Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) shows Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) how to use a pulse rifle
The common perception is that a sequel to the film is never as good as the original, and that belief holds true for the overwhelming majority of film franchises throughout history with good reason.
Most of the time, studio executives greenlight a sequel because they know that it is much easier to milk the success of a popular movie than to come up with a new intellectual property that has just as much chance of becoming the next The Adventures of Pluto Nash as it does of being the next Forrest Gump.
On a rare occasion, a sequel comes out that is notably better than its predecessor to a degree that critics and film buffs can point to it as an exception to the rule. Movies like Clear and Present Danger, Superman II and Back to the Future II were better than the previous films in the franchises, but it’s tough to say that Patriot Games, Superman and Back to the Future weren’t themselves great movies that were almost as good as their successors.
Even rarer are the films that surpass the originals in such a way that there is a distinct night-and-day difference between the quality of the two movies in favor of the sequel. James Cameron’s Aliens is one such film: a tense, thrilling, action-packed extravaganza with a great, if unknown, cast and a gripping plot that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats.
On the edge of my seat I was for a good part of one year during junior high school when my sister and I watched our Aliens VHS twice a day every day. The first viewing was always a full run-through of the movie followed by a ten-minute rewind session and a second viewing where we skipped to all of our favorite scenes (how useful DVD’s instant scene selection functionality would have been back then).
We knew every line in the movie by heart and had loads of fun reenacting some of the more intense scenes. The film even inspired me to write loads of fan fiction more than a decade before I had even heard the term. Regardless of whether they liked me, many of the kids in my classes waited to read the latest chapter of my “epic” battle between Colonial Marines and vicious aliens to see whether their character lived or died (and whether they went out heroically or died like a punk).
It probably wouldn’t surprise you to read that Aliens is easily my number one favorite movie of all time.
The premise of the movie is a grand evolution in many different ways of the one presented in Alien, a horrifying science fiction thriller directed by Sir Ridley Scott and first released in 1979.
In that original film, the crew of the commercial towing ship Nostromo, on their way home to Earth, are awakened from stasis by the ship’s computer after it picks up a transmission of unknown origin from a nearby planet. Acting on orders from The Weyland-Yutani Corporation, their corporate employers, they descend to the planet’s surface to investigate, damaging their vessel in the process. While several members of the crew work to repair the ship, the captain, executive officer and navigator head out to find the source of the transmission and discover that it originates from a derelict spacecraft. It is in this wreck that the X.O. becomes the victim of some strange alien creature that attaches itself to his head and puts him in a sort of comatose state only to later fall off and die. Of course, things don’t end well for the officer, as the viewer soon discovers in one of the most horrifying scenes in motion picture history due in part to the very real reactions from the other actors, who were not informed ahead of time by the rest of the crew exactly what was going to happen.
While Alien was essentially a survival horror film set in space where “no one can hear you scream,” Aliens is at its essence a war movie with the cocky Colonial Marines who think they can take out any enemy representing the technologically superior, gung ho United States military during the Vietnam War, the seemingly mindless aliens representing the more primitive North Vietnamese forces and the transformed mining colony representing the unfamiliar and hostile foreign environment that greatly favored the enemy.
There are, of course, some scares (one particularly gruesome moment early in the movie is very reminiscent of Alien’s defining scene) and plenty of thrills as the Colonial Marines, whose forces dwindle dangerously as the plot moves forward, fight desperately to survive long enough for their android executive officer to establish a communications link with the spare drop ship on board the warship Sulaco and remotely pilot it down to the planet’s surface.
Along the way, we’re treated to a roller coaster ride of high impact action scenes interspersed with eerie intermissions in which we’re never quite sure when the quiet safety will be torn away by another heart-pounding alien encounter. As fun as the guns, loud explosions and in-your-face thrills in Aliens are, however, the more compelling aspect of the movie are the characters, both in how they develop and what they represent.
Front and center, of course, is the lead character of Lieutenant Ellen Ripley, played with much gravitas by the very talented Sigourney Weaver who received her first Academy Award nomination (and one of the only such nominations for an actor in a science fiction film) for the role. Ripley is widely regarded as the first true action heroine of cinema, and while the seed for this was planted in Alien, it is in Aliens that she truly evolves into this pioneering character.
In the earlier film, Ripley is the sole survivor and manages to kill off the menacing alien creature, but the overwhelming impression is that a lot of her success can be attributed to luck. She’s not unlike Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode at the end of Halloween, the same as when the movie started save for some emotional or psychological scars from the events that unfolded around her.
In Aliens, Ripley starts off as that relatively weak and timid character, still unsure of herself and perceived by the stronger people around her as having little to offer to the mission, but develops, quite necessarily, into a leader who is able to organize the few remaining soldiers and civilians into a semblance of a fighting force and eventually earn their respect (as begrudging as it is from some). In the third act of the film, it is Ripley who goes on the solo mission to rescue an abducted friend, and it is Ripley who again defeats the last remaining alien threat although this time it is very clear her decisiveness, ingenuity and courage are greater contributing factors than luck is.
