This week’s Thursday workshop began with a debate on the topic “Aliens is more than just a sci-fi film”. I arrived late and was assigned to the negative, meaning I had very little time to do any research and gather my thoughts. Luckily, my team had done some great work in getting the main points of our argument together:

• Aliens is full of stereotypical science-fiction tropes (e.g. aliens) and in fact influenced the shape of sci-fi for the next two decades, particularly through its dark, Gigerian production
• Science fiction necessarily incorporates elements of related genres like the thriller, war film, etc.
• Genre is significantly tied into marketing, and based on the film’s poster and trailer you can’t argue that Aliens is anything but science fiction

I thought I came up with a relatively successful argument in retort to something the affirmative said: that Aliens is tied into wider cultural factors active at the time of its making and is therefore more than “just” a sci-fi movie. My response was that thinly-veiled social commentary is actually one of the core features of science fiction, so if anything that argument actually helped the negative side more than the affirmative.

As it happens, my personal opinion actually lies on the side of the affirmative — if genre is a construct that is not inherently sublimated into the fabric of a film itself, but is applied to a film from the outside, then every film is more than just a [whatever genre it belongs to] film. People can come along way after the fact and group/categorise films based on criteria that may not have even existed at the time the film was made. Maybe I’ll get to make that argument in a future project.

The reading¹ draws some interesting parallels between Aliens and motherhood, discussing the alien queen as vagina and womb, entered by an army of “ineffectual male gametes”. It takes Ripley, a maternal presence (yet still a hardened warrior) to break through and reckon with the alien mother-to-mother — all in protection of her “daughter”, Newt. The depiction and treatment of women in cinema is something I’m particularly interested in, and something I’m considering exploring in my sketches later this semester. Aliens is an interesting example of gender-flipping a traditionally male genre, though in this case the character of Ripley conforms to many of the traditionally male characteristics a character in this genre would have, at least superficially. Femininity is deeply ingrained in the character in many ways (as Brown illustrates) but I wonder if it would be possible to completely remove the character from any traditionally male expressions.