Alien Franchise Watch-Along: Aliens

Eiko Yamamoto

Let's keep this ship sailing

Alien

Aliens

Alien 3

Alien: Resurrection

Prometheus

Covenant  

Aliens

(1986,  dir. James Cameron)
 
Blue nebula opening this time, now with military drums.
 

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So they have floating drone robots now? What an extremely useful thing that we’re never going to see again.

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Ripley was sleeping for 57 years, which we’re told is long enough for her ship to pass through the core worlds and come out the other side. With the Nostromo destroyed shortly after leaving Zeta Reticuli and given the numbers crunched in the last movie (~40 light years to Earth), Ripley’s shuttle was definitiely FTL. No wonder no one was able to pick it up for decades. Was her distress signal off to save power?

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In what I've realized was a bad move, I watched the theatrical cut instead of the extended one, and so lost the entire thing with Ripley outliving her daughter. Normally I'm in the "cut content is usually cut for a reason" but that is kind of an extremely important bit of thematic and character building.
 

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The lady W-Y rep says that they’d never met aliens that sort of parasitism before, which does confirm that alien life is a known quantity; why it’s so hard to believe in xenos when parasitoid wasps exist on Earth, I have no idea. Must be the growth rate, that's really the only anomaly here.
 
It also apparently only costs 42 million dollars (adjusted for inflation) to buy a spaceship holy shit that's bargain basement.
 

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This space station must smell like absolute dogshit with all the smoking, the costs of replacement air filters alone would be outrageous. A prime example of sci-fi missing some basic things thanks to the blindness of the era it was made in (which, if it isn't the kind of thing that makes one cringe away in revulsion, is usually where the flavor resides.)
 
Ripley is also able to afford an ungodly amount of space on a dockworker’s income. Insurance payout?
 

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Burke’s coming in with the one-two punch of asshole chair-spin and answering a video call with no shirt on. Forty years and this Type of Guy hasn't changed, he's just gotten new hobbies.
 

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I like the “shake-and-bake colony” terminology, it evokes the methods used to terraform without weighing things down in detail we don’t need. From what we see of Hadley's Hope later on, it's a really appropriate metaphor - it's fast, brute-force, and careless. They're not importing an ecosystem, they're literally just setting up factories to make the temperature and atmosphere human-appropriate and then just leaving them to run indefinitely, I guess. Actually terraforming a planet would take too long for the shareholders, after all.
 
How the colony lost contact, though, that’s a weird one. Do they have an ansible? Connection to a hyperspace comms relay? Mail ship? What’s the time scale and turnaround here? When did they lose contact? Is that another deleted scene I missed?
 

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Hey there Sergeant Johnson, nice to see you! And Vasquez, everyone loves Vasquez.
 

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The briefing with the marines is a place where I think Cameron lets his distaste for the military hamper his storytelling; even a group of the most orc-like meat-head grunts are going to have one or two dudes who will want to have a good idea of what they’re up against so they don’t die. But, then again, this is just Space Vietnam so "the imperial power is sending kids out to die for nothing and in their blindness from being the top dogs back home they can't conceive of anything else."

But that also begs the question as to what these guys have been doing all this time, since they seem to have no meaningful combat experience (Gorman’s only got one other combat drop) and yet they’ve been sent out on apparently multiple “bug hunts”. Considering the similarity to “snipe hunt” that makes me think that the Powers that Be have been chasing shadows where there are none wrt aliens, but it could also be that they’ve been sent out as effectively pest control against alien organisms that don’t pose any real threat. But then even if they're being sent out on bug hunts, why haven’t they done more drops? Is it just Gorman who has no experience?
 
The ambiguity regarding what people in this setting know about alien life strikes again.
 

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Also noteworthy is that the colonial marines all have American flag patches. Weyland-Yutani might own half the known universe, but the nation states of earth still have a semblance of political continuity. And are still making racist jabs at Mexico, because of course they would. Honestly between that, the "I prefer artificial person", and hating on androgyne sex workers, this sequence really proves how fucking many people are just stuck in the 80s and their conceptualization of the world has not progressed past this movie.
 

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Ripley demonstrates she knows how to use a loader in a moment of foreshadowing, which is a literary technique…
 

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It’s so weird that the lock and load sequence is so heavily copied when it is basically screaming THIS IS SATIRE I AM MAKING FUN OF PEOPLE WHO THINK THIS IS COOL. Another tally for satire swiftly becoming indistinguishable from the thing satirized.
 

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Does Ripley not have the coordinates (or at least a general idea of the location) for the Jockey ship? Is the signal no longer active? Weird oversight to not even mention it, it's on the same moon. 

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The marines look like children playing with toys when entering the colony, that’s gotta be intentional. Wild that they only sent one squad of 13 guys for a entire town of a couple hundred people.
 

