RogerBW's Blog: Aliens

1986 science fiction, dir. James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn: IMDb / allmovie. Game over man, game over.

This is a hard film for me to write about dispassionately. I saw it at just the right moment in my life, and for several years it was a universal reference for the role-playing groups I knew in the way that Monty Python had been for a previous generation. Also, I had read the novelisation of Alien, but not seen it – so I had a fair idea of what had gone before, but I wasn't familiar with the look of the thing, so I had no expectations for that.

Which was good, because this is very much not a New Wave film. Cameron is not a subtle director: he pushes the "motherhood" button so hard that it's in danger of wearing out, and everything must get its foreshadowing, even if those foreshadowing scenes serve other purposes too (for example, Ripley showing that she can drive the powerloader both causes the Marines to start thinking that she might be some actual use and sets up the loader for the ending). This isn't a bad thing – a hypothetical Scott version that just suddenly brought the loader in at the end might have distracted the viewer from the fight itself – but watching the two films in quick succession there's a very evident contrast in styles.

This was a much more troubled production than Alien: in particular, Cameron expected the crews to work themselves to death for him, as American crews would have been required to do, and threw a tantrum at every tea-break. But there was more to it than just the filming: for example, the actors playing the Marines got several days of training in how to move like soldiers and not point their guns at each other (helped by Al Matthews (Sgt Apone), who'd seen service with the USMC in Vietnam), but William Hope (Lt Gorman) was deliberately excluded from this team-building experience.

On this viewing, I found myself particularly impressed by Paul Reiser as Burke the company man: a minor obsession of mine is the worldview of people (for example most modern politicians) whose entire experience has been of problems that go away by talking to them enough, meeting real impersonal problems that can't be blandished or bribed, and Reiser plays this to perfection. As Burke realises that not only can he not negotiate away the aliens, he can't even negotiate away Ripley, he comes apart and starts doing stupid things…

(One might wonder what happened to the original bioweapons team that diverted the Nostromo back in Alien, and clearly knew that there was something up with the planet. My theory is that when the ship vanished without trace they wrote it off as a bad job and buried their files to stop themselves from being associated with what would on the face of it appear to be a random ship loss; by fifty-seven years later they've all retired.)

And of course there's Bill Paxton, always excellent, as the mouthy comic relief – but unlike most comic reliefs, he doesn't just annoy the audience, he annoys characters in the film too. Which makes the whole thing better, because rather than being the guy the scriptwriter put in to defuse the tension, he becomes the guy who's trying to cope with his own fears by being loud.

And Carrie Henn plays one of the few child roles that doesn't irk me – perhaps because she's a survivor first, and a child second. (Just as Ripley here is the survivor who takes things seriously first, and female second. Being "the girl" was never enough characterisation to convince, and nobody here suffers from that.)

But really, all the acting is good here. Some of the cast have pretty tiny roles, but nobody's a weak spot. Meanwhile Cameron is of course making a Vietnam film: at this point that was the most recent experience of America going to war on a large scale, but it's interesting just how much he draws on the language and tactics of the day rather than trying to get more conventionally science-fictional. It's a very small degree of technical advance (compared with antigravity and FTL travel), which makes the whole thing much more relatable.

There's plenty of fridge logic: why is there no ship crew? Even if the ship can run itself, what happens if the mission goes as planned, but when they want to get back aboard the remote control for the dropship bay doesn't work? Given the implicit expense in sending a ship in the first place, and that there are two full squads' worth of hardware on board, why not send two actual squads? When and why, after the fuss of getting the APC out quickly, did they land the dropship? And leave the ramp open? And so on. But these are things one thinks of later, which while not as good as actually having them got right in the film is at least better than their popping up to distract one while it's going on.

All right, that sequence from dropship launch to landing is quite possibly my favourite bit of film ever: it's not just exciting things happening with people doing their jobs well, it's also characters being established with glorious economy. All it needs to make it perfect is the male voice choir from Dr Strangelove humming When Johnny Comes Marching Home.

If you still have at least ninety-eight minutes to reach minimum safe distance and you want more of my witterings, you should listen to Ribbon of Memes.

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