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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Swanosaurus" data-source="post: 9732424" data-attributes="member: 7044220">Wait, hear me out before you shove me out of the next airlock!Alien is a very unsettling movie for several reasons: Mostly for it's gruesome depiction of pregnancy, but also for depicting workplace relations in a pretty realistic way ... the people aboard the Nostromo don't necessarily like each other, but most of them (apart from Ash) have gotten used to each other, and that is enough ... but then they are thrown into this crisis, where they really have to stick their heads together, and they manage to do that, but the tension is palpable. It's not as if meaningful bonds were suddenly formed, there is no big reward for getting their act together and working together, but they do it, because that is what most people in a crisis manage to do. But there's nothing cathartic or romantic or terribly meaningful about it. They manage. And still die. Apart from Ripley.Then you have Aliens with the marines and their bluster and camaraderie, and sure, not all is well there, but the movie makes a point of having Ripley form meaningful bonds, and of showing meaningful bonds between them. Hicks and Ripley become besties, Ripley and Bishop, too (hey, I love Bishop and the Bishop/Ripley relationship, but that's how it is), and don't get me started on Newt ...But Aliens' most "feelgood" aspect is that it wipes away all the dirty unsettling stuff about pregnancy by making Aliens a movie about Ellen Ripley as the Lioness defendig her cub, which is such a clean and familiar and beautiful concept, it washes away a lot of the terror left by the first part. And in the end, all people with whom Ripley formed meaningful relationships survive, and this great little family with ma Ripley, pa Hicks, Newt and uncle Bishop rides off into the sunset.It's a great movie, the constant suspense from the moment they enter the colony on is sublime, and all the character beats work, but it's a very different movie than Alien; and of course, that's partly what makes it great and more than a repetition, but I also feel that it cheapens Alien a little bit for me, because in the end, it's just a lot more conventional.And Alien3, for all its flaws, is a return to the spirit of the first part. It's its own thing as well, but it still feels more of a piece with Alien then Aliens does.I wouldn't want to miss any of these three first movies (of which I think as a proper trilogy, with Ressurection being more of a weird epilogue and everything else as spinoffs of varying quality), but if I had to let go of one of them, it would be Aliens.</blockquote>

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