One of the things that I find most unpleasant about the current movie-going experience are the trailers. They’ve become slicker and louder than ever, but nevertheless a relentless homogenization has set in. The reason that a spoof video called A Trailer for Every Academy Award-Winning Movie Ever Made went viral earlier this year was because it deftly mocked a great number of the tired conventions used by modern-day Hollywood’s editors and marketers. See for yourself:
[youtube 7_8_HO1x1BY — click here to watch in full-screen]
The above short wouldn’t be so funny if the horrid little things weren’t so ripe for parody. To be fair, the trailers of old were just as bad in their way — if you watch classic film DVDs and take the time to run the special features, you’ll soon grow weary of seeing every film advertised as the GREATEST CINEMATIC TRIUMPH EVER! But we’re supposed to be better than that these days, we’re supposed to have evolved, right? In truth, our stuff’s just as cheesy, and will be revealed as such in a couple decades, when people yet unborn will watch them on some as-yet-unfathomed format and chuckle at how predictable and “of their time” they are.
Every once in awhile, however, a trailer comes along that’s startling in its freshness, that manages to break all the rules and become memorable in its own right. So it was with the two-minute teaser to Aliens, first spied by my then fifteen-year-old self in the spring of 1986. Can’t remember which movie I was at — Cobra probably, or maybe The Karate Kid Part II. But I’ve never forgotten that daring, brilliant bit of marketing:
[youtube fjlN-m7CUvA — click here to watch in full-screen]
No gravelly-voiced narrator intoning exhausted platitudes. No giving away the plot of the movie. In fact, no dialogue at all, just chilling music and sound effects overlaying a brooding nightmare, all of it implicitly promising equal parts horror and action. A true teaser trailer, that manages to recapture everything audiences loved about director Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) while clearly marking itself as something much more than a pale retread.
I still remember hearing others in the theater catching sight of Michael Biehn in full futuristic military gear and whispering, “Hey, that’s Reese from The Terminator! Cool!” Blending the original Alien‘s carefully measured horror with classic sci-fi author Robert Heinlein’s blistering space-marine concept was a stroke of genius. These days the decision seems obvious and inevitable. But at the time the film was being made, many thought that all the action would dilute and destroy the wonderfully creepy, character-driven atmosphere created for the first picture in the series by Ridley Scott and his talented crew.
Because of this, the movie took more guts than most to make. It was a follow-up to a treasured movie, an “instant classic” from seven years earlier. Director James Cameron recalls power lunches with various executives and agents in the wake of his success with The Terminator, where everyone was warning him away from the project. “Kid, kid, kid, trust me,” they all told him. “Don’t make this Alien II thing. It’s a losing proposition. It’s a no-win for you. If it’s good, it’ll be good because Ridley Scott did such a good first film. And if it’s bad, it’ll be totally your fault.”
When we movie-buff civilians talk about films and how we’d do things different, we often forget the pressure-cooker atmosphere that these people work under, making career-altering decisions with millions of dollars on the line. Could any of us honestly say that we’d have implacably stuck to our guns in the face of all those warnings from people with a lot more experience than us? To his credit, and to the benefit of an entire genre of literature and filmmaking, Cameron did. As he recalls, “My response was, ‘Yeah, but I really like it. I think it’ll be cool. Can’t I just do it?'”
By the time he was finished, he had “done it” all right. Costing only $18 million dollars (anyone who says we aren’t living in a time of immense, catastrophic inflation is nuts), it brought in many times that and became one of the biggest hits of the year. Anyone worried that Cameron would forsake horror in favor of gunplay, or that seeing dozens of the eponymous creatures mowed down would somehow demystify their power to frighten, had their concerns allayed in short order. Gale Anne Hurd, the movie’s producer (and, for a few years, James Cameron’s second wife), remembers one screening where “There was one woman who could not look at the screen, and she was grabbing the side of the seat so hard that she actually pulled it off. And then she started pounding the arm of the seat onto her boyfriend’s leg because she was so terrified by the film. But she couldn’t stop looking.”
Ever since its debut in 1986, it’s also been ranked as one of the best action movies ever made. Unlike the majority of films where the fights become dated, the passage of time has only made Aliens look better. BH’s John Nolte put it well in a previous column: “The one thing Cameron has always done well is to create busy, energetic, brilliantly choreographed action scenes that allow the audience to follow what’s going on. That’s not a small thing because it’s becoming a lost art in Hollywood as more and more filmmakers lazily trade coherence for the artless shaky-cam and hyper edits.” The many adrenaline-pumping fight scenes in Aliens still thrill, and even after a quarter-century they look more visually effective and accomplished than 99% of modern action movies.
“This Time It’s War,” was the tagline Cameron crafted for his own version of the Alien legend. “It’s blaster action rather than Gothic future horror,” said the Los Angeles Times in its review. David Giler, one of the film’s producers, called Aliens a cross between his own Southern Comfort (1981) and The Magnificent Seven (1960). Writing in The Futurist, her book on Cameron, Rebecca Keegan adds that, “For Aliens, Cameron envisioned something reminiscent of World War II combat pictures like Sahara or The Dirty Dozen, where a scruffy, ethnically diverse squad of soldiers find themselves trapped behind enemy lines and pull together to face an overwhelming foe.”
World War II wasn’t the only influence. At the time Cameron wrote the picture, he was also hard at work on the script for Rambo: First Blood Part II, and the latter’s focus on the pain and betrayal left behind in the wake of the Vietnam War bled over into the sci-fi script. Aliens features spaceships that drop marines off on planets with visuals eerily similar to Hueys landing soldiers in the jungle on 1960s newscasts. “It was a definite parallel to Vietnam,” Cameron admits, “to tell the story of a technologically superior military force which is defeated by a determined, furtive, asymmetric enemy.”
Also like Rambo — and unlike many cinematic stories that reference stories of Vietnam-era defeat and loss — Aliens features not just characters who are jeer-worthy but heroes who are cheer-worthy. To my mind, by far the most interesting Aliens influence is one brought up by Rebecca Keegan in The Futurist: “He also had in mind John Wayne’s film The Alamo, in which Wayne, as Davy Crockett, galvanizes his overmatched, ragtag troops against the advancing Mexican army. As Cameron saw it, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, was John Wayne, the unflappable leader in a hopeless battle.”
Sigourney Weaver’s Aliens character as John Wayne? I like it. I also like the other great characters Aliens introduced to movie audiences: Vasquez, Hudson, Hicks, et. al. It’s amazing that, even after twenty-five years, one need only mention those curt surnames for the fully-formed personalities to come roaring back out of the past. Has there ever been a more memorable assortment of grunt soldiers in movie history?
Aliens, then, is a film that can only have been made by a man bearing a peculiar assortment of influences, talents, and an absolutely incredible amount of mental fortitude. For if Aliens is a war story, so is the tale of its making. . . .
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