Review of The Alien Legacy

Note: This column has been revised since original publication due to the release of the Alien Quadrilogy box set on DVD.

One of my favourite sequences in Alien is the whole Ash-gone-rogue segment. For a monster on the loose movie, this is a delightful and deliberately gruesome left turn. In one sense, this is only another step in a carefully calculated escalation of tension and isolation -- not only is the science officer a bit too interested in the alien, he is literally not human (something that is set up subtly early in the movie where we see him drinking a liquid that looks like milk), in addition to the fact that he is complicit in a plan to preserve the alien for exploitation at all costs. Aliens a few years later puts some clever spin on the whole synthetics/Company as evil theme, cementing the shape of alien stories to come: the aliens are ferocious killing machines, and this is matched by the greedy rapacity of entities like the Company. I call this the greedy human plot, and it has been repeated over and over again, in the movies and literally every add-on, tie-in, sequel, novelization, and computer game. But it begins here, with the synthetic named Ash, and a startling confrontation with a machine who looks like a man. It's no wonder Scott was attracted to the Philip K. Dick material that would form the basis of his next movie, Blade Runner.

Another subtle moment in Alien is the question of how much of the host does the alien take on. On this viewing of the four movies, I didn't catch the point at which the aliens began to be referred to as xenomorphs, but the term refers to their ability to adapt the best bits of host DNA (like the speed of the dog in Alien 3). There's not much material in the first movie about this subject, but at one point the crew is discussing how humanoid the alien is, and Ash mutters under his breath, “Kane's son." Nicely played.

What does Alien mean? My first answer would be: not much! The movie is meant to scare us, and it succeeds, case closed. But why does it scare us when other movies have failed so consistently at doing so in an intelligent manner? Still in the reductionist sense, the answer, partly inherited by the sequels (the third and fourth movies more so than the second), is only a functional byproduct of scaring us. In other words, if the movie could get away with being 100% scare-by-sting -- stings being those jump moments when a squirrel or a friend's hand or, in this case, a cat bursts onto the screen with an accompanying crash of loud music -- it would go the easy way. Many horror movies do this. But they also often fail, and so Alien has to give its material a psychological edge, a psychosexual foundation that gets under our skin in order to succeed at its job. With Giger in the works, the movie immediately becomes something about the frightening intersection between sexuality, death, and machines -- biomechanoid as it has been called. The whole idea of the facehugger and chestburster cycle was designed to avoid letting the men in the audience feel comfortable or even complicit in the woman-in-peril clichés of most monster movies (O’Bannon talks about this a bit in Alien Evolution). The first victim is a man, so no one is safe from the physiological violation (it’s also psychological in the subsequent movies for those who know what will happen to them once the facehugger has done its work). So the movie not only plays on the fear of death but also the desecration of the body for alien purposes.

DVD Note: The Alien Quadrilogy box set dedicates two DVDs to each movie in the series. For Alien, the box includes both the theatrical version and the recent director's cut and a second DVD with nine new documentaries and some deleted scenes.

Aliens is a remarkable sequel, building on the strengths of the first movie, yet displaying its own sense of the Alien universe. The two movies are like a complementary set, mirror images yet still distinct. James Cameron's achievement here is really quite astonishing: a sequel that not only stands its own ground in the face of an overpowering original work, but also brings new life to that work. Baldly categorized, the two movies would be suspense and action, which makes sense structurally; viewers of Alien knew nothing about the creatures, whereas Aliens viewers would be less surprised so new techniques of captivating interest were required. Of course this process has left subsequent iterations out in the cold, especially those not quite so adept at re-imagining the material.

Aliens follows quite directly from where Alien left off. Ripley's escape vehicle is discovered floating in space and she and her cat are revived. Understandably upset at the loss of a huge space freighter, the Company wants to know what happened, and Ripley is debriefed, judged, and removed from her rank. But she has nightmares, nasty in the extreme, and when the colony on the planet is not heard from and she is approached to help a mission of Marines figure out what happened, she agrees. She goes with a Company representative, Burke; a synthetic, Bishop; a new officer, Gorman; a cowardly Marine and a brave one, Hudson and Hicks; along with the rest of the squad of Marines. In a bit of excessive foreshadowing, Ripley helps the Marines load up their ship with a power loader, a type of exoskeleton or motorized suit that gives a human great strength. They get to the colony, only to find it mostly in ruins. There is also a laboratory full of facehuggers, two of which are alive. Bishop finds that the PDTs (personal data transmitters) of the colonists are all clustered in one area, so Gorman sends in a squad to find out what is going on. Despite all of Ripley's warnings, the Marines really have no idea what they are about to face.

