Yeah, baby

Rating: 10/10 (21 May 1999)

The sequel to Ridley Scott's successful ALIEN (1979) is a nonstop, high-tech, souped-up war movie - it does for action sci-fi thrillers what the original did for horror-flicks: namely, reinvent and soup up the genre.
This is James Cameron at his very best: wonderfully suspenseful action sequences with our spunky, likable heroes (led by a female - A Cameron staple) taking on a villain that is literally out of this world.
Cameron's villains have included relentless terminators and unstoppable icebergs, but the aliens he creates are something else. Killing machines par excellence, vicious and unremorseful.
Sigourney Weaver returns as Ellen Ripley in an oscar-nominated performance; Ripley is perhaps the most convincing, exciting action heroine anywhere in filmdom.
The rest of the good guys are a squad of hardbitten, foul-mouthed marines, tough and resourceful but fraught with human frailties in a crisis just like any of us. And that's where the fun begins.