The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
James Cameron · a film · 1986 · about 137 minutes, the theatrical cut · written by Cameron from a story by Cameron, David Giler and Walter Hill
Mode
Combat film and siege film grafted onto a horror sequel; the platoon picture, the haunted house and the rescue under one clock
Mythos
The descent of the rescuing mother into the underworld for a child, and the duel of two mothers; the family made by choice out of a wreck
Phase
A few days, from a salvaged lifeboat and an inquiry on a station to a troop ship, a drop, a siege, a descent and a fight in an airlock
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 35 mm, in English; the theatrical cut of about 137 minutes, a long first movement before any creature is seen in full
Register
Barracks comedy turning to dread and then to siege; terror held in an empty corridor and released in fire and steam
Scale
One woman, one child, a platoon, a corporation and a hive
Governing Proposition
The one survivor of a ship lost to a creature goes back with a platoon of marines to a colony that has stopped answering, and finds that the colonists have become a hive. The wager of the film is that an army sure of its equipment is no protection and may be the danger, that the one thing the wreck of the corporate and military order leaves standing is a family chosen in the ruins, and that a long hour of preparation is what gives the collapse its meaning.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A salvage crew finds a drifting lifeboat, and inside it Ripley, the one survivor of a ship lost to a creature. She wakes on Gateway Station into a nightmare, and then into an inquiry. The Company that owned the ship does not believe her account and strips her of her licence. The world where her crew found the creature has since been settled: a colony works there, making its air breathable.
Then the colony stops answering. Burke, the Company’s man, played by Paul Reiser, asks her to go back with a platoon of colonial marines, and after the nightmare she goes. The film takes its time before it lands anywhere, and that delay is its first decision. Sigourney Weaver plays a woman who has seen the thing and is not believed, among people who believe in their equipment.
The film is Aliens, written and directed by James Cameron from a story by Cameron, David Giler and Walter Hill, produced by Gale Anne Hurd, photographed by Adrian Biddle, edited by Ray Lovejoy, with music by James Horner and creatures from Stan Winston’s studio. It was released in July 1986, in a theatrical cut of about 137 minutes, and that cut is the one judged here.
Movement II
On the troop ship Sulaco the marines wake from sleep and joke. They are a platoon out of the war picture, with its familiar faces: the green officer, Gorman, who has made two drops; the tough sergeant; Hudson, played by Bill Paxton, the wisecracker; Vasquez, played by Jenette Goldstein; Corporal Hicks, played by Michael Biehn. Bishop, the synthetic, played by Lance Henriksen, does his trick with a knife, and Ripley distrusts him from the first.
The film spends this hour on hardware. Ripley proves she can work by driving a power loader, a lifting frame strapped to the body. The motion tracker is shown as equipment, a screen and a beep. Hicks shows her the pulse rifle and its grenade launcher. None of it is idle. Each piece is put in the audience’s hands so that it can fail later or be turned to another use, and the comedy of the barracks is the confidence the rest of the film will break.
The dropship lands them in an empty colony. Empty rooms, a doll’s head on the floor, and nobody. In the ducts they find a child, Newt, played by Carrie Henn, who has survived by hiding, and Ripley is the one who reaches her. The family the film will assemble out of its wreckage begins here, with a woman who has lost everything and a child who has lost everyone.
Movement III
The search leads under the atmosphere processor, and the marines go in on foot while Gorman and Ripley watch from the armoured carrier. The corridors give way to walls of resin built from bodies, and one cocooned colonist begs to be killed. Their weapons cannot be fired near the cooling system without bringing down the plant, and the confidence of the drop is already half disarmed. Then the walls move.
The massacre is shown largely on the helmet monitors in the carrier: faces, flashes, and screens failing one by one, while Gorman freezes. Ripley takes the wheel and brings back what is left. The film’s best device for horror is distance: the audience sees the platoon destroyed the way its commander does, as feed from cameras, and like him it can do nothing.
Then the dropship, coming down to take them off, crashes, and they are stranded with what they carried in. The device is the plainest in the film, and the film’s logic needs it. Hudson speaks the verdict on the first hour: “Game over, man.” The confidence was the danger, and from here the marines are not an army, only people in a building.
Movement IV
They fortify the colony’s operations block and wait. Newt tells Ripley why the creatures have not come yet: they “mostly come at night.” Ripley tucks her in. Two clocks start in the last third: the time a second dropship needs to arrive, and the reactor’s countdown to the processor’s destruction. The film holds the audience inside both.
Burke’s betrayal comes as signalled. He wants a specimen for the Company and lets loose the creatures’ parasites in the room where Ripley and Newt sleep, so that they will come home carrying it. The turn is expected, and the film pays it in a single stroke and moves on. Its interest is not in Burke but in what greed of his kind sets in motion.
The night attack is the motion tracker’s scene. Its count falls toward zero with nothing in the corridor; then the marines look up, and the creatures are in the ceiling. The siege breaks, the survivors flee through the ducts, Hudson makes his last stand, and Newt is taken. The confidence that the first hour built has been spent to the last round.
