There are many reasons Aliens is an important film. It confirmed James Cameron’s status as a blockbuster talent after he had directed The Terminator and cowrote Rambo: First Blood Part II. (“The action is mine,” he told the New York Times, “the politics is Stallone’s.”) It turned Sigourney Weaver into a feminist hero. But what makes it a great and eminently rewatchable movie is that it deftly combines horror, action, and science fiction, showcases jaw-dropping practical effects, and weaves in themes of corporate greed, militarism, and motherhood without being preachy or pretentious. In a decade when it was fun to mock sequels, Aliens reminded filmgoers why the risk was worth it.
Cameron’s film picks up 57 years after the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), in which nearly the entire crew of a space freighter belonging to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation was slaughtered by a terrifying creature they had unwittingly brought on board. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) manages to slay the alien and, as one does after surviving such encounters, enters a cryogenic sleep chamber with a cat. When Aliens begins, she is discovered and taken to a Weyland-Yutani space station to recover—and answer questions about what happened aboard her ship.
Ripley’s guide at the station is a slick executive named Burke, played to sleazy perfection by Paul Reiser. Everyone there wears suits with popped collars, an unsettling combination of preppy snobbishness and corporate conformity that bodes poorly for Ripley’s meeting with company officials. Like when Chunk calls the police in The Goonies, nobody believes her story about a creature that gestates within a human host and has concentrated acid for blood, and they blame her for the loss of the valuable company property.
Yet the company is also intrigued. It has established colonies on the planet where Ripley and her crew found the alien, so it sends colonists to check the spaceship she had mentioned. The special edition of the film, released in 1991, includes a glimpse of this colony, which comprises dozens of families and a kid riding a Big Wheel. Nothing says interplanetary exploration in the distant future like low-riding plastic tricycles with hand brakes. It also shows the first colonist encounter with the deadly parasite, which looks like a cross between a scorpion and the eight-fingered hand of a giant.
When the colony goes dark, Burke recruits Ripley to join a discovery expedition led by a group of supposedly unstoppable Colonial Marines. You can tell he’s not trustworthy because his collar is still popped, and he calls her “kiddo.” The Marines are well-armed, confident, and crude. Also, funny. Private Hudson (Bill Paxton) asks the butch Private Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), “Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” “No,” she replies, “Have you?” Searching the colonial outpost with Ripley, they find signs of a battle but no survivors except for a young girl (Carrie Henn) cowering in the ventilation system. She calls herself Newt and Ripley treats her like a daughter.
Like its predecessor, Aliens is a masterfully suspenseful slow-burn that builds to dramatic moments of gruesome violence. What set it apart are Cameron’s more elaborate special effects and action scenes. The first such scene occurs when the Marines explore a fusion-powered processing plant and find themselves in a nest of alien cocoons guarded by adult aliens (called xenomorphs). The inexperienced commander panics, the sergeant and others are killed, and Hudson is hilariously confused. Cameron amps up the sense of chaos by showing much of the scene through the Marines’ helmet cams. Ripley (like Sarah Connor in The Terminator) must take charge. The only other characters who are much use at all are Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) and an android (Lance Henriksen), and that’s because they’re smart enough to do what Ripley says.
Back in the main facility, the survivors prepare for an alien invasion. The buildup to the second attack is also gripping: The crew sets up barricades and armed posts; the ever-opportunistic Burke plots to smuggle an embryo off the planet to develop into a bioweapon; and they all wonder: If the parasites hatch from eggs, who lays the eggs? They’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, aliens break through the defenses and kill beloved and despised characters alike. Ripley and others escape, but she must return to the alien hive to rescue Newt—all before a reactor meltdown leads to a thermonuclear explosion. Don’t you just hate Mondays?
Ripley’s rescue of Newt leads to a remarkable crescendo when the mother and daughter figures stumble into the lair of the enormous alien queen. This scene is the apex of Cameron’s practical effects. As clunky and stiff as these aliens are, they are more frightening and convincing than the slick CGI of later versions. The alien hive is gooey, gloppy, and gross. The queen’s ovipositor is one of the most repulsive things in cinema. Still, the scene’s best moment is subtle. The queen and Ripley recognize that they both want the survival of their children, so they seem to intuitively make a pact: Ripley won’t torch the eggs, the queen will call off the xenomorphs. Peace in our time!—until Ripley notices an egg opening. Knowing the parasite that emerges will attack, she makes a face as if to say, “Are you serious? Deal’s off” and proceeds to do her best impression of Rambo in a POW camp. This action-hero side of Ripley is bolstered in the final you didn’t really think it was over did you? showdown between the big mamas, when Ripley delivers the kind of one-liner required of all ’80s action stars.
Weaver earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, though surely Pauline Kael was wrong to claim that “without her it’s a B picture.” The relationship between Ripley and Biehn’s Hicks is compelling, even if Biehn himself is vanilla. Reiser’s corporate sleaziness is matched perhaps only by Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner) in Die Hard. But Paxton’s performance is my favorite. He’s not only the most quotable character (“Game over man, game over!”), but his transformation from arrogant warrior-bro to doomsaying downer is both comical and alarming.
The film’s critique of the military isn’t subtle. While making the film, Cameron described it as being “about a group of United States marines 200 years in the future” and that it “works on one level as an allegory for Vietnam,” as Avatar would be an allegory of the Iraq war. And, as in the original, the company is willing to endanger its employees and humanity itself to profit from the aliens. This inspires overindulgent Marxist interpretations like, “Capitalism is the soulless parasite that keeps coming back, again and again, its appetite for violence and power never stinting, its thirst for new prey never slaked.”
The film is reasonably understood in feminist terms, as Ripley proves herself a more capable fighter and survivor than her male peers. But Aliens is also about Ripley’s identity as a mother. One reason the special edition is superior to the theatrical release is it reveals Ripley had a daughter who died two years before the movie’s events. This adds layers to her connection to Newt. Ripley is a childless cat lady when Aliens begins; by the end, she’s a mother again.
Aliens vindicates the urge for sequels. Alien 3, which begins by cheating Ripley of her triumph, is another story. But you’ll have to wait six years for that retro-review.
Editor’s note: This retrospective review is one in a series celebrating 1986, arguably the greatest year in movies—inarguably if you’re Gen X.
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).
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