Aliens: 10 Things That Still Hold Up Today | ScreenRant
Ridley Scott’s Alien is the kind of untouchable masterpiece that should never be ruined by sequels. But James Cameron proved that there are exceptions to this rule with 1986’s Aliens, which both satisfies as a follow-up to the first movie and stands as a classic of action cinema in its own right.
Decades after being hailed as one of the greatest sequels ever made, Aliens remains a masterpiece to this day. From Sigourney Weaver’s Oscar-nominated performance as an even more heroic Ellen Ripley to a bunch of edge-of-your-seat jump scares, Cameron's movie continues to thrill and scare modern audiences.
10 Replacing One Xenomorph With A Hive Of Dozens
Like all the best sequels (including Cameron’s own Terminator 2), Aliens significantly raises the stakes from the first movie by expanding the scope of the premise. The first Alien movie was essentially a haunted house movie in space, with the crew of the cargo freighter Nostromo getting picked off one by one by a ravenous xenomorph wandering around their ship.
In Aliens, there are dozens of these xenomorphs on the loose as opposed to the single alien that threatened the heroes of the original movie. The single xenomorph from the first movie was scary enough, but Cameron upped the ante with a festering swarm of otherworldly monsters.
9 Switching Genres To Action
Aliens avoided rehashing the original movie in more ways than just one. An Alien sequel with more than one xenomorph that played as another haunted house movie in space still would’ve felt like a retread of the Ridley Scott classic.
Cameron knew he couldn’t top Scott’s masterful command of terror with another straightforward horror movie, so he switched genres to action. (Not that there isn’t still plenty of horror.) This genre switch kept the tone fresh and resulted in some of the most spectacular action scenes ever put on film, like the dropship crash and the Marines unwittingly walking right into the aliens’ nest at the beginning of the movie.
8 Ripley’s Mother-Daughter Dynamic With Newt
Thematically, Aliens is a movie about motherhood. The cherubic orphan Newt fills the daughter-shaped hole left in Ripley’s heart when she emerges from 57 years in cryosleep and learns that the child she left behind on Earth has since died of old age.
The theme of motherhood ties into the alien queen trying to defend her nest from the Colonial Marines. Both Ripley and the queen are loving moms with the same motivation: protect their children at all costs.
7 The Sheer Terror Of The Facehugger Scene
One of the most terrifying sequences in Aliens sees Ripley and Newt awakening from a nap in a medical lab to find themselves locked in with a pair of facehuggers. Aside from the horrifying scenario, what makes this sequence so relentlessly scary is its masterful sound design: Cameron mostly utilizes eerie silence with the occasional hair-raising blast from James Horner’s score.
Slimy corporate suit Carter Burke released them so he could impregnate them and bring a couple of xenomorphs back to Earth. Ripley makes the poignant point to Burke that the swarm of bloodthirsty aliens surrounding them are more morally upright beings than him.
6 Michael Biehn's Performance As Hicks
One of the fan-favorite supporting performances in Aliens alongside Carrie Henn as Newt and Lance Henriksen as Bishop is Michael Biehn as Dwayne Hicks, a corporal in the Colonial Marines and, more broadly, a fearless gun-toting action hero. Biehn had previously worked with Cameron when he played Kyle Reese in The Terminator and it’s always a treat to see Michael Biehn in full "action hero" mode.
Hicks is the anti-Burke; he’s the one who bursts in to save Ripley and Newt from the facehuggers after the alarm is tripped. Biehn also shares great chemistry with Sigourney Weaver, and the scene where Hicks teaches Ripley how to use an assault rifle is one of the most bizarrely flirtatious moments in the entire franchise.
5 The Jump Scares
While Aliens is primarily an action movie, it still retains the hair-raising horror roots of Ridley Scott’s 1979 original. There are a handful of unforgettable jump scares throughout the sequel that surpasses the frightening moments in Alien.
Scenes like the Marines illuminating a swarm of xenomorphs crawling through the vents overhead and an alien rising up from the water behind Newt and towering over her rank among the most memorable moments in horror movie history. These scenes also proved highly influential as many science fiction films like Starship Troopers and Independence Day have imitated them with diminishing results.
4 Ripley’s Unwavering Heroism
Ellen Ripley had already broken new ground for female action heroes in the original Alien, proving that women could lead action movies by vanquishing the xenomorph from the Nostromo. But Aliens stepped up her heroism even more and turned her into one of the quintessential action heroes like John McClane or Indiana Jones.
All throughout Aliens, Ripley is an unwavering hero that the audience rallies behind as she tries to survive the alien onslaught. When Newt is in danger, she doesn’t hesitate to go straight into the aliens’ hive alone armed with nothing but a giant flamethrower.
3 The Increasing Intensity
The sheer intensity of Aliens was noted as a negative point in some contemporary reviews, but the fact that Cameron maintains tension throughout the entire movie and gradually increases that tension throughout the story is truly impressive.
The movie gets more and more intense as the runtime goes on. Initially, it seems like the survivors will just have to hunker down and wait for salvation. However, once the xenomorphs figure out a way to get to them, the final hour is nonstop exhilarating. From the terrifying facehugger scene to the airshaft sequence with Vasquez and Gorman, each set piece is more thrilling than the last.
2 The Exoskeleton Finale
Any great action movie needs a huge, action-packed climax that tops all the action that came before it, and Aliens has that. The xenomorphs’ queen stows away on the survivors’ transport and then confronts Ripley on the ship.
To put an end to the queen’s reign once and for all, Ripley dons a cargo-loading exosuit, marches up to the queen as it’s threatening Newt, and says, “Get away from her, you b****!!” What follows is a thrilling fight sequence more spectacular than anything in the rest of the movie.
1 Sigourney Weaver’s Oscar-Nominated Performance
Sci-fi movies, action movies, and horror movies tend to be overlooked by the Academy, and Aliens is all three. But Sigourney Weaver’s turn as Ellen Ripley was powerful enough to earn a Best Actress nod. According to Entertainment Weekly, this was the first-ever Best Actress nomination for a science fiction film. It just goes to show how impressive Weaver’s performance was that the Academy snobs would overlook its genre roots.
Weaver brings a fierce commitment to every facet of the character, whether she’s taking Newt under her wing or holding her own opposite the Colonial Marines, or lambasting the corporate suits for betraying her. The only thing wrong with Weaver’s Oscar nomination is that she didn’t win.
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August 17, 2021 at 12:00AM
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posted by Puram arjun @ August 17, 2021
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