My Favorite Film

Rating: 10/10 (1 March 1999)

I was introduced to ALIENS, somewhat forcibly, by a film-wise friend in 1987; she plonked me down with a strong drink, cued the videotape, chuckled, and said something like, "Trust me."
12 years and 2 film sequels later, I'm still in her debt: the film rose to the top of my "Fave Film" list in '94 and hasn't dropped. With all the films ever made, between 1200-1400 of which I've experienced, why "Aliens"?
1) I rarely had to suspend my disbelief, remarkable with an SF film. This could be the future; this all could happen, I felt, except for the compression of events between the initiation of the destruct sequence [for planet LV-47] and it's completion. Cameron challenged my credibility there, but hardly anywhere else.
2) Humans repel advanced, mightier, hostile species, despite Corporate greed, arrogance & fuggheadedness (Carter Burke and Ripley's review committee) and Military arrogance, fuggheadedness & incompetence (Lt. Gorman, and to a lesser extent Hudson, Apone, Drake, etc.). The heroes/victors?: 2 adult females (1 survivor), 1 juvenile female, 1 synthetic person and 1 adult male. Hard to get more egalitarian than that.
3) Crisp, believable, memorable, quotable script--a rarity and a joy in any film since the lion's share of a major film's budget went, not to the actors, but to the pre- and post-production crew (as well as the crew off-camera during filming).
4) Cameron's depth of research and "world-building" for this (and a few other) films is almost as impressive as John Tolkien's for Middle Earth. Where Ridley Scott sketched out a series of events, James Cameron built a time and place that could have thousands of plausible, interesting stories.
5) Cast selection, and subsequent character building, rival and perhaps top (ironically) Ridley Scott's "Bladerunner".
I echo many of the feelings and opinions other reviewers here have already written, so won't repeat them, except: I have never yet seen Aliens and felt that I'd seen it one too many times. This film's superior has not yet been created; everyone involved in bringing it to the screen should be proud to have worked on a dramatic Science Fiction-cum-Thriller-cum-Action film masterpiece.