The Plot: The planet from the original Alien has been colonized, and Ripley, 57 years after the events of the first film, has been found by a salvage crew. With greater fire-power she and a band of Marines attempt to liberate the colony from the Aliens, plural this time, which have invaded it. The Subtext: Aliens can be viewed as a strong allegory of the Vietnam War. An overly confident, heavily armed military find themselves in a battle with an enemy they can not comprehend, nor really see. They are in a morass-like war-zone, bogged down and demoralised. The film's poster read "This Time It's War!", while the crew nicknamed the film "Grunts in Space" during production. The Vietcong hid in tunnels, the Aliens hid in air-conditioning ducts. Troops in Vietnam and troops in Aliens are both led by incompetent officers and both were let down by civilian bureaucrats. Aliens is often read subtextually as a feminist film, and while that reading works as well, the Vietnam reading is just as strong, the film pulsing on the fear that an unknown enemy can strike silently in the foreign jungle atmosphere. Aliens, then, is both about the Vietnam war (especially in its accurate talk of rank, procedure, vernacular and its depictions of weaponry and uniform, all of which seem inspired by the images which became prevalent and thus well-known to the American public in light of the War's multifaceted media-coverage), and too about America's understanding of it, something which solidified in the 1980s when a slew of art (film, music, literature) looked back at the War with hindsight, giving the general public a greater understanding of one of the most ill-conceived battles in all of human history.
