ALIENS film analysis - "the Antidote Sequel" by Rob Ager

“THE ANTIDOTE SEQUEL”

A thematic analysis of James Cameron’s

ALIENS

Watch the video version on Youtube or read the more detailed text version.

The sequel Aliens was released in 1986 and instantly met with wide critical praise, a remarkable achievement by 32 year old director James Cameron. An incredibly high standard had already been set by Ridley Scott’s Alien, a film with such a deserved reputation that almost any director attempting to follow its lead would surely be resigning themselves to the ranks of mediocrity among critics. Even the now very successful David Fincher couldn’t pull off the task (his film Alien 3 had the double task of competing with two classic films in the franchise). Another obstacle for Cameron was the bar set by his own previous sci-fi film The Terminator. So he was competing with both his own prior success and that of Ridley Scott.

The ingredients for the success of Aliens are seemingly obvious – ground breaking special effects and fast paced action. These elements gave the film a visceral immediacy that was very different to the dark and unsettling, but slow paced, imagery of the first film.

After the initial shock and awe of Aliens began to subside, the film gradually settled into an enduring rank and file status as a classic piece of sci-fi entertainment, but one that was considered artistically inferior to its predecessor. The “Aliens is a fantastic stand alone film, but not a very good sequel” reaction would pretty much sum up critical opinion of the film today.

The visceral differences between the two films are straight forward. Scott’s film uses organic imagery and sounds to unsettle the viewer. It plays on unconscious fears of birth trauma (that of both mother and child), rape and the unsettling mechanical aspects of human reproduction. These factors were very original in Alien and are as important to its success as the convincing visual designs and storyline. Aliens lacks these psychological qualities and at first appearance it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that James Cameron is simply a less artistically sophisticated film maker.

After a gap of nearly ten years I recently re-watched Aliens, expecting little more than a couple of hours of well-produced sci-fi escapism. What a pleasant surprise that viewing was. Years of CGI movie overload have induced a cognitive distance in my viewing of special effects based films. As a result, psychological subtleties in Aliens became more apparent.

The first thing that stood out to me was the high calibre acting. All the performances are very good, from the traumatized then empowered Ripley to the gentle android Bishop to the playful Hudson and even the vulnerable little girl Newt. There’s not a bad performance all around. In this respect Aliens matches its predecessor.

Before Aliens was first released a one hour behind-the-scenes documentary was broadcast on British television. I was 12 years old when I saw this documentary and, even though I hadn’t yet seen the finished film, I was inspired by the film making process at work. My own film making aspirations began with watching Cameron working on the Aliens set and listening to him in interviews. But something else that was briefly explored in that documentary was Cameron’s fascination with the Vietnam War and its effect on the military designs in Aliens. The tag line in the film's marketing campaign was “This time it’s war”.

Around the same time that Aliens was scripted, James Cameron wrote early drafts of Rambo, the sequel to First Blood. Cameron apparently opted out of directing the film and his script was altered before the film was shot. Perhaps Cameron's early drafts would shed some light on his opinions of the Vietnam War, but to my knowledge those drafts aren't publicly available. (thanks to Dax Cushman for bringing this up)

The action of Terminator and Aliens gave the broad impression that James Cameron’s fascination with guns and warfare were akin to the shooting range enthusiast who collects military paraphernalia – driven by macho fantasy and possibly a hidden fascist ideology. However, James Cameron followed these two ultra-violent action flicks with a distinctly anti-war film, The Abyss. In a major commercial and artistic disaster, many key scenes were cut from The Abyss by the studios, dampening the core themes of the film. Years later, Cameron’s cut of The Abyss got a DVD release.

From a thematic perspective The Abyss is the most important film Cameron has made because it discredits many assumptions about the director. Though the film features armed military characters there is very little gun fire. The action is far less violent than in The Terminator and Aliens. The ending of the film, in which Aliens bombard us with images of warfare taken from the blood-drenched annals of human history, show us that Cameron has a peaceful, possibly naïve, philosophy on life. And more recently, his Avatar epic has been referred to as a “hippy” film.

So why is war and violence presented with such enthusiasm in Aliens? If we look to The Terminator for clues we find that the violence, like in Aliens, is not human against human. Man versus machine is the basic conflict of The Terminator and in Aliens the violence is inter-species. Ripley: “I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.”

