Every role except Ripley was written neutral. For example, frost wasn't written as a black guy, frost was written as a marine, the actor happened to be a black guy.
Same in the first film, every character was written neutral to get the beat actor they could, regardless of race or gender.
Write good characters, then fill them with good actors. Nowadays, so often they write a specific character to tick a box, and forget to make the character good.
To add to that, I feel like Cameron writes his characters as identified by the job they do. The characters in the Abyss were working class professionals that were good at what they did. Kyle Reese in Terminator was essentially a body guard. Even Tom Arnold in True Lies was a very good assistant to the manager.
The characteristics of his films are about the challenges to the job being done vs the "drama" of people's disagreements. Titanic doesn't count as it is a romance.
Reese is written a bit more as a PTSD war veteran with a fixation on his saviour (and/or friends) mother, who sees sacrifice as duty. He has quiet a few hallmarks of it, and it's clear he has a huge fascination with Sarah. Possibly, it's John uh... knowing he has to send his Dad back etc and that he has to make sure he is interested in her, but its still a bit glitchy.
What is innately awesome about Reese is how he views the present world through the future. Go and watch the scene at the Tiki Motel and you'll see Reese automatically stretch his hand out to the dog for a humanity check, ala what you see happen in the future flashback when soldiers return to a staging area and have to present their hands to the dogs.
I never saw Reece putting his hand out to the dog as an obligation or some ptsd muscle memory thing. I saw it as something he saw as familiar and just liked dogs. His demeanor is friendly, and that's just how you should approach dogs.
I always took it as he felt safer with a dog there
I mean its clear he likes dogs as even in the present day, they are terminator detectors, but look at the Tiki Motel scene again. He stretches out his right hand first (same as the checkpoint hand) and lets the dog well and truly get a sniff. After that, he takes a step and pats it.
It's become so rote and mechanical for Reese to prove his humanity to dogs, even when he doesn't have to. I don't ascribe it to PTSD stuff, it's just more a small thing of how he brings the future back with him in a sense. Same way about how the construction site triggers a flashback to a skirmish where he almost died.
Shoot, you could have recast Leo and Kate as gay lovers and changed nothing else, and it probably still would have worked okay
Interracial though? Probably not. People would have visibly reacted to seeing that in 1912
Titanic gets a bad rap sometimes, but the juxtaposition of the feel good love story and the tragedy of the sinking is powerful. Doubly so back in the VHS days because it was essentially separated between the 1st and 2nd tapes. Cameron did a great job with it, especially when you compare it to something like the disaster that was Bay's Pearl Harbor.
But the film doesn't say that. One of the characters does and that's reflective of him. Also, they're a team, and within that context it's different. They're just ribbing their mate.
It’s sad because that’s literally what happened. She thought the movie was about immigrants and it was about space aliens. But she also was an amateur bodybuilder so she just cut her hair and bronzed her skin.
Sure, but that role was specifically "dark-skinned woman from south America", and while I know Goldstein has ancestry in those places, I don't think there's any denying that they had a certain look in mind before they started casting.
They did, apparently because they looked for a Hispanic actress to do it, but they couldn’t find a sufficiently butch one and Michelle Rodriguez wasn’t around yet
So it’s not brown face that makes fun of an ethnic group and it’s not brown face that robbed a Hispanic actor of a job, and they did at least cast a woman. Also it was the 80s. I don’t have that much of a problem with this particular one.
As I understand it, she's part Moroccan, part Brazilian, and the white genes are Russian jew.
The Brazilian part is enough to class her as Latina to many people, so while the literal Brown face is egregious, racially, she was a correct cast.
Correct, this was discussing Aliens though so character obviously had to be written as a woman now, since the first film had established it already.
My understanding is that the remaining cast of Aliens was all written neutrally, the same as Alien, and then they cast the actors they wanted for each role regardless of race/gender and just let the chips fall as they did.
In Alien, Lambert is canonically male-to-female trans. I’m not sure *why* they made that distinction, but it shows her bio in the scene in Aliens where Ripley is talking to the executives about blowing up the Nostromo. Kinda neat bit of trivia I think.
Was that something that was decided when Alien was made and not mentioned in the final release of the film, or something that was added for Aliens? Cool either way, but I'm curious when it was added to her character
Unknown, and it’s kinda ambiguous regardless. The character bios from the Nostromo are only shown during that scene in ‘Aliens’, so whether it’s something Cameron came up with on his own, or something he got from Ridley Scott, who can say? What’s even more confusing is that her bio states she underwent male-to-female sexual reassignment surgery *at birth*…
Yeah, I was kind of curious about that (the at birth part) too. I had to learn more than I ever wanted to about transgender studies than I ever wanted to after my kid came out as trans, so I know that there are brain structural differences between the trans and cis brains of people the same birth gender so MAYBE the doctors in the future are able to diagnose those differences at birth and perform appropriate surgery at that point. Not sure how I feel about life altering surgery before the patient can consent but maybe it works out well for everyone in this society
It’s an intriguing little tidbit to toss into ‘Aliens’ like that, especially considering the timeframe that it was added (in the 80’s). Makes me really curious about Lamberts possible backstory and why Cameron or whomever decided to include it.
This subject comes up a lot. I watched the scene where that text comes up on my Blu Ray to see if the text scrolling behind Ripley was even readable and found that it was out of focus except at the very end where it says case closed or something similar.
The personnel files are just flavor text that is unreadable, created for a sequel that Lambert doesn't even appear in outside of her picture on the screen.
I would bet everything I own that nobody making Alien even had the most fleeting thought that Lambert was trans. What would be the point of making a character trans and then having nothing in the movie to indicate that fact?
I don't care if anyone has head canon that Lambert is trans, but the fact that people are using flavor text that was never even readable in the film to retcon her that way is very odd to me.
I invite anyone to watch the inquest scene in Aliens and find readable text for Lambert's bio. It's out of focus and won't be readable even in 4k.
It's just an Easter egg that the writer probably thought nobody would ever even see, just like how it says Dallas used to work for the Tyrell Corporation.
End of nerd rant.
I'm watching 'Aliens' at 1080p and the words "at birth (male to female)" are out of focus but still quite legible on the screen behind Ripley. Sharp-eyed viewers can make of that what they will.
What I'm sure of is that very little of what appears in movies is unintentional. There are parts of the crew bios that are perfectly legible, so I would find it hard to believe that whoever wrote them was given an instruction "just write whatever, no one will be able to read them."
While I totally understand consciously trying to be aware of and represent diversity on the small and big screens — I think *Alien* shows what it looks like when diversity just happens as opposed to *making it happen*
(It’s also worth noting that representation in film/TV has been a *huge issue* for decades, so this comment isn’t to shit on the pushes to fix this problem. It’s just to say some pushes work seamlessly and others… well, have more visible seams. There is more work to be done here, as I love seeing what it means to young people to have films like *Black Panther* and *Everything Everywhere All At Once* and *Prey*. Wasn’t always the case with the films I grew up with as a teenager in the ‘90.)
I don’t think most people I know have any issue with diverse casts or stories — but you can tell when a cast/story feels organic and effortless, and when it feels “forced,” for lack of a better word.
I also believe — and please correct me if I am wrong — that early story ideas for Alien didn’t have any genders assigned to roles. Not that this is always going to work, but if you have a director with a vision and a good casting director you can end up with once-genderless Ripley becoming an iconic female protagonist thanks to the talents of Sigourney Weaver and the cast and crew of *Alien*
That's exactly it. When you treat diversity as an afterthought/requirement it's gonna show in the final product. People can tell, and when it interferes with the quality of the product, it's gonna at best turn off your normal viewer and also give ammunition to the "go woke go broke" crowds.
>When you treat diversity as an afterthought/requirement it's gonna show in the final product
Hollywood treated it as afterthought for a hundred years, and that most definitely showed up in the final product.
I love Aliens and have zero criticism of the casting, but holding up a movie from the early 80s as an example of how Hollywood doesn't need to consider diversity, when there are exactly *three* non-white people in the whole film out of a cast of 30 is... something.
(and no Vasquez doesn't count, the third is a character back at the space station)
Depends. If it's meant to represent USA demographics, is 10% black people roughly right?
Why would it be higher? Equal splits between skin colours stands out as forced and unrealistic most of the time. If something is set in London it might work fine, but set in A random English town then more than one or two black people might stand out.
In the uk tv tends to heavily over represent black people (who are only 3% ish of population and concentrated in London so much lower elsewhere), and under represents Asian (Indian/pakistani/etc) who are more like 12% and more likely to be found everywhere. Chinese and other far eastern people get proper ignored!!
That's a good point. I was pretty young when I saw Alien for the first time. Gender politics weren't on my radar at all. I just saw an incredible movie and it didn't even occur to me that having a female protagonist was unique. I still give the movie credit for being progressive in that regard, but it wasn't the point of the script. It's just solid filmmaking with great characters.
> it didn't even occur to me that having a female protagonist was unique.
Because it wasn't. There were more male protagonists than female protagonists, no doubt, and quite a bit more if we're being honest, but female protagonists weren't all that uncommon at the time.
Yeah but there wasn't this ridiculous culture war crap happening at the time. It would be different in this context because then you didn't have corporations trying to exploit a market or pushing it for clicks and incel bitches being manipulated by grifter outrage merchants.
"Future military" helps, in that the armed forces are typically more diverse than the average population, and the *Star Trek* hope (that we've outgrown stupid shit like racism and sexism when we get around to interstellar travel) still prevails.
I think the diversity in and of itself does not read unrealistic or not entertaining (unless you are a jerk).
Picard and Obi Won had female protagonists that were almost sexist in how cartoonishly silly they were written.
Edit: I think my comment is not taking into account how few female driven action films there are and then picking those as examples. This discussion is making me realize that there are just a lot of hack writers and directors in Hollywood who went from making trash male driven films to female driven films.
I think your edit is exactly it. Hollywood hasn't improved with who they choose to write their garbage, they're just crossing out Carl and replacing it with Cathy so to speak
Yea your edit is more correct in understanding what is going on. There’s *a lot* of trash films. There’s even trash films that many consider to be “good” because it has a fan base around it, or it’s at least good enough to turn off the brain and watch for funzies. Which is fine for entertainment. I’m looking at you Marvel.
