One of the best sequels in history!

Rating: 10/10 (4 November 2002)

To achieve greatness, let alone relevance, a sequel has to innovate. Think of the very best and you will find they build unexpectedly on existing characters and deepen old themes while exploring new territory. The Godfather II does that, Empire Strikes Back certainly does that, and Aliens undoubtedly succeeds as well.
Fresh of the first Terminator, a young writer-director James Cameron had a broad choice of follow-up projects. It says a lot about the influence and staying power of Ridley Scott's original nightmare that he chose to explore this universe. The stakes are very different, with first opus survivor Ripley (Weaver, Oscar nominated this time around and with reason) is intercepted after a long drift through space and learns that not only was the planet where she encountered the original alien later colonized, said colony has recently gone completely silent. The ominous "company" decides to send a platoon of space marines to investigate, preferably with a corporate stooge and Ripley as an adviser along with them.
You'd be forgiven for thinking "here we go again" and expecting little in the way of novelty, but Cameron wisely innovates with the tone, knowing full well you can't put the first film's genie back in the bottle. What we have then is not a slasher film in space, but a rescue mission film than deteriorates into a fight for survival. In typical Cameron-fashion, the bad-ass military hardware is glorified at first, before proving cruelly insufficient in the face of an implacable enemy, not just one alien, but overwhelming numbers, undaunted by modern firepower: the best of horror with echoes of the Vietnam War.
If Alien is the film that casts a long shadow over the genre, artistically speaking, Aliens is the one people remember for pure visceral thrills, and it is to this second outing that we owe the actual Alien phenomenon, encompassing video games, comics, toys and yet more sequels. In unleashing a strong director with his own voice it set a unique and sadly rarely imitated precedent of making films within a series wildly different from each other, with the courage to experiment with varied tones, looks and ideas in the hands of directors whose voices were quite unique (Scott and Cameron first, followed by Fincher and Jeunet). It is that, not just the monster, that makes it special, and this ingredient we owe to Cameron's caring treatment of the burgeoning saga. Speaking of monsters, we also owe it an evolving of the monster's life-cycle and, idiot savant that he is, Cameron's silliest idea - replacing the mystery of the alien's biology with a bee-hive structure and, in essence, adding the equivalent of a video game boss level to his film in the form of the queen - turns out to be a masterstroke.
This film deserves its status as the most popular in the franchise and is all the validation you need for Cameron's counter to the original Alien's premise. Yes, sometimes less is more. But in this case, as the man said, more clearly was more!