Review of Aliens (1986) by Phillip D — 07 Jan 2015

Before really dissecting Aliens, I want to point out that as a whole and on its own, the movie is excellent and nearly flawless. The tension, performances, effects and action were all spot on. That being said, I want to elaborate on why this movie is not as good as its predecessor.

At the time of Alien, the first Star Wars had just been made and Ridley Scott was truly a trailblazer alongside the brilliance of an early George Lucas. The only movie that compared to the bleakly artistic tone of Alien was Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey but that lacked the human touch to really connect with the average movie goer.

Scott bridged the gap successfully and created a masterpiece. Seven years later however, with all of the Star Wars movies created and Blade Runner in the books, Cameron took over the franchise. At this point, new, original contributions would have and should have been expected from the budding director, who had just hit the peak of his career 2 years earlier.

Instead, Cameron played a safe game, with Aliens perfectly matching much of the tone and visual brilliance that defined the earlier Scott movie while dropping much of the artistic flair. Despite the fact that this still makes for an excellent movie, it cannot be denied that Cameron added very little of his own work to the movie, save for his penchant for extreme suspension of disbelief and aggressive over weaponization, cheap tricks of film that would negatively manifest in completely uninspiring future works such as Avatar.

All in all, the second greatest work of the most financially successful director of all time ends up being an elaborate copy. It is an entertaining and entirely worthy copy of course, but a copy all the same.

Even in this early work, Cameron shows the unoriginal attitude and deliberate neglect for a polished storyline that would haunt his later films. For this, Aliens falls well below Scott's original work.