Alien was enormously successful in 1979, becoming at the time the highest grossing R-rated movie ever. Naturally, in less than a year Alien 2 was released.
…Wait, what?!
Okay, Alien 2 isn’t an official sequel to Alien, but rather one of an incredible fraternity of Italian genre rip-offs from the 70s and 80s. The Italian film industry was an amazing thing back then – it was the sort of place where dignity was never an issue, not when there’s scant money to be made taking advantage of a Ridley Scott masterpiece. Who cares how cheap and unrelated it is, just throw in a chest-bursting scene retooled to appeal to Italian tastes (that is, gory and tasteless as hell)?
This particular sequel ruse couldn’t last long, and outside of Italy, where laws exist, the title had to be changed to Alien Terror (or the far less instructive Strangers). And thus goes a remarkably unofficial entry to the Alien saga, one which is sadly available only on random YouTube snippets. Seriously, if I could find this thing, I’d review it here. Because if you can’t tell, I’m actually kind of overwhelmed by the need to consider two genuinely good movies in a row. Oh well, I blame James Cameron for making Aliens good.
Indeed, 1986’s Aliens is widely considered one of the greatest sequels of all time, so this should at least be instructive as a way of exploring that fabled “good sequel” phenomenon. Here we have a perfect storm of elements, from a good, invested director, the proper genre elements, and a studio willing to nurture them.
That last one is the most amazing – a well-meaning movie studio. What’s even more amazing is which studio it is – Fox, the demented Hitler of the Hollywood system. In fact, their treatment of the Alien franchise merely confirms my suspicions that this studio has forever remained willfully stupid. Here’s the thing: Alien didn’t make enough money to warrant a sequel! What did they expect?! It was the highest grossing R movie of all time, for goodness sakes, it’d already performed above natural expectations! But no, Alien was just left to rot, a mere one-off masterpiece.
Enter that James Cameron fellow, hot off his tremendous international success of Piranha II: The Spawning…Wait, what?! Yes, Cameron had just completed his first, and crappiest, film (there shall be no Titanic or Avatar backlash here – not worth the effort). But in 1983 he showed notable promise, having just completed an apprenticeship under the great and almighty Roger Corman (I’m reading a book now about the man – lots of Corman love here!). Also, Cameron had just finished writing a script for something called The Terminator.
It was in this context when he approached Alien producer David Giler, who still wisely controlled the property with Walter Hill. Giler was so impressed with Cameron’s self-conceived sequel idea that he allowed him permission to flesh it out into a script – something Cameron had nine months to do, considering a delay on filming that little Terminator script of his. Then Giler liked the script enough to accept Cameron’s proposal to direct this Alien sequel…after another Terminator-related delay.
Now Aliens was in active preproduction – note that title, which does a far better job than Alien 2 of suggesting that this is both a sequel, with precise escalation, yet it is not a cheap copy of the first. This is one of the best and most efficient sequel titles in history. Anyway, now that Aliens was in active preproduction, the time has come for the idiots at Fox to do something stupid – demand that Sigourney Weaver not return! What on earth, guys? Apparently, they wanted to charge Weaver her wages from the first Alien, ignoring the fact she was then a bit Broadway player and now a recognized movie star. Thankfully, Cameron’s years-old deal with Giler stipulated Weaver’s return, forcing Fox to cough up the $1 million needed to get her. And it’s a good thing they acquiesced, because for the only time in this franchise Weaver wanted to return, and because Aliens would turn her into one of the greatest sci-fi icons of all time.
Aliens invokes escalation – nearly all sequels promise going “bigger and better” than the former film, though they almost always just recreate it on new terms. Cameron’s choice to multiply the number of aliens (now called xenomorphs) exponentially served something more than the same old haunted spaceship tale on a higher budget. The very genre of the franchise changed with this entry, yet without jeopardizing the fundamental nature of Alien. Famously, there are now more aliens, and Marines to fight them, so what we have here is an action movie built upon the framework of a horror film. In space. That the genre could switch, yet the story content remain the same, is perhaps one of the biggest reasons for Aliens’ comparison to Alien’s success (careful with the titles – note those s’es and apostrophes).
The opening, picking up on Ripley’s (Weaver) errant escape ship as it drifts through space, evokes stylistic similarities with Alien – titles over the star field, loving shots of a spaceship model and its interior sets. This stuff all plays as rather more low key (a surprising tone for the film’s early scenes), because the focus will be elsewhere. The first film had to set up its primary location here, while Aliens uses its early scenes to explore Ripley greater.
