Alien, Aliens, and more aliens *g*
Jan. 26th, 2004 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakInspired by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rozk's take on the subject, I have started rewatching the Alien movies; the first two, so far. I find my reaction is pretty much the same as when I first saw them; I still prefer Ridley Scott's Alien to James Cameron's Aliens.
Mind you, I'm less allergic to the Marines in the later than I used to be, probably due to having seen lots of soldiers in and out of sci-fi films and shows in between. So I'm not about to accuse Cameron of blind worship of the military, as my 19-years-old self did. But I still find them irritating, and I do think Cameron is overly in love with his big guns and big machines. Probably the most 80-ish thing about Aliens; remember when everything got bigger, the radios especially, instead of smaller? (Francis Ford Coppola had a neat jab about this tendency in Peggy Sue Got Married.)
Mostly, though, it's that I find Aliens less interesting. It's a good action movie, no question about it; everyone gives a good performance, and since Cameron makes the bond between Ripley and little Newt the emotional core of the movie, and hits upon the ingenious idea of paralleling this with the Queen (his contribution to the myth) and her eggs, it gives us an easy identification with the heroine. But. It's one of several polished action movies. Not unique.
Alien, now. Alien, for starters, is not an action movie. It's a horror film. Rewatching it, it strikes me that Scott could even have made it as a silent movie, because the spoken dialogue is not that important. It has no memorable lines, which doesn't mean it's badly written. Au contraire. The marines in Cameron's Aliens communicate in snappy Hollywood one liners, which is entertaining, but clearly identifies them as People Not You Or Me. The crew of the Nostromo, otoh? Are really, as one of several contributors to the script put, truck drivers in space. No one liners. They bicker (and then they panic), but they do it in a way you can imagine listening to in any working environment where the people have been together a bit too long not to be edge and tired of each other.
Still. This could have been a silent movie. It was only Ridley Scott's second feature film (after, as he points out on the extras, more than 200 commercials - since he makes a similar point when reminiscing on the Thelma and Louise DVD methinks the man has still issues about having been dismissed as a director of TV ads way back when), but there is nothing whatsoever either unaccomplished or, going into the other extreme, overindulgent in the new railway set (looking at you, Orson Welles) about his direction. He composes his pictures in a way that makes each frame fascinating, and he takes his time with the pace. We've got more than half an hour of the crew waking up, bickering, landing on a planet, and investigating before the action kicks in. I wouldn't want to miss a minute. What fascinates me isn't just Scott doing his usual great thing with the scenery (in this case, the set designs by H.R. Giger for the Alien ship and the Aliens themselves, and Rob Cobb for the Nostromo) but the way he sculpts his characters. I deliberately use the word "sculpt". It can be Ripley's face, or it can be the shot of Ash in medlab with Ripley barely visible at the edge of the frame, but you have the idea these people have been ever so carefully positioned and modelled from clay.
Not, though, in a Stanley Kubrick manner. Because the crew of the Nostromo is not supernaturally beautiful or physically perfect in the way actors appear in many movies and TV shows, American movies and TV shows at least. They have an every day look which reminds me more of British TV shows; even the two women, Ripley and Lambert, while being good looking are so in an, excuse the cliché, unconventional way. Ian Holm as Ash could not look more inconspicuous (no Schwarzenegger he). John Hurt, Tom Skerrit and Harry Dean Stanton are all character actors, not front-page-of-Vanity-Fair material or action heroes. There is a sense of eminent normalcy and realness about these people that isn't, perhaps because it can't be, with any of the casts of any of the sequels.
Moreover, Alien doesn't give us easy identifications. If someone manages to see this film now with blessed lack of knowledge about it or its sequels, this hypothetical viewer will take his or her time realising that Ripley is meant to be the main character, and the one who will probably survive. (Or will she? Scott in the extras confesses he had at one point the sudden mad idea of finishing the movie with the Alien killing Ripley, instead of vice versa, and then setting course to Earth.) She doesn't have more scenes than the other six crew members until her conflict with Ash intensifies, and she's not necessarily portrayed as more sympathetic, with her smart but also cold decision not to take the infected Kane back on board. There is no arrow pointed at her saying "This is your heroine; love her".
Then there is the element of fear. All the Alien movies have their scary moments, but Scott, doing it for the first time, could really use hints and fragments and teasing insinuation for a single monster which work that much more strongly on the imagination, instead of having to deliver ever more monsters. And since the crew of the Nostromo aren't soldiers, they don't even have pretend they aren't afraid. One of the reasons why one does identify with Ripley in Alien after all is that Sigourney Weaver and Scott show that she's scared out of her wits while trying to hold it up, that her courage goes along with fear just this side of body-numbing. When she, for the final showdown, sings to herself, tunelessly, you know it is about the only thing keeping her from an instant breakdown. This isn't the warrior goddess she was going to become.
