This project is about horror movies. Specifically what breaks the realism in viewing them. Something that commonly shatters the audience's sense of immersion is that protagonists are often illogical. We find ourselves thinking "Why would she go back in the house? You know what's in there," and when the person is predictably killed we find ourselves thinking smugly that we were right. So I was set to examine one of the top 100 horror movies of all time and look for some of these trope situations.
Spoilers to follow. General knowledge of the plot of the movie would be helpful.
The movie I
chose to examine more closely on this list was James Cameron’s 1986 film
“Aliens”. As a complete aside from what I’m going to dissect in the movie, I
will admit that I really enjoy this film. Both Aliens and its prequel were
extremely well written science fiction and began a huge amount of tropes in
genres across all manner of media. That being said, there is a huge amount of
cavalier cheesiness that makes me want to start shooting from the hip at
anything that moves…
I want to
begin with the marines and ask people why they seem to think that trained
military personnel of the future are insubordinate in almost any scenario. In
this case it isn’t so bad because it’s the first time that its featured
prominently in this type of scenario, but more often than not, space marines
now remind me of my favorite Top Gear saying: “Ambitious, but rubbish,”. An
example I dwell on here is that when the marines are moving towards the
generator complex and Lt. Gorman tells the marines that there can’t be any weapons
firing in the generator room. I find that if there is a potential thermonuclear
detonation that hinges on whether or not my men fire in a certain direction, I
will definitely stress why that scenario can-not happen; I actually think that
this is reasonable no matter how little training you have as an officer.
There is
some more ineptitude that I’d want to pull out and consider with the character
of Burke. When he is found out to have planned to kill the entire crew at the
first opportunity and that he put Ripley and Newt in a room with two face
huggers, why in god’s name did you just let him walk around as if nothing
happened? I understand that without that detail, Burke can’t have any feasible
way of locking the crew in a room with the aliens, but it seriously makes me
think “of course that happened, you didn’t even handcuff his corporate ass”. By
the way, plastic zip cuffs are not out of place in military equipment. I
understand that Burke is your supervisor and superior and also a human being,
but handcuffing him not only is the alternative you need to killing him, it
makes him dependent upon his captors for survival as he can’t do anything on
his own.
Another
situation I find completely ridiculous is anything having to do with the Sulaco
or the dropship in the movie. The fact that the characters are stranded and
unable to get aboard the warship in orbit makes perfect sense, but the fact
that literally everyone leaves the ship and goes to the surface is a bit
terrible. I can’t believe that you wouldn’t leave at least a pilot or
communications officer aboard to actually continue flying the ship. Even worse
than this is the fact that the drop ship lands at the colony! When you have a
ship with weapons on it, you don’t keep it out of the fight. Modern helicopters
have the ability to provide over watch for forces on the ground, and by keeping
military equipment landed, it gives the enemy an opportunity to steal
technology, take a vehicle out of the fight. When the stowaway alien kills the
two pilots on the dropship the only thing that surprises me is why they landed
the ship and kept the doors open. If I were a scary spooky alien, why wouldn’t
I take advantage of that?
Aside from
the predictability of the jarheads’ actions, I find most of the situations to be
fairly in touch with how human nature works. Ellen Ripley remains one of the
smartest horror archetype characters that I have seen. Situations where most
characters act irrationally cause her to be quite logical; nuking the colony
from orbit is definitely a breath of fresh air compared to: “I say we go back
inside the house- er I mean processing plant- and look for clues!” I don’t feel
that there are any situations where the fight or flight response is really
ignored as is the norm for many horror movies. Ripley is continuously rational
for much of the movie (the one exception being her rescue of Newt, but I would
view that as understandable since Newt is basically Ripley’s replacement
daughter).
I tend to
think this logic being used for Ripley is something that is used to identify
characters we are supposed to “like” as the audience. Bishop, Hicks, Ripley and
Burke for the first half of the movie are really developed as characters
because of their use of logic. We immediately like Bishop because of his cautious
personality and the curiosity he shows; we like Burke because he seems to be
the only person to believe Ripley and Hicks seems to be the only marine to keep
a level head for the entirety of the movie. Instead of using bad logic to
simply kill off characters in the movie, it is used to develop who characters
are and give us people to root for as it were.
It’s very
hard to escape horror movie tropes, the ones that say that the protagonists are
to be killed by their own ineptitude. This type of movie comes very close,
however. The thing that makes Ridley Scott’s alien so frightening is that it is
noted for outsmarting the heroes not because the heroes are inept, but because
the alien is smarter, faster, and negates the logic used. The alien is an unstoppable,
mute, predatory force that is made to tear apart the ideas of the protagonists,
many of which are similar to actions that many of us would take in the same
scenario. The thing that makes the alien truly terrifying is thinking that in
the same situation you would be just as helpless as the protagonists.
You can find the list of movies I chose from here:
