Après Newt, le Déluge

A warning in advance: this article is going to do absolutely nothing new. Griping about diminishing returns in the Alien sequels is a well-ploughed furrow. Still, with Disney threatening to make more sequels in the franchise, I might as well bite the bullet and go ahead and offer some thoughts on the series, especially since I already did the same for the Alien vs. Predator movies.

Alien

I’ll try to keep this one short, since it’d insult your intelligence to give a plot recap; Alien‘s plot is pretty damn archetypal, all told, and if you haven’t already seen it and have any interest in SF-horror hybrids, you need to go fix that.

You can see the original 1979 Alien as a riposte to Star Wars – a gruesomely visceral SF-horror nightmare which takes place in a similarly grimy, “used” version of the future without the glamour or mysticism of the Jedi or the bombastic space battles and Death Stars to steal the spotlight from the blue-collar characters in their functional blue-collar ship, and which is more than willing to take a slow, gentle pace when it calls for it rather than keeping the action fast and furious all the way along.

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley became the franchise protagonist well past the point when that stopped making sense. In some respects that’s kind of a shame. Only the very first audiences to see Alien, before Weaver’s central role became widely known, will have been able to fully enjoy the question mark over who (if anyone) would survive the slasher movie-esque depredations of the xenomorph.

Still, at the same time Ripley is arguably an important figure not just for science fiction (still precious few female leads in that), but also for horror. On the one hand, she’s an example of the Final Girl concept as widely used in slasher movies, but only in the extremely surface-level, literalist sense that she’s a woman and she’s the only cast member to survive the xenomorph’s assault.

B-Grade Schwarzeneggers of the 1980s

It’s interesting how if you want to do a parody version of a typical 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie in something (like The Simpsons does with Ranier Wolfcastle’s McBain movies), you make it a fairly lowbrow straight-ahead 1980s action movie – no offbeat counterfactual genre stuff like horror/SF/fantasy movies might include, nothing fancy, just a badass cop or special forces guy blowing away bad guys and delivering quips.

The thing is, Schwarzenegger’s filmography doesn’t actually reflect that. The 1980s movies which made his reputation for the most part consisted of fantasy schlock (Conan the Barbarian and its sequels), unexpectedly thoughtful science fiction (The Terminator, Predator, The Running Man), and the oddity which was Twins (a comedy playing off his image). This pattern largely persisted into the early 1990s, where a strand of movies like Kindergarten Cop, Last Action Hero, and True Lies emerged playing off his reputation as this archetypal hero for straight-ahead pure-action movies when, in fact, he’d hardly done anything in that vein.

The major exceptions to this are Commando, Raw Deal, and mmmmmaybe Red Heat, though that’s enough of a comedy that I’d consider it borderline. It’s certainly strange that Schwarzenegger’s cinematic reputation should be based essentially on two or three movies that rank among his less successful and of the decade. Let’s take a look at them and see how they come across these days.

Commando

Colonel John Matrix (Arnie) is a retired special forces commando who lives in a happy little mountain cabin with his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano). Their domestic peace is shattered when Matrix’s former boss descends on them in an Army helicopter to bring bad news and a couple of bodyguards for the family. You see, it turns out that someone has been killing off former members of John’s unit, and the assumption is that their civilian cover identities have been blown and John is next on the list.

Literally as soon as the Army brass have departed in the chopper it all goes to shit; within minutes the soldiers left behind to guard the house are dead, Jenny’s been kidnapped, and Matrix is in the hands of the mercenaries – led by Bennett (Vernon Wells), a former member of Matrix’s unit that Matrix had kicked out for getting a bit too war crimesy with their operations. Bennett and his team are working for Arius (Dan Hedaya), the former dictator of the South American nation of Val Verde who Matrix and crew ousted in a US-backed coup. Arius wants Matrix to use his status as a hero of Val Verde to assassinate the new president, with the intent of using the killing as the opening strike in a counter-revolution.

Naturally, Matrix isn’t having it; a few death-defying stunts later, and he’s on the loose, with only 11 hours to go until the plane he’s discovered. When coup conspirator Sully (David Patrick Kelly of Twin Peaks fame) makes the mistake of trying his pickup artist bullshit on flight attendant Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong), Matrix spots an opportunity to start unravelling the plot, and after some initial reluctance Cindy finds herself swept up in Matrix’s adventure.