Aliens: 40th Anniversary
Aliens poster by Vance Kelly
The sci-fi action masterpiece still resonates with the times forty years later.
James Cameron, the Hollywood hitmaker, is a wizard with movie sequels. In the summer of 1986, Cameron’s Aliens racked up 131 million dollars on an 18.5 million dollar budget and locked him in as one of the movie industry’s most reliably bankable directors. More than that, Aliens proved that a sequel could seamlessly flip genres. Ridley Scott’s 1979 original, Alien, is a sci-fi horror masterpiece. Aliens is a high-octane sci-fi action masterpiece. Both exist in the same narrative universe. One of them is better than the other by a thin margin. It’s rare when a movie sequel surpasses the original work, but James Cameron pulled it off with Aliens.
Back in the late 1900s, my friend Tim’s dad rented Aliens on VHS one weekend. Tim invited me over to watch it. They lived at one end of our block, so it was a quick thirty-second Huffy ride away from my house. We sat on his couch with some snacks and great enthusiasm for a Saturday afternoon home matinee while his dad posted up in his recliner and started the movie. It was all good until the space marines landed on LV-426 and make it down into the lower levels of the human settlement. Those poor bastards were assigned to terraform one of the worst places in the universe(by Carter Burke, a proxy for the evil mega Corp Weyland-Yutani). As bad luck would have it, none of the colonists were aware of the derelict ship that had crashed on LV-426 with all the xenomorph eggs and hell that shows up when those eggs hatch.
After that happened (presumably), Weyland-Yutani lost contact with the colony, so they sent a platoon of space marines and Ellen Ripley, the lone survivor of the Nostromo incident in Alien. The group arrives on LV-429, the windblown moon, and the space marines are overflowing with bravado and confidence that they will be in and out of this job like it’s prom night. Some of them even have the nerve to make fun of Ripley and question whether she actually saw what she claims to have seen on the Nostromo. If you recall, she blew that ship up at the end of Alien.
As I mentioned, the doo-doo hits the fan once the space marines descend into the lower levels of the colony. It has now become a xenomorph lair. Halfway through this first encounter with those creatures, I walked out of Tim’s house, hopped on my bike, and rode home. I didn’t get back to finishing that movie until several years later when I was a teenager. It terrified me as a child, but it thrilled me as a teenager. Forty years later, Aliens is still a terrific watch.
There’s a lot to chew on as James Cameron eviscerates the Vietnam War and corporate greed, but my favorite thing about this flick is the cast. The space marines, featuring Jim Cameron’s homeboy Michael Biehn as Corporal Dwayn Hicks and a scene-stealing performance by Bill Paxton as Private William Hudson, have the type of chemistry that only a squad who has been through the meat grinder together can have. You don’t doubt that these soldiers are a badass bunch. If not for the poor leadership of their green C.O., Lieutenant William Gorman (William Hope), more of these marines might have made it out of the first fight alive, and maybe, just maybe, they would have caught that dropship back home before it was intercepted by a savvy xenomorph. Paul Reiser really dialed in the scumbag with his portrayal of Weyland-Yutani putz Carter J. Burke. At a certain point in the movie, you realize that the xenomorphs might not be the worst characters in the movie. They operate on a hive-mind that has been tuned to destroy every living thing it sees in order to advance the hive. They’re big ass space parasites. Weyland-Yutani, and Burke, are also parasites. They feed off humans in a different way, and they will never be satiated.
Aliens truly belongs to Sigourney Weaver, who transforms Ellen Ripley from a meek Warrant Officer on the Nostromo to a downright bug killer and super mama bear on LV-426. This is how you create a believable evolution of character from one movie to another. Ripley was transformed by the events in Alien and then again by what was happening in Aliens through a gritty and traumatizing arc. Another incredible performance in this movie belongs to Al Matthews, who plays Sergeant Al Apone. He provides a steady hand of leadership as Lt. Gorman’s mouthpiece. Unfortunately, we don’t get enough of Apone as he is one of the first space marines to bit the bullet. I don’t want to leave out Bishop, played by Lance Henriksen. He was the barometer by which Ripley’s transformation was measured. Her hate for androids was understandable after the one in the previous movie (his name was Ash) flipped out and tried to get her killed by the xenomorph. He “malfunctioned” according to the company, but the subtext is that Ash was really just doing what he was programmed to do. Bishop is the upgraded version of Ash, with all the loosey-goosey stuff programmed out, so that he couldn’t hurt his human counterparts.
Where this movie shows its age is in the special effects. No surprise there because it was made forty years ago. If you want better special effects in an Alien movie, you can go and watch Alien: Romulus. If you never seen one of these movies before, you could watch that one and think it’s not bad, but it really is just a ripoff of the first two flicks in this franchise, with some of its best moments tipping the cap to Aliens.
Cameron would go on to make another outstanding sequel, this one for an original that he also directed. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one part of my sci-fi action holy trinity. One of the other movies has a character named Trinity in it, and the third is Aliens.
Aliens has a lot of fun scenes that push the exposition and build tension with some humor and a bunch of action. I like how the movie opens with Burke visiting Ripley in the hospital after she’s been rescued, and he has to break it to her that she was in cryo-sleep, floating around in space for 57 years. By the end of the scene, we find out that it’s a nightmare, but the truth of her reality is that she’s missed half a century, making her own daughter older than her. This scene gives the audience a sense of time within the film and also establishes Ripley as a person out of time. She missed out on her daughter’s life and really only has Jonesy, her cat. This scene sets up Ripley’s affinity for Newt, the young lone survivor on the LV-426 colony, and drives her motivation for keeping this little girl alive.
I also love the scene when the audience is introduced to the space marines, waking up from cryo-sleep all the way to their mission debriefing. The cast shines here, showing off what feels like years of earned camaraderie. But, my favorite scene in this movie is near the end when Ripley rescues Newt from the cocoon a xenomorph has put her in, and they stumble into the center of the hive where the Queen xenomorph has been laying her eggs. Ripley has a face-to-face with her highness, which leads to the film’s climax.
Movie climax.
Here’s the scene I’m describing.
Was I right, or what? Excellent stuff. Happy 40th anniversary, Aliens!
