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.
Blade Runner tackles one of science fiction’s biggest questions: what makes us human? The story by Philip K. Dick is a sci-fi allegory for soldiers returning home with post-traumatic stress, wrapped in the veneer of a neo-noir detective story — all in all, a beguiling blend of genres and content. Harrison Ford plays the detective, Dekkard, a world-weary loner hired to hunt androids (here called replicants) in need of ‘retirement’. The notion is that the replicants were created for war, and once they’re done fighting, they can’t possibly reintegrate back into society. But where real-life soldiers risk losing part of their humanity through warfare, the replicants allege to have discovered theirs — if not through battle, through the things they’ve seen and experienced across the universe.