Movement V
Ripley goes down alone, with a flamethrower and the tracer the child carries, into the lowest level of the processor, through fire and steam, while the countdown runs above her. She finds Newt cocooned among the dead and brings her out. In the chamber at the bottom she meets the Queen, enormous, tethered to her egg sac, and the two mothers face each other across the eggs. For a moment they keep a silent pact. Ripley breaks it with fire.
The processor explodes behind the dropship as it climbs. On the Sulaco the film seems to have ended. It has not: the Queen has followed the woman who burned her brood, and the duel of mothers is fought again on the ship. Ripley returns in the power loader, the frame the film put in her hands in its first hour, and says it: “Get away from her.”
Machine body against creature body, she drives the Queen into the airlock and blows her out. What is left is a soldier, a made man, a woman and a child: the family the corporate and military order did not plan and could not destroy. The film is built to arrive at that picture, and it reaches it plainly, without mystery, by the shortest road its own hardware allows.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little idle, because nearly everything shown in the first hour is spent in the last. The power loader Ripley works on the Sulaco to prove herself to the marines is the weapon she fights the Queen with. The motion tracker, introduced as equipment, becomes the film’s clock of terror. Bishop’s knife trick sets up the distrust he must overcome; Newt’s doll’s head in the colony foretells her taking; Hicks showing Ripley the pulse rifle and its grenade launcher is paid in the hive. The long wait before any creature is seen is required. What gives holds the axis where it stands: the dropship’s crash is a device to strand them, Burke’s betrayal is signalled early and paid in one expected turn, and much of the marines’ banter repeats a single note.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What the film brings into the open is articulated, but through its genre’s means. Institutional and technological confidence is no protection and may be the danger: the marines’ weapons cannot be fired near the cooling system, their officer has made two drops, and the Company’s man would sell them for a specimen. The equipped army destroyed on ground it does not understand carries the shadow of Vietnam. A second disclosure is of a survivor’s recovery, Ripley finding agency by choosing to protect a child, and the film sets two mothers face to face and lets the likeness speak. These are true and hold, but they are drawn with a broad hand. Motive is legible at once, Burke’s greed and Hudson’s panic among it, and does not deepen on any face.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Terror and a hard grandeur, reached often. The nest, its walls built of resin and bodies, with a cocooned colonist begging to be killed, is the first height; the massacre seen on the helmet monitors in the armoured carrier, the screens failing one by one while the lieutenant freezes, is a second, horror by mediation. The tracker counting down with nothing in the corridor, and then the ceiling, is the film’s best single image of dread. The Queen revealed by Ripley’s light, tethered to her egg sac and rising, is grandeur in the creature’s own register, and the power loader is the cathartic peak. The figure is held by range: the elevation stays almost wholly in fear and its release, there is little beauty, and the sublime of scale belonged more to the earlier film’s derelict.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The archetypal structure is built, not alluded to. Ripley’s descent alone into the lowest level of the processor, through fire and steam, to bring back a child taken into the earth, is the underworld journey of the rescuing mother, and the film stages it so: the clock above, the drop below, the child cocooned among the dead. At the floor she meets her opposite, another mother guarding her brood, and the two face each other across the eggs in a silent pact that Ripley breaks with fire. The duel is fought again on the Sulaco, machine body against creature body. The figure is held by the frame’s clarity: good mother and bad mother, soldier father and made uncle are drawn so plainly that the myth reads as a diagram.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The turn is real. The sequel to a revered haunted-house horror film becomes a combat film; the single creature becomes a society with a queen; the heroine of a survival structure becomes a commander and a mother. The stake was not small, a second studio feature by a director with one hit, under the shadow of Scott’s film. But the swerve runs onto proven paths. The platoon picture is inherited whole: the lost patrol, the green officer, the tough sergeant, the wisecracker. Much of the machinery repeats the earlier film’s, the Company, the synthetic crewman and the airlock ending among it. A woman leading an action film was rare at this weight in 1986 and was not new. The departure lies in recombination and scale, not in form, and that holds the axis where it stands.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The form is a long fuse and then a siege, and it carries part of the knowledge. The first hour’s slowness, all checklists, banter and hardware, is what makes the collapse of that hardware mean something; open with the creatures and the film can no longer say that confidence is the danger. The cutting between the monitors and the nest, the confinement of the siege and the two clocks of the last movement hold the audience inside the marines’ sense of time, and then inside Ripley’s. The limit is substantial. The form is that of the well-made action thriller, and much of what the film knows would survive another shape: the maternal story above all is carried by scenes that could stand in any form, and the form is more a vehicle than an instrument.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Forty years of return have kept yielding, within a narrow range. Feminist criticism has read it for decades, as an arrival of the armed woman and as her containment in motherhood; the war reading, the corporate reading and the reading of the two mothers continue. Formally it repays study as a model of setup and payoff, and its editing and sound are taught. What return does not yield is new meaning in character. Ripley’s arc is complete on a first viewing, the marines are drawn to be read at once, and the moral surface, greed punished and courage rewarded, does not open on a second. The depth is of construction more than of meaning, and that holds the axis a step below the film’s making.