Blogtober Chapter 10: They Mostly Come At Night. Mostly.

Welcome back to Blogtober!  We've reached chapter 10 now, which means we're roughly a third of the way through the month.  It's honestly hard to believe we're that far already, but let's not slow the train down now.

The space train.

On with the show!

ALIENS (1986)

Blogtober Qualifications: Aliens, acid blood, death, corrupt corporate executives

*Spoiler warning for Alien*

57 years after barely surviving her encounter with the hostile alien aboard the Nostromo, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is recovered from stasis.  The Weyland-Yutani Corporation is looking for answers to why she lost them all that money.  Sixty years ago.

Ripley submits her report, but no one at the company believes her, and only company man Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) is the least bit polite to her.  That is, until communications cease from the now-colonized planet from which the Nostromo picked up the alien in the first place.  Ripley agrees to serve as an advisor on a rescue mission alongside Burke and a platoon of marines.

Things quickly go south, however, as the characters are trapped on the planet with a hive of the aliens, and there's no backup coming any time soon.  Add to that the complication of protecting the colony's only survivor, a young girl by the name of Newt (Carrie Henn).

Things aren't looking too good.

So believe it or not, this is my first time seeing Aliens all the way through.  I've seen bits and pieces here and there, and I'm of course familiar with the famous lines.  But how does it hold up here?

To put it simply: pretty darn good.  With some caveats.

To begin with, Sigourney Weaver as Ripley is awesome.  There is no debate there, as far as I'm concerned, and if anything she's even more competent this time around.  Maybe it's because her mom instincts are triggered.  She was a clear inspiration for Samus of Metroid fame.

That's right, Ripley is so cool that she inspired the biggest stone-cold badass female in all of gaming.  In fact, I'm gonna go ahead and put forth the argument that Ellen Ripley is the single coolest action mom character ever.  Feel free to debate that.

The other actors are, unfortunately, a mixed bag, and the mix leans towards poor.  My absolute least favorite parts of the movie are the early scenes showing off the marine platoon.  Their dialog and interactions hover somewhere in-between corny and cringe-inducing.  It's like Starship Troopers, but I'm pretty sure that movie was going for cringe.

As memetic as Bill Paxton's character Hudson has become over the years, I found him to be the most annoying.  I understand that he's supposed to be annoying, at least early on, but he's not "movie" annoying, he's "annoying" annoying.  Once the situation goes south and he really loses his cool, he skirts dangerously close to "skip his dialog" annoying.  I'm assuming that's why so many of his lines became popular in the first place.

Michael Biehn, of Terminator fame, is just playing the same character here as he did there.  That's not a bad thing, since he does it well, and to be fair he is a bit more capable here.  It's still a fact that I keep forgetting his name is Hicks and just call him Kyle Reese.

Lance Henriksen's character, Bishop, is an android, though he prefers to be called an "artificial person."  He plays the part perfectly, but I'm pretty sure Lance Henriksen is actually an android, so I dunno if that should be considered impressive.

Similarly, Paul Reiser, as Burke, is a little too convincing as a two-faced corporate snake.  I've got my eye on you, Paul Reiser, wherever you disappeared to.

And lastly, Carrie Henn, here playing Newt, does as good a job as you can expect from a child actor in the 80s.  She's not bad, just a little stiff from time to time.  Still, she's the source for the title of this review, so that's pretty sweet.  Good job, Newt.

I guess most people know this by now, but Aliens takes a step away from the horror roots of its predecessor and becomes more of a horror-action movie.  Emphasis on the "action."  There are a lot more aliens (hence the title) this time around, but the humans are also better-equipped, so the aliens go down faster.  The action here is done well, but I found myself much more interested in the smaller-scale scenes, when the heroes are on the backfoot and the tension has a chance to build.

The effects, for the most part, hold up extremely well.  It makes sense, because almost all the effects are practical.  However, there is that one little thing that's threatening to become a recurring nemesis for Blogtober: rear projection.  I only detected it in one scene, and it's done better than in Army of Darkness (made six years later, by the way), but I feel unsafe just knowing it's still around.

All jokes aside, though, the creature effects are still convincing, more than thirty years later now.  The final fight scene, which is all done with practical effects (to the best of my knowledge), is really something to behold.  I won't spoil it, but suffice it to say that Ripley gets a chance to stand on equal ground with the baddest alien there is, and its all prefaced by the best line in the movie.  It's a lot of fun.

Story-wise, I felt like a lot of things weren't capitalized on.  Absolutely no mention is made of Ripley's daughter.  Apparently there was a reference to her in the special edition, but I watched the original theatrical cut.  Either way I feel like we could've focused on that a bit more, especially since it would have had thematic ties to Ripley's concern for Newt.

It also seems more than a little convenient that this colony has been around for twenty years, but it gets attacked by aliens shortly after the one person who's encountered them before awakens from a hibernation that lasted almost sixty.

Still, these are minor complaints overall, and they don't ruin my enjoyment of the movie.  Besides, if I want information about Ripley's daughter, I can always play Alien: Isolation.  The movie is a touch too long (I feel like I say that a lot), and I feel like it could've been easily pared down by cutting out some of the godawful marine dialog.  Still, at least that makes it satisfying when they die.

People will tell you that Aliens is a rare example of a sequel being better than the original.  My feelings are a tiny bit more complicated.  I'd say that the two films are about equally good at what they're going for, but I prefer what the original is going for.  It's not a slight against Aliens, I just prefer the feeling of the first movie, and I'll more readily watch that one again.  Still, at least this movie didn't make the previous movie's ending completely pointless.

I'm looking at you, Alien3.

Tomorrow, though, we will not be looking at Alien3.  Instead we'll be hopping over to that ever-so-classic horror setting, 1800s England, for a good old-fashioned ghost story by one of my favorite directors.

Well, it's more of a story with a ghost in it.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening - Dio: The Last in Line (1984)

Playing - Bloodborne: NG+ (2015)

Reading - Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood (1987)

Watching - WWE Hell in a Cell (2017)