Endless winter

And you thought our winter was interminable? The vitamin-deficient cast of The Colony are stuck living underground full-time in the midst of an ice age forecast for the not-too-distant future. Everybody seems crazy with misery and paranoia—a flu could easily wipe out the colony’s meager population. An extra-hammy Bill Paxton plays a trigger-happy veteran whose only source of engagement seems to come from getting rid of his fellow colonists the moment he catches them stifling a sneeze. “This isn’t right,” someone complains when Paxton marches a sniffly one out into the cold for an unceremonious execution that’s entirely against colonial protocol. “This is survival,” he replies with Schwarzeneggerian ponderousness. The hydroponic garden offers low yields and protein is scarce. Inhabitants mope around in unsexy layers of discount surplus store buys. Not even the rabbits seem to want to mate. Gilligan’s Bomb-shelter this is not.

Replete with an intermittent boilerplate voice-over (“One day it started to snow. It never stopped.”) riddled with redundant exposition, all of the film’s elaborate sci-fi trappings and awkward explication for murderous cabin fever are finally just laying the groundwork for what is essentially a dopey variation on the zombie apocalypse siege movie by another name. The good guys are attacked by a gang of cannibal freaks from a fellow colony, all of whom have astounding reflexes, top-notch combat skills and superhuman strength, which is funny when you consider that they’re severely malnourished. The aphasic bald trench-coated giant who seems to be the gang’s leader runs around in arctic weather conditions without a hat on. Laurence Fishburne is about the best things in the movie, but he gets killed in the first act. Canada’s own Julian Richlings shows up but is mostly just hysterical and famished. The violence is disgusting, phony looking and boring, and the landscapes are heavily digitized—could the not find appropriately wintry locations? Does Alberta not do service productions anymore? Do we really need to go to the movies in April to feel colder?

      

Born slippy: too close for comfort encounters with unidentified life forms, too few encounters between James Cameron and editor

Just a glance at the personnel involved in Alien (1979) serves to remind us just how remarkable this movie—at once science fiction and slasher flick, not to mention a chamber drama—truly was. The cast included John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Skerritt, Yaphet Kotto and Ian Holm, while the director came fresh from his in many ways never bettered debut The Duelists (77), and would thereafter make a little futuristic detective yarn called Blade Runner (82) which managed to revolutionize a genre. His name was Ridley Scott, he came from advertising, and while time hasn’t proved him the world’s deepest director the guy had style to spare and a cunning, merciless sense of economy.

The strength of the ensemble cast is emphasized early on, their first scenes being group ones of seemingly regular folks amiably bitching about their jobs. Intriguingly, the film’s hero only establishes herself roughly halfway through. We only really start to notice—if not entirely trust—Ripley (a long, tall and very cool Sigourney Weaver) after we see just how badly things go with the unidentified creature she alone insisted not be let aboard the spacecraft, the first major spasm of mayhem occurring in that still utterly traumatizing “birth” scene where the only overtly sympathetic character dies writhing in his own blood. It's a scene that instills a sort of corporeal discomfort that would undoubtedly make David Cronenberg smile. From there onward a showdown of intergalactic Darwinism locks the movie between its teeth, playing out on a brilliantly claustrophobic set from one of the great periods in sci-fi design, with gear made of industrial strength material, stuff with actual weight you want to wrap your knuckles on.

Edmonton's Metro Cinema is screening Alien this coming Sunday afternoon along with Aliens (86). There are camps that claim the sequel superior, yet to my eye the relationship between the two is nearly identical to that between The Terminator (84) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (91), which Metro screened last week and which were both directed, like Aliens, by James Cameron. Aliens indeed establishes its themes of ruthless maternal and/or propagatory instincts more clearly, and develops Ripley, awakened after a 57-year sleep to help fight an entire colony of the acid-blooded, multi-mouthed aliens, into a fully fleshed out character with a resonant backstory and inner conflicts. Yet after Scott’s style and economy we go straight to Cameron’s workmanlike flabbiness. Like T2, Aliens is another two-and-a-half-hour movie full of over-cooked sequences and abundant redundancies. The climactic scene where Ripley discovers and then escapes from the queen mother’s lair, all goopy vaginal egg pod thingees, smoke and sweat, is masterfully handled—too bad we’re then forced to sit through a “surprise” second ending that’s not half as thrilling and just takes forever.

There are concessions, like a sinister Paul Reiser as the corporate weasel, Bill Paxton, fresh from playing Chet in Weird Science (85) and reveling in playing a babbling human Nerf ball, and Lance Henrikson, proving robot scientists can actually be nice guys, always lending a hand, even when their bodies are chopped in half. For better or for worse, there’s more of everything in Aliens, though I’d pick its predecessor for the stronger, meaner chills and thrills any day of the week.