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Year: 1986 Production: A Brandywine Production / 20th Century-Fox Director: James Cameron Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Paul Reiser, Carrie Henn, William Hope, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, Bill Paxton Screenwriter: James Cameron Based on a story by James Cameron, David Gilder, Walter Hill. Novelization (1986) by Alan Dean Foster 137 minutes, Color
This formidable sequel to Alien is more an action than a horror movie, reminiscent of all those war films and Westerns about beleaguered groups fighting to the end. Ripley (Weaver, in a fine performance), the sole survivor at the end of Alien, is sent off again with a troop of marines to the planet (now colonized) where the original alien was found. The colony has been wiped out by aliens (lots of them this time); the marines, at first skeptical, are also almost wiped out. Ripley saves a small girl (Henn), the sole colonist survivor, and finally confronts the Queen alien. Aliens is conventional in its disapproval of corporate greed; less conventional is its demonstration of the inadequacy of the machismo expressed by all the marines, women and men. A peculiar subtext has to do with the fierce protectiveness of motherhood (Ripley and the little girl, the Queen and her eggs). This is a film unusually sophisticated in its use of sf tropes and is arguably even better than its predecessor. |
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