All hail James Cameron.

Rating: 10/10 (1 December 2018)

All hail James Cameron.
Much like Alien, my experience with its 1986 sequel, Aliens is limited to non-existent as I never watched it growing up mostly because I was far too young to even see it even if I had wanted to. However, as I got older and began to hear other people comment on how excellent the film was, I felt compelled to give Aliens a watch and lo and behold, I absolutely loved it. From its solid direction and writing to it's wonderfully executed action and top-notch performances, Aliens is a movie that stands head and toes above its predecessor in every possible way.
The film opens with Eileen Ripley drifting in space while in stasis for 57 years but is rescued by a deep-space salvage team and taken to a space station above Earth. While recovering, she learns that her daughter has passed away. Later on, she is questioned by her employers of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation as to why she destroyed The Nostromo. Ripley tries to explain what happened but the company don't believe her and revoke her pilot license. Meanwhile, on the planet LV-426, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation has established a terraforming colony but when contact with the settlement is lost, a representative named Carter Bruke asks Ripley for help. Ellen is reluctant is take part in the operation due to her previous encounter with the beasts but after Burke reassures her that the mission is to wipe the creatures out, she agrees. On board the USS Sulaco, Ripley meets the Colonial Marines along with the android Bishop who Ripley is at first hostile to due to her previous experience with Ash. The team soon descends down to the planet's surface and enter the compound where they find signs of a struggle but no bodies apart from a devastated young girl named Newt. The group then processes to the center of the compound where they find the settlers cocooned. After the marines kill a chestburster, the rest of the aliens emerge and attack the squad, killing several. When the inept Lieutenant Gorman panics, Ripley drives the transport into the hive to save the remaining marines. Now, the survivors must find a way to get off the planet before it's too late.
In the world of moviemaking, creating the perfect sequel that is able to match the first one is never an easy task to pull off and every guideline that dictates such actions always has a number of exemptions to this rule. Empire Strikes Back had a different director working on the movie and it turned out fantastic, Evil Dead II was just the first movie with a bigger budget and more comedy while Terminator 2 was a much larger film with bigger action and a more human story then what the first Terminator was. Aliens go against all of those rules mostly with the rule of not amping up the action in an effort to have a majority draw. Having shown in The Terminator that he could handle both captivating sci-fi themes as well as nerve-racking tension, James Cameron was the right guy to carry the story set by Ridley Scott's 1979 classic upon his shoulders onwards and adjust it for the 1980s action crowd and while the movie is not as frightening nor as satisfying as Alien, it nevertheless endures as an appealing and smart action film that doesn't insult or talk down to its audience unlike action movies like Transformers: Age of Extinction or Robocop 3.
Out of all of Cameron's films, there are several that are always battling each other for the top stop and while I will say that Terminator 2 is easily Cameron's best movie in terms of story and themes, Aliens is easily more accessible and easier to watch than other sci-fi movies like Avatar or Passengers. Disregarding the movie's place within a quintessential film series, Aliens serves as a practical handbook on how to adequately build a movie, from the screenplay to directing the action and everything else in between. It's difficult to see Aliens as anything less than a total cinematic achievement, no matter what standpoint you see the movie from. Cameron's choice to take the Alien series from horror to action seems a bit bewildering to those who haven't watched the first film. Nowadays, action movies like Skyscraper, A Good Day To Die Hard and the Fast and the Furious movies have become identified with idiotic and cheesy dialog, cardboard characters, redundant storytelling and horribly shot action scenes that it's now easy for audiences to forget the brilliance and improvements directors like Cameron, Spielberg, and McTiernan brought to the genre. As Dan O'Bannon said, taking the story Alien established and turning it into an action film was the best route to take the series. Had that not happened, the series would have become the next Halloween, creating more of the same unoriginal and unfrightening horror films lacking any of the passion or creativity that made the first film work so well.
It's often be argued whether Alien or Aliens is the better film. In my personal opinion, I gravitate more towards Aliens due to its more accessible story and more fleshed-out characters but it's never an easy decision as both are perfect examples of two very different kinds of filmmaking as well as both films being notable enough to stand on their own as fairly stand-alone movies. While Alien and Aliens may share a lot of the same story points, visuals, and the same lead character, they are both entirely different movies from one another as Ridley Scott's Alien is a haunted house in space while James Cameron's Aliens is a futuristic war movie with elements of horror added in. While there are obvious spheres of overlapping from both films, there are also key contrasts too as both Scott and Cameron use horror differently. Ridley's version of Ellen Ripley is able to survive due to her rejecting the conformity of the womanlike trope of being the scream queen or the victim while Cameron's version of Ripley is able to destroy the alien queen by grasping her stand-in family with Newt being her daughter, Hicks being her husband and Bishop being the loving uncle.
However, regardless of how fantastic the story is, it's also how Aliens is built up in terms of its pacing that make it so great. It would be fairly bad if one assumed that the attention given to the events unfolding as well as the mainstream appeal would mean that the world of Aliens and Ellen Ripley would be lacking any kind of development, but much like what Nolan did on Batman Begins or what Joss Whedon did on The Avengers, it takes almost an hour until the main action even gets going and yet, the viewer is never left feeling bored. Like Alien before it, Aliens takes its time setting up its surroundings as well as its characters. It doesn't rely on hitting the viewer over the head with explaining Ripley's backstory to us as the movie does a wonderful job showing us all the events that have taken place since the first film. Unlike a director like Roland Emmerich, James Cameron actually takes the time to build up and develop the cast of characters. Sure, the Marines may come across to some as generic but at the very least they feel like actual characters with a part to play in the movie rather just be irritating comic relief or just there to be used as cannon fodder for the plot's convenience unlike a movie such as The Patriot. The amount of detail and thought that went into creating the characters as well as building the world of the film is nothing short of astonishing and pays off handsomely by the time the final action set-piece rears its head. That is a testament to the airtight screenplay that Cameron wrote himself as well as throughout the film, Cameron arranges the scenarios that the characters find themselves in and the outcomes of those situations so beautifully, bringing in ideas like the damaged nuclear reactor and the motion trackers in intelligent ways long before they can give the viewer any sort of exciting finale.
All this may feel like a standard storytelling approach that could apply to any movie, but I personally believe very few directors can pull this off as well as James Cameron can. Hell, it's one of the main reason why even casual moviegoers are able to be engrossed by Cameron's films so easily even more so than a Spielberg or a J.J. Abrams movie. It's his gift for incredible storytelling and quality filmmaking that have made films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day and True Lies connect with audiences and critics as well as earn high amounts of money. It's also because much like the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films, all of Cameron's films are completely approachable to a vast majority of people and demographics which again shows how gifted James Cameron is in all of those departments even if some of his films don't always have the amount of quality and passion behind them. In my personal opinion, Aliens is everything Avatar tried to be but failed at being. One of the best things about the film series is that each of the movies has it's own definite visual style while having a different director working on each movie. While Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection aren't held in high standards when it comes to the franchise, one can't disagree that all four movies have a quintessential visual style that compliments the director behind the camera even if the final film isn't up to par with what the first two movies are. Much like the beasts themselves, the films are flexible and sensible as well as being able to superbly imitating Fincher's or Scott's styles behind and in front of the camera.
In the case of themes and messages, Aliens delivers a surprisingly complex moral on commercial greed and corruption, something Cameron would explore again in Avatar even though I personally feel that Aliens has a better handle on its messages more so than Cameron's later film does and doesn't rely on the standard "white guy falls in love with a women from another culture and becomes part of that culture all while his fellow men wage war on the tribe." troupe that both Avatar and Dances with Wolves