Aliens have returned in spectacular fashion!

Rating: 10/10 (30 October 2004)

Aliens avoids the all-too common fate of sequels, to live forever in the shadow of their predecessors, and usually for good reason. It is especially common for sequels of enormously successful movies to fall flat, particularly in the horror and science fiction genres (remember The Exorcist II?). The first sequel to Ridley Scott's spectacular 1979 film, which set the standard for science fiction for years to come, is placed into the capable hands of James Cameron, who clearly takes some knowledge from Halloween director John Carpenter. Once this movie gets going, it goes full speed and doesn't let you rest for two and a half hours.
The movie starts off exactly at the same point where the first movie left off. Well, 57 or so years later, but otherwise the same. Ripley has been in deep sleep and drifting aimlessly in space, and was discovered, as one man describes it to her, by dumb luck. She wakes up to a series of significant and inevitable shocks. Her daughter, whom she had promised that she would be home from her mission, the one from the last movie, has grown up and died an old woman. It's a strange scene to see Ripley looking at a picture of her daughter, now decades older than her own mother.
It's not long before Ripley learns that the planet on which they found the strange craft with the alien eggs in it is now inhabited by an entire subculture of families, living on the planet in order to cultivate the atmosphere so that it will be breathable for more people to go live there. Needless to say, she's not entirely impressed with the idea of families living on the planet where the aliens came from, but these people have a lot of money invested in populating that planet, so no one's going to call off the whole project based on the ramblings of some woman who has been floating in space for five decades. And there you have the premise for the movie, already having justified its existence and separated itself from its predecessor enough so that it owns the rest of its own plot. Many good sequels still only tell another story under the same basic plot outline or involving the same characters. In this one, only one character remains from the original story, and the rest of it is simply a continuation of the original story. James Cameron later went on to develop something of a reputation for making good sequels.
Alien fans can rejoice because they made another movie but did not sell out. There's a big risk in successful movies being followed up with a sequel just for the money, you see it all the time  Predator, Texas Chainsaw, Darkman (Durant survived that helicopter crash???) etc. Aliens starts right off knowing that it's not wise to throw in another alien and film it chasing and killing people. The movie starts out with Ripley facing serious consequences for official misconduct for that expensive ship that she destroys. She has to convince the board that she had no other choice at the same time as she has to credibly explain the deaths of her entire crew and convince them that those families living on that planet, LV-426, are in grave danger. Not only are they skeptical of her story, she's a suspect in a criminal investigation.
Suddenly, all contact is lost with LV-426, and Ripley's story begins to take on a little merit. They offer her a clean slate if she'll accompany their military forces to the planet to check out the situation. She agrees as long as they are going there to destroy the alien, not capture and study it. There is an interesting new crew in the movie, except in this case Ripley has to convince them of her reason for being there. She's not combat trained like they are, but she knows what they're up against, and it's not until they learn about that that they begin to realize how important she is to their mission.
My favorite is Bill Paxton's character, Pvt. Hudson, a tough-talking, loudmouth showoff who is reduced to a whining baby, just about wetting himself with fear when the group is confronted with the alien. He was the toughest talker and the loudest mouth going into the mission, but the first to give up hope on himself and the entire crew. This is one of the ways that the story develops unique personalities, people that we can identify, if not identify WITH, just enough to care about what happens to them. And in a movie like Aliens, it's very important that the audience cares what happens to the characters.
When they get to the island, it's not long before they encounter a young girl named Newt, who has survived when the rest of the planet was decimated by the aliens, and doubts the crews ability to fight a growing number of aliens with such a small force, and Ripley takes her under her arm. Ripley becomes the mother that Newt no longer has, and Newt becomes the daughter that Ripley no longer has, and it sets an interesting tone for the rest of the movie. The aliens are trying to protect their offspring, and Ripley is essentially trying to do exactly the same thing.
One of the things that makes the Alien movies so successfully tense is the setting. They are enclosed within a ship in outer space, trapped with a much more powerful creature. If both sides were unarmed, the aliens would do away with the humans in minutes. Cameron uses this setting to its full potential, employing motion sensors to heighten tension and using spaces in the ship, like the space above the ceiling, to allow the aliens to get extremely close to the humans, even while the humans are watching their movement on their monitors and wondering why the monitor shows them in the very room but they can't see them yet.
In another lesson that Cameron seems to have taken from John Carpenter, he keeps the aliens mostly out of sight during the movie, feeling that the less we see them the more menacing they become and remain. He's exactly right about this, too. It maintains a sense of mystery and danger surrounding the aliens that transcends simply their viciousness and obvious physical superiority, and always keeps the viewer straining to see more. But like the crew, we know very little about these creatures other than how deadly they are. Oh, and if you want to see what happens when a director doesn't understand the need to keep the killer in the shadows, watch Halloween II.
This is, unfortunately, the last movie in the quadrilogy before it makes a precipitous creative turn downward with the sub-par second and third sequels, but Alien and Aliens are spectacular enough that they fill the void left by their two predecessors. Two such powerful movies may make it even more difficult to take that the good ones seem to be over, but these two remain landmarks. Also keep your eye out for (among several other Cameron regulars) Jenette Goldstein, a lesser known actress whose impressive versatility becomes clear when comparing her character in Aliens with her character, say, in Titanic!