Aliens (1986)

Tagline: This time it’s war.

Curiosity: Father! Bedtime stories! Childhood!

Plot: Having survived the events of the original Alien, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) puts herself into hyper-sleep (a.k.a. suspended animation), hoping to be found by another ship in about six weeks.

She drifts in deep space for 57 years before being discovered. Her daughter, who was 11 when Ripley left for her mining mission, died at 66. The company she worked for refuses to believe in her story about the alien and removes her pilot’s license. Ripley seems stuck in a dead end job without family or friends, only to have Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) offer her a new gig. Turns out that planet Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo landed on in Alien has since been colonized, and said colony has lost contact with Earth. Burke secures a team of Marines and, with Ripley’s help, intends to investigate the situation.

Thoughts: I’m kind of experiencing a personal backlash against James Cameron, who wrote and directed Aliens. Maybe it’s the craptastic trailer for Avatar. Maybe it’s the hack job he did on Rambo: First Blood Part II (or the fact that he recycled Rambo’s set-up for Aliens). Or maybe it’s just that Aliens, while probably the more popular film among fans, is the weaker, dumber film. The set-up has a huge plot hole – how could the colonists not have noticed the alien ship’s signal like in Alien? The dialogue is way crasser. And Cameron lacks Ridley Scott’s nuance with a camera. Where the monster was in Alien was mostly concealed so as to build suspense, Cameron only does so when he needs to save money, and it shows.

Still, Cameron is a natural action director, and his film has some excellent scenes spread out. The creature effects he got out of Stan Winston’s team, especially on the Alien Queen, are phenomenal. The final battle sequence is both more visually satisfying than the original and a lot less based in science. Ripley starts to come into her own as a heroine. In the original, she was clearly smart, but here she begins to lose her fear of the aliens. As Weaver herself nicknamed the character, she turns into “Rambolina.”

Reflection: God the Queen looks so cool.