The second in the "Alien" series, part of a 30th anniversary BD set.

Rating: Null/10 (16 August 2017)

The year 1986 was when I moved my family from the New Orleans area to Texas. A career move to a new job and I don't recall ever seeing this move back then.
Fast-forward to 2010, a re-release of all the first 4 "Alien" movies in one complete set on BluRay disk, along with two extra disks of extras. A total of 6 BDs. I found that my local public library has the set and I now have watched Alien (1979) and today I watched this one. Picture and DTS sound are excellent as we have come to expect for BluRay.
I watched the extended director's cut which is about 2 1/2 hours long and it never seemed too long.
In the first movie Sigourney Weaver as Ripley barely escaped the Alien after the rest of her crew were systematically killed. She put herself and the ginger cat into hibernation, not knowing for sure where she would end up.
As this movie starts we see her escape pod captured by a larger space vessel and when she awakes finds that she had been asleep for 57 years. During that time her young daughter grew up and died. But then during the debrief sessions no one believed her story, they could not detect any trace of alien tissue and accused her of incompetence.
However that same far-away moon had been settled with a terraforming operation and now over 150 people were residing and working there, including some families. When a normal communication from the site is missed a team is assembled and sent to investigate.
(Aside, we see them go into the hibernation pods, later to wake up, but are not given any hint of the actual transit time. It must be a very long time, but no more than a few years.)
When the team arrives all they find is devastation and a few dead people in pods that the aliens used for their growth. Plus one survivor, a small girl of about 8 years old, dirty and scared and hiding out. She is first-time actress Carrie Henn as Newt. She and Ripley eventually bond and their mutual survival becomes the focus of the story.
Paul Reiser is good as Burke, representing the business interests of the operation and ultimately wanting to save his own skin. Lance Henriksen is good as the emotionless robot Bishop. Bill Paxton is a bit "over the top" as Private Hudson, always either wisecracking or being scared out of his wits.
A really good, tense movie, most viewers rate it clearly about the seed movie Alien.
SPOILERS: For my recollection, with lots of bullets, fire, and explosives they manage to escape from most of the aliens, but with many casualties. In the end only Ripley and Newt are alive when they come upon the "queen" alien, the large one laying eggs, Ripley thinks they get away from it but find it in the escape space ship and she has to once again figure out a way to eject it into space, and blowing up the manufacturing site to kill all the remaining aliens. With difficulty she does it and she and Newt go into hibernation pods as the movie ends.