At this point, we get the first of many action sequences in the movie. But before discussing Cameron's acumen at creating incredible action setpieces, I would like to point out that an hour and ten minutes of the movie have already passed by the time we get to the first such setpiece. By this time, heroic Ripley, slimy Burke, and the others are firmly established in our minds, the squad has discovered the only human survivor of the colony, a young girl named Newt, and all the pieces are in play to make us emotionally involved. We also have a clear main character to cheer for.

And then the action kicks in, and I sometimes still find the last hour and a half of this movie too tense to watch in one sitting. The squad of Marines takes a beating -- especially since they were ordered to remove their ammunition! -- and requires a knuckle-biting rescue by Ripley. The dropship pilots get their heads chomped, so the survivors have no way off the planet. Next up is a dramatic nail-biter scene, where Ripley and Newt wake up locked in a lab with the two live facehuggers. They survive, but only just, and Ripley immediately realizes that they were the ideal smuggling devices for Burke to get alien DNA off the planet and through any quarantine. Newt and Ripley in the lab is probably the best showing or illustration, as opposed to telling, in the Alien series of the greedy human plot; characters we cherish have their lives in danger in a semi-self-contained episode. And best of all, directly afterwards Ripley confronts Burke and vents some of her rage. More philosophically, she concludes, "I don't know which species is worse." To me, that is a keystone of the series, because as bad as it can get in conflict with the xenomorphs, there's always somebody from the Company looking to sacrifice you.

But Cameron isn't through with wrecking our nerves just yet. Still to come is a scene of retreat, Newt in peril, Ripley putting together an uber-gun for herself, and perhaps best of all, the power loader! Anyone who has seen the movie will know what I'm talking about. Anyone else, go see it immediately!

Why would Ripley want to go back into such a nightmare? It's a problem: how to create a convincing reason for Ripley to head back into such a scenario. Any enticement offered by the Company would mean nothing to Ripley, from money to recognition to the backhanded reward of restoring her license to go into space. Very credibly, Ripley's nightmares of helplessness and fear cause in her the desire to fight back, to overcome, to rescue her own sense of self from the damage done by the xenomorphs. This plays out in a direct line through all of Ripley's actions in the movie, actions like choosing to go along, rescuing the Marines in the face of Gorman's incompetence, confronting Burke about his duplicity, or going back to rescue Newt. This is very much Ripley's movie, unlike in Alien where her centrality was deliberately accidental. Two famous lines of dialogue illustrate Ripley's character: when the company won't believe her, she says, "Did IQs drop sharply while I was away?" and when the alien queen threatens Newt, she snarls, "Get away from her, you bitch!" Much has been made of the theme of maternalism, as evidenced by the latter line, in Aliens, with good reason. Ripley loses a daughter and fights to save an adopted one, while the alien queen has her own brood to protect. A large part of my sheer admiration for this movie comes from the canny construction of the climactic fight between Ripley and the alien queen. I don't know if I can recall any other movie with a struggle between two such powerful female figures, protagonist and antagonist, and such as the careful working out of such complex ideas of loyalty, competing interests, survival, and of course pure excitement.

Like the first movie, Aliens has some good sequences with a synthetic character, in this case Bishop. I like the role he plays at the end of Aliens, not to give too much away. The technology of the synthetics may be a bit out of line with what else we see of this future (especially IT-wise), but I find that it gives it a little more science fiction credibility.

DVD Note: The two DVDs for Aliens include both the theatrical version and the special edition (which adds 17 minutes of footage). The second DVD has eleven new documentaries and James Cameron's original treatment.