Lastly, there is the bizarre sexuality present in Alien, absent in Aliens, fragmentary present in Alien³ and brought back with a vengeance in Alien: Resurrection. I understand why Cameron didn't go for it; he had the Queen instead, and structure that needed the face-off between two mothers, without any sexual dynamics. Which works very well emotionally. But it does not access the subconscious in the disturbing way Giger's original creature, and the way Scott uses it in Alien does. Dan O'Bannon, the original scriptwriter for Alien, uses the description "horrifyingly beautiful" for the Giger sketches that had first attracted his attention, and Scott says something similar in the audio commentary. O'Bannon mentions working out the story with his collegue who when they hammered out the logistics of how the monster was going to come on board said "what if he screws one of the crew, impregnates him and then gets born inside the ship". When the final showdown between Ripley and the Alien arrives, Scott and Weaver comment on the sexuality of it, the "Beauty and the Beast" factor. It's interesting that Ripley originally wasn't written as a female character (nor was anyone else) for Alien, but that the sexual subtext for the Alien seems to have been there from the start, whereas of course for Aliens her being a woman was a basic condition, and you have no sexuality at all.
Speaking of Aliens and sexuality. I've got my DS9 story, Cold Heaven, up on FFN since a few days though for some strange reason it doesn't show up on the normal director, just on my personal account. Same with the Londo/G'kar extravaganza, titled In Vino Veritas.
Also, this is Born to the Purple week in Babylon 5 terms.andrastewhite wrote a wonderful story featuring Londo and G'Kar between Born to the Purple and Parliament of Dreams; my own contribution for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
thefiringline is a story about Adira:
Title: Her Better Days
Author: Selena
Rating: PG 13, I suppose.
Disclaimer: All owned by JMS and Babylonian productions.
Words: 838
Spoilers: For "Born to the Purple".
Her body had never belonged to herself. Adira had not been free since her early childhood, since her father, after his last attempt to make his fortune on a colony world failed, had sold himself and his family into bondage. Back then, he had told them they would be able to buy their own freedom back, which was certainly legally possible, and Adira had believed him. She did not realise that it had been as empty a promise as all his schemes until her breasts started to bud, and it had been time to shave her skull. It was only then that she truly understood what it meant to be a slave.
For a while, during her training as a dancer, she entertained hopes that she would still be able to earn enough money to buy her freedom, even if marriage and children were now out of the question. She didn't want children anymore, anyway. Not knowing what would wait for them in the end. But Trakis, who bought her contract from her previous owner, made it clear he expected her to deliver all her earnings, in full, and besides, she was not to believe that he'd ever let her go. Trakis hated all Centauri. He had been a slave himself once.
It wasn't as if Adira had much love for her people left in her either. The laws of the Republic had not saved her, or the siblings she had not seen since her fifth year. Still, when Trakis told her she was to seduce the Centauri Ambassador on Babylon 5, something in her balked. At this point she did not know the Ambassador. The other girls said he was generous with his tips, even if they did not always come from his own money, and good company to be with, but that was true of a lot of men. No, what disturbed Adira was the idea of putting anyone else into Trakis' power.
Then the Ambassador started to notice her, as Trakis had foreseen, and began to court her, which was completely unanticipated. Both Trakis and Adira had expected the Ambassador simply to summon her to his quarters and be done with it. True, he did not know she was a slave and thus had no right to refuse anyone's attentions, but a free dancer's status wasn't that much higher.
It was bewildering and strange to be exposed to flattery, gifts, and endless attempts to make her smile. Which she did, and soon she found she did not even have to pretend. The other girls had been right; Londo Mollari was good company. Adira began to remember bits and pieces of her childhood she had tried to forget; the tales her mother had told her, the romances, the songs. He never stopped behaving as if she had a choice in the matter, and it took all her energy to recall that she did not.
When they ultimately did have sex together, he continued to surprise her. It wasn't as if she had been lacking in experience, despite her youth. But the other Centauri she had slept with usually didn't bother to take their time between one and four, and once they got to six, that was that. It was so new for her to enjoy herself at all stages that she did not now what to say, how to look. All the practised expressions were gone.
