Review of Aliens (1986) by Dirigiblepulp — 26 Jul 2017

This film just works, like the first one does, it's as simple as that. Cameron found a way to preserve the spirit of the original while taking it in a new direction and expanding on its characters and universe in what feels like an effortless and wholly inevitable follow up to the original classic - he knew the same old shtick just wouldn't cut it this time around.

So instead the film jumps genre - a lot of people regard this as an action movie though I think they're off by one. This is an action-thriller, or an action-suspense movie. The scenes of gun shooting and alien running and jumping is played first as suspense, and then as thriller, wrapped in an ostensible action package. It's more like trying to fight back against the invincible boogeyman than it is just mowing down hordes of faceless baddies.

The special effects by Stan Winston are out of this world. Maybe the best mechanical and miniatures of the entire series (it's ironic that the parts that aged the worst are the old CGI). The Queen and her egg laying is just as gnarly as ever. The Alien slowly rising out of the water behind Newt is an all-time iconic shot.

Sigourney Weaver is never better than in this film. She's given just a bit more characterization this time around, involving the subtext of mothers and daughters, but it never overtakes the story and most of its emotion is brought through in her performance. There's a shot of her smoking a cigarette near the beginning, with a long untapped piece of ash hanging from it, that says everything just from the way she holds herself. She has to go back and fight, there's nothing left for her in the "real" world. She takes what she learned in the original and here becomes an ultimate badass heroine for the ages.

This is a prototypical Cameron movie. I'm not sure how he does it but he takes seemingly simple plots and characterizations and makes them fresh, exciting, thrilling, and acceptable to the audience, while honoring the pacing and rhythms without flourishes or indulgence and still manages runtimes in excess of 2 hours. The 2 1/2 hour director's cut here is superior in every way, and it doesn't even feel longer.