Here’s my pet
theory to why life went so badly downhill, personally and professionally. Why I’m
blacklisted in every industry and career field. Why females have treated me
like the ebola virus (actually, statistically, I think ebola has gotten luckier
more often than myself). Why things for Charles Cassady are generally just a
series of humiliations, punishments and rejections.
Because I’ve
always felt a little cold toward James Cameron’s ALIENS. In fact, when it first
came out in 1986 I only gave it two and a half stars.
(The few remaining
readers of the Cleveland Movie Blog at this point quit to support ISIS. It
actually works out well for them; they get hired as tenured professors at Kent
State University)
Yes, ALIENS, the
smash sequel to Ridley Scott’s ALIEN. The Cameron continuation was bigger,
faster and more amped-up than Scott’s moody, cramped original. I’ll admit, at
the time it was a refreshing change from the general Hollywood routine in the
1980s for sequels to be ever-cheaper, downtrending copies, cranked out for a
quick buck.
If ALIENS errs,
it does so when director James Cameron - don't forget, dude wrote the
Neanderthal RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART TWO at the same time - insists on squeezing
every last cliffhanger out and goes over the line with the manipulation,
putting a screaming little orphan girl in hideous peril literally every time
the opportunity arises. And conniving to make sure that opportunity always
does.
Ellen Ripley (Sigourney
Weaver), sole human to survive the alien onslaught of the earlier film, is
found drifting in space in suspended animation and revived. She's shocked to
discover that more than a half-century has gone by, and her family, including
her little daughter, are all dead.
Furthermore Earth
authorities, apparently dominated by a nameless, amoral Company that controls
most everything, don't believe her account of her crew massacred by an alien
parasite. And they've started to colonize the distant planet in ALIEN where the
Ripley's crew was attacked (and answering any of the obvious questions about
that distant planet had to wait a loooong while for Scott’s prequel PROMETHEUS).
Blackballed into
doing menial spaceport jobs, Ripley is summoned by a slimy Company executive
(comedian Paul Reiser cast against type) when communications with the colony is lost. He convinces her to
go back to the planet in an advisory role with a massively-armed squad of
tough, swaggering interplanetary Marines, who are itching for action and don't
pay much attention to Ripley's warnings about the monsters.
When they first
find the human colony it seems deserted, except for a cowering girl named Newt
(Carrie Henn). But a little more searching - and nightfall - brings out the
aliens, hundreds of jaw-snapping, fanged, acid-bleeding horrors, unafraid of
guns, who cut through the panicked Marines. It's Ripley who has to more or less
take charge of the mission (and uncover yet more Company treachery) if any of
them are going to get away alive.
In an era when moronic gun-fetish actioners set the pace for the Ronald Reagan years so cherished in
our culture today, ALIENS won fans on both sides of the incipient Red State/Blue State aisles, from the action
freaks (you can practically see the kill-them-all routine of video games like
Doom) and the horror/SF geeks, who insisted on reading profound feminist
meaning into Sigourney Weaver as a butt-kicking female action heroine (back
before that sort of thing became tiresome, or are you really looking forward to
the next RESIDENT EVIL picture?).
And Cameron
conjures a strong Vietnam metaphor (or US military misadventure of your choice)
when he depicts proud, gung-ho muscleheads charging into battle with their
fancy hardware, only to get shredded to pieces by hordes of a primitive enemy
that keeps on coming. I was really with the film up to that point.
But then - for me
at least - it gets little hard to take seriously when Ripley, forsaking even
body armor, slaps together a gun-flamethrower combo and charges alone into the
alien nest to rescue Newt and confront the super-sized queen alien. Overpaid
critics from the 1980s onwards love to point out that both Ripley and the queen
alien are essentially driving by mothering instincts and they mirror each
other. It's very much to Weaver's credit (and she received an Academy Award
nomination for her efforts) that Believe-It-Or-Not Ripley still comes across as
human scale in the outsized mayhem.
With the success
of ALIENS came further sequels, and an ultimate decline into comic-bookishness
as Aliens battled Predators. I know a lot of people frankly despised the
immediate continuation, ALIEN3, but I secretly thought, hey, at least director
David Fincher wasn’t buying Cameron’s she-Rambo BS either; Fincher opened his
iteration as a repudiation of what had gone before, with the cruel offscreen death
of Newt and the one Marine who was shaping up to be Ripley's love interest. I
could almost hear him shouting, THIS IS THE REAL WAY A HOSTILE UNIVERSE WORKS,
YOU AIRHEAD FANBOYS! It sure wasn’t as much of a crowd pleaser.
I saw ALIENS, by
the way, on opening day, mind you, in a now-vanished (like so many of them)
suburban Cleveland cinema in Beachwood. Long before those of you tools with
friends and living wages dressed up as Jedi to stand in line for hours and
hours at a Star Wars premiere, I was THERE at one of the first matinees of
ALIENS – really, not so much out of my enthusiasm for the franchise but because
the matinees were always cheaper, and I really, really needed to keep my
expenses down. Cleveland paychecks, you know.
And guess what?
Hardly anyone else was there. And those few who did watch the thing largely sat
through it in stony silence, not unlike myself, and left afterwards without
much comment. I remember thinking upon exiting the auditorium, gee, I had heard
the advance word on this disappointment was really, really good. Fox will
probably lose a small fortune. James Cameron is sooooo screwed… I hope he at
least gets half-credit for the gangbusters first half, and maybe someday directs another movie and learns to do better. Yes, I actually had
those thoughts.
And, I like to
think, in a fairer world than this I would have been correct. (2 ¾ stars)
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