Ridley Scott's Directing Was Missed

Rating: 3/10 (21 February 2011)

Right off the top the movie made me shake my head with one of those "it's just too convenient" moments. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) - the only survivor from the first movie - is finally rescued by a salvage ship after being in "hyper-sleep" for 57 years. OK. She tries to brief the company that sent her and her team on the first mission on the dangerous aliens they encountered, but no one will believe her story. Why not? Because there have been human colonists on the planet now for over 20 years and there hasn't been a single report of a problem. Well, we know where this is headed, don't we. Now that Ripley's back all of a sudden contact with the colony is lost, which allows the company to send Ripley back to the planet to do battle with the aliens all over again. Apparently they were waiting for her to be found!
Setting aside that moment of ultra-convenience, this movie is weaker than the original in the series. James Cameron took over the directing duties in this from Ridley Scott, and Scott's touch was missed. What made the first movie very effective was the shadowy nature of the aliens. Scott never really gave us a good look at them. They were shadowy figures which made the story quite suspenseful. Cameron dispenses with that idea completely. The aliens are front and centre once the team reaches the planet, and somehow that makes this movie less frightening than its original. Cameron (who also co-wrote the screenplay) also turns this into a pretty standard humans vs. aliens shoot out with lots of weapons and lots of explosions, etc. The characters in this seemed more one dimensional than those in the original. So you have an out of control Marine (Bill Paxton), an in control Marine (William Hope) and the requisite bad guy representing the company (Paul Reiser). Then of course there's Ripley who, while being far more aggressive here than in the original, also gets to explore her maternal side as she becomes a surrogate mother figure to Newt (Carrie Henn) - a little girl who's apparently the only survivor among the colonists. The scene in which Ripley holds the little girl tight as the alien is approaching and says to her "close your eyes, baby" is actually a virtual reshoot of a scene in which a mother comforts her daughter as a monster approaches them in a 1957 movie called "The Monster Who Challenged The World." And - wow - can Newt ever scream when scary things happen!
No. I wasn't especially impressed with this movie, although I did get a laugh near the end, when Ripley appeared to do battle with the aliens inhabiting that big robot-like suit swinging away at the creatures without mercy, and I suddenly realized that - hey - that's where James Cameron got the idea for the same kind of suits the Marines used in "Avatar!"