James Cameron’s “Aliens” (1986): Why It Sucks
Posted By Iain Coleman on September 20, 2009
I had some back trouble lately, which left me unable to do pretty much anything except sit up straight in front of the television. Not so good in terms of doing any kind of writing, but they say every problem is also an opportunity…
…so we finally got round to watching all four Alien movies back-to-back. Special Editions / Directors’ Cuts in all cases, naturally. And it was in the course of this that I came to a surprising realisation:
I don’t like Aliens.
Mainly it’s the script. It’s just so grimly efficient, like a C-list porn actress setting a gangbang record: sure, it gets the money shots, but it’s a joyless mechanical process devoid of meaning, emotion or humanity. The dialogue is so unremittingly on the nose, every word, every action serves only to set up the next plot point, bang bang bang bang bang THE END. The characters are stock types, and the “subtext” about Ripley dealing with the loss of her daughter is so heavily highlighted and triple-underlined that they might as well have a bloke wander on with a sandwich board reading RIPLEY IS TRYING TO CREATE A REPLACEMENT FAMILY. Compared to the understated realism of Dan O’Bannon’s characters in Alien, and the credibility of their fumbling, all-too-human attempts to come to terms with the truly alien, this seems crude and simplistic.
The acting is also inferior to the earlier film. Oh, Sigourney Weaver is as excellent as you would expect, but for the most part the actors around her fail to give any sense of their characters having an inner life beyond their scripted lines and actions. Admittedly they aren’t given much to work with, but here only Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen go beyond the “remember your lines and don’t trip over the furniture” school of performance.
But what is really surprising is how poor the special effects look. Yes, these things date, but the effects work in Alien still holds up thirty years on, while much of the later film looks plasticky and false. Fundamentally this is because Ridley Scott is just a better director than James Cameron, more skilled at disguising the limitations of model work and sound stages. Cameron’s film looked great in its day, but now its artificiality is all too often apparent, while Scott’s film continues to impress even after you’ve watched all the “making of” documentaries and know exactly how it was all done.
Look, I get that Cameron’s working in a different genre. He’s not making a horror film, he’s making a war movie. Specifically, a Vietnam war movie. But that’s no excuse for these failures. There are, after all, plenty of actual Vietnam war movies which manage to have credible dialogue, rounded characters, convincing special effects and genuine layers of subtext, allusion and meaning. Mainly they do this by being about real people in a real conflict. Watching Aliens, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that Cameron made this movie because if he had made the Vietnam movie he wanted to make with human enemies, rather than implacably nasty aliens, it would have come across as horribly racist.
I’m surprised noone’s decided to bite your head off. I felt the same way when I rewatched it recently. I wouldn’t say the effects were terrible, but the characters, dialogue and writing sure were. Like you said. there’s just nothing going for it. Things happen, corny lines are delivered, guns are fired, idiots die, a ridiculous boss fight happens due to more idiocy, three people and an android survive. Ripley has a new family consisting of a wounded cardboard cutout and an annoying child, there’s nothing else to it, nothing to think about, everythings hunky dory. Big deal. The End.
They had to kill those characters at the beginning of Alien 3 in order for me to care, and even then, Newt and Hicks were so boring that I only felt sorry for Ripley. If it wasn’t for the fact that Aliens bridges the gap between 1 and 3, I wouldn’t have it in my collection. It’s a classic example of cold, empty 80s film making by an overhyped action director that pales in comparison to the Alien movies and directors that sandwich him and this piece of work. At least it’s not as bad as the fourth one, I guess.
I just saw Cameron’s Aliens for the first time, and damn, it was awful.
Scott’s Alien was a nuanced, almost noir-ish monster movie. It had atmosphere, mystery, and lots of real suspense. The entire cast, a veritable who’s who of top-notch character actors, brought to life a crew of very real people, who not only gave the science fiction a sheen of authenticity, but once the Alien was aboard the ship, reacted in ways that made the monster REAL.
Cameron flushed all that down the toilet. Gone was the nuance. Gone was the gritty realism. In its place was gaudy bombast, blazing guns and historonics. Every single marine was a comic book character. Even worse, Cameron tossed aside the very idea that made the original Alien so scary in the first place - it was incredibly strong, fast, and utterly indestructible. At the very end of the Scott’s film, the alien was jettisoned into space and blasted by the ship’s freakin’ rocket blast, and it was STILL fighting for a way to kill Rilpley! In Cameron’s version, the aliens blow apart like flimsy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. His aliens are weak and pathetic, and the only thing making things “exciting” are the alien’s sheer numbers.
Iain’s already talked about the banal “motherhood” plot point, but I’ll add another couple of comments. First off, the whole deal of Ripely wandering space for 50 some-odd years as an excuse to kill off a daughter we never knew she had was serious weak-sauce. It actually brings up a whole host of real sci-fi issues - for one, things change rapidly in a high-tech environment in 50 years. How does Ripley adjust to what would literally be an alien world to her? Who knows? Cameron completely ignores these obvious and engaging questions because it was never his intention to explore them. It was simply a convoluted plot devise to introduce the whole retarded MOM vs MOM schtick. Ripley loses a daughter, and conveniently, there’s an adorable moppet there to take her place. GAG.
9 of the most arrogant James Cameron moments. http://www.theweek.com/article/index/105309/9_most_arrogant_James_Cameron_moments