Ripley recovers at Gateway Station, presumably orbiting Earth. She is visited by a slimy Company executive named Burke (Paul Reiser). The “Company” is now Weyland-Yutani, and under Burke’s shining example here, it seems more shortsighted and incompetent than actually evil. Again, I think it’s what Fox became. Also, Jones the cat is there for continuity, but he quickly leaves too, for they’re not about to make the stupid cat mistake Scott made. Ripley learns it is now 57 years after her deadly alien encounter from the original (hyper-sleep and all) meaning children she once knew are now dead of old age. (Deleted scenes from a so-called Producers’ Cut reveal Ripley’s own daughter is now among the elderly deceased – this is so essential to Ripley’s motherly arc in this film, it’s astounding it’s only an unofficial part of the movie.) Furthermore, Burke reveals that blah blah blah – Ripley clutches her chest, a ghastly latex form rises from her torso, and –
She awakes in a sweat. It was only a dream – the chestburster alien, that is. Sadly, Burke is real. And forgive the film a rare retreat into such lame shock tactics, but something early on has to remind us this is an Alien movie. Besides, character motivation and all…
Ripley performs an inquest for the Weyland-Yutani executives (I’m going back to calling it the Company – I ain’t typing that pseudo-Toyota nonsense out for an entire franchise). This allows us to get the first film’s recap out of the way naturally, and lets Ripley impress upon us how dangerous the xenomorphs are. The futuristic Fox executives overseeing Ripley pooh pooh her worries, claiming that “LV-426,” the rock the alien monster came from, is now safely settled by pioneers, there to mine it for whatever mineral (and narrative) value it may hold. Ripley yells in protest, and the bigwigs fire her (she did destroy 20 million tons of ore, you know).
One challenge of a sequel like Aliens is that the mystery is gone. We’re all well aware of the alien and its lifecycle, and we also know Ripley shall play survivor and hero here. A sequel trying to play the pure horror card would have to struggle with these facts, losing its potency somewhat. This movie is different. We retain the same knowledge Ripley has, and so her terror informs our own. In sequel terms, this is one of the nicest pig-ear purses I’ve ever seen.
An indeterminate amount of time passes, and this sci-fi/action/horror hybrid briefly threatens to become a drama. Ripley silently mulls her lot in life alone when the plot – that is, Burke – arrives to move things along. He is accompanied by the green, ineffective Colonial Marine Lt. Gorman (William Hope). Apparently, contact has been lost with LV-426, and a platoon of Space Marines shall be heading out to investigate. Ripley initially refuses to accompany them, and only after awaking from another (unseen) extraterrestrial nightmare does she determine to face her fears and return to the alien planet. There is actual motivation, as Ripley opts to do this, really making the insane action extravaganza to come really all about her character. And Sigourney Weaver genuinely carries this difficult material, rendering it believable rather than hokey and tiresome – unlike so much sequel “motivation” I’ve seen. Weaver’s Best Actress nomination was rightly earned, which is more than I can say for…whatever damn dramas she was surely up against in 1986.
We rejoin Ripley and the cast of Space Marines upon the space-battleship Sulaco (a town from Joseph Conrad’s novel “Nostromo” – Nice touch!). The platoon awakes from their hyper-sleep chambers, in events that stylistically recall Alien’s (note apostrophe placing) similar cast introduction. This is as good a place as any to mention Cameron’s unique skill with sequels: Often he fashions moments that directly recall the earlier film, a sort of sequel checklist most follow-ups conform to, and yet he is always able to devise new meaning to these call-backs. Later events shall show this particular art at its highest.
The various Marines, their dialogue, personas, etc. all feel familiar from roughly 80% of all video games ever made, as well as the many Aliens rip-offs (astoundingly, that is an entirely different awful subgenre than Alien rip-offs). In cinematic terms, most of these guys are just here for color and cannon fodder, so I’ll only waste my energy recounting the featured players: cool and collected Hicks (Cameron regular Michael Beihn), loony comic relief Hudson (Cameron regular Bill Paxton), macha Latina Vasquez (Cameron regular Jenette Goldstein), and Cameron irregular Al Matthews as Sergeant Apone, a black, cigar-chomping canister of testosterone who feels like a Predator character somehow welded into this film. Burke is there too, to serve as “company liaison” – that is, to do trope-tastic slimy capitalist evil deeds even a good movie like this somehow needs to squeeze in. There is no cat.
