I’m noJames Cameronnewbie— being born in 1998 predisposes you to havingTitanicplayed around you at all times for the first five years of your life — but I’ll be the first to admit thatAlienswas a massive blindspot in my otherwise very thoroughaction movieeducation. Despite being allowed to watch practically every ‘80s movie on the market thanks to my parents, the entireAlienfranchise as a whole was something I missed, in part because of my fear of xenomorphs as a child (thanks, Disney World) and partially because, despite my voracious appetite for more mature films, it’s probably written in a parenting guide somewhere that showing your child a film about bloodthirsty parasitic monsters when she’s ten isn’t exactly advisable.
But I did eventually get there,thanks to the upcoming release ofAlien: Romulus, the trailer for which both scared the pants off me and finally intrigued me to see what all the fuss was about. I’ve always opted for more traditional monster films — see: my ability to quoteThe Lost Boysfront to back — but my fascination with final girls gave me confidence that I’d enjoy the franchise, including the sequel directed by the same guy who helmedAvatar, a movie I saw three times in theaters when I was eleven despite only understanding half of it.
I’m sure it’s absolute heresy, butI do think thatAliensis the better film of the two.Ridley Scott’s original project, at least for me, seemed more thriller than horror — the genre everyone refers to the franchise as, and where I thinkAlien 3really excels — and aside from the terror inherent in the concept of parasitic facehuggers, it lacked what everyone I know hyped it up to be: truly scary. Cameron taking the most thrilling aspects of what worked inAlienand punching them up into an action film fits the xenomorphs (and their queen) much better.
Decades after surviving the Nostromo incident, Ellen Ripley is sent out to re-establish contact with a terraforming colony but finds herself battling the Alien Queen and her offspring.
‘Aliens’ Has a Far Stronger Cast of Characters Than Its Big Sister
It also helps that I’m immediately more endeared to the crew Ripley’s saddled with inAliens. While the Nostromo was absolutely stacked with Hollywood greats, includingHarry Dean StantonandJohn Hurt, there’s an immense amount of charm to the rag-tag military operation that makes me all the more upset when they’re slowly picked off one by one. (Even if having white actressJenette Goldsteinplay a Latina private is a severely misguided choice.) They’ve got the kind of bombastic personalities that the characters inAlienlacked (in favor of Scott’s more subdued storytelling approach), and it’s impossible to resistBill Paxton’s charm as the panicky Private Hudson, arriving just a year after he played meathead older brother Chet inJohn Hughes’Weird Science.
Paul Reiser’s turn as the seedy, underhanded Carter Burke is also a standout, primarily because his presence expands upon one of the themes I was most interested in in the original film: the Weyland-Yutani Corporation trying to use the xenomorphs as biological weapons. Even more so because I actuallylikedthe little creep in the first half of the movie, which quickly morphed into a loud cheer when one of many xenomorphs decided they’d had enough of his BS and (presumably) ripped his limbs from his body. Really, I should’ve known he was suspicious from the start — I mean,who rolls up to a military space station dressed like a yuppie?
‘Aliens’ Expansion on Xenomorph Lore Strengthens the Entire Franchise
Aliensexpands the universe of the franchise more than any of its sister films, and that’s maybe its strongest point for someone coming to the series with totally fresh eyes. UnlikeAlien, which has become so culturally ubiquitous that any burgeoning film kid is bound to encounter spoilers like I did,Alienswas totally new ground for me — even newer thanAlien 3, which I’d seen fits and starts of thanks to the podcast I run about starPaul McGann— and aside from knowing about the existence ofCarrie Henn’s Newt thanks to the film’s poster, everything was a complete surprise.
Some people complain about Cameron taking the lore of the xenomorphs “too far” when he introduced the idea of a queen bee xenomorph and her brood, but for me, it’s the exact kind of exploration I wanted fromAlienoriginally, as a girl who grew up obsessed with monsters to the point that I was watchingVan Helsingfar too young. There’s still plenty we don’t know about the aliens themselves at this point — where they came from, why they kill, what (if anything) can killthem— butCameron stumbles into a thematic exploration of motherhood almost by accident with the queen, something that Scott’s original film touches on with its facehuggers and chest bursters dredging up fears of pregnancy as parasitic invasion. Newt and Ripley, who becomes the girl’s surrogate mother, are a mirror and foil to the queen and her hundreds of eggs, a mother figure by choice rather than by force, the way the entire terraforming colony of LV-426 met their grisly fate.
Combine that with a further understanding of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation — a mega-entity that partners with the military almost like they own them — andCameron’s done triple the work Scott had to flesh out theAlienuniverseinto something big and iconic enough to latch onto. Without this film, we might still haveAlien 3andAlien: Resurrection, but I’m almost certain that wouldn’t be the case for the handfuls of novels, comic books, video games, and other spin-offs that the franchise has generated since 1986. While Scott was the one to establish the lived-in feel of theAlienfranchise that makes it so memorable, Cameron took that idea the rest of the way, setting the stage for what perhaps no one expected would be a franchise still alive and well almost forty years later.
Aliens is the best film in the franchise that surpasses even the original.
