[Hammock Parties]

Nice post on a great movie. Discuss.

Feminism:



Aliens is like the Johnny Guitar of sci-fi movies. It takes an overwhelmingly male-dominated genre and turns it into a matriarchy. Consider: there are four societies at work in Aliens: the marines, the civilians, the colonists, and the aliens.

The strongest, bravest marine is Vasquez, a woman. The smartest, bravest civilian is Ripley, a woman. The smartest, bravest colonist is Newt, a girl. The strongest, smartest alien is the Queen.

And what are they fighting about? Possession of Newt. You’re watching three matriarchs fight for a surrogate daughter. This is the like three years after Leia's gold bikini. And it does it so well and so organically that it never feels out-of-place or strained. There’s an interesting observation in Mulhall’s On Film, in which he theorizes why Ripley is so much more iconic than her contemporary Sarah Connor:

Unlike Sarah who, to assert herself, bulks up and learns guns, Ripley never loses her basic femininity. Ripley commands a squad of rough men and fights an alien horde not by becoming more masculine, but with her basic integrity, courage, and intelligence.


The props and set design:



The set design in Aliens is some kind of genius. The first original set (as in not recreated from the first film) we see is Ripley’s hospital room at Gateway Station. It’s white and sterile and totally recognizable. With the exception of a moment after her nightmare, everything until Burke and Gorman come to her door with her mission is bright and bland and official. Then we’re in her apartment hearing about the loss of the colony and everything is cold steel, light silver. Then we’re in the Sulaco and (in a beautiful montage tribute to the original film) everything is gunmetal gray, militarized.


Then LV-4226, everything is dark gray, weathered, and muddy. Then the lights go out and everything is blood red for almost an entire act. It would be interesting to see a color chart of the film – I’ll bet it’s a perfect gradient from white to dark gray, suddenly disrupted by a blast of red. The closer Ripley gets to the alien threat, the greyer and more unsettling the sets become. I suppose this isn’t revolutionary, but it’s extremely effective and incredible deliberate and consistent.

For that matter, the design of the props is some kind of genius, too. The helmet-mounted cameras, the flashlights which bob over their shoulders, the LED ammo readings. Everything looks practical and usable, as well as cool as hell.


The texture:



Aliens has to be one of the most tactile movies every filmed. From the bejeweled frost on Ripley’s hypersleep chamber in the opening scene to the thumb-operated joysticks on the Power Loader, James Cameron makes a concerted effort in dozens of lingering close-ups to show us how things would feel if we touched them –when Hudson’s opening the main gates of the complex there’s a shot of the control panel, dripping with rainwater, being manipulated with alligator clipped wires.


It’s totally inessential to the story and there’s no real reason we couldn’t have stayed on Hudson as the door opened, but it gives the moment a weight of reality, a practicality. The whole movie, really, is obsessed with having weight (“feel the weight,” Hicks tells Ripley right off the bat when he hands her the gun) and reality. Just look at how much welding goes on. And what do those pulse rifles fire? 10mm explosive tip caseless, standard light armor piercing rounds, duh.

Unlike most sci-fi movies, Cameron’s secure enough in his future to allow things to break and be kind of a pain in the ass - Drake’s camera malfunctions early on, Ripley needs regular duct tape to fix the guns together – and these imperfections allow the universe room to breathe. Even the aliens are imperfect. The queen gets stuck on her disgusting egg tube, and we see desiccated facehugger corpses early on. A lesser director might have worried this would make them less of a threat. Cameron was wise enough to realize that, instead, it made them more of a tangible threat. This isn’t realism, mind you, in a strict sense. It’s a kind of hyperreality which makes pretty silly ideas like space marines seem practical and functional.


The opening:



I love the opening to this movie. The very beginning, after the credits roll and before Ripley’s awake.

A version of the Gayane Ballet Adagio, famously used in Kubrick’s 2001, hums sweetly, bringing us back to the haunted tranquility of the first film’s ending. We’re in a blue sea in space – the remnants of the Nostromo? a nebula? Dunno. But the Narcissus lifeboat (a great name for a lifeboat, by the way), is right where we last left it. The camera moves but the Narcissus stays in the center of frame – it’s clearly rudderless.



We dissolve into the interior, a dark roaming shot of frosty equipment that could have come right out of the first film.



The music changes. Horner’s new score asserts itself and we cut outside to a huge monster of a ship looming overhead. Now we have some confusion – we were just at that angle. Was that first shot a point-of-view shot? It’s subtle, but it’s the same trick Carpenter used in the beginning of Halloween to make the audience feel complicit in young Michael’s crime. Cameron has a habit of doing these false point-of-view shots. Remember in Avatar when Sully’s getting off the transport and we fall in line with the soldiers?



Anyway, we’re back in the Narcissus and it still looks like a Ridley Scott movie. Long lenses, slow editing. Suddenly a robot! And welding! What’s this? It seems ominous. Apparently, the producers thought this was a waste of money and Cameron had to pay for that robot out of pocket. He was right to do so, it preys on the technophobia lingering from the first film and makes this operation seem a lot creepier.



