More more more...but less of what made Alien so great.

Rating: 7/10 (21 November 2011)

(I'm Dutch and do not speak/write English perfectly, beware!)
Here and now, in 2011, I decided to watch both Alien movies. It was about time since I am 27 now and I love science fiction, but I never took the chance to watch these two movies. I'm not going to review them both of course, but Aliens is such a different movie than Alien is that I have to include my experience with the first movie.
To summarize my night with the first movie: I LOVED it. Some viewers criticize Alien for having a slow pace but i think it is an essential feature of this movie being so effective. There are few scares, but the ones i got truly SCARED and HORRIFIED me. I also love the atmosphere, strengthened by the beautiful music and convincing effects, still holding up after 30 years. There is a loneliness in it all that just sucked me in, sitting alone myself in my room with the lights turned off.
A few days later i started to watch 'Aliens', not knowing what to expect, besides a continuation of the story. Soon i discovered that Aliens is a truly different movie, and the difference in style didn't appeal to me first. Sure, Ripleys' situation is fascinating and the money-hungry CEO's made my empathize with Ripley even more but I really missed the buildup the first movie had. There, I felt isolated like the small crew in the ship, slowly being drawn to the alien horror. In Aliens, this feeling of isolation is largely absent as Ripley starts her second encounter being in contact with groups of people, being at safe distance from the threat.
After an initial scare, the first half of the movie has a pretty slow pace compared to how the movie speeds up eventually. When the movie starts to pick up pace I loved most of the action scenes and after some early annoyance with Newt, I started to love the bond she developed with Ripley and I really wanted them to survive! So for me, the second half of the movie made up for the first half which I felt to be quite dull.
But still, I feel the urge to write about what i consider Aliens' shortcomings because I had higher expectations of this movie. Maybe some of my points of critique arise because i am born in the eighties and raised with bombastic movies like Terminator (2), Robocop, Independence Day, and Starship Troopers. I guess I would have like this movie better if i would have seen it earlier, maybe then i wouldn't have felt the action movie deja vu feeling Aliens gave me.
Deja vu, like the group of Marines. I've seen too many cool Marines on the big screen in my life. Sympathy for them did develop throughout the movie, but their 'badass' attitude made them far less human for me than the crew of the first movie. Talking about 'less human', I hated Burke from the start, it was just too obvious he was a lying weasel. I enjoyed him being killed, too bad the killing scene was too short in comparison with the disgust i felt for him!
After 25 years, Despite my complaints, this is a pretty good movie with a fantastic finale. In retrospect it suffers from the existence of too many roller-coaster ride action movies which came out after 1986. And in this argument lies my appreciation of the first movie, it lacks explosions and bombast but that simplicity feels like a fresh breath of air in a landscape of action/horror movies trying to be bigger than the one before.