James Cameron: Aliens (1986)

In Scream 2, a movie that is self-referentially obsessed with the nature of sequels, Timothy Olyphant’s film buff, Mickey, tries to make the case that a sequel can be better than the original, flouting the claim by Jamie Kennedy’s Randy (the film buff in the original Scream) that sequels are by definition derivative. Mickey cites Aliens, then T2, before someone falls back on that sequel safe-haven, The Godfather Part II.

The mention of a James Cameron movie twice in the scene is apt, as sequels play no small part in his oeuvre. After all, Cameron began his career with a sequel, Piranha II (which Aren has reviewed). With the addition of Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, three of Cameron’s first five directorial features are sequels. Cameron has also spent the past decade working simultaneously on multiple sequels to Avatar.

Like oceans, technology, and science fiction, sequels in many ways define Cameron’s career in film. It’s not just that he’s made many sequels. It’s also that Cameron is an artist, in my view, notable less for his original concepts for movies—although he does have some, most notably on display in The Terminator, as Anders has discussed—and more for what he does with seemingly familiar material: robots, aliens, strange planets, the sinking of history’s most famous ship, spy movies, etc. Every Cameron movie gives us a novel high concept premise: a robot sent back in time; extraterrestrials at the bottom of the sea; humans encountering aliens on a strange moon by inhabiting alien bodies, etc. It’s the combination of different narrative concepts and genre elements that makes his stories fresh. Of course, Cameron is also a mighty technical innovator for cinema, but Aliens, while boasting pre-CGI special effects that still hold up wonderfully, is more an example of Cameron’s innovations on the levels of concept and genre. In fact, Aliens and True Lies might be the only Cameron movies that merely utilize the best of current special effects, without really pushing the envelope.

Terminator 2 was Cameron’s first sequel to his own creation, and we will have to compare it to Avatar: The Way of Water when it comes out. In contrast, Aliens, like Piranha II before it, is a sequel to someone else’s film. In both Piranha II and Aliens, Cameron was tasked with fulfilling the expectations of the title as well as carving out new terrain. He does this by combining the previous film’s concept with new genre elements and by expanding the scale of the story, the action, and the special effects.

With Aliens, Cameron famously steered the emergent franchise in a new direction, away from the concept of a single-monster horror movie set aboard a spaceship and to combat action with a host of monsters on an alien planet. As the tagline tells us, “This time it’s war.” With these changes, Cameron not only extended the lifespan of the franchise but he also set up a science-fiction template that has been duplicated in everything from his own Avatar to the video games, TV shows, and books of the Halo media franchise. There is no shortage of sci-fi stories about space commandos facing off against alien creatures. Whether or not Cameron was the first to tell this story, Aliens is the visual and conceptual reference point for the majority of these kinds of stories.

However, my characterization of the film above as a pivot from horror to action can often be overstated. Indeed, that characterization coloured my memory of the differences between Alien and Aliens until I recently revisited the sequel for this retrospective. It’s important to point out that the xenomorphs only emerge, and the Colonial Marines’ guns only start blasting, at almost exactly one hour into the theatrical cut. The two films are more similar than they are often characterized.

Accompanied by James Horner’s repurposing of Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting, eerie musical melodies (which themselves recall elements of the non-classical score for 2001: A Space Odyssey), the initial scenes of Aliens are very much in the mode of the first film. Both films are incredibly deliberate in their set-ups, quietly and carefully providing the viewer with small pieces of information in order to build intrigue and a simmering sense of dread.

A first time viewer of Aliens might be led to think this sequel will be very similar in scale and approach to Alien. Based on the first scene, we could imagine a lesser sequel about the space salvage crew picking up Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and another xenomorph attacking their ship. But Cameron does not simply rehash the basic plot of Alien; instead,  Cameron imitates the mystery, atmosphere, and mounting dread of the first film.

Aliens opens with a robotic probe scanning the interior of the discovered escape pod which viewers might recognize as that in which Ripley escaped at the end of the first movie. We expect that the sequel will pick up the story soon after the end of the first movie; as the audience will soon discover, however, that may be true for Ripley, but not for the rest of the universe. The tall thin beam of the robot’s laser sensor illuminates the smoky atmosphere as it passes over the ship’s interior. A space suit-clad crew enters the ship. These images—a probe is sent in, followed by suited-up explorers—Cameron will repeat, with variation, in numerous other movies, from The Abyss to Titanic. The parallels suggest that space is not so different from the ocean in Cameron’s imaginative universe: both contain worlds alien to human earth-dwellers, who require technology to explore them. (Is this why Cameron once pursued shooting a film on the international space station?)

