Aliens
Posted by J on July 30, 2008
Aliens is not a movie we’d recommend to anybody, but if, like us, you’ve seen it and are willing to recognize it as the best
of its kind (the blockbuster action movie), there are several things to consider about what you have learned by viewing it.
One of these is already well-known. Aliens is yet another Vietnam War movie from a defeated American perspective. The overconfident marines hired to destroy the “natives” quickly turn into scared pansies once they realize that they cannot defeat these natives. It’s not just that they can’t defeat them, but they never could. The aliens are in their natural environment, they are relentless, there are a lot of them, and they will not stop attacking until either the marines are dead or they have left. Though the marines have all the firepower they could ever dream of, they could never subdue these aliens; the only way to beat them is to utterly destroy them via aerial bombing. Otherwise, the marines can’t regain control of the colonial outpost and maintain a long-term, military presence there. Obviously, in a way, this is all more than a comment on Vietnam; it is a general comment on imperial rule in the modern-day context.
The unremarked aspect to Aliens is the purpose of the final showdown, which is not between the marines and the alien horde, but instead between Ripley and the alien mother. Ripley, of course, is the female hero who exhibits military leadership and soldier skills. There is a feminine side to her — she adopts the tough, orphaned girl found at the colony, its last survivor — but she is clearly a feminist model for a woman in the army. She could never assume the traditional role of mother while conducting a mining operation in deep-space or while shooting up alien monsters.
In a future Alien movie, this point is amplified. Her adopted child dies and Ripley is infected with an alien host, which bursts out of her abdomen as she commits suicide, knowingly killing the creature gestating inside of her. The aliens are hideous, but Ripley was probably never going to give birth to anything anyway. She is a career woman.
Ripley’s opponent, however, is a traditional mother in both the animal and human sense. The alien mother, like a queen ant, rests in her hive and makes babies all day long. Her job is to reproduce the species, caring for her babies and making sure that they develop and thrive. It is clear, then, what will happen when Ripley and the marines come to shoot up the aliens’ hive. The alien mother gets ticked, so ticked that she is willing to leave her nest, latch onto a spaceship, and ride it into orbit, where she will battle her masculine rival, Ripley, in a deathmatch. The movie’s obvious preference is for the G.I. Jane figure to defeat the full-time mother, obvious because the full-time mother is hideous-looking and G.I. Jane is a bona fide moviestar.
Other than these two issues, colonialism and femininity, Aliens is all guns, monsters, explosions, tension, and military talk (with much taboo language). It is well constructed, which is why we say that it’s the best of its kind.
Entertainment: 10
Intelligence: 4
Morality: 0
