Yeah, really. Invasion USA was a “stupid, bloated 80s action movie”. Aliens was well constructed and easily holds up today.
I really enjoyed Aliens when it was released, and still like it but I agree with you wholeheartedly that it completely moved away from the original film. I am also one of those who few lonely and despised fans of Alien 3, primarily because it did move the franchise back to the atmospheric horror vibe of the original.
I liked 3 reasonably well. It had a brooding feel to it that I thought worked. It also cemented that there weren’t going to be any happy endings, ever, as long as The Company continued to pursue its xenomorph programs.
Part of what made Alien great was that there were so many mysteries. Where did all those eggs come from? What’s with the shimmering layer of light? What was the alien pilot’s story? Just how smart is the alien? This left a lot of room for your imagination to operate (and come to its own horrifying conclusions).
With Aliens, Cameron just said. OK, here’s how the aliens work. Now let’s crank up the soundtrack and blow some shit up! YAHHHH!
I guess some people like roller coasters and some like haunted houses.
If that’s true, then why did so many people get so bitchy when the Alien series followed Cameron’s action movie with a horror film? Why? Because they were expecting and hoping for another action movie. (Just as I was expecting a horror movie when Aliens came out…and was disappointed.)
Because it was a shitty “horror” film.
Sorry you didn’t get another shoot-em-up.
Could’ve made it a rom-com. How I Ate Your Mother
Or soft porn. Same title.
I’m not sure I really understand that criticism. The only thing that Cameron added to the aliens’ backstory from the first movie was showing what laid all those eggs. What else about how the aliens “work” did he show us?
I suppose he could have tried to answer the mysteries presented by the first film. We all saw how well that worked in Prometheus, right? Or he could have piled new mysteries on top of the unresolved ones from the first movie, which is more or less the formula that made the last few seasons of Lost so wildly popular.
I also don’t buy the action movie/horror movie dichotomy being built up here. Aliens was certainly more action-y, but it’s still a pretty fucking scary movie. The scene with Ripley and Newt trapped in the med-bay with the two face-huggers is up there with any scene in the original for sheer terror.
Alien had a Lovecraftian horror, which entails some air of mystery, and a feeling of human insignificance against a much larger force.
Aliens is an 80s action movie. It has tension, as any good action movie would (like the face-hugger scene you mention), and lord knows it has lots of shoot-em-up action, but there just isn’t the creeping sense of horror that I would expect from a horror film.
It has a very 80s-action-movie vibe, complete with all the big guns, militarism, explosions, and loud throbbing soundtrack you expect from that genre.
While I agree about Aliens, I think Alien is not Lovecraftian at all, but straight up Friday the 13th “magic invulnerable all knowing monster” genre. I went in hoping for some SF, but found a horror film set in space. A good, maybe great horror film, but since I despise that genre, I have never liked Alien.
Google Lovecraftian and Alien, and I think you will see I am not alone in noticing that influence. Have you read “At the Mountains of Madness?”
No. The reason why Aliens works and Alien3 doesn’t is because Aliens is a natural extension of the story from the first movie. It’s a different genre, sure, but it makes sense that a truck driver who has had a run in with a horrible rape monster is going to have a hard time returning to their old life. At the end of Aliens, Ripley has closure. Alien3 then snatches that closure away.
It’s the same bullshit they did in the third Terminator movie - the first movie was about surviving first contact with the enemy, the second was about taking the fight to the enemy and earning your happily ever after, and the third movie undoes the satisfying conclusion of the previous movie so they can keep the franchise lurching along forever.
I was just a kid when I saw Alien in the theaters, but I was a kid who’d seen I, Claudius. I totally expected Ripley to be the first to go, and either Skerritt or Hurt to be alive at the end. Once Hurt died, everyone in the theater was pretty sure no one was going to survive. It wasn’t just that the redshirt didn’t die first; the actors died pretty much in reverse order of their bankability in 1979. It’s impossible to recreate that.
As a sequel, Aliens has to be different. We have already seen the monster. Of course, there is the small matter of Paul Reiser’s character being revealed to be a monster in a figurative way, so there is some suspense there, but there is no over-arching mystery-- the suspense comes in short bursts. It’s just the way of sequels, particularly monster movie sequels, since the big deal in any monster movie is revealing the monster a little at a time, until you finally see the whole creature close to the end of the film.
I don’t really see the “human insignificance” part in Alien. A dangerous animal gets on board a ship, and kills a bunch of people who aren’t really trained or equipped to deal with it. Sucks for the crew of the Nostromo, but the situation doesn’t really invoke the existential horror that’s the hallmark of Lovecraft. There’s nothing about the alien that makes you question mankind’s role in the universe, or reveals human hopes and values as a delusion papered over a universe of bottomless terror.
Later films in the series tried to inject that: namely, Prometheus and Alien versus Predator. We all know how well that worked.
I don’t think “80s action movie” works very well as a genre descriptor here, either. “80s Action Movie,” as a genre, usually revolves around a single, indestructible, hyper-masculine character who spends the movie remorselessly hunting down his enemies. To the extent that Aliens works at all with that genre, it’s to subvert it. The hyper-masculine characters are largely ineffectual in the face of the alien hordes, are easily slaughtered, and after the initial encounter with the monsters, spend the rest of the film trying to figure out how to get away from them.
I also think you’re over-estimating the amount of “shoot-em-up” action. There are really only two major gunfights in the movie - the first encounter with the creatures under the atmosphere processing plant, where most of the marines are slaughtered, and the aliens final assault on the survivors in the command room, where the rest of the marines are slaughtered. The “big guns” often as not make the situation worse for the characters. The heavy machine guns Vasquez and Dietrich use under the processor are what cause it to start melting down, and Ripley’s brief training with the smaller pulse rifle doesn’t actually serve her - the only time she uses it is when she shoots up the egg chamber, which is what prompts the queen to chase her back to the Sulaco. If she hadn’t opened fire, they very likely would have made a clean getaway.
As for the actual horror elements of both films, I think they’re largely the same: a small group of people, trapped in an enclosed space, slowly being picked off by a monster. That sense of claustrophobia and slow encirclement by an implacable foe is what fuels the tension in both movies. Alien, while more closely hewing to the horror movie formula than its sequel, is not a markedly more frightening film for it.
I loved both Aliens III and IV.
I have, several times, including the annotated version by S.T. Joshi. What specific parallels do you see between that story, and Alien?
Ooh! The annotated version! You are soooo erudite!
Sorry, I am not going to do this with you. You obviously saw Aliens when you were 12 or so, and nothing I say is going to lessen your childhood obsession with it. Enjoy.
As for the parallels with “At the Mountains of Madness,” as I said, Google is your friend. I am not going to “annotate” Alien for you.
I have to disagree with you on this point–I don’t think she had a choice about opening fire. Recall that she did so in response to an egg opening and a facehugger starting to emerge. Even just that one facehugger represented a serious threat–she was about to have to make a long run back through areas with poor visibility, lined with alien organic structures that even full-size aliens were shown hiding effectively in. Under those circumstances, keeping a facehugger from successfully jumping her or Newt would be problematic, and it gets a lot worse if more eggs open.
So, she had a strong reason for killing that facehugger. Once she did so, the standoff was over, so she might as well kill the rest of the eggs and the warriors to make sure none of them came after her. Her errors were in misjudging the queen’s vulnerability and mobility, and in going overboard. A little ammo held in reserve probably wouldn’t have stopped the queen later, but it might have bought her a few crucial seconds.