For all that Ripley has to do and go through in order to prove herself to the Marines and win the respect of her fellows, and our respect as well, it’s ironic that she places the same responsibilities on Bishop, the android who acts as Sulaco’s executive officer. Ripley is clear early in the movie about her disdain and distrust despite Bishop’s insistence that it is impossible for him “to harm, or by omission of action allow to be harmed, a human being,” even as the marines complain about how annoying civilians are and scoff specifically at her attempts to contribute to the mission.
The actions Bishop, played by horror and science fiction journeyman Lance Henriksen, takes in order to rescue the remaining members of the mission, and subsequently earn Ripley’s trust and respect, actually elevate the character into another challenge to cinematic convention of the time. Just as Ripley made plausible the idea of a woman being the hero in an action film instead of a fragile creature to be ogled and/or protected, Bishop showed people that they could trust technology.
Amidst films like Westworld, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Demon Seed, and even Alien (in which the android Ash, portrayed by Sir Ian Holm, betrays the crew under orders) and Cameron’s own Terminator, which fed into the common fear and paranoia people felt towards the ever quickly advancing technology and machinery, Aliens instead portrayed technology as something to be depended upon with Bishop’s willingness to risk himself for a chance of rescue and ultimate success in getting the survivors back to the Sulaco. This new perspective on technology, an admitted obsession of Cameron’s, is something he again explored in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
The other two civilian characters are for the most part predictable and flat. Carter Burke, played by comedian Paul Reiser, is a corporate lawyer for Weyland-Yutani who hitches a ride on the mission in order to watch out for his employer’s interests (it is their colony that the marines are investigating), and he is as slimy as one expects a movie corporate lawyer to be. And Newt, played by Carrie Henn in her only film role, is rather useless within the context of the film despite being played up as the only colonist to have evaded the alien infestation by using her wits – according to Ripley, she survived for more than 17 days “with no weapons and no training.” About all she does is look scared and run away from danger, although she is the catalyst for Ripley’s transformation into an action heroine.
The Colonial Marines are also, for the most part, a bunch of throwaway characters, mostly there to act all gung ho in the beginning of the film and then get torn apart by the aliens. Few have more than a handful of lines or moments of screen time and use them to act like the archetypical caricatures of soldiers we so often see in movies.
There’s Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope), the fresh-out-of-the-academy officer with no real field experience who quickly alienates the troopers under his command and subsequently, and quite predictably, doesn’t keep it together when the proverbial excrement hits the air circulation system.
There’s Sergeant Apone, played by real life Vietnam War hero Al Matthews in a casting movie similar to the one that put real life drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, who insults his troops, chomps cigars and looks down his nose at Ripley.
There’s Private First Class Drake (Mark Rolston, most recently seen in Saw VI), the stereotypical big thug wearing the perpetual snarl and oozing what ultimately is foolish bravado in the face of danger, and his fellow M56 “smart” gun operator Private First Class Vasquez of the hotheaded, tough-as-nails Latina stereotype (despite being played by the Jewish Jenette Goldstein) now represented faithfully by Michelle Rodriguez. Vasquez has a significantly bigger role in the film than Drake but ultimately doesn’t climb out of the “butch soldier woman” box.
The standouts of the squad, however, are Corporal Hicks, played by Michael Biehn in his second of three (four if you count his deleted scene in Terminator 2) James Cameron films, and Private First Class Hudson, the breakout role for Big Love’s Bill Paxton, who himself appeared in five James Cameron films and, coincidentally, five films with Biehn.
Hicks is the most grounded and level-headed of the Colonial Marines, and is the only one willing to give Ripley the time of day in the earlier scenes – in fact, one such scene, which was deleted from the theatrical release but reintegrated in DVD director’s cuts, had Hicks showing genuine concern for Ripley’s apprehension at entering the colony compound built near the crash site of the derelict ship from Alien. It is Hicks who is able to keep his head during the initial encounter with the aliens and get the survivors of his squad out of harm’s way, and to recognize the need to destroy the colony despite corporate interests. The role is not a stretch for Biehn, who also played the hero Kyle Reese in Terminator.
Hudson, on the other hand, is decidedly not level-headed, but that fits with his role as the everyman – his character represents the normal person dropped into a far from normal situation. He provides necessary light comic relief from the film’s tensity and reacts as I believe most people would if they found themselves trapped in an isolated place with an army of vicious aliens hunting them down. Paxton plays Hudson with just enough exasperation to be believable without becoming unlikable where the audience can’t root for or laugh with him, and, despite his inexperience at the time, provides us with the most memorable character of the film.
Aliens is ultimately a fun sci-fi romp with a good mix of thrill, excitement and drama that at the time of its release was generally unseen in such a genre movie. Like a master bartender concocting his signature cocktail, Cameron provides the perfect combination of ingredients to create one of the definitive films of 1986, one that turned many cinematic conventions on their heads and still stands today as a sci-fi action masterpiece.
Final score: 5 out of 5
Experience it for yourself!
(Amazon)
(Amazon)
). These are the movies that I had the most fun watching and could watch over and over again, say, if I were stranded on a desert island that somehow had a television, a DVD player and some way to power them. 