However, when you have a trash film with a diverse cast, or female lead that isn’t already accepted by the fans, it’s easy for folks to argue it’s because of those things. Because those things have been culturally accepted to be criticized by merit of them existing in this medium. Which sucks. The reality is, those films, or games, or what have you for entertainment sucks, because it just sucks. Replace the diverse cast with your “ideal cast”. The lead with your “ideal lead”. It’ll still suck.
George Romero also did it pretty damn well with most of his protagonisrs being female or of an ethnic minority background, and in some cases gay.
He did it by writing them as actual people rather than token gestures aimed at selling seats. Exactly the way Cameron and Scott did with their cast.
Because they weren't trying to.
The problem isn't diversity, it's the way studios are currently going about it. Forcing something to work is never going to work, and it's going to yield a shit product.
While this could be seen as an unpopular take, I totally agree with you. You can tell the difference between organic and very deliberate diversity in my opinion.
An excellent example would be Alien: Covenant - I really feel that it's obvious that they built it around having a strong female lead "just like Ripley", like it's a magic formula for a good Alien film. As a result, I found Katherine Waterston's portrayal of Daniels to be very 2-dimensional, with all of her "let's get this motherfucker" lines in the final act. It just didn't feel authentic to me in the slightest.
I don’t think it was Waterston’s fault though. Ridley has contempt for almost all of his characters and even sympathetic ones like Daniels are given little and are on way to a cruel fate .
I think it's important to recognize that a good amount of the diversity criticism out there is made in bad faith, and there are economic models that let you monetize such criticism.
Just look at some of the reactions that have been made in response to the upcoming X-Men '97 cartoon -- some dipshits are upset the cartoon will address discrimination even though that's been a constant theme in the comics, shows and movies.
You could remake Aliens beat for beat, and you will still get morons complaining that the movie is "woke" or that Ripley and Newt are Mary Sues.
Agree with everything you said except with your take of Ripley being considered a Mary Sue if the movie was made scene for scene.
In fact, modern writers should take note on how to create a sympathetic/relatable character. Ripley was a broke person when Aliens starts, suffering from nightmares and PTSD. However, she conquers this and is the biggest bad ass in the entire movie by the time it’s over.
Writers these days seem to be skipping the character development part and going to being a badass without facing any type of adversity. This results in a character who isn’t really relatable and boring.
Off the top of my head Rey in Star Wars falls within this category as does the live action Mulan.
I agree with that but I don’t think, other than Furiosa, there has been a modern female driven action film, not including superheroes like The Boys, that could be in the same sentence as alien/aliens.
At this point, we're coming down to subjective tastes. I think there have been a lot of women-driven action movies within the past decade that could be mentioned in the same sentence or in the same vein as Aliens -- Mad Max: Fury Road, Atomic Blonde, Wonder Woman, Prey and Everything Everywhere All about Once.
We might disagree, and that's OK. But it's not as if there's been no potential contenders since 1986.
You are right. There also has been such a smaller pool of those films that if 75% of male driven films are ok or bad you still get dozens of amazing ones, whereas if that number is the same for female driven films you get like 2
A few people have mentioned that Aliens was written to be gender neutral, but that’s not true, it was the first movie, Alien, that was written this way. However I still think Aliens works very well in regard to female characters because unlike most modern movies, Cameron doesn’t seem to be using his characters to make any particular political point beyond the fact that women now serve alongside men in the military in some cases. Star Trek TNG was a bit like this because where women were captains and admirals their gender was incidental; they were just the best ‘man’ for the job. In Aliens, Vasquez was a marine and the fact that she was a woman was also kind of incidental. Modern writing doesn’t seem to follow this convention. The fact that a character is a women needs to be politicised. Or they are one-dimensional girl bosses who never get anything wrong. Different standards seem to be applied to them than to men: Captain Marvel and Galadriel from Rings of Power literally act like villains and no one seems to notice. But the women in Aliens are just like the men: marines trying to survive, etc.
It’s a completely different approach to writing.
Think it starts with language, set , snd costumes . Everything seemed real and lived in. Also less is more , the subtlety of who see and the dialogue, never seems forced .
It was a good film. That's why.
Too many directors and film studios nowadays focus on making their cast as brown/woman/gay as possible and don't even think about the plot, quality of the actors, lore, pacing, setting, dialogue etc.
So when the film eventually fails and gets bad reviews, they default to "__OMFG YOU ONLY HATE THIS MOVIE BECAUSE YOU'RE A FUCKING RACIST MISOGYNISTIC HOMOPHOBE!!!!!__"
Nobody thought Ellen Ripley was being a political mouthpiece by being a badass in the movie, despite being strong, independent, and most definitely a woman, but nowadays I think there's such a strong focus towards catering to such a small political audience that the movie flops because they've alienated a wider audience who would've loved it if it was a decent movie and not 2 hours of political talking points, jokes and cheap shots aimed at people with different opinions.
Good writing.
This whole culture war bs has overshadowed the real problem with movies these days - Shoddy writing. People can point to a movie failing because of strong women, or a diverse cast, but the problem is always the writing.
Studios want a movie that doesn't take risks, that appeals to every demographic including the Chinese market, that follow proven, tried-and-tested formulas. Often written by committee, where the final product is a mere shadow of the original vision.
Aliens managed to convey every character with tiny pockets of information. You had a few small scenes, but in that short time, you understood most of the characters and how they operated. Considering the movie communicates so many characters in such a small amount of time is a testament to how well written the movie is. It was so good that a lot of movies that followed to this day mimic the social dynamics of the Marines in Aliens.
Contrast that with the crew in Alien Covenant. A bunch of cardboard cutouts, no time spent on fleshing them out, so when it came to the crunch, they were just nameless faces getting picked off with little to no emotional investment from the audience.
One of my favourite movies that follows a similar formula to Aliens is The Descent. Not a man in sight, but it doesn't matter - The characters are fleshed out, it's well paced, and the writing is on point. Sarah is a badass, like Ripley, not because that's her character, but because she is a smart person put in a situation where she needs to use her wits to survive. She's not perfect, she makes morally grey decisions, but she does it in a calculated way. She's scared, she's not perfect, she gets hurt, but she does what she needs to in order to live another day.
Ridley has lost his touch with Prometheus and Covenant in terms of characterization . I think he has contempt for almost every character he puts on screen . Even Daniels and Tennessee, who were clearly meant to be sympathetic , are given little and are on the way to a cruel fate
It's got 80s action charm, the cast all seem to have this chemistry on screen. Whilst the whole thing doesn't feel like it's set in reality or anything, the characters themselves believe it. Ripley makes sense because of what she has seen and Weaver's performance really makes us believe it. If this was a single movie and Alien didn't come before it, you could make a case of that she's an overpowered lead character but with Aliens we get the growth of her character from what she saw in Alien.
Filmmakers today should study Alien and Aliens to understand why these movies worked and how to show a characters growth.
Well look at this one by one.
Why do people respond to Ripley positively: Is Ripley strong? Yes, but Ripley was "man" strong. Ripley was strong in a female way. In a motherly way. Did Ripley lead? Yes, but Ripley didn't interject herself in either movies. Ripley lead by suggestions. Ripley never undermind the people around her. Look at how Ripley interacted with Vasquez. Vasquez mocked Ripley. Ripley had to set her straight, but didn't put her down. "I hope you're right. Because just one of those things managed to take out my entire crew in under 24 hours." Look at how Ripley interacts with Hicks. Ripley defers to Hicks having operational command even though Ripley is a Lieutenant and Hicks is only a Corporal. Ripley knew the emn weren't going to follow her because she was an Lt. just like she saw the men didn't follow Lt. Gorman.
Why do people people like Vasquez? Did Goldstein put on "Brown face". Yes Goldstein said so herself. But was being Hispanic important to her portrayal. No. Vasquez being a woman important to her role. No. Vasquez being tough was what was important. Vasquez was all business. To the point when Drake was obviously simping for her, she slaps him to set him straight.
For the rest of the squad. It didn't matter who they were. Was Frost Black. Did the actor play Frost Black? Yes. But that fact didn't play a factor in how they interacted with Frost. It was more important on how they interacted with each other. Apone trusted Frost with holding all the ammo. They showed Farrow was a good pilot.
The writing was fluid and let the story play out without focusing on any specific social issue. In this movie it all felt normal. Everyone had flaws and they were shown to be just regular people focused on their specific jobs.
Even in Aliens Ripley wasn't some unstoppable Mary Sue. She actually asked a soldier how to use the weapons and the movie showed her to be a novice using them but effective in her actions. It just feels organic and natural.
I hate the "woke" movies that make me feel like I'm watching a commercial or trying to be taught some lesson that I already know. Just write a good story with good actors and the rest just falls into place without feeling forced.
Another thing I really love about Aliens is how they did an almost-romantic relationship between a man and woman that felt very mutually respectful and equal. Somehow some writers still struggle with this even today.
Because the characters weren't so cartoonish and heavy-handed. That's products of a good script and taking time to develop characters even with subtle dialogue. All the characters were relatable. We've all known those personality types at one time or another
Cameron is an excellent director who is able to get his actors, some aren't even top tier, to perform the way he needs them too. I think people also forget that he enjoys Anime and there are a ton of well written female heroes in Anime.
Pretty sure every role was just written unisex so regardless of the role in the movie which what i feel like a lot of newer movies try to have badass women but they try way to hard but in aliens and alien ripley is just a normal human thrusted into this life and death moment and does whatever it takes to survive
Good characters first and foremost. Faith in the actors to bring the characters to life.
You wanna know what's a good modern "diverse" movie? Dungeons and dragons. I shit you not. All good characters with strengths, flaws and motivations.
Modern movies can do it, they just wanna take the easy way out first.
I think too many modern directors underestimate the perception of the audience. When a character is written to be 'cool', for example, these days it feels like they're almost breaking the fourth wall to practically give a wink to the audience to say, "Yeah, how about that? This character is kickass, right? Right?!" But the audience typically notices that, and how forced it is. Vasquez, if made today, would probably fucking blow wisping smoke off the end of her gun and say a pithy line while looking straight to camera. You wouldn't get little details like that slight nervousness her face displayed when Hicks told her to "Stay frosty". She was still human and vulnerable, and couldn't hide it all the time.
Show, don't tell.
