When Chuck listed Lunar Brothel as a setting, I couldn’t resist the urge to do a sequel to Hart’s Office.
He shook his head as he walked away from the depot, clearing out the cobwebs in his mind. Traveling by slug was the cheapest option, and he was on a budget, but the claustrophobic nature of what amounted to a coffin inside a ferrous projectile still bothered him. He checked the oxygen rig he wore, just in case he’d missed something after swapping it with his filtration mask. Safety regulations on Luna were strict, what with hard vaccuum outside, but he wasn’t the type to take chances.
Then why are you here, Dave?
He rubbed the bridge of his nose as he walked. His PDA hummed and he tapped his wrist to check its holo-display. Another message from the Futuron investors. Working for two clients at the same time was nothing new for him – times like this, you took all the work you could – but he couldn’t shake the feeling he was caught between two warring sides.
“You might want to start with Clive Jameson, the research head.” Catherine Hart’s suggestion echoed in Dyson’s ears. He pushed memories of her away. Her presence unnerved and intrigued him all at once. She was corporate, meaning she wasn’t to be trusted, but her perfect body and velvet voice refused to let go of him. She was by far the most dangerous woman he’d ever met, which probably explained at least part of the reason she turned him on.
Focus, Dave. Find the egghead.
Neon pulsed above and around the storefronts in the dingy corridors. Luna’s miners and researchers were in two separate compounds, and while most respectable scientists stuck with their own, Jameson hadn’t come here to compare notes on nanorobotics with someone. Dyson rounded a corner to find the lurid silhouettes and tantalizing signage he was seeking.
RED LIGHT ROOMS – OUT OF THIS WORLD – GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
He took a deep breath and walked through the door. The lighting indeed was more subdued and crimson than the utilitarian fluorescence in the corridor. A few girls of various builds and wearing about one outfit between the lot of them were dancing on tables and around poles, enticing tips from the leering men and women around them. A tall woman with a buzzed haircut stood behind the bar, and she was the one Dyson approached.
“What’ll it be, dick?”
“Beg pardon?”
She smirked. She had a ring in her lower lip. “You walked in here with a purpose, rather than a hard-on. You’re dressed for Earth streets, you’ve got a high-end comm on your wrist and if I’m not mistaken you’re packing a 10mm select-fire Ruger Blackwater under that fashionable coat. So do you want a drink before you start busting up the place?”
Dyson smiled. “You an ex-cop?”
“Five years, Dallas downtown.”
“Seven, Philly homicide.”
She extended her hand. “Mira. Nice to meet you.”
“Dave. Likewise.” She had a firm grip. “And I’ll take a Walker Twenty on the rocks and a quick ID.”
“Information costs more than imported booze, handsome.”
He put a bill on the bar. She examined it and set about his drink.
“I’m looking for a Terran egghead.” He brought up the picture on his wrist display.
“Saw him disappear into the back with Chloe. Wasn’t too long ago so you probably won’t catch them at it if that’s what you’re after.”
He thanked Mira, downed his whiskey, and headed towards the back rooms. Only one door was locked.
Knock, knock. “Clive Jameson?”
“Go away.”
“I’m here about Catherine Hart.”
A pause from within, followed by some scrambling. The door opened a crack.
“Can it wait? I’m in the middle of…”
“The late-night experiments. Tell me about them and I’ll leave.”
After a moment he stepped out of the door, closing it behind him. He wore a Red Light Rooms robe which he held closed with a tight fist.
“I should call my lawyer.”
“I’m private, Doc. No Miranda, just questions. Your boss is concerned about your extra-curriculars, and I don’t mean the Lunar trim you’ve been plowing.”
Jameson winced. “If my wife and kids knew…”
“I won’t say a word to them if you start talking.”
“Okay. We wanted to explore artificial intelligence. We have the means for a subject to walk around indistinguishable from-”
“Stop right there. You know how illegal that shit is.”
“Yes, yes, I know. Why do you think I’m here? If Futuron found out…”
There was a ruckus back in the main room. Women screaming. Dyson looked over his shoulder and saw three men in dark suits with weapons drawn scanning the room. One of them spotted Dyson and raised the rifle.
