It's not all about action.

Rating: 10/10 (29 July 2008)

Cameron's Aliens is a completely different beast to Ridey Scott's original film. Those who tout Cameron's sequel as a better film are missing the point. From a gung-ho, blockbuster point of view, yes, Cameron's film is audacious, thrilling, brilliant.
The original film was a sublimely intellectual exploration into the abject horror of psycho-sexual not-human monstrousness. It reached a level of horror and monstrousness that is not, not could be, matched by Cameron's film.
Luckily, he is clever enough to realise this. The point of the original Alien film is that the creature is entirely semblant and lacks definition; culturally as well as thematically. By the time Cameron's sequel was released, the creature became absorbed into popular culture and to present it once again as the unknown would have been a failure. This is why Alien 3 failed. It is a rehash of Alien, and while it contains the obligatory horror film shocks and schlock content, it lacks the terrible subconscious entry into the human body that the alien signifies, and was not successfully picked up until, somewhat surprisingly, Alien Resurrection.
So, Cameron's film is a big, muscular blockbuster, whose contribution to the series is to expand the alien canon through the introduction of the Queen - still one of the greatest screen 'villians' ever - and the theme of motherhood in a very different way to the original film through the character of Newt.
I love this film; its big muscular Marines with their big guns and black humour never outgrow or undermine the subtle horror flourishes of the alien universe, but their camaraderie and arrogance makes their fallibility all the more inevitable. And with the use of the character Carter Burke, we are left thinking, like Ripley, which species is worse.
It's a fantastic sequel, and one of the greatest science fiction action horrors of all time, but it's not better than Alien (and that doesn't mean it's not as good...)!