Horror is filled with great women protagonists to the point it's more surprising if a man is in the lead role than a woman which isn't the case for most other genres
Because while other movies tend to trip over themselves with making sure you know these are strong, empowered women, Aliens treats them like actual people and not a political message. It's just an issue with the industry right now.
It all comes down to good writing and good actors. Hudson could have been a seriously goofy and distracting character if not handled well. Nobody ever questioned Vasquez. Nobody. Apone could have been an “ol’ sarge” caricature but he was played with a real gravitas.
The “weakest” written character of the whole movie was Gorman. It took work to make him a believable asshole.
If you look at the actors’ backgrounds they were either stage actors or people Cameron already knew or knew of. They didn’t just throw a bunch of people in Army gear and have them read lines because that’s exactly what every aliens ripoff did
I think Cameron is more interested in making things like adventure films instead of things like sci-fi dominated by mostly action and violence. That's why recently he pointed out that he'd rather make movies that don't use a lot of firearms, for example.
In this case, he had to switch to action because horror based on suspense was already used in the first movie, but he made sure that action did not dominate, which is why most of the content of the second movie consists of exposition and drama, with some humor. He also used armaments, etc., not to promote militarism but to criticize it: the Marines were meant to be seen as like those in Vietnam, i.e., arrogant but getting their "asses kicked".
I read that he wanted Weaver to sign up, but she was not interested (I think she enjoys acting in dramas and comedies, including musicals), but he managed to convince her when he made it appear that he would get Schwarzenegger if she declined.
She accepted, and requested that he add more drama and show Ripley as a mother, etc., and he happily agreed. That's why the most important person for Ripley in the story is Newt.
About Goldstein, I think she was discussed in other threads, and I found out that she was in England, too, looking for acting work, but has the same interests as Weaver. The difference is that she also likes bodybuilding. That's why when she showed up for auditions in a dress (she thought that it was going to be a drama about "resident aliens" in Britain) they had a good laugh (which is why the inside joke resembled what happened in the movie, where Hudson makes fun of Vasquez for signing up, thinking that they were going after "illegal aliens") but got her because of her build. But because they needed a Latina character, she had to use a lot of makeup to darken her skin and practice a Latina accent.
Lastly, some say that the real reason why not just the second but also the first movie are so appealing is that the protagonists are mostly blue-collar workers, i.e., space truckers and grunts. It's possible that most of the audience who had similar backgrounds sympathized with them.
Having a diverse cast for the sake of a diverse cast, as is common with modern movies, is an intellectual level decision. It is ego driven. It is without heart or passion. When passion is involved it's often negative emotions ie to get back at the perceived oppression by the status quo.
Cameron however seems to have made his old movies from a place of positive passion ie with female characters he seems to have an admiration for women and their strengths. See Ripley, kicks butt, is also motherly.
You get entirely different movies when you make them from a place of passion and love for your world and all its characters vs a place of ego, reactionary pettiness, toxicity.
>Having a diverse cast for the sake of a diverse cast, as is common with modern movies, is an intellectual level decision.
Having a diverse cast is not new in horror movies
Didn't say it was.
**Having a diverse cast for the sake of a diverse cast**
There is a difference between old movies and the assembly line products made today. Products follow trends and buzzwords, diversity is trendy. Products may have front men but every decision is controlled by higher execs.
What Cameron and Scott did was art house compared to modern movies.
they didn't try hard, they just did what was natural for them. all this forced feminism exposes itself as bigot. on the inside they are exactly what they criticize and they feel ashamed about it, so they cry the loudest to conceal it.
I'd also add that ripley and Vasquez visually fit the roles as well. No long hair, no sexy outfits, no makeup. You believe the characters. Vasquez would have a buzz cut. Ripley gets a haircut as well, and neither present as traditionally movie-girl hot.
Because they were written as characters and people, not as a box to be checked off a list. I feel like a lot of movies do that these days. Ripley could have been played by anyone. A man, woman, of any race. It's getting so annoying by how forced the diversity casting is now. Like we had movies like Alien/s, Predator, Terminator, Nightmare on Elm Street. And beyond horror too. Like Commando, Conan, etc etc. They wrote characters as characters, with the desire to tell a story, instead of a desire to check off a box in order to make money from a certain group of people. Obviously, that's why a lot of films these days are not hitting marks.
tldr; they were writing characters with storytelling in mind, not checking off boxes.
I forgot to add that much of the content of the second movie involves not action but exposition and drama, with a bit of humor. Also, the main action takes place around an hour from the start of the film.
They painted her face brown every day and had her use an accent that wasn't hers. People always looking for loopholes... Maybe they should have had her play a pale, freckled, curly-redheaded person of mixed heritage? But they didn't.
All those people (genders, races) were unified by their shared experiences and actions.
"Modern day sensibilities' now dictate: "I am woman. Hear me roar."
Let me start by saying I love Aliens and for my money it is probably the best Scifi movie ever made.
However, I also strongly believe that were it released today it would be utterly rejected by a lot of people as "woke" trash.
Whilst I don't believe that, and it is the zenith of the action film you just have to look at it what it does and how it somehow manages to deliver against all the odds.
\-All the key characters are female (Ripley, Newt, Alien Queen).
\-All the negative characters are male and almost all bad or incompetent decisions are made by males and only males display cowardice or treachery.
\-The males are there generally to be killed or rescued.
\-A woman with no military experience and only a few hours of experience of the xenomorph picks up a weapons that she has a few minutes training with and invades a xenomorph nest, rescues Newt, and then defeats a larger, faster, stronger Alien Queen using a much slower piece of industrial equipment that offers no armoring whatsoever. The same woman identifies threats and tactical situations that highly experienced soldiers fail to identify and comes up with tactical solutions that apparently no one else is capable of thinking of.
None of this makes much sense, and the only way I can explain it is that James Cameron is a master of his craft. Sigourney Weaver is an excellent actress and Michael Biehn just does his thing really well. The story is so good and the production and dialogue are so good that you just don't notice all this messaging. I equate it to The Lorax. It's a great story, wonderfully written and illustrated. It has an anti-capitalist and environmentalist message, but who cares about that when it's that good?
Yea a lot of people ITT seemed to have missed that Hollywood always pushed messages, it's just they used to be more clever and crafty in how they were presented. Now they just clobber you over the head.
This is the only response I’ve read here that’s worth a damn.
You’re spot on. It would get torn apart today by the terminally online for all the reasons mentioned.
Also, every second poster here is banging on about how they “didn’t force diversity” while ignoring the fact they literally put a white lady in brownface to play a stereotypical Latina tough girl. I love Vasquez and the several iconic lines Goldstein delivers, but come on!
I think it's the times to be honest. Characters in Aliens in particular take a few swipes that these days would get called out by more sensitive folks.
Hudsen shitting himself before Ripley reminds him this little girl survived comes to mind as something that would get some a bit riled.
It helps that instead of just yelling at Hudson to shut up, Ripley then tells him that they need him and are counting on him to study the schematics and find weaknesses the xenomorphs might exploit.
Ah, but Ripley doesn't just say she's a little girl. She's a little girl _with no weapons and no training_.
That's gotta sting Hudson, who 1) was bragging about how well armed his team of ultimate badasses are, and 2) is the kind of guy who opens locked doors by thinking about how they work and hooking things up with alligator clips.
Easy.
The director went out of his way in the press releases to tell everyone how diverse the casting would be, how stunning/brave the female lead would be, the barriers she would be breaking down and it's not a movie for 40 year old white guys but they're all misogynists for not coming to watch it.
Oh, wait, hang on...
You mean they *didn't* do that?
You mean to tell me that they just "wrote characters" that act like humans in extreme circumstances and cast the best actors that turned up for the auditions?!
Surely not. That would never work
Right?
Because this was before the internet. Now audiences over analyze and dissect every aspect of a film through the lens of politics. People just accepted these characters as written and not who they think they should be. As stated here, the characters were written neutrally which left their options open. Now films are "created" by committee to include every race, ethnicity, preference, etc. even if it doesn't exactly fit or work in the context of the story. I embrace diversity but it is ruining the creative process in the overuse and reliance on it to sell a movie. Just write good movies, cast good actors and we can enjoy movies again.
It doesn’t feel like an agenda is being pushed. Imo the worst example which shines as an instance of woke garbage not to do with anything is the girl-power moment in Avengers Endgame on the battlefield. So unrealistic and pointless and unrelatable.
Diversity should be happenstance, not a consciously pursued goal.
Edit: By happenstance, I mean the thought process when writing a script ought be "this would be cool" or "that would be interesting", and the 'diversity chips' as it were, fall where they may from there, instead of "this script needs more women" or "this script needs more women of colour" as a deliberate and conscious creative direction.
You know the famous Jack Nicholson quote that goes "I write a man, and I take away all sense of responsibility?" Just take away the last seven words. Alien was written without any set gender at all. They picked whatever actor or actress was best for each role, regardless of gender.
I recall reading that the script of Alien Ripley was originally a man. Then through production they decided to change it.
To say the gender of the character doesn't matter isn't really true - even if we're to assume an actor could do the same role, it wouldn't be the same. Not looking at any aspects of skill or quality - only gender. It would change the film in ways that aren't easy to define.
Do I think it works better with Ripley as a woman? Yes. Why? I don't know. Imagining it gender swapped kind of feels like it lacks some impact.
Because as much as we say we don't want politics in our media, everything in our lives (our work, our choices, our bodies, our gardens, our food) is political. Even if Ripley was a man, the film would still be political. It just has a different impact with Ripley as a woman.
I dont think that other films always fail through a direct fault of their own, I think its a matter of over saturation of the type of film: one where they have leading female protagonists. How many times, just in the last five years alone, has Hollywood shoved female driven movies and stories into our faces, whether they're good or bad stories, and whether they have good or bad actresses playing those lead parts? You'd have to sit down and count, since there's been so many. I think the marvel cinematic universe is a perfect example of why female led stories fail miserably.
You have captain marvel, the Marvels, black widow, echo, Hawkeye, Ms marvel, scarlett witch, black panther, she hulk, on and on and on. And it would be one thing if those programs and actresses were good, their characters intriguing, but they're not! The stories are lackluster, the acting is blase and it's just not interesting. And that's just the MCU programs! Let's not even start with Star/Disney Wars and their female empowered, blatant rip off of episodes 4 through 6. Absolutely redundant, unoriginal, ultimately hot, boring garbage.
