Cameronius Explodius McMonius

NOTE: I watched the Special Edition of the film, what the creators believe to be the true version of it, so there may be things I talk about in this review that aren't featured in the original cut.

 

Aliens was released in 1986 and was directed by James Cameron. The movie follows on from the events of 1979's Alien where the heroine Ellen Ripley wakes up from cryogenic sleep many years in the future and tries to explain her alien encounter story. When contact is lost from the now-colonized origin planet of the aliens, Ripley agrees to go with the marines to overcome her fears.

 

This film did indeed surprise me. I definitely was expecting it to be great but when I finished it I was quite surprised to believe that I actually liked this one more than the first which was something I wasn't expecting. This is one of the rare instances where the sequel is nearly as good as/as good as/better than its predecessor and the amount of effort put into the film was impressive. This could've easily been a cash-grab film but the amount of effort put in shows how much respect James Cameron had for the source material and also how much the actors cared about it and wanted to make a worthy sequel and their enthusiasm for the project definitely added up to it being an amazing film along with all the other great things about it.

 

Something I love about this film is that it is very different to the first and offers a completely new experience rather than just revisiting plot elements of the original again. As well as being refreshingly different, it expanded on knowledge we learnt in the first much more too.

 

Ripley's character was developed much more in this film and her inner struggles were shown too which made for a more complex and realistic character. For those of you who don't know, the Special Edition of this film is the original cut as the one that ended up in cinemas was a trimmed down version as people weren't expected to sit through 2 and a half hours. One of the parts cut from the cinema release was a background about Ripley's daughter who she obviously didn't spend much time with due to her cryogenic sleep and her sadness over this event added much more to her character and also something else I'll get onto in a minute.

 

I thought that Ripley's relationship with the young girl Newt was great and had much more of an impact in the Special Edition; as I mentioned a minute ago, in the Special Edition we find out about Ripley's sadness of not being able to see her daughter which makes her basically treat Newt like the daughter she wished she still had which added much more of an emotional connection to it and I'm surprised that the daughter sub-plot was originally cut.

 

All of the side-characters each added something to the story and their chemistry with each other made them feel like real people too. Their characters were well-written just like Ripley's crew in the original and you felt a sense of danger when they were in sticky situations.

 

Something the movie did very well was keeping the tense atmosphere of the original while adding much more to it like great action and great sets. The practical effects are fantastic, especially for the time. The quality of them help capture a sense of realism to it too and really makes it feel like these characters are somewhere that actually exists.

 

Overall, I thought this was an amazing film and I have nothing but praise for it. My basic overview of the film is that it incorporates many similar elements to the original, expanding them to a much bigger spectacle while adding much more too and this is why I prefer it to the original. As I said earlier, these two films both offer different experiences, this one being an action film and the first being a thriller. It probably depends which genre you prefer to determine which movie you prefer but either way I would still highly recommend this film.

 

8.7/10