Aliens (1986)

1986
Directed by James Cameron
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, William Hope and Bill Paxton

Regardless of anything that anybody wants to say about James Cameron now, he can go to his grave knowing that he has done two of the absolute best goddamn sequels of all time - Terminator 2 and the movie in question today.  Given what's on tap for his career, I am dead certain that this statement will hold true in its original form, because there's no way that the next 17 Avatar movies are going to come close to doing what these two flicks did.  Namely, what a sequel is SUPPOSED to do.  They raise the stakes, but also manage to carve out their own little identity at the same time.  Back in the '80s and '90s, Cameron was just a guy who knew the ins and outs of how to write an action movie screenplay, and this movie is a textbook example.  The end result is a flick that's still a damn fun watch 31 years after its initial release.  It's not quite as good as the first from a horror standpoint, but in terms of explosions and excitement, look no further daddy.

First off, a little background.  Seven years passed between the original Alien and the sequel Aliens, a very unique concept given the current climate of Hollywood cinema.  Back then, they actually used to let a movie sink in, digest and age before they planned out a sequel.  These days, it seems like the powers-that-be already have the sequel and the subsequent four films (complete with a wholly masturbatory two-part "final" film) planned out.  By the time 1985 rolled around, the original movie was already considered a classic, and this James Cameron guy had spent much of the interim time turning all kinds of heads.  He directed a movie about flying monster fish (seriously - Google it), wrote and directed a low-budget sci-fi flick featuring a bodybuilding champ from Austria that effectively blew up any and all expectations that it might have had, and wrote one of the early spec scripts for the insanely popular Rambo: First Blood Part II.  Aliens would be his first foray into the big budget, and if I haven't given this dude enough nerdgasm yet, he delivered on all counts.  Raise the stakes, bring stuff back, but make it important in different ways.  Sequels 101. 

As the movie starts, Ripley is being awoken from stasis.  For those keeping score, she placed herself in suspended animation after surviving the final encounter with the vicious, heat-seeking, xenomorphic creature from that film...and 57 years have passed.  Bummer.  She is debriefed by her employers, and the remainder of the first act is spent with the set-up for everything to come.  As you can imagine, Ripley - again with Sigourney Weaver playing the role, and once again she is 100% sliced awesome - is feeding her employers an incredible story about what she faced aboard the USS Nostromo.  One that would be hard to believe.  Hell, I'll admit, I would probably make a few jokes about how the tall woman who was frozen for half a century is full of crap.  But as she gets the news that there is now a human colony on the moon that her crew investigated in the first movie, we can quickly gleam where the story is going.

Lo and behold, it doesn't take long for word to reach the crew on Earth that communication has been cut off to the settlers on LV-246.  It's admittedly a pretty big script convenience that this happened JUST as Ripley came to, but bear with us for the sake of the movie.  Because of her experience on the planet, Ripley is asked to accompany the space marines (not THE space marine from the video game "Doom," but again, bear with me) on a search and potential rescue mission.  And this is where the film really gets cool.  The thing about James Cameron up until the colossal fail train that was Avatar was that he was AMAZING at creating memorable tough guy supporting characters, and this movie is full of 'em.  Michael Biehn as Corporal Hicks, the incredible Bill Paxton as sleazy Private Hudson, Lance Henriksen as the android Bishop (whom Ripley distrusts immediately for reasons that were clear if you watched the first movie), and Jenette Goldstein as tough chick Private Vasquez are all people that I remember by name, and their characters and traits are established from that first scene as they suit up for battle.  Great stuff.

Time for the "fun and games" act.  Of course, the marines find a derelict, demolished colony completely bereft of survivors, save a small child named Newt (Carrie Henn, who Cameron chose for the role over something like 500 professional child commercial actors because all of them smiled after saying their lines) who doesn't say much outside of things like "They mostly come at night.  Mostly."  If you've seen the 1950s creature feature Them! about giant killer ants, there's a character in that film very similar to this one who is horrified by the things she has seen and is initially mute.  So +2 for Cameron for making these references.  Cue the discovery of a baby alien that is subsequently killed by the marines, a big mistake since it awakens the hordes of xenomorphs that have overrun the place, killing off several of the lesser marines and leaving us with what's nothing short of a solid 45 minutes of really well-sustained tension-packed action sequences.

See, kids, these days I'm pretty damn sick of action movies.  In the last, oh, 15 years or so, they've essentially dropped any and anything resembling building characters or arcs and have pretty much been boiled down to "event cinema."  Not so here.  We got to know those characters, so there are things at stake once the guns start blazing.  The movie's central plot cog is the relationship between Ripley and Newt; the director's cut, which is widely available now in pretty much every home video format, lets us know that Ripley had a daughter on Earth who has since passed away, and the surrogate mother-daughter relationship between the pair gives the movie a genuine power.  But anytime that emotion starts to overpower everything, boom, here's Bill Paxton to make another one of his trademark jerkass quips and we're back to reality.

Another thing the movie has is a really good human villain.  Paul Reiser of all people plays the movie's representative of the big, bad evil company in charge of a similar "alien salvage operation" that the first movie swerved us with.  This time around, it's not much of a swerve, but Reiser pulls off the slimy executive thing really well.  Yet more Grade-A film criticism courtesy of the Lick Ness Monster.  It's also another pretty big screenplay leap, as we're meant to suspend disbelief and buy that this same damn company has been keeping up with the "we have to get a xenomorph all to ourselves!" mission for the past 57 freakin' years and has made attempt #2 just as Ripley re-awakens from stasis, but just roll with it, baby.

While Aliens is a damn fun action movie and one of the best that the genre has to offer, there's something about it that keeps me from enjoying it quite as much as the first film.  There was something about that one that stuck with me long after watching it for the first time.  This one lacks the sense of discovery that the initial one had; we already know all of the tricks of the trade when it comes to the alien creature, so a bit of the scariness was lost.  Which is just fine, since Cameron was going for more gunplay anyway, but it's just part of the nature of the beast with sequels.  There's a law of diminishing return no matter what.  Well, save for one BIG surprise that the movie has for us in the epic climax.  That part was all new.  So new that I won't even spoil it.

Having said all that, let's assign a rating.  Aliens gets a *** 1/2 out of ****.  It's one of the best sequels of all time with the same badass heroine, a ragtag group of supporting characters, and that middle 45-minute action sequence that's effectively one of the coolest things ever.  Unfortunately, it's also the last truly good movie in the Alien franchise, but we'll get to those in due time.