Film Review: Aliens

Director: James Cameron

7 years after the original Alien which was a huge success, James Cameron took up the directing job from Ridley Scott and brought back the only surviving character of Officer Ripley who was played by Sigourney Weaver to take on the now famous Alien. Weaver actually called herself Rambolina as a joke in reference to the Rambo franchise with Sylvester Stallone. It was filmed at Pinewood Studios in England and Cameron directed this after the huge success of The Terminator in 1984.

Aliens movie poster

*possible spoilers*

The film continues where the original film, Alien, left off with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) being rescued whilst travelling in stasis. She has a meeting back on Earth with board members from her company who don't believe her story about the Alien killing the crew and her need to destroy the Nostramo. She loses her space-flight license and suffers from nightmares about her encounter with the creature. She also learns that the planet where she ran into the Alien is now a terraform colony which the company loses contact with for no reason and now wants Ripley to return as a consultant to see if the Aliens have returned.

The first thing to notice about this film compared to the first is that the nerve jangling tension is almost gone and has been replaced with more gory action sequences. There are more shootouts which are reasonably entertaining but it makes for a less scary film which can be a good or bad thing depending on what you want. I am a bigger fan of the tense nature of the first than the all-action plot of the second but you can understand the logic as Cameron knew he couldn't better the first without taking the film in a different direction.

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) with Newt (Carrie Henn) battling the queen Alien

Unfortunately a lot of the Marines in the film are very stereotypical in their roles as naive jocks who think they will just shoot their way through the Aliens only to be caught out. The first film had much more developed characters that you could relate to and weren't just expendable people that you hoped would be killed sooner rather than later. The queen Alien is a superb special effect as it still looks terrifying despite being much bigger and harder to film; this plot device of many eggs producing many Aliens gave the film a new dimension as the crew are under siege.

2.5/4 More action and stereotypical characters mean it doesn't compare to the first for me.