There is also Bishop (Lance Henriksen…yeah, yeah, Cameron regular). He gets his big introduction performing…that “almost stab myself repeatedly in the fingers with a knife but don’t” thing I have no name for. His finger briefly bleeds milk, meaning he is an android (or “artificial person,” in Bishop’s terms). Since this is now 57 years later, the future of the future, technology has improved so that he is no longer the threat Ash was in the first. Of course we needed an Ash analogue here, and Cameron had already fulfilled the mutinous betrayer role with Burke, so…
Okay, Aliens is a fairly longish movie, and there’s a lot of quality content in there to comment on (and we’ve all seen it), so I gotta hurry things up a lot, and maybe focus primarily on this movie’s sequelling. Getting on to business, all the Marines travel down to LV-426 in a hovering drop ship. This ship, the Marine’s weaponry, tactics, etc. all recall Vietnam. Aliens has been called Cameron’s comment on the Vietnam War, but this seems one of the lesser goals of the movie. Of all the genres in this hybrid creature, sci-fi is the least essential, and with it goes sci-fi’s frequent need to serve as metaphor. I can basically picture this movie as an action/horror stripped of its futuristic space setting (in that form it’s called Predator), and nothing about it has changed. So the Vietnam-esque designs are really just a shorthand for audiences of the 80s to understand the Marines here in precisely normal terms. There’s very little technology here, or in the franchise as a whole, that’s meant to alienate us.
Another bit of new technology that just simplifies the story is the terraforming. Apparently, from a practical filmmaker’s standpoint, the colonists on LV-426 have rendered the planet’s (moon’s? – whatever) air breathable – this eliminates that pesky need to showing our characters in bulky spacesuits for the entirety of the movie, so if there are any scientific reasons this couldn’t happen, I’d rather not hear them. Anyway, a futuristic tank of some sort (again, I can’t be bothered to investigate what) disgorges from the drop ship, which in turn disgorges the Marines. They creep about the abandoned colonist compound, and here surely audience is expecting the first violent alien action to take place. They’d be mistaken, though, for Aliens is as concerned up front with building suspense as Alien was – it’s what happens once that suspense reaches a head that marks their differences. So it is that the Marines simply discover the end results of a spectacular firefight, floors melted through from acid – xenomorph blood, remember?...Geez, acid, milk, only humans have blood for blood! This wise delay in alien action manages to establish the compound setting – where the finale shall be taking place.
Ultimately the area is “secured,” and the many, many civilians (Ripley, Burke, Bishop) join their military buddies in the interior. Now, with the movie actually somewhere near half over, we get the first genuine evidence of the xenomorphs: several facehugger specimens sealed in jars, two of them still alive – this affords a nice little silent jump scare, seeing as James Horner’s usually-bombastic (and self-plagiarizing) soundtrack often sees fit to over enunciate the on-screen action. You know, it’s surprising realize where this stuff falls in the movie’s runtime. The second half is so astoundingly loaded with event, all my memory of Aliens falls to that side. But this lengthy setup is needed, to allow scene upon scene of craziness to follow through seamlessly later on. This is the result of fashioning an action film out of horror movie grammar – at this stage, Aliens IS a horror movie.
There’s another little shock – something dashes right before the camera, as is a beast’s wont to do – surely this is a xenomorph, right? No, it’s a little girl (Carrie Henn, astoundingly in her one and only acting role ever). Ripley manages to secure her when the over-confident Marines cannot, allowing for the start of a truly essential surrogate mother-daughter relationship between them. This is why Ripley’s loss of a daughter is so important, why it’s so odd they chose to drop it. The little girl is Newt, and she has alone managed to hide and survive long after the xenomorphs eradicated the other 150 or so colonists. Encased in her tale is an amazingly harrowing story, one that is all the stronger for having never been filmed. (To you prequel-happy Alien producers today: Do not choose to make Newt’s survival into a movie! Leave something unexplored.)
It is through Newt that Ripley will manage to find some redemption in the nihilism of her alien adventures. Here is one of Aliens’ triumphs as a sequel, one I’ve rarely seen mentioned: It is a moral and ethical response to the downer worldview of Alien. Despite the fact only one Marine will survive this movie (it’s Hicks), Ripley can come out of this encounter a fuller person than she was before, a mother and a victor over the alien race. More on this to come.
