Theme - Aliens - Life, Death, and Something In Between

Aliens – Life, Death, and Something In Between

Story by James Cameron, David Giler, and Walter Hill.

Based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

Screenplay by James Cameron.

One of my favourite go-to movies when thinking about theme is Aliens, written by the gentlemen named above. Every major plot point in the movie revolves around the theme – or in other words, what happens revolves around what it’s about.

In other other words, the plot revolves around the theme.

That theme? Life, death, and something between the two.

That thing in the middle is the twilight zone where someone exists, but isn’t alive. It’s where real-life zombies trudge through their non-lives, acting not with purpose, but just for the sake of acting.

Awake, asleep, or dead.

In an interview James Cameron talks about how he wrote the story about vets returning from war to find that they could not exist back in the peacetime world.

Aliens is about Ellen Ripley being forced to choose one of those three options. Wait and see how often how one of those three choices comes into play during the movie.

Breaking it down.

The very first time we see Ripley, she’s asleep in the hypersleep chamber, her heart and vital functions presumably reduced to a crawl. She’s not alive, she’s not dead, she’s existing in that twilight zone between the two.

She has her nightmare (by the way, this is the only scene for the first at least half hour that even vaguely resembles an action scene – the fact that we stay gripped by the story for that long in an action movie is quite the feat unto itself), and when she wakes the nurse asks her if she needs a sedative. Ripley replies, “No thanks, I’ve slept enough.”

We’ve just heard Ripley’s underlying mission – to wake up.

Unfortunately the company she works for is no help. They strip her of her flight status, not believing her story. She has no family left after being away for so long. The job she ends up with, working a loader, is ridiculously far beneath her qualifications, and can’t possibly satisfy her in any way other than to pay the bills and keep busy for the sake of keeping busy.

When we see her apartment, it’s devoid of anything personal, the walls blank. It’s a casket.

She’s existing, but not living.

Another nightmare is what propels her to finally accept that she has to make a choice – she can’t just go on existing. She’s going back out there to face her own war and choose – life or death.

More emerging from sleep, this time with the Marines. She flips right out when she realizes not who Bishop is, but what. Aside from the fact that an android caused a wee spot of trouble in “Alien”, there’s something else going on here – she subconsciously recognizes that she and Bishop are the same thing. Bishop is something that exists but is not alive, just like Ripley. And it freaks her right out.

The Marines have their meeting about the mission. They make jokes, they don’t take the threat seriously – “It’s a bug hunt.” They’re asleep to the threat of what they’re going to encounter. Ripley tries to explain it to them, but try explaining the horror of your own nightmare to someone else – it can’t be done. When she doesn’t get through to them, she loses her cool, yelling at them to WAKE UP! But they all still ignore her.

Hicks might be the only one who actually sleeps on the way down, but they’re all in dreamland – Hudson rattles off how badass they all are, and how they’re going to kick butt.

The Marines move in. Ripley watches over monitors – passive, not part of the action. Finally the Lieutenant calls the area secure – he’s living his own dream of everything going by the book.

And that’s where everyone besides Ripley gets their first eyeful of the aliens – the face huggers in sample tubes – looking somewhat like the hypersleep chambers. One of them comes alive and darts and Carter’s face when the humans come close – a mirror image of what’s about to happen with Ripley.

Up until now, Ripley has been passive. She let the Marines shoo her aside when she was trying to get them to wake up to the threat? Why? Because she took the wrong choice as her reason for coming out here – “to kill, not to study, not to bring back.”

That choice changes in a heartbeat when she lays eyes on Newt. In that moment, Ripley chooses life, living, and for the first time ignores the commands of the Marines and takes charge, grabbing a light and diving headfirst into potential danger in order to take Newt into her care.

Newt has also only been existing, barely surviving, more animal than child. She doesn’t respond to anyone until Ripley treats her like a little girl instead of a thing to be interrogated or poked and prodded, earning her the little girl’s confidence enough to tell her her name, and that only her brother calls her Rebecca.

Hudson finds the locators implanted in the colonists. They tell where the colonists are (that they still exist), but not whether they’re alive.

The Marines move in. They’re warned not to use their ammo. But Vasquez and Drake live for their guns, and sneak ammo despite the order – although it’s not entirely their fault (the order wasn’t explained), they choose death both literally (the ammunition) and figuratively.

They find the colonists. They seem to be all dead – but they’re not – they’re alive, for the moment. And then hey-o! we have a little visitor – the aliens’ way to life (being born) is through the death of another.

All hell breaks lose. Just like the colonists, what was thought dead comes alive – the walls aren’t just walls, they’re aliens, and they’re not happy with one of their babies getting roasted.

The Lieutenant’s dream of is shattered and he’s woken up by a nightmare – life, waking life, doesn’t happen just like you want it to. To expect “by the books,” to expect pure order in life is to court death. I think every writer knows a person or two who dreams big but never does anything about it – and life passes them by.

Ripley, now awake, now fighting for life, takes over. The Lieutenant fights with her, wanting to go back to sleep where everything was a nice ordered dream. It’s here that we get the other half of the mirror image of the facehugger lunging at Carter’s face – an alien smashes through the vehicle’s windshield and Ripley is face to face with her nightmare.

She slams on the brakes, causing it to tumble, then hits the gas, speeding forward to crush it. Metaphor much? J

Ripley is the reason any of the Marines make it out alive. Some of the other Marines’ monitors show them as still alive – but it’s hopeless, they’re existing as hosts for the next batch of baby aliens, and that’s it.

The Lieutenant has been knocked unconscious – another state of being somewhere between alive and dead.

They choose death again – nuke the entire site from orbit. It is, after all, the only way to be sure.

