1986 • R • 2hs 17mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
👽 Alien(s): An Alien and Aliens double-feature
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie. You walk into your pizza joint and the air smells like fresh tomato sauce. You pick up your pie and ask the guy at the counter, “Hey, what should I get from Blockbuster to go with this?” Tonight he says, “You ever seen that one where the loom lady goes back and there’s even more aliens?” He must mean Sigourney Weaver’s 1986 action-horror masterpiece, Aliens. We pop in the tape.
Here’s the plot. After 57 years adrift in hypersleep, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) gets rescued by her employers who really want to know what happened last time. Since Ripley took her long nap, a terraforming colony set up shop where she and Nostromo’s crew found alien eggs. Uh-oh. Weasley corporate hottie Burke (Paul Reiser) smooth-talks her into returning with a platoon of Colonial Marines to save them. Will they kill the aliens once and for all, asks Ripley? Yeah yeah yeah sure sure sure of course of course, says Burke!
Ripley finds herself aboard a ship bound for cursed LV-426. With her are commander Gorman (William Hope), Sergeant Apone (Al Matthews), head-on-a-swivel Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn), bros Privates Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) and Drake (Mark Rolston), loudmouth Private Hudson (Bill Paxton) and house mother Bishop (Lance Henriksen). They reach the colony only to find … no one. We got a Roanoke on our hands. Turns out the aliens are colonizing too. Any human colonists remaining? Can our heroes fend off aliens long enough to find out? And, hey, where’s this fresh batch of aliens coming from anyway?
The Movie They Almost Didn’t Make
You’re not gonna believe this, but Aliens almost didn’t get made. About three times over! Here’s how it happened.
The original, Alien, cost about $10M (expensive for the time) but raked in $100M. With a return like that, the studio couldn’t wait to make a sequel. Right? Wrong. The execs at Fox called it a fluke. Producing studio Brandywine didn’t think a sequel worth making was even possible. Director Ridley Scott had moved on to Blade Runner (’82) and a million-dollar commercial for Apple. Alien 2 was on the rocks before it even started.
On the rocks, that is, until James Cameron came along. See, a couple fellas at Fox read his The Terminator (’84) (hey, we covered that!) script and convinced him to write a treatment for Aliens 2. What would you do with this? they said. Make it “Ripley and soldiers”, they said. Cameron wrote it, but the studio stiffs hated it. So he got down to business making his robo-Arnold picture and forgot all about it. Later, as the story goes, Cameron re-pitched the suits by writing “Alien” on the chalkboard, then adding an “s”, then drawing a line through it to make “Alien$”. His two-pronged approach—make several aliens and a whole lotta money. They still didn’t go for it.
But you know what changes a studio’s mind? A change in leadership. In ’84, Lawrence Gordon moved into the top office at Fox. He’d go on to back Predator (’87). I just watched that one again last week—still rips. As you can imagine, he loved Cameron’s treatment. Asked him to expand it into a script. Cameron, who was on hiatus from shooting The Terminator, wrote Gordon a ninety-page bona fide masterpiece. It folded in alien moms, power loaders and his fear that T1 would bomb. While Alien is lean and focused, everything Cameron could think of went into his sequel script for Aliens.
Cameron’s Crew
When The Terminator made a tidy profit, Cameron suddenly found himself with his next job lined up—Gordon hired him for Aliens. They never even offered it to Ridley Scott.
When you’re building a career, two things matter. Number one: What you pick to do. And number two: Who you pick to do it with. Cameron was quickly becoming the guy who could string a complex sci-fi story onto a simple emotional thread. And he was building a roster of collaborators who could too. Here’s a few of his repeating players:
⭐️ Bill Paxton: Hudson here, punk from whom Arnold liberates clothes in The Terminator
⭐️ Michael Biehn: Aliens’ Hicks and Kyle Reese in The Terminator
⭐️ Lance Henriksen: Bishop in this, a cop in The Terminator
⭐️ Jenette Goldstein: Our Vasquez, John Conner’s foster mom in T2 (hey, we covered that!)
⭐️ Gale Anne Hurd: Cameron’s Aliens producer, whom he said was the only person who could keep him honest and tell him “no”. He also married her for his second of five marriages.