But what broke her was that he wanted her to remain afterwards. When he fell asleep, she regarded him and tried to understand what she felt. It wasn't that he was particularly handsome. He wasn't young anymore, far from it, and he drank too much; she could smell it on his skin. And it wasn't as if they actually had something in common. He was a noble, the head of one of the great Houses; poverty was as alien to him as, she imagined, helplessness. Moreover, his kindness to her would surely end as soon as he found out what Trakis intended. Romances weren't the only tales she recalled now; a noble had the right to whip a commoner through the streets if the commoner had offended him.
And yet. And yet. Right now, she did not want to be anywhere else than here, in this room, with this man. Reality would catch up with her soon enough, she knew that; and ultimately she would betray him, or he would find out and turn against her. The past was a nightmare, and every experience she ever had told her there was no future. But there was the present.
He had told her to call him by his name, which she hadn't dared yet. Now that he was sleeping, though, she whispered it, just his name, because she still didn't know what to make of the bewildering confusion that refused to let her go. Then she told the computer to lower the lights, and tried to sleep as well.
Around them, the shadows crept closer.
rozk's take on the subject, I have started rewatching the Alien movies; the first two, so far. I find my reaction is pretty much the same as when I first saw them; I still prefer Ridley Scott's Alien to James Cameron's Aliens.Mind you, I'm less allergic to the Marines in the later than I used to be, probably due to having seen lots of soldiers in and out of sci-fi films and shows in between. So I'm not about to accuse Cameron of blind worship of the military, as my 19-years-old self did. But I still find them irritating, and I do think Cameron is overly in love with his big guns and big machines. Probably the most 80-ish thing about Aliens; remember when everything got bigger, the radios especially, instead of smaller? (Francis Ford Coppola had a neat jab about this tendency in Peggy Sue Got Married.)
Mostly, though, it's that I find Aliens less interesting. It's a good action movie, no question about it; everyone gives a good performance, and since Cameron makes the bond between Ripley and little Newt the emotional core of the movie, and hits upon the ingenious idea of paralleling this with the Queen (his contribution to the myth) and her eggs, it gives us an easy identification with the heroine. But. It's one of several polished action movies. Not unique.
Alien, now. Alien, for starters, is not an action movie. It's a horror film. Rewatching it, it strikes me that Scott could even have made it as a silent movie, because the spoken dialogue is not that important. It has no memorable lines, which doesn't mean it's badly written. Au contraire. The marines in Cameron's Aliens communicate in snappy Hollywood one liners, which is entertaining, but clearly identifies them as People Not You Or Me. The crew of the Nostromo, otoh? Are really, as one of several contributors to the script put, truck drivers in space. No one liners. They bicker (and then they panic), but they do it in a way you can imagine listening to in any working environment where the people have been together a bit too long not to be edge and tired of each other.
Still. This could have been a silent movie. It was only Ridley Scott's second feature film (after, as he points out on the extras, more than 200 commercials - since he makes a similar point when reminiscing on the Thelma and Louise DVD methinks the man has still issues about having been dismissed as a director of TV ads way back when), but there is nothing whatsoever either unaccomplished or, going into the other extreme, overindulgent in the new railway set (looking at you, Orson Welles) about his direction. He composes his pictures in a way that makes each frame fascinating, and he takes his time with the pace. We've got more than half an hour of the crew waking up, bickering, landing on a planet, and investigating before the action kicks in. I wouldn't want to miss a minute. What fascinates me isn't just Scott doing his usual great thing with the scenery (in this case, the set designs by H.R. Giger for the Alien ship and the Aliens themselves, and Rob Cobb for the Nostromo) but the way he sculpts his characters. I deliberately use the word "sculpt". It can be Ripley's face, or it can be the shot of Ash in medlab with Ripley barely visible at the edge of the frame, but you have the idea these people have been ever so carefully positioned and modelled from clay.
Not, though, in a Stanley Kubrick manner. Because the crew of the Nostromo is not supernaturally beautiful or physically perfect in the way actors appear in many movies and TV shows, American movies and TV shows at least. They have an every day look which reminds me more of British TV shows; even the two women, Ripley and Lambert, while being good looking are so in an, excuse the cliché, unconventional way. Ian Holm as Ash could not look more inconspicuous (no Schwarzenegger he). John Hurt, Tom Skerrit and Harry Dean Stanton are all character actors, not front-page-of-Vanity-Fair material or action heroes. There is a sense of eminent normalcy and realness about these people that isn't, perhaps because it can't be, with any of the casts of any of the sequels.
Moreover, Alien doesn't give us easy identifications. If someone manages to see this film now with blessed lack of knowledge about it or its sequels, this hypothetical viewer will take his or her time realising that Ripley is meant to be the main character, and the one who will probably survive. (Or will she? Scott in the extras confesses he had at one point the sudden mad idea of finishing the movie with the Alien killing Ripley, instead of vice versa, and then setting course to Earth.) She doesn't have more scenes than the other six crew members until her conflict with Ash intensifies, and she's not necessarily portrayed as more sympathetic, with her smart but also cold decision not to take the infected Kane back on board. There is no arrow pointed at her saying "This is your heroine; love her".