There are two main problems with this story. All of the characters, apart from Ripley, have to learn about the deadly abilities of the xenomorph, most of them the hard way. But the audience already knows the majority of what the hapless prisoners are giving their lives to find out. No surprise is left. What remains is only some senseless gore, and Ripley acting as Cassandra to a bunch of doomed nincompoops. Plenty of exciting, interesting stories could be told in the Alien universe, and structurally, by the fact of the audience's pre-existing familiarity, those stories should not rely on the same bloody revelations. I'll discuss this further in my review of Aliens: Berserker, one of the graphic novel sequels to the second movie.

The second main problem has to do with the role of Ripley as a woman in this movie. Alien and Aliens both featured a casual, unspoken equality between the genders; the women were competent and in the case of Ripley, superior enough in brains to survive and help others survive. Neither of the movies dealt with human sexuality in any profound way, apart from a general fear of violent interspecies rape. The equality between men and women, however, was a matter-of-fact positive much to the series' credit. That changes with the third movie. Alien 3 presents much the same point, namely that equality is a good thing, but here the story works by the negative instead of the positive. Ripley is the lone woman in a group of predatory men, and at one point she requires rescue from impending rape (the threat comes from humans, not aliens). Yes, inequality is bad and equality is good, but stories that follow from the latter seem to suit what we know of Ripley much better. The situation is exacerbated in Alien 3 due to a quite gratuitous sex scene; Ripley tells the doctor that she still has urges and they jump into bed. My description of it may seem laughable, but the scene is really that meaningless. It's small consolation that the doctor is the only other sympathetic character, because as soon as he has finally revealed his past to Ripley, he gets his head chomped off.

The ending confirms my sense that the movie has not much clue of what to do with a strong heroine. The much-discussed final scene features Ripley throwing herself into molten lead, sacrificing herself in order to kill the alien embryo in her chest. At one level, this is a suitably dark twist on theme of maternalism from the previous movie; as her chest bursts open during the plunge, Ripley cradles the nascent alien queen in her arms, not to nurture but to ensure its destruction. At another level, this isn't qualitatively different than any of umpteen other movies where the woman dies at the end, as if there were no other conceivable character arc for a smart, competent woman. And if this ending was due to Sigourney Weaver's desire to kill the series, it was about as successful as Doyle killing Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls. Doyle could bring back Sherlock with an explanation as simple as a ledge on the cliff; resurrecting a character in a science fiction movie, especially someone immolated in molten lead, can necessitate convoluted plot developments. Which is just what happens in the next movie, Alien Resurrection.

DVD Note: The Alien Quadrilogy box set includes the theatrical version of Alien3 as well as a working print version of how the movie could have been different. The second DVD goes into great detail about the problems of the movie.

That might seem like an odd statement from someone who has played and enjoyed games like the survival horror System Shock 2. But something about these two games got entirely under my skin, to the point where I couldn't even take my character down a hallway without my heart racing. The games are really effective at capturing the tension that Ripley undergoes in the second movie; specifically, when she straps together her uber-gun and heads back for Newt, into claustrophobic hallways, strobing lights, and the threat of an alien at any corner. It's interesting because one of my strongest reactions at initially seeing Aliens was to observe that Ripley's journey into the hive would make a particularly hair-raising virtual reality game. Now that someone has made a version of it, even for the relatively non-immersive medium of the computer game, my comment has come back to haunt me. Both AvP and AvP2 were just too hair-raising.

Most of my reaction was due to the uncanny accuracy, or verisimilitude if that word applies to faithfulness to a work of fiction, with which the programmers replicated the world of both alien and predator. For example, I'm a lonely Marine, trapped inside an alien-infested complex by an explosion that separates me from my squad (as happens at the beginning of the second game), and I have a deeply-ingrained knowledge from the second movie that the pulse rifle in my hands, despite making a really cool noise exactly as it does in the movie, will not stave off my certain destruction for very long. Playing as the alien does not improve matters much, as the well-equipped squads of Marines make short work of any solitary alien, again true to Aliens.

