Full disclosure: Aliens was my favourite film when I was 12, and Aliens is still my favourite film in 2020. I am now 35 years old and have flecks of grey in my beard. I’ve often worried about this. The film, I mean, not the beard. On the one hand, lots of people still like things they liked when they were 12. You don’t see entire generations reaching their 20s and suddenly switching their favourite colour because they think they’ve found a better one, or one day deciding they no longer care for Ribena or biscuits. Some things are just good, good for ever, and that’s that. Growing older alongside them has no impact whatsoever on their objective merits.
On the other hand, some profound intellectual awakening probably should have occurred in the intervening 23 years. Because I was not some wise-beyond-their-years child genius whose artistic tastes were surpassed only by a wit pithier than a Sunday league half-time snack. At 12, I was a preposterous little idiot. I wore, almost exclusively, Adidas “popper” tracksuit bottoms, a Fila jumper so starchy you could smash paving slabs with it, and a curtains-with-undercut hairdo you might charitably call “wildly misjudged”. This was in addition to double-train-track braces, and the general fug of Lynx Inca that was concomitant with any boy at that time who had started to want girls to like them, and rather optimistically assumed body odour was the only reason they didn’t. Yet one thing I’ve got in common with that little dolt from 1997 is Aliens. He liked it and so do I. I’ve come to accept that the reason for this is simple: Aliens is the single greatest film ever made.
I didn’t get to see it in the cinema. It came out in 1986, and I’d only been out for a year at that point. So my introduction to James Cameron’s opus came around the age of 10, from a version taped from the telly on to a knackered E180 video, from which my dad had failed in a valiant attempt to seamlessly excise the adverts by using the stop and record buttons.
My mum had developed a loose set of rules about what my sister and I were allowed to see at that age. Sex and swearing were tentatively permitted, subject to her swift judgments on gratuity. Sexual violence was a no-no, as were drugs. Horrors were out (my uncle Tony was my source for these). People shooting other people: bad. People shooting robots and/or aliens: fine. Robots and/or aliens shooting robots and/or aliens: fill your boots. Through a loophole of her own making – “It’s people v aliens, so it’s fine mum, honest” – I’d seen Alien, and found it bleak, claustrophobic and more terrifying than I cared to admit.
It was in later years I came to truly appreciate Ridley Scott’s original masterpiece, which is only the second-best film of the franchise on away goals. But I was hooked enough with the atmosphere, titular beast and the character of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley to want to see where the story went next. Nothing prepared me for the onslaught of brilliance to come.
Aliens is often regarded as a blueprint for how to execute an effective sequel. And rightly so. It didn’t try to replicate the first film. Instead, it took its essence and Scrapheap Challenged a rip-roaring war movie out of it. Ripley, the lone survivor of the mining ship, Nostromo – the sepulchral setting for the first film’s slasher-horror minimalism – joins a ragtag band of marines to take the fight back to the aliens. And what a bunch they are: Michael Biehn’s stoic Hicks, Bill Paxton’s wild-eyed gobshite Hudson, Jenette Goldstein’s badass gunslinger Vasquez. Frost, Spunkmeyer, Gorman, Apone, Drake – it’s amazing how many memorable grunts Cameron managed to forge with so little expository dialogue. That they used enormous “smart guns” mounted to their hips and sped around in a Batmobile-esque armoured personnel carrier only served to sprinkle more geek catnip on my impressionable 12-year-old brain.
The first film’s tagline was: “In space no one can hear you scream.” The tagline for Aliens was: “This time it’s war.” That, as much as anything, summed up how impossibly cool it was. The original film had scared the bejesus out of me, and I felt as if I was right there with Ripley, facing her fear, gaffer-taping a flamethrower to a machine gun because, hey, why not.
Rewatching it over the years I’ve only come to appreciate Aliens more. It remains a masterclass in building tension: we don’t actually see an alien until the hour mark, and when we finally do it’s in a bewildering frenzy of bodycam panic. The scene with Ripley and Newt (the girl Ripley finds living feral on a base long since overrun by aliens) trapped in a laboratory with a scuttling face-hugger is still a bum-clenching ordeal. Paul Reiser’s smarmy, flop-sweat-slick company man, Burke, has become ever more punchable with every passing year. And Ripley overcoming her prejudices to accept the android Bishop as a friend is more touching now than it ever was. Yes, Bishop had to be literally ripped in half in order for her to do this, but the point stands.
It could be argued that Cameron hasn’t made a truly great film since Terminator 2 (1991). That was the other adult-centric movie I remember featuring heavily in my childhood. Both Cameron films, both sequels to grimier, more disturbing originals that my mum would rather I didn’t watch, both held together by remarkable performances by their leading women. I’ve come to think that my mum was engaged in a not-so-subtle campaign to imbue me with an appreciation of strong female role models. Was she casting herself as Ripley, or Sarah Connor? Perhaps. This does rather sweetly imply that she cast my dad as Mr Biehn, as opposed to the arguably more apt Mr Bean, but maybe I’m overthinking it.
So, spotty pre-teen wazzock he may be, but my 12-year-old self and I remain in agreement. Pot Noodles are still nice. Encore Une Fois by Sash! is still an absolute stone-cold banger. And Ripley gaffer-taping a flamethrower to a machine gun is still the coolest thing ever committed to celluloid. Game over, man!
