Aliens Review

Refusing to repeat Ridley Scott is what makes this work. Scott made a haunted house in space, slow and sealed and singular. Cameron makes a war film about a technologically superior force walking into a place it does not understand and being taken apart, and the tonal shift from dread to combat is executed so confidently that the two films now read as complements rather than rivals. The middle hour is a masterclass in escalating pressure, the motion tracker in the ceiling crawl space, the ammunition pulled from the marines before they enter the reactor, the dropship coming down in flames.

Weaver turns Ripley into the genre's defining lead, and her Oscar nomination for a science fiction sequel remains close to unprecedented. The marines are broad types by design and a few of them never become more, Newt functions as much as a plot engine as a child, and the theatrical cut removes the colony material and the scene of Ripley learning her daughter died, which is exactly the material that makes the ending land. Even trimmed, it is close to perfect.