Could Hardly Be Improved.

Rating: 9/10 (3 May 2008)

Rarely does a sequel do greater justice to an idea than the original. But 'Aliens' manages it in spades.
The music and sound score alone are absolutely mesmerising. If you haven't got a good system, you're missing-out big time. Here's a simple thing; just listen to the 3 latches locking into place when Ripley's 'lifeboat' is recovered by the deep-space explorer. You can't see them, but you can hear them, ker-k-link, each in succession, right around your sound stage. The noise tells you that they haven't just latched, but latched and locked. Listen with you eyes shut, if you don't believe me. It's that meticulous attention to detail both aural and visual that makes this movie a true work of art. There really is no need for the sounds to be there at all. But they are, and they convey complete fidelity to a scene that lasts just seconds.
Here's another. When the marines are crossing the rain-swept depot to the airlock, its windy and wild. When they get inside, the ambiance completely changes. it's still noisy, the wind continues, faint but audible and there is lots of dripping water, but now there's also a strange, claustrophobic intimacy, and I'm quite at a loss as to how that has been accomplished. Yet the mood-change is hair-raisingly palpable.
These set pieces are completely seamless throughout the movie. Strange, gloomy, suggestive, broken; the ghost of dead technology appears to haunt them as much as any alien demons. A thin, whining, electronic note does the work of tense music, it suits the circumstances perfectly, as well as providing a foil to any ambient sounds that the engineers and director thought appropriate.
The sound and sets earned it two well-deserved Oscars.
Tension builds and builds again. It's a fairly well-worn formula of gradual attrition. Ripley's valliant rescue of the ambushed and trapped space-marines must have any viewer at the edge of their seat. And on it goes, tighter and tighter, until finally we are squeezing through air-ducts.
Acting is pretty formulaic but entirely believable. People we've quickly grown to like get killed suddenly and nastily, smug Apone, and macho Drake. The alien queen brings the movie to a perfect climax. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there was absolutely no CGI in this. Proof enough that it isn't actually needed, and is never as good as the real McCoy.
And the script, by the way, is excellent.
As a comment upon sexuality and survival it is a very telling one. The female is deadlier than the male. It draws from a simple Darwinian premise, that she makes a greater investment in the production of the young, and will therefore go to more determined and ruthless lengths to ensure their survival. She knows her genes are in the offspring: momma's baby, poppa's maybe. Males are simply expendable seed-carriers of convenience.
I've docked a point for what strikes me as technological incongruity. The continued use of old-fashioned 'querty' keyboards for example, and CRT/VDU. The latter have all but gone to the scrap-heap now, never mind hundreds of years hence. Check-out the roll-up screens in 'Red Planet'; now that's more like it. Also, a sophisticated android like 'Bishop' surely suggests the probability of 'mechanised' marines. Or at least, a self-propelled remote for entering the alien hive. Bomb disposal squads already have those today. Bishop himself should have been able to simply plug-in and interface with the uplink. Or even communicate by WiFi. Though these things would compromise drama, their absence compromises its science-fiction credentials. And I am certainly no purist.
But, golly-gosh! - nit-picking aside; this is an absolute crackerjack of entertainment.
I believe it has only one other challenger for the crown of greatest sci-fi horror movie - Carpenter's 'The Thing'.
You split 'em; I can't.
It's 22 and 26 years since their creation, and no-one has managed to raise the bar. What does that tell you?