The Vietnam War ended just ten years before Aliens went into production. So news coverage of the war may have been a key factor in the formation of James Cameron’s political views during his teens. Whatever the cause of his fascination with war, Cameron’s views on the subject appear to be dual in nature at the time he shot Terminator and Aliens. In The Terminator Kyle Reese uses necessary violence against an enemy that cannot be reasoned with. Even the most well-intended of men must retain the capacity for violence, even if they never use it. But in Aliens the paradigm is somewhat different.

Possibly as a deliberate parallel of the Vietnam War, the space age Marines are given a false sense of security by their high tech weaponry and the pep-talk of their Sergeant. They charge arrogantly into the battlezone, expecting a simple, clean victory, but encounter an enemy who, while being technologically inferior, are much more resourceful than anticipated. The Aliens are able to use their familiarity with the environment to their advantage. We’re told matter of factly that the aliens have nested their hive in the main cooling towers, where firearms are a hazard, which leaves the remote question of whether the choice of nesting location was a deliberate tactic. Later, the aliens cut the power to the med-lab before launching their own counter attack against the humans. Hudson, the most over-confident of the Marines, becomes a coward when faced with an enemy that is his match. And later again, the Queen Alien shows a rudimentary understanding of the firearm threat from Ripley, and is able to use an elevator. Was Cameron offering an intentional parody of the underestimated enemy of the Vietnam War?

Overriding all these themes is the emotional journey of Ellen Ripley, and especially how her journey relates to Ridley Scott’s film.

Alien was thematically bleak – presenting a vision of humanity as a fragile, helpless biological accident in a relentlessly hostile universe. The film offered no other hope to the viewer than a symbolic retreat of the main character to the womb-like salvation of hypersleep. As a horror film it succeeds perfectly.

Wisely, Cameron makes no attempt to repeat the thematic content of Scott’s film. And even if he had attempted to do so, what would be the point? Instead he does with Aliens what a worthwhile sequel should do. He treats the first film as a first act in an evolving story. He takes the plot forward into new territory, but most importantly he takes forward the psychological themes and central character’s of the first film (in this case there is only one character left from the first film) and evolves them in a convincing and worthwhile new direction.

Alien was a story of psychological trauma, a first act. Aliens is a story of recovery and empowerment, a natural progression from the first act.

At the start of Aliens Ripley’s enduring fear of the alien creature is destined to haunt her for the rest of her life. Initially she takes her first brave steps of facing that fear by volunteering to join the rescue mission in a civilian role. The circumstances and events of the rest of the film all lead in a single direction – an uncompromising confrontation between Ripley and her own fears. Like a scared rabbit ,she hesitates before entering the complex where a horde of aliens have overcome human colonists. She watches a colonist die in agony through a comlink to a camara on a Marine's helmet. Once the first battle ensues, led by an incompetent Leuitenant, Ripley sums up her first major act of courage by assuming her own rescue mission. She saves lives and even manages to kill an alien by running it over in an armoured vehicle. At this stage her engagement in the action is panicky and focused on escape rather than attack. After finding that she is trapped on the planet with a rag tag group of grunts, Ripley takes charge as an organiser – using available resources creatively and calming delirious soldiers who should be taking charge themselves.

One by one her team are killed off, just as they were in the first film, but instead of retreating in terror, Ripley arms herself to the teeth and charges into the alien nest … alone, she is willingly confronting the one scenario she most fears. Like in the first film, she searches a maze of corridors, gripping a flamethrower for protection and racing against a clock to avoid a nuclear explosion. Not only does Ripley kill off several Aliens, but she faces a much larger and more powerful version of the creature that traumatised her in the first film. She confronts the Queen Alien and blasts its offspring to pieces.

As if Ripley hadn’t done enough to overcome her fear, she even discards her weapons and takes the Queen on in a wrestling match by using the cargo bay loader. Her unsuccessful attempt to blast the alien into space in the first film is successful this time around.

Mixed in with this gradual build up to Ripley's confrontation with the Queen are a variety of other empowerment themes. At the start of Aliens Ripley finds that not only has she been traumatized by the alien of the first film, she has also lost all her friends and family, and especially her daughter. Her betrayal by “The Company” in the first film is ignored or covered up and she is reduced to a manual labour job. She has a whole horde of personal demons to overcome.

As well as fighting aliens, she uses her manual labour skills to make herself useful and break the ice with the Marines and eventually she becomes their leader.

