1986 saw James Cameron directing a sequel to what is inarguabley one of the best films ever made: Alien. With its absolutely impeccable mise-en-scene used in every single shot to evoke claustrophobia or dread, its production design full of the Everest of nightmare imagery and a director of commercial fare who, like so many directors before him, made his greatest film his first. James Cameron's sequel Aliens is widely regarded as one of the greatest sequels of all time, and that's a perfectly fair assessment. While some morons believe Aliens outmatches Alien, I can't even imagine a film as great as Alien having a sequel that lands anywhere near its predecessor. The fact that it actually ends up being a great movie is cause for celebration. It's not the unmitigated masterpiece that Alien is, but it's brilliant in its own right.
For those of you who don't know (and for those of you who don't, get the fuck off my blog), Alien ended with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) unsympathetically blowing Michael Seymour and H.R. Giger's masterpiece out an airlock and snorting a line of phenobarbitals in celebration before falling asleep for sixty years. That's where Aliens picks up. Ripley is awoken and is immediately handed a pickax despite possibly being the oldest woman on the planet. Before long, a swanky, charming corporate type who only cares about the dollars and cents shows up to convince Ripley to go back to the planet where she first encountered the alien lifeform. It seems that the big corporation has lost contact with the settlers they impulsively let live on a planet overrun with murderous aliens. It's up to Ripley and an ill-equipped, under-manned squad (that means eight soldiers) of space folly to go in and clean up the aliens that seemed to effortlessly wipe out several hundred people.
There Ripley encounters the sole survivor of the alien onslaught, a little girl named Newt for some reason. Ripley robs the cradle and runs off with her shiny new daughter to replace the one whose life she slept through.
So we're off to fight the aliens, and what a fight it is! Essentially highjacking all the brilliant design work of the first film and throwing it into a brilliant action film. Aside from the designs, a general narrative continuation and Ripley, the films aren't that similar. Ripley, like all the characters in the last film, was barely more fleshed out than she had to be. Like most slashers, she exists to be killed by the glorious beast at the center of the film. Cameron gets a lot of mileage out of fleshing out her character and really bringing Sigourney Weaver to the film's fore in a performance that's as great as everything you've ever heard.
And here's where James Cameron's noted femnism works the best. Now, I don't think of myself as a sexist, but I DO think that there are irreconcilable differences between men and women that don't begin and end with penis/vagina. For instance, men are inherently stronger than women. Don't believe me? Arm wrestle a woman. Or, if you're a woman, arm wrestle a man. The man will almost always win. That's not to say that a woman can't win, in fact I've had a woman crush my arm into a bloody powder. I dated a girl that could kick my ass, but that's the exception that prove the rule.
Anyway, I was going somewhere with that. Ripley could easily be the best female action hero ever. Most of the time a female action hero is a woman with a ballsack. She suddenly punches out burly Russian lumberjacks three times their size without breaking a nail, puts on a barrelfull of muscle and becomes the picture of emotionless head-smashing (see: Sarah Conner in Terminator 2). She fails to retain any uniquely feminine characteristics (I consider violence and hot tempers masculine characteristics, although again they're not exclusively masculine characteristics; I just find men more inclined to those traits, generally speaking) and fails to be anything more than a generic action hero. With a vagina. Ripley is strong, intelligent and uniquely feminine, making her the perfect model for female action heroes. In any case, there's usually a REASON we're putting a female lead in a film primarily targeted at adolescent males, right? Why not make it something that defines her character as a strong FEMALE? Her maternal instincts guide her actions, but not in a shitty Hallmark Channel sort of way, in a "grenade launchers and flamethrowers" sort of way.
So if a lot of the thrills of the first film came from the mystery of discovering what the alien was, Aliens derives most of its thrills from seeing the aliens organize and put those traits we discovered in the first film into action in their own environment rather than the "alien" environment of the Nostromo.
As far as Cameron's direction, which, if I'm remembering correctly, is the entire reason I'm watching this movie, it's another action masterpiece. This film has more in common with The Terminator than any of his subsequent films in that afterward you feel like you've been dragged through a field of thorns, mud and cancer. Helping play into that is a billion false endings that never feel gratuitous or cheap because we're invested in the story and characters. Also the razor-sharp editing does a lot to keep the film moving, never lingering on the various plot points and always moving towards the action or the impending sense of doom. It's one film that uses every second of its two and a half hour running time to great effect, despite my frustration at this recent trend of action films outliving your children.
But the best thing he does as a director in this film is that he takes the alien muppets (and make no mistake, they are fucking muppets) and making them absolutely convincing just with his editing and camera work. It's one of the most repeated stories in filmmaking legend that the shark in Jaws became the quintessential unseen menace because Spielberg couldn't get the goddamn animatornic shark to work. This sort of filmmaking is a casualty of the rise of CGI and if there's anything to blame for the fall of horror, it's that. Cameron's lumbering alien muppets were clearly not suited to be convincing antagonists until he teamed up with his virtuoso crew. It's the sort of thing only a truly great director can pull off, and I think James Cameron happens to be a goddamn brilliant director.
It's no Terminator, but it's one hell of a film.
10/10
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