https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMtv1WfgJFA
Tag: aliens
Aliens Week: Aliens (1986) opening credits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlfAokjSa2s
Aliens Week: Mondo Aliens posters
Aliens Week: James Cameron’s Aliens at 30
The first time I saw the movie Aliens I was 12 years old. It was a Saturday night and me, my brother and a cousin were all camped out on our living room floor one Saturday evening as we always did that summer. That particular night Aliens was set to premiere on HBO and we three had made it our mission that weekend to watch it since none of us had seen it yet.
And Aliens did not disappoint. Myself as a 12 year old loved it, my brother at eight was a little too young to get it but I think he liked it since his big brother liked it. But I think Aliens hit my ten year old cousin a little hard. When we finally decided to try and get some sleep after the movie had ended it was getting late and we all climbed into our sleeping bags in the dark of the living room. I’d begun to doze off when the air conditioner in the living room clicked on. At the time we had several window units around the house and when they’d automatically turn on from time to time there’d be a loud “snap” then a growl as the unit powered up and came to life.
To my cousin, this must’ve sounded like one of the alien monsters, which made him literally scream in reaction, jump up and dive for cover by the couch. It was only a momentary fright and he regained his senses a few seconds later and sheepishly came back to his sleeping bag and endless hours of ribbing from my brother and myself over him thinking the air conditioner was an alien.
That’s my strongest memory of the movie Aliens that turns 30 this year.
To me, Aliens is a seminal film. Before I always thought sci-fi was mostly things like Star Wars and re-runs of the original Star Trek. The universe of Star Wars might have been a lot dirtier than that of Star Trek, but both were similar in tone. The good guys always won and no one died who didn’t deserve it — or at least died in order to move the story along.
Aliens was quite a different “beast.”
The setting of Aliens from space ships to space stations to far off worlds feels real and lived in. Like a place that real people in a real future might call home. And in Aliens lots of people die — most of them just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just like in real life, the universe of Aliens is a harsh place where things happen unexpectedly and not always fairly.
Even today I still watch Aliens about once a year and it’s still one of my favorite films. From the vistas of outer space to the Colonial Marines duking it out with the alien creatures to the character of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), whom we knew had a strong survival streak in her from the first outing in Alien (1979) who gets to go into her “tough as nails get in her way and she’s going to throw you aside” persona Aliens works from start to finish. Even today in the era of movies costing hundreds of millions of dollars to create using specialized computer effects, the analog FX of Aliens are, dare I say, superior to what’s used in movies today.
The budget of Aliens in todays dollars is something like a little more than $40 million. To put that number into perspective, Captain America: The Winter Soldier cost something like $170 million.
And I think it’s these real special effects of real people in real environments fighting these “real” creatures that makes the movie work so well. Everything in Aliens feels believable and there’s nothing that happens that feels out of place or there to “show off.”
What I find fascinating is that the original Alien was brilliant and the different but also great Aliens was amazing, that none of the films that followed were ever able to match either the original or Aliens brilliance. I think that those two movies set such a high mark in the franchise as it were that everything that came after from Alien Resurrection to Alien vs Predator is simply trying to redo what was done so well in Aliens back in 1986.
Direct Beam Comms #30
TV
Game of Thrones
The sixth season finale of the series Game of Thrones titled “The Winds of Winter” aired last Sunday on HBO and was pretty great. The episode finished a lot of on-going storylines of the series and set a path towards some sort of conclusion to the overall Game of Thrones story at some point in the near future.
If only the fifth and the rest of the sixth seasons had been as good.
During the last two seasons of Game of Thrones much of the multitude of storylines have essentially been stuck in place. Things would happen to the characters and they’d do things in reaction to them, but in the end they’d end up right in the same place they started in. The series seemed to have completely lost its momentum and didn’t seem to be headed anywhere I could discern. I’m not sure if this was because the show’s based on the popular book series, and the creators of the TV series were biding their time trying to stretch things out for the storyline of the books to catch up with the show, or if the series creators were trying to do their best at translating the story of the books to TV which meant a lot of the same stuff over and over again? Regardless, the last few seasons of Game of Thrones simply haven’t been as good as the first few.
That being said, “The Winds of Winter” seemed to do a lot to right the series’ course.
Over the years the main and secondary casts of Game of Thrones have ballooned to perhaps dozens of actors. And with a cast that big meant that some main characters were written out of the show for entire seasons while others would only get a few minutes of screen time each season.
“The Winds of Winter” seemed to have fixed those issues with many characters exiting the series while at the same time all the various storylines of the show that have played out independently for years now being brought together into a single arch.
All of which is great. While all those separate stories might have been cool in the beginning, as we slowly got more and more and more separate stories the series grew into this colossal, unmanageable beast that started to get hard to follow. I can’t tell you how many times my friend Michael had to key me onto who was who’s brother/sister/aunt/uncle and why I should be caring about them. But it seems now like things might have changed on the show for the better. Even if it means less of what makes Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones and more cues from things like The Lord of the Rings right down to how battles play out and how oaths are delivered.
Season 6: C+, “The Winds of Winter”: B+
One of the best series on TV Halt and Catch Fire is set to return Tuesday, August 23 to AMC. They’re calling it a “late summer” return, but to me late August is the start of the fall TV season.
Movies
Alien observation
When we first meet the character of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien at the most she’s got a few months to live and at the least several weeks from her perspective. The events of Alien plays out over a few days and at the end of the movie Ripley goes into a frozen hyper sleep where she dozes for 57 years before being rescued. But from her perspective one second she goes to sleep and the next she’s awakened by her rescuers.
Those 57 years pass in a flash to her.
From the looks of her apartment, the fact that she has to go through legal hearings on the events that transpired in Alien and that she has enough time to get a license to use heavy machinery and work on the docks, I’d say the events of Aliens play out over the course of a few months. And again, she’s in hyper sleep on the way to Acheron with the marines and when she’s awakened I’d say that Aliens plays out over no more than a week’s time total after.
The same goes for Alien 3 — Ripley’s in hyper sleep after Aliens and is awakened on Fiorina 161 where the story plays out over the course of, again, maybe a week. And the Ripley after that in Alien Resurrection is a clone and doesn’t really count!
So from Ripley’s perspective the three original Alien trilogy movies take place over the course of the worse few months anyone’s ever experienced!
(BTW — you can thank me for it if the next Alien movie is called Alien Observation.)
Sully movie trailer
“I’ve got 40 years in the air, but in the end I’m going to be judged on 208 seconds.”
This week in pop-culture history
- 1978: Battlestar Galactica (the original series) debuts in European cinemas
- 1982: TRON opens in theaters
- 1985: Back to the Future premiers in theaters
- 1996: Independence Day opens in theaters