"Get away from her, you bitch!"
After surviving the onslaught of Alien, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has spent 57 years in stasis,
floating aimlessly through space. By chance she is picked up by a salvaging
vessel and woken up from her deep sleep. Upon telling her story to the Weyland-Yutani
Corporation she is met with scepticism and is reduced to working in a loading
dock. Later she is visited by Burke (Paul Reiser) who informs her that Weyland
Co has lost contact with colonists on LV-426 and he requests that she returns
to the planet with a group of Colonial Marines to discover the fate of the
colonists. Ripley reluctantly agrees and joins the expedition only to discover
that the aliens have struck again, only this time on a much greater scale.
Unlike Alien which
was a sci-fi/horror, Aliens is more
of an action-adventure in the mould of director James Cameron’s recent super
hit Terminator and reminded me a little of Predator. In the end the slight
genre change had little effect on the final product as the film is in my view
very close to as good as the original. The sets look incredible and realistic.
I’m a big fan of a well designed and dressed set and those in Aliens are superb. The sets of 80s
science fiction movies always look more impressive to me than those of today
because you get the feeling that the actors are really there, interacting with
their environment as supposed to being stood in front of a green screen and
stepping over green boxes. The ships, vehicles, planet and colonist’s HQ all
look great. The design of the guns is also very good. They remain grounded in
reality but with a slight futuristic edge to them. The effects are a mixed bag
with some looking as good as anything today but others looking noticeably aged.
