Uncanny Alien Bug Mother example essay topic

This morning I was struck by the realization that I've been going to movies for fifty years now; starting when I was eighteen months old, my mother would take me on a streetcar every Thursday togo shopping, have lunch, and go to a matinee and stage show at thePantages or the Orpheum in downtown Los Angeles. Clearly I like movies and I usually find something enjoyable even about bad ones. I can hardly remember a time when I have seriously considered walking out of a film. But I considered it yesterday afternoon asI was watching "Aliens 3; I was thinking it was the most unremittingly unpleasant film viewing experience I could remember. This reaction has to be seen in the context of my own tastes and biases.

Science fiction and horror films are my least favorite genres. I don't enjoy being frightened in the movies, as some people clearly do. Nonetheless, knowing that nearly every member of the women's community in Tallahassee where I lived at the time was wildly enthusiastic about Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, I did bring myself to see "Aliens" the second film in this series, and Have to admit, I too, was entertained and pleased by the sight oft his powerful female hero doing her Rambo number against what feminist theorist Lynda Z winger called "the uncanny alien bug mother". Since Ripley's ongoing battles against this monster and against the greedy machinations of "the Company" back home, which wants to capture the monster and use it as a biological warfare weapon, havebecome sort of feminist cult films, I figured I'd better be among the first to check out "Aliens 3 and see what happened to Ripley and Newt (the little girl she rescued from the monster at the end of "Aliens"). Well, they " ve fallen on hard times. They crash land near an island used as a prison for 25 of the hardest core criminals on earth-murderers, rapists, etc. -all of whom havebecome members of a kind of Christian fundamentalist cult thathasn' done a thing to temper their rampant misogyny.

Everyone else on the space capsule bringing the sleeping survivors of the Nostromo back to earth has died except Ripley. She's been asleep for 50 years or so and has been shaken up in the crash, so she " 's looking a little the worse for wear with a black eye and deathly pallor. Furthermore in this latter day version of a medieval dungeon she's landed they dress her in convict gray and shave her head which makes her fit right in with the inmates. The only person there who's even remotely pleasant is the doctor, himself a former inmate, with whom Ripley asks to have sex (it's been over 50 years, you know); while we don't see them in the act, the implication was it was purely the utilitarian satisfaction of an urge, still Ripley has to pay the price for it later on. The whole visual milieu of the film is grim. The color spectrum is dark browns and blacks, dirty tans and grays, fiery, hellish yellows and reds.

The only spots of other colors are a few pieces of turquoise blue stained glass in the doctor's quarters, to let you know he had some aesthetic sensibilities, I guess. The set is something like an abandoned underground steel mill with miles of filthy, rotting, decaying tunnels. The only organic matter we seems blood and gore, the monster, and this wholly gruesome pack of convicts who do, out of terror and the notion they have nothing to lose, do come together under Ripley's leadership to try to kill the thing with no weapons but the decaying prison itself to use. "Aliens" at least had some spots of humorous repartee.

"Aliens 3 has almost none. It's grim, grim, grim. And though Sigourney has a few heroic moments, she's sick and weak and not up to her previous standards. Though this time-I think-she finally does inthe alien bug mother and its children. I hope so, I don't think the world can use yet another Alien movie.