Review of Aliens (1986) by Moviemaniac83 — 22 Apr 2015

Perhaps the best single word to describe James Cameron's Aliens is relentless. Tautly paced and expertly directed, this roller coaster ride of a motion picture offers a little bit of everything, all wrapped up in a tidy science fiction/action package. From the point when the opening half-hour of exposition ends and the real movie begins, Cameron barely gives viewers a chance to catch their breaths or ease their grips on their armrests as he plunges his characters from one dire situation to the next. This is one of those rare motion pictures that involves the audience so completely in the story that we're as worn out at the end as our on-screen counterparts.

Aliens takes place a half-century after the events in Alien. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, reprising her role as the lone survivor from the first outing) has been in cryogenic sleep in outer space, accompanied only by her loyal cat, Jones, until a salvage ship discovers her and brings her back to Earth. There, she finds herself facing serious charges of official misconduct (she was responsible, after all, for the destruction of a space ship) and her claims about the alien are greeted with skepticism. She is stripped of her pilot's license and left to cope on her own with life in the future - a future without her daughter, who recently died of old age. Then, all contact is suddenly lost with the terraforming colony on LV-426 - the planet on which Ripley's crew discovered the alien. A corporation executive, Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), approaches Ripley with a proposition: accompany a military team to LV-426 as an advisor and have her pilot's license restored. She concurs, but with a proviso: they are going there to destroy the aliens, not to harvest them or bring them back. Burke agrees.

If Aliens was no more than a series of suspenseful, effectively executed action sequences, it would still be a superior motion picture - Cameron's grasp of what gives an audience a jolt of adrenaline is that masterful. However, the element that elevates Aliens into the sparsely populated stratosphere of great science fiction movies is character identification. We care about what happens to the men and women populating this film. Even the supporting characters, such as Hudson and Vasquez, have personalities - they're not cookie-cutter fodder for the aliens to pick off one-by-one. I'm not talking about complex characterizations here, but the likability factor (or, in one case, the detestability factor) is way up. It doesn't take long for us to land on Ripley's side and to start cheering her on.

Ridley Scott developed Alien as a horror film - a "haunted house in space." Cameron's approach is different. Aliens is a fairly straightforward action/adventure picture. The horror elements are still there (most notably in an early dream sequence and during the scene when the marines encounter the cocooned colonists), but their impact is diminished. Nevertheless, even though he changes the tone, Cameron remains faithful to the original (something that cannot be said about the later two installments of the Alien quartet). From plot points to visual cues, it is apparent that Cameron made a careful study of the first film before embarking upon the sequel. The aliens, based on the design by H.R. Giger, possess virtually the same grotesque look (shiny black skin, prehensile tail, row upon row of sharp teeth). The space ships, rendered using "old fashioned" special effects (i.e., model work, not computer generated), have the same workmanlike appearance - starfaring behemoths built to be functional, not aesthetically pleasing. In fact, it should be noted that, although the fx work in Aliens may not be state-of-the-art by today's standards, it still holds up reasonably well.

For James Cameron, who would go on to direct two of the 1990s most memorable motion pictures (the action-packed Terminator 2 and the all-time box office champion, Titanic), The Terminator may have been the movie to put him on the map, but Aliens announced him as a force to be reckoned with. For fans of the Alien series, Aliens represented an unqualified triumph, exceeding the expectations of the most optimistic faithful. (Unfortunately, the lamentable Alien 3 stalled the series' momentum, effectively trashing the emotional core of its predecessor while sending the franchise into a creative free-fall.) When it comes to the logical marriage of action, adventure, and science fiction, few films are as effective or accomplished as Aliens, and there's nothing on the market (either in theaters or on video store shelves) that will leave you as thoroughly exhausted.