Aliens

Ripley returns, only this time there’s a few more parasites, a lot more alien destruction and a little pinch of the unbelievable. Ridley Scott hands the baton over to James Cameron and thankfully, for the sake of the franchise, he doesn’t drop it into that zone called ‘straight to DVD release’. Instead, Cameron reinstates Weaver in her pro-feminist role and she even gets a little female sidekick – Newt. Newt is neither amphibious nor slimy, though she is a little dirty and feral at first. But what can you expect from a kid whose forced to live alone after the horrific death of her parents? Harry Potter lives in a cupboard under the stairs; if you’re an orphan in cinema, this is how you’ll end up. Better start watching the Ray Mears back catalogue now. 

Aliens is set 57 years after the finale of the first film. In this time computers have failed to become touch screen and Sigourney’s choice in underwear hasn’t become any fancier. It’s as if they’re still living in the 80s. Ripley learns that her daughter back on Earth has passed away. Perhaps she should search for Marty Mcfly in the yellow pages – he seems to deal fairly chirpily with the aging of family members. 

And then the inevitable happens. Ripley ends up on a marine mission in search of not one alien, but many. Suddenly the title of this film isn’t so indecipherable. A couple of marines who make the trip, don’t make it past the first action sequence. The aliens pack them up efficiently and store them for later. If the aliens ever get their claws on Tupperware, we’re screwed. Let’s hope a salesman doesn’t meander that way anytime soon. Imagine if they were visited by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Aliens refusing to transfuse their acid blood and eating Christmas trees with their little mouths. 

Once more it falls to Ripley to save the day. There’s no talk of peace negotiations with the enemy, so Ripley arms herself to the teeth and dives back into a swimming pool of alien madness. She hasn’t banked on one thing. The big alien has mastered the art of elevator-control. It sees her enter her lift, it waits casually until she thinks she’s on the brink of escape, then it saunters over to the second lift and enjoys a bit of the mandatory country tunes you find in all elevators. It probably shazamed the track on its Iphone and saved that for later too. They are advanced beings after all and you don’t get much more advanced than app software. 

Aliens is as viciously exciting as its older sister, only multiplied by the number of aliens that get their milky insides dissipated everywhere. The only oversight is the omission of Jones the cat, minus his little skit in the opener. The feline must be cursing his agent for bagging him such peripheral roles. He’d been hailed as the next Arnie. You’d think Cameron would have taken to him. 

IMDb 250 position: 58

Possible Position in my 250: 

34. How can lots of Aliens been worse than one? If there’d been twenty E.Ts, I’d have cried twenty times more