“Get down!”
The coilgun slug made a whip-crack sound as it flew past Dyson. He ducked into an open room. Two more goons appeared flanking the shooter and started opening up. When the tiny sonic cracks of the weapons subsided, he moved back out, pistol in his hands, and old firing range instinct kicked in.
Center of mass. Take your time. Make them count.
He dropped two and winged the third. The wounded one tried to raise his weapon but there was the boom of a shotgun from the bar. Mira leaned out to look down the corridor, a sawn-off over-and-under in her hands.
“Everybody okay?”
Dyson looked to Jameson. The scientist lay dead on the floor, the robe splayed open, a hole each in his chest and head.
“Everybody but Chloe’s client.”
He stood and walked to the dead assassins. Mira was already searching the bodies and handed him a slate.
“You’ll want to see this.”
It was a list of five names with attached photos. Two were men he didn’t recognize. One was Jameson. One was him.
And one was Catherine Hart.
He fumbled in his wallet for more bills. “Call the Lunar PD. Sorry about the mess.” He handed her the money and ran out towards the depot.
He wasn’t a praying man, but if he were, he’d pray the damn slug back to Earth moved fast enough.
Using this picture again, because Garrus calms me down.
So now is when we discuss the ending to Mass Effect 3. I know it’s been discussed and being discussed all over the Internet as I type this. One of the best articles on the subject is over at GameFront and the Escapist podcast gives a good slice of opinions on the subject from people not frothing at the mouth in entitled rage.
Let me tackle that issue first to ensure I push spoiler material past most summary snippets.
I’m as flabbergasted by the endings to Mass Effect 3 as anyone. Moreover, I feel that at least a couple of the problems I have with them could be solved with some quick edits that leave the overall ‘message’ (if there is one) intact. But as much as I would like to see what I consider to be improvements applied to this conclusion to satisfy me personally, I know full well it may never happen. Just like we’ll never get a truly & universally satisfying end to the Star Wars prequels, or that “other” Indiana Jones movie, or Battlestar Galactica, or LOST, or the Transformers live-action films, we may never get one for Mass Effect.
Now, I’m not saying gamers shouldn’t try. I’m not saying we can’t be upset. The problem I have is in the way gamers are approaching it. Raising money for charity to make BioWare aware of this wide-spread disappointment is one thing, but to claim we want to “retake” it is preposterous. Mass Effect and its universe was never really ours, not entirely. It is a product of BioWare’s creative minds and programming chops, and to a lesser extent, it also belongs to EA’s marketing department just as much as Madden does. Yes, we add to the experience of the game by playing it, by making decisions, and by growing attached to its rich cast of deep characters. And as participants in the story, we can and should have something to say about how it ends. But we never owned it, outside of purchasing a copy of the game disc or downloading it onto our PC. There’s nothing to “retake”.
Now. Let’s talk about the actual endings. This is bound to get a bit long, so grab a drink. You may need a few, actually.
The Death Knell of Choice
Once Shepard talks The Illusive Man (hereafter referred to as TIM) into blowing his brains out in a nice if somewhat inexplicable call back to the first game, he’s conveyed via magic elevator into the Crucible. There the Starchild or whatever it actually is tells Shepard (and, by extension, us), that the Reapers do not in fact slaughter organic life as part of their reproductive cycle or just because they’re evil eldritch sci-fi horror-terrors. It is part of a “natural” cycle created to ultimately preserve organic life. The Reapers destroy sufficiently advanced civilizations so that they will not destroy themselves and all other life when they inevitably create synthetic life.
“It has been my plan all along to destroy organic life in the galaxy down to the last squirrel. Except for Jeff. “… That is a joke.”
First of all, Shepard should be able to point outside the window at EDI. She’s spent the entire game exploring the aspects of organic living she doesn’t understand in an entirely peaceful way. And if you, like me, managed to broker peace between the Quarians and the Geth, then you have another huge example as to why the reasons for this cycle are monumentally flawed. While both races have work ahead of them to repair rifts left by racial hatred and near-genocide on both sides, the evidence exists that the peace will last, and synthetic and organic can work side by side without any sort of artificial reset button of face-melty death.
