#100: Aliens
Release Date: July 18th, 1986
Format: Blu-ray
Written by: James Cameron
Directed by: James Cameron
4 Stars
James Cameron is a furnace of ambition and a deeply creative, difficult person with a laundry list of ex-wives. I suspect that his films are a byproduct of this inner tumult of intelligence and vision. Whereas someone like, let’s say, Martin Scorcese’s genius seems to lie squarely within the realm of cinematic creation - I couldn’t imagine Martin Scorcese’s exceptional talent translating to anything other than creating films - I feel like James Cameron’s intelligence could go in myriad directions. I could see him running a multinational corporation. Or designing a forklift. Or wiring and sequencing a drone light show. Really anything that involves creative solutions, design, and doing something exceptionally.
Before writing this review I did a little bit of reading on Cameron, and his upbringing seems perfectly apropos of who he became. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother an artist (what a perfect marriage of sensibilities to create the man who would later write Aliens and become a foremost expert on deep sea exploration). He grew up in rural Ontario, Canada, enjoyed building things as a young man, but was not a particularly great student. After moving with his family to southern California in his late teens, he enrolled and subsequently dropped out of college. He worked odd jobs and experimented with drugs.
And then he found movies. Getting his foot in the door with exploitation films, Cameron was like Michael Jordan playing in a men’s league at the YMCA, proving his worth immediately and ascending quickly through the production ranks of various late ‘70s low budget sci-fi films, from production assistant to art department director to special effects designer to production designer.
In 1982 he finally had the opportunity to direct a movie, Piranha II: The Spawning. It was bad. Battles with producers and compromised creative control hamstrung Cameron. Never again would he make something in which he was not at the helm, the sole visionary.
Then he wrote and directed The Terminator, crossed paths with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the rest is history.
If you have any doubts regarding James Cameron’s talent or capacity for creation, it was actually during the production of The Terminator that he worked on developing Aliens (and, listening to Cameron’s Aliens’ Blu-ray commentary track, I learned that he took on a third job(!), writing Rambo: First Blood Part II; so over-leveraged with writing responsibilities, Cameron decided to calculate how many pages of script he needed to write across these various projects and divided them by the number of hours he had before production began). Convinced that The Terminator would most likely see a modest financial return at best (he was wrong), and being mostly a gun-for-hire writer on the Rambo project, Cameron envisioned a much greater potential in growing his own career by expanding the creative brilliance of Ridley Scott’s Alien for a sequel.
The original Alien, written by Dan O’Bannon, is beautifully conceived. A cold, character-driven horror suspense set in space, the milieu became instantly iconic: tactile spaceship equipment, a sound design dominated by the ship’s quietly droning mechanical systems, and softly glowing ambient lighting, both comforting and disturbing, casting dark shadows into the recesses of the ship’s interior.
In Aliens, Cameron works devotedly from this milieu, but completely, and brilliantly, switches genres on us. Once our protagonist, Ripley, returns to the planet LV-426 with a team of space marines to investigate lost contact with a human colony there, we quickly realize that this is not an atmospheric horror mood piece at all. No, this is an enormous action-adventure, horror, suspense, monster movie, men (and some badass women)-on-a-mission extravaganza.
Given a cushy, almost $20 million budget, James Cameron is finally allowed to fully exert his ambition and genius, and he makes as big and as fun of a movie as you can imagine. It’s a great, great spectacle. I think I prefer it to Ridley Scott’s original.
James Cameron would go on to reach this level of grandiose cinematic achievement a few more times in his career, namely with Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Titanic, and Avatar. But I selfishly wish there were more. They say a person’s greatest strength is also their greatest weakness, and for film lovers, it’s a shame that James Cameron has only directed nine narrative feature films in 42 years as a director. Decades of his life have been devoted to intellectual pursuits such as deep sea exploration, motion capture, and 3D photography, instead of making movies explicitly. It seems like his remaining years as a filmmaker will be devoted to his Avatar franchise, which seems to be driven more by his technical fascinations than it is with cinematic storytelling.
Aliens marries both of these aspects, the technical and the cinematic. It shows James Cameron is a visionary, whose ability to pull off large-scale film escapism is as strong as any filmmaker who has ever lived.
