Going bigger and slightly better, Cameron's "Alien" sequel pulls off everything it attempts.

Rating: 7/10 (30 April 2019)

There is a moment about half way through James Cameron's "Aliens" which seems to very deliberately turn back to its 1979 predecessor and say 'yeah, I see your effort, and I raise you'. It occurs when a bevy of soldiers are trooping through the remains of a settlement on a desolate moon: it has been ransacked by a series of violent creatures whose sole purpose is to seemingly seek organisms and attack them. As they march through the crime scene, we realise that they are essentially traversing an area which has seen events play out that were very similar to the first film: a group of (largely) unarmed people trying to defend themselves from these animals in a zone they cannot escape. "Aliens", however, is just getting out of second gear by this point...
Cameron's film somehow manages to go bigger and, dare I say it, a bit better than "Alien" - marrying the genres of action; horror and science-fiction to excellent effect. Indeed, like the best of anything science-fiction has to offer, you get the feeling you are in another world - a world of superior artificial intelligence, of space vehicles designed for things we are still a long way from pioneering ourselves and of distant worlds.
The terror Cameron seems able to inject into proceedings stems, I think, from knowing there are multiple enemies; indeed, an endless supply, about whom we know very little but always seem to be conniving to get you one way or another. One would think lots of these creatures dumped into a film alongside a group of gun-toting protagonists would make for a disaster after the menacing calm of the first film - perhaps I once thought that myself, but having seen the film again recently, I'm of the opinion that Cameron executes the material really well.
"Aliens" begins with a military-style drum roll over the opening credits, briefly foreshadowing the militaristic content this edition will possess. We pick up, quite literally, where the first film ended: the lone human survivor of the transport ship Nostromo, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), is drifting through space in an escape capsule. When she is found, a rare and amusing moment occurs: an outside agent, totally unaware of what they have stumbled upon, crack open the door and send in a probe to make sure it's safe - they are afraid of what we know is perfectly fine, and yet we as an audience are unsure of what has found our heroine and so are oddly uneasy as well.
When Ripley comes around, the film allows us to share in her shock at the fact some 57 years have passed since the events of the first film. She has lost a daughter who has outlived her and, gut-wrenchingly, entire families have since settled on the moon the initial alien's biological origins were discovered. Her only friend amidst a sea of disapproving bureaucrats, unsympathetic to her story, is a smooth-talking company employee named Burke (Paul Riser), whose pleasant manner makes certain later reveals all that more surprising...
Burke wants Ripley to traverse to the moon when, inexplicably, communications with the settlement suddenly cease, only he wants her to accompany a platoon of marines, as she has first-hand experience of the creature and nobody can take any chances... What Cameron does impressively here is he allows for the opening act to calmly break us into this sequel, which is at once both very similar to "Alien" but very different: loose ends are tied up, Ripley becomes grounded again; we sneak a glimpse of mugshots of the first crew on a monitor; she accepts her daughter's death and even reconciles with the cat of the first film.
Once Cameron senses we are ready to roll, act two arrives, and the film begins to play games: the marines themselves strike us as unprofessional in their messing around and cracking crude jokes. They are not especially well-drilled - one of them even seems to echo the dialogue of the doomed crew of the first when they speak about not being paid enough; the commander confuses two marines, Hudson (Michael Biehn) and Hicks (Bill Paxton), and we are afforded a shot of Ripley looking on in horror at her escorts.
When the time comes, of course the film breaks out into action - armed soldiers versus a nest of beasts when it's discovered a process similar to what befell John Hurt in "Alien" occurred to an unwitting inhabitant of the colony. But, without question, the film is more than merely two hours of blazing guns and wretched shootouts - there is variety to the set pieces and they're executed really well: pulsating gunfights in rooms drowned in red light give way to retreats into ventilation shafts; there is a dramatic confrontation in the cargo bay of a giant spaceship, which refuses to end when it spills into the airlock. Midway through, Ripley is trapped in a small bunkroom with a crawling specimen eager to attach itself to her face where every little rattle and clank is unnerving. What additionally struck me was just how difficult it was to predict who was safe and who wasn't.
Moreover, the film is a poised character study of Ripley negating this new nightmare with an infant girl called Newt (Carrie Henn), orphaned by the monsters, and allowing Weaver's character a kind of second chance at good mothering. She may have failed to live up to the promise she made to the daughter we find out about, but damned if she's going to fail to get Newt out of this jam. The arc is eventually afforded closure as Ripley and an alien queen, responsible for the eggs from which the aliens essentially harbour their existences, confront one another and we remember it was one of the queen's own offspring which ultimately took Ripley's time with her own little girl away from her. "Aliens" is a taut, well-made sequel and well worth seeing.