If there's one thing that movie fans love to do it's read hidden meanings and symbolism into their favourite movies. For the original Alien, theories floated around suggesting that the movie was a metaphor for rape - with Aliens, one of the dominant theories is that it served as a metaphor for the Vietnam War. The difference between these two theories is that one is speculation whereas the Vietnam War theory is actually fact; a metaphor fully intended by James Cameron and his collaborators. The comparison should be fairly obvious to anyone with a basic grasp of the history of the Vietnam War: it was a war driven by corporate interests and the notion of a permanent war economy in which naive young men and women fought an enemy they knew very little about. It was an intractable war which effectively had no end, where arrogance and superior firepower met their match against a committed enemy. As Cameron himself expressed it, there was "a lot of firepower and very little wisdom, and it didn't work." Whether or not any hint of racism can be inferred through comparing the Vietnamese resistance to aliens is another matter entirely.