Just as perplexing is the notion that this sort of wholesale slaughter is necessary to preserve lesser species. It’s a given fact that organic life in general can get pretty wild. It does tend towards patterns of chaos rather than the rigid order of manufactured forms. However, imposing order on that chaos does not mean destroying it. When I want to prune a bonsai tree, I do it with tiny shears and patience, not a blowtorch. The Starchild is basically imposing SOPA on the universe with organic life taking the place of the Internet.
But Shepard, beaten and half-dead, just kind of rolls with it. The Starchild presents three options: Destroy the Reapers (and, he says, all other synthetic life in the galaxy), control them (because that was such a hot idea when TIM was ranting about it all Huskified just minutes before), or synthesize synthetic life with organic life. Let’s leave aside the two obvious ones and look at that last one. Instead of doing what we’ve been doing all game long, brokering peace and helping people overcome differences to work together towards a common goal, we are essentially forcing every individual being in the galaxy to forgo all differences to become a single, homogenized race. They are given no say in this. It all comes down to what Shepard wants. I mean, all three endings have this problem and the word choice of the kid in the stinger calling him “the Shepard” seems to indicate this messianic overtone carried over into whatever life survives this idiotic illusion of choice.
I say “illusion” of choice because they are all essentially the same. All three endings end the same way. The Reapers are dealt with, the mass relays are destroyed, and the Normandy struggles to outrun an explosion. I’ll deal with those last two later. Stepping back and looking at the endings from a broader perspective, we see that the only true difference is a swap of colors and a few different graphical assets. The original Mass Effect only swapped dialog lines, it’s true, but those lines and choices actually had an impact on the games the followed. The finality of these endings, however, precludes any sort of feeling that we made that big a difference. We see nothing of what our teammates after those last moments on Earth. There’s no way to know how the galaxy reacted to its fate. There’s no closure. It’s an ending instead of a conclusion, an abrupt and forced truncation of the story of Shepard that leaves the player empty and unsatisfied.
The Indoctrination Theory
If you take a closer look at this, carefully prying up the cow patties BioWare seems to have left all over their trilogy, evidence exists of something deeper going on. Several sources on the Internet have pieced together moments and snippets of lore throughout all three games to put together the following theory. To me, it’s a bit of a stretch, but not much.
Since the very first Mass Effect, we’ve known that one of the most insidious weapons in the arsenal of the Reapers is the process known as “indoctrination”. An individual of sufficient power or influenced exposed to the Reapers begins to come around to a way of thinking not necessarily their own. Their reasoning seems sound and logical to them, but to the outside observer it’s clearly flawed, even dangerous. This influence is pervasive, creeping into the thoughts and dreams of the target often without their knowledge. This is called indoctrination. It happened to Saren. It happened to TIM.
And some say it happens to Shepard.
After all, Harbinger’s thing has always been to assume direct control…
The VI taking the form of a little boy Shepard failed to save in the prologue doesn’t make much sense even in the rather dumb “a form you can understand” explanation given in things like Contact. At least Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation used human perceptions of him to make various points or play some pranks. The Starchild, though, isn’t just present at the end. Shepard sees the sprog in nightmares throughout the game. And the nightmares, while carrying the voices of lost comrades and the cries of the dying, also are possessed of an inky blackness that pervades them, just as inky black tendrils try to creep into Shepard’s perceptions during his showdown with TIM.
The evidence doesn’t stop there, according to this theory. Consider the “choices” offered. Two of the three of them end with Shepard dead and the Reapers alive. In synthesis they exist in a new form but they continue to exist. And in the control option, even if Shepard believes himself to be strong-willed enough to call them off, they still live. Only the destruction option matches up with Shepard’s goals, but two things happen that not only are meant to dissuade players from choosing them but give subtle hints that there’s more going on. First, the Starchild plays down the option, saying that destroying the Reapers is not enough, and the explosion will kill all synthetic life. For a weapon painstakingly designed to only kill Reapers, this seems incongruous. Second, the option and its explosion are colored red, the color of Renegades. It’s directly opposite the control option, colored Paragon blue, despite it being in line with TIM’s wishes, to which Paragons are staunchly opposed.
