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Aliens: Emotion, Action, Suspense, Horror
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11342 |
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THE ARTS
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11 / 1986 |
896 Words |
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Kenneth Chanko
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James Cameron is the Bruce Springsteen of movie directors. Watching a Cameron film, like attending a Springsteen concert, is an extraordinarily entertaining test of emotional endurance. Toward the end, just when Cameron has fully drained his audience through a series of expertly crafted and sustained shock and suspense sequences, he pulls out yet another action scene that tops everything that has come before. Aliens, which Cameron wrote and directed, is probably the best action suspense-horror film since Jaws, and it is certainly the most emotionally satisfying sequel since The Godfather, Part II.
The Ridley Scott directed original, Alien, was a far more subdued and detailed film. It was the first to bring horror type shocks to outer space and, perhaps more interestingly, it was the first to portray space travel as something other than inspirational or exhilarating. Instead of a technically wondrous ship featuring gleaming white surfaces, the Nostromo was a grimy, second-class freighter on routine assignment with a work weary crew aboard. Having set virtually the entire film on the Nostromo, Scott paid as much-if not more attention to atmospherics as to action. Cameron, however, has rightly emphasized action in the sequel. Not limiting himself to just one or two sets, he doesn't have to spend as much time detailing the environment, though he has followed through on the original's concept of a less than technologically perfect future world in space. And since the alien was finally revealed at the end of the original film, Cameron doesn't have to play around with hiding the creature from the audience in the sequel.
Aliens begins with Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) - sole human survivor of an encounter with a large, lizard like creature - being found floating in space, in suspended animation, for fifty-seven years. Not only is her story of what happened to her and the Nostromo crew cursorily dismissed by a board of inquiry, but she learns that there is now a small space colony living on the planet where the Nostromo set down and the alien was picked up. Once contact with the colony, which includes whole families, has been lost, Ripley agrees to accompany a Marine combat team as an "advisor," and off they go.
Cameron shrewdly puts the impact of the original to use in establishing an urgent rapport between the characters and the audience. We come to this sequel aware of the alien species' ghastly nature. It forcibly deposits an egg down the throat of a human and soon a baby bursts out of the host's stomach and in its ferociousness kills all but one of the Nostromo crew. So we know that any human who comes in contact with this alien will have to wage a fierce life or death battle to survive. But the ragtag team of Marine grunts, joking around and treating the mission as unworthy of their abilities, doesn't have any idea what they're in for. Cameron makes us want to elbow them in the ribs to wake them up.
Distinct personalities are deftly and humorously established during the flight. In addition to Ripley and Burke (Paul Reiser), whom we've met earlier as a top executive of the profit obsessed Company we need know nothing more about, we are introduced to, among others: Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope), the inexperienced leader of the combat team; Bishop (Lance Henriksen), the synthetic who assures Ripley that, as one of a new series of androids, he cannot harm humans in any way; Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn, who costarred in Cameron's The Terminator), who is quietly capable; the wise cracking Hudson
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