A great, action-focused sequel, but lacking in horror

Rating: 8/10 (5 May 2015)

After Ridley Scott's Alien had broken new ground in 1979, the sequel was inevitable. This one, which hit theatres in 1986, was spearheaded by a different director however, James Cameron. His career was just picking up steam, having directed The Terminator two years earlier. As a standalone film, Aliens is pretty good. As a direct sequel to Alien however The story picks up where Alien left off. Ripley—and her cat—are drifting in an escape pod when another ship recovers it. She's saved and back on earth. There's a committee willing to hear Ripley's story, and like all on-screen committees, they don't believe a single word. However, when all communications are lost with the colony assigned to investigate the alien site, the company decides they might need Ripley after all. And since Ripley's being haunted by nightmares every single night, she thinks confronting her fears might be the best option. She joins a group of 'hardcore' colonial marines and they head off to planet LV-426 to find out what happened.
As I said, as a standalone action flick, I mostly like Aliens, mostly. Though some of the events and dialogue are clichéd, it's usually Sigourney Weaver's acting that kept me fully immersed. I think it's also got something to do with her outfit. I mean, a leather jacket in an 80s action flick? Pff, it's on.
One of the things I like the most is the slow build-up. The whole film tends to feel 'grounded'. It's not about going from one overblown action set-piece to the next, but to make you feel like you're standing right next to Ripley and the others, experiencing their panic, trying to figure out the best course of action.
Other things like the relationship between Ripley and Newt are also pretty well done. Whenever the action cools down, the film takes its time to let their relationship develop. The same goes for the romance between Ripley and Hicks which is, thankfully, mostly suggested and implied, though the symbolism gets way too obvious in the scene where he's teaching her how to handle 'guns' *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*. But overall, there are no hands wiping a steamy window à la Titanic. Instead, there is a mutual connection based solely on their ability to remain cool, calm and collected under extreme circumstances.
The film also mostly looks good, mostly. While the space scenes remind one of how incredible 2001—a film made in 1969—still looks, the aliens themselves still look as detailed as they did in Alien. It's pretty mindboggling how James Cameron and his team made the aliens look so good with only roughly a third of the budget Alien³ had.
In the end, it's a good action film and I enjoyed it a great deal. Despite the film being ridden with clichés, the was still a genuine feeling of tension. The final thirty minutes are basically one big action scene and once it's all over, there's a genuine sigh of relief.
However, as a direct sequel to Alien, things become more ambiguous. On the one hand, I appreciate they tried to do something different. They could've easily remade Alien with a different set of characters being picked off one by one, but that movie already exists: it's called Alien. Instead, Cameron went his own way and turned it into a straight-up action flick. So, I appreciate that at least they didn't get all formulaic on me. On the other hand, the concept of the alien—or Xenomorph—lends itself far more to pure horror. Remember one of those deleted scenes from Alien? It was a short scene where the alien crawled towards someone or something to that effect. But the reason it didn't make the cut is obvious: the alien was completely visible and instead of being horrified, you were looking at it, thinking 'that's a guy in a suit'. So Scott and co applied the Jaws principle: rarely, if ever, show the monster in all its gory glory. It's all about fear of the unknown. What you can't grasp, visually or intellectually, is the definition of horror. That's what the alien is all about. In Aliens however, one can only watch aliens being blown into a pile of yellow goo for so long before they go from 'horrifying, perfect hunting organism' to 'cannon fodder'. So, what the film gains in action, it loses in horror. There's a reason the 2010 video game adaptation Aliens: Colonial Marines—formatted after Cameron's film—failed. It's because you associate the Alien franchise with horror. Fending off endless waves of aliens with guns à la Call of Duty isn't what the Alien franchise is about at its core. No, it's is about a sense of dread; it's about being the hunted and not the hunterwhich is why 2014's game adaptation Alien: Isolation was such a good game.
So, how do you judge Aliens in the end? Is it fair to judge it for being a failed horror film, for the ways it doesn't adhere to the groundwork laid in Alien? Or do you judge it as a film that tried to be something else from the get-go? The latter would be the correct answer I feel. Aliens took the concept in new and exciting directions and did so with aplomb. Though I firmly believe Alien is by far the superior film, I still enjoy Aliens for what it is and for all the things it does right.