The original theatrical version of Aliens presents an ambiguous development of events on planet LV-426. As Ripley learns, the uninhabited planet where her crew discovered the alien eggs in the first film has, in the 57 years that have elapsed while Ripley has been in cryosleep, been colonized by humans. However, that information only comes out after Ripley’s tribunal before her corporate bosses, who don’t exactly buy her story about the xenomorph, and want to hold her accountable for destroying an expensive spaceship. Other pieces of important information about what has happened since the last movie emerge through Ripley’s conversations with a company man, Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), both before and after the tribunal scene. Exposition about what has been going on only arises amid Ripley’s frustrations with her employer and her own psychological disorientation, as she tries to reestablish herself in the world of the living.

In the theatrical version, we never see and are never sat down and given a clear, detailed exposition of what happened on the planet, LV-426, whether over the last 57 years or in the time between Ripley’s discovery of the colony and the news that the company have now lost communication with the colonists there. Is this a deficiency in terms of storytelling, or a masterfully sly way of doing things? Contrasting the theatrical and special editions will help us to begin to answer this question.

In the brief intro that precedes the 2010 Alien Anthology Blu-ray special edition of Aliens, Cameron, in voiceover on top of archival footage that plays before the film begins, briefly tells us that this is the film he intended. He accounts for the theatrical version by saying that the conventional wisdom at the time was not to make movies too long. He says this is the longer and more intense version of the “40 miles of hard road” that is the movie.

Now, there are definite merits to the special edition. I think the extended tribunal inquest scene clarifies Ripley’s relationship and conflicts with the corporate conglomerate, Weyland-Yutani. As well, the scene in which Ripley learns from Burke that her daughter has passed away in the years that have elapsed since the first movie deepens Ripley’s character, further motivating her maternal feelings later on the film, and tinging her behaviour throughout with sorrow at what has been lost to time.

However, the biggest addition to the special edition, the sequence on the colony before Ripley and the Colonial Marines arrive, showing the family of the little girl, Newt (Carrie Henn), finding the ship from the first movie and accidentally unleashing the xenomorphs on the colony, actually diminishes the slowly simmering atmosphere and narrative flow of the story. Newt’s trauma is less terrifying when we know what she saw, rather than imagine what horrors the girl might have experienced. Here, I would defy Cameron’s assumption that more is more—an approach that is almost a mantra for him, and is certainly on display in almost everything he does. 

In a recent interview with GQ, Cameron complains about film nerds asking if he ever wants to do a small movie with only a couple actors:

Yeah, I make that movie every time I make a big movie. On a given day I might be doing a scene with two actors in a room, me handholding the camera. How is that any different than the smallest independent film? It’s just that maybe the next day I’m doing a battle with 40,000 people. I like to do that too.

While it is certainly the case that Cameron prefers a big canvas and works well on that scale, I would say that the Aliens special edition undermines the overall effectiveness of his big style. That the early scenes showing what happens on the colony increase the audience’s knowledge is undeniable. Some viewers might appreciate the clarity. Indeed, the theatrical version is so subtle in the set-up we can easily miss important details provided only once in passing during a conversation. However, I also dislike extending the audience’s knowledge beyond Ripley’s perspective, which somewhat diminishes the potency of the intrigue and mystery in the first hour of this film, and also impairs, albeit slightly, the audience’s close alignment with the heroine. 

Cameron’s comments about the special edition also indicate that Cameron, in spite of his immense success and a record of only good and great movies, is not perfect. He does sometimes make odd filmmaking choices. For example, what about that weird moment very early in the film, when Ripley is in the hospital talking to Burke, and the conversation seamlessly drifts into a nightmare. Burke stuns Ripley with news that 57 years have passed and she understandably begins to freak out. Her heart beat is thumping loudly and the cat is hissing. Doctors pin her down and then Cameron teases a sinister turn. Something seems to be moving inside her. Her abdomen is about to burst open. We expect that we are getting one of those slasher movie twists, where the heroine is killed off early in the next episode. Then the scene cuts to Ripley waking up and a nurse asks if she’s having more bad dreams. Later on in the first act, Ripley wakes up similarly and we wonder if she dreams of the alien inside her each night.

