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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5117496" data-attributes="member: 42582">Board rules make some of this a bit tricky. And not everyone sees the war in IndoChina the same way. And both the person who made the observation, and me, are Australian, which means our relationship to that war, and our relationship to American understandings of and responses to that war, are likely different from those of many other people posting in and reading this thread.And of course Aliens is not an allegory for that war. But there are all sorts of ways of being wish-fulfillment without being allegorical.All the above said, here is the basic idea: Aliens involves a duplicitous military-industrial complex sending soldiers into an impossible situation, where an insidious and faceless enemy is all around them (and at least from time to time in an area that is hot and steamy), and the real solution to stopping the spread of this contaminating enemy - which is also the only way to stop the needless deaths of the soldiers, but which the conspiracy won't permit to be used - is to pull out and just nuke the whole place from orbit.Undoubtedly that story can be read in various ways. It was only after seeing the movie a few times that someone suggested to me this particular way of reading it. It resonated with me, and has always stuck with me.A story can be anti-military and also wish-fulfillment in relation to a war. To give an example: Breaker Morant is a movie that is anti-military, but which also has (in my opinion) strong elements of Australian nationalist wish-fulfillment (of a more literal variety than Aliens).Anyway, I'm guessing that my reading of Avatar is also a minority one!</blockquote>

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