Aliens

I did something kind of stupid last Thursday night. Don't regret it a bit.

Basically, I was flipping through the local paper and saw that one of the local theaters was showing Aliens that night at 10 p.m. as part of its throw-back program. (Old movies on Thursday nights. We live in a college town.) Aliens was one of my absolute favorite movies as a teenager. Saw it four times in the theater. Since then, I've wanted to see it in the theater again. I blew one chance in about 1994 when it was playing at the Pacific Film Archive more or less across the street from my law school. I blew it again about a year ago when the same local theater was playing it in the throw-back series. At the time, I thought, "Man, I'm old, I'm not going to a two-and-a-half-hour movie that starts at 10 p.m. on a work night." I of course regretted not going the following morning. So, this time, damn it, I went, with The Muse's blessing. Thanks, Muse.

And, man, I am glad that I went. The print was old, so there were little bugs -- not aliens -- on the screen most of the time. Lines, too. The theater staff was really irritating, not starting the movie until after 10 as they gathered written comments, talked about various types of lubes, held a raffle and made the raffle winners "roar like a Viking" to get their winnings. But that still is one hell of a movie.

The last hour of the movie is the most sustained white-knuckle ride I have ever seen. From about the time that the good guys determine that Paul Reiser's character Burke (he should try being a bad guy more often -- he's better at that than trying to be warm and funny) has tried to get the aliens to lay eggs in Ripley and Newt to get the eggs past quarantine for the Company's weapon labs, it is just aliens, aliens, ailens, Ripley and Hicks nailing aliens, Hudson yelling, Burke getting eaten, Hudson getting eaten, Vasquez and Corman getting trapped by aliens and blowing themselves up to kill aliens, Newt falling into water and getting abducted by ailens, Ripley going back to save her from aliens, Ripley slowly realizing that she's in the queen alien's lair, Ripley trying to blow up as much of the alien lair as she can, Ripley trying to get Newt out while the whole place counts down to a thermonuclear explosion brought on the earlier alien-induced crash of the initial transport ship, Ripley thinking she and Newt are stuck on the landing bay by the artificial human Bishop who took the new transport ship off the bay, the queen alien coming up the elevator chasing Ripley, Ripley and Newt getting on the transport, which can't quite get all of its landing gear up, the ship taking off as the whole place detonates, Ripley telling Bishop that he did a good job once they get back to the main ship, you thinking that the movie is more or less done, the queen alien stabbing Bishop and ripping him in half (although he lives because he's artificial), Newt and Ripley trying to hide, Newt getting chased by the alien under the cargo bay floor as the alien uncovers parts of it, Ripley coming out in the loading robot suit and saying -- in the single greatest line in an 80's movie -- "Get away from her, you bitch," Ripley and the alien fighting and then Ripley blowing the alien out of the airlock.

More than that, watching this movie after 20 years was really interesting. Some of the special effects haven't aged well. Many of the shots of ships clearly were shots with models moving against green scenes and kind of look silly (it's interesting to compare them with the shots of the rebel ships attacking the Death Star in Star Wars, which have held up much better because, I think, there was no green screen involved). The ending is still somewhat implausible. Ripley, Bishop and Newt are able to keep from flying into space when Ripley opens the airlock? O-kaaaaay. Ripley's shoe, but not her foot, gets ripped off when the queen alien finally can't hold on anymore? O-kaaaaay. But these are quibbles.

It was really interesting to see how Aliens both went with and played with some of the 80's action movie conventions. There is the obligatory gun-fetish scene, where Ripley straps together various space weapons and loads up on grenades as she's getting ready to go save Newt. That scene could have come straight out of Rambo or Die Hard or Lethal Weapon. Most importantly, though, I just can't think of another 80's action movie -- and really, until recently, any action movie -- that features such a prominent female action star. (Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies is the only one who even came close.) And her motivation is done very well and not obviously as well. The set-up of Ripley basically being cut off from everything that she had going by the fact that she had been floating through space for 57 years after the end of Alien and had nothing going on, only to find this little girl Newt, who had lost her family, and basically become her mother as something to hold on to is not stated explicitly at all, but you know what's going on. God knows, the motivations of the heroes of other 80's action movies weren't that well-developed or that well-done. (For example, we learn in Lethal Weapon 2 that Riggs is mad at the South African bad guys because they killed his wife when one of the characters telling us that.) It shows you that James Cameron, Aliens' director and the director of the Terminator movies (see Linda Hamilton above), was once a really good director, before he started making hooey like The Abyss (although I have heard that the director's cut makes more sense than what was released initially) and Titanic.

And there are a lot of great lines. "Game over, man, game over!" "They come at night mostly. Mostly." "Ripley, she doesn't have dreams because she's just a piece of plastic." "How did they cut the power, man?!? They're just a bunch of animals!" "You always were an a--h---, Gorman." "Guess she don't like the cornbread either."

I give Aliens a Film rating, just like I would have in 1986 if I had met The Muse by then. So, in the end, I am really glad I did the stupid thing of going to see a 20-year-old, two-and-a-half-hour movie for the fifth time at 10 p.m. on a Thursday night. Try it sometime. Just don't expect to be running at full speed on Friday.