Quote from: Kradan on Oct 24, 2020, 04:41:10 PM
How so ?
Alien is all about the employees of big corporate entity being stripped of their rights and sent down to survey a signal under forfeiture of shares for work that they had already completed, with their lives quite literally put on the line in order to preserve a specimen for the company. If that isn't saying anything about workers rights in a corporate workspace, I don't really know what is.
By
Aliens, you start to explore a very critical look at the US military complex. Here you have the United States Colonial Marines, emphasis on United States, getting their strings pulled by this mega-corporation. People are once again expendable in favor of the almighty dollar. And the presentation of the marines themselves is a pretty well-documented stand-in for the mentality of the US military during the Vietnam War, and it is harshly critical of that - people remember all of the fun, quippy one-liners, but what they forget is that this OOH RAH mentality is actually a blanket that these characters hide behind and are limited by, a presentation of people so high on their own belief in unmatched power. The film then explicitly challenges that power and because the marines are so woefully unprepared, they fail miserably, with most of them dying in the span of a single scene.
Repeat these concepts ad infinitum, throughout the franchise, with various different takes and ideologies attached each time, but they are all political nonetheless.
This is like the people whining that Star Wars or comic books are only just now becoming political. Star Wars was literally a story about a rebellion going up against a fascist government from its very first film, and as time went on, it began to explore the dichotomy of those two structures and how a democracy could crumble into fascism in real time. Comic books have always made it a point to represent characters from every walk of life, with the heroes often being the "little guy" and the villains representing the big institutions with a chokehold on our world.
Some people just like to forget that all of the stories they love are political, until they see a person of color or a woman or LGBT representation, and then all of a sudden it is only
now political in their eye, so they take to the internet to scream about it. People overlook the fact that Luke Skywalker was toppling space Nazis and that Iron Man was a weapons developer who found new meaning in life and switched gears to using his money to help people. Both of those narratives are inherently political to their core. But it only becomes apparent to some people that these stories are political when you swap Luke out with Rey, or Iron Man with Captain Marvel, or John Connor with Dani Ramos, etc.
I shit you not, I saw people complaining about HBO's
Watchmen being political.
Watchmen. Political. Who knew!?!
