Synopsis: Following her excursion into horror aboard the doomed ship Nostromo, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is stripped of her job, forced to work in the cargo docks to make ends meet. When the opportunity to vindicate her story of a hostile organism comes around, inviting her to return to the planet she and her crew picked up said organism 57 years before, she has no interest in joining up. However, plagued by nightmares and feelings of powerlessness, Ripley finally signs on as an adviser to squads of Colonial Marines investigating a loss of communication with the colony of Hadley’s Hope on the still early stages of being terraformed planet LV-426. There, the marines encounter more than they hoped for and more than they were prepared to face. Ripley finds a chance to work out some of her psychological issues with survivor Newt (Carrie Henn). Also new variations on the aliens she encountered previously come to light, kicking the whole shebang up to 11. Writer/director James Cameron’s third feature, 1986’s Aliens, is a thrilling excursion into nightmare and speculation, following up a film that could be considered the worst possible work day imaginable with one of the coolest military sf stories to play out on the big screen.
DANIEL’S TAKE
Like Critters, which came out the same year, I have a lot of difficulty divorcing my feelings from first seeing Aliens whenever I pop it on to watch now. I was at that impressionable age of somewhere around eleven when ALIENS hit theaters, and I had been hearing cool things about the flick from relatives who had seen it. I somehow managed to convince my folks to take me to see it, and it left an indelible print on my psyche. I was no stranger to horror at that point and no stranger to science fiction either. 1986 was the year that these two fascinations would come together as a part of my movie going life. Later that year, I would catch Cronenberg’s The Fly in theaters as well, another movie I sincerely loved and continue to love to this day; hey, ’86 was a great year for flicks, huh?
Aliens is a movie I know backwards and forward. I watched the hell out of it on cable when it hit there, wore video tapes to death when we recorded it off cable. Of the two cuts, I have watched the Theatrical Release fifty times or so and the Extended Version maybe two dozen times. It is a movie I can quote backward and forward and yet it is still a movie that brings me great amounts of joy. It’s a technical achievement, a special effects extravaganza (Stan Winston did some incredible creature characters for the picture), and it’s the movie that introduced me to Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein, who would later reteam (along with Lance Henriksen) in the delightful Near Dark (1987). I knew Michael Biehn and Henriksen from their work on the first Terminator (1984), which I had seen on cable, and I continued to enjoy their performances here.
Over the years, I have used the phrase “a perfect movie” to describe a few pictures. Aliens, The Fly, The Thing (1982) all rank high on the list of my all-time favorite films. I still stand by this description. Now, this does not mean there are no flaws in the picture. Of course there are. These things are put together by people, made under budgetary constraints and cut for time and yadda-yadda. Even before the internet clued me in to “errors”, I could tell that Ripley pulls a flame unit off the rack in one shot and lays down a pulse rifle in the next, that she then pulls a pulse rifle off the rack in the next shot, and then lays down a flame unit on top of the pulse rifle. If you watch a movie enough times and have any amount of perception whatsoever, you have a decent chance to see the errors that made their way into the production. They are meaningless things, though, doing nothing to ruin the experience of watching the flick. I love the characters. I love the relationship between Rebecca “Newt” Jordan and Ripley. I like the mean-spiritedness of some of the sequences and the thrilling action sequences, the banter, and more.
For a period of about a year in high school, I was our little group’s go-to gamemaster. It seemed like we played Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, D&D and other games just about each afternoon. Every single adventure I ran for the tabletop RPG Justifiers basically relied upon the plot template of Aliens. Over and over and it never got boring, never got stale (for me, anyway). My group and I ate that movie up.
Aliens was my first experience with military sf, as well. Everything I have encountered since, be it the flick Soldier (1998) I reviewed back in June or the chest thumping Baen Books works I have read, the Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal Starship Troopers as well as the 1997 adaptation from Paul Verhoeven, David Weber’s Honor Harrington series or Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War . . . I compare everything I read, watch, partake of to Aliens in terms of thrills, characterizations, and whatnot. Some of the selections are found as good, a few of my subsequent finds are better (or at least show me some of those inspirational wellsprings Cameron was likely influenced by), and there are plenty of things that just do not measure up. That’s me, of course. Your mileage may vary.
The one thing I have not done is watch the movie since becoming a father. Many things have changed in my head and heart since wee baby E came into our lives. I am sensitized to stories that hinge on children in jeopardy (though perhaps not as much as Trista seems to be), and when she suggested we give the extended version of Aliens a rewatch over the July 4th long weekend, I decided to say what old Jack Burton always said: “What the hell.”
It has been about three years since I saw the movie last. The lines were still up there, ready to be chanted along with the picture, and surprisingly enough I was more attuned to the stuff with Newt and her parents or Newt in general. Carrie Henn plays the role of a survivor with heartbreaking accuracy. Here is a kiddo who has seen some shit, who has survived, who knows her parents and brother and everyone she has ever known are all dead. She has the thousand yard stare down. She has the defensive rebuttal down. She has the stone silences. It is heartbreaking in a whole new way, and not just because I am a parent. It brings to mind all the horrors I have seen about the children of refugees, detained at the border. Henn’s portrayal is chilling in how close it is to the stuff we see about the kids who are eventually reunited with their families only to be broken inside their heads. Whatever place the young actor went, it remains an impressive, brave performance. She is strained to the breaking point but manages to recover, and yet she is still human, a person in need of the connections she has been without while she was prowling the colony’s ducts in survival mode . . . It is a stunning performance.
I thought I knew all the things this movie had to show me. I could tell you shot composition, I can tell you where Paxton is ad-libbing, I can tell you the SFX insert about which Weaver gave Henn advice about acting when there is nothing there to act off of, and all kinds of minutiae. As it turns out, the film has more to share and show than I thought, growing as we move into newer, darker times. I remain impressed with the picture.
It is a hell of a watch, despite being two and a half hours long. It is a hell of a rewatch too. So, if you have not checked in with Cameron’s finest hour (at least in my not-so-humble opinion) in some time, then you might consider changing that. If you haven’t seen the picture before and fear that a flick from the big, bad eighties cannot either possibly be relevant to the world we live in or entertaining to a twenty-first century film going audience, then you are in for a treat. This is the year Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) turns forty, and it is a sf/horror picture par excellence. However, James Cameron’s sequel manages to do the nearly impossible: it stands on its own footing, builds on the mythology of the first film, and delivers a thrilling, entertaining experience on par with the original. The film rewards new times and perspectives, so give it a look!
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Aliens is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming editions, often as part of an omnibus edition with the other pictures.
Next up in our SHOCKtober series is Alligator, a fun creature feature starring the great Robert Forster. It is not easily available on home media, but you might be able to dig up a copy here or there.
“SHOCKtober Movies: Aliens” is copyright © 2019 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Poster and image taken from IMDB.
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