Aliens (1986) – Aliens changes up a lot of what worked
in Alien, swapping director Ridley
Scott for James Cameron and moving from claustrophobic horror to expanded
action. It’s a film that tries almost
too hard to distance itself from the original, but although it’s so different
from its predecessor Aliens succeeds
on a number of levels. Returning as
Ellen Ripley, Sigourney Weaver steps up her performance as Ripley suffers from
PTSD after her encounter aboard the Nostromo; Weaver successfully evolves her
character from fearful victim into proactive hero as she leads a military
platoon against the Xenomorphs. The rest
of the cast is passable: Lance Henriksen
plays android Bishop, but he doesn’t do as much as Ian Holm in Alien, and Paul Reiser is surprisingly
scummy as a company man whose only investment is in weaponizing the creature, while
Bill Paxton plays an entertainingly campy soldier whose every line is a
catchphrase (“Game over, man! Game over!”). And the action scenes are first-rate; much as
it pains me to laud James Cameron, he does strong work filming the chaos of a
full Xenomorph squadron’s assault. But in
this element perhaps rests the film’s greatest detriment; we see entirely too much
of the Xenomorphs (indeed, we even have a name for them now). There was something to be said about the
original film’s refusal to let us see the creature fully, so an element of
horror is lost when the creatures are seen in full lighting; worse, they’re not
indestructible, which makes them mere cannon fodder at times. But what Cameron sacrifices with the visible Xenomorphs,
he reclaims with the Alien Queen, whose final sequence with Ripley and the
iconic cargo loader is as exciting as anything the film offers.
That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, but stay tuned later this week for our no-spoilers-barred review of The Dark Knight Rises!
1 comment:
Love this film. This might be my favorite James Cameron movie (it's between this and T2), and it's definitely one of the best action movies ever. And I disagree on one point: I think the Aliens are so nightmarish and imaginatively designed that they're still frightening even when you see them. Especially the Queen.
Just one little flaw [SPOILERS]: there was the whole "crew expendable" secret order in the first Alien, but it's never mentioned here, and Ripley seems to have forgotten or moved on. And if the company knew there were aliens on the planet (as some suggest the order implied), you'd think they would have explored it again in the nearly six decades between the two movies.
Which version did you watch? I saw the Director's Cut first, and prefer that version. A few added scenes are negligible, but there's one or two sequences that add more tension to the whole thing.
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