Strange_Bundle (Level 18)

Despite my lack of confidence in my previous post, I watched Aliens today, for the first time in...  maybe more than half my current years lived.
 
In a way some of my fears were confirmed, yet there were still some strong moments that I don't think I reacted to quite the same way back then.
 
First of all, Newt's lines and single-tone, high pitch screaming were just as awkward as I remember them, but she's no moppet: she actually acts as a symbol of innocence, and her interactions with Ripley, if at times forced, are rather touching. 
 
One thing that completely slipped my mind was the tense buildup before everything started falling apart, and this made the scenes of destruction much more affecting and involving than I remember. The marines still feel a bit too lax and ineffectual at times, suggesting at least that the military's discipline has dropped sharply in the intervening years, but right when they started with their banter, even though I still think it was inferior to Alien's banter, it was like seeing familiar friends. I found myself smiling when they were giving each other shit, and their teasing actually feels charmingly tame by current standards. 
 
Aliens, I've also begun to realize, actively tries to subvert expectations, so once you're familiar with the story a bit of its fire is gone. You know what's going to happen, you know about the three endings all piled on top of each other hearkening to Terminator and even the first Alien (doom in a fiery pit, whew-made-it-boom, Bishop spills his guts). And though the tone is so very different than the first film, it wasn't until Newt's rescue that I felt this tone to be so incompatible with the lurking horror of Alien, especially with the last-minute airlift. 
 
Part of the script that I appreciate all the more now, despite its painful telegraphing of a few elements that will be used later and its leaning a bit too hard on certain characters' obvious traits, was its insistence that things be messy, and have a cost to them. Another script might have let more live to start, might have made everyone completely compartmentalized in their roles, telegraphing what their character was there to do. Sure, Burke is a slimy bastard (I guess he knew the aliens were there? was never absolutely clear to me, but I guess it would have come out in the trial had he lived), but his absolute villainy is contrasted with Hudson's panic and the lieutenant's incompetence, though the latter two manage to redeem themselves in minor ways before they're killed off (almost as though the script was god and picked off the characters with less pristine personalities). Few characters were nuanced, but Bishop and Apone were still a joy to see.
 
It was also neat seeing the Special Edition, where I saw who played the colony's commander, good old Mac McDonald, Captain Frank Hollister from Red Dwarf, who actually references his deleted Aliens character in one of Red Dwarf's later episodes. Weird to recognize the lines he gives AFTER hearing them on Red Dwarf. Some of the special edition stuff was certainly unnecessary, but the moments at the beginning, with Ripley learning about her daughter, help cement later themes and give us a better idea what human culture is like before we're thrust out into space again.
 
Now for the geeky stuff: the alien reproductive system will never allow them to multiply, if what we've seen is pretty much it. They need hosts to create a single offspring, so they're limited to the hosts they find. A small consolation for anyone who dies by bursting chest, but they don't seem capable of any sort of population explosion, at least.   This is also, at least as measured by the deleted scene about Ripley's daughter, a purely faster-than-light science fiction setting. At least in Alien one could wonder if they needed "hypersleep" in order to avoid growing old or going nuts, but the time frame was severely narrowed by the daughter scene when Ripley says she had planned to make it back before her child's birthday. Unless LV-426 is really close by, this means hyperspace.
 
This movie's influence is still being felt, crazy as that seems. Space marines are ubiquitous, especially in video games, and good old Giger's alien designs probably got a big boost from this movie, making a dark, long-headed, tube-covered monster pretty much the go-to symbol of terror and alien-ness.  
 
For an action picture, the movie feels downright classy compared to its 80's contemporaries and many of its winking-at-the-camera modern equivalents, but I found its direct lineage and change in tone from the first film inescapable, only strengthening my feelings about the first film and making me want to watch it again. Yet I accept Aliens, unlike the later Alien films, and I still wish they had set the third film on Earth with a full outbreak, which seems like a natural way to end it all.  Since it's really not possible, I'll take these two and call it good.
 
An interesting site concerning some early changes and possibilities for the first Alien film.