The cherry on this theory is that with enough readiness and war assets, when the destruction option is chosen and the result plays out, a hint is slipped into the end that Shepard survives the ordeal. This is probably the ‘best’ ending possible, very hard to attain, and yet it comes bundled with free genocide for the Geth? There’s something wrong, here. Either it’s yet another facet of the ending I simply cannot grok as a writer, or the Reapers are lying to you.
The Real Problems
Even if this theory proves true, or BioWare reveals some other greater agenda to explain away the aforementioned malarkey, the real problems of the endings still exist. We’re not just watching Shepard make some sort of sacrifice to deal with the Reapers once and for all. We’re watching the end of galactic civilization as we know it, and we’re watching perhaps the cruelest betrayal in all three games combined.
The mass relays are destroyed. And the Normandy abandons you.
Let’s tackle the bigger one first. The DLC Arrival had you destroying the Alpha relay, an act that wrecked the system so thoroughly that hundreds of thousands of innocent beings died. This was why Shepard was on Earth in the first place, facing down trial for that act. And then, at the end of Mass Effect 3, we apparently destroy every single relay in the galaxy. That’s going to be a LOT of dead people.
Let’s assume that this isn’t the case, and some sort of space magic preserves trillions of lives from the big booms. Civilization’s still pretty fucked up. While it’s an established fact that FTL drives do exist on all civilized spacecraft in the galaxy, they are a great deal slower than using the mass relays. Journeys that take hours or days would take years without them. So those aliens who lept to your aid at Earth now have to limp their way home. If you managed to assemble the largest force possible, this means the quarians who finally retook their home planet may never see it again. It means the krogan possibly freed from the genophage will never actually sire children on Tuchanka. I think you get the idea. I’m not entirely sure if galaxy-wide communications relied on the mass relays or not, but if they did, Shepard saved the galaxy only to plunge it into a dark age. Fierce fighting over fiefdoms and religious zealotry ahoy!
Pictured: James Vega twenty years after the ‘liberation’ of Earth.
But even beyond this issue there’s one even more personal. The Normandy has been our home for three games, moreso in the last two. The final game even makes an effort to put a more lived-in feel into the ship, with crew members wandering around and conversing freely with one another without our prompting. This ship and her crew have been there for Shepard through thick and thin. They flew through the Omega-4 relay in Mass Effect 2 knowing it was a suicide mission. In fact, at the start of Mass Effect 3, the ship was grounded. To get to Shepard as quickly as they did, the Normandy had to have already been airborne when the Reapers hit. They knew what was coming and they knew their commander needed them. And yet at the very end, when Earth is on the cusp of rescue and their leader making a dire and perhaps final choice, what do they do?
Apparently, according to BioWare, they tuck tail and run as fast as they can. It’s possible they didn’t know about the space magic that would keep the mass relay explosion from killing them all, and were trying to escape before what happened to Bahak happened to Sol. I still don’t get that, though. They’re not just abandoning Shepard but the entire planet they just helped liberate. And how would they know it was coming? Their motivations for running are unexplained and nebulous. You do see some of them living after the whole outrunning-the-explosion bit if you had enough war assets, but again, logic comes and bites whatever happiness you can get from this stupidity right in the ass. If Garrus or Tali survived, what happens when the humans run out of dextro-friendly food? If Liara survived, how do you think she’s going to like living out her long life on this planet while every other person she survived with dies around her? They’re stranded, and with the mass relays destroyed and given the distance Joker probably jumped, chances of rescue are slim to none.
To me it would make more sense if the Normandy was caught in the blast from the relay and Joker has to struggle to keep her aloft long enough to land safely on Earth. And when they do land, depending on the war assets, either they’re all killed, they survived but the battle wiped everybody else out, or they survived and are hailed as heroes… with the notable and palpable absence of Shepard.
