Alien Money

Capitalism and war in James Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi picture

Most films about America’s post-World War II colonialism are remarkably free of greed as a motive. Pro-war propaganda like 2018’s 12 Strong show Americans invading foreign nations like Afghanistan in the name of security and humanitarianism, not in order to steal people’s stuff. Anti-war films are more skeptical about the altruism, but tend to present war as meaningless, atavistic chaos. Ivory trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness abandons his duty and position in the Belgian Congo at least in part to satisfy his appetites for sex and plunder. In the Vietnam film adaptation Apocalypse Now, though, Kurtz seems motivated solely by bloodlust and megalomania. Imperial violence is unsullied by lucre. War in anti-war films is a nightmare. But you can’t buy nightmares.

Aliens (1986), which picks up 57 years after Alien (1979), is less shy about addressing the way in which war bursts with a bloody hiss from the stomach of capitalism. In the series’ first installment, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and a commercial crew landed on the moon LV-426 and encountered a hideous alien with a toothy mouth inside its mouth and acid for blood. The alien murdered everyone on board except for Ripley and her cat. They escaped and put themselves in stasis, to finally be awakened when another commercial vessel…