James Cameron's sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien. The action film that took a haunted-house horror premise and weaponised it.
Fifty-seven years after the events of Alien. Ellen Ripley, the sole survivor of the Nostromo, is found drifting in hypersleep by a salvage crew. The colony established on LV-426 — the planet where the original Nostromo crew encountered the xenomorph — has gone silent. Weyland-Yutani assigns a unit of Colonial Marines to investigate; Ripley is sent as an advisor.
The marines arrive at the colony to find it mostly destroyed and the colonists either dead or harvested as xenomorph hosts. One child, Newt, has survived in the air ducts. The film tracks Ripley, the surviving marines, the android Bishop, and Newt across roughly thirty-six hours of progressive siege. The film closes with the famous Power Loader confrontation: Ripley, strapped into an industrial exoskeleton, fighting the xenomorph queen in the colony's loading bay. 'Get away from her, you bitch.'
Aliens is, by general critical consensus, one of the two or three greatest sequels in mainstream cinema. The film took the haunted-house-in-space premise of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and reworked it as a military-action thriller. The shift in genre is the film's structural argument: the same threat works at multiple scales, but the human response can range from the original film's mercantile science-fiction discovery to this film's all-out combat operation. James Cameron wrote, directed, and produced; the film established him as the dominant action-blockbuster director of the late 1980s and 1990s.
What makes the sequel land is the recognition that the audience already understands the threat. Cameron does not waste time re-introducing the xenomorph. The film opens on Ripley's psychological aftermath, escalates through the marines' arrival, and structures itself around the question of how many of them will survive rather than what the threat is. The pacing is enabled by the audience's prior knowledge of the original — and the film, in turn, deepens what the original was doing by demonstrating that the threat works in multiple registers.
Sigourney Weaver's Ripley was the first major action-film female lead constructed at this scale of competence and seriousness. Aliens treats her not as a love interest, not as a victim, not as a 'final girl' — but as the operational commander of the surviving group, whose judgment is consistently better than the marines' and whose courage is what drives the third act. The Power Loader confrontation is one of the great catharsis scenes of 1980s action cinema.
Weaver was nominated for Best Actress at the 1987 Oscars — a rare nomination for an action-film lead. The performance launched the broader 1980s and 1990s tradition of competent female action protagonists. Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 (also Cameron) extended the template. Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight, Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde — all are descended from Ripley.
Cameron's filmography includes several films that have grossed over a billion dollars. Aliens is on a smaller scale ($85m worldwide on an $18.5m budget). What it shares with the later Cameron blockbusters is the discipline of pacing — every scene either advances the plot, develops a character, or establishes a piece of geography that will be paid off later. There is almost no filler in the 137-minute runtime.
The film's effects work, which won the Visual Effects Oscar, was significantly more ambitious than the previous Alien's. The xenomorph queen — an animatronic puppet operated by 16 puppeteers — is one of the great practical-effects creations of the 1980s. The Power Loader was a partially-functional industrial exoskeleton built for the production; Weaver and a stunt operator wore it in alternating shots.