ecades after escaping the murderous alien that terrorized the doomed star freighter Nostromo, Ellen Ripley (Weaver) is finally pulled from her suspended animation aboard the ship's life pod, only to discover that she's outlived her young daughter and her life on Earth.
Less than receptive to the sympathy offered by the corporate representative, Burke (Paul
Reiser), Ripley gets a freight-loading job, operating an exo-skeletal forklift while enduring post-traumatic stress.
Then Burke tells her that a human mining colony, newly established on the same planet where her own crew picked up its deadly stowaway, has just gone out of contact.
Reluctantly agreeing to accompany Burke and a platoon of space marines as technical expert on the aliens, Ripley leaves her cat Jones behind, but keeps the attitude. Once aboard, she joins us in meeting the crew, among them the inexperienced Lt. Gorman (William Hope), whose posturing immediately earns the contempt of the fighting men and women of the platoon. There's also the brash Pvt. Hudson (Bill Paxton), who quickly establishes himself as all hat and no cattle, the tough-talking Latina Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) and the quietly dependable Cpl. Hicks
(Biehn), who is immediately and obviously attracted to Ripley. Ripley is most disturbed by the presence of Bishop (Henriksen), an android science officer who serves as an unpleasant reminder of the first film's traitorous Ash.
Arriving on the colony planet, Ripley and the marines discover an abandoned outpost marked by signs of a major battle. The one survivor, a shell-shocked little girl who calls herself Newt (Henn), tells of an alien assault that wiped out her community and friends. The marines decide to investigate further, a decision that wipes out much of the platoon and leaves the survivors not only stranded and surrounded by enemies, but also facing an inexorable nuclear countdown.
As the crisis worsens, one of the survivors turns traitor, another reveals himself a coward, a third proves unexpectedly trustworthy, a fourth shows his mettle by refusing to leave a wounded marine behind, and Ripley's maternal instincts render her more formidable than the rest of the platoon combined. ...
The high point of the series
Aliens is often cited as exception to the rule that movie sequels are never as good as the originals, and it deserves to be. Rather than ape Ridley Scott's dark, atmospheric original, which used claustrophobic sets and abundant shadows to ratchet up audience tension over the doings of a monster that never seemed to take the same form twice, the James Cameron followup eschewed the haunted-house formula of the original in favor of a more action-packed, combat-driven model. Superior to most action movies of its era (and ours) in that it took time to sketch out its characters, and the hopelessness of their situation, before introducing them to the menace, it firmly established Sigourney Weaver's Ripley as an action heroine and turned what had seemed a one-shot hit into a major franchise. As it happens, further Alien sequels (including a crossover with the much-inferior Predator franchise) blew that promise by being content to go over the same ground while paradoxically taking the series in repugnant new directions, but that was not the fault
of this installment, which managed the rare feat of being exciting, emotionally involving and, by the standards of its kind of film, smart at the same time.
Those standards are, of course, somewhat loose. The aliens, designed by H.R. Giger, may be creatures out of nightmare, but their life cycle makes no more sense than it ever did. While they prey on other life forms as breeding receptacles, nobody ever seems to have devoted any thought to what they eat, or even whether they eat, a question that looms especially large when you
imagine just how much they would need to ingest in order to grow from their embryonic chest-burster size to their lumbering six-foot monsters that attack at the climax. In this film, they also manage to excrete enough building materials to turn the bowels of a human colony complex into an organic, labyrinthine hive—a job that would require enough sticky sap to
cover a sizable shopping mall. As their human victims are (mostly) left alive, to dangle from walls while more aliens gestate inside them, the thousands upon thousands of tons of biological mass these creatures would need to construct their hive, while turning their eggs into a predatory alien army, still seems to come from nowhere but the convenience of the screenwriter's imagination. This is more than simply vague. The murky motives of the villainous "Company,"
which wants the aliens for its "weapons division" (to be used against what?), the thorny question of just what "bug hunts" these space marines have engaged in when they've never encountered these aliens before, and the self-evident stupidity of not leaving somebody behind on the orbiter, to man a rescue mission if needed (or, failing that, getting the little girl to
safety before mounting an assault on the alien hive), all seem well-thought-out in comparison.
Not that any of this matters in the watching. Aliens is tense, frightening, funny and, at times, downright thrilling stuff. It develops a gallery of likable supporting characters like the android Bishop, whom Ripley despises at once, but who turns out to be a dependable, heroic and self-effacing. It takes its own sweet time setting up its final ordeal by fire, but then maintains a high energy level with one of the greatest series of nested
climaxes in genre cinema history. It builds up to one line that never fails to evoke cheers, "Get away from her, you bitch!" and a final confrontation between Ripley and the alien queen that amounts to a catfight between two specimens of wounded motherhood. This is even more articulated in the "uncut" version, which is some 20 minutes longer and contains some
scenes that were rightly cut and others that never should have been left on the editing room floor—including several that establish Ripley as a grieving mother whose instantaneous bond with Newt is in part expiation for a child who grew old and died while a hibernating mom was lost in space. There's also a moment between Ripley and Hicks that should have been
considered indispensable. Damn it.
Carrie Henn, who played Newt, never appeared in any other film. Jenette Goldstein's charismatic turn as Vasquez seemed a breakout role, but she remained a little-known bit player.
