it in my mind. How could they kill Hicks(Michael Biehn!) and Newt?! Luckily Dark Horse's Aliens series, and eventually the many drafts of Alien 3 that ended up online, curtailed my concerns.

 

It took me a while, but I came to realize that William Gibson's Alien 3 was a hot mess. Just silly, with half of it feeling nothing like an Alien movie (more like some strange procedural set on a space station) and the other half feeling like Aliens EXTREME with more of everything, completely misunderstanding what made the first two movies work. David Twohy's proto-Riddick Alien 3 was better, but felt inconsequential and unworthy of the Alien name.

 

With that preface, when I purchased the Aliens Quadrilogy set a few years ago, complete with the Assembly Cut, something clicked in my mind. The nihilism, the imagery, the subtext; this is a dense movie. The setting is kind of brilliant, because the lack of weapons not only restores the xenomorph's threat, but devolves the cast back to medieval times. They might as well be in a gothic castle in England circa 1300, fighting a literal dragon (or Satan, or their own personal demons).

 

That's what's great about the movie: the Alien is unnecessary. In fact, it's shown too much (especially in the Assembly Cut, which is a superior version but has a few horrible scenes of xenomorph CGI). It's the threat of the thing, and the implications of that threat, that matter here. Like any great zombie film, or the first two Alien films, it's the people that are the real threat.

 

Speaking of the people, I don't understand the complaint that the cast is unlikeable. Clemens, Dillon, 85 and even Morse are all standouts, with idiosyncratic quirks and rousing bits of very quotable dialogue. So they're former criminals...so what? In the context of this film, they're monks that have long been seeking redemption. Further more, the thesis of the film is that no one is innocent, even St. Ripley. There's a question of fate vs. free will, choice and temptation running throughout the film. This is exemplified by the two Bishops.

 

In chess, a Bishop is not limited in the distance it can travel but can only travel diagonally. A Bishop is also, of course, an important figurehead in the Catholic Church (duh). Along with the Alien Queen, there's multiple metaphors permeating this beast that intertwine: Chess, Christianity, and Fairy Tales. Ripley is playing a game here with the Alien Queen, the inmates, and the Company, and by the end she knows the only way to win is to sacrifice the Queen. The question of choice is first raised by the android Bishop, who not only confirms Ripley's fears but chooses to die rather than face a life of hardship. The second choice is presented by Bishop II (or Michael Bishop, or whoever he is), who tells Ripley the Queen can be removed from her. Kudos to Lance Henrickson for pulling off the dual role with class, even though he maybe has five minutes screentime total.

 

The Christian parallels have been long-discussed, and free will is just as much a question in the Bible as it is in Chess. Ripley starts off the movie under glass, like a Saint preserved forever. She is corrupted by a facehugger/dragon/satan, and falls from grace. She brings temptation, original sin to humanity (the inmates), and then has to become a man (shaves her head) in order to be Christ-like and destroy sin. All pretty obvious, which brings me to Golic...

 

The Judas character, or from the perspective of Fairy Tales, Gollum. When the Vincent Ward version of the film was going to be set on a wooden space station and the cast were to literally be monks, there was some discussion of the film working as a Snow White allegory (Ripley=Snow White, monks/inmates=Seven Dwarves, Alien=Evil Stepmother, Alien Queen=poisoned apple). Although this has met with derision, personally I love the idea and think it can still be applied to the finished product. Ripley under glass is certainly evocative of Snow White, but the subversive nature of the ending is brilliant in that Bishop II shows up as Prince Charming to save the day, and Ripley not only rejects him but becomes a man herself in order to slay the dragon. It's not a 1:1 parallel, but there's certainly a gothic fantasy element to the movie that is intentionally being confronted.

 

Along with the imagery of emaciated, sickly people and all the needles hinting at the Alien as an HIV metaphor, this is a fun little movie to pick apart. I don't know if I would rate it above the first two films, but I do know it's my favorite performance from Sigourney Weaver. It's brave of her to dirty Ripley up like this, making her simultaneously ugly and sexual. A lot is hinted at here, including her lack of faith, that makes her a truly well-realized, multi-faceted being even after three movies and more than a decade. That's really the biggest change in my opinion of the film, as I used to be a big advocate of getting rid of Ripley and having stand-alone tales, or Alien vs. Predator.

 

Now I realize these movies (at least the series proper) are Ripley's story, and the xenomorphs are only there to comment on her. I am looking forward to Prometheus, but with hope a thrilling, challenging lead will be introduced to bounce off the awesome creature design and foreboding connotations of H.R. Giger's creations.

So, um. I finally saw the original Alien this past weekend. (The Director's Cut, if you're curious). I actually saw Aliens first, several years ago, and I remember enjoying it a great deal. It wasn't perfect, no, but Cameron's skill with action, actors (well, the results at any rate; I'm well aware of his difficult behavior with the actors in many of his films), pacing, and effects was a terrific thrill ride. Then you have this, which is the polar opposite. And I like that they're different. Anyway, laundry list!:

 

-It's remarkable how patient the movie is. I went in knowing certain things (Nostromo, Ripley being the only one who gets out alive, John Hurt dies after getting facehugged and then chest-bursted, Ian Holm is an android), but I still felt a sense of discovery and surprise because of how deliberately paced the first half is.

 

-When they discover and comment that it looks like something came out of the chest of the "Space Jockey" (such a great design), I immediately went, "Ohhhhhh shit."

 

-Ian Holm is so creepy and good in this movie. He's so... still, barely showing any emotion save when talking about the creature that fascinates him so. The eerie robotic effect on his last lines is great: "I won't lie to you about your chances, but.... you have my sympathies."

