I've always found it interesting to look at humanity's interpretation of life outside our own world. Just looking at our movies alone many would say the human race is quite paranoid. Though there are the random times when visitors from other worlds either come to warn us or help us most of the time it seems they simply want to eat us or destroy us so they can have our planet. However despite our horror about what lurks in the infinite galaxies outside our own, including the scary possibility of Jar Jar Binks being real somewhere, the topic has produced some rather entertaining films such as this one. The much fabled Alien franchise began in 1979 with the simply titled Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott the movie gave us one of the freakiest dinner table experiences ever (alien out of a chest and all), and the appropriate tag line "In space no one can hear you scream" to his claustrophobic horror film about a single alien taking out an entire crew. Seven years later up and comer James Cameron fresh off of Terminator decided to continue his action sci-fi trend and decided to add an S to the end of the title rather than a 2 and then made good on his title.
The story begins with Ripley being discovered after her successful attempt to flee from the singular alien that killed her entire crew. Turns out her trip went long and the planet that hosted the alien eggs is now full of colonists. Despite her warnings, the aliens are discovered and the colonists are all killed. Ripley in an attempt to confront her own demons agrees to go and help a platoon of space marines eager to get some killing done exterminate the parasites. But it turns out there might be a few more of them than last time. Maybe hundreds. So what was supposed to be an extermination now becomes a fight for survival with Ripley and company in the thick of it.
As far as sequels go this is a great blueprint of how to do it. Here it's very much the same concept as most horror movies or war movies which is kill the bad things lets stay alive. However, Cameron brings his own flair and knows that audiences aren't going to shocked out of there skulls by the same alien popping out and making kills. With that in mind he decides why not have more of them? Oh and let's get a team of people with gigantic machine guns and flame throwers and ramp the action up to eleven! Though the situation is familiar the reason this movie succeeds is because it feels entirely different. There are new characters new locations and let's not forget Ripley's classic line "Get away from her you bitch!"
The character of Ripley is also a great example of how you make a female action hero without her being man-ish or over sexualized. Does Ripley act like a woman? Most certainly. She's deathly afraid of these things that surround her and very protective of the little girl their find at the colony. But what she doesn't do is break down on mentally or twirl her hair and get half naked just because. She's also not uber masculine unless you think her being in control makes her masculine. Here she's in charge because she has the most level head on her shoulders not because she won a game of arming wrestling. Oh it also helps immensely that Sigourney Weaver earns her academy award nomination for this movie.
This the part where I make excuses for the critiques I'm about to make. Despite what I say all of my complaints are really just petty compared to a rather enjoyable movie experience and the movie is widely considered a classic by nearly every critic myself included.
Ok excuses out of the way what do we not like about this movie. First complaint the sounds the guns make. I know they really didn't have a very big budget for this but this gigantic machine guns that they use look like they could level buildings and instead they sound like someone making machine gun noises by vibrating their tongue through their teeth. I also feel like I heard the same explosion about fifteen times throughout the entire movie.
In the same vein I felt the first movie did a very good job of mixing sets with green screen technology and while many of the sets are impressive there are numerous occasions where I am very aware that a green screen is being used. For instance when a spaceship moves up and down and the background behind it doesn't have a shadow. Once again this can probably be chalked up to the minuscule budget but Space Odyssey 2001 holds up way better and it was made nearly twenty years before this film.
There are also a couple of characters that seem to be to cartoonish for the movie. Vasquez the manish Latina spews out Spanish slang and cursing throughout the entire movie and behaves more like a gang member than a trained soldier. And as funny as he is while he screams "Game over man!" Bill Paxton is pretty much too over the top to appreciate. He's so cheesy half the time he comes across like a used car salesman......(this is me waiting to see if anyone gets the joke)........
But as I've mentioned this movie is a major accomplishment because it made something out of nothing and we've all seen what Cameron can do with a budget that is bigger than what some small countries make in ten years. Apparently his new movie is coming out soon and I can't tell if I'm excited or worried about it because apparently it was uber expensive but it's supposed to revolutionize the industry. Oh well we'll wait until Christmas and find out. In the meantime check out this movie and remember that even with it's lower production values it will always be better the Alien vs. Predator series.
No comments:
Post a Comment