Hudson, technical specialist that he apparently is, manages to trace the remaining colonists’ surgical tracers to the nearby heat exchanger in a massive power plant – of some sort. And this setting is a massive power plant – a decommissioned British plant that later served for part of Batman’s shoot as well. The Marines, gung ho little gun goons that they are, opt to race into this obviously dangerous location right away! Thus they make a lengthy, suspense-filled trek into the plant’s bowels. Again, suspense in Aliens is a means of setting up settings for later action use. But for now, there’s just time for the Marines to admire the delicious resin that covers the basement walls, looking like one of H.G. Giger’s macro-scale vagina paintings. Ah, with the increased overt themes of motherhood, all this womb imagery serves a distinct purpose.
Here they discover the colonists encased in the resin before a mass of alien eggs, a few still alive – for the next few seconds. This is Aliens’ chestburster scene, played more low key than Alien’s simply because it cannot shock in the same way the second time. But that’s okay, because here come uncountable hoards of adult xenomorphs to decimate the Marines – the shock of this, and the intentional confusion of this scene, really sets in stone how this movie shall play out. Flamethrowers and machine guns abound, and yet by the end of this scene, the only Marines left alive are those I’ve bothered to name above (oh, except Apone is dead…I’m not sure why I mentioned him). Ripley, driving the big mofo tank over the protests of the thoroughly useless Gorman, manages to save what few Marines she can, engaging the xenomorphs in what passes as a car chase if you squint really hard. And now, something like an hour and a half into this action movie, we get an action sequence!
Ignore the delays, Aliens has a very strong claim as the greatest action movie of all time. My friends would assert this (yeah, they hate Alien but they like Aliens – I cannot figure it out). I myself would argue in favor of Die Hard, partly because that is a pure action film to Aliens’ hybrid. Still, Aliens is very exciting from now on.
And about those aliens – There are more now, presumably well over a hundred. (One creepy truth of the Alien franchise is that every xenomorph in existence is the result of a human’s death – an off-screen massacre was necessary to get the numbers here up to sequel-acceptable levels.) Increased budgets can account for some more xenomorph suits, but surely not that many. Ah, but in 1986 James Cameron could actually direct on a budget (again, no comment on Titanic or Avatar here), and could make his limitations into positives. Mmm, sows’ ears. In reality, there are actually something like six or twelve alien suits in this film, all of them far less complex than the single beast created for Alien. No matter, careful lighting can disguise any defects in the suits’ design, while the ballet dancer stuntmen can add the sort of eerie animalistic movement Alien’s (original) titular alien could never possess. And this movie won the Oscar for special effects – one area the foolish Academy is often good at judging. So guess what? Most viewers come away from Aliens thinking they’ve seen more monsters than they have. And seen more action. This big, insane sequel is surprisingly suggestive.
The mofo tank crashes amidst the hideous rock formations of LV-426 – it looks like Utah at nighttime. The survivors (Ripley, Newt, Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez, Gorman, Burke, and Bishop – he’s elsewhere) debate what to do. Despite Burke’s whiny, bitchy pleading to preserve the alien species (I’d love to see an environmentalist character thrown into one of these films), everyone else resolves on a remarkably sane course of action – nuke ‘em! So that will simply require getting back up to the Sulaco in orbit, and –
Oh wait, that drop ship just dropped! Those sneaky xenomorph buggers seems to have made their slimy way into the cockpit, cutting off the one way off this planet (or moon, comet, whatever). It seems there’s no one left aboard the Sulaco, which seems like a pretty major tactical mistake to me. So all turn to Newt, the only one with real experience now. She advises taking shelter back at the compound. It seems, despite all evidence, night is yet to fall, and they’ve only faced the first wave of alien aggression.
Aliens is now primed to be a siege movie…whenever a enemy is as instantly lethal as the xenomorph, the best tactic is avoiding the damn thing by all means – it serves that Jaws function of keeping the monster effectively off screen too. To Hudson’s genuinely hilarious dismay (everyone I know loves Hudson, and actively emulates the man), it will be a full seventeen days before they can expect a rescue. But Bishop has even worse news. The nearby power plant is venting off noxious gas (joke not found) – Due to the extended firefight against the xenomorphs, our heroes have triggered a nuclear meltdown. So the countdown is now four hours! But thankfully Bishop, the true unsung hero of Aliens, proposes rewiring the compound’s antenna array to call in the Sulaco’s second drop ship (probably the same model, pre-destruction). He leaves to take care of this, crawling through the tightest air vent I’ve ever seen in a movie (seriously, it’s about as wide as Henriksen’s head). The rest stay behind and prep for battle.