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I wonder, can xenos reproduce normally or do they always require a host? What do they do when there are no hosts available? Just hibernate until more show up? Now that I think about it, I wonder if the weird mist in the Jockey ship was part of a stasis / suspended animation field similar to human cryo, and that’s how all the eggs survived that long.
 

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Jesus fucking christ, Random Marine, traumatize the kid more why don’t you? If a clearly terrified child is desperately attempting to put as much distance as possible between them and you DO NOT ATTEMPT TO GRAB THE TERRIFIED CHILD.
 
I get that the scene is meant to demonstrate that Ripley’s the only one showing Newt some empathy, but I don’t know if Cameron is the right pick for handling that. Like “Oh no, I’ve made a clean spot” is good, but then immediately following it up with calling Newt “pretty”. Nah man, don’t do that. “Pretty” is reserved for grandmas talking about a new dress or something like that.
 

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The colonists have implanted monitoring chips, the marines don’t (but they do have them built into their armor, we see later). Interesting that W-Y has bought and sold their lives on paper but not entirely.
 

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The marines, apparently, didn’t bring any non-explosive rounds, which is fucking insane. YOU ARE IN SPACE. WHAT ARE YOU DOING.
 

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The proper introduction of the xenomorph looks sick as hell. The effects game is something else in this movie, even when compared to Alien's already high bar.
 

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Newt getting out of her dropship harness and then immediately hunkering down with her back to a corner is brutal. I still don’t think Cameron is doing a great job with her, but he’s at least aimed in the right direction sometimes.
 

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There’s got to be a tactical analysis of the Hadley’s Hope mission like that one blogpost about the Battle of Hoth, right? Or ACOUP’s Helm’s Deep series.
 

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Yes! Nuke the site! YOU HAVE ORBITAL SUPERIORITY! And even if you don’t nuke the site, you can sit in orbit, call home, and wait in cryo until reinforcements arrive, which you should have done as soon as things started getting touchy.
 
Apparently there’s no one left on board the Sulaco, which is even more baffling. Like, someone's got to pilot and maintain the ship, right? Or did Bishop handle all of that?

[I did look on the wiki for this one, and apparently yes, the Sulaco was handled entirely by Bishop and the onboard AI. And could also carry thousands of marines, which really makes me wonder why they sent out such a big ship for an intentional suicide mission, it's certainly worth more than the marines to W-Y. Probably planned to recover the hulk from orbit, now that I think about it.]

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Why didn’t the xeno in the colony attack when it had ample chance to? They have no compunction about picking off people 1 by 1. We see similar restraint from a facehugger later in the film, though in this case "restraint" is "not attacking immediately".
 

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Man those facility maps look absolutely unreadable.
 

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Newt: “She doesn’t have bad dreams because she’s just a piece of plastic.”
 

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Bishop says the xeno’s acid neutralizes on contact with oxygen; my cursory research says that’s not really a thing, but sulfuric acid will dilute itself by attracting water molecules so weakening on contact with air is still a thing that can happen.
 

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Bishop in the pipe is very in line with Cameron’s modus operandi with the movie at large; take Alien, make it bigger and nastier at every chance you get.
 

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Ripley means well, but she still shouldn’t be so gung-ho with the traumatized child's spacial boundaries.
 

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Jesus Christ the facehugger attack is harrowing. Puppet budget is way up, the hugger itself is using a scary amount of tactics. The lighter trick to spring the fire suppression is clever.
 
The aftermath I’m less positive on; Burke specifically targeted Newt & Ripley with a pair of facehuggers and a hugger’s not subtextual allegory for sexual assault, it is the text. At bare minimum Burke should be beaten to a bloody pulp, and “he had an accident and we couldn’t recover the body” isn’t out of the question. Him dying moments later to a xeno doesn’t feel particularly satisfying in that regard. The other humans don’t get the chance to render judgement.
 

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Power’s down again in clear callback to original; point for xenos being wholly artificially and damnably smart. But not smart enough to do this earlier, so who knows if they actually intentionally chewed through the cables like a squirrel.
 

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I know this xeno spared Newt for drama, but thinking Watsonian about it I can’t figure out what’s going on. The xenos show no compunction about killing people and wasting their bodies during the rest of the film, why is Newt the exception? She’s much lower mass than any of the marines. Do xenos even actually need a live host? They grow so fast they can’t possibly be absorbing a meaningful amount of nutrients, since if they did they’d just insta-kill the host long before the chestburster bursts chest.

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This is me speaking as a pair of fresh eyes from 2026 with a very specific set of experiences shaping my interpretation: the finale felt a bit unheimlich in ways that offset the B-movie with extremely high production value we get at the end.

There's an essay out there, though I can't remember title, author, or website because why would I remember something important, about sci-fi's recurring obsession with reproduction and how the symbolic and often literal hope for the future is tied to the reproductive capabilities of a young woman (or, as is the case here and depressingly common, a child). It's One of those things that doesn't stop being seen once it's seen, certainly not while living in the age we do.

