I wouldn’t dream of revealing what Ripley and the marines find the aliens doing there, just that “Aliens” becomes an all-out war between the two species, as spaceships crash and generators overload and power goes out. Director Cameron knows that suggestion is more terrifying than sight; we see evidence of the monsters, then we see blips on a motion tracker, then we hear them scurrying around our heavily-armed but terrified heroes, then we hear automated machine guns trying to stave off their relentless assault. The violence is intense and graphic, but not as gory as in more recent films, which have chosen the easy routes of being descriptive and surgical instead of the more difficult road of actually being scary. The musical score by James Horner is completely appropriate, with fiery brass interludes during combat sequences, as well as one of the most effective and certainly the most imitated of chase pieces. But Horner is even more appropriate during moments of calm, when suspense is building behind the eyes of all involved. The same less-is-more approach goes for the aliens themselves, who are shadowed more often then not, and whose history is left nameless and lost in the history of a fifteen billion-year-old universe, as if God Himself were slapping us down for thinking there’s nothing more interesting in the cosmos than self-obsession with our own capitalism. If I have been short on description of the monsters, it is to preserve the unfolding of “Aliens’” secrets, culminating in the dialogue “there must be something out there we haven’t seen yet.”
“Aliens” knows that we may be here to see the monsters, but they’re not our heroes. Among those fighting alongside Sigourney Weaver is one of the best ensemble casts assembled for an action picture. Michael Biehn is a cool-headed and professional corporal, Lance Henriksen is a twitchy, soft-spoken android, Paul Reiser is perfectly cast as a Company crony, and Jenette Goldstien is a hard, seemingly invincible marine with the biggest gun. And in one of the film’s many masterstrokes, the marines find a survivor at the colony, a little girl nicknamed Newt (Carrie Henn), who is both innocent and hardened from watching everyone she every knew die, and whom Ripley adopts as an eerie surrogate for her own dead daughter. But perhaps most memorable is Bill Paxton as Private Hudson, who has the reaction we’ve all been waiting for in movies like this when things start going wrong: “what the f—k are we gonna do now?” Together they immortalize about a half-dozen quotes into pop culture, among them the mission statement that “a bunch of colonists need us to save them from their virginity.”
“Aliens” is one of the most intense and unrelenting films ever made, not just about monsters and gore, but about courage under fire and under exhaustion. As such, it is not suitable for all viewers, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. But for those willing to spend two hours watching humankind reassert its right to survive, they will find “Aliens” is one of the best films of 1986, alongside such diverse fare as “Platoon” and “Hannah and Her Sisters.” It’s certainly my favorite film of the year.
P.S. The director’s cut of “Aliens” is available on DVD and is as good as the theatrical release. There is a bit of trade-off, however: the theatrical release is more urgent and driven, pulsing toward the terror even before we’ve seen it on screen, while the director’s cut loses some of this intensity to give us many more interesting details about Ripley, about the marines, about the colony, and about the monsters themselves.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night