Aliens

Spoiler alert. Entertainment Weekly put this as the 42nd greatest movie of all time, citing it as “the greatest pure action movie of all time.” As directed by James Cameron, after the first third or so, the movie sure is pretty purely action, and if his goal was to make the viewer feel the ugly alien attacks right alongside Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), well, then, job well done, I guess. But the whole thing is 2 ½ hours of shock-scare-shock, and, not so shockingly (I had the bad fortune to watch this right after Cameron’s The Terminator - much worse), there isn’t much suspense to make Cameron’s rampages pay off. After all, suspense (and better imagery, better (if equally broad) characters, and, well, a sense of originality, among other things) is what makes Alien so great - and, for that matter, greater.

And yet there are some fascinating, if unintentional, social politics wondering through this thing. The idea of a bunch of colonizing Americans going in to attack a bunch of super-intelligent killer species the Americans don’t understand, right in their very own homes may have seemed cool in the 80s, but it adds a much-needed chilling level of allegory to the story today. Which group, I’m left wondering – the humans or the creatures – does the title refer to? Consider (if my memory of Alien serves me correctly): What’s the difference between an “alien” and a human? The two groups are equally intelligent, and about as strong. Difference is, all the aliens want to do is kill and reproduce. A listen to the admittedly hilarious dialogue of the marines in the 1st act establishes how big a difference this is. In all fairness, Cameron does make those guys the first ones to die, but it’s telling that in the very final struggle of Aliens, Weaver wins only because she has a stronger physical grip. Feelings & humanity got nothin here.

Not that Cameron doesn’t try. A subplot (is there a main plot?) involving Weaver’s adoption of the kid she never had is the standard yawn-jerker stuff (though there is an awesome moment in the beginning where Weaver sees her 66 year old daughter, now dead, played by Weaver’s mother), but while I’m not a feminist (whatever that means), and at the risk of sounding as ridiculous as my subject, the gender politics of Aliens (I know, I know) are, well, rather insulting. The key moments to which the entire movie builds are based around two badass mothers (Weaver and an alien “bitch”) feeling the full threat of each other to their children, and thereby fighting each other. This may sound plenty female-empowering, but it's note-worthy that to fight each other, each has to lose her sense of maternity. The alien rips off her egg ducts, and Weaver sends off her adopted child, and having lost, I feel, all traces of femininity, they fight mano-a-mano, man-to-man. So why the hell do they abandon the things they should be defending? Well no, probably not so much misogyny, as that it makes for an easier (and yes, ever masculine) fight sequence. It was Cameron’s misfortune that his hero had to be female. I suppose this route is perhaps politically better than following Weaver’s request that she not use weapons, make love to an alien, and die – but what unsettles me the most about Cameron’s gender reversal is that he completely deflates the premise and promise of his hero. In any case, give me that striptease fight at the end of Alien any day – for feminists, it should be truly empowering: a girl, oh so fully female, is superior to any guy around (hell, except for the alien, they aren’t even around anymore); and for men – well, it’s more sexy (and beautiful, original, and thus, most of all, scary) than anything in Aliens.