A true rarity....

Rating: 10/10 (9 July 2004)

Aliens, James Cameron's 1986 sequel to Alien;is one of the few sequels in film history which improves upon its predecessor.Whereas the 1979 original focused on a tense suspense driven approach to horror, Aliens is structured as a war film in space. Still providing horror but now mixed with action; Aliens would be the ideal young, testosterone driven, macho male film if not for its leading character being Ripley (the sole human survivor of the original), a woman who learns to hold her own amongst all the bravado of the colonial marines. I remember renting this film frequently from my local video shop in the late eighties, it really stands well to repeat viewing given the amount of quotable lines it features. It's such a shame that the two sequels never once revisited the quality of either this or the afore-mentioned Alien.