Display MoreGreetings WingNuts,
The Wing Commander movie club is pretty universal in this one: Aliens is as close to a perfect movie as you can make! We greatly enjoyed revisiting it last week and it's such a good film that we could probably do it again soon.
In the treatment for the Wing Commander movie, Chris Roberts described it as being like Alien in that the character drama emerges from the fact that everyone is totally cut off from reasonable rescue or help. And he was right, both movies certainly do chase that goal… although the isolation you feel in Aliens is much more effectively delivered. Of course, Aliens' greater legacy to Wing Commander and across most science fiction was the colonial marines. James Cameron's mixing of future space warfare with Vietnam-styled American soldiers feels like a lightning bolt… they would be aped endlessly including in Wing Commander III, IV and Prophecy.
Here are the two quotes we talked about being used as nods in Wing Commander games in the intro. I was shocked to learn that the actual line is 'Drake, we are leaving' and not 'marines, we are leaving'.
Aliens and Wing Commander Prophecy share a visual futurist: artist Syd Mead worked on both, designing the aliens in Wing Commander Prophecy. His design of the Sulaco troopship is also referenced in the Wing Commander movie; the prows of the Sivar and the Snakeir are extremely similar!
Aliens' APC design also looks pretty familiar: it was clearly the inspiration for the Hercules LC seen in Wing Commander Prophecy. Once again, this is Wing Commander borrowing directly from Ron Cobb.
Before we started watching AD said we should pay special attention to the 'scanners' at the start of the film. Sure enough, they're an extremely similar effect to the one used on the ConCom in Wing Commander.
Along those same lines, we noticed that the soundless shot of Ripley and Newt futilely trying to alert the marines from inside a sealed room was pretty similar to the shot of Admiral Wilson trying (?) to destroy the NAVCOM AI.
Chris noticed that the 'above' shot of the elevator in the third act was very similar to the one used in Wing Commander III (and then referenced again in the third episode of Academy). I'm not sure if this shot originates with Aliens or not but it's possible particularly given Chris Roberts' enjoyment of the film!
And surely the armored pleasure planet police mech from the Righteous Fire introduction owes more than a little to Ripley's exoskeleton loader! (Interesting fact, the Righteous Fire cutscene was originally rendered as the 'out of money' losing endgame for the original game. It was cut for space and was given entirely new dialogue to introduce the mission disk!)
I also thought the shot of the red lit alien crawling through the ducts looked a lot like one of the shots from the Super Wing Commander takeoff cutscenes… but that one may be a coincidence!
Sully doesn't know about this guy.
