Comparative Reality

I've been meaning to recommend this piece of horror criticism for a couple of months: Nicholas Seeley's "A Dragon in the Time Machine: A Gross Anatomy of Horror." He does a good job expanding on Stephen King's theories, and this part in particular grabbed me:

But to my mind, the perfect work to illustrate the Vampire archetype is perhaps not the one you would expect: Ridley Scott's film Alien. This is a Vampire story distilled to its essence: a small group of humans, alone with the darkness, in which lurks a thing that is coming after them. They have done little or nothing to deserve this fate, but it doesn't matter much. Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon takes some pains to develop the characters, but character is, in the end, nearly irrelevant too. The good and the bad, the strong and the weak get eaten all alike. There's no excess in this movie to distract from the horror—and wonder—of the beautifully conceived monster that's coming to get us.

This made me think of Aliens, which is a very different movie altogether. I don't own Alien or Aliens on DVD. I love the movies, but I've been scared off by the eighteen different versions available (Original, Director's Cut, Platinum Edition, Gold Star Director's Platinum Edition Special Version, Extra Crispy...).

One version of Aliens, for example, restores some deleted scenes. One of those being a scene where the marines set up sentry guns, and those guns mow down scores of aliens before finally running out of ammo. When I first saw that scene, I thought it was pretty damn great, and I wondered why the hell it was removed.

But now, after reading Seeley's article and thinking about it for a bit, I agree that it should have been removed. Because that scene really reinforces what Aliens is: It's a Zombie movie. While Alien might be a Vampire movie, with the humans facing off against a single, powerful being, in Aliens the good guys are running away from hordes of monsters. Monsters that die easily when faced one at a time, but which will quickly overwhelm you when faced in numbers. The sentry gun scene only serves to highlight that point: You can kill dozens of the things, but eventually you'll run out of bullets and they'll tear you apart.

So the sentry gun scene just isn't necessary, doesn't really add anything (except some nifty hardware), and possibly detracts from the movie.

As a bonus, I think that reduces the number of versions I have to choose from to only around twelve or so.