Aliens: Explaining Show Don’t Tell
The surprisingly sturdy storytelling in James Cameron’s greatest film.
Sometimes, when I’m bored, I like to imagine the pitch meetings for famous movies. Most of these imagined meetings involve a large mound of cocaine and several people grinding their teeth and shouting YES! YES HERE IS A BILLION DOLLARS MAKE THAT MOVIE!1 But every now and then there’s a variation. For example, when I imagine James Cameron pitching Aliens, I always imagine he had a big sign reading ALIEN and then just walked in and slapped an “S” on the end, and the gathered investors broke out into cheers and carried him out of the room on their shoulders, singing “For he’s a jolly good fellow!”2
In all seriousness, the conciseness of the concept is remarkable: If one alien in 1979 was a classic, the sequel should obviously feature more than one alien3. The fact that you really don’t need any more of a logline than the title of the movie is very telling.
But Aliens is so much more than just an extremely obvious sequel concept, or even a particularly well-made action sci-fi movie. It’s also kind of a master class in that most elusive of writing skills: Showing and not telling. Which is something, considering this is a movie about the world’s most complicated life form4 murdering a whole lot of people, which you normally wouldn’t think required much subtlety. But that’s what elevates successful pop culture to great pop culture: Aliens would likely have been successful even without the solid writing. But the solid writing is why we’re still talking about it.
What the Hell are We Supposed to Use, Man? Harsh Language?
“Show Don’t Tell” is a slippery concept for writers, because it’s not a universal law. You can, in fact, sometimes tell your audience things. Sometimes you have to. People get confused about a rule that you have to regularly break. To get an idea of how to handle this, let’s consider the squad of marines in Aliens, aka the Galaxy’s Worst Fighting Force5.
Forget the fact the Earth sends a handful of soldiers to investigate the offlining of an entire colony, knowing full well there’s probably an unknown and probably vicious xenomorph involved6. The marines under Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope) and Sergeant Apone (Al Matthews) are quite possibly the most incompetent marines ever committed to film. They’re undisciplined, insubordinate, and actively terrible at their jobs. This is communicated to the audience well before they’re all basically slaughtered, without once resorting to the words incompetent or undisciplined out-loud. From the moment these morons emerge from their cryosleep, they are clearly disinterested in being effective soldiers.
There’s a silent moment that encapsulates this approach: Privates Vazquez (Jenette Goldstein) and Drake (Mark Rolston), strapped into their heavy guns and doing some rather ridiculous badass poses with them7. These are not serious people8. These are people pretending to be dangerous, and you have to start to wonder if this is one of those Dirty Dozen situations where these particular marines were chosen in the hope that they would all die during the mission.
Between moments like that and the general fuckery of Private Hudson (the late, great Bill Paxton), the audience is not at all surprised when these fuckups disobey orders and approach their mission with a near-total lack of proper planning or tactical intelligence. This is intentional, of course—this isn’t Cameron (with assists from David Giler and Walter Hill) getting lucky. The marines are purposefully telegraphed as incompetent because the story needs them to be incompetent. If the marines are good at their jobs and survive the initial encounter with the aliens more or less intact, the story doesn’t work. The aliens, as terrifying as they are, are fragile creatures: Automatic rifle fire tears them up like paper. Their effectiveness relies on camouflage and subterfuge, so the story needs to de-power the marines as quickly as possible because the audience won’t believe any version where the aliens march through withering, superior firepower.
There are plenty of moments like this in the film. Consider the way the three-dimensional nature of the colony is highlighted several times in the early going, especially when the marines first encounter the aliens: We’re informed without being told that the aliens know full well that you can go over and under things, so when the survivors can’t figure out how the aliens got past their barricades later in the film the fact that they’ve simply gone over them is a surprise—but a fair one9. Or the petty way Lieutenant Gorman punishes his squad when they humiliate him during the briefing scene—once again we’re informed without being told that Gorman is a putz, and a terrible officer.
But the greatest piece of show-don’t-tell characterization is definitely Corporal Hicks.
Outstanding. Now all we need is a deck of cards
Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) is a great character, and he’s presented as slightly more competent than the other marines without it ever being overt. For one thing, he doesn’t take part in the juvenile roughhousing and insults of the others. Biehn plays Hicks as a more thoughtful soldier, someone who thinks before he speaks. He’s the only one to think of bringing a close-quarters backup weapon aside from the standard sidearm, and he’s the one who immediately grasps the severity of their situation once the aliens attack—and the first to understand that Ripley is basically as close to a commanding officer as they’re going to get, lack of training or not10.