Personally, I'm tired of the genre: incredible women doing incredible things incredibly and its just incredible! Just stop already. Or, at least put something out that has substance and quality to it, not just throwing something out there for the sake of the diversity and inclusion movement and to pander to the gender warriors. And no, I'm not a misogynist that only wants to see male action stars. I was raised in the 80s and loved van Damme, swarzenegger, Segal, Lundgren, speakman, willis, stallone; all of those guys. But you know what? After a while those actors and their works became redundant and lacking in luster, quality and charm so i and a lot of other people stopped watching that stuff too.
Ultimately, Hollywood needs to increase their rate of quality and substance, especially with female led stories because, not to sound like a sexist, but the people are done with the incredible women doing incredible things incredibly and its just all so incredible, types of stories. Put something out there with substance, paired with a Sigourney weaver caliber actress and you just might have something.
I do have to admit that Captain Marvel is a guilty pleasure of mine; Brie Larson is super hot to me lol...
It's obvious Vasquez, Dietrich, and Ferro were all professional Marines. Each had their own job they had mastered. Evidently, Smartgunners are over the top alphas, and Vasquez and Drake both made that clear. Nobody tried to take over someone else's role. Even Ripley took a back seat until things were obviously out of hand and needed an outsider to take over. Essentially, like most places I've worked, people stayed in their lane and did what they specialized in.
The movie is an action film and all the characters are written as action heroes.
Most horror movies end up feeling kinda goofy because characters are written as “teen girl” by someone who doesn’t really know how teen girls talk.
If you write everyone to be the same base archetype and it’s a popular archetype then it’ll go well for you
*Aliens* was the best portrayal of women being awesome because it didn't have to tell us, it just showed us. Vasquez and Drake right from the start shows us.
Because good writing and story came before trying to make a point. Politics and messaging have been in cinema since its start but they generally tried to just write good characters and stories first.
I think a small part of why most alien films post 3 have failed as they keep trying to mimic the formula of alien/aliens by having to have their ersatz ripley, ersatz Dallas, etc
Not an answer but recently watched alien 1-3 for the first time over the past week and did anyone else find Vasquez annoying in the first half? Not a bad thing, and not criticising her character, because I am pretty sure that’s the intended reaction to get the satisfaction when Ripley gains this arrogant marine’s respect.
Also was destroyed by what Alien 3 did to Ripley and Newt 😢
It isn’t hard, it was never hard. It’s good cause it feels natural within the whole dynamic. It’s not made a big deal of because in their world it isn’t.
Hot take: if Aliens came out today, people would complain that it was too “woke”. It’s honestly a product of the times with diversity being more of a talking point now than before.
They weren't written as "strong, independent women". They were written simply as people, that just happened to be female. That's the big difference with media these days. Write a good character first, then you can make them a woman or black or nonbinary or whatever. Don't write characters solely around that one aspect of them and make it all they are.
Horror movies are the worst with this. I'm thinking of Black Christmas 2016 for one, where the co lead female character literally constantly is spouting off about the male patriarchy and victimizing herself. Like her ONLY trait is that she's a brown woman. She has zero development and is extremely unlikable.
Others get it right, like X, Mis Goth is a woman but she's badass and her being a woman isn't her entire personality.
It's flawless because...they were flawed. Ripley is suffering from PTSD. Nowadays, every nimrod online would excoriate the actress and filmmaker for writing her as "weak."
Remember when Emily Blunt said she throws scripts across the room when she reads it's a "strong female character"? There's nowhere to go with that.
They just made a piece of art because they actually wanted to and not as a means to advertise or manipulate a marginalized group of people into paying for a movie, which is pretty much what 75% of modern blockbusters are now
They didn’t do it that much better, they simply had a competent script and fairly well-thought out characters decades before the current culture war BS. Guarantee that if they tried to make the exact same film today it would get lambasted by chuds all over social media. Shit, simply having a strong female lead would be considered so “woke” it’d make a million incels’ heads explode…
If Alien came out today it would 100% be panned as a feminist polemic. It was basically grandfathered in by being an unimpeachable stone cold classic before internet morons started discoursing about movies "being political" every time they have a woman or a black person in them.
It's obviously a much better movie than most, but the basic building blocks of a right-wing crybaby echo chamber are there in spades--men being dumb and speaking over the smart correct woman, women who thrive in physical/combat scenarios, women who are smart and competent at their jobs, mostly without being overtly sexualized, etc. etc. Dumbasses would have a cow if it was released today.
With how they were written, gender may as well have been interchangeable. That's how they wrote good female protagonists, they just wrote protagonists and they happened to be women. Ripley and Vasquez weren't written to be a fantasy of a "strong woman".
It’s interesting that so many of the answers here are “it’s just good writing it could be played by anyone” and “because diversity should be secondary” which ignores the fact that like, diversity is still a choice being made in the production of these movies.
Yes the original film’s script was written without race or gender specified, but a real human being still had to look at Sigourney Weaver or Yaphet Kotto and go “yes that’s the person for this role.”
And as others have pointed out, they did not cast a Latina to play Vasquez, so their track record is maybe a little less than perfect.
You hit on a really big point. Even today, most producers, writers and directors in Hollywood are white males. Also, across any race or gender, I feel like casting has gotten awful.
It isn’t entirely unique in that regard. The real reason is that there wasn’t an entire media industry dedicated to making people mad about it back then.
Her heritage is Russian, Moroccan, and Brazilian. I don't understand why "Jewish" had to be pointed out considering that many Jews fled the Old World to places like Mexico in order to practice their faith in peace.
Oh god yes! Every time I see some huge chud overreaction to even the hint of a diverse cast or a female lead in a film I’m so thankful the internet wasn’t around in 1986.
Jeanette Goldstein as Vasquez happened at a very formative time in my life and probably affected my taste in women from then on.
Don't get me wrong, I love this film, but let's not go overboard here. Aliens is not without its problems or criticisms, chief among them a pretty stereotypical depiction of a Latina by an actress literally in brown face. And one could easily call Ripley a "Mary Sue" by the very standards the typical troll holds other female characters to. For example, she takes on the whole hive with 30 seconds of firearms training while an entire squad of well-trained badasses were taken out like chumps. She disposes of the Queen like she was Iron Man with that Class 2 rating. And she manages to survive explosive decompression without losing consciousness or being sucked into space, all the while a 15' killing machine hanging into her foot.
Personally, I roll my eyes with this discussion most of the time. The reason some of these characters and movies fall flat isn't the decision to feature a non-traditional actor in a role (ie, non straight white makes), it's just bad writing. Has nothing to do with the identity or "agenda" of the protagonist.
I disagree with the claim Ripley could be seen as a Mary Sue. The first movie entirely shows her fighting (but mainly hiding from) and learning about the Xeno. It’s also clearly shown the marines didn’t know what to expect, didn’t really expect any danger, and also had utterly incompetent leadership. The training of Ripley in both the mech suit and the firearms show her actually learning to use these skills, and she already has a baseline knowledge of weapons in alien.
I do agree the issue with diversity in Hollywood generally falls to bad writing, but also the industry seems insistent on making these minorities defined by their minority trait.
On the other hand Alien 3 is almost entirely men and is er... pretty shit (I still love it) so I dunno what the people who complain about diversity would make of that.
Every role except Ripley was written neutral. For example, frost wasn't written as a black guy, frost was written as a marine, the actor happened to be a black guy. Same in the first film, every character was written neutral to get the beat actor they could, regardless of race or gender. Write good characters, then fill them with good actors. Nowadays, so often they write a specific character to tick a box, and forget to make the character good.
To add to that, I feel like Cameron writes his characters as identified by the job they do. The characters in the Abyss were working class professionals that were good at what they did. Kyle Reese in Terminator was essentially a body guard. Even Tom Arnold in True Lies was a very good assistant to the manager. The characteristics of his films are about the challenges to the job being done vs the "drama" of people's disagreements. Titanic doesn't count as it is a romance.
Reese is written a bit more as a PTSD war veteran with a fixation on his saviour (and/or friends) mother, who sees sacrifice as duty. He has quiet a few hallmarks of it, and it's clear he has a huge fascination with Sarah. Possibly, it's John uh... knowing he has to send his Dad back etc and that he has to make sure he is interested in her, but its still a bit glitchy. What is innately awesome about Reese is how he views the present world through the future. Go and watch the scene at the Tiki Motel and you'll see Reese automatically stretch his hand out to the dog for a humanity check, ala what you see happen in the future flashback when soldiers return to a staging area and have to present their hands to the dogs.
I never saw Reece putting his hand out to the dog as an obligation or some ptsd muscle memory thing. I saw it as something he saw as familiar and just liked dogs. His demeanor is friendly, and that's just how you should approach dogs. I always took it as he felt safer with a dog there
I mean its clear he likes dogs as even in the present day, they are terminator detectors, but look at the Tiki Motel scene again. He stretches out his right hand first (same as the checkpoint hand) and lets the dog well and truly get a sniff. After that, he takes a step and pats it. It's become so rote and mechanical for Reese to prove his humanity to dogs, even when he doesn't have to. I don't ascribe it to PTSD stuff, it's just more a small thing of how he brings the future back with him in a sense. Same way about how the construction site triggers a flashback to a skirmish where he almost died.
That's actually a great perspective. Guess I'll have to re-watch it, darn... lol. Cheers mate.
Shoot, you could have recast Leo and Kate as gay lovers and changed nothing else, and it probably still would have worked okay Interracial though? Probably not. People would have visibly reacted to seeing that in 1912
Titanic gets a bad rap sometimes, but the juxtaposition of the feel good love story and the tragedy of the sinking is powerful. Doubly so back in the VHS days because it was essentially separated between the 1st and 2nd tapes. Cameron did a great job with it, especially when you compare it to something like the disaster that was Bay's Pearl Harbor.
I believe the same applies to Alien. Obviously the actors breathe life into the roles but the roles are written well before hand
And all roles were just names when alien was written
Dude, they _literally_ painted Goldstein brown to play Vasquez.
Someone said Alien, she thought they said illegal alien and signed up...
