Don't watch this if you're 10

Rating: 10/10 (22 February 2005)

I did and it scared the bejaysus out of me. It was a defining moment in my life, one which sparked my love affair with the horror / sci fi genre.
Everyone knows the "plot". After the events of Alien in which a alien life form wipes out her crew, Ripley returns with a tooled up team of badass marines. "This time Its War" is the tagline and it doesn't disappoint.
I believe this is a superior film to the original. There is hardly any exposition compared the the very slow build up in Alien. The action comes thick and fast interspersed by tension on a par with Ridley Scott classic. A lot of what makes this film so cool is the visual feast it supplies. The setting of the Colony is a science fiction nightmare, the weapons and vehicles are instant classics which have been aped and copied endlessly since. The cast are simply brilliant. A movie I would compare it to in this sense is Predator. The squad of soldiers are so likable that you genuinely don't want them to get picked off by the alien horde. The fact that you know they will be makes it so morbidly absorbing.
As for the aliens themselves. I believe they've never looked better in the series then they do here. Its just something about the lighting, the way its shot. Not too much is shown but enough is glimpsed to make them the most terrifying screen aliens of all time. This film really took the baton provided by Alien and cemented the standards for the genre.
An absolute gem of a film. There isn't a bad scene in it and its a film I could watch a million times and never get tired off. Hopefully I'll have enough time to do just that.