Unfortunately the aliens had the same idea – dealing out death, and they kill pilots Ferro and Spunkmeyer. The aircraft nearly squishes the survivors, leaving them stranded and with very few supplies. “This ain’t happening man! This ain’t happening!” Dream on, Hudson.

Ripley and the others make two choices, one life and one death.

The life – Bishop will go alone for the spare dropship.

The death – the sentry guns.

I suppose we could really stretch a point here and say the way the survivors seal themselves off in one small life-giving (well, life-retaining, anyway) area is kind of womblike. And the shaft Bishop crawls along is vaguely umbilical. Does this work? I don’t know – what do you think?

The Lieutenant wakes up – repentant. He hasn’t just woken from his being unconscious, he’s woken from his dream of life being orderly and by the books. He’s conscious of this, and gives an apologetic nod.

Ripley puts Newt down for a nap. Newt is worried about bad dreams. Ripley looks in Newt’s dolls head and says there’s no bad dreams in there, but Newt corrects her saying the doll isn’t real. Newt knows dreams from reality – something all the Marines had to learn the hard way.

It’s right around here that Ripley confronts Carter about what she learned – that he chose to send colonists out to the alien ship without a proper warning. He chose death to make a buck, which makes him far lower than the aliens in Ripley’s (and our) eyes.

And then Ripley makes a big (thematically speaking) mistake. Carter traps Ripley and Newt in with the face-huggers when? When they’re taking a nap – when they’re asleep.

“Wake up Newt, we’re in trouble.”

Carter turns off the cameras to the med-bay – the Marines are asleep to the threat to Ripley and Newt. She has to wake them up with the alarm. They make it just in time to save Ripley from death by face-hugger snu-snu.

Ripley explains how Carter would have gotten away with it – the Marines’ wouldn’t have been able to alert authorities about Ripley and Newt being impregnated because Carter would have arranged accidents for them where? In their hyper-sleep chambers.

The aliens attack. If we’re using our womb metaphor – then the calm of dream of pre-birth is pierced, really rather rudely, by the aliens. Hudson finally wakes up that this is happening, man, and goes out fighting like a beast.

Carter, that stinker, is still in his own dream of getting away with it all. In his panic he does just about the worst thing he possibly could – he locks the Marines out, the only people who could accuse him, but also the only people who could defend him. And he pays for it.

It’s time to go. Newt leads them through air shafts, making for the drop ship which Bishop has nearly brought all the way down.

V

asquez goes down. Does she suffer from a dream too? She did share the communal Marine dream of there not being anything they couldn’t handle. Maybe she’s the epitome of this dream – maybe she thought above all the others she had the most chance to survive, just because she’s a warrior, and warriors win.

Maybe, maybe not. Either way, she goes out, the Lieutenant finally earning a bro-shake from her as they grab hands around the grenade.

Newt is lost in the sewers. Ripley loses her life-choice cool at that moment, trying to dive down into the sewers after the girl without any caution, Hicks hauling her back. She threatens to kill him. 

But he shows her the tracker for the locator that he gave to Ripley, and that Ripley in turn gave to Newt. But in order to help Newt they have to save themselves from the alien onslaught first – life is the right choice in order to be able to save Newt.

Ripley’s delay, her moment of choosing death over life, of threatening Hicks, has consequences – he eats a face full of acid. Ripley’s alone now in her quest to fight for life – Newt’s life, and through Newt, her own.

Ripley gears up, heads down into alien-palooza. There’s a couple of bits of irony at play here – the atmosphere generator, the thing that allows humans to live on the planet, is the thing that’s going to blow them up real good. On top of that, the inorganic, dead walls of the generator plant are covered with alien resin walls – organic interior décor, life, but it represents a world of death for humans.

Speaking of death, Newt’s about to get introduced to the working end of a face-hugger (another life/death thing here – eggs are life, except in this case eggs are death for humans). But Ripley saves the day! Hooray!

Until she runs them right into a room full of leathery death/life eggs. And, oh yeah, Mom.

A face-off. My baby or yours. Ripley was going to back off, everyone back to their corners, she didn’t want to fight in here.

But the alien Queen, she is nothing but death. There’s no choice here, she’s death all the way. And so she tries to have some of her warriors try a rush on Ripley. And that gets all of her eggs blown up – face-hugger omelets for everyone!

Run run run, chase chase chase – Bishop saves them, zoom zoom zoom, up and away – safe! Alive!

Ripley, now fully alive, thanks Bishop. Up there in the Sulako, they’re a right old nuclear family – Hicks the dad, Ripley the mom, Newt the child, and Bishop the dog.

And who is the first that the Queen attacks? Bishop. She rips the existing but not living android literally in two. His dead legs go one way, his alive top the other. The Queen is telling Ripley – no more in between. It’s either life or death for you.

The Queen of course is pure death. Even if she spoke the good Queen’s English she could not be argued with, dissuaded – she’s there to kill. And she goes after not Ripley, but after Ripley’s source of life – Newt.

“Get away from her you bitch!”

Ripley was actually safe in the bay that she locked herself into, where she’s gearing up with the walker. She could have stayed in there (well, I suppose there’s potential future starving issues, but you get the idea), but that would mean losing Newt.

And losing Newt, but being physically alive, would have put her right back where she started – existing but not living.

S0!

Fight fight fight, punch bite whip-tail, and they topple over into where? The airlock - that twilight zone that exists between the life inside the ship and the death in outer space.

At the end, the Queen, being pure death, doesn’t try to save herself. She only tries to kill Ripley by dragging her out into space. But Ripley clings (literally) to life (in this case a ladder rung). 

Newt is sucked towards that same death but the alive half of Bishop saves her.

And at the end, in the final moments, Ripley is able to finally go to sleep in the hyper-sleep chamber, because this time she knows she’s going to wake up to live again.

Unless of course the sequel shits all over this perfect ending.