⭐️ Sigourney Weaver: Uh Avatar
You’re Interrupting Again
In Alien there’s just one … what’s that? You heard what? Run that by me again.
I heard this was a sequel to Terminator.
Okay, no, but Cameron wrote it while making The Terminator. See, doubt is contagious. Cameron thought T1 might flop hard. So did the studio, so did his actors. So when production hit pause for months while Arnold made Conan the Destroyer (’84), Cameron wrung every last idea out of his brain into his Aliens script. That’s why, from lost colonies to power loaders, it’s chockablock with concepts. A true sci-fi script.
I heard that power loader was real.
Sort of. Like every prop, a physical version did exist. But the difficulty level of controlling it required a crew member in a black jumpsuit stationed behind it to actually operate it.
Fine, but I heard the flamethrowers were real.
Yep, they were. The actors lit sets on fire on accident with them. Bananas!
I heard they made custom Reeboks for Weaver.
Weird product placement but yeah, they did. Cameron stipulated only that the shoes involve no laces so Weaver could easily slip them on and off in the final act.
So I heard the marines got to customize their armor too.
Some did. During rehearsals the actors playing the Colonial Marines added words and doodads to their costumes. I’m gonna level with you—it’s so dumb. Especially Drake’s summer camp-esque braids hanging off of everything. But boy did the cast love doing that. Michael Biehn, a late replacement for James Remar who had to drop out due to a coke arrest, hated that he missed customizing his own armor. Their earnest seriousness about this macho little boy stuff takes me out of it.
Okay but I heard the aliens are just guys in suits.
True the first time, but less this time. Let’s get into it.
Mighty Xenomorphin’
In Alien there’s one alien. Clearest title of all time. In Aliens, we’ve got several on our hands. But the story doesn’t actually care about the multi-alien problem. We get no situations like Jurassic Park’s raptors in the kitchen cleverly ganging up on our characters. No, Aliens only cares about where these baddies are coming from. If you got unlimited aliens, somebody’s been makin’ more.
The xenomorph queen is new, but it didn’t come from H.R. Giger like the original did. What they called the “warriors”—the adult runaround xenomorphs—carried over from Alien. Eggs and facehuggers too. As we covered last time, artist H.R. Giger’s freaky brain spawned those lifecycle forms. What a weird man. Bet he’s an amazing hang. Anyway, Aliens’ plot required a queen, a new invention from Cameron’s own mind. Gotta be one of those things he wrote and then scratched his head and said, “How’m I gonna make this?” You gotta remember, Cameron came from creature features. Worked in special effects prop design originally. That’s why his first picture was Piranha II. So the guy rolled up his sleeves and designed the alien queen himself.
From his sketches it went into the capable hands of Stan Winston. You know Stan? He’s the creature effects guy behind Cameron’s Terminators. Other credits: the Predator in, uh what’s it called, checking my notes, okay I’m seeing it’s called Predator, the Penguin in Batman Returns (’92), dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (’93), suits in Iron Man (’08), animatronics in the Universal Studios ride T2-3D: Battle Against Time, a Mr. Roboto mask for Styx, and, of course, animal transformations in Manimal (’83), a show about a man who can turn into any animal he wants. Weird that it only lasted 8 episodes. Impossible to say why. Winston died in ’08 while working on what would become Avatar (’09). Oh no no not like while working on it, it was just his last project. They didn’t have to reset the Days Since An Accident counter or anything. You get it.
How to Make a Xenomorph
With their powers combined, Cameron and Winston extended Giger’s designs, adding detail and variations. For my money, it just doesn’t hit like the barely seen alien of the original. But I respect how tough the task was. What was that? A skeptical snort? OKAY BUCKLE UP buckaroo.
