Garoo

Just as I thought: it’s a miracle that the Alien franchise survived that movie. Of course, it’s efficient as a Cameron movie, which gives a watchable action flick, but it’s just that, and as a good action flick it has a completely stupid script. They didn’t even bother find a credible way to send Ripley back to that planet — if she were suicidal, or just cynical about it as in the fourth episode, it could work. But here? She just doesn’t want to have nightmares anymore. Right. It’s all the more irritating as Cameron made a pretty good portrait of a survivor in Terminator 2. But I guess suicidal heroines weren’t fashionable yet in the 80’s.

The only nice thing in the movie, the only little invention, is the final fight. But that’s not enough to justify a four-hour movie and, besides, as pretty as it is, it’s just as stupid as the rest — aliens are able to force their way through steel doors, but they can’t fight a forklift?! I’m supposed to consider the introduction of a queen as the most memorable element of this movie, but I don’t find it interesting, first because its existence is actually quite obvious, and second because there isn’t much point to it, as they already had thousands of eggs in the alien spacecraft.

What surprised me, watching this one, was how much these movies repeat themselves. The “Kill me” line is actually in each episode; the alien sucked into space in the end is almost in each; etc. Of course, it makes for some cohesion, but I didn’t remember it was that repetitive. As far as the fourth episode is concerned, you could say that the whole atmosphere had been changed so much that coming back to the story’s basics was needed, so that the viewers could find at least some of what they expected7. But, for the second movie, I’d call it a complete lack of originality and imagination. At the beginning of this post, I wondered how the saga survived Aliens, but the answer is simple: Alien3 saved it. (Am I taking unreasonable risks by writing this before I watch it again?)

A sidenote: if the first movie wasn’t quite clear about that, Aliens is affirmative that earthlings have met lots of alien species before. (In Alien, you could only suppose so because the crew didn’t seem so amazed at the idea of discovering an extra-terrestrial lifeform.) I can imagine they’d decide to keep it low, afterwards, so it wouldn’t get to look like Star Trek or Star Wars, but it does get in the way of credibility: somewhere down the line, they’re going to need to have nice, hairy alien pets, or to meet an intelligent species that doesn’t want to feed on them (and, in the end, the Alien vs. Predator concept isn’t so stupid).

Anyway, the good news is my CPU was perfectly stable at 51° C during the whole movie, and nicely came back to 49 as soon as the DVD stopped. Hallelujah. (Considering it must have been overheating for months, there’s not much point by now in trying to get the temperature lower than that.)

Blogging was less tiresome when I only wrote in French and didn’t proof-read my posts.