But hey, what do I know, I don’t write for BioWare.
The Biggest Tragedy Of All
The worst part of the endings has nothing to do with the decisions themselves or the gaping holes in the plot through which one could fly the Normandy. The worst part is how the ending of Mass Effect 3 renders every decision you’ve made over the 150+ hours spent across the trilogy completely inconsequential. It doesn’t matter if you cured the genophage, brokered the peace that ends a centuries-long race war or even how many lives you save or change just by being Shepard. In the end it all comes down to different colored explosions that basically give you the same results.
Stories have done the “what you choose doesn’t matter” ending before, and it’s been effective. Brazil and 12 Monkeys spring to mind. But those were films. These are video games. Moreover, the Mass Effect series are video games that emphasize player choice, tolerance, examinations of individuality and life itself. We are told, and invited to exemplify through gameplay, that the choices we make matter, that the direction lives take are important, and that tolerance and peace are not only possible, they are preferable to the alternatives even in our current, modern day lives. A world where different species can form friendships and even romances without any serious social implications and a man can talk about his husband in a very real and moving way is one that is definitely worth dying for.
But Shepard’s death, just like our choices, really has no meaning. I mentioned before that there’s no sense of closure. There’s also no sense of gravity to our decisions. We have no idea if the alliances we’ve forged, the peace we’ve brokered, will last beyond the multi-colored explosions we create. And in the end, we’re given to understand that it really doesn’t matter. To make everything in all three games come down to a single choice could work, if the aftermath of that choice also reflects choices we’ve made since the beginning. As it stands, those decisions carry no weight. Even in the case of the ‘best’ ending, there’s no sense that what we did was ultimately worthwhile. The whole trilogy, from who to rescue on Virmire to the events on Thessia, feels like a waste of time, because no matter what we do, the completely interchangeable endings are waiting for us.
It’s one thing to botch the ending of a video game. It’s another to ruin its replay value as a result, and another still to also destroy the replay value of the games that came before it. As a writer and a gamer, I simply cannot grok this decision.
I’m fine with Shepard dying. Just as I was with Spock dying in Wrath of Khan. It’s all a question of the how and why behind that death. If BioWare do indeed heed the criticism of their fans, there’s no reason to simply push them into a “happy” ending. But the ending should mean something. It should have an effect on us other than anger. We should feel our time was well-spent, and worth spending again. Even if the end is bittersweet or downright tragic, if it’s satisfying enough it will be worthwhile, perhaps even to the point of repetition. People watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy and all of those Star Wars films multiple times, even if the ending isn’t entirely happy, because the world is still rich and full of life and meaning after the end. As it stands now, the Mass Effect universe is left empty. Shepard’s death is essentially meaningless. Shakespeare put it best:
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
This post may be similar, in the end. I have no idea if BioWare is actually listening. But even if they aren’t, if you’ve gotten this far and are still reading, I thank you for your time. I welcome other thoughts on this matter. And I pray that I never, ever botch the ending of anything I write this badly.
Endings are tricky things. It can be difficult to tie up loose ends, wrap up character arcs, and bring the lines of the plot to a satisfying conclusion. It’s as true for romantic comedies as it is for war stories, though the latter tends to be more harrowing and bittersweet in the end result. And make no mistake. Mass Effect 3 is a war story.
As an aside, I will maintain my usual policy of avoiding spoilers in the review, which is difficult in this case because the controversial ending of Mass Effect 3 has an effect on the game as a whole, but I can’t discuss it without spoiling things. I will do my best.
In the 6 months since the events of Mass Effect 2‘s Arrival DLC, Commander Shepard has been under house arrest on Earth. Finally brought before Alliance Command, it turns out they suddenly believe Shepard’s story about the Reapers. That’s because the Reapers invade Earth. The race of sentient murderous machines have begun a unilateral campaign of annihilation across the galaxy, and as much as Shepard would like to stay on Earth to fight, the Normandy is instead sent out to get help. And with an enemy as numerous and implacable as the Reapers, they’ll need all the help they can get.