Then there is the element of fear. All the Alien movies have their scary moments, but Scott, doing it for the first time, could really use hints and fragments and teasing insinuation for a single monster which work that much more strongly on the imagination, instead of having to deliver ever more monsters. And since the crew of the Nostromo aren't soldiers, they don't even have pretend they aren't afraid. One of the reasons why one does identify with Ripley in Alien after all is that Sigourney Weaver and Scott show that she's scared out of her wits while trying to hold it up, that her courage goes along with fear just this side of body-numbing. When she, for the final showdown, sings to herself, tunelessly, you know it is about the only thing keeping her from an instant breakdown. This isn't the warrior goddess she was going to become.
Lastly, there is the bizarre sexuality present in Alien, absent in Aliens, fragmentary present in Alien³ and brought back with a vengeance in Alien: Resurrection. I understand why Cameron didn't go for it; he had the Queen instead, and structure that needed the face-off between two mothers, without any sexual dynamics. Which works very well emotionally. But it does not access the subconscious in the disturbing way Giger's original creature, and the way Scott uses it in Alien does. Dan O'Bannon, the original scriptwriter for Alien, uses the description "horrifyingly beautiful" for the Giger sketches that had first attracted his attention, and Scott says something similar in the audio commentary. O'Bannon mentions working out the story with his collegue who when they hammered out the logistics of how the monster was going to come on board said "what if he screws one of the crew, impregnates him and then gets born inside the ship". When the final showdown between Ripley and the Alien arrives, Scott and Weaver comment on the sexuality of it, the "Beauty and the Beast" factor. It's interesting that Ripley originally wasn't written as a female character (nor was anyone else) for Alien, but that the sexual subtext for the Alien seems to have been there from the start, whereas of course for Aliens her being a woman was a basic condition, and you have no sexuality at all.
Speaking of Aliens and sexuality. I've got my DS9 story, Cold Heaven, up on FFN since a few days though for some strange reason it doesn't show up on the normal director, just on my personal account. Same with the Londo/G'kar extravaganza, titled In Vino Veritas.
Also, this is Born to the Purple week in Babylon 5 terms.
andrastewhite wrote a wonderful story featuring Londo and G'Kar between Born to the Purple and Parliament of Dreams; my own contribution for thefiringline is a story about Adira:Title: Her Better Days
Author: Selena
Rating: PG 13, I suppose.
Disclaimer: All owned by JMS and Babylonian productions.
Words: 838
Spoilers: For "Born to the Purple".
Her body had never belonged to herself. Adira had not been free since her early childhood, since her father, after his last attempt to make his fortune on a colony world failed, had sold himself and his family into bondage. Back then, he had told them they would be able to buy their own freedom back, which was certainly legally possible, and Adira had believed him. She did not realise that it had been as empty a promise as all his schemes until her breasts started to bud, and it had been time to shave her skull. It was only then that she truly understood what it meant to be a slave.
For a while, during her training as a dancer, she entertained hopes that she would still be able to earn enough money to buy her freedom, even if marriage and children were now out of the question. She didn't want children anymore, anyway. Not knowing what would wait for them in the end. But Trakis, who bought her contract from her previous owner, made it clear he expected her to deliver all her earnings, in full, and besides, she was not to believe that he'd ever let her go. Trakis hated all Centauri. He had been a slave himself once.
It wasn't as if Adira had much love for her people left in her either. The laws of the Republic had not saved her, or the siblings she had not seen since her fifth year. Still, when Trakis told her she was to seduce the Centauri Ambassador on Babylon 5, something in her balked. At this point she did not know the Ambassador. The other girls said he was generous with his tips, even if they did not always come from his own money, and good company to be with, but that was true of a lot of men. No, what disturbed Adira was the idea of putting anyone else into Trakis' power.
Then the Ambassador started to notice her, as Trakis had foreseen, and began to court her, which was completely unanticipated. Both Trakis and Adira had expected the Ambassador simply to summon her to his quarters and be done with it. True, he did not know she was a slave and thus had no right to refuse anyone's attentions, but a free dancer's status wasn't that much higher.
It was bewildering and strange to be exposed to flattery, gifts, and endless attempts to make her smile. Which she did, and soon she found she did not even have to pretend. The other girls had been right; Londo Mollari was good company. Adira began to remember bits and pieces of her childhood she had tried to forget; the tales her mother had told her, the romances, the songs. He never stopped behaving as if she had a choice in the matter, and it took all her energy to recall that she did not.
