Aliens

Written and directed by James Cameron, veteran of the Terminator movies who would go on to make The Abyss and Terminator 2 before switching genres to make Titanic, Aliens has an entirely different feel and texture from Alien.

Aliens: Return of Ripley

The sole survivor of Alien, Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (played with panache by Sigourney Weaver) was last seen entering hypersleep for her trip back to inhabited space. Alas for excellent intentions, her escape pod is improperly directed and misses the main space lanes, and drifts for years.

Discovered 57 years later, Ripley is rescued and awakens to find much has changed in her absence.

"Did IQs suddenly drop while I was away?"

Unfortunately, much remains the same, including entrenched bureaucracy and the overwhelming need of business entities to make a buck. In Ripley's long sleep, the planet she barely escaped from has been colonized. The colonists are terraformers and are the first wave of settlers - when they get the planet suitably habitable, they will be followed by others who will build a world. But contact with the colonists has been recently lost and the Company, amoral corporation behind much of the economy, wants Ripley to go back with a team to find out what happened.

Send in the Marines

Ripley is persuaded to join with a party of Colonial Marines who are going to assess the situation, and it is here that the difference between this movie, and its predecessor, becomes clear. Where Alien was creepy-crawly tension and jump-out-at-you boo's, Aliens veers into action-adventure with the 'eighties-style hoo-rah Marines.

Led by a green lieutenant, played by William Hope, the grunts themselves are veterans of a plethora of encounters with 'xenomorphs'. Their its-a-living enthusiam for their mission is one touch that makes this installment one of the franchise's most enjoyable.

A Desolated Colony, a Sole Survivor

The Marines find the colonists' station uninhabited and derelict, clearly having been overrun by hostile ... things. They also find a sole survivor, the small girl who goes by the nickname 'Newt' (played by Carrie Henn). She has survived by creeping through access tunnels too small for the monstrous aliens to follow her, and it is from her that they learn what happened.

Their sensors tell them, however, that many of the colonists are still alive, and they track the signal to a hideous nest, where the living colonists are kept cocooned as a spider would a fly, to serve as hosts for the alien eggs that are hatching.

Maximum Action

Battles ensue, with the massively outnumbered Marines falling (heroically) one by one to the collosal bugs. The situation is hardly helped when it is discovered that Company Representative Burke (played with two-faced sympathy by Paul Reiser) is actually trying to secure an alien to take back with him for the Company's research department.

Soon it is down to Ripley, Newt, the android Bishop (played by Lance Henriksen) and Corporal Hicks (Michael Beihn, who also played soldier of the future Kyle Reese in Cameron's earlier Terminator) to get away. "I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Yet before they can effect their escape, Hicks is wounded and Newt is captured by the Queen Alien. Ripley enters the lair alone, armed to the teeth, to retrieve her, and Bishop snags them from the building's superstructure moments before the self-destruct sequence destroys the colonial facilities.

Just When You Think It's Over

But the alien queen has hitched a ride on the landing craft, and just when Ripley and Newt have finished tucking the wounded Hicks into a hypersleep pod, she emerges to continue the battle. This is the occation for one of the most impressive 'cat fights' in film history, as Ripley dons a mechanical 'loadlifter' (a kind of wearable backhoe) to do hand-to-hand combat. Newt having stirred Ripley's maternal instincts, it's the Battle of the Enraged Mothers. Fortunately Ripley's feminine machismo wins the day, as she blows the queen out the airlock. Ripley's strength of will and buff physique launched a new style in female action adventure heroine.