[10]

James Cameron accomplishes a rare feat with a sequel that doesn't shame the original and succeeds on its own merits.  Aliens is so different in tone than the original Alien, I think of it as a sequel only in name (this goes for all the Alien movies).  In a smart move, Cameron decided not to compete with Ridley Scott in the areas of horror and suspense.  Aliens is decidedly a combat movie.

Cameron’s screenplay picks up with where the last movie left off, with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) adrift in space. She’s discovered by a salvage crew and taken out of cryo-sleep only to discover that decades have passed and her only connection to life on Earth, her daughter, has passed away. To make matters worse, Ripley is haunted by nightmares of an alien terror that nobody around her believes is real. So when a team of interstellar marines asks her to join their investigation of a colony that’s fallen off the grid, she first says no. But as the nightmares worsen, Ripley ultimately decides to face down her greatest fear and head back into the lion’s, er, alien’s den.

It’s a smart script that focuses on Ripley’s character and the mother/daughter relationship she forms with one of the colony’s young survivors, Newt (Carrie Henn). Ever since his debut with The Terminator, James Cameron has always found a way to marry character and story to visceral thrills in a way that continually wins both box office and critical favor. Even before Titanic and Avatar, Aliens already contained the winning recipe. And for my money, it’s still his best film to date.

The last hour of Aliens is an incredible run of non-stop thrills, complete with a surprise double-ending that surpasses your highest expectations. With marines firing heavy artillery at hordes of aliens that burst into lethal sprays of acid, and Sigourney Weaver with pulse rifle and flamethrower in hand, Aliens is an irresistible chunk of cinematic bad-assery. Sigourney Weaver earned an Oscar nomination for her fierce performance (rare for an action movie), and hers isn’t the only memorable part, either.  Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, and Jeanette Goldstein are very good as marines unprepared for the horrors ahead of them, and Lance Henrickson is indelible as the resident android whose allegiance is in question. James Horner serves up one of his most exciting scores (also Oscar nominated) and Stan Winston does an outstanding job bringing the enormous Queen alien to frightening life. The final confrontation between Ripley and the Queen is a seamless combination of miniature photography and on-set animatronics. The visual effects in Aliens are a stunning display of ingenuity and craftsmanship that outshine any of today’s digital effects. The film’s Academy Award for visual effects is among the most richly deserved.

I’ve seen Aliens at least one hundred times now, and it never gets old.  It’s an action classic, and one of my all-time faves.

Academy Awards: Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Effects Editing

Oscar Nominations: Best Actress (Weaver), Best Score (Horner), Best Film Editing (Ray Lovejoy), Best Sound, Best Art Direction