The theme of war and an impending sense of doom hang over Mass Effect 3 like a dark shroud. The Reapers are everywhere. Even in the galaxy map, you can see them descending on system after system. Shepard has to deal with them as well as just about every friend and foe that’s been made over the course of the trilogy. This being the last game in the story, anybody who’s survived thus far is pretty much obligated to make an appearance. Thankfully, Mass Effect 3 continues the tradition of maintaining a coherent narrative in its character moments right down to incidental things like individual rescued colonists and well-meaning but overenthusiastic fans. It also looks even more polished and expressive than the previous titles, even if the pervasive lens flares get a bit irritating.
Actually it’s pretty mild in this shot.
The inventory and combat systems have been tweaked a bit, making things feel like a hybrid of both previous games. Shepard’s loadout is now based on weight rather than class, allowing you to customize your experience to some degree. You can load up an Infiltrator with a shotgun or a Vanguard with a sniper rifle, with the only price being an increased recharge time for your powers. Returning from the first Mass Effect are weapon mods, this time handled in their own interface rather than being buried somewhere in the general inventory system. Procurement, upgrades, and customization are all done in one place, with separate interfaces for each, making these decisions easy and actually interesting instead of the tedious chore they were in the first game.
As for combat, we continue to handle our differences in opinion in a succession of corridors full of chest-high walls. The reintroduction of grenades, however, encourages us to move around the battlefield and keep the pace and tension high. Enemies will also employ special tactics against you, such as setting up turrets, siphoning health from nearby friendlies, and approaching cautiously behind riot shields. Your powers remain satisfying to use in response, for both you and your squadmates. It bears mentioning, though, that having one button for taking cover and picking up items and using environmental highlights and just about everything else can be frustrating when you meant to take cover but wind up trying to hack a terminal while angry enemy warriors use your N7 logo as a bulls-eye.
“My momma says I’m pretty.”
The scanning mechanic of the previous game also makes a return, but it’s not quite as crap. The removal of resource-gathering, the reduced time to find a particular item, and the chance of getting chased down by angry Reapers actually makes it a bit fun to search for war assets. The purpose of scanning this time around is not to buy fancy upgrades but to bolster the war effort. Discovered assets and forged alliances can be viewed in the Normandy‘s war room, along with a ‘readiness rating’ that reflects participation in the multiplayer, iOS interactions, and possibly other aspects as well. The goal is to gather as much support and firepower as possible in order to, in theory, get the best ending.
While it’s to be expected that a war story is going to have all sorts of tragedy and noble death, it must be said that Mass Effect 3 does a great deal of it quite well. Despite some of the forced tragedy of the opening, some of the character moments are absolutely amazing. We get the feeling that things we’ve done in the previous games do, in fact, have lasting meaning. Characters we’ve come to know and love come out guns blazing, defending their ideals to the death and showing just how much influence one individual can have. These moments, combined with the smooth combat, improved world-map hunting, and some above-average dialog even by BioWare standards, had me absolutely adoring the Mass Effect 3 experience…
Wouldn’t be a story about Shepard without Garrus.
…right up until the ending. Which I will discuss tomorrow.
Stuff I Liked: The variety of weapons and the ability to try them out on Shepard no matter what your class. The diversity of the enemies that required tactical thinking to overcome. The revamped Normandy and the way crew members walked around it naturally instead of being stuck in one place constantly. Stuff I Didn’t Like: The reduced number of conversation choices, while allowing things to move more quickly, felt a little off, as if choices were being made for me. The finicky use/cover button. So many lens flares. The occasional graphical glitch or clipping issue. And while I appreciated Kai Leng’s role as a villain, was it necessary to make him a space ninja? Stuff I Loved: The tight focus on characters. The smartly-written dialog. The casual and progressive way in which the game handles same-sex relationships. The way every decision feels important, and the ways the game shows you the consequences of those decisions, until the ending begins.
Bottom Line:Mass Effect 3 is like going out to dinner with a bunch of old friends. You have some drinks, laugh about old times. The food is delicious and the company’s fantastic. It’s a deeply satisfying experience… and then, suddenly, your friends are gone, you’re stuck with the massive check, and something on your plate was undercooked and now you have food poisoning. The ending ruins what was otherwise a great gaming experience.
