Ioanna Papageorgiou

Aliens 30th Anniversary: (re)viewing the film with "better eyes"

 

As the Blue-ray, special, anniversary edition of Aliens arrives in the UK, a challenging of some of the notions / accusations / misconceptions that still, persistently, follow this film is pertinent and timely. And what better way to do so by interrogating one of the seminal essays written about it, in  Stephen Mullhull's book 'On Film'.

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To a cinephile Stephen Mulhall’s (a book, in which the Alien Quadrilogy is taken to be “an exemplary of cinema that finds itself in the condition of philosophy – of film as philosophy”) is a revelation. Especially if he, or most significantly, she was introduced to and became fascinated with this particular cinematic series by James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, (1986), and not by the original classic, Alien, directed in 1979 by Ridley Scott. Because among and in comparison with his pears in the creation of the Alien universe, Cameron is still considered less of an artist whose work deserves to be analysed (although he is the only "author" of the bunch, since he writes, directs and edits his films, himself) and more of a “designed for mass-consumption” product maker.