But her most triumphant victories are her new relationships. The loss of her daughter, combined with Newt’s loss of her Mother, results in Ripley adopting a new daughter. Newt is roughly the same age as Ripley’s daughter was when they were parted. Combined with this is an element of self-identity. Ripley’s state of fear and panic in the first film effectively reduced her to a child-like state of helplessness. Like Ripley, Newt has “scary dreams”. Ripley clung to her cat for comfort and Newt clings to a doll’s head. And both of them know that these tiny companions are false forms of security. Newt: “She doesn’t have bad dreams because she’s just a piece of plastic.”

On a base psychological level, Newt is Ripley’s self-image – a helpless, terrified child. Together they sleep under the bed for fear of monsters and, like Ripley, Newt is the sole survivor of a group massacred by monsters. By charging into the alien nest to rescue Newt, Ripley is basically rescuing herself. A strong indication of this paradigm is that the first Alien film ended with a shot of Ripley in hypersleep, but Cameron's film ends with a similarly framed and angled shot of Newt in hypersleep, with the two character's heads tilted at the same angle - the distance perspective making her face and Newt's an identical size.

As well as replacing her lost daughter, Ripley finds something that was missing for her in the first film … a man. Hicks is the most mature and supportive of the men she encounters among the marines. Though we don’t witness a fully fledged sexual relationship between them, its potential is certainly implied. Hicks instructing her in the operation of a loaded gun, for example, may have been a sly joke to this effect. One of the reasons this romantic interest is important to Ripley is because of the sexual threat aspects of the alien in the first film (its elongated head, viewed side on is an erect phallic symbol). By interesting co-incidence there was no overt sexual relationship between Ripley and any of the other men on the crew in the first film, though a scene of Ripley having a sexual relationship with Captain Dallas was scripted. Finding a lover who she trusts is essential to Ripley’s recovery in Aliens.

The use of guns as a symbol of empowerment is standard in action films and is especially so in Aliens. The character Vasques is a subtle role-model for Ripley in this respect. She may be a woman, but she carries the biggest gun and is the most fearless in battle - physically wrestling an alien while shooting it with a handgun - a sort of precursor to Ripley's own wrestling of the queen alien. As Ripley attempts to recount her experience of the first film for the tactical benefit of the marines, it is Vasques who interrupts: “Look man. I only need to know one thing. Where they are.” By the end of the film, Ripley has so completely conquered her fears she could say the same thing. And in parallel with Vasques' use of giant guns, Ripley makes her own giant gun by taping a flamethrower and pulse rifle together.

Another conquered fear for Ripley is her distrust of androids. In Alien, Ash was more than just a cold mechanical mind with a hidden agenda. He admired the alien for its lack of human qualities, which added to the film’s bleak suggestion that humans and everything they believe in amount to nothing compared to the vast hostility of the universe. In Aliens, Bishop serves his human creators without compromise. Incrementally he earns Ripley’s trust, even risking the life of Hicks during Ripley’s suicide mission into the alien nest.

In the first Alien film, the cold manipulation and sacrifice of the Nostromo crew by “The Company” was almost a match for the horror of the alien itself. In Aliens, Ripley unsuccessfully faces off with the bosses of the corporation, but later outwits Carter Burke, exposing his corruption for what it is. Burke ends up being eaten by the creature he was trying to make money from.

And lastly, something else that was sorely missing from Ripley’s existence in the first film, with the exception of crude banter between Parker and Brett, was humour. In aliens this is provided by Hudson. Ripley may not be overly amused, but we the audience were.

At the level of both audience participation and Ripley’s character development, Aliens is an empowering antidote to the traumatic terror and hopelessness of Alien. Themes and events from the first film are relived and transformed in a natural progression. Ripley's elevator decent into the alien lair, as she arms herself with guns, ammunition and explosives, accompanied by a pounding military drum score, is one of the most intense images of human empowerment in the history of cinema, as is her "Get away from her you bitch!" line to the alien queen.

The repeated hypersleep shots at the end of each film sum up the emotional change – one ending in terrified retreat from fear, the other a peaceful aftermath of conquering fear. The absence of darkly suggestive visual design in the sequel also fits with the change in thematic direction from fear to empowerment.

The personal empowerment journey of Ellen Ripley is the real success underlying the barrage of special effects, violent action and futuristic designs of Aliens. It is one of those rare sequels that accomplishes what it is supposed to.

BACK

MAIN PAGE