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1980s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film fused the horror film’s dread to the action film’s momentum with a control few had reached, and put a woman at the centre of an action spectacle as its commander, not its survivor. That reorganises a popular genre more than the art of film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is very wide and the stronger component: the colonial marine, the pulse rifle, the motion tracker and the hive became a template for combat science fiction, above all in video games, and Ripley here set the figure of the armed heroine for the action cinema that followed. Most of that reach belongs to genre and industry, and the pressure on the decade’s cinema at large is smaller than its imitation suggests.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Forty years, and survival is demonstrated. The film as released survives whole, in its original negative and in restorations; the theatrical cut has never been withdrawn, and the longer Special Edition circulates beside it as an alternative, not a replacement. Presence has been continuous: television, home video in every format, revival screenings and constant citation. The surface is fixed to its moment in places, the military vernacular of the 1980s, cathode-ray monitors and some optical compositing, though the practical creatures, the Queen above all, have aged better than most effects of the decade. Forty years are not centuries, and the dated surface is a real charge. The figure credits what elapsed time has shown, and it clears the bar of the gate by a tenth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. Ray Lovejoy’s editing builds tension by spacing rather than speed: the long held corridors against the tracker’s sound, the carrier sequence cut between the monitors and the faces watching them, the countdown and the lift. The physical making is remarkable for its means: miniatures, rear projection, a full-scale hydraulic Queen worked by puppeteers from Stan Winston’s studio, effects done in camera so that the actors share the frame with them. Sound design is one of the film’s instruments, and Adrian Biddle holds a blue, steaming, industrial palette with consistency. The charges are real and weigh: dialogue serviceable and often broad, a score that leans on repeated cues, and marine performances pitched at a single level.
Score: 8.3 / 10
One physics governs. The acid blood forbids firing near the cooling system; the hive’s biology of eggs and hosts runs the colony’s fate; the Company’s logic of profit sets the trap; the machines work until they do not. The two farthest elements, the comedy of the marines’ arrival and the horror of the nest, obey one law, because the comedy is the confidence the horror is there to break, and Hudson carries both. The fight on the Sulaco after the climax below could look like an added act, but it is lawful: the Queen is the mother whose brood Ripley burned, and she follows her. The strains are small and real: the dropship’s crash and the timing of rescues serve the plot more than the world’s law.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The orders held: one woman’s trauma and recovery; the family, lost, found and made by choice; the military as an institution; the corporation and the colonial labour of a settlement making a world breathable; a non-human biology with a social order of its own; and, through Bishop, the question of the made person. They are joined, not listed: the corporation’s greed sets the trap, the military’s confidence springs it, and the family is what survives it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is scale. Each order is held at the size of one action over a few days, and the state, history and the sacred are absent or only gestured at.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Made at 8.3 and The Inner Law at 8.2. A film whole and continuously present for forty years, its practical creatures aging better than the decade’s effects; editing that builds dread by spacing, a physical making in which the actors share the frame with the creatures, and sound used as an instrument; and one physics, acid, hive and profit, under which the barracks comedy and the horror of the nest obey the same law.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: trauma, the made family, the military, the corporation, a non-human order and the made person are joined, but each at the scale of one action over a few days, with the state, history and the sacred absent. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 7.4, a true disclosure drawn with a broad hand, and The Bottomless Well at 7.5, a depth of construction more than of meaning. What holds the film below Tier IV is the weight of its meaning against the force of its making: the archetype reads as a diagram, the swerve runs on proven paths, and the form carries the knowledge only in part.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.7, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.9, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Swerve at 7.6 and The Unconcealment at 7.4 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Unconcealment, 7.4, below 7.5; The Bottomless Well meets it exactly at 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Aliens as released by Twentieth Century Fox in July 1986, the theatrical cut of about 137 minutes, in English, from the salvaged lifeboat to the Queen blown out of the airlock: written and directed by James Cameron from a story by Cameron, David Giler and Walter Hill, produced by Gale Anne Hurd for Twentieth Century Fox with Brandywine, photographed by Adrian Biddle, edited by Ray Lovejoy, with music by James Horner and creature effects by Stan Winston’s studio; with Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein. The Special Edition of about 154 minutes, prepared for home video in 1990 and 1991, which restores Ripley’s lost daughter, the colony before the infestation and the sentry guns, is not the object and is weighed only as part of the film’s life. Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is a separate work and is named only as the film this one inherits from. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, in three short lines, and speech is otherwise described. Details that could not be verified, among them where the colony and the hive were built and shot, the minute at which a creature is first seen in full, the exact running of the two clocks, the film’s awards, the director’s own statements about the war it recalls and about the two cuts, a later high-definition edition and complaints of its processing, the circumstances in which the score was written, and the particular video games said to draw on it, are not given.