I may have said this before, but it bears repeating: there was a time when sequels were not foregone conclusions. People like a good serial, to be sure, but not every entry into a genre is going to become a bestselling franchise. These days sequel hooks are practically a requirement as part of the conclusion of a story. Having one person survive a horrific ordeal doesn’t necessarily qualify as a sequel hook, but it does have the advantage of concluding the original story in a satisfying way while leaving the door open for a new story to pick up where the original ends. Such was the case in 1986 when Ridley Scott’s Alien was followed by James Cameron’s Aliens.
Of the events aboard the ill-fated Nostromo, there were two survivors: Warrant Officer Ripley and Jones, the ship’s cat. Rescued by a salvage team as the Nostromo’s shuttle drifted through space, Ripley is awakened from cryonic stasis to find 57 years have elapsed and she has no evidence of the unknown attacker that savaged her crew and forced the destruction of her ship. The company revokes her flight status and tell her that if such creatures exists, the 50-60 families that colonized the planet her crew landed on would have said something, right? When the company loses contact with the colony, they tap Ripley to accompany a team of Colonial Marines sent to investigate. They have military training, superior firepower, plenty of attitude… and are completely unprepared for what awaits them.
This film is a significant tonal shift from the original Alien. Ridley Scott’s film is a claustrophobic and shockingly intimate descent into nightmare, while Cameron’s plays more as a sci-fi action yarn with horror elements. Even so, there is a coherence in aesthetic that keeps the stories feeling closely related beyond threads of the plot. Despite not taking as much time to expound on every character involved, Aliens still contains the close environments and elements of tension that make the original memorable to this day. In other words, it does what a sequel needs to do in order to be a true success: it holds true to the original while expanding the scope of the story.
It’s all about girl power.
While many action films draw their power from the decidedly male side of things, Aliens also continues the tradition of not only having a female lead, but playing on rather feminist themes. Alien dealt very much with rape and bodily violation (even if it was interspecies) while Aliens focuses on female empowerment and motherhood. From the smart-gun wielding take-no-prisoners Vasquez to the dropship pilot Ferro, women are seen comfortably holding positions of power and performing jobs with distinction. Ripley herself continues to grow, showing a great deal of depth and complexity along with the ingenuity and bravery that got her through the first encounter. This isn’t to say the men are marginalized by any stretch. Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen turn in great performances, and Al Matthews’ Sergeant Apone is quite memorable, serving as the template for future Marine sergeants in places like Halo. Carrie Henn turns in one of the most effective child performances I’ve ever seen. Finally, Aliens pulls off the feat of making everybody want to punch quintessential nice guy Paul Reiser in the face. Though I’m sure those who didn’t like the TV show Mad About You wouldn’t need his role as a sleazy corporate douchecanoe to add to their incentive.
In addition to its cast being well-rounded and progressive rather than running entirely on machismo, Aliens seems to have something to say about the nature of asymmetrical warfare. Here we have a team of highly-trained well-armed soldiers plunging headlong into an environment they know little about, trusting their high-tech weaponry to prevail over whatever’s in their path. But the enemy is something they’ve never encountered before. They are belligerent and numerous. They exist in a setting that is unnerving and (let’s face it) alien to the Marines, and they use the enemy’s ignorance to their advantage. They conceal their numbers, they strike without warning, and their methods are brutal and inhumane. This setup could be used as a metaphor for quite a few of America’s wars, though Cameron had Vietnam in mind when he was making the film.
Oo-rah.
All the same, it goes without saying that Aliens is decidedly less frightening than Alien. There are elements of horror, to be sure, mostly in the form of jump-out scares, but given the expansion of the cast, the shift in focus, and the presence of so many automatic firearms, this should come as no surprise. It does have tense moments, though, exemplified in the Special Edition scene involving the sentry guns. It’s funny to me that 20th Century Fox said this scene showed “too much nothing” when building tension in a movie like this is essential to its success. I guess it shows what studio executives know about storytelling.
