You Love to See It: Aliens

Aliens, James Cameron’s 1986 action-horror followup to Ridley Scott’s 1979 sleeper hit, starts twice, but don’t mistake that for a stumble. For the first twenty-odd minutes we follow Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, the sole survivor of the titular organism’s predation in the previous film, as she wakes from decades of cryogenic sleep and adjusts to a world in which her loved ones are gone and she has no place in society. Once she’s tapped as an advisor to a military expedition to a colony world that’s gone dark, Cameron hits the soft reset and introduces an entirely new cast of characters so smoothly and quickly that it’s like we’ve known them for weeks by the time they pile into a dropship and plummet toward their doom.

Ripley, of course, has a whole movie’s worth of characterization as a resourceful, cautious survivor behind her, and that solid base allows Paul Reiser’s corporate operator Carter Burke and the contingent of marines aboard the troopship Sulaco to slot neatly into a world defined in part by her reactions and opinions. Her distrust of the android Bishop, her clashes with the loudmouth marine grunt Hicks and the inexperienced field officer Lieutenant Gorman, her maternal instincts toward the similarly isolated and hunted orphan girl Newt; Aliens uses Ripley’s solidity to immediately define and flesh out the people she meets. It’s brilliant craftsmanship on the part of the cast and script.

Speaking of the script, Dan O’Bannon and Cameron are as tight and thematically coherent as screenwriters here as either of them ever got. Their characterization of the marines is a master class in short-form introductions, moving from the swagger and bravado of the troopship to the chaos and tears of the ambush on the colony in a matter of minutes. We find out who’s friends with who, who’s breaking balls, who sits at the top of the pecking order — twenty minutes later it all gets thrown into a meat grinder and splattered all over the walls of the colony’s reactor. And then, beautifully, the grief and paranoia and remorse of the survivors is even more compelling than watching the dynamics gel was in the first place.

Newt, played by child actress Carrie Henn in her first and last role, cements just how much the film is about Ripley learning that her own daughter died of old age while she drifted frozen in space. It’s appropriate that she becomes the movie’s emotional nexus and, like Ripley, a point of reference to learn something definitive about each character around her. Vasquez and Hicks are indifferent to her, Gorman uncomfortable, Burke patronizing and indifferent — these traits factor meaningfully into the film’s plot and structure. Nothing in Aliens is wasted, and far from making the movie feel overly constructed or artificial, the result is a sense of easy, naturalistic humanity.