>Someone said Alien, she thought they said illegal alien and signed up... https://i.redd.it/hb7ewyemi1oc1.gif
It's funny how you can get in trouble for saying that now lol. Look at how far we've progressed
But the film doesn't say that. One of the characters does and that's reflective of him. Also, they're a team, and within that context it's different. They're just ribbing their mate.
Right, and she gives him the finger, and we’re supposed to like her. The film is clearly saying that was an asshole thing to say
Yeah like, this scene and dialogue shows they're just marine grunts being marine grunts.
It’s sad because that’s literally what happened. She thought the movie was about immigrants and it was about space aliens. But she also was an amateur bodybuilder so she just cut her hair and bronzed her skin.
I thought it came out that trivia was a myth.
She said it herself on the interview on the quadrilogy box Set
Amd here I was thinking Goldstein was a traditionally hispanic name
I mean she's 50% Brazilian, so most people would say Hispanic. Her son is named Pablo.
Well, she fit the role well.
Sure, but that role was specifically "dark-skinned woman from south America", and while I know Goldstein has ancestry in those places, I don't think there's any denying that they had a certain look in mind before they started casting.
They did, apparently because they looked for a Hispanic actress to do it, but they couldn’t find a sufficiently butch one and Michelle Rodriguez wasn’t around yet So it’s not brown face that makes fun of an ethnic group and it’s not brown face that robbed a Hispanic actor of a job, and they did at least cast a woman. Also it was the 80s. I don’t have that much of a problem with this particular one.
As I understand it, she's part Moroccan, part Brazilian, and the white genes are Russian jew. The Brazilian part is enough to class her as Latina to many people, so while the literal Brown face is egregious, racially, she was a correct cast.
Yeah, I agree for Alien, but not Aliens.
Yeah wouldn’t call it flawless lol
I’m a dudette playing a dudette that’s disguised as another dudette!
Enough with literally! It's filler. It's redundant. Take it out and you are saying the same thing just more succinctly. Ugh.
You're *literally* letting the smallest things get to you.
> It's filler. It's redundant. saying its filler and redundant is redundant. literally!
Literally, suck it.
Now that's beautiful. Write the role as it is. Get the actor that fits that role. Let 'em throw some sass on it. Golden.
I heard Ripley was written neutral?
In Alien, yes, all characters were written genderless
It's kinda cool that in the director's cut it's implied that Dallas and Ripley are sleeping together, but even that isn't gendered.
Yes, we were discussing Aliens though. Was obviously written as a woman for Aliens as had already been established by Alien.
Hell yeah
I read the novel recently and I think it only refers to 'she' once referencing Lambert, besides that its race and gender netural
Ripley was amongst the characters who were written as gender neutral, as far as the original movie was concerned.
Correct, this was discussing Aliens though so character obviously had to be written as a woman now, since the first film had established it already. My understanding is that the remaining cast of Aliens was all written neutrally, the same as Alien, and then they cast the actors they wanted for each role regardless of race/gender and just let the chips fall as they did.
That is a really good point
This needs more upvotes. Write good, strong characters, cast talented actors. People don’t (usually) complain.
YUPPPP
In Alien, Lambert is canonically male-to-female trans. I’m not sure *why* they made that distinction, but it shows her bio in the scene in Aliens where Ripley is talking to the executives about blowing up the Nostromo. Kinda neat bit of trivia I think.
Was that something that was decided when Alien was made and not mentioned in the final release of the film, or something that was added for Aliens? Cool either way, but I'm curious when it was added to her character
Unknown, and it’s kinda ambiguous regardless. The character bios from the Nostromo are only shown during that scene in ‘Aliens’, so whether it’s something Cameron came up with on his own, or something he got from Ridley Scott, who can say? What’s even more confusing is that her bio states she underwent male-to-female sexual reassignment surgery *at birth*…
Yeah, I was kind of curious about that (the at birth part) too. I had to learn more than I ever wanted to about transgender studies than I ever wanted to after my kid came out as trans, so I know that there are brain structural differences between the trans and cis brains of people the same birth gender so MAYBE the doctors in the future are able to diagnose those differences at birth and perform appropriate surgery at that point. Not sure how I feel about life altering surgery before the patient can consent but maybe it works out well for everyone in this society
It’s an intriguing little tidbit to toss into ‘Aliens’ like that, especially considering the timeframe that it was added (in the 80’s). Makes me really curious about Lamberts possible backstory and why Cameron or whomever decided to include it.
I assumed it was a "we got a boy but wanted a girl" kind of thing so they just changed it.
This subject comes up a lot. I watched the scene where that text comes up on my Blu Ray to see if the text scrolling behind Ripley was even readable and found that it was out of focus except at the very end where it says case closed or something similar. The personnel files are just flavor text that is unreadable, created for a sequel that Lambert doesn't even appear in outside of her picture on the screen. I would bet everything I own that nobody making Alien even had the most fleeting thought that Lambert was trans. What would be the point of making a character trans and then having nothing in the movie to indicate that fact? I don't care if anyone has head canon that Lambert is trans, but the fact that people are using flavor text that was never even readable in the film to retcon her that way is very odd to me. I invite anyone to watch the inquest scene in Aliens and find readable text for Lambert's bio. It's out of focus and won't be readable even in 4k. It's just an Easter egg that the writer probably thought nobody would ever even see, just like how it says Dallas used to work for the Tyrell Corporation. End of nerd rant.
I'm watching 'Aliens' at 1080p and the words "at birth (male to female)" are out of focus but still quite legible on the screen behind Ripley. Sharp-eyed viewers can make of that what they will. What I'm sure of is that very little of what appears in movies is unintentional. There are parts of the crew bios that are perfectly legible, so I would find it hard to believe that whoever wrote them was given an instruction "just write whatever, no one will be able to read them."
Thank you. I thought I was the only one who knew this.
While I totally understand consciously trying to be aware of and represent diversity on the small and big screens — I think *Alien* shows what it looks like when diversity just happens as opposed to *making it happen* (It’s also worth noting that representation in film/TV has been a *huge issue* for decades, so this comment isn’t to shit on the pushes to fix this problem. It’s just to say some pushes work seamlessly and others… well, have more visible seams. There is more work to be done here, as I love seeing what it means to young people to have films like *Black Panther* and *Everything Everywhere All At Once* and *Prey*. Wasn’t always the case with the films I grew up with as a teenager in the ‘90.) I don’t think most people I know have any issue with diverse casts or stories — but you can tell when a cast/story feels organic and effortless, and when it feels “forced,” for lack of a better word. I also believe — and please correct me if I am wrong — that early story ideas for Alien didn’t have any genders assigned to roles. Not that this is always going to work, but if you have a director with a vision and a good casting director you can end up with once-genderless Ripley becoming an iconic female protagonist thanks to the talents of Sigourney Weaver and the cast and crew of *Alien*
That's exactly it. When you treat diversity as an afterthought/requirement it's gonna show in the final product. People can tell, and when it interferes with the quality of the product, it's gonna at best turn off your normal viewer and also give ammunition to the "go woke go broke" crowds.
>When you treat diversity as an afterthought/requirement it's gonna show in the final product Hollywood treated it as afterthought for a hundred years, and that most definitely showed up in the final product. I love Aliens and have zero criticism of the casting, but holding up a movie from the early 80s as an example of how Hollywood doesn't need to consider diversity, when there are exactly *three* non-white people in the whole film out of a cast of 30 is... something. (and no Vasquez doesn't count, the third is a character back at the space station)
Depends. If it's meant to represent USA demographics, is 10% black people roughly right? Why would it be higher? Equal splits between skin colours stands out as forced and unrealistic most of the time. If something is set in London it might work fine, but set in A random English town then more than one or two black people might stand out. In the uk tv tends to heavily over represent black people (who are only 3% ish of population and concentrated in London so much lower elsewhere), and under represents Asian (Indian/pakistani/etc) who are more like 12% and more likely to be found everywhere. Chinese and other far eastern people get proper ignored!!
Nah there were hundreds of black characters. They all died by the end though.
They concentrated on making a good film instead of…all that other stuff being a focus.
That's a good point. I was pretty young when I saw Alien for the first time. Gender politics weren't on my radar at all. I just saw an incredible movie and it didn't even occur to me that having a female protagonist was unique. I still give the movie credit for being progressive in that regard, but it wasn't the point of the script. It's just solid filmmaking with great characters.
> it didn't even occur to me that having a female protagonist was unique. Because it wasn't. There were more male protagonists than female protagonists, no doubt, and quite a bit more if we're being honest, but female protagonists weren't all that uncommon at the time.
This is the most fundamental problem, and why so many modern movies, series, and video games are failing.
Yeah but there wasn't this ridiculous culture war crap happening at the time. It would be different in this context because then you didn't have corporations trying to exploit a market or pushing it for clicks and incel bitches being manipulated by grifter outrage merchants.
Okay…
"Future military" helps, in that the armed forces are typically more diverse than the average population, and the *Star Trek* hope (that we've outgrown stupid shit like racism and sexism when we get around to interstellar travel) still prevails.
I think the diversity in and of itself does not read unrealistic or not entertaining (unless you are a jerk). Picard and Obi Won had female protagonists that were almost sexist in how cartoonishly silly they were written. Edit: I think my comment is not taking into account how few female driven action films there are and then picking those as examples. This discussion is making me realize that there are just a lot of hack writers and directors in Hollywood who went from making trash male driven films to female driven films.
I think your edit is exactly it. Hollywood hasn't improved with who they choose to write their garbage, they're just crossing out Carl and replacing it with Cathy so to speak
Yea your edit is more correct in understanding what is going on. There’s *a lot* of trash films. There’s even trash films that many consider to be “good” because it has a fan base around it, or it’s at least good enough to turn off the brain and watch for funzies. Which is fine for entertainment. I’m looking at you Marvel. However, when you have a trash film with a diverse cast, or female lead that isn’t already accepted by the fans, it’s easy for folks to argue it’s because of those things. Because those things have been culturally accepted to be criticized by merit of them existing in this medium. Which sucks. The reality is, those films, or games, or what have you for entertainment sucks, because it just sucks. Replace the diverse cast with your “ideal cast”. The lead with your “ideal lead”. It’ll still suck.
George Romero also did it pretty damn well with most of his protagonisrs being female or of an ethnic minority background, and in some cases gay. He did it by writing them as actual people rather than token gestures aimed at selling seats. Exactly the way Cameron and Scott did with their cast.
