For the follow-up to Ridley Scott's immensely successful and incredibly terrifying sci-fi masterpiece, Alien, director James Cameron decided that it probably wasn't a good idea to make another movie in exactly the same vein; instead, he opted to do things differently, taking the ideas and concepts that made Alien so appealing (and did we mention terrifying?) and moving them all into the realms of a totally different genre. Which is to say, whereas Alien is a horror movie with sci-fi aesethics, Aliens is a balls to the wall blockbuster. And man does it kick ass! Aliens picks up where the last movie left off, with our hero Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) awaking from cryosleep to find that the remnants of her old life have long drifted away into the vacuums of time. She's soon manipulated into escorting a group of Marines to an abandoned base on a lowly planet, and before long is facing off against not one, but dozens of Xenomorphs. The attention to detail apparent here is astounding, the cast are brilliant and memorable, the movie dark, funny and terrifying; you could not have asked for a better sequel.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
