Sci Fi Geek

Aliens & Starship Troopers: My Top Two

Heavy, relentless rain one night last week reminded me of the scene in Aliens when they touch down on LV-426. I watched it again, the rain scouring the front patio putting me right onto that stormy planet with the heroic Ripley & Hicks, bad ass Vazquez and of course the loathsome Carter Burke (Boo! Hiss!). It’s an iconic Sci-Fi classic, and I will certainly watch it again many more times, and I’d love to see it in the cinema again.

I grew up devouring Science Fiction novels. I read all the giants from Asimov, Bradbury, HG Wells, and Arthur Clarke to Ursula Le Guin, Anthony Burgess, John Wyndham and my favorite Philip K Dick. They wrote parables of the modern world with all its excesses and failings and set them in dystopian landscapes in the far future. They were always talking about us in modern times. That’s what I love so much about Aliens and Starship Troopers, those two films hold true to the genre of the Sci Fi stories and novels I love. There’s a lesson, or more accurately a warning in those stories.

Star Wars came out in July of 1977. I went to see it in the cinema at least twenty times that summer, I was fourteen. Star Wars was by no means a message film like the dark and ominous Aliens or bright and jingoistic Starship Troopers. Star Wars was a summer swashbuckler, more like an adaptation of an old Errol Flynn pirate movie sprinkled with spaceships, lasers and shiny robots, but it ushered in the renaissance of Science Fiction on the big screen. Prior to Star Wars, all Sci Fi geeks like me had were reruns of the old 60’s Star Trek series on TV. Star Wars opened up the field for big money studios to produce Science Fiction movies for a larger audience. It led to better stories and adaptations of the great Sci Fi works onto film.

Like everything with Hollywood a lot of what was produced was not very good. Close Encounters? ET? Spielberg’s kids movies? Meh. Blade Runner? Ok it’s based on a Phillip K Dick story, but Ridley Scott? Really? The story gets lost in way too much thick gloomy atmosphere. It’s so dark, couldn’t he afford lighting? Again, Meh. The Star Trek movies were all bad up until ‘VI: Undiscovered Country,’ which is a message film. Watch it again, it’s not that subtle. Rogue elements of the Federation military elite conspire with rogue elements of the Klingon military elite to perpetuate a false flag attack so they can continue with perpetual war. (9/11 anybody?? …I’ll put my tinfoil hat on now.) Also Christopher Plummer puts in a sublime performance as the Klingon bad guy. When you need an evil villain for your movie, call in a pro.

This brings me to 1986. On the back of a huge surprise success with 1984’s Terminator James Cameron was given a big budget to make Aliens, the sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien. Sadly, Ridley is no longer with us so I’ll not speak ill, suffice to say again buy some light bulbs, the film is way too dark. It’s like a low budget Hammer Films’ ‘trapped in a haunted castle’ horror from the 60s except on a spaceship and without Peter Cushing.

In Aliens the fictional Weyland Yutani corporation conquers the galaxy using the might of the Colonial Marines to provide the muscle. Everything comes second to the profit of the corporation. The lust for profit and advancement within the company is so overpowering that Carter Burke is willing to sacrifice Hicks, Ripley and Newt to bring home incubating xenomorphs for Weyland Yutani’s “bio-weapons” division.

Aren’t we living in the Weyland Yutani world right now? We might not be there today, just yet, but we’re on the way, and we’re much closer than we were when Cameron tried warning us in 1986. He even tried warning us again with Avatar, but the blue Nabu people distracted everybody from the message. Blackrock, Vanguard, Raytheon, BAE Systems, and Pfizer: it’s really simple to draw the parallel that these are the Weyland Yutani Corporation of today, and they use NATO and the US Military, as their Colonial Marines to do their bidding.

Early on in Starship Troopers the veteran soldier with one arm, one claw, and no legs in the Mobile Infantry recruitment office wheels his chair around to address the new enlistees. The fresh faced kids hold him in reverent awe, honored by his sacrifice. Isn’t this what we do now? We revere our mangled veterans who make it back to society from our wars of conquest? How many heart wrenching YouTube videos are out there of war veterans with prosthetic arms or legs reuniting with their children in the airport? In Verhoeven’s fictional society only the willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice qualifies you for citizenship. Is that where we’re headed? I hope not, but it looks ever more like reality.

“Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today.” The dismembered vet says, gesturing to the enthralled kids with his one good hand.

The Mobile Infantry travels across space to invade the desert planet of Klendathu, the ‘bug planet’ as the reporter informs us from his embedded position with the Mobile Infantry. All the clips of the news shows in the movie are of bellicose panelists foaming at the mouth for war on the “bugs”. (9/11? Iraq? Afghanistan? Ukraine? Anyone?…or is it just me with my tin foil hat again?)

Verhoeven is anything but subtle, he shows you Fascism and rubs your face right in it. Somehow people never got that movie’s message, even when Neal Patrick Harris comes out in the end in full black leather Nazi SS regalia. ‘This is where we are heading if we don’t change course:’ Verhoeven screamed at the audience.

I love those movies because they show through an entertainment medium where we are going if we continue to let the beast grow bigger and bigger. Government and Military contractors and weapons manufacturers merge with media, tech and financial companies, growing into one huge juggernaut. Weyland becomes Hyperdyne, becomes Skynet, becomes Weyland Yutani, and suddenly there’s only one entity and it controls everything. That’s Cameron Universe accurate by the way for you geeks, it started with Weyland before the Terminator, and by Aliens we end up with Weyland Yutani.

We need more movies like these, but sadly the only thing we get from co-opted Hollywood today are mega blockbusters like Top Gun II, a blatant propaganda film for military aggression. They should have let Verhoeven direct that, it would have been hilarious. I’m sure he would have enticed a fantastic homoerotic performance out of Tom Cruise. Cruise already has the Nazi uniform from Valkyrie when he played Von Stauffenberg. China is no different now, check out the Chinese films Wolf Warrior I & II. They are the Chinese versions of Top Gun, except the West are the one dimensional, dehumanized enemy.

I want James Cameron to make a movie based on John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, a perfect parable for where we are headed if we continue to listen to war hungry leaders pushing us ever closer to nuclear conflict and a post apocalyptic, neo-prehistoric world. If you haven’t read The Chrysalids I highly recommend it. I hope this idea gets to the desk of James Cameron. I would also like someone to make Dune into a series. Spice in the desert becomes oil in the desert, Frank Herbert’s story is an ecological parable after all. Sorry Denis Villenueve, your movie wasn’t as bad as David Lynch’s, but Dune is too big for a movie, it needs ten episodes. Twice people have tried and in my opinion both movies fell flat. There are some who would argue that Dune was already adapted onto film back in the late 70s with the Star Wars franchise, Frank Herbert certainly thought so, before he died he sued Lucas three times, each time coinciding with a new Star Wars episode release.

Give me a good Sci-Fi movie with a good story and a strong message, anyday. Entertain us by all means but make us think while you’re at it.

Honorable Mention:

Planet of the Apes (1968); Soylent Green (1973); The Matrix (1999); Gattaca (1993); The Andromeda Strain (1971); Invasion of the Body Snatchers (original 1956 and remake 1978); Minority Report (2002) {its from a PKD story}. And of course RoboCop, Total Recall and Terminator I & II, & Avatar Verhoeven & Camerons’ other stellar contributions to the genre….

……To name but a few, feel free to add to my list.