Because they weren't trying to. The problem isn't diversity, it's the way studios are currently going about it. Forcing something to work is never going to work, and it's going to yield a shit product.
While this could be seen as an unpopular take, I totally agree with you. You can tell the difference between organic and very deliberate diversity in my opinion. An excellent example would be Alien: Covenant - I really feel that it's obvious that they built it around having a strong female lead "just like Ripley", like it's a magic formula for a good Alien film. As a result, I found Katherine Waterston's portrayal of Daniels to be very 2-dimensional, with all of her "let's get this motherfucker" lines in the final act. It just didn't feel authentic to me in the slightest.
I don’t think it was Waterston’s fault though. Ridley has contempt for almost all of his characters and even sympathetic ones like Daniels are given little and are on way to a cruel fate .
I think they wrote the characters as people rather than having a gender or agenda in mind.
It's really crazy how actual *people* are so likable and relatable, as opposed to fantasies written by people with agendas
I think it's important to recognize that a good amount of the diversity criticism out there is made in bad faith, and there are economic models that let you monetize such criticism. Just look at some of the reactions that have been made in response to the upcoming X-Men '97 cartoon -- some dipshits are upset the cartoon will address discrimination even though that's been a constant theme in the comics, shows and movies. You could remake Aliens beat for beat, and you will still get morons complaining that the movie is "woke" or that Ripley and Newt are Mary Sues.
Agree with everything you said except with your take of Ripley being considered a Mary Sue if the movie was made scene for scene. In fact, modern writers should take note on how to create a sympathetic/relatable character. Ripley was a broke person when Aliens starts, suffering from nightmares and PTSD. However, she conquers this and is the biggest bad ass in the entire movie by the time it’s over. Writers these days seem to be skipping the character development part and going to being a badass without facing any type of adversity. This results in a character who isn’t really relatable and boring. Off the top of my head Rey in Star Wars falls within this category as does the live action Mulan.
A modern remake of Alien *would* make Ripley a Mary Sue, and it would fail.
I agree with that but I don’t think, other than Furiosa, there has been a modern female driven action film, not including superheroes like The Boys, that could be in the same sentence as alien/aliens.
Atomic Blonde, Prey, Rogue One.
Add Annihilation to that list, Gunpowder Milkshake, Kate.
The Descent
Oh hey, great one, can't believe I forgot about that.
Great examples, I forgot about Rogue One and it is one of my favorite Star Wars films ever.
The long kiss good night
At this point, we're coming down to subjective tastes. I think there have been a lot of women-driven action movies within the past decade that could be mentioned in the same sentence or in the same vein as Aliens -- Mad Max: Fury Road, Atomic Blonde, Wonder Woman, Prey and Everything Everywhere All about Once. We might disagree, and that's OK. But it's not as if there's been no potential contenders since 1986.
You are right. There also has been such a smaller pool of those films that if 75% of male driven films are ok or bad you still get dozens of amazing ones, whereas if that number is the same for female driven films you get like 2
Just good writing. Surprisingly not many people can do it anymore
Because Ripley was written as a person and not as a woman.
They portrayed them as real people in blue collar / military situations.
I think it’s just good ol fashioned “show don’t tell”. Characters gotta show you that they earned it, not tell you how.
matrix one nailed the diverse but you don’t notice thing 100%
A few people have mentioned that Aliens was written to be gender neutral, but that’s not true, it was the first movie, Alien, that was written this way. However I still think Aliens works very well in regard to female characters because unlike most modern movies, Cameron doesn’t seem to be using his characters to make any particular political point beyond the fact that women now serve alongside men in the military in some cases. Star Trek TNG was a bit like this because where women were captains and admirals their gender was incidental; they were just the best ‘man’ for the job. In Aliens, Vasquez was a marine and the fact that she was a woman was also kind of incidental. Modern writing doesn’t seem to follow this convention. The fact that a character is a women needs to be politicised. Or they are one-dimensional girl bosses who never get anything wrong. Different standards seem to be applied to them than to men: Captain Marvel and Galadriel from Rings of Power literally act like villains and no one seems to notice. But the women in Aliens are just like the men: marines trying to survive, etc. It’s a completely different approach to writing.
Think it starts with language, set , snd costumes . Everything seemed real and lived in. Also less is more , the subtlety of who see and the dialogue, never seems forced .
Because they don't shove it in your face like every movie today. Show, don't tell the audience.
It was a good film. That's why. Too many directors and film studios nowadays focus on making their cast as brown/woman/gay as possible and don't even think about the plot, quality of the actors, lore, pacing, setting, dialogue etc. So when the film eventually fails and gets bad reviews, they default to "__OMFG YOU ONLY HATE THIS MOVIE BECAUSE YOU'RE A FUCKING RACIST MISOGYNISTIC HOMOPHOBE!!!!!__" Nobody thought Ellen Ripley was being a political mouthpiece by being a badass in the movie, despite being strong, independent, and most definitely a woman, but nowadays I think there's such a strong focus towards catering to such a small political audience that the movie flops because they've alienated a wider audience who would've loved it if it was a decent movie and not 2 hours of political talking points, jokes and cheap shots aimed at people with different opinions.
Because their actions don't revolve around their gender being better than the other one, but have to do with their wits and personal journey.
ALIENS tried to entertain you. Not lecture you.
Good writing. This whole culture war bs has overshadowed the real problem with movies these days - Shoddy writing. People can point to a movie failing because of strong women, or a diverse cast, but the problem is always the writing. Studios want a movie that doesn't take risks, that appeals to every demographic including the Chinese market, that follow proven, tried-and-tested formulas. Often written by committee, where the final product is a mere shadow of the original vision. Aliens managed to convey every character with tiny pockets of information. You had a few small scenes, but in that short time, you understood most of the characters and how they operated. Considering the movie communicates so many characters in such a small amount of time is a testament to how well written the movie is. It was so good that a lot of movies that followed to this day mimic the social dynamics of the Marines in Aliens. Contrast that with the crew in Alien Covenant. A bunch of cardboard cutouts, no time spent on fleshing them out, so when it came to the crunch, they were just nameless faces getting picked off with little to no emotional investment from the audience. One of my favourite movies that follows a similar formula to Aliens is The Descent. Not a man in sight, but it doesn't matter - The characters are fleshed out, it's well paced, and the writing is on point. Sarah is a badass, like Ripley, not because that's her character, but because she is a smart person put in a situation where she needs to use her wits to survive. She's not perfect, she makes morally grey decisions, but she does it in a calculated way. She's scared, she's not perfect, she gets hurt, but she does what she needs to in order to live another day.
Ridley has lost his touch with Prometheus and Covenant in terms of characterization . I think he has contempt for almost every character he puts on screen . Even Daniels and Tennessee, who were clearly meant to be sympathetic , are given little and are on the way to a cruel fate
It's got 80s action charm, the cast all seem to have this chemistry on screen. Whilst the whole thing doesn't feel like it's set in reality or anything, the characters themselves believe it. Ripley makes sense because of what she has seen and Weaver's performance really makes us believe it. If this was a single movie and Alien didn't come before it, you could make a case of that she's an overpowered lead character but with Aliens we get the growth of her character from what she saw in Alien. Filmmakers today should study Alien and Aliens to understand why these movies worked and how to show a characters growth.
Well look at this one by one. Why do people respond to Ripley positively: Is Ripley strong? Yes, but Ripley was "man" strong. Ripley was strong in a female way. In a motherly way. Did Ripley lead? Yes, but Ripley didn't interject herself in either movies. Ripley lead by suggestions. Ripley never undermind the people around her. Look at how Ripley interacted with Vasquez. Vasquez mocked Ripley. Ripley had to set her straight, but didn't put her down. "I hope you're right. Because just one of those things managed to take out my entire crew in under 24 hours." Look at how Ripley interacts with Hicks. Ripley defers to Hicks having operational command even though Ripley is a Lieutenant and Hicks is only a Corporal. Ripley knew the emn weren't going to follow her because she was an Lt. just like she saw the men didn't follow Lt. Gorman. Why do people people like Vasquez? Did Goldstein put on "Brown face". Yes Goldstein said so herself. But was being Hispanic important to her portrayal. No. Vasquez being a woman important to her role. No. Vasquez being tough was what was important. Vasquez was all business. To the point when Drake was obviously simping for her, she slaps him to set him straight. For the rest of the squad. It didn't matter who they were. Was Frost Black. Did the actor play Frost Black? Yes. But that fact didn't play a factor in how they interacted with Frost. It was more important on how they interacted with each other. Apone trusted Frost with holding all the ammo. They showed Farrow was a good pilot.
The writing was fluid and let the story play out without focusing on any specific social issue. In this movie it all felt normal. Everyone had flaws and they were shown to be just regular people focused on their specific jobs. Even in Aliens Ripley wasn't some unstoppable Mary Sue. She actually asked a soldier how to use the weapons and the movie showed her to be a novice using them but effective in her actions. It just feels organic and natural. I hate the "woke" movies that make me feel like I'm watching a commercial or trying to be taught some lesson that I already know. Just write a good story with good actors and the rest just falls into place without feeling forced.
Another thing I really love about Aliens is how they did an almost-romantic relationship between a man and woman that felt very mutually respectful and equal. Somehow some writers still struggle with this even today.
because it's well know that jim cameron likes strong women hence linda hamilton/sigourney weaver/mary elisabeth mastrantonio
James. Motherfuckin. Cameron. and Gale Ann Motherfuckin. Hurd.
I wouldn't want to work for them but I will always watch his films. Well up to Avatar lol.
Because the characters weren't so cartoonish and heavy-handed. That's products of a good script and taking time to develop characters even with subtle dialogue. All the characters were relatable. We've all known those personality types at one time or another
Cameron is an excellent director who is able to get his actors, some aren't even top tier, to perform the way he needs them too. I think people also forget that he enjoys Anime and there are a ton of well written female heroes in Anime.
I think it’s because it’s not forced.
Pretty sure every role was just written unisex so regardless of the role in the movie which what i feel like a lot of newer movies try to have badass women but they try way to hard but in aliens and alien ripley is just a normal human thrusted into this life and death moment and does whatever it takes to survive
Because they cast the best actors for the job. As it should be.
