Blurbing For The Weekend 3/29/24

I first saw Alien on TNT, hosted by Joe Bob Briggs, sometime in the mid-‘90s, so I’m going to assume there was a good bit of editing for cable. I know I must have watched once or twice in the years since, but I must have had my laptop out. Because last week’s viewing truly felt like my first. While I recalled some key moments of violence, I had almost no recollection of what a striking, and honestly still unique character Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is in the world of sci-fi and horror cinema.

I give director Ridley Scott a lot of shit for his many decades of mere competence, but I was truly taken by the patience of the filmmaking here. After some expository text and a slow tracking shot around a spaceship - presumably commercially mandatory after Star Wars - the first person we see is John Hurt rising from a pod in his undies, Yaphet Kotto and Ian Holm visible behind him (“what film opens with Yaphet Kotto, Ian Holm and Jon Hurt sleeping in their boxers?” would be a great pub trivia question). We’re soon introduced to a rag-tag ensemble of scientists and mechanics on an interplanetary mining mission, led by a dashing, confident and clearly respected Tom Skerritt. The co-ed crew gets orders to check out a distress signal, which leads them to an Unidentified Crashed Object of transparently “alien” origin. 

The part of Ripley was originally intended for co-star Veronica Cartwright, which is hard to imagine now that Cartwright (Witches Of Eastwick, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, The X-Files) is thoroughly typecast as someone who must be quickly rattled and slowly driven insane (even in The Right Stuff she’s the most disgruntled of the astronaut wives). And though Weaver’s height and knowing facial expressions immediately suggest formidability, we’re quite a way through the movie before she’s clearly the lead, taking over by attrition when panic, compromised judgment or simple error renders the more likely suspects null and/or dead. Horror writer Tananarive Due might have a Peacock subscription too, as she coincidently called out on Twitter last week how no one in any recent Alien movie has had “an ounce of the protocol sense” that makes Ripley so remarkable. And while that clarity of mission and morality is more notable than her gender, I admired Weaver’s choice to make clear Ripley could use a good cry. This isn’t some fantasy of unimpeachable stoicism in the face of extreme capitalist cruelty and casual sexism. More than once, emotion wells up in her face upon revelation of an existential threat, before she commits herself into the most logical response anyway. It makes her strength and heroism atypically human, and her survival so much more than a Final Girl trope. POPCORN CLASSIC, duh.

Alien was such a rewarding revisit it left me unable to finish some other movies. I recalled Quarantine - last seen on DVD - as another decent enough found-footage zombie thriller, but now couldn’t stand the endless shrieking of cliche-if-not-dubious motivation for choices amidst arbitrary camera work. I know from Dexter that Jennifer Carpenter is more than capable of playing a Ripley, but in Quarantine’s she’s made to scream disbelief or “people need to know about this!” again and again, her TV reporter character too busy justifying her cameraperson to do anything else. Denis O’Hare’s drunken businessman, the only one to realize they all might be safer hiding from Super-Rabies in their apartments rather than congregating in the lobby, is killed off way too fast, simply because the leads refused to let him sleep in peace. Wack.

A more surprising victim of paling to Alien? Aliens. James Cameron does a stealthily brilliant job of imitating the original film for the first act, spotlighting Ripley's unique charisma amidst echoes of familiar thrills at a similarly calm clip. Paul Reiser’s greasy corporate-climber is a neat addition to the ensemble, and Lance Hendriksen’s android being a legitimate improvement on Ian Holm’s cold-blooded company-bot adds a twist to Ripley’s virulent distrust for AI. While the back-slapping marines Ripley joins on a rescue mission are one-dimensional compared to the crew of the previous film, those marines include a wild-eyed Bill Paxton, so no complaints there. But eventually the film devolves into machine gun fire, everyone (including a child) shrieking and music cues way more Spielberg than Scott, Ripley very much Linda Hamilton in T2 rather than Linda Hamilton in T1. I’ve probably seen Aliens no more than Alien, but the attempted rewatch wasn’t enlightening or entertaining enough to bother completing.

Not that I can’t finish a disappointing movie I’ve seen before! Instead of investigating one of the numerous unseen credible and celebrated dramas released over the last few years, I found myself watching Sinister again, immediately reminded of how stupid it was. Ethan Hawke has proven himself a fantastic presence in b-thrillers of late, but even he’d need a lot more help than Sinister's script offers to convey why this frustrated true crime writer moved his family into a murder house without telling his wife. If that wasn't bad idea jeans enough, our hero finds a cache of snuff films in the attic that wasn't there last time he checked (sketch, right?). He spends the next hour of the film stroking his beard over booze, watching increasingly surreal super-8s of familial carnage, pretending there isn’t considerable evidence that someone supernatural (or just with access to his attic) is gonna fuck his shit up infinitely more than a rudderless career and diminished bank account will.

A goofball fanboy deputy played by Ziggy from The Wire figures out how badly Hawke’s author fucked up before he does, as does Vincent D’Onofrio via Skype. And this embarrassing idiocy still doesn’t explain why the family eats dinner under a spotlight in a house so otherwise dark that you can’t even see the walls. Even if Mom didn't know the dark history of the house, surely she checked the fixtures? I remember shorting Doctor Strange because I couldn’t imagine Scott Derrickson, director of both (as well as that staggeringly dull The Day Earth Stood Still remake), making a four-quadrant winner. But Sinister does have vibe (those Super 8s are indeed freaky!), and I guess he was cool letting the Marvel factory bolster everything else (at least until he left the sequel in pre-production). And vibe, jump-scares and a few welcome actors are all I need at 11pm sometimes. POPCORN CLASSIC.