The curious aspect about the formal nature of this sequence, in particular the transition between the two scenes, is that there is no clear signal that we are moving from reality to dream. It’s pure cinematic manipulation. Did the earlier parts of the conversation with Burke really happen? The conversation is vital to the narrative, after all. Is this a memory of a real conversation playing out in a dream that becomes a nightmare? The sequence is effective, but does it make sense? In a way, it points to Cameron’s emotive approach to cinema. He’s more concerned in the feeling of that scene than in whether it actually makes narrative sense. You could imagine him replaying, “It freaked you out, didn’t it? Why are you complaining?”

Even though he admired the craftsmanship of Aliens, awarding it three and a half stars out of four, Roger Ebert described the movie as an unenjoyable experience: “The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was drained.” Ebert’s account has always stuck with me. How do you describe a film that is so effective at making you feel anxious and unhappy? Does one “like” such a movie?

The effectiveness of Aliens is almost undeniable. It is a relentless experience, aided, in part, by its confined setting and limited narrative. It also spends the proper time, like many great suspense and action movies, moving the plot along step-by-step. This narrative economy is something too many would-be action movies today lack. They are overstuffed with narrative content. This is also why Aliens, on its deepest level, is an action movie. It’s about what the characters do, the actions they perform, the simplicity of the story, and fully inhabiting the setting and its possibilities.

I mentioned the video game Halo above. One of the most significant things about Aliens is its impact on other works of science fiction. Everything about Aliens is material that has been used to furnish a thousand genre movies and video games. Space commandos. Alien monsters that just want to kill you. Strange, empty locales, such as rocky alien terrain and ransacked outposts. Industrial landscapes, such as refineries, power stations, elevators. Empty hanger bays. The attention to the gear and guns, the amounts of ammo Ripley has left (conspicuously shown in exact measure to the audience with electronic numbers). The main character’s competency and ability to perform tasks, clear tasks that have to be completed in order to progress. Can you drive? Can you shoot? Land on the outpost. Track the missing colonists’ homing beacons to figure out what happened. Destroy the alien lair. Activate the satellite to get your ship to escape. The film even has the eventual fight with the big boss, the Alien Queen, and with Ripley levelling up to get the necessary equipment—the forklift mech—in order to fight the villainess.

One of the first missions in Aliens is to figure out what happened to the colonists on LV-426. Of course, this is more of a mystery in the theatrical version, but, regardless, the audience is going into this sequence waiting for the “aliens” of the title to pop out. For this reason, it is a sequence of pure suspense; we are anticipating what we expect will happen. To find the colonists, the Colonial Marines will track the beacons each colonist was provided with. The sequence is justifiably famous, full of anxious exploration and slow revelations until the big reveal of the movie’s monsters (plural). Notice how much slow and careful build up there is and how little smash and bang fighting. Like the best of Spielberg, this is miles away from the constant, muddled action in a Russo Brothers movie, where there is little build up and lots of mucking about. 

The sequence also exemplifies the way that Cameron sets up, inhabits, and explores the narrative and architectural spaces of his films. Cameron’s films often contain fewer scenes than you might expect. He rarely cuts back and forth between multiple locations and plotlines. For instance, here Cameron intercuts the Marine team and the crew on the ship, but the film’s plot follows all this at the same time. We don’t go back to what’s going on on Earth, for instance. (This is another reason why I don’t like the early depiction of the colony in the special edition.) Cameron would rather take you along for the whole ride than move you back and forth around the maze, as Christopher Nolan prefers. 

As much as Cameron likes clear narrative through-lines, he also sets up incredibly clear spatial environments in his films. With the Marines going in we get a sense of how the processing station is set up. Later, when they are defending the colony, we likewise understand the layout and what is needed to defend it. Not only is the Marines sequence perfect for its technical combination of building suspense and delivering gun battle action, it also layers the levels of viewing.

Cameron attaches video cameras to the Marine team, which Ripley and the rest of the crew will monitor from the ship. This adds not only an extra tool for generating suspense—uh oh, the cameras have gone out!—but it also adds an extra layer of significance to the sequence. A combat team streaming live video may feel routine nowadays in a world where special military operations and police tactical teams often wear body cameras, and where live feeds of events as they happen often shape our understanding of the news. But here, in 1986, the cameras are novel, and they create a nicely self-reflective moment for the usually more earnest and direct Cameron. Characters in the movie are also viewing, and feeling suspense, trying to follow the events, just like us watching the movie. The viewer witnessing Ripley’s and others’ reactions to the events enhances the emotional impact. Sometimes we mimic the viewers on-screen; other times, we experience different reactions to the characters’ responses. 