This is the final calm before the storm, the moment where important relationships can develop, between Ripley and Newt, and Ripley and Hicks. I’ve noted the mother-daughter stuff, but not the Hicks thing. But we all watch movies, we can see where this is going: Romantic subplot! Uh oh, that would be out of place in an Alien film. But thankfully Cameron leaves things as understated as possible. Through Hicks’ developing respect for Ripley, he briefs her on various weaponry. The main point of their scenes is to justify Ripley’s later transformation into an action icon, so this is very justified.
At Hicks’ suggestion, Ripley curls up beside Newt in the med lab for a little well-earned sleep. When she wakes later, she is aghast to find those two living facehuggers have been freed from their jars. Cue an intensely creepy struggle against these highly-mobile little beasties, the moment where Aliens most effectively employs the horror angle. In the end, both Ripley and Newt are saved, and – Look, I’ve watch this scene many times, and there is no way they laid eggs in Ripley! Or Newt! And we’re supposed to realize this too, because an egg is a death sentence. Don’t tell the producers this, though, because an egg did get laid here – the egg for another sequel. Groan. (Or…maybe not. Damn it, can’t pick apart Alien3 now.)
Whatever. This last scene was Burke’s attempt to transport the species back to Earth – man, that would have failed spectacularly had he succeeded here. But there’s no time to worry about smacking Burke about now, for the lights are out and the full mass of xenomorphs are here for the grand siege! Inner doors are welded shut in a final desperate bid for defense, and yet the aliens’ tracer beeping continues unabated. Here the film’s grandly wrought suspense reaches its fullest head, rather recalling the vent scene with Dallas in the first, climaxing as Hicks sees like eight aliens in the ceiling. Man, that shot is effective!
Shootout! Burke flees early on, that useless little ass, only for another xenomorph to capture him in a doorway. And…Burke’s comeuppance isn’t nearly so satisfyingly horrific as we’d all wish, especially since it comes shortly after a far grislier fate meted out to that loveable goon Hudson. (Making up for his lack of useful weaponry, Hudson defends himself against the aliens with a remarkable cluster F-bomb.) Newt leads the rest to safety through another air duct, but still the aliens pursue. They are only stopped when both Vasquez and Gorman sacrifice themselves with a grenade – this movie is just merciless towards its characters. The cast is killed off in fell swoops, not the slow whittling of Alien or countless hateful slasher films.
Newt is cut off from Ripley and Hicks, tumbling down a wheel well of some sort. Ah, but Ripley has equipped her with a tracer, so she can track Newt. Newt awaits Ripley’s rescue effort, cowering in waist-deep sewer water (yummy) as another mass of aliens nears on the scanners. Then this movie earns yet another remarkably effective shot (how many is that now?) when an alien slowly rises from the water behind Newt and snatches her up.
Ripley and Hicks escape onto the second drop ship with Bishop. Hicks is now out of commission, face and torso partially burnt with spattering acid – considering the intensity of some of the gun fights we’ve seen, I’d expect more acid injuries than we’ve seen. Ripley insists on going after Newt, who has not been killed, but rather taken back to the power plant for facehugger impregnation (see, Burke’s dumbass egg attempt didn’t work). Against Bishop’s worries, they head to the rapidly-crumbling, fiery plant. Oh, and now it’s a mere nineteen minutes until core meltdown – betcha forgot about that “race against the clock” deadline, eh?
Ripley alone lowers into the plant’s bowels, descending in an industrial lift that includes the greatest elevator music I’ve ever heard (I’m randomly assuming Horner’s soundtrack is diagetic). Now, with like 1/20th of the film yet to go, Ripley fully emerges from the chrysalis into full-on action heroine mode, earning her lifelong reputation for a tiny, tiny part of the overall franchise. And – it – is – awesome! Oh, if only Ripley’d affixed a chainsaw to her arm and uttered “Groovy,” it’d be the greatest badass moment in all of film history! (And through all this, Weaver continues to portray Ripley’s genuine fears, because she is a fully rounded action icon.)
