CineTV Contest: Memories. James Cameron's Aliens

At the end of the 1980s, when I was a schoolboy, one of our summer activities was going to Uncle Zhenya, a good friend of my father's, to watch movies. Despite the fact that we lived well off - it was Soviet times and we didn't have a VCR, and long before that Uncle Zhenya had introduced me to science fiction. At his suggestion I started reading a lot of sci-fi literature, got to know a lot of great authors, like Clifford D. Simak, Philip K. Dick and Harry Harrison, and despite the huge age difference we could discuss our favorite characters and authors at length. It was pretty darn cool!

Anyway, he was the first among our acquaintances to have a VCR and, as he often went to Moscow, he constantly had new films, which were never shown at the cinemas (due to strict censorship and love of the Soviet audience for Indian cinema) and we often visited him to watch the novelties. It was with him that I first saw Batman, Die Hard and comedies with Eddie Murphy, but the most impressive experience and breakthrough was Aliens by James Cameron, which I still consider an unparalleled masterpiece.

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It's worth saying that at the time I didn't particularly like horror movies, preferring action movies with Stallone, Jackie Chan and Schwarzenegger, so I didn't particularly like the first part (Alien). Yes - a scary monster who brutally destroyed a team of astronauts, yes - cool special effects and tense plot, but for me, as a schoolboy - it was too complicated and raised a lot of questions to the concept of an evil alien. So I didn't think the sequel would be such a cool movie.

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And how wrong I was! Having transformed from a horror movie into a fast-paced action film, the film took on new colors. Spaceships, brave star paratroopers, futuristic machinery, an android with a very strange sense of humor... and Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, I fell in love with with no memory of it. A woman surrounded by tough professional soldiers turns out to be cooler and braver than they are at times, and her actions and the character's logic evoke a real delight, which is multiplied by the storyline with little Newt, demonstrating the real power of a woman ready to go to any lengths to save a child. And the monsters, which became so damn numerous in comparison with the first film, this time were not only frightening, but also caused interest, because you could see them only partially, and imagination itself put the fragments into a solid picture, because of what it became really scary and interesting.

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Years later when I got the home Internet I spent hours and hours looking at galleries with works by Hans Rudi Giger, who designed that monster, and damn it I still can't understand how he could come up with such a terrifying and deadly creature.

It's understandable that such a creature couldn't help but leave its mark on pop culture and perhaps it's only fitting to remember the scene in which Ripley fights the xenomorph in the robot loader. I just squealed with delight. A confrontation that is impossible and rightfully carries the status of "legendary"...

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Every few years I watch it with great pleasure, and no one has ever managed to raise the bar so high, combining bloody horror with solid science fiction and action. The sequel of Alien became even darker and much closer to a hermetic thriller, the fourth part is a circus with monsters, and I don't know about you, but this movie became a reference point by which I still measure sci-fi movies and no one has ever managed to impress me as much as this movie and leave such vivid memories...

I've heard that the restart of the series is being overseen by the inventive Neill Blomkamp, whose films I like a lot and if I'm lucky enough to see it, I will judge it based solely on James Cameron's Aliens :-)

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