There have been other computer games based on Alien mythology over the last few years, including Alien: A Comic Book Adventure, The Alien Trilogy, and Alien Colonial Marines. None have had the impact or sales of the AvP series. I will talk a little bit about how the matchup between alien and predator came about in the first place in my next review.

The world of Aliens lives on in numerous Dark Horse comic series, some of higher quality than others. Aliens is used very specifically because most plot points follow from the second movie and contradict what was shown in the third and fourth movies. For example, the scientists in Alien Resurrection contend that Ripley (nearly) succeeded in wiping out the xenomorphs when she dove into molten lead at the end of Alien 3, whereas every Aliens graphic novel has an alien infestation in some corner of the galaxy or another.

It was in the Dark Horse series that the aliens were first matched up against the predators, and there has been no shortage of crossover conflicts since then. Aliens have fought against, among other luminaries, Batman, Superman, and the Green Lantern. The comics have been illustrated by a wildly varying group of artists, in styles that were sometimes more appropriate to the subject matter than others. One of the first is still one of the best, a trilogy under the titles Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum, and Female War (all available also in novelization form). Berserker is a recent one, and I chose it because of how much I like the story as a candidate for what the third movie should've been like. More on that in a minute. Berserker also breaks the mold a bit; most of the sequels can be classified pretty clearly under what I have termed the greedy human plot, familiar enough already from the movies. Berserker is about a hunter killer team, trained in exterminating aliens. Yes, they run across the inevitably gruesome results of human greed, but the main part of the story has to do with their alien-stomping techniques in action.

Briefly, their plan is this: one squad member goes into the hive in a submissive pose. In the absence of attack cues, the drones bring him or her back to be cocooned and impregnated. The soldier's surveillance equipment gives an inside view of the hive, and in the meantime, the acid proof faceplate has hopefully not come loose! Not surprisingly, the character in Berserker whose task it is to go in first has escalating psychological problems. Next, a computer/cyborg-controlled, heavily-armoured and heavily-armed walking tank goes in with guns, flamethrowers, missile launchers, and other assorted weapons blazing, with tactical data from two points helping to triangulate targets exactly. The other soldiers are the mop-up squad. Berserker begins with an operation that, despite many tense moments, goes according to plan; the last two-thirds of the book concerns an operation that does not go so well. The story may be a bit skimpy, but it is both exciting and satisfying.

To me, it's the sense of satisfaction that makes the idea of a trained alien squad compelling. Alien had a crew who didn't know what they were facing; Aliens had a team of military personnel who knew of a threat but didn't have more specific details. I've always thought that the next logical step would be a story like Aliens: Berserker, where human ingenuity faces the well-understood menace of the xenomorphs. In this sense, the most disappointing aspect of Alien Resurrection was the military who were not prepared and couldn't even evacuate competently. I suspect what happened with the movies as the franchise progressed was that the threat of the unknown was such an alluring premise that it was reused even when it no longer made sense. This ties in with my earlier complaint about the third and fourth movies, where we are forced to watch ignorant or incompetent characters learn about the alien threat in the split-second before their death. Would fully-prepared humans be a match for the xenomorphs? You won't find that out in any of the four movies, and that's why I enjoyed Aliens: Berserker as much as I did.

I promised to discuss what is next for the Alien franchise, but forecasting what will be next in this particular series has always been a game that makes the players look a little ridiculous. One thing is for certain: most side projects will continue on, especially the lucrative computer games. But in the case of a franchise where the movies are considered canon, most important is the nature of what we will see next up on the big screen. At this point (December 2002), it looks as if Alien 5 will not be made; instead, the next project is Aliens vs. Predator, which I'm mildly ambivalent about. I'm completely dismayed that one of the worst directors still working, Paul Anderson (Event Horizon, Soldier, Resident Evil) has been signed up to start work on an AvP movie once he has finished Resident Evil 2. I reiterate: this information is only accurate as of writing. And I would be more than grateful were it to change. AvP would actually be a fun project, if the absence of Ripley could be excused, and some wisdom about how to do a sequel taken from Cameron's Aliens.

James Schellenberg lives in Canada, where xenomorphs have never visited.

First posted: December 7, 2002; Last modified: February 1, 2004

Copyright © 2002-2004 by James Schellenberg