No matter what edition you see it in, Aliens is definitely worth watching. It’s solid construction comes from being built on the great foundation of Alien and it wisely finds ways to expand its scope without sacrificing what worked the first time around. A strong female lead, great character beats all around, and the visual aesthetic of a sci-fi action director who would become one of the best in his field contribute to make a memorable film that may other movies and several first-person shooters would borrow heavily from for decades. It’s a great mix of fun and frightening.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
Our fear of the dark is something primal, something elemental. It hearkens back to the days when we were scraping out our existences in caves and under large trees hoping bigger predators covered in fur and claws weren’t about to leap out of the underbrush and use our intestines as a meaty spaghetti dinner. Since then we’ve learned to do things like create firearms, build sturdy housing, and put all of our information in one place so we can share, argue over, and laugh about it all day instead of doing necessary jobs. But even with the Internet and guns, the fear of the dark is, for many, still there. And it doesn’t get much darker than the depths of space, where as Alien reminds us, nobody can hear you scream. Unless you’re on a spacecraft of some kind.
The events do in fact take place on a spacecraft, the interplanetary ore hauler Nostromo, crewed by the half-past-the-future equivalent of a team of truck drivers. The captain, Dallas, receives orders from his corporate masters to set down on a planet nearby to investigate a distress signal. Despite the protestations of his crew, he sets out with his first officer Kane and navigator Lambert after they land. When they return, Kane has been… attacked. Warrant Officer Ripley, senior member of the crew with Dallas away and Kane incapacitated, orders them to remain outside for quarantine, but the science officer, Ash, lets them in anyway. What happens next has rampaged through nightmares and five more movies of varying quality.
This is where it all began for the disturbing alien creature referred to as a ‘xenomorph’ in the sequel. Strange creatures born out of space doing nasty things to human beings is nothing new in cinema. War of the Worlds and This Island Earth immediately spring to mind as examples of previous films that dealt with this sort of close encounter. Few of those films are truly frightening, coming off these days as more cheesy or quaint. Alien, however, despite thirty years of film making innovation, holds up as something disturbing to an effective degree. You may not lose all bowel control as folks tend to do when playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but you’ll probably come away from the film at least little unnerved.
“No. I don’t care what you say, I am NOT sitting in its lap.”
Part of this is due to the casting. Veterans Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, John Hurt, and Yaphet Kotto were joined with newcomer (at the time) Sigourney Weaver to play normal, working-class people who just happen to do their jobs in space. Their conversations and interactions should remind modern fans of the sort of back-and-forth seen in shows like Firefly, if a bit more subdued and quiet. It’s still a bit difficult for me to hear every line spoken in the first twenty or so of the film, as the conversations are held at a low, interpersonal tone. I have to wonder if this was intentional on the part of director Ridley Scott, drawing us as the audience closer inch by inch until things start grabbing bloody hold of the crew.
When shit does hit the fan, it does so as viscerally as possible and there’s very little time to catch one’s breath. The scenes in the latter two thirds of the film are filled with tension and uncertainty. Very wisely, we don’t get a very clear view of the xenomorph until we’re close to the end. As it crawls through the Nostromo‘s air ducts picking the crew off one by one, the brainchild of H.R. Giger shows itself to be a very intuitive, very vicious, and very perverse sort of creature. It seems to truly enjoy stalking these humans and doing unspeakable things to them. This is a major part of what makes it so fearsome. It isn’t a mindless beast lashing out in fear or hunger. This thing knows exactly what it is, what it does, and likes it.
Bilbo’s probably just missing Bag End.
There are a couple jump-scares that happen, but most of Alien‘s effectiveness comes from the fear of the unknown, the twists that new viewers may not see coming. They’re done so well and with such sincerity that even I, a repeat viewer, am still a little unnerved by what happens. This is the sign of a story well-told. No matter its age, no matter the scene of popular media around it, its beats still ring true and its characters still come to life. This, above any of the disturbing imagery or foundations of films that came after, is why I highly recommend Alien. Fire it up and see how this nightmare began.
And next time, I’ll tell you how it continued.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
