“Wait. Wait! So that’s where that comes from?!?”
“Yep.”
“Cool.”
I watched Aliens last night with my son. I had reluctantly shown him the first movie about a week ago, and he was keen to see the second last night. I needed to do some podcast prep as we were going to record the Hellboy podcast at midnight, but I figured, “What the hell.”
Now I’ve seen Aliens more times than I can count, but watching it with someone who has never seen it, someone you love and are raising, was wonderful. I’m trying to teach my son things about analyzing a movie, in much the same way as I’m trying to teach him cooking techniques. I’m not an expert in either, but I want him to have a grasp on what to look for when he gets older. It’s kind of like planting a seed. It might not matter much now, but later in life he’ll have the knowledge embedded.
Anyway, I’ve seen this movie so many times, and I love it so much. But even so, I find new things every time. For instance, here’s an example of my missing something that is completely obvious, or at least me not remembering, but which my kid caught immediately. “Did Newt call her Mommy?”
I was all, “Uhhhhh.” And we ran it back.
Also, it’s far scarier than I remember, even having seen it recently. I see it through a different lens. As a different genre than the first movie, which is a horror movie. I always just label this one as an action movie. But my son found it really scary, and seeing it through his eyes, it is a terrifying action movie. James Cameron really does a great job of bridging between horror and action. They can often go hand in hand, but rarely this well. It was a joy to see it in this regard, with my son again hiding behind a pillow and me worried about all the “language throughout” in the movie. I know he uses this language with his friends. It’s much more casual for them than it was for me growing up, as I was a church kid, but it still makes you cringe as a parent to constantly hear the eff word when you’re watching something with your teenager.
One of my favorite moments in Aliens is when Vasquez takes a pistol, cocks it, and hands it to Bishop as he gets in the pipe to crawl through to pilot down the other drop ship. I love that bit. She takes it out. Cocks it. Hands it to him, and then looks away. Then he regards the pistol for a second, and hands it to Ripley. It’s a beautiful moment. Pointing that out to my son was so much fun.
And that he found the Vasquez line, “No. Have you?” hilarious was thoroughly gratifying.
It was sad to me to have to tell him that the movies only go downhill from here.
-xtien
“It’s the only way to be sure.”