The Screening Room: Aliens!

  
I strongly recommend you take ten minutes to go ahead and watch that video. Go ahead, I'll wait. It's not quite as good as the Predator Rap or the Robocop Rap, since it relies perhaps a bit too much on audio clips from the film, but it's still pretty great. 
 
Now, where were we? Oh yeah, we were mostly coming out at night...mostly. What can a mere mortal say about Aliens? This is, undoubtedly, my favorite movie by James Cameron, and a ridiculously influential film, especially if you look at the history of video games that take place in space. The look and feel of games like Gears Of War or Halo undoubtedly owe a lot to the angular machinery and rough-and-tumble space marines of Aliens.
 
You could also write a book about the film's recurring theme of motherhood, whether it's Ripley's fevered desire to rescue Newt, or the aliens' desire to make everyone a kind of mother by turning them into human incubators for the rest of their kind, or the alien queen's stab at revenge after the destruction of her offspring. It's a film with interesting political subtexts, as well, as was the first Alien ; Cameron himself compared the Marines' over-reliance on firepower and its inability to deal with the specific threat that the aliens posed with the U.S. soldiers who were sent to Vietnam. 
 
And, of course, a lot of fucking aliens get blown to shit. Won't you please join us at 4 PM PST in our chat room (that link will go live around 3:00 PM) and watch one of the most seminal films of the 1980s? 
 
( Note: The version of the film on Netflix Streaming is the Aliens "Collector's Edition" according to the title, but it does not have the extra footage added in the director's cut of the film. We'll sync everyone up multiple times in the film to ensure that we're all on the same page, but there will likely be incongruities here and there.)