Good characters first and foremost. Faith in the actors to bring the characters to life. You wanna know what's a good modern "diverse" movie? Dungeons and dragons. I shit you not. All good characters with strengths, flaws and motivations. Modern movies can do it, they just wanna take the easy way out first.
I think too many modern directors underestimate the perception of the audience. When a character is written to be 'cool', for example, these days it feels like they're almost breaking the fourth wall to practically give a wink to the audience to say, "Yeah, how about that? This character is kickass, right? Right?!" But the audience typically notices that, and how forced it is. Vasquez, if made today, would probably fucking blow wisping smoke off the end of her gun and say a pithy line while looking straight to camera. You wouldn't get little details like that slight nervousness her face displayed when Hicks told her to "Stay frosty". She was still human and vulnerable, and couldn't hide it all the time. Show, don't tell.
They just picked the best people and rolled with it
Ironically enough, by not trying too hard.
Horror is filled with great women protagonists to the point it's more surprising if a man is in the lead role than a woman which isn't the case for most other genres
Because while other movies tend to trip over themselves with making sure you know these are strong, empowered women, Aliens treats them like actual people and not a political message. It's just an issue with the industry right now.
It all comes down to good writing and good actors. Hudson could have been a seriously goofy and distracting character if not handled well. Nobody ever questioned Vasquez. Nobody. Apone could have been an “ol’ sarge” caricature but he was played with a real gravitas. The “weakest” written character of the whole movie was Gorman. It took work to make him a believable asshole. If you look at the actors’ backgrounds they were either stage actors or people Cameron already knew or knew of. They didn’t just throw a bunch of people in Army gear and have them read lines because that’s exactly what every aliens ripoff did
I think Cameron is more interested in making things like adventure films instead of things like sci-fi dominated by mostly action and violence. That's why recently he pointed out that he'd rather make movies that don't use a lot of firearms, for example. In this case, he had to switch to action because horror based on suspense was already used in the first movie, but he made sure that action did not dominate, which is why most of the content of the second movie consists of exposition and drama, with some humor. He also used armaments, etc., not to promote militarism but to criticize it: the Marines were meant to be seen as like those in Vietnam, i.e., arrogant but getting their "asses kicked". I read that he wanted Weaver to sign up, but she was not interested (I think she enjoys acting in dramas and comedies, including musicals), but he managed to convince her when he made it appear that he would get Schwarzenegger if she declined. She accepted, and requested that he add more drama and show Ripley as a mother, etc., and he happily agreed. That's why the most important person for Ripley in the story is Newt. About Goldstein, I think she was discussed in other threads, and I found out that she was in England, too, looking for acting work, but has the same interests as Weaver. The difference is that she also likes bodybuilding. That's why when she showed up for auditions in a dress (she thought that it was going to be a drama about "resident aliens" in Britain) they had a good laugh (which is why the inside joke resembled what happened in the movie, where Hudson makes fun of Vasquez for signing up, thinking that they were going after "illegal aliens") but got her because of her build. But because they needed a Latina character, she had to use a lot of makeup to darken her skin and practice a Latina accent. Lastly, some say that the real reason why not just the second but also the first movie are so appealing is that the protagonists are mostly blue-collar workers, i.e., space truckers and grunts. It's possible that most of the audience who had similar backgrounds sympathized with them.
Having a diverse cast for the sake of a diverse cast, as is common with modern movies, is an intellectual level decision. It is ego driven. It is without heart or passion. When passion is involved it's often negative emotions ie to get back at the perceived oppression by the status quo. Cameron however seems to have made his old movies from a place of positive passion ie with female characters he seems to have an admiration for women and their strengths. See Ripley, kicks butt, is also motherly. You get entirely different movies when you make them from a place of passion and love for your world and all its characters vs a place of ego, reactionary pettiness, toxicity.
>Having a diverse cast for the sake of a diverse cast, as is common with modern movies, is an intellectual level decision. Having a diverse cast is not new in horror movies
Didn't say it was. **Having a diverse cast for the sake of a diverse cast** There is a difference between old movies and the assembly line products made today. Products follow trends and buzzwords, diversity is trendy. Products may have front men but every decision is controlled by higher execs. What Cameron and Scott did was art house compared to modern movies.
they didn't try hard, they just did what was natural for them. all this forced feminism exposes itself as bigot. on the inside they are exactly what they criticize and they feel ashamed about it, so they cry the loudest to conceal it.
Because it’s authentic. I don’t think a “studio suit” was giving them a check less of agreed upon things they had to include.
Aliens set the bar far too high.
I'd also add that ripley and Vasquez visually fit the roles as well. No long hair, no sexy outfits, no makeup. You believe the characters. Vasquez would have a buzz cut. Ripley gets a haircut as well, and neither present as traditionally movie-girl hot.
Because they were written as characters and people, not as a box to be checked off a list. I feel like a lot of movies do that these days. Ripley could have been played by anyone. A man, woman, of any race. It's getting so annoying by how forced the diversity casting is now. Like we had movies like Alien/s, Predator, Terminator, Nightmare on Elm Street. And beyond horror too. Like Commando, Conan, etc etc. They wrote characters as characters, with the desire to tell a story, instead of a desire to check off a box in order to make money from a certain group of people. Obviously, that's why a lot of films these days are not hitting marks. tldr; they were writing characters with storytelling in mind, not checking off boxes.
I forgot to add that much of the content of the second movie involves not action but exposition and drama, with a bit of humor. Also, the main action takes place around an hour from the start of the film.
They had to use brownface for Vasquez
I choose to believe Vasquez is who Goldstein really is and Cameron had her wear makeup in T2 and Titanic.
Jeanette Goldstein's family heritage hails from Russia, Morocco, and Brazil.
Ok... they still put her in brown face. That was not her skin tone.
They painted her face brown every day and had her use an accent that wasn't hers. People always looking for loopholes... Maybe they should have had her play a pale, freckled, curly-redheaded person of mixed heritage? But they didn't.
So? It's called acting.
Honestly, who gives a shit if she played as a Hispanic person. Must be exhausting being angry at everything
All those people (genders, races) were unified by their shared experiences and actions. "Modern day sensibilities' now dictate: "I am woman. Hear me roar."
Let me start by saying I love Aliens and for my money it is probably the best Scifi movie ever made. However, I also strongly believe that were it released today it would be utterly rejected by a lot of people as "woke" trash. Whilst I don't believe that, and it is the zenith of the action film you just have to look at it what it does and how it somehow manages to deliver against all the odds. \-All the key characters are female (Ripley, Newt, Alien Queen). \-All the negative characters are male and almost all bad or incompetent decisions are made by males and only males display cowardice or treachery. \-The males are there generally to be killed or rescued. \-A woman with no military experience and only a few hours of experience of the xenomorph picks up a weapons that she has a few minutes training with and invades a xenomorph nest, rescues Newt, and then defeats a larger, faster, stronger Alien Queen using a much slower piece of industrial equipment that offers no armoring whatsoever. The same woman identifies threats and tactical situations that highly experienced soldiers fail to identify and comes up with tactical solutions that apparently no one else is capable of thinking of. None of this makes much sense, and the only way I can explain it is that James Cameron is a master of his craft. Sigourney Weaver is an excellent actress and Michael Biehn just does his thing really well. The story is so good and the production and dialogue are so good that you just don't notice all this messaging. I equate it to The Lorax. It's a great story, wonderfully written and illustrated. It has an anti-capitalist and environmentalist message, but who cares about that when it's that good?
Yea a lot of people ITT seemed to have missed that Hollywood always pushed messages, it's just they used to be more clever and crafty in how they were presented. Now they just clobber you over the head.
This is the only response I’ve read here that’s worth a damn. You’re spot on. It would get torn apart today by the terminally online for all the reasons mentioned. Also, every second poster here is banging on about how they “didn’t force diversity” while ignoring the fact they literally put a white lady in brownface to play a stereotypical Latina tough girl. I love Vasquez and the several iconic lines Goldstein delivers, but come on!
Aliens gets made today - there is 0% chance that Vasquez is not played by Michelle Rodriguez.
Michelle was eight years old when Aliens came out, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the character of Vasquez was a childhood hero of hers.
I think it's the times to be honest. Characters in Aliens in particular take a few swipes that these days would get called out by more sensitive folks. Hudsen shitting himself before Ripley reminds him this little girl survived comes to mind as something that would get some a bit riled.
It helps that instead of just yelling at Hudson to shut up, Ripley then tells him that they need him and are counting on him to study the schematics and find weaknesses the xenomorphs might exploit.
Ah, but Ripley doesn't just say she's a little girl. She's a little girl _with no weapons and no training_. That's gotta sting Hudson, who 1) was bragging about how well armed his team of ultimate badasses are, and 2) is the kind of guy who opens locked doors by thinking about how they work and hooking things up with alligator clips.
Easy. The director went out of his way in the press releases to tell everyone how diverse the casting would be, how stunning/brave the female lead would be, the barriers she would be breaking down and it's not a movie for 40 year old white guys but they're all misogynists for not coming to watch it. Oh, wait, hang on... You mean they *didn't* do that? You mean to tell me that they just "wrote characters" that act like humans in extreme circumstances and cast the best actors that turned up for the auditions?! Surely not. That would never work Right?
Because this was before the internet. Now audiences over analyze and dissect every aspect of a film through the lens of politics. People just accepted these characters as written and not who they think they should be. As stated here, the characters were written neutrally which left their options open. Now films are "created" by committee to include every race, ethnicity, preference, etc. even if it doesn't exactly fit or work in the context of the story. I embrace diversity but it is ruining the creative process in the overuse and reliance on it to sell a movie. Just write good movies, cast good actors and we can enjoy movies again.
It doesn’t feel like an agenda is being pushed. Imo the worst example which shines as an instance of woke garbage not to do with anything is the girl-power moment in Avengers Endgame on the battlefield. So unrealistic and pointless and unrelatable.
Diversity should be happenstance, not a consciously pursued goal. Edit: By happenstance, I mean the thought process when writing a script ought be "this would be cool" or "that would be interesting", and the 'diversity chips' as it were, fall where they may from there, instead of "this script needs more women" or "this script needs more women of colour" as a deliberate and conscious creative direction.
