Bigger, Badder, and Bloodier – Aliens Redefined

Here is the rewritten article:

I’m no James Cameron newbie — being born in 1998 predisposes you to having Titanic played around you at all times for the first five years of your life — but I’ll be the first to admit that Aliens was a massive blindspot in my otherwise very thorough action movie education. Despite being allowed to watch practically every ‘80s movie on the market thanks to my parents, the entire Alien franchise as a whole was something I missed, in part because of my fear of xenomorphs as a child (thanks, Disney World) and partially because, despite my voracious appetite for more mature films, it’s probably written in a parenting guide somewhere that showing your child a film about bloodthirsty parasitic monsters when she’s ten isn’t exactly advisable.

But I did eventually get there, thanks to the upcoming release of Alien: Romulus, the trailer for which both scared the pants off me and finally intrigued me to see what all the fuss was about. I’ve always opted for more traditional monster films — see: my ability to quote The Lost Boys front to back — but my fascination with final girls gave me confidence that I’d enjoy the franchise, including the sequel directed by the same guy who helmed Avatar, a movie I saw three times in theaters when I was eleven despite only understanding half of it.

I’m sure it’s absolute heresy, but I do think that Aliens is the better film of the two. Ridley Scott’s original project, at least for me, seemed more thriller than horror — the genre everyone refers to the franchise as, and where I think Alien 3 really excels — and aside from the terror inherent in the concept of parasitic facehuggers, it lacked what everyone I know hyped it up to be: truly scary. Cameron taking the most thrilling aspects of what worked in Alien and punching them up into an action film fits the xenomorphs (and their queen) much better.

Combine that with a further understanding of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation — a mega-entity that partners with the military almost like they own them — and Cameron’s done triple the work Scott had to flesh out the Alien universe into something big and iconic enough to latch onto. Without this film, we might still have Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, but I’m almost certain that wouldn’t be the case for the handfuls of novels, comic books, video games, and other spin-offs that the franchise has generated since 1986. While Scott was the one to establish the lived-in feel of the Alien franchise that makes it so memorable, Cameron took that idea the rest of the way, setting the stage for what perhaps no one expected would be a franchise still alive and well almost forty years later.

Aliens is the best film in the franchise that surpasses even the original. James Cameron takes us further into this world than Ridley Scott. The characters are all ones you care about as they get increasingly picked off. Aliens explores the ideas and elements of the murderous beings with more depth than the original.

REVIEW
Aliens is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

WATCH ON MAX