An Aliens Anniversary
The main tag line for Aliens, James Cameron’s followup to Ridley Scott’s claustrophobic space horror, was the rather succinct, “This time, it’s war.” The marketing department of Hollywood studios tend to be a bit of a punching bag for people who like to think of their movies as art, but in this case, the sales pitch at least lives up to the brilliance of the filmmaking.
Unlike its predecessor, which plays out somewhere between a body-horror thriller and slasher- pic, Aliens, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary at Comic-Con, is a war movie in space. In Alien, the double- jawed, acid- blooded xenomorph is a stalking terror, slowly picking off the unprepared; in Aliens, they are the enemy, overwhelming a group of space marine badasses who quickly end up on the wrong side of a “bug hunt.”
Cameron has never been shy about drawing parallels between his movie and the well-established genre of war flicks, particularly the unique war- is- hell blend of Vietnam War movies, where an overconfident force runs headlong, first into an enemy it doesn’t understand and then, shortly thereafter, its own frailty. The story is about a fighting force getting decimated down to a ragtag force, and then desperately trying to find a way to get home. It moves from glorying in the tools and tactics of war — rumbling tanks, badass flame-throwers, flashing radar units — to breaking these soldiers down to their human components, and seeing what they’re made of. Naturally, it’s Ripley who shines in the worst going, because she’s the only one who’s been aware of this human frailty the whole time.
This conception extended to behind the screen, too: Cameron helped get his cast into character with many of the same techniques more straight- ahead war movies are notorious for. His soldiers — except for a few designated outsiders, including Sigourney Weaver — went through boot camp together, to develop their camaraderie. One of them, Al Matthews, who played gruff Sergeant Apone, even held the same rank in the actual Vietnam War, and figures it was his war experience that got him the part.
While setting a war movie in space was reasonably original for the time — Cameron was basically the first to bring this premise, at least in such an explicitly genre way, to the big screen — the more interesting legacy of Aliens is in the way that, as a sequel, it truly reinvented the franchise it was creating. That is not something that sequels, even these days, do terribly often, and Cameron was the very first to take a well- known blockbuster and bend it to his own ends.
Sequels, even the good ones, have always just tended to take what made the first one good and do more of it — perhaps much more of it. The more commercial ones do this rather emptily — just this year stuff like Independence Day: Resurgence, Now You See Me 2 and Alice Through the Looking Glass would fit that bill handily — while the more skilled ones might also try to advance some story — save for the Jeremy Rennder detour, the Bourne series, the latest one out now, has been pretty good at this — but the point is continuity. In its way, this is its own kind of art: just look at something like James Bond, which has for 50 years essentially been about remixing its own tropes.
Aliens was among the first sequels to take some of the recognizable elements of its film, and do something entirely different. Obviously the aliens are there, along with our badass female hero. A sense of the pervading isolation of space seeps through, and the fear of human overreach, too. Otherwise, these are entirely different films that happen to play out in the same dark corner of space/ our imagination. (Something, it should be said, the Alien franchise has remained good at doing, even if the films haven’t always been of the same quality.)
Thirty years on, Aliens would seem to be the ideal template for Hollywood’s current vogue of “cinematic universes.” For all the talk of the potential for using familiar characters or themes — or at least settings — to lure in audiences for potentially different kinds of movies, we haven’t seen much of it. As with most things CU, Marvel might be the best, mixing in stuff like space opera (Guardians of the Galaxy), heist (Ant-Man) and spy (Captain America: Winter Soldier) tropes, although even these tend to be pretty thin glosses on the usual punch- ups. We have yet to see a superhero movie that doesn’t solve things with explosions, for instance, or even just shifts its focus from something other than action set-pieces.
Most of the other franchises going this expansive are still getting revved up, so it’s possible we’ll start to see some more genuinely different films in familiar settings. ( Certainly, given the burnout the summer audience seems to be experiencing, it might behoove the studio to take some chances.) Their best blueprint is a film that was released 30 years ago, one that built up a terrifying universe well before the marketing department ever dreamed up the possibility.