Oct 02
Assault on Precinct 13 and Alien
Yesterday, I had the chance to finally see John Carpenter’s classic from 1976 “Assault on Precinct 13″ (imdb, wikipedia) - which, you might know that, got the dubious honor of a remake in 2005.
While watching this really worthwhile film (an exception is the cheesy and annoying soundtrack btw.) I got the feeling of “hey, I’ve seen that before”. Then it hit me: Alien! I don’t know if this is a well documented fact, but if you look a bit closer at structure, character orchestration and theme, this film closely resembles Alien from 1979 (imdb, wikipedia).
First, there is this diffuse threat, the gang in Assault and the beast in Alien, that is prominent throughout the whole film. One member of the group, the father in Assault and Kane in Alien, was outside and when he comes back in brings the threat with him.
In Alien, the location under siege are the crew quarters on board the Nostromo space ship, in Assault it’s the police station Precinct 13. As soon as the father/Kane is inside, the mean antagonist of the movies, of which we never see a clear face, goes into attack mode.
The character that expresses her fears and conveys the panic and confusion to the audience is Julie, in Alien this role is Lambert, reacting with a striking similarity in hysteria and even dialogue.
Looking at it from today, James Cameron seems to have been very aware of the relationship between Assault and Alien. While writing Aliens (imdb, wikipedia) it appears as if he had revisited Assault to extract further structural elements for the Alien sequel.
Further on, in Assault, the film features defense action, with the gang climbing in. Very similar to what we got to know from Aliens. Actually so closely that while watching Assault you wait for Hudson or Vasquez sealing doors with a torch. Then, the Assault plot takes us into the basement of the station, in the Alien movies we get to see the innards of the Nostromo or the Weyland-Youtani habitat.
Vasquez in Aliens offers Gorman to keep a grenade back to kill them both, a promise she will keep later on while crawling through one of the tunnels (the basement in Assault). In Assault Leigh does the same offer to Napoleon. The strong character of Leigh, by the way, is a close fit with Ripley in Alien, although Leigh isn’t exactly the protagonist.
A very interesting finding while researching the similarities between Aliens and Assault is that Cameron actually named a character Bishop! A character named Ethan Bishop was the lead, the police officer supervising Precinct 13, in Assault.
Bishop along with Ripley is a group of outsiders in Aliens, where the marines think they run the show. In Assault, the three convicts first seem to pose a further threat on the group in the station, while in reality and later on in the movie they become their closest allys - just like Ripley, Bishop and the marines in Aliens.
In order to break out, the group in both movies makes a plan. In Assault, the first attempt is that someone has to crawl through the drain system tubes to reach a car parking in front of the building. It has to be someone with a special capability: to short-circuit and start a car without key. In Aliens, someone has to crawl through a tube to reach a communication link terminal, to remotely steer the drop-ship shuttle down for a pick-up. Bishop is selected with his special capability: only he is able to steer the ship with robotic precision.
Once you’ve found out the parallels, the similarities become obvious. As said, I don’t know if this is a known fact, but if I am the first to notice it, I’d like to write my copyright under it.
You might ask if this belittles the merit of Alien and Aliens. I do not think so. Only in very few cases, art is a completely original process. The Alien/Aliens “homage” is a very good example of telling an appealing story twice through a change in setting while keeping the overall structure. And for every science-fiction fan the Alien franchise is an interesting twist and update on the Assault story. It is evidence that universal themes in literature (and film) never die.
