Alien (1979)/Aliens (1986)

I just saw both of these classics at the Paramount tonight. I had seen Alien before on video, but I had (believe it or not) never seen all of Aliens. Go figure. A big James Cameron fan not seeing one of his most popular pre-sinking ship movies.

We all know what these movies are about. A strange alien race with hot dog shaped heads are killing off members of ship crews one by one and Ripley (Sigourney Weaver’s best role yet) survives (usually).

The first one, directed by Ridley Scott, was very slow. That’s not taking anything away from the movie because it builds its tension very well. It’s a great movie and one of the classics of the sci-fi horror genre, not to mention one of the first.

It has a wealth of mostly unknown at the time actors. Yaphet Kotto (who was much thinner in Live And Let Die) played Parker, a workman for hire who happened to be on the Nostromo when all hell broke loose with his friend Brett (Harry Dean Stanton). Dallas (Tom Skerrit) is the commander of the ship. Lambert (Veronica Cartwright who was in The Birds and not much after that) is the weak link of the ship. She just kind of screams when things go wrong. Kane (John Hurt from The Elephant Man and the ultra-failure Heaven’s Gate) is the first victim of the alien. He’s the one that loses his lunch and so much more when the alien pops out of his stomach. He reprised his role in the funniest scene of Spaceballs. (“Oh no. Not again!”) Then there’s Ash (Ian Holm from The Sweet Hereafter, Chariots Of Fire and The Fifth Element). I can’t really tell much about him in case you haven’t seen it, but he’s the suspicious science officer.

This movie is what a friend of mine and I call a “wake movie.” It was made in the wake of Star Wars. Think of all the sci-fi movies that came out after Star Wars. This is the best (even over Star Trek: The Motion Sickness) and probably the most popular. (Star Trek as a phenomenon is more popular, but would you rather watch ST:TMP than Alian? I thought not.) There’s a lot of influence from the Holy Trilogy, too. Before Star Wars the future was a very clean time to live in. All the ships were nice and shiny and there was no dirt anywhere. Now it’s hard to make a sci-fi movie like that. Everything has to look lived in. The Nostromo is a beat up old commercial tug. It’s a worker ship and you can tell. There’s also an obligatory Star Wars shot at the very beginning of the movie. The camera hugs the bottom of the Nostromo as it sails by just like it did to the Star Destroyer in the opening scene of Star Wars. I bet they didn’t scrape the camera lens, though.

As I said, the movie is very slow. The tension is built very deliberatly and very well. It has it’s splatter-ish parts and is pretty graphic, but it’s still not as gory as the second movie.

Which brings us to that one. It also has a bunch of no-names that turned into names. Paul Reiser plays Burke, the Company worker who is supposed to be helping to kill the aliens on the planet that Ripley and the Nostromo crew found them on in the first movie. They’re taking a whole army with them including Hudson (Bill Paxton in one of his better roles, even if he is kind of annoying), Hicks (Michael Biehn in pretty much the same role he played for Cameron two years earlier in The Terminator), Biship-a “synthetic person” (Lance Henriksen) and Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein who worked with Henriksen agian in Near Dark and Cameron in T2 and Titanic. Along the way they find Newt (Carrie Henn in her only role to date), a girl whose family was killed by the aliens.

This movie is much more intense than the first one and I actually liked it better. It just doesn’t let up for the entire 2 hour and 17 minute running time.

They actually did a good job with keeping the plots in line between the two movies. There are some sequels that just don’t quite match up (Evil Dead being a great example, but I think it’s a running joke with that series). This one actually picks up where the last one left off. Ripley is floating through space for 57 years in a cryogenic state with her cat until The Company finally finds them.

The Company is an interesting entity, too. We never really hear the name of it, but they’re always wanting to bring back an alien so they can breed them for war. Why not? Giant beings that know no mercy. We haven’t seen the likes of that since Barbara Streisand’s nose. (Well, now we have Cameron’s ego, but who’s counting?) It’s a pretty typical device for these kinds of movies (The Company, not the nose…unless we’re talking about a Woody Allen movie), the big, evil corporate entity that doesn’t care about people, only money. Cameron used it again in T2 and even Titanic to some extent. Ridley Scott used it again in Blade Runner. Everybody uses it. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad plot device, though.

The other really interesting thing is Ripley’s character. She’s not really the badass that we all know now. In the first one she’s sort of a survivor by luck. The second one, though, she starts to let the badass out. As soon as those maternal instincts kick in for Newt she lets it all hang out. Nobody’s getting between her and her adopted daughter. (Sigourney was nominated for an Oscar for this one. With good reason, too. She’s great in it.) Seeing these two movies really lets us know how far downhill the series has come. She’s become a characature of her former glory. Now she’s a comic book character with one-liners and big muscles. Back then she was just a normal woman who rose to the challenge. (By the way, my critiques of the third and fourth ones are: Alien Cubed=pretty bad–I like David Fincher (the director of Seven), but he couldn’t save this one. Alien Resurection=not bad–very gory and stylistic, and Winona Ryder was pretty cool. Ron Perlman was pretty good, too, I guess. The style was probably better than the movie was. Leave it to Jean-Pierre Jeunet (director of Delicatessin and City Of Lost Children) to bring a lot of style to a project.) If they do make a fifth one (and they’re planning it) they need to watch these first two and draw from them.

Some IMDb trivia: There are a few Joseph Conrad references in both movies. Nostromo (the ship in the first movie) is one of his books, which takes place in a town called Sulaco (the ship in the second movie). Narcissus (the escape pod in the first movie) is another one of his books. There was a sex scene in the script for Ripley and Dallas (which confirms the fact that there was something going on there–watch it again and you can tell), but it was cut. The front part of the alien head was an actual human skull. Ridley Scott wanted the movie to end with the alien biting off Ripley’s head in her cyro-chamber and talking to Earth with her voice, but 20th Century Fox didn’t go for it. There’s a line in Aliens about Vasquez signing up for the mission because she thought it was for tracking down illegal aliens. This was an inside joke for the cast and crew. Jenette Goldstein showed up to the casting calls with long hair and a lot of make-up thinking that the movie was about immegrants.

By the way: H.R. GIGER RULES!!!!! He designed the aliens for these movies and for Species (they’re pretty similar). He also did the album cover for Emerson, Lake And Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery. His style is pretty distinct. It’s always easy to tell when he’s involved in something. It’s always very dark and almost humanesque if you look at it in the right way. Anyway, he’s awesome.

And so are these movies in their own ways.