I’ve always preferred James Cameron’s version of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Aliens to the Ripley of Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien. A lot has been said on the differences, especially as they relate to sexuality and the male gaze, between Scott’s version and Cameron’s. James Cameron himself has said quite a bit. I think both Ripleys are admirable but in different (and not necessarily contradictory) ways. That said, it doesn’t take a Pulitzer Prize in critical analysis to notice that Ripley is more well-sketched out in the sequel. Whereas the original Alien is a perfectly over-crafted and over-designed claustrophobic haunted house film, Aliens is a character- and thematically driven action masterclass in action filmmaking—a change that would have been impossible with the characteristically thinner 1979 Ripley.

Set in the far future from the original, Ripley’s awoken from cryosleep to find out her whole life passed while she was unconscious. In the director’s cut, she also learns that her daughter, who didn’t exist in the canonical version of Alien, has died of old age—a bit that makes her parental relationship with Newt (Carrie Henn) mean a bit more than in the theatrical version. But even in the theatrical cut, she’s just a richer character. She cares about more than the mere survival of herself and her crew—which is all that was needed for the near-perfect execution of the corridor thrills and kills in the first movie—but also about preserving the innocence of Newt, the lone child survivor from the colony on LV-426, and has to work through her own traumas from her first extraterrestrial encounter. As she’s basically forced onto a mission returning to the exomoon where her original crew first found the xenomorph as soon as she wakes, her traumas are too raw for her to revert to the same cold (and, according to Cameron, sexualized) action hero that she was in the original. She has no option but to grapple with her emotions before the audience.

The film’s politics rather famously make a mockery of American foreign policy and macho militarism. Relatedly, the change in aspect ratio from 2.39:1 in Alien to 1.85:1 in Aliens works perfectly with the switch in genre from a haunted house horror film to Vietnam-in-space by increasing the total visibility of the final picture, a decision so simple yet so crucial. With the taller frame, Cameron has greater free range for close-quarter firearm combat within the narrow architecture of the ship. It allows the film, stuck inside an ugly spaceship, to feel like a war film, which more frequently take place in harsh outdoor environments (such as the ignoble jungles of Vietnam). And given that our country is still committing the same crimes against human life through foreign policy, the critique ages well in a way that period-specific political filmmaking often doesn’t.

Something I found interesting in this watch that I didn’t give much attention to in previous viewings was Cameron’s treatment of Bishop (Lance Henriksen), an android or “synthetic” aboard the Sulaco. 

In Alien, the android Ash (Ian Holm) follows programming to return the alien to the Weyland-Yutani company at all costs. When his programming interferes with the survival plans of the crew, Ripley confronts him, unaware of her opponent’s technological ontology, and Ash attempts to kill her by causing her to choke on a rolled-up pornographic magazine. The remaining crew members arrive just in time to save the “damsel” Ripley, beheading Ash in the process and revealing his man-made interior. The timing of the revelation, of course, is important, but so is the intended means of murder: forced choking on pornography, a weaponized use of perhaps the 20th century’s best exemplar of the perceived expendability of our species. The degree to which sex workers and models were exploited is no well-kept secret—disposed of with the first sign of aging or non-compliance, where consent wasn’t always respected, and where women were often reduced into objects of pleasure for masculine eyes. That the robot would resort to such a weapon, turning the bodies of women into a literal object for violence, tells us something about Scott’s distrust of technology as well as his own critiques of capitalistic cannibalism: remember, Ash’s orders are to return the xenomorphs to a company, not a government or scientific organization.

Less of a technophobe than Scott, James Cameron’s Bishop is endearing from the beginning, where he shows a capacity to amuse and please others in a terrifying game of knife roulette. Ripley is irritated to identify the robot in the crew, and given her past, it’s hard to blame her. Not quite retconning but minimizing the insidious capitalistic programming of Ash in Alien, Bishop assures her the 120-A/2 model was prone to software glitches and programming inconsistencies and that his model, built 57 years in the future, demands complete loyalty to humans and an inability to hurt them. And in the film’s biggest moment—Ripley’s encounter with the Queen Mother and their escape from the exomoon—Bishop delivers on his promise. 

The difference, I think, is reflective of Cameron’s career as the great director of digital cinema. In fact, his Avatar would help put the final touches ushering in the final stage of the digital revolution: theatrical exhibition, or how movies are shown. According to film historian and theorist David Bordwell, “In 2009, about 16,000 theatres worldwide were digital; after Avatar, the number jumped to 36,000.” That being noted, it comes as no surprise that the same filmmaker doesn’t present the same universal distrust of technology that was generally prevalent in the cinematic landscape of the time, as shown in The Terminator and RoboCop series, as well as Alien. Bishop is a good, trustworthy synthetic, whose differences with his precursor, Ash, are explained away via software updates. This futuristic decision is reflective of Cameron’s overarching optimism in humanity’s ability to use and create better technologies. It’s not a blind optimism, for sure: it requires intelligent human cooperation and a consistent striving for better technologies. Unlike AVP: Alien vs Predator (2004) director Paul WS Anderson’s Alice in the Resident Evil series, Cameron’s heroes—at least as of 1986—are still human; they are just aided by and friends to synthetics. Cameron puts the onus for technological responsibility, then, on those who use and create it—not the technological products themselves. 

And I think Cameron’s at least partially right in his technological optimism: without great technologies, and humanity’s collective ability to improve and preserve those technologies, the Coolidge wouldn’t be able to present Aliens in 35mm this Friday at midnight. Don’t miss it!

Aliens
1986
dir. James Cameron
137 min.

Screens (on 35mm!) Thursday, 4/6, 7:00pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the month-long series: The Creatures and Effects of Stan Winston