The Big Picture

Aliens
is a superior film to
Alien
, offering a thrilling action-packed take on the xenomorphs and their queen.
The diverse cast of characters in
Aliens
adds depth and charm, making the crew’s fate more impactful and intense.
Cameron’s expansion on xenomorph lore in
Aliens
delves deeper into the franchise, exploring themes of motherhood and corporate greed.

I’m no James Cameron newbie — being born in 1998 predisposes you to having Titanic played around you at all times for the first five years of your life — but I’ll be the first to admit that Aliens was a massive blindspot in my otherwise very thorough action movie education. Despite being allowed to watch practically every ‘80s movie on the market thanks to my parents, the entire Alien franchise 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 of Alien: 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 quote The Lost Boys front 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 helmed Avatar, 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, but I do think that Aliens is 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 think Alien 3 really 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 in Alien and punching them up into an action film fits the xenomorphs (and their queen) much better.

Aliens 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.Release Date July 18, 1986 Director James Cameron Runtime 137 minutes Main Genre Sci-Fi Writers James Cameron , David Giler , Walter Hill Studio 20th Century Fox Expand

‘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 in Aliens. While the Nostromo was absolutely stacked with Hollywood greats, including Harry Dean Stanton and John 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 actress Jenette Goldstein play a Latina private is a severely misguided choice.) They’ve got the kind of bombastic personalities that the characters in Alien lacked (in favor of Scott’s more subdued storytelling approach), and it’s impossible to resist Bill Paxton’s charm as the panicky Private Hudson, arriving just a year after he played meathead older brother Chet in John 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 actually liked the 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
Image via 20th Century Fox

Aliens expands 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. Unlike Alien, which has become so culturally ubiquitous that any burgeoning film kid is bound to encounter spoilers like I did, Aliens was totally new ground for me — even newer than Alien 3, which I’d seen fits and starts of thanks to the podcast I run about star Paul McGann — and aside from knowing about the existence of Carrie 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 from Alien originally, as a girl who grew up obsessed with monsters to the point that I was watching Van Helsing far 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 kill them — but Cameron 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 — and Cameron’s done triple the work Scott had to flesh out the Alien universe into something big and iconic enough to latch onto. Without this film, we might still have Alien 3 and Alien: 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 the Alien franchise 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.

REVIEW Aliens Aliens is the best film in the franchise that surpasses even the original.ProsJames Cameron takes us further into this world than Ridley Scott.The characters are all ones you care about as they get increasingly picked off.Aliens explores the ideas and elements of the murderous beings with more depth than the original.

Aliens is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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