Aliens is on AMC tonight. It came on and Chad started watching it. Although I am a huge fan of Sigourney Weaver, but I had never seen any of the Alien movies, so I stuck around.
It was all going great. Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, and a slew of other interesting actors who never really did much of anything else. I had no idea what the movie was even about, but I know that Aliens is the sequel to Alien.
This movie did have some great effects, especially being made 25 years ago. Everything was going great, until they took a flamethrower to a colonist who dies as an alien baby comes out of her stomach. I quietly left the living room and took my laptop to my bedroom to watch Kathy Griffin on Larry King Live (via YouTube).
The over-arching purpose of the Alien cinematic franchise (other than the obvious, make a shitload of money) seems to be to freak people out and make them afraid.
That is where I part ways with Aliens, and most horror movies. I swear sometimes, I have the constitution of a 60 year-old woman. But more than that, I have enough tension and stress in my life that watching a person covered in goo have a disgusting creature bursting from their digestive system seems like my idea of horror, which thefreedictionary.com defines as "an intense, painful feeling of repugnance and fear." I couldn't agree more.
Why do we have to be entertained by such terrible and unpleasant things? Moreover, why do we let people profit from our most visceral and profound emotions? I'd rather enjoy the pleasant things in life. Red wine, Ben & Jerry's, cheese, a nice canoe trip at Chain O' Lakes, and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. There are a thousand things I would rather do than subject my brain to terror, especially terror that's censored for TV and interrupted by commercials.
(If you click on the link, you can go to the Wikipedia page.)
