Revisiting Aliens (the film) so many years later

A friend of mine recently sent me a meme that sheds a lot of light on one of everyone's favorite characters from the film "Aliens" who is played by Bill Paxton.

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I think that most people kind of viewed Bill's character of Hudson as being a bit of a loose cannon with not a great deal of being capable of under pressure. His famous ad-libbed line of "game over man, game over!" and the frantic way in which he shouts it and then saying "I don't know if you just saw that, but we just got our asses kicked!" He still remains a classic character but this meme says a lot in his defense.

These were all things that I managed to overlook when watching the film the first 20 times or so that I have seen it, but this meme inspired me to go back and watch it again and I was able to see Hudson in a very different light. His character was instrumental in the eventual success of the mission despite the fact that out of all the marines involved, he does in fact seem the most whiney and out of control.

Another thing that me and this friend got to talking about when we were speaking about one of our favorite Sci-Fi films of all time was the topic that is all too frequent in modern films: Diversity.

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While most of the cast is white, there was a badass hispanic gunner, a black sergeant, and also a female lead protagonist. The bad buy that is there to screw over the entire operation is a white guy.

Today this sort of setup would seem like something that Netflix or someone else was trying to shove down our throats in the name of having a diverse cast but back when Aliens was filmed there were exactly zero people that would have complained had the entire cast been white males. The cast in *Aliens" wasn't chosen to meet some sort of quota, they were chosen because they were the best characters for positions and the actors and actresses were chosen because they were the best people available to play the characters.

So much in the cinematic world has changed since then. These days a lot of us have gotten to the point (well, I have) that I am just waiting for when Netflix is going to introduce a black Viking lord in a part of history where no black people lived in those lands, or when they introduce an all female team of badasses that somehow manage to overpower all of the people in their way, most of the time which will be white men. Any time I am watching something on streaming these days, I am not at all surprised when a completely unnecessary gay love story is introduced into it as well. I'm not saying that gay love stories should never be presented in films or tv shows, but the way that it is done today, this sort of thing will be introduced into stories where a love story isn't even necessary for the show at all, straight or gay. A good recent example of this would the The Fall of the House of Usher.

The cast of *Aliens" was absolutely perfect is what I am trying to say here and none of it was forced upon us, that is part of the reason why it is such a fantastic film. Nobody complained when Ripley was the lead despite being female, because the world wasn't concerned about such things at the time. These days it seems like there are certain diversity boxes that every show and movie needs to tick before they even concern themselves with whether or not they actually have a decent story on their hands. Thankfully, there is some level of public backlash about this and it appears to be somewhat in decline.

Anyway, I didn't mean to get all political there for a minute but the main thing I am trying to say here is that Aliens is still a fantastic film all these years later and maybe you should go and have a look at it again with both the renewed impression of Hudson and the fact that the cast was very diverse even though there were no standards at the time that dictated that it had to be that way.