The best movie of the decade

Rating: 10/10 (24 January 2004)

I have a dirty little secret. It's that I've never been an enormous fan of Ridley Scott's 1979 original. It's a classic, yes. It's a very good film, yes. It deserved more success than it received, yes. But the best thing it did was to pave the way for James Cameron's Aliens. It's here that the real core of the Alien franchise lies.
The basic premise is hardly new. A plot summary would essentially read: "space soldiers battle killer aliens on a far away planet." It's simply that Cameron, in the same way he did with Terminator before this, has taken a lot of tired old sci-fi conventions and reinvested some energy and vitality in them. He also keeps the pace ferociously fast, not allowing the movie time to bog down. A case in point is the aliens' double jaw. In the first, Scott meant it to be show-stopping. Here, Cameron simply shows it as just another interesting aspect of action scenes already packed with different elements. It works much better that way.
One of the trademarks of Cameron's films is that he never assumes that just because there's lots of action, we can be fobbed off with cardboard characters. The actors here are given real roles to play, and their characters create genuine sympathy. It's one of the only movies like this I've ever seen where we actually hope the humans live out the movie, rather than rooting for the aliens to tear them apart (like Starship Troopers).
Aliens is a technical masterpiece in every way possible, and a strong dramatic piece too. Nobody who claims to enjoy movies can really justify not having seen it.