Just the Ticket #140: Aliens
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster.
At the end of my 65 review, I said that if I wanted to watch a good version of an astronaut dealing with time dilation and the loss of their daughter, I would re-watch Interstellar instead. But I could have just as easily name-dropped Aliens into the mix.
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The movie starts out on a strong note with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and "Fuckin' Jonesy" as the only survivors of the Nostromo, which she set to nuke itself (because it's the only way to be sure even though it didn't work and she ended up having to start a franchise trope by blowing the penis-headed Xenomorph out the airlock of her escape pod and incinerating it with a thruster burst) at the end of the first film. Discovered fifty-seven years later by a salvage team, she must cope with the loss of her daughter during the timeskip between films, her repeated PTSD nightmares of being chest-bursted, and the corporate greed-defined legal ramifications of destroying hundreds of millions of tons of ore and space travel equipment (plus five "expendable" human lives and one psychotic android) to kill a dangerous alien species that she cannot prove the existence of.
Goaded into a "do an investigative suicide mission to save your career" scenario by scumbag corporate lawyer, Burke (Paul Reiser, who would play a less interesting but equally entertaining version of the same character in One Night At McCool's fifteen years later), Ripley agrees to accompany a group of Colonial Marines to the colonized planetoid LV-426 (the site of the Space Jockey's ship--which was filled with "thousands" of eggs--from the first movie) to explore the planetoid following an undisclosed incident there.
The Marines include Hicks (the aforementioned Michael Biehn, who became something of a meme because his characters die in every movie he's in, unless they die between films), Hudson (who talks like a parody of Dennis Hopper from Apocalypse Now, has many quotable freakouts here, and is played by the late Bill Paxton, who holds the distinction of being the only actor to get "killed" by a Terminator, a Predator, and a Xenomorph), Bishop (this movie's "synthetic human" character, played by Pumpkinhead star Lance Henriksen), and Vasquez (who rocks, has a fantastic comeback line here, and is the film debut of Jeanette Goldstein, who had supporting roles in Lethal Weapon 2 and Terminator 2 in subsequent years).
While exploring the devastated colony, the group encounter Newt (retired child actress Carrie Henn, who has a forgivably inconsistent accent, considering her age at the time), the surviving daughter of the Patient Zero family who brought the Xenomorphs in. She and Ripley have a developing surrogate family relationship throughout the film that landed Weaver an Oscar nomination.
As the title suggests, Aliens embodies the sequel concept of "let's do the first movie again, but in a different genre, but the threat is plural now and one of them is big," and it mostly works. The pacing is a bit uneven, trying to mimic the slow buildup of the original, but replacing that movie's environmental storytelling and thematic coloring with a lot of James Cameron and the visual effects team going, "look at all the cool stuff we can put on camera!" Granted, a few hundred million tons of gold accolades should be given to the Aliens crew for doing everything with practical effects, green screen, and camera tricks alone (I think the version I watched had a bit of digital refinement, but it wasn't enough to hurt the practical presentation that much). Once Ripley starts coming to grips with the passage of time, the death of her daughter, and her PTSD, though, things slow down for quite some time so the crew can show off their effects skills before the Xenomorphs show up and force the galaxy's greatest soldiers into a Pyrrhic retreat so we can look at more cool effects and listen to more failing machismo before the finale.
Not that there's no visual storytelling; we do get some signage that identifies The Company as the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, "Building Better Worlds" (which is all the information a new or returning viewer would need to understand that the LV-426 colony was basically a Xeno farm for the WYC's weapons division, and Burke--who gets what's coming to him as the movie's secretly evil asshole character--was tagging along to bring back specimens and leave any loose ends behind to get eaten or caught in a nuclear explosion).
The highlight of Aliens, aside from the visual effects, memorable lines, frenetic action (once it actually starts), and commendable treatment of the supporting characters (relative to this being a sci-fi/action/horror movie where most of them die), is Ripley. Not only does she get a satisfying character arc through her relationships with Newt and Hicks (the latter of whom acts as a love interest and mentor in the art of badassery), she gets two cool suit-up sequences: one where she duct tapes two Colonial Marines guns together so she can single-handedly annihilate the Queen Xenomorph's nest in a hail of bullets, grenades, and flames, and one where she steps into a Power Loader (this movie's Chekov's Gun; a practical animatronic mech suit typically used as a humanoid forklift) to deliver her most iconic one-liner of all time before engaging Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Puss-Filled, Malformed Slug-For-A-Butt in a hectically edited fight for Newt's safety and upgrading the series' most famous trope from fluke to coincidence as she blows the Queen out an airlock to where no one can hear it scream.
Things end with Ripley, Newt, and Hicks going into cryosleep as the credits roll.
Something I forgot, or didn't realize until I re-watched Aliens for this review, is that the Colonial Marines were the first to give the aliens their Xenomorph designation. As far as I'm aware, there has never been a statement of their actual species name in the series or among the fandom, but the word Xenomorph is derived from the Greek, meaning "strange form," and while it has an underwhelming, generic, clinical feeling to it, it also fits well enough.
I know there is much debate (or at least, a difference of opinions) among the fandom as to whether Aliens or Alien is the better entry, and I am of the opinion that while Aliens did more to make Ripley the franchise icon that she is as the original quadrilogy was moving in a more action-focused direction and has more ambitious effects, Alien is the superior movie when it comes to showing between the spoken lines. Aliens is perhaps longer than it really needed to be, and relies on spectacle for its own sake rather than as a means of saying something important about its world or ours.
Might it be the best sequel of all time? Yes. The best action movie of all time? Maybe. But the best Alien movie of all time? Keep on debating!
B+
Next Friday, Alien gets cubed, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, send a beacon to the comments section at the bottom of this post because it's the only way to be sure my site doesn't get nuked from orbit, help out my ad revenue as you read to keep The Company happy, and use the air ducts to follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn so you can like what you see and receive the freshest Xenomorph eggs of news on my chest-busting content.
Ticketmaster,
Bursting Out.
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