Ripley follows Newt’s signal, retracing the Marines’ steps – this is why the earlier scenes were so intently paced. This is one of those “sequel checklist” moments I cited as one of Cameron’s strengths. Ripley also went back to save someone in the first film, only that time it was a yellow tabby cat. But Aliens can make Alien’s stupid moments into assets, for at this stage it’s about more than just survival, but about saving something. Well done, sequel! In fact, the rest of the film is a replay of Alien’s climax. Only this time, Ripley doesn’t simply encounter a mere alien once she’s found her target (Newt). Instead, now Ripley finds the alien queen! Ah, I see where the budget went! And this is the sort of sequel escalation that makes sense, since it answers the remaining questions about the xenomorphs’ biology. This is the franchise’s acme as far as the species goes – it’s all downhill from here.
All hail the late Stan Winston, who is entirely to thank for this 100% full-scale, practical effect, full-motion queen. This monster, the height of either a building or Yao Ming, is the holy grail of creature creation, the closest a special effect can come to being the real thing sans full-on genetic engineering. (You know some scientific moron’s gonna try making actual xenomorphs some time 100 years from now. Did we learn nothing from Jurassic Park?)
Ripley has a tense faceoff against the queen, who’s busy crapping out eggs all over the place from her enormous sac-like behind. Without dialogue, we’re allowed to ponder these two dichotomous forms of motherhood, Ripley and the queen. Then Ripley goes and explodes the eggs and bursts the sac – We get whole minutes of nothing but flames and goo, something all exploitation films should aim for! Ripley and Newt flee back up the elevators, countdown now at four minutes. The short version is that they’re rescued by Bishop in the drop ship, though naturally Cameron finds ways to make all this situation at intense as possible. Horner’s theme from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan blares as the ship sails away from a really cool mushroom cloud effect. Happy Fourth of July, everyone!
Peaceful music plays as the drop ship rejoins the Sulaco. We’d think the movie is over now, except we’ve noticed how events are mirroring Alien here. That means the queen is about to make an entrance, which she does in no uncertain terms by impaling Bishop on her massive tail and ripping him in half at the waist! Heh heh, queen takes Bishop. But Bishop’s a robot, so he’s okay – which is fine by me, since he’s earned his survival. The queen goes after Ripley, who hides behind a loading bay door. Then the queen instead sets its (her?) sights on Newt, hiding under the floor grates. The queen is about to get her, when –
Ripley emerges from the next room in a massive “power loader” suit, making her basically the same size as the queen (another remarkable practical effect). “Get away from her you bitch!” It ain’t an action movie one liner unless it involves curse words – or Clint Eastwood says it. This moment brings down the house.
The short version of Ripley’s fight is that Ripley wins (on believable terms), dumping the queen out of the airlock and allowing Horner to again reprise his Star Trek music (a mere seven or so minutes after last time). Of course, Ripley’s battle is epic, the sort of scene that murders my cynicism and turns me into one of those overly-enthusiastic fan boy types I often distrust. The milk-puking Bishop compliments Ripley’s victory, and Newt embraces her genuinely, actually calling Ripley “Mommy.” Ahh.
The final scene sees Ripley readying everyone for hyper-sleep, having achieved victory rather than mere survival. A species has been unquestionably eradicated, so Ripley has accomplished more than most of us could ever hope for. The final shot of Ripley asleep in her pod echoes the original Alien, only with the addition of Newt, Ripley’s surrogate daughter. It builds closure and builds on the first – if only that damned Alien3 hadn’t messed it all up!
Aliens is a great sequel, and can actually inspire arguments about which is the better film, it or Alien. This is usually a moot debate, since the genre switch changes the playing field. As far as preference goes, it’s mostly a question of if you personally prefer horror or action – this is why all my buddies love Aliens, while I…I actually can’t make up my mind. In the end I’d have to split hairs and go with Aliens, simply because it avoids Alien’s truly inexplicable cat mistake.
Of course what usually makes for a good sequel makes for a bad franchise. Aliens offers closure, and even if an avenue could be found to perpetuate the xenomorphs, there would be little purpose to doing so. Aliens stands on its own, an actual self-contained movie that just happens to follow up on another self-contained movie. It is thematically whole, creates a believable arc, and is wholly satisfying. Anything to follow cannot help but be lesser.
Related posts:
• No. 1 Alien (1979)
• No. 3 Alien3 (1992)
• No. 4 Alien Resurrection (1997)
• No. 5 Alien vs. Predator (2004)
• No. 6 Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
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