With regard to verminization, I wonder if what keeps Aliens from becoming some kind of ideological substrate is the presence of the changeling child Newt. Whether it’s Newt as in neuter or Newt as in an amphibian with a tail, something is up. “Nobody calls me Rebecca,” she informs Ripley, who is far too eager to rehumanize a moppet recovered from the film’s polyvinyl fairie folk. The child is ambiguously vermin-like, adept at crawling through vents, unnervingly frank about death, dirty as a chimney sweep (in the way that uncanny post-apocalyptic urchins always are). The child’s traumatized inhumanity frustrates Ripley’s desire to establish a maternal relation. As neutering, though, I suppose this refusal of the birth name doubles as wish-fulfillment for Ripley, distancing the child from a biblical figure whose fertility would give rise to “thousands of myriads.” The element of reproductive anxiety prepares for the several scenes in which Ripley protects Newt from impregnation. The harrowing face-hugger sequence seems like the hysterical consequence of the mother-daughter intimacy that precedes it, translating the pair’s protective cuddling into the threat of lethal cocooning. The final battle with the grotesque sexual mother is…well…overdetermined.

The point, though, is that the elements of the film that seem to be about Vietnam or technological hubris end up being less central to its structure than the play of gendered psychology centered around Ripley. This doesn’t make the film’s historical imagination trivial by any means, but rather significant by way of becoming intimate, libidinal, psychological, etc., albeit intimate by way of an elaborate spectacle in which Lovecraftian obstetrics comprises the principle feature. Perhaps, alas, I’m missing the squid for the tentacles. If only someone would write an essay called “The Queen of America Goes to LV426.”

In any case, the hopeful ending facilitates the return from survivalist exile to a social sphere bounded and regulated by the same institutions (a Foucauldian check-list) that have provided the T-1000 with his avatars: policing, medicine, the family. In his chameleonic way, this villain moves almost invisibly through the channels of social discipline, embodying the kind of dispersed power that can’t be blown up because it never resides at a singular source. Under this paradigm, assaulting the social order with a view to smashing the control chip where it lives is about as effective as unloading bullets into into the T-1000. He is, as you have implied, a figment of an upgraded apocalypse.

It must matter also that the spectacle of the T-1000 indexes the progress of digital reproduction and (if one may stretch) the virtualization of commodities. Speaking of which, the sequel’s self-consciousness as a sequel, it’s incessant reworking of lines and scenes from part one, may well arise from T2’s status as Cameron’s first (and still only) experience extending a film of his own into a brand after providing second acts for Piranha, Alien, and (screenplay only) First Blood. In T2, the play of iteration and escalation becomes a simultaneous source of pleasure and anxiety, in that the second film sets itself apart with flourishes rooted in our memory of the original, signifying a broken mold by means of a hermeneutic that is specific to the franchise as a franchise. I wonder, along these lines, whether the proliferation of sequels during the eighties and nineties provides a useful symptom of poetic conditions as well as market forces, granting that the two aren’t exactly unrelated. Someone has to have written something in that direction that I haven’t yet managed to read. To return to the text proper of the film, the Fordist nostalgia of a showdown in a steel mill sharpens the film’s concern with obsolescence, of the old-fashioned steel-frame Terminator and possibly of the fantasy in which he moves.

As for bad plastic skin as testing for humanity, points for effort, but… I’ve wanted to redeem the bad intercutting of African documentary images as background to white actors (in Mogambo and Tarzan) as some kind of intentional commentary on the ways spectacle functions in colonialism, but I’m ultimately not convinced there’s much to do with it beyond that. I feel your point re: inspiration and formalism, though; I just can’t find a way to make that intercutting very interesting as a reading (feels like the moments in class where I’m like “and here’s this!” and my students nod their heads, in agreement but with nothing to say).

Ford was pretty okay with destroying the future though, so yeah, I’d say “typee” personality is about right.

Along similar lines, some of the less convincing effects may be redeemable as exercises in testing for humanity. When Arnold removes his damaged eye, revealing the glowing lens below, we’re obviously looking at latex-wrapped animatronics rather than the actor, but the dialogue about “infiltrator units” resonates with this image. We’re told that the earlier models were “easy to spot” due to their “rubber skin.” I wonder whether the image inspired the dialogue or vice versa, not that inspiration matters to formalism any more than fact matters to this internet of ours. Also, the demolition of a toy truck early in the film seems like a plausible gesture toward the miniature work in other sequences (although it looks like they blew up a real honkin’ truck for the finale).

More in a bit on dream-work in the Cameron oeuvre, Terminator to Titanic.

That aside, it’s kind of cool to think that Damon’s inexplicable celebrity is exactly the same kind of super-power that his blank characters seem inevitably to possess. That early turn as Tom Ripley, a character whose titular talent and personal vacuity are functionally identical, has become in retrospect a schenectady for Damon’s entire career. He’s Keanu Reeves, but without the racial ambiguity that makes Reeves the perfect vacuum for sci-fi (him and outer space).