For instance, we witness the hapless Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope) make bad decisions. We witness him sweat and feel fear, and it makes us both more afraid for the Marine team but also anger towards the feckless leader, removed from the immediate consequences of his bad decisions. This is a theme Cameron constantly returns to, and perhaps points to why Cameron as a leader on the sets of his films is so respected, in spite of his demands and toughness. He delivers. If he acted that way and made bad and unsuccessful movies, like some other once-aspiring directors we can all name, his reputation would be completely different, as would the respect he generates from his film crews.

Aliens also reveals some of Cameron’s views on the military and corporations as well as human organization and human nature more generally. We get a motley crew of both military and corporate actors. Most of them are the types that Cameron reuses time and again, such as the tough-ass sergeant (Al Matthews) or the loose cannon (Bill Paxton). We also see Cameron’s admiration for individual Marines, alongside scorn for others, and how his view of the character is determined not by their rank, or class, or type, but by their choices and actions. Characters can be rough and rude, but are they cowards? There is often bro banter between the grunts and workers in Cameron movies, (which filmmakers like Michael Bay also deploy), but what Cameron really appreciates is those who work hard, like Michael Biehn’s Corporal Hicks. 

As I’ve already noted, Cameron has nothing but scorn for leaders who are either incompetent, such as the new lieutenant Gorman, or conniving, like the company man Burke. At the end of the day, the guys getting their hands dirty are more laudable than the guy who uses other people to do dirty things or collect things. Cameron, one of the most profitable of all filmmakers, consistently despises the greedy and avaricious in his films. He did drive trucks before making movies. And he is an expert sport shooter. He also owns many farms. What do we make of this?

Aliens also showcases Cameron’s approach to gender. Cameron’s films are marked by both an emphasis on the differences between men and women as well as on women’s ability to outperform male expectations. There are streaks of feminism in his works, but not in ways that perfectly align with the dominant feminist doctrines of 2022. One such example is Cameron’s reverence for the maternal nature of women. Motherhood is something that is almost sacred in Cameron’s imagination (a quality that he also significantly inverts in this film with the Alien Queen, as I will elaborate on below). 

It should go without saying that Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is hands-down one of the great female characters in movie history, and the character is even better in Aliens, making Weaver’s Oscar nomination very worthy. In Aliens, Ripley is both a protective mother and a competent warrior, and the movie never, ever turns her into a stereotypical “badass” woman, today such a cliché. Cameron certainly has an interest in badass, almost-macho warrior women—think about Sarah Connor’s evolution as a character in T2, and Michelle Rodriguez’s Trudy in Avatar—but Ripley is not one of them, and she is in fact set in contrast to Jenette Goldstein’s Private Vasquez. Any time people complain about female representation in action movies (not always without merit), I wonder whether they recall Ripley’s presence and legacy in the genre.

Cameron is also deeply concerned with competency. Indeed, the many stories about his on-set personality and perfectionism are everywhere paralleled with on-screen characters admired for their ability to do things well. He loves when people can perform their tasks and succeed, and his films are accordingly replete with characters we admire for their competency and others who are frankly so incompetent that they are deficient, regardless of their intentions. Think about how his Terminator movies both admire the lean, brutal efficiency of the Terminators, while also rendering that efficiency without humanity as a force we should fear and reckon how to prevent. 

In Aliens, Cameron has the cyborg, Lance Henriksen’s Bishop, directly express these themes: he admires the xenomorph’s power and sheer killing prowess, echoing Ash’s comments in the first film. (These comments on the xenomorph biology are even more prominent in the special edition.) The fear of an unrestrained focus on performing the mission haunts Bishop, and makes Ripley fear him (and echoes the inhumanity of HAL’s perfectionism in 2001). Take also Lieutenant Gorman, who is so inexperienced. Cameron’s obsession with competency also extends to the film’s constant interest in Ripley’s abilities, and in others underestimating her abilities, as mentioned above. At the same time, Ripley is marked by a desire to destroy and not learn from the aliens through study. Ripley embodies Cameron’s idealized approach to competency combined with humanity. She is capable, but not single-minded.