 

-The whole cast is great, mind you, but Holm and Sigourney Weaver are easily the standouts. I totally get why this movie made her a star. You really understand that she's such a hardcase not because she wants to be, but because she feels she has to be. And she's totally right! Bringing Kane back on got everyone else killed.

 

-In all its forms, the Alien (or Xenomorph, if you wish) might be H.R. Giger's masterwork. Part of the increasing terror of the movie is that feeling of "what  the hell will this thing do or turn into next?" The facehugger is just nasty, while the chestburster is undeniably phallic and disturbing. In its final,  most famous form, I love that we only get quick glimpses of it until almost the very end.

 

-I know Jerry Goldsmith was unhappy about having to redo his score for the movie, but when the results are this good, I find it hard to speak against Ridley Scott for this choice. I especially love the eerie little leitmotif that plays from time to time; it sounds too cheerful, which puts the audience on edge.

 

-The blue collar feeling is great. This is not Star Trek, where the characters are all "Sweet, an alien planet to explore!" Here, it's more like "Shit, we gotta go explore a damn alien planet. I hope I get more money for this crap." I particularly love how Brett and Parker seem to have formed a mutual bond of bitching about payment.

 

Can't wait to see Prometheus this summer now.

I don't know if this is an idea that's been floated in the thread already, but it was on my mind. It's a common and I think valid complaint that Cameron helped rob the alien of its mystique by normalizing the sexual biology (introducing a mother) and turning it into a relatively easy to squash foot soldier. It's Cameron's film that eventually lead to little kids hopping about with their alien plush toys, and so it goes, it's no longer this grotesque, phallic rapemonster that's going to murderfuck Veronica Cartwright. That's all been said, but it ocurred to me that Cameron could have gotten his way and possibly maintained the unsettling mystique of the creature by pushing the angle of wartime rape. It is a fact of war, and was used as a method of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and I think there could have been a subtle way of introducing that. Just graphic enough to relay the information, but subtle enough to allow for implication, and you could easily have a scene or two of LV-426 colonists being corralled by a guerilla army of nightmare penises and left to be facehugged. You'd have to restructure some bits of the film and allow for a tone, nimbleness, and level of abstraction that I don't think I've ever seen Cameron demonstrate, but it looks good and creepy in my head, and keeps the creature from turning into the Mothra to Predator's Godzilla.

The first Alien lays eggs...it was just cut out of the theatrical release for pacing purposes.  Cameron just expanded on that in Aliens.

With the sequel, how could you pull off the horror exactly like the 1st film when we know what the alien looks like? Something touched upon in Alien 3 is how the creature takes on the characteristics of the host (in the theatrical cut since the alien busts from a dog, it made sense with how it moved). I think Prometheus is playing on that fact and the facehuggers and creatures of that film will evolve into the creatures we know.

( Edit: I don't know why lis tis showing up as one giant paragraph, as my editor shows the page breaks!) OK, I can't say I read all 400 posts on this thread, but I had to add my comments, which are probably adding nothing new to the conversation. I prefer to just compare Alien and Aliens, the subsequent movies in my view are not particularly good in any way. So, Alien is a near-perfect film. Scary and intense, with characters that feel real and real terror, even the use of "jump-cat" is effective. Criticism that Aliens is not as scary or intense as Alien is silly. Aliens never tries to be that movie. Had they tried, it inevitably would have failed. (Though I would argue there are a few very intense scenes in the sequel, when the marines first find the Alien hive and when the Paul Reiser releases the facehuggers at Ripley and Newt) Cameron's take was to take the story in a new direction...and at the time it was insanely effective. Parts of the movie haven't aged particularly well. Most of the characters feel very underwritten, even the ones that make it far into the film. (I would argue that everyone besides Ripley is purely one dimensional at best.) But, where I defend this movie is in Ripley's journey. She came out of the Nostromo experience really fucked up. She goes on the mission without really wanting to. The rest of the characters are very blase about this whole situation compared to her because they have not been through the horror. Her only desire is really to get the hell out of there. And then she finds Newt...and suddenly she has a reason for living. To save one innocent girl from the terrors of these creatures. And she spends the entire rest of the movie essentially doing that. That's why this movie still works gangbusters for me (though I admit I haven't sat down and watched it in a while) even up to the last time I saw it. She went through the true Hero's journey, from wanting nothing to do with the whole thing to selflessly saving the lives of others. And I would also argue she was way more of a fully formed character in Aliens than she ever was in Alien. In fact, one of the things that worked so gangbuster about Alien was that Ripley appeared to be a minor character for much of the running time of the movie and only becomes the focus when no-one else is left. I guess I've got to go to Alien3 here (we always called it Alien cubed), but this is why i HATED how they opened Alien3, by having Newt killed for essentially nothing. (I understand, strip Ripley bare with nothing to live for, but didn't make me like it any less.) The catharsis at the end of Alien that she had saved this one person from the horrorible fate was what made Aliens all worth it. That said, if I'm going to pick the best film (to date) in the frachise, I'm going with Alien. There's my 2 cents. That and that the Director's Cut of Abyss is definitely Cameron's best movie, and far superior to the theatrical cut, which while 85 % great ended with such a thud. Probably the best example of a Directors Cut actually fixing a flawed film. Though I want to say that "True Lies" doesn't seem to get any votes yet is 2/3rds a very entertaining film. (The flabby middle section didn't work for me from the day of release forward.) Part of the reason his movies get dated worse than most is because he so rely's on the WOW of seeing something that you've never seen before.
Edited by skierpete - 4/26/12 at 12:39pm