Amazing sequel that far outshines the original

Rating: 10/10 (15 August 2011)

Sent along on a rescue mission to determine the source of lost contact with a space station, a woman and a group of Marines find themselves under attack by the same alien threat she encountered before.
This is an almost-flawless film, with tons of stuff to really love and very little to dislike. In fact, the only parts not to like here result from the film's near gargantuan running time, which is tempered by the continuous action but still has a lot of extras in it that are wholly unnecessary and don't really serve much purpose beyond character development, which is quite extended in the later half with the surrogate-mother storyline being the main culprit that really hampers the action. In fact, that alone is really the film's main shining quality, it's stupendous and utterly thrilling action scenes which are some of the best filmed in the genre, and among the top in many other genres altogether. From the initial swarming shot in the colony to the encounters in the medic bay and the numerous shoot-outs with them, its pace is nearly frenetic and nonstop, giving off so many impressive scenes that there's a real sense of thrills to come from them. That also includes the aliens themselves getting more screen-time, and the extra exposure does them good as they come across, in all their stages, as a really imposing and fantastic life-form, and the extra knowledge acquired about them doesn't hurt either. The gore is ratcheted up with some more bodies to get ripped apart, the locations much more suspenseful and the film as a whole doesn't have a lot wrong with it, leaving this as a fantastic sequel that is far better than the original.
Rated R: Extreme Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and children in danger