Review of Aliens (1986) by Filius S — 13 Dec 2015

Aliens is the James Cameron sequel to the Ridley Scott classic: Alien. The sequel came nearly seven years after the original because Fox wanted to hold off talks about a potential sequel until 1983 - yeah, you read that right: this film is from a time when a major studio pumped the breaks on a sequel.

In Aliens we join space heroine Ripley as she wakes up from cryosleep after drifting through space for 50 years or something, with the crew of the rescue ship thinking "yeah, bullshit" when she explains the sequence of events that led her there. They head back to the planet where the original Alien eggs were found, where Ripley and a rag tag team of mercenaries, including updated android model Bishop, to check out an outpost which has lost radio communication.

When they hit up the outpost, they find the survivors have been cocooned to the wall and they're all "...kill....me..." and then all shit breaks loose. I won't give any more of the plot away, but there's a time constraint that gives the second half of the film a nice bit of consistent tension.

Unlike the original Alien, which featured a standard drone style xenomorph, Aliens ups the ante and introduces new types of aliens including the now famous Queen. The overwhelming feeling of being trapped with a destructive stealthy creature is a bit lost in favor of numerous destructive in your face creatures which attack without remorse. The result of this is that Aliens feels a lot more like an action movie, than the space-horror that Alien was. Additionally, with typical 80's flair Alien also attacks the corporate world by hiring very-punchable Mad About You co-star Paul Reiser to play a generic corporate dick bag.

Seeing as how the budget for the sequel was larger, Aliens introduces a lot more toys: personnel carriers, dropships, pulse rifles, and the smart-gun, which was made from a jury rigged steadicam and went on to feature heavily in the AVP games as the weapon of choice for newbs. Also new to the game is a massive EXO-suit, which acts as a large exoskeleton thingy for loading crates in a loading dock. I don't know how it's more practical than a forklift, but hey, a forklift probably wouldn't look cool cruising around in Aliens.

The pace in Aliens is faster to keep with the more action driven plot, and the music and sound effects reflect that. The lighting is also what I would consider brighter, with the original Alien being almost a film-noir in regards to how sparse the lighting was, Aliens tends to be evenly lit to accomodate the visual action feast. Special effects on the Aliens is now improved, with more advanced puppeteering, allowing the aliens to run around quickly and evasively, rather than the stealthy style of the original.

TL;DR - 8/10.

Aliens is a great sci-fi action film, and a fairly competent sequel. I personally still prefer the original for its foreboding sense of dread, suspenseful pace and unnerving feeling of isolation, but this is still as good a sequel as one could really expect, and Cameron holds it all together. The acting is great, the pacing is tight and it still feels fast by today's standard. Although the first movie made the Alien a movie monster of legend, Aliens cemented the creature as a franchise moneymaker, garnering numerous academy awards, and smashing the box office.