one-word review: slimy

An Essay On Why I Like the Aliens, by Jessica

Yesterday I watched all four Alien movies in a row. I’d seen only bits and pieces of the first one previously. My reviews:

Alien: Good but boring, in the same way Night of the Living Dead is good but boring. Obviously the “best” of the four, though perhaps not the most enjoyable. The only one that seems to be true horror as opposed to horror/sci-fi or just sci-fi. Plus, Jonesy!

Aliens: I can see why people think this is the best in the series, though they’re wrong. Mostly because of the little kid. Ugh, little kids.

Alien 3: I liked how they got rid of the kid quickly and unceremoniously. Nobody needed her. I liked Ripley’s haircut the best in this one. The ending was decent. It wasn’t as bad as Ian said it would be.

Alien: Resurection: The worst in the series, and all Joss Whedon’s fault. Way, way too sci-fi-y (That stupid cube-of-whiskey trick? Dumb dumb dumb dumb stupid.).   And the making the basketball shot was stupid, and the look on Cher’s dad’s face when he pulls out a piece of his own brain (ugh – cross-eyed?  I bet that was written into the script, even: “Pulls out piece of brain, looks at it cross-eyed, wah-wah music plays.”)  And Ripley doing that whole “actress playing an animal” thing where she goes big-eyed and slowly tilts her head to one side, as though trying to understand this “humanity” you speak of?  Boring.  And blah blah everybody’s searching for their humanity, wah. Though – the alien searching for its humanity, too was the only saving grace in the movie. The newborn, period, was the only saving grace. Those eyes!  Goddammit that thing broke my fucking heart! Seriously, the newborn saved the hell out of this movie.  A great death scene for him, too.  I kind of like to imagine though that he didn’t die and he went back to earth with Ripley and the series turned into a funny sitcom where Ripley had to teach it not to eat people and stuff and they lived together in an apartment in LA and had misadventures together.  In one episode, they take a yoga class!  Hijinks!

Overall:

• Ripley only aged about 20 years in about 250. That’s pretty good.
• Ripley likes to walk around in her underpants. That’s okay. We all like it.
• Weak pretty things to be saved, successively: Jonesy, Newt, giant mutant rapist prisoners I guess, Winnona Ryder.
• Incidentally, who do you think adopted Jones? I don’t think Ripley had an awful lot of friends back there on that mining base or whatever. She probably just set him up with a whole lot of extra bowlsful of food and 200 years later, they discovered him when they were trying to re-sell her apartment or whatever.
• Ripley doing that prisoner suddenly was stoooooopid.  It felt like they were just finally trying to shoe-horn in a sex scene.  They weren’t content to just have a badass female hero who didn’t wear high heels or have pretty hair or do boys – they had to remind us, “she’s still pretty!  boys like her!  it’s okay!”  (Ripley doing the alien was acceptable.)
• Halfway through the second one I thought I had discovered a very deep and interesting theme about strong female warriors and mothers and queens. Ian informed me that everyone already knew this.
• Ian says that the real overarching theme of these movies is the pitiful failure of navigation systems in the future.  Every damn movie begins with her having crashed or gone off course or something.
• Alien incest! Ripley’s alien child is also her alien grandchild! I guess that’s…scandalous?
• Omg speaking of: alien vagina.
• O hai look it’s the cast of Firefly.
• The best part of the series was constantly pointing out things that happen in the future.  “In the future, cats are named ‘Jones.’”  “In the future, you travel in your underpants.”  “In the future, business cards are clear.”  “In the future of the future, aliens get eyeballs.”