Cameron’s xenomorphs are different. While Alien posited skeletal nightmares, he gives us skittering bugs that goosh when smooshed. And the queen is the king of gooshin’. Winston called what Cameron sketched up an unholy mashup of xenomorph, praying mantis and T-Rex (I can see it). Cameron said he wanted his queen to look “hideous and beautiful at the same time, like a black widow spider”, which it does not. They made what we see in the movie out of 14’ of foam and puppetry that took nine people to operate: Two folks inside worked the arms, figure two more for the poles attached to the feet, somebody stood on a ladder and whipped the tail around with fishing line and a rod, and four more people controlled the head’s servo and hydraulics. The humans hid behind smoke and clever lighting. For her part, Weaver made sure she didn’t know how any of it worked. If it seemed real to her, it would seem real to us watching her.
Cameron kills at this stuff. Now three movies into his career, he’d figured out not how to make his ideas less upsetting but how to make them more commercial. His simple, momentum-charged plot zooms us through the yucky stuff fast enough that we don’t get stuck in it. Aliens ingredients include an alien mom womb, goopy carnage, nuclear explosion during the real world’s Cold War, colonialism on yet another planet, etc. Cameron figured out how to make an appealing product while keeping it twisted.
Blazing Through the Box Office
What did folks make of this in ’86? It was the year Challenger exploded, Pixar was born, and Aliens came out on July 18th. It opened against The Karate Kid Part II and Ruthless People. It held the number one spot for four straight weeks, going on to rake in $157M against a budget of just $18M.
Reviewers liked it. Specifically its pacing, visual effects and high level of craft. Variety said it was less original than the original, which is merely an unhelpful description of the concept of sequels. The LA Times astutely compared it to The Thing (’82) in grossness. Time observed that Aliens evolved from the original to find emotional depth for Ridley, which it certainly does. The Orlando Sentinel called it “the Jaws of the ’80s”. Roger Ebert felt it was too stressful to really be entertaining, which is sort of horror’s whole thing?
Overall, I’m surprised by how intense and scary the ol’ pen-wielders found Aliens. Teens and tweens loved it. As did the ’87 Oscars, which gave it two lil’ statues for Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects. Weaver got a nomination for Best Actress—very rad of the Oscars—but lost to, I dunno, someone else from something else less rad. Fine, it was Marlee Matlin. From Children of a Lesser God. I don’t know anything about it. But while Children of a Lesser God was remembered by I assume no one, Aliens dominated VHS players and DVD collections for the last almost forty years. Here’s to you, Ripley. Love live the queen.
Power to the She-ple
Aliens has two legacies. Action classic, obviously. Cameron bundled up tough guys, guns and gore like never before. He didn’t do it first, but he sure did it best. We talked plenty about that in Terminator and Terminator 2, so let’s go on to more interesting number two.
Aliens is also a feminist classic. While the original found Ripley on the run and under the gun, by the sequel she’s not scared anymore. Cameron wrote the screenplay with a headshot of Weaver on his desk. He pitched Weaver, who didn’t want to do another Alien installment, like this. Last time she was just part of the crew, but this time she’d be a female Rambo. Ripley would move through her trauma by going back to face her enemies. Not to eradicate them but to protect colonists and a few remarkably unprepared space rangers from them. Toward the end and with a kid under her wing, the plot pivots to Mother Ripley versus Mother Xenomorph. And you wouldn’t bet against Ripley unless you’re looking to put your wallet on a diet. Weaver saw the character’s strength at the core of the story and took the job. She nicknamed Ripley “Rambolina”.
Could Aliens be one more thing? We watched a story about troops tromping into a land just they plain don’t understand, sure that a truckload of firepower and confidence will see them through. Hmm? What’s that? “Vietnam”? Hey, you said that, pal, not me.
And so wraps our Alien(s) Double Feature with Alien and Aliens. I hadn’t seen these in forever, really glad we went back to them.
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Notes:
Giger couldn’t do Aliens creature designs because he was doing a Poltergeist movie. They couldn’t even ask him.
The marines’ smart guns are actually motorcycle parts stuck onto MG 42s attached to steadicam rigs.
Also from ’86: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Jenette Goldstein is the owner of Jenette Bras, which specializes in bras for larger cup sizes. Their slogan? “The alphabet starts at D.”
If you’re watching you can see an egg yolk squish out as the Marines’ vehicle drives over a xenomorph head. Goosh!
The director’s cut is better, but I watched the theatrical for this.
Catch up on last issue’s Alien coverage here.