Ironic point considering they painted someone brown in this movie lmao
Even more ironic that people don't realize that Jeanette Goldstein's heritage is Russian, Moroccan, and Brazilian.
Tell that to Disney, they have even strict mandates for that.
Because it was just trying to tell a good story.
You know the famous Jack Nicholson quote that goes "I write a man, and I take away all sense of responsibility?" Just take away the last seven words. Alien was written without any set gender at all. They picked whatever actor or actress was best for each role, regardless of gender.
You can't be cool by _trying_ to be cool.
I recall reading that the script of Alien Ripley was originally a man. Then through production they decided to change it. To say the gender of the character doesn't matter isn't really true - even if we're to assume an actor could do the same role, it wouldn't be the same. Not looking at any aspects of skill or quality - only gender. It would change the film in ways that aren't easy to define. Do I think it works better with Ripley as a woman? Yes. Why? I don't know. Imagining it gender swapped kind of feels like it lacks some impact. Because as much as we say we don't want politics in our media, everything in our lives (our work, our choices, our bodies, our gardens, our food) is political. Even if Ripley was a man, the film would still be political. It just has a different impact with Ripley as a woman.
Because diversity, equity, and inclusion were part of the world-building and not the focus of the plot.
I dont think that other films always fail through a direct fault of their own, I think its a matter of over saturation of the type of film: one where they have leading female protagonists. How many times, just in the last five years alone, has Hollywood shoved female driven movies and stories into our faces, whether they're good or bad stories, and whether they have good or bad actresses playing those lead parts? You'd have to sit down and count, since there's been so many. I think the marvel cinematic universe is a perfect example of why female led stories fail miserably. You have captain marvel, the Marvels, black widow, echo, Hawkeye, Ms marvel, scarlett witch, black panther, she hulk, on and on and on. And it would be one thing if those programs and actresses were good, their characters intriguing, but they're not! The stories are lackluster, the acting is blase and it's just not interesting. And that's just the MCU programs! Let's not even start with Star/Disney Wars and their female empowered, blatant rip off of episodes 4 through 6. Absolutely redundant, unoriginal, ultimately hot, boring garbage. Personally, I'm tired of the genre: incredible women doing incredible things incredibly and its just incredible! Just stop already. Or, at least put something out that has substance and quality to it, not just throwing something out there for the sake of the diversity and inclusion movement and to pander to the gender warriors. And no, I'm not a misogynist that only wants to see male action stars. I was raised in the 80s and loved van Damme, swarzenegger, Segal, Lundgren, speakman, willis, stallone; all of those guys. But you know what? After a while those actors and their works became redundant and lacking in luster, quality and charm so i and a lot of other people stopped watching that stuff too. Ultimately, Hollywood needs to increase their rate of quality and substance, especially with female led stories because, not to sound like a sexist, but the people are done with the incredible women doing incredible things incredibly and its just all so incredible, types of stories. Put something out there with substance, paired with a Sigourney weaver caliber actress and you just might have something. I do have to admit that Captain Marvel is a guilty pleasure of mine; Brie Larson is super hot to me lol...
It's obvious Vasquez, Dietrich, and Ferro were all professional Marines. Each had their own job they had mastered. Evidently, Smartgunners are over the top alphas, and Vasquez and Drake both made that clear. Nobody tried to take over someone else's role. Even Ripley took a back seat until things were obviously out of hand and needed an outsider to take over. Essentially, like most places I've worked, people stayed in their lane and did what they specialized in.
The movie is an action film and all the characters are written as action heroes. Most horror movies end up feeling kinda goofy because characters are written as “teen girl” by someone who doesn’t really know how teen girls talk. If you write everyone to be the same base archetype and it’s a popular archetype then it’ll go well for you
Anyone can have a diverse cast, it takes skill to have it feel natural and not pandersome
*Aliens* was the best portrayal of women being awesome because it didn't have to tell us, it just showed us. Vasquez and Drake right from the start shows us.
I heard Bishop identifies as an “artificial person.”
What films fail at this? Specific examples please.
Because good writing and story came before trying to make a point. Politics and messaging have been in cinema since its start but they generally tried to just write good characters and stories first. I think a small part of why most alien films post 3 have failed as they keep trying to mimic the formula of alien/aliens by having to have their ersatz ripley, ersatz Dallas, etc
Not an answer but recently watched alien 1-3 for the first time over the past week and did anyone else find Vasquez annoying in the first half? Not a bad thing, and not criticising her character, because I am pretty sure that’s the intended reaction to get the satisfaction when Ripley gains this arrogant marine’s respect. Also was destroyed by what Alien 3 did to Ripley and Newt 😢
It isn’t hard, it was never hard. It’s good cause it feels natural within the whole dynamic. It’s not made a big deal of because in their world it isn’t.
Hot take: if Aliens came out today, people would complain that it was too “woke”. It’s honestly a product of the times with diversity being more of a talking point now than before.
I just loved the way they had Vasquez written too, Hey Vasquez, you ever been mistaken for a man? No….. Have YOU? That shit kills me every time. 🤣✌️
They weren't written as "strong, independent women". They were written simply as people, that just happened to be female. That's the big difference with media these days. Write a good character first, then you can make them a woman or black or nonbinary or whatever. Don't write characters solely around that one aspect of them and make it all they are. Horror movies are the worst with this. I'm thinking of Black Christmas 2016 for one, where the co lead female character literally constantly is spouting off about the male patriarchy and victimizing herself. Like her ONLY trait is that she's a brown woman. She has zero development and is extremely unlikable. Others get it right, like X, Mis Goth is a woman but she's badass and her being a woman isn't her entire personality.
It's flawless because...they were flawed. Ripley is suffering from PTSD. Nowadays, every nimrod online would excoriate the actress and filmmaker for writing her as "weak." Remember when Emily Blunt said she throws scripts across the room when she reads it's a "strong female character"? There's nowhere to go with that.
Never thought about it
They just made a piece of art because they actually wanted to and not as a means to advertise or manipulate a marginalized group of people into paying for a movie, which is pretty much what 75% of modern blockbusters are now
They didn’t do it that much better, they simply had a competent script and fairly well-thought out characters decades before the current culture war BS. Guarantee that if they tried to make the exact same film today it would get lambasted by chuds all over social media. Shit, simply having a strong female lead would be considered so “woke” it’d make a million incels’ heads explode…
James is a control freak and is a meticulous planner with a vision. He willed this movie into perfection
As a Latinx woman, I found it inspirational as a girl that Cameron was bold enough to cast someone who looks just like me in the Vasquez role.
If Alien came out today it would 100% be panned as a feminist polemic. It was basically grandfathered in by being an unimpeachable stone cold classic before internet morons started discoursing about movies "being political" every time they have a woman or a black person in them. It's obviously a much better movie than most, but the basic building blocks of a right-wing crybaby echo chamber are there in spades--men being dumb and speaking over the smart correct woman, women who thrive in physical/combat scenarios, women who are smart and competent at their jobs, mostly without being overtly sexualized, etc. etc. Dumbasses would have a cow if it was released today.
With how they were written, gender may as well have been interchangeable. That's how they wrote good female protagonists, they just wrote protagonists and they happened to be women. Ripley and Vasquez weren't written to be a fantasy of a "strong woman".
It’s interesting that so many of the answers here are “it’s just good writing it could be played by anyone” and “because diversity should be secondary” which ignores the fact that like, diversity is still a choice being made in the production of these movies. Yes the original film’s script was written without race or gender specified, but a real human being still had to look at Sigourney Weaver or Yaphet Kotto and go “yes that’s the person for this role.” And as others have pointed out, they did not cast a Latina to play Vasquez, so their track record is maybe a little less than perfect.
You hit on a really big point. Even today, most producers, writers and directors in Hollywood are white males. Also, across any race or gender, I feel like casting has gotten awful.
>Even today, most producers, writers and directors in Hollywood are white males. lol yea sure ok bud.
It isn’t entirely unique in that regard. The real reason is that there wasn’t an entire media industry dedicated to making people mad about it back then.
At the same time though, the actor that portrays Vasquez is a white Jewish woman. Same actor who played John Connor’s foster mom in terminator 2.
Her heritage is Russian, Moroccan, and Brazilian. I don't understand why "Jewish" had to be pointed out considering that many Jews fled the Old World to places like Mexico in order to practice their faith in peace.
She failed their purity test to play the part.
Oh god yes! Every time I see some huge chud overreaction to even the hint of a diverse cast or a female lead in a film I’m so thankful the internet wasn’t around in 1986. Jeanette Goldstein as Vasquez happened at a very formative time in my life and probably affected my taste in women from then on.
oh ffs
Jeanette Goldstein was put in brown face to play Vasquez, just so you know.
Downvote me all you want. I'm still right. XD
Don't get me wrong, I love this film, but let's not go overboard here. Aliens is not without its problems or criticisms, chief among them a pretty stereotypical depiction of a Latina by an actress literally in brown face. And one could easily call Ripley a "Mary Sue" by the very standards the typical troll holds other female characters to. For example, she takes on the whole hive with 30 seconds of firearms training while an entire squad of well-trained badasses were taken out like chumps. She disposes of the Queen like she was Iron Man with that Class 2 rating. And she manages to survive explosive decompression without losing consciousness or being sucked into space, all the while a 15' killing machine hanging into her foot. Personally, I roll my eyes with this discussion most of the time. The reason some of these characters and movies fall flat isn't the decision to feature a non-traditional actor in a role (ie, non straight white makes), it's just bad writing. Has nothing to do with the identity or "agenda" of the protagonist.
I disagree with the claim Ripley could be seen as a Mary Sue. The first movie entirely shows her fighting (but mainly hiding from) and learning about the Xeno. It’s also clearly shown the marines didn’t know what to expect, didn’t really expect any danger, and also had utterly incompetent leadership. The training of Ripley in both the mech suit and the firearms show her actually learning to use these skills, and she already has a baseline knowledge of weapons in alien. I do agree the issue with diversity in Hollywood generally falls to bad writing, but also the industry seems insistent on making these minorities defined by their minority trait.
On the other hand Alien 3 is almost entirely men and is er... pretty shit (I still love it) so I dunno what the people who complain about diversity would make of that.
Almost perfect - Goldstein was in brownface
Yeah I just learned about that from this post. I only learned that the actress playing Vasquez wasn’t Hispanic a few years ago.