It shines a mystery laser and then guys show up in creepy hazmat suits (props from Outland), faceless and breathing like Darth Vader.



The guy in front wipes the frost off Ripley’s bed and sees her. Lit with his flashlight she looks pretty heavenly, pure white against the grime around her.



Creepo pulls off his mask and talks – now he’s a person, no longer a monster.



Then Ripley dissolves into the earth. No doubts about her role in the film. She’s a ****ing savior. All done in images and implication. That’s great filmmaking, right there.

The false ending:



Horror movies, which I suppose Aliens is, love false endings. It’s almost a tradition to have that last little jolt – Jason jumps out of the water, Freddy Krueger becomes a convertible. It’s how it goes. As far as I’m concerned, only two movies make this asinine tradition work: Alien and Aliens. And Aliens is the dopest. The main thrust of the action ends with “a vapor cloud the size of Nebraska,” a trail of dead everything, and the ballest-to-the-wallest close one ever. If it ended there it would still be one of the most intense action films ever. But then ALIEN V. ROBOT FISTFIGHT OH HOLY SHIT. Literally the only way you can add something without it being anti-climactic, Ripley has to go one-on-one with the Queen. It was telegraphed early and, again, it’s not revolutionary, but it’s done better than any other of its ilk has done it before.


James Cameron can move a ****ing camera:



Nobody really discusses the camerawork in Aliens, which is a shame because it’s really pretty impressive at times. There’s smooth lines of action and continuous shots that help keep the film moving.



Like when Apone goes “what are you?” and they all yell “lean mean something or others” – it goes from Hicks checking his armor to Vasquez and Drake to Apone yelling to Dietrich yelling in one shot.

Then the next shot follows then out the hall into the APC. You could waste ten shots on that, or you could pull a Cameron and just get it in one swift motion. That second shot, by the way, is another one of Cameron’s patented false POV shots. The camera follows the motion of the soldiers, even with the marching bob, but never actually takes a specific perspective. When he cuts to the bank of cameras, Cameron finds an ingenious way to have like 5 POV shots at once.



Here’s another example: when Ripley sees the Queen for the first time. There’s this terrific shot of Ripley holding Newt close and it just keeps panning up and up to reveal the full stature of the Queen with those freakyass bonewings. Cameron could’ve moved the camera back a few feet and gotten it all in one frame, but he’s clever enough to let the monster totally overwhelm the frame. It’s subtle and incredibly menacing.


Nothing is easy:

Here’s the big one. Every single scenario in the film, no matter how small, is pushed to the absolute limit. Anybody remember my City Lights thread? I talked about how Chaplin always let gags build on gags. This is sort of the same thing but with aliens.. It’s a terrific technique, never so much “are they going to get out this,” but how – it’s part of why we remember Raiders of the Lost Ark so fondly. Take the part when Ripley rescues Newt.

Your scenario is: the aliens have Newt, Ripley’s going in to get her. How do you film it? ****, probably have Ripley shoot a few aliens, get the girl, shoot a few more and get out. That seems pretty routine. Cameron doesn’t let it happen that easily.

- Ripley’s got the tracker, she’s struggling to find Newt.
- She finds the transmitter, it’s laying on the ground. Newt’s nowhere to be found.
-Then we cut to Newt – we don’t pan to her, we CUT to her so we have no idea how far away she is. There’s an egg in front of her. She’s passed out. Then the egg opens **** **** **** what’s gonna happen – she wakes up screaming.
- Ripley comes running. Phew, she kills the facehugger just in time. All done, right? Nope.
- An alien hears the gunfire, attacks. She kills it.
- Then she has a hard time even getting Newt out of the cocoon, which is dicey because we know the aliens know where they are.
- Finally she gets the girl out, they start running but **** THE STATION’S BLOWING UP, an explosion almost takes them out.
- They run and run and then freeze? What is it? Cameron cuts to a wider shot. We see eggs. ****. They’re surrounded by eggs.
- Then, and only then, does Cameron show us the real threat: the Queen looming over them.

Cameron pulls every single drop of suspense and adrenaline out of every little situation, and he measures it out for us. We don’t get: “they freeze, there’s eggs and a queen and drones everywhere.” We get: “they freeze, there’s eggs. Then a queen. Then some drones show up.” We have just enough time to savor how absolutely ****ed everyone is before things get even worse. I mean, consider how the dropship has to circle around because the platform was too unsteady. That wasn’t necessary. It’s still pretty scary to have Ripley run right onto the ship with the Queen in tow. It probably cost them a lot of money to stretch it out. But it was totally worth it, to give us that fleeting five seconds of “how are they going to get out of this one?”.






Aliens doesn’t do anything revolutionary. It's a bit subversive and set the standard for sci-fi action, both in pacing and in mise en scene, but doesn’t have that great-leap-forward importance of Citizen Kane or Breathless or even the baseball-bat-to-the–industry impact of Night of the Living Dead or Pulp Fiction. It’s merely an exceptionally crafted film that, for my money, is as mesmerizing and fun as anything else anyone’s ever managed to put on screen. And that makes it the greatest ****ing movie ever made.