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I don't think I even can open this with a quote like I've been doing. Every single line of Aliens has been so endlessly repeated and mutated that they're all just memes now. Any profoundity they might have had has been bleached dry after forty years of online bullshit. The obsession around Aliens is unique amongst every movie we will cover. There are whole movies, entire films, that rip this one off practically scene for scene, just replacing the xenomorphs with dinosaurs (Carnosaur 2) or tentacle monsters (Deep Rising) or giant spiders (Spiders 2). Not to diminish any of those films, I happen to like Deep Rising better than Aliens. Alien create a its own subgenre in 1979, uniquely amongst film genres, it's sequel basically did the same. Every creature feature to star a group of smart-talking soldiers owes something to Aliens, even Predator. There's entire archetypes of characters in genre stories whose origin can traced right back here: the Vasquez, the Hudson, even Ripley as we know her truly starts in Aliens. Every movie full of nonsense military technobabble which you can just make up on the fly ("I want a a clean Triple Delta formation, make sure Oscar Yee-Haw-76 is covered on the flanks!") comes back right here.
There is an enormous shift in tone from Alien to Aliens, right down to the inspiration. James Cameron was so taken with Robert A. Heinlein's book Starship Troopers, he made much of the cast read it. Starship Troopers would get its own adaptation a decade later from Paul Verhoeven, one that wisely chose to satirize the material versus playing the militarism straight. (And was depressingly accurate with the course 21th century America would go.) Cameron is mostly borrowing Heinlein for aesthetics, he does not believe in a Roman Republic military-citizen society either. We wants the cool mechs, the drop ships, and the waves and waves of bug aliens for his version of the Roughnecks to tango with.
Until now, these alien invasion movies have been reactions to WWII. Aliens is a reaction to the next generation's conflict: Vietnam. The Colonial Marines, these horny, undisciplined, and woefully unprepared grunts would not be too out of place in Kubrick's Fullmetal Jacket, releasing only a year later. There's more sexual harassment in the dialog, fewer slurs. Cut all out all the SciFi and Aliens is about marines on a search and destroy mission for Victor Charlie that goes horrendously wrong. The jungle is now the dark metal corridors of a space colony filled with the goo of a xenomorph nests. The point is you're always open to ambush. The military has awesome technology that Cameron goes to great lengths to show off, but all this tech in the hands of frat boys and an officer, Lt. Gorman (William Hope) who is an empty uniform. If anything the gizmos and gadgets get in the way, since Gorman cannot follow the action using his video feed, and his confusing radio messages only add to the panic. The mission is to make a galaxy safe for corrupt corporations - and nobody is pretending otherwise. There's no pride, there's little morale, the moment their mechanisms are insufficient to the task, that they lose their air support, the marines collapse.
In contrast to all this ultimately toothless machismo, we have Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who Cameron transforms into the ur-example of the female action star. In this movie she's a predecessor for Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, the Mama Bear protecting her cubs. The theatrical cut actually limits the theme a bit. We open with Ripley (and the kitty Jonesy) having drifted through space for 57 years after the events of the first film. There are deleted scenes focusing more on Ripley's horror that she's lost so much time, including a chance to live with her daughter. But she a surrogate daughter out in space. That's Newt (Carrie Henn), the only survivor of planet LV-146, the abandoned scary world of the first film, and the place that the Company very foolishly chose to colonize.
Even the xenomorphs have been recast in a more feminine, more organic light. We never really knew much about the alien in that first film. There's a whole sequence where Ripley finds a nest, discovering that the creature kept her crew alive, transforming them into eggs - this is all cut making room for the new concept. In Aliens the creature that so scared us in the first film was just part of an entire hive of insect-like creatures, hundreds of soldiers protecting a massive queen. To make them more insectoid, Aliens redesigns the xenomorphs, so the smooth head is now ridged, losing that machine-aspect. H.R. Geiger was not invited back, by the way, the Alien Queen is all Cameron. And of course, we have to celebrate the Queen as a masterpiece of puppetry and design. I had of toy her growing up, she's really damn cool.
Cameron stages things so have two mother figures at war, Ripley protecting Newt, the Queen protecting her eggs. This is why "Stay away from her, YOU BITCH!" is not just an Eighties action catch-phrase, but like a statement of the entire theme of Aliens. Ripley imagines that going out with the marines might fix her PTSD, I do not recommend this course of action for anybody in real life. And she does find an answer to her problems by basically adopting Newt, who also is terrified of her nightmares. Textually the movie ends with them both drifting off to sleep, imagining good dreams. Cameron is not subtle here. That is not his thing. His thing is big fuck-off warships, Batmobile-looking ATV props, and an awesome power loader suit. Even if you don't care about parenthood, you can just nerd-out at the technology.
And as for happy endings... don't worry about Alien³ just yet, we'll get there. That is not this movie.
We need to talk about the other villain of this franchise, the Company. I think the Company was scarier in Alien when we could not see them, they were just a faceless distant terror of capitalism. Now they have a name "Weyland-Yutani", tossing just a dash of Eighties Japanophobia in there. Now we meet them up close, and maybe it is true to life that they're not some brilliant calculating computer. They just suck. Their representation is a little shit of a man, Burke (Paul Reiser), unmistakably an Eighties business cretin in that skinny red tie. He's cowardly, double-dealing, and shoot small. In all the other films the Company is this calculating monolith, here it seems they colonized LV-146 without even remembering its importance. Burke's plan to smuggle a couple xenomorphs comes off like he's trying to get cocaine past the border up his colon. It's small-time, petty shit. Extremely human failings.
Meanwhile, Aliens rehabilitates the android - sorry, "artificial person". They do some tension with Bishop (Lance Henrickson) maybe turning on Ripley, but he never does. There is no evil computer, the mechanization is not the problem, is it the weasels operating them. Of course, James Cameron would be a booster of technology, his entire career has been about pushing effects and filmmaking gizmos. He's all in on the AI fad right now. The warmaking machinery is not at fault. With all the gear the Colonial Marines had and if anybody had bothered to listen to Ripley's reports, LV-146 should have been easy rollover of mindless beasts. Ripley on her own demolishes the alien nest, since she is the only soldier with anything to fight for.
Aliens is great, of course, I will never doubt that. But I will never believe that it is a better movie than Alien. Not for lack of trying, Cameron did everything he could to emulate the original Alien just bigger. What is the final mech fight but the surprise final jump scare of the xenomorph on the escape pod, made into a whole fight sequence? There's a bigger alien, there's a bigger kaboom, there's more effects, there's more action, there's more comedy. And yet, there's a mood lost. There was a grim fatalism of the working class left to die by their bosses in Ridley Scott's film. Cameron replaces it with big heroics and the family unit bringing us all back together, which is fine, it's nice. It is a matter of preference ultimately. Even in a broken universe, maybe family can be save you. I can't say Aliens is doing anything wrong. But it is a lot more crowd-pleasing and a lot simpler.
Even the franchise had to admit that things were not so easy. Because... man... strap yourself in.
Next time! Plural aliens? What's next? Exponential aliens? Uhh... yeah, cubic filmmaking in Alien³.
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