Aliens

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In the tradition of film franchises where the sequel is widely regarded as being better than the original, it tough to argue the two "James-Cameron-in-his-prime" titles of 'Aliens' and 'Terminator 2' (coming in a couple of weeks to this particular list). Both have similar reasons for this like advancing the story and characters, bringing something new to the table, not repeating itself, and of course each are headed by an absolute badass woman, here being Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), a mother lion type, protecting her cub.

A little background on the preceding film, 'Alien' - Taking place in the distant future, a commercial ship, "The Nostromo" and its crew are heading home, but get distress call from a distant moon. Obligated to investigate the crew does so, only to stumble on a nest of creepy face-hugging creatures that hug that face so damn hard an alien will eventually burst from your chest (die hard fans, please take that with a grain of salt). Anyway, spoiler alert, the alien gets big, and brutally kills everyone on board the Nostromo except Ripley, who manages to escape with the crew's cat, Jonesie.

'Aliens' picks up 57 years later, when Ripley is found in stasis by pure chance by her employers at the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. She is debriefed, but it's hard for them to buy her story about the alien creature they stumbled upon, since the moon where that original distress signal came from has since been colonized with no record of anything terrible happening.

Of course, once they shut Ripley's story down, they lose contact with the colony. They then ask her to help them investigate, now buying into her story, with her being the only person available with any familiarity of these aliens. Ripley flat out refuses at first, but she eventually accepts once learning that she'd be protected by an awesome group of Marines, and with the promise of destroying the aliens. The whole mission is headed by a guy named Burke (Paul Reiser) who, right from the get-go, comes off as a guy you dunno if you can trust.

Upon investigation, they find a girl named Rebecca, but we call her Newt (Carrie Henn). She's the sole survivor of an off-screen alien smorgasbord. Ripley instantly becomes a new mother figure and protector to Newt, which she needs to be, because the film pretty much cranks it to eleven once the Marines discover an alien nest. Much of the rest of the film is Ripley doing her survival thing again, but this time, it's an escort mission for her, trying to get herself and Newt safely off that God-forsaken rock.

The main group of these Marines consist of Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn), Private Hudson (Bill Paxton), Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope), Private Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), Sergeant Apone (Al Matthews), and their android, Bishop (Lance Henriksen). There are plenty more, but we could be here all day. The film does a great job of letting us get to know and care about this particular group of characters, and that serves very well for how the film unfolds.

Of the series, I've always felt this one to be the most revolutionary as well. Released in 1986, horror at the time was completely my taste, but it's hard to deny that 'Aliens' pulled two great tricks from its hat. For one, the survivor girl was incredibly confident, take-charge, and bad ass, while other horror survivor girls did fine, but they were all still very much victims. Ripley just don't play that, don't get on her bad side.

The second thing it does is turn horror into action, and let me just say, horror/action is a fantastic sub-genre, giving you the adrenaline you want from both sides. 'Aliens' is the golden standard for it, and not much has been able to follow in its footsteps successfully.

'Aliens' place in movie history is unique, setting the bar for sci-fi action so much so that a lot of alien movies outside of this franchise are often said to be inspired by it, or at least compared to it. Personally, I see a lot of inspiration from this from titles like 'Attack the Block', 'Cloverfield', 'Pitch Black' and 'Starship Troopers'. There are probably a lot more straight-to-video releases I'm missing too. It's an amazing sequel that still totally holds up as on not only one of the best sequels of all time, but one of the best movies of all time.

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