SuperMechagodzilla on Aliens: Colonial Marines

I wish people would stop cancelling their preorders; although I don't play videogames, I love schadenfreude.

This game is actually a pretty fascinating case study of the notion of expanded universe taken to its logical extreme. Far from a betrayal of the fanbase, this game gives fans everything that they demanded - but should never have actually obtained. It's Fanservice: The Game (albeit with bad graphics). It's a product of a failure to understand Aliens as a story told through the language of cinema, and an even more fundamental failure to translate it into the videogame medium.

It's apparent right from the get-go, when the very first shot of the opening 'cinematic' is a flat, thirty second close-up of a dude with a bandage on his head dumping exposition into the camera. Even if what he was expositing about didn't turn out to be totally irrelevant to the story, this is incredibly inexpressive. There's no sense of urgency in the delivery, and there's nothing evocative in the background. Neither the camera nor the objects in front of it move at all. James Cameron obviously did not open Aliens this way, even though - and it's important to stress this - he absolutely could have if he were lazy.

It's arguably closest to the opening of Alien3, except that Alien3 employed split-second shots of abstract, evocative images intercut with a slow pan over a planet to create the sense of a situation quickly deteriorating (while also wordlessly dispensing plot information). The bandaged head kinda bobbing around slightly is utterly pathetic by comparison. Someone who knew what they were doing would have followed Fincher's lead by beginning with a shot of a star-field, then panning over the planet to the derelict in one unbroken shot, which would then be interrupted by a hard cut to a static-y, distorted transmission. They could then intercept the panicked transmission with the slow, methodical scanning of the ship by the smaller planes. The actual content of the transmission is fairly irrelevant, and should be mysterious or incomplete.

(This is the most basic way to 'fix' the opening shots of the game, but there's a more fundamental problem. Hicks was not in any danger when we last saw him in Aliens, so a writer attempting to continue directly from the film would have needed to convey more complex emotions than just "I need help, get here quick". A well-written prologue would need to capture the tone of Aliens' ending - something quiet, along the lines of "this is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off" - while also hinting that something is amiss and in need of investigation. But doing that would entail a full, ground-level rewrite.)

An editor worth his salt would have absolutely cut the references to Ripley and Newt in the opening monologue, since they have no real bearing on this story. Instead, it's just thirty seconds of Hicks™ talking about Ripley™ straight into your face. Nothing more. Without prior investment in the series, this is basically meaningless.


It's pretty funny that the opening 'cinematic' soon cuts to the marines' locker room - which is extremely brightly lit and sterile-looking. Obviously the people making the game wanted to accurately copy what the marines' locker room looked like. But this points to another huge issue - that 'universe-accurate' lighting is wholly inappropriate as game lighting. Once you actually get into the gameplay, this bright lighting disappears completely - when it was specifically used in the films to signify a (seemingly) safe, controlled area. Alien did the same thing, with the bright crew quarters frequently punctured by sudden violence, summed up with the image of the acid eating through the white floor of the medical bay to reveal layers of industrial crawlspace underneath. (The acid blood in A:CM does nothing.)

A game that understands the Alien(s) aesthetic should have the blindingly-bright, white-walled interiors recurr in ways that correspond to lulls and pauses in the gameplay. Lighting everything in both the Sulaco and Hadley's Hope with dim, shitty lights because 'that's what it objectively looks like' is as wrongheaded as using Dario Argento's Suspiria as a blueprint for a functioning dance academy.


The tension between the regular living areas and the pipes 'underneath' is something even the overly-maligned AV|P:R understood, with its aliens emerging from the artistically-exaggerated sewers beneath an archetypal small town. See, the makers of the game obviously got enough about this to include a sewer level and equate the aliens with zombies - but they employ cliched zombies-as-ragdolls to be knocked around for kicks. See, the aliens are sewer-dwellers, and they are blind, but that's not a limitation that reduces them to shambling dolts. Rather, it's used to underline their obscene, demonic nature. They are shit-monsters that 'don't need eyes to see'. That's why Prometheus ends with one excreted onto a barren rock, looking like something between Francis Bacon and Heironymous Bosch. AV|P:R, intelligently, referenced Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead, in which the zombies are utter bastards. People are disgusted by the mean-spirited, intimate violence perpetrated by the aliens in the film. They 'blindly' spread, without any moral limitations. What do they do in this game?

Even Half-Life 2, one of the first to really exploit zombie-as-ragdoll mayhem, underlined that the zombies were still-conscious and in constant pain - playing off the mind-body duality of being controlled by a parasitic creature. Kill the flayed body and the headcrab merely detaches, unharmed. Obviously, it should be the humans who are reduced to shambling blindly, lashing out in the dark. In Aliens, it's the marines who cause friendly fire - because they can't see shit. In every film, the aliens are a dark reflection of the people they spawned from. There's a reason the one in Alien looks like a distorted astronaut, with a semitransparent dome for a head, while the ones that fight the marines in Aliens have rigid armor. If the Aliens are bugs, the humans are inferior bugs.

** A:CM profoundly misunderstands or ignores the meaning of the creatures, just to include some 'canonical' new subspecies in the pokedex. There's just so much wrong here, but it all links back to a fundamental fanboy-ignorance of what things actually mean, in favor of the unquestioned assumption that they just, objectively, 'are'. **