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!
