Movie #60 – Aliens (1986) - 137 min, cert 18.
Having put herself back into suspended animation at the end of the first film, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is awoken by a deep space salvage team who have happened across her craft some 57 years later. The planet where she encountered the aliens has been colonized in the intervening time, so no one believes her story. Some time later, contact with these settlers is lost and Ripley is persuaded to accompany a team of marines who are going to investigate. They still don’t really believe her story, so they are taken by surprise when they get there and find that the aliens are real and have taken over the colony. The only survivor they find is a little girl hiding in the air ducts. The marine force is decimated by their first encounter with the aliens, and the few that survive have to find a way to escape back to their ship so they can blow the aliens up from orbit.
Ridley Scott directed the original as a horror movie set in space, with lots of quiet, creepy scenes where you’re just waiting for the alien to jump out. This is a James Cameron film, and the difference is noticeable. There are still some horror elements around, but it is essentially an action movie, with lots of big battle sequences. Michael Biehn is great as Hicks, the ever-cool corporal who finds himself in command when all the other officers are out of action. I’ve always thought him a very underrated actor, but he’s an apparent favourite of Cameron, having also been in The Terminator and The Abyss. There isn’t a huge amount of dialogue, but what there is is often punchy and memorable.
Score – 8/10. Not exactly a heavyweight, but certainly entertaining. So 60 films in, my top ten looks exactly as it did ten films ago:
1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
2. Pulp Fiction (1994)
3. Forrest Gump (1994)
4. Amelie (2001)
5. Fight Club (1999)
6. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
7. Toy Story 3 (2010)
8. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
9. WALL-E (2008)
10. Memento (2000)
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