[A couple years
ago, I spent a
fun week AmericanStudying summer blockbusters—this year, it’s time for the sequel!
Add your thoughts, on these or other blockbusters, for a weekend post that’s
sure to set box office records!]
On friendly and
hostile extraterrestrials, and the real bad guys in any case.
In the shape of
his head, E.T.
(star of Steven Spielberg’s
1982 film of the same name) looks a tiny bit like a distant cousin of the mother alien (the “bitch,”
that is) from James
Cameron’s Aliens (1986). But that slight comparison is
about the only possible way in which these two summer blockbusters aren’t
wholly distinct from one another. E.T.
is perhaps Spielberg’s most kid-centered film, from its youthful protagonists
to its product placements for Reese’s Pieces and the
good ol’ Speak and Spell,
its drunken slapstick to its underlying theme of growing up in a single-parent
household. While Aliens has to be one
of the most adult, hard-R-rated summer blockbusters ever, featuring one nightmare-inducing,
graphically violent and horrifying sequence and image after the next (to
say nothing of the Space
Marines’ extremely salty repartee).
E.T. and Aliens aren’t just at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes
to their ratings and intended audiences, however. They also embody two entirely
different perspectives on the question not of whether there is life other
than our own in the universe (both films agree that there is), but of what
attitude toward Earth and humanity those extraterrestials might hold. The
summer blockbuster Independence Day (1994),
about which I
blogged here, explicitly engages with these contrasting perspectives,
featuring a number of characters
who believe the aliens might come in peace before their true, hostile
intentions are revealed. Because of its status as a sequel to a film in which the alien
creature could not be more hostile and destructive to humans, Aliens can dispense with the debate and
move immediately into the story of how its human characters will combat the
extraterrestrial threats. And by tying his extraterrestrial’s first entrance
into the film to the creature’s love of Reese’s Pieces, Spielberg similarly signals
from the start that his alien will be friendly to—indeed, overtly parallel
to—his young protagonist Elliot.
E.T. isn’t without antagonists, though—but
they’re of the human variety, the community of threatening scientists and
government officials who seek to capture and (if necessary) kill E.T. to learn
his secrets (and who in the original film carry
guns, not walkie talkies, in that pursuit). And in that sense, E.T. and Aliens aren’t quite as far apart as they might seem—because in the
latter film’s major reveal (SPOILER alert), it turns out that Paul Reiser’s corporate
scientist Carter Burke is far more overt of a villain than the aliens, who
are after all only fighting for their own survival (rather than driven by greed
and manipulation, and a willingness to sacrifice anyone who gets in their way,
as Burke and the Weyland-Yutani
Corporation for which he works are revealed to be). If there’s one thing on
which such disparate summer blockbusters can apparently agree, it’s that the
powers that be—whether corporate or governmental—represent a far greater
threat, to humans and extraterrestrials alike, than any alien invaders.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other summer blockbusters you’d analyze?
No comments:
Post a Comment