From the point when the opening half-hour of exposition ends and the real movie begins, Cameron barely gives viewers a chance to catch their breaths or ease their grips on their armrests as he plunges his characters from one dire situation to the next. This is one of those rare motion pictures that involves the audience so completely in the story that we're as worn out at the end as our on-screen counterparts. For many years, the proposed Alien 2 languished on the back burner, lacking both a viable script and a director. The film's box office success gave Cameron some clout in Hollywood, allowing him to get a hearing when he pitched his version of an Alien sequel. Fox liked what he proposed and the project was greenlighted.
Aliens takes place a half-century after the events in Alien .
She is stripped of her pilot's license and left to cope on her own with life in the future - a future without her daughter, who recently died of old age. Ripley takes the child under her protection, but Newt is unconvinced that a small group of armed soldiers will be able to stop the ever-growing army of aliens. Soon, they are fighting the clock as well as the creatures, as the plant's nuclear reactor starts on a countdown to going critical. If Aliens was no more than a series of suspenseful, effectively executed action sequences, it would still be a superior motion picture - Cameron's grasp of what gives an audience a jolt of adrenaline is that masterful. However, the element that elevates Aliens into the sparsely populated stratosphere of great science fiction movies is character identification.