He’s also a decent guy. How do we know this? Not simply because he’s positioned as such and as Ripley’s potential love interest, though that certainly helps11. No, it’s his interactions with Newt, the terrified little girl that the marines discover hiding in the service crawl spaces of the colonial installation that shows us the type of guy Corporal Hicks is.
There’s the scene when they call for the dropship and it crashes. Hicks immediately, silently, and instinctively shelters Ripley, who is sheltering Newt. There are no significant looks or lingering closeups, no words spoken to underscore this moment of heroism. You notice it more or less subconsciously—Hicks just threw himself between shrapnel and a little girl.
Later, when they’re looking at the installation plans and Newt can’t see, Hicks is the only one to notice her frustrated efforts. Again, there’s no clumsy exposition, no lampshading—Hicks simply picks up the little girl and sits her down on the console so she can see. He does this automatically and easily, simply an adult recognizing the desires of a child and lending a moment’s assistance. It’s a small moment, but it tells you everything you need to know about how Corporal Hicks approaches his existence12.
The visual intelligence of Aliens is one reason we still love this movie, despite the amusingly incompetent marines and lack of Harry Dean Stanton. These moments don’t jump out at us because they’re part of the infrastructure of a story—you’re not supposed to notice them. The only time you notice stuff like this consciously is when it’s clumsily underlined by writers who don’t trust their audience.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go contemplate how often I use the line “Game over, man! Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?” in my everyday life. hint: It is a lot.
Next week: The Matrix Resurrections owes me 3 hours.
I spend an inordinate amount of time carrying manuscripts around seeking these gatherings. If you ever read a headline about me getting a billion dollars for a 1,000,000-word novel about my cats, you’ll know I found one of these legendary Hollywood Cocaine Mountains.
It’s key to remember that back in 1985-6 when Cameron wrote treatment that eventually became Aliens, he wasn’t Titanic or Terminator 2 Cameron. He was Terminator 1 Cameron, which is like saying he was Gandalf the Grey who hadn’t yet ascended. In other words, his movie pitches weren’t guaranteed. [UPDATE]I swear I didn’t actually know this when I wrote this, but as it turns out … that is exactly what happened. I made a dumb joke in a Substack and it turns out I’m some kind of psychic. I WILL USE MY POWERS TO DESTROY YOU.
Am I alone in thinking they should have added exactly one alien for each sequel? Yes, I see that I am alone. Carry on.
I mean: Seriously, the xenomorph must have evolved on a planet where fireballs are literally raining down on a world where the dirt itself is made of razor blades. But at least so far no one has had the bright idea of letting the aliens learn how to talk. Oh, fuck, I just said that out loud. It’s out there now. “Aliens 6: Look Who’s Talking!”
Apparently all you need to become a Colonial Marine in the Alienverse is a beating heart and a way with words.
Question: Androids are smart, fast, and difficult to kill. Not to mention eminently replaceable. Why not send 1,000 Bishops armed to the teeth? Bonus: They will totally obey orders and bring home several dozen specimens.
It is not impossible they are actually trying to have sex with their guns in this scene.
I know because game recognize game.
I remember back in the day when the original Doom came out and introduced a half-assed hack version of vertical space into First Person Shooter games and I almost had a stroke. Then Quake came along with true three-dimensional play and I suddenly realized I have the hand-eye coordination of a shrubbery.
Biehn’s drawled “Yeeeaaahhh,” when Ripley points out that Hicks is now the commander of what’s left of the marines is a master class in pained resignation.
There is no doubt that if Hicks and Ripley had survived and made it back to Earth those two would have boned for three weeks straight, based solely on their body language in the movie.
Since I regard children as disturbing alien presences, I fall deeply into the category of “ignore them and maybe they will go away.” But if you have children or cats, you know this always backfires.
Let us not forget they had a lot of experience not needing to take their missions seriously. The line, “Is this going to be a stand-up fight, or another big hunt?” not only gave all the crypto-fascist, Heinlein-fanboys a boner, but it also told us these were people who’d never seriously been challenged in a fight. They broadly knew their jobs, even Hudson, but this was the first time most of them had needed to perform under extreme pressure in circumstances their training hadn’t covered. Plus, the mission was horribly undermanned because Burke needed it to be in order to work his angle. A battalion of these same bozos, instead of one short platoon, would have had the numbers to absorb losses while learning what they were up against and adapting appropriately. Even our little squad of surviving goofballs got their shit together by the end, though circumstances were beyond their brutally reduced numbers by then.