How could the chestburster scene<\/a> be topped, you might wonder. Well, it wasn\u2019t, and Cameron didn\u2019t try. He made his film stand out by changing its genre from horror in space to war in space, and its look from low-grade industrial to high-tech military grade. And where Scott had only one alien, Cameron had a bunch. <\/p>\n Cameron had been reluctant to write a treatment for an Alien sequel because he considered Alien to be a \u201cperfect movie\u201d. He told<\/a> the studio that instead of duplicating the original, he would create a \u201cstylistic hybrid\u201d between Alien and The Terminator. The result cemented his rise as a blockbuster director and the reputation of its producer, Gale Anne Hurd.<\/p>\n Picking up 57 years after the events of the first film, Aliens brought Sigourney Weaver back as Ripley. But she was no longer simply the resourceful survivor of Alien. Cameron turned her into an action hero.<\/p>\n Ripley is surrounded by a fictional interstellar military corps called the Colonial Marines, including both men and women, providing the model for movies like Starship Troopers (1997)<\/a>. One of my favourite exchanges in the film is when the male Private Hudson asks his female colleague, \u201cHey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?\u201d and she replies, \u201cNo. Have you?\u201d<\/p>\n The joke captures something important about Cameron\u2019s vision. The women are not simply victims or romantic interests. They are soldiers, technicians and survivors.<\/p>\n Like the \u201cfinal girl\u201d<\/a> trope of the horror genre, Ripley survives while others are killed around her. But Cameron takes the idea much further. She protects the young survivor Newt, fights alongside Corporal Hicks and the synthetic android Bishop, and confronts the alien queen. She eventually blasts the queen into space while delivering the film\u2019s most memorable line: \u201cGet away from her, you bitch.\u201d<\/p>\n Like its predecessor, Aliens is full of anxiety about sex, reproduction, motherhood and technology. The alien also taps into anxiety about the vagina dentata<\/em><\/a>, a Latin phrase meaning \u201ctoothed vagina\u201d, whereby female genitalia contain teeth. It\u2019s a myth described in many cultures worldwide. The visceral horror of the first movie is maintained. <\/p>\n Like its predecessor, Aliens was another entry into the tech noir<\/a> subgenre, that reflected on where the human ends and the machine begins. The Alien itself is organic but looks almost metallic, while the synthetic Bishop blurs the distinction between human and machine.<\/p>\n Yet the film suggests that the role of the real enemy belongs to the corporation. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation treats human lives as expendable in pursuit of profit. Its representative, Carter Burke, is willing to sacrifice the surviving humans so that the alien can be brought back to Earth for study. As Ripley tells him: \u201cI don\u2019t know which species is worse. You don\u2019t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.\u201d<\/p>\n That line still rings true 40 years later. Weyland-Yutani is fictional, but its pursuit of profit at almost any cost remains recognisable.<\/p>\n The political context is important too. In the seven years since Alien, when Democrat Jimmy Carter was president, the US was led by Ronald Reagan. His administration was dominated by free-market capitalism, deregulation, the Strategic Defence Initiative<\/a> and projecting American power abroad after the Vietnam war, explaining why Cameron put the marines into space. Here, colonialism is not a dirty word. <\/p>\n The Reagan era wanted an image of hard-bodied American hyper-masculinity, as exemplified by Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. By having a woman defeat the aliens where the men could not, Cameron effectively made Ripley into a female Rambo. Ripley succeeds where the marines fail because she understands the enemy and, crucially, has something to protect.<\/p>\nThe real enemy<\/h2>\n
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