[Historical context is important, Aliens comes out 6 years after Michelle Remembers and during the McMartin Preschool Trial. Which is to say that the zeitgeist of its creation is one where the fear of lurking sexual predators blinds many to the real abuses carried out right under their noses.]

We know how xenos work and we know the fears that they embody. It’s just the text. Newt being captured by the xenos is objectively the threat of sexual assault, and the movie’s going for a parental revenge fantasy in response. I'm not so hypocritical to deny that I like dipping into that trope, but the circumstances here felt too clean for comfort. The perpetrator is a faceless, mindless, incomprehensible Other against whom all violence is justified. Burke gets his karmic death but it isn’t in such a way that would sully the hands of the other characters. Newt is effectively a token used to prove the morality of the rest of the cast.

[I can't imagine the ending of this movie playing out the same if Newt was a boy. Not that the scenario is unthinkable, but that I don't think a blockbuster from 1986 would do it. That Newt would be given some opportunity to help kill the Queen, or cleverly escape, or there'd be much more overt gay panic to maintain the sexual menace.]

Burke is a pathetic bag of shit whose combination of stupid, desperate to please his corpo overlords, and inured to the violence he inflicts on other people (since he's always done it at a distance) leads him to release facehuggers on Ripley and Newt. But because he's human, and he's a human within a system that rewards those behaviors, I think he deserves much more of the culpability than he's given. The xenos are amoral in the extreme, voiding even the baseline behaviors of a normal animal half the time (because these movies can never make up their mind.) They're as evil as a forest fire, while Burke is someone doing a gender reveal party because he thinks that nothing bad will happen to him.

But, just because Burke probably deserves to get beaten to death with a crowbar doesn’t mean that beating him to death with a crowbar is good. It's good for the story, certainly, because it can add moral complexity and play up the compare-and-contrast between Ripley and the Queen, but it's still a pretty brutal murder.

[All this is ultimately the balance I try to walk with MSF and my other work. It feels good to imagine the fist of an angry god leaving a red smear on the sidewalk where a particular motherfucker once walked. It's also far too easy for that fantasy to become an idol and for the retributive violence to become the object of worship. It's the evergreen tweet about knowing that monarchy is shitty but wanting all the same to see the chosen king wielding his magic sword. We all want to see mama bear kill the shit out of whoever threatens the cub, but we've got to remember that she's still going to leave a mangled corpse when she's done.]

I don't really have a closing thought for this, there's no real conclusion. But, man, there is a lot of Gender this series and none of it gets any better handled than this. 

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Things I like about the ending: 

• Queen effects are 11/10.
• The Queen knows how elevators work, and that’s hilarious.
• Ripley is smart and cooks the eggs before they can hatch.
• Bishop is great, he's been great this entire movie. 

Things I don't like about the ending that I haven't already mentioned

• Can we not with the flashing lights?
• A 30 km blast zone means they need to get at least 18 miles away in seconds. I don't remember how much time they had, but if I'm charitable and say that they have 10 seconds to do it, that's 6480 miles per hour for the bare-minimum safe distance. Miracle everyone on board was not utterly obliterated.
• How the fuck did the Queen piggyback on the shuttle with no one noticing? 
• Ripley's airlock maneuver probably should have torn off her leg. 

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Alternate Ending: Burke finds out about the Queen (probably through the notes left by the colony scientists), and ends up snapping under the pressure and going full cultist. Like he’s certain the Queen is sapient and can be reasoned with, and kidnaps Newt in the chaos for a bit of human sacrifice (“We’ve killed so many of her children, we need to pay her back with one of our own"). Give him some sort of repellent just convenient enough to get him to the heart of the hive unharmed but not convenient enough to solve the problem. Probably some hacked together job of “oh xenos use scent or some kind of ultrasonic pulse to identify each other so if we’re super careful and don’t do anything to blow our cover we can get through the hive.”

Ripley tracks him down, shoots him in the head / beats him to death with a crowbar, rescues Newt, escape sequence as normal. Me being me, I'd probably not end up killing the Queen. Wounding, yes, but if we're going to imply the Queen is sapient (as this movie has), I'd be fine with an "all right, now we're even" ending. We're no longer in horror mode by the end of Aliens anyway, might as well lean into it and force whatever poor shmuck is stuck doing the third film with that can of worms.

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I mostly enjoyed Aliens, but I think this is the point where the series hits the point of no return. Most of the ways it builds on Alien are both cool and make sense, it's expanded the world in interesting and generally logical ways, but it's closed things off as well. How do you build off of this? We've escalated to action shlock (mostly positive) so now this is what people will expect. We built on what came before but didn't add enough extra parts to build off of later down the line. The trajectory is set, and now it will just get harder to diverge from it.