Aliens (1986) Review

ALIENS (1986)
Director: James Cameron

Writers: James Cameron, David Giler, and Walter Hill

Producers: Gordon Carroll, David Giler, Walter Hill, and Gale Anne Hurd

Editor: Ray Lovejoy

Music: James Horner

Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn, Paul Reiser, and Lance Henriksen

Runtime: 2 hours 17 minutes

Rating: R ("monster violence" and language)

Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Horror

Release Date: July 18, 1986

Before Watching the Movie: This is a sequel to Alien, but it's not totally essential to see it before seeing Aliens. All you really need to know is that Ripley (Sigourney Weaver's character) was on a ship and her entire crew was killed by an alien and she put herself to hyper sleep at the end after blowing up the ship and jettisoning the alien into space.

Intro: My friends and I gathered together for a movie night about a week ago, and decided we would watch Back to the Future on Blu-Ray, since my friend had brought it. After waiting 20 minutes for the stupid Blu-Ray player to load the disk and then once it did load, somehow making the disc menu, along with all the buttons, disappear, we gave up and decided to watch Aliens instead.  While Alien is a good movie and regarded as a classic by many, Aliens, its sequel, actually manages to be better through great directing by James Cameron and lots of action, suspense, and unpredictability.

Plot: Ellen Ripley (Weaver) has been put in cryogenic sleep since the end of Alien, where she was on a cargo ship that was terrorized by an alien they picked up as part of a covert operation. She is the only survivor, and she is found in the capsule floating in space by her company 57 years later. Back at corporation headquarters on earth, she frantically tries to explain the danger of these aliens to everyone while she finds out terraformers have started colonizing the same planet her ship found the alien on. When contact is lost with the planet, she agrees to go along with a group of marines to the planet to wipe out the aliens. While there, they find a young girl named Newt (She is the little girl Ripley is holding in the poster. Also see picture below) who is the lone survivor of the entire colony and who Ripley adopts. Though the marines are cocky about the mission to begin, they soon find out that Ripley is right and that exterminating the aliens won't be as easy as they thought.

My artistic (As in, I know how to use Photoshop)
rendition of Ripley and Newt. No, that isn't
what Newt looks like in the movie, thank God.

Things people may find “objectionable”: There is a good deal of violence in the movie, but not as much gore as you'd expect. There are also a few uses of the f-word, but it's not excessive.

Ratings:

     -Directing/Cinematography: 10/10. James Cameron, as always, does a great job with the directing, and the visuals don't disappoint.

     -Acting: 9/10. Good performances by pretty much everyone. Sigourney Weaver is great as always in the role she's known for.

     -Writing: 8/10.

          -Story: 8/10. Solid story with no obvious plot holes. It got a little cliché and over-the-top at times, but not so much that it ruined the movie at all. Also, the story had a nice degree of unpredictability to it, as I didn't know how the characters would escape or which ones would escape (besides Ripley, of course).

          -Script: 8/10. Not a bad script at all, though some of the lines for one of the marine characters (I can't remember his name) were a little cheesy, as the only adjectives he  seemed to know were "big/bad-ass" and "huge." Also, he ended pretty much all of his lines with the word "man." A majority of his lines sounded a lot like, "That was a big-ass alien, man!!"

     -Special Effects: 8/10. By 1980s standards- incredible. Today, some of it kind of looks cheesy, but in watching it, you need to keep in mind how good the effects are for the mid-80s. People will likely be saying the same things about Avatar (another James Cameron movie) in 20 or 30 years.

     -Music/Score: 8/10. Solid score that fit the movie pretty well.

     -Power/Emotion: 8/10. The movie makes you concerned about at least Ripley and Newt, if not anyone else. This is one area I thought the movie was definitely better than its predecessor, since I found it hard to care to deeply about any of the characters except for Ripley, since it was fairly clear they were all going to die.

     -Adrenaline: 10/10. As an action movie, Aliens succeeds in keeping you thrilled pretty much the whole way through, even though it takes a little while to get started. This similar pattern of a slow beginning that leads into an exciting and suspenseful rest of the movie is followed in both Alien and Prometheus, which are parts of the same franchise.

     -Mind-Bendingness: 7/10. The movie features a some cool concepts, such as the terraformers and a couple other spoiler-related things. However, blowing your mind is not as much of an emphasis as it is in Prometheus or Avatar.

     -Humor: 3/10. Not the point of the movie, but there were a couple funny moments that were worked in.

     -Best Credit: Barbara Coles as "Cocooned Woman."

     -Final Score: Aliens was a great movie and to me it was better than Alien, as it's well-rounded and thrilling. I'd recommend this to anyone who like sci-fi and anyone who has seen Alien, since it is a continuation of the story, and is close to Alien in terms of quality at worst.

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