When they ultimately did have sex together, he continued to surprise her. It wasn't as if she had been lacking in experience, despite her youth. But the other Centauri she had slept with usually didn't bother to take their time between one and four, and once they got to six, that was that. It was so new for her to enjoy herself at all stages that she did not now what to say, how to look. All the practised expressions were gone.
But what broke her was that he wanted her to remain afterwards. When he fell asleep, she regarded him and tried to understand what she felt. It wasn't that he was particularly handsome. He wasn't young anymore, far from it, and he drank too much; she could smell it on his skin. And it wasn't as if they actually had something in common. He was a noble, the head of one of the great Houses; poverty was as alien to him as, she imagined, helplessness. Moreover, his kindness to her would surely end as soon as he found out what Trakis intended. Romances weren't the only tales she recalled now; a noble had the right to whip a commoner through the streets if the commoner had offended him.
And yet. And yet. Right now, she did not want to be anywhere else than here, in this room, with this man. Reality would catch up with her soon enough, she knew that; and ultimately she would betray him, or he would find out and turn against her. The past was a nightmare, and every experience she ever had told her there was no future. But there was the present.
He had told her to call him by his name, which she hadn't dared yet. Now that he was sleeping, though, she whispered it, just his name, because she still didn't know what to make of the bewildering confusion that refused to let her go. Then she told the computer to lower the lights, and tried to sleep as well.
Around them, the shadows crept closer.
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-26 08:58 am (UTC)I'm not sure which editions of the films you are watching - the original or director's cuts. Comparing the original versions of Alien and Aliens, I have to agree with your assesment of the two films. But, it was after seeing the directors cut of Aliens that I found it difficult to decide which was the better of the two.
Granted, Aliens is much more the action picture, more visceral then meditative, but in the extended version we see where character development was sacrificed for the sake of gunfire. While it was easy enough to draw comparisons between Ripley and the Queen, the extended cut allows us to see why Ripley was so desperate to save Newt - she couldn't let her down as she felt she had her own daughter. And there is the brief exchange between Ripley and Hicks in which they exchange first names. It's a small moment that was easily cut, but seeing it included helps to strengthen the connection between the two.
Interestingly, had not Ridley cut a key scene from Alien showing Dallas and others being turned into eggs, would the Queen/hive concept have been born? If so, it was likely there would have been massive criticism of the films contradicting each other.
Agree about the regular vs. directors cut versions...
Date: 2004-01-26 11:07 am (UTC)The director's cut of Aliens allows the viewer far more character insights, including perhaps the most important detail of the entire film, the fact that Ripley had a daughter whose life she missed out on, and further, the film scares me more than the first. There is no moment I think in any film as genuinely frightening to me as Newt standing in the water as the alien arises out of it behind her. Ripley's final showdown with the Queen, rife with subtextual implications about their divergent maternal instincts, I also find more satisfying than the Beauty-and-the-Beast sexuality of the first film.
Pardon the typo
Date: 2004-01-26 11:08 am (UTC)Re: Agree about the regular vs. directors cut versions...
Date: 2004-01-26 11:46 am (UTC)That truly is a frightening moment. Seeing a child threatened is far more disturbing than an adult in the same predicament.
Another thing I found interesting about Aliens was we get to witness the intelligence of the Aliens. I know Ridely wanted to persue that more but didn't have the opportunity to. Thankfully James Cameron chose to incorporate it. I was always struck by the scene in which Ripley threatens the Queens offspring. Granted, you can argue it's instinctual to protect the colony, but I saw more than that. The Queen knew what Ripley was thinking and seemed to read both her actions and emotions very well.
Disagree
Date: 2004-01-26 12:43 pm (UTC)Again, with the showdown of the mothers it's the same thing. I find it effective, and a good idea on Cameron's part. But it does not haunt me in that nightmarish quality as the showdown in the earlier film, nor do I identify that strongly with Ripley as I do in the first one.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-26 12:49 pm (UTC)Even more interesting, the cut scene with Dallas must have been known to Cameron because clearly the scene in Aliens where the Marines find the half-digested colonists hanging from the walls is inspired by it visually.
Yes, if the scene had not been cut it would have taken some convoluted explanations to explain why all of a sudden there was something like a Queen necessary to lay eggs. I'm still in two minds as to whether I prefer the film (Alien that is) with or without the Dallas scene, because it is quite moving.
Incidentally, since this scene was included in Sigourney Weaver's original screent test it's somewhat ironic it didn't make the final cut...