Pick of the Month from Gayle Gaddis - Aliens!

Nitrate Stock is pleased to present this new feature, which asks friends, readers and fellow film aficionados to provide their choice for the month's most unmissable flick.

For the rare few of you that need it, a synopsis: the film picks up where Alien left off. After 57 years of floating hypersleep, Ripley is found, then discredited, until, oh yeah, they need her. LV-426, where her former (because they’re all dead) crew encountered the original alien, is now a terraforming colony, except it’s gone silent. So Ripley goes in, with a badass team of colonial marines, to open a can of whupass. And without spoiling anything, they all get more than they bargained for.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s no Alien.

A hard point to argue with, I grant you: it trades intimate claustrophobia for blockbuster bravura. Authentic human (and not) characters for star-supporting stereotypes. Ridley Scott for James Cameron. (Ouch. I almost talked myself out of this whole thing, remembering Titanic.) But the nail biting’s still there. The heavily atmospheric, all-immersive tension. And then more tension. And more. Because Cameron’s never content with stasis, the menace, the mood, the fear all have to escalate. What’s scarier than a chest-exploding, acid-bleeding, 7 1/2-foot alien? A nest of chest-exploding, acid-bleeding, 7 1/2-foot aliens. And when that starts to feel par for the course, the mother (literally) of all chest-exploding, acid-bleeding, 7 1/2-foot aliens. Cameron’s art is his excess, because it’s calculated, perfectly calibrated to raise the stakes just when we’re starting to accept the terms of the situation. Like this: early in the film, when the marines are “securing” the seemingly abandoned station—an almost dreamlike sequence of twists and turns through wreckage and strangely textured, sweating walls that uses silence like a hammer—we think we know, with them, what the threat is. It’s a “bug hunt.” Unseen as yet, but we’re prepared for attack. Except oh, by the way, if you fire at them, you could set off a thermonuclear explosion.

But while the tension builds, all else subsides. For a blockbuster, it’s almost impossibly sparse with its distractions. For one thing, it’s a killer alien flick with virtually no blood. There are screams. Then silence. Then occasionally a flame thrower setting the whole damn place on fire. But no blood. And very little dialogue. Early on, there are wisecracks from the marines, but only to establish the rules: talk won’t keep you alive. By the end, the silence is so powerful that every word feels like a shout. Like this scene: Corporal Hicks is drilling through the floor to rescue Newt while Ridley monitors the tracker. We hear nothing but a muted drilling sound and the rapidly accelerating beeping; who knows how many aliens are approaching, FAST. Here’s the entire dialogue:

Hicks.

I know.

Hurry.

I know.

I mean it.

All the tension. Twice the urgency. Nine words. That’s just deeply, deeply cool.

But blah, blah. Ditch all of that, and you’re left with Ripley. Hallelujah, Ripley. #8 on AFI’s list of the top 50 movie heroes (#1 in our hearts). Ellen Ripley is one of the most badass-but-vulnerable female characters ever to grace the screen, and yes, Cameron owes a debt to Ridley Scott for it, but he took her somewhere more profound. She’s better, faster, stronger, because he did rebuild her. The greatest achievement of Aliens was forcing Ripley (sometimes literally kicking and screaming) to re-own her humanity, her need for connection, for love. To come to terms with emotions as powerful and, well, alien as anything coming out of those eggs. It’s new territory, for her and us: sci-fi meets self-discovery. And it’s what makes a line as banal as “Get away from her, you bitch!” into so much more: A battle cry. A woman taking back the night. And a reluctant mother figure realizing she can no longer protect herself by going through the world alone.

Damn.

Damn, Cameron.

I almost forgive you for Titanic.

-Gayle Gaddis

James Cameron's ALIENS screens Friday and Saturday the 25th and 26th, midnight at the IFC Center, and Sunday evening the 27th at BAM.