Ripley fills a symbolic role in many ways in the film. The Alien Queen is Ripley’s foil, the dark parallel, rather than just a point of contrast. You could think of Ripley as the White Queen and the Alien as the Black Queen on the chess board. There are inversions as well as similarities between the two. Ripley is the adoptive mother, displaying an innate tendency to defend a child (Newt) that is not her own biological offspring. (In the special edition, the absence of a child takes on a nuanced role, with Ripley’s actual, biological offspring having died at the age of 66 two years before her mother reenters time.) Ripley’s care for Newt suggests it is a part of Ripley’s character, and not just her fulfilling the social role of care for her own offspring. 

The reason this is thematically important is that the Alien Queen is a dark adoptive parent turned reproductive parasite. The xenomorphs require biological hosts that they will destroy to complete their life cycle. The cycle of egg to face-hugger to full-grown xenomorph requires prey that the face-hugger can implant with a little baby alien that eventually bursts out of the host’s chest. Connotations of both rape and sexual slavery linger beneath the surface, hauntingly visualized in the bodies of the colonists (and, later, Marines) bound to the walls in the lair. The creepy imagery recalls not only insect lairs and spiders’ webs but also victims in bondage in some dark predator’s basement. In the xenomorph society, what are social roles for human beings are merely functions in a mechanistic program, each creature fulfilling its role for the hive. 

At the end of the first Alien, in a variation on the extra scene horror movies would come to often include, the xenomorph has hidden away on Ripley’s escape pod. Critics and fans have remarked how the xenomorph acts like a sexual predator, springing from the shadows. The contrast to the showdown between Ripley and another xenomorph that makes up this climax of Aliens indicates so much about Cameron’s distinct approach to movies (even as Ridley Scott would come to make films that also operate on an enormous scale).

Cameron has his heroine not relying on just about anything she can get her hands on (like a button to open the hatch), but rather tools she has trained to use. Ripley’s success here is adaptive but not haphazard. Ripley is outfitted with technology—the forklift mech—to fully take on, as a physical equal, the Alien Queen. This shows that technology can be very good and useful in Cameron’s universe, in spite of his many critiques of it. The set up for the final showdown is careful, with Ripley slowly walking out, showing off her mech-suit like someone entering the wrestling ring. The two will actually fight, exchanging blows, like two mythological titans. At the same time, the sequel takes the first film’s open hatch into space and replays it, this time bigger and more intense.

To conclude my thematic analysis of Aliens with this scene, Ripley is both mother and warrior, and the one impowers the other. The Queen too is both warrior and master mother. But note how the Alien Queen is able to detach from her gigantic egg-laying body and engage in her own combat against the protagonist, shedding her reproductive parts to engage in battle. Ripley retains her motherly affection for Newt, which in fact drives her protective combat: “Get away from her, you bitch!” The antagonist, the Alien Queen, is the darkened, distorted, monstrous mirror of Ripley, trying to retrieve the little girl who was taken from her bioprison, to be fuel for further reproduction.

Thematically, Aliens is as coherent and resonant and deep as Cameron gets, and exemplifies his style of direct, impactful, clear storytelling. Things are never overly complex or incredibly nuanced, yet he likes to explore the depths of certain archetypes and social phenomena. Aliens isn’t subtle in its exploration of gender and the warrior mother, but it is profound, while also being an incredibly gripping, relentless action thriller. 

Aliens is an incredible movie, but so is the first film, so it’s hard to say whether Aliens is better than Alien. I like each for different reasons, even as I want to highlight the strength of their similarities. My love for atmosphere makes me lean towards Alien, but I certainly don’t think Alien can be regarded as a masterpiece without mentioning Aliens as another masterpiece, this time of science fiction action. Regardless, Aliens deserves to be on the lists of great sequels as a genre film that combines the highest achievements in technical filmmaking with strong themes and excellent characters.

One reason I find Aliens so compelling within Cameron’s body of work is because it is one of his leanest films. It’s still big, but, especially with the theatrical cut, there’s no bloat, little cheese, and everything is top-notch. It’s less sentimental, never hockey, yet still emotionally affecting. It might be Cameron’s most sound achievement in all dimensions of film, even if other movies of his excel further in one particular aspect. Like the xenomorphs themselves, Aliens is incredibly effective and efficient. It excels at what it does.

10 out of 10

Aliens (1986, USA/UK)

Directed by James Cameron; screenplay by James Cameron, based on a story by James Cameron, David Giler, and Walter Hill, based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett; starring Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Carrie Henn, Bill Paxton, William Hope, Ricco Ross, Al Matthews, Jenette Goldstein, Mark Rolston.

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