The sec­ond movie in the Alien Quadrilogy (IMDB/Ama­zon) is Aliens and is directed by James Cameron. The Alien Quadrilogy pack­age is very nice by the way with very slick and nice-looking open­ing DVD sequences in night-vision green, futur­is­tic com­puter flow­charts and such. After select­ing the director’s cut, I was greeted with a mes­sage from the direc­tor which I remem­bered hap­pened with Alien as well.

In a recent inter­view with James Cameron, he spoke about how it is that a good film­maker will honor the orig­i­nal when mak­ing a sequel and he cer­tainly did this with Aliens. (I would imag­ine that since he holds sequel-makers in such high esteem that he prob­a­bly isn’t so happy about what has hap­pened with the Ter­mi­na­tor movies [T5 is in the mak­ing by Cameron by-the-by].) As a sequel, this is lov­ingly made from the original.

In the orig­i­nal Alien, the sole-survivor of the Nos­tromo, War­rant Office Rip­ley is found after float­ing in space for 57 years, two years after her daugh­ter has died. Upon return­ing to Earth, she has con­stant night­mares of the alien that had slaugh­tered her fel­low crew-members and is sus­pended from work for Weyland-Yutani because com­pany rep­re­sen­ta­tives don’t believe her story. They say that aliens haven’t been found on LV-426 where the orig­i­nal alien attacked a Nos­tromo crew mem­ber as a par­a­site; there have been fam­i­lies liv­ing there for years.

Orig­i­nally, the crew of the Nos­tromo were diverted to LV-426 to inves­ti­gate a dis­tress call which turned out to be a warn­ing bea­con setup by a derelict ship of unknown ori­gin. Not long after Rip­ley is relieved of duty, con­tact is lost with the colonists on LV-426 and Rip­ley is given an offer to go in with Colo­nial Marines to find out why; Ripley’s role is that of mil­i­tary advi­sor hav­ing first-hand and up-close deal­ings with what may be the rea­son for the lost con­tact. What ensues is noth­ing more than a scary roller-coaster ride of sus­pense, com­bat and res­cue operations.

Sigour­ney Weaver received her first Oscar nom­i­na­tion for her por­trayal of Rip­ley. With­out her emo­tional dis­play of wak­ing from her night­mares it would not have been believ­able that she would want to face the mon­sters that dom­i­nate her sleep in real life again. In addi­tion, she knew she was betrayed by Weyland-Yutani as a crew mem­ber of the Nos­tromo and that she would have to trust them again that she would not be expend­able. After see­ing this movie so many times, I got this deep sense that many of the Marines sent in to res­cue the colonists were absolutely expend­able and I often won­der if they didn’t mean for Rip­ley to die as well.

REALISM GRADE > MARINES: B

The lieu­tenant who was in charge of the pla­toon of Colo­nial Marines was prone to freez­ing and really wasn’t so believ­able as a grad­u­ate of the Naval Acad­emy. But, this fits my the­ory that many of the Marines sent in were expendable.

While I could give the por­trayal of Marines here to be accu­rate in the sense that the Marine char­ac­ters like Gor­man, Hud­son and Apone were either incom­pe­tent or too salty for their own good. And, yes, while I am say­ing that Gor­man was incom­pe­tent and that Hud­son was too salty, I am say­ing that Apone was too salty as well. For a fairly moti­vated sergeant, my only expla­na­tion as to why he would clearly be wear­ing an Army Sergeant First Class insignia is that he’s a salty old f***. His demeanor is pro­fes­sional and his talk is tough, but I’m bet­ting that he’s not really with the pro­gram. Either way, there is no real expla­na­tion for why a Marine is wear­ing an army rank insignia and so I give this a B for realism.

REALISM GRADE > MONSTERS: A

Cameron really one-upped the orig­i­nal Alien by intro­duc­ing a new alien into the cur­rent life­cy­cle of egg/facehugger/chestburster/adult alien by cre­at­ing a queen alien. The queen is the one who lays all the eggs. The queen was alluded to mid­way through the movie and then appears in the cli­max of the film in a sur­pris­ing twist. The alien is 14-feet tall with a very long whip-like tail with sword-like tip. Very nasty. Very remarkable.

REALISM GRADE > ANDROIDS: A

We are intro­duced to Bishop who prefers the term arti­fi­cial per­son to android. We see him again in the Alien uni­verse in the remain­ing parts of the quadrilogy. He’s top-notch. A very fun part of the movie is when Pri­vate Hud­son calls out Bishop to “do the thing with the knife” where he takes his K-Bar and puts his hand on the table and stabs the table between the thumb and fore­fin­ger, stabs near the pinkie, back to the first posi­tion and then back and forth to cover all the places between fin­gers; because he is an android, he does this remark­ably fast. Other Marines had grabbed Hudson’s hand and put Bishop’s hand over it while he did “the thing with the knife” and it was pretty funny watch­ing Hud­son yelling while his eyes lit up freak­ing out. How­ever, Bishop missed slightly; he cut his fin­ger and was bleed­ing that white gunk that we saw in the first Alien movie when Ash was bashed open. Cameron wrote the script and he is just so smart; he wanted Rip­ley to dis­cover that there was an android on this mis­sion and so as Bishop sits down with Rip­ley offer­ing corn­bread, he notices the cut and she flips out when she sees what he is bleeding.

REALISM GRADE > TECH: A

Every­thing about this movie is so well thought out. LV-426 is being ter­raformed so there is a gigan­tic atmos­pheric proces­sor; looks totally real. The com­bat gear that the Marines use is totally believ­able. This is Cameron’s first use of load­ers which he uses again in Avatar exten­sively. Cameron got his start because he was a prop and effects guy.

REALISM GRADE > ROBOTS: A+

Even though these may not really be con­sid­ered robots, there are these auto-targeting machine guns which are called sen­try units which the Marines use to estab­lish a perime­ter. They were com­pletely miss­ing from the the­atri­cal release by the way. Again, sim­ply top notch. I give this an A+ because some­times the sci­ence fic­tion in movies is so good that it should be adapted for real life and this is a prime example.

REALISM GRADE > OVERALL: A

This movie rocks for so many rea­sons. It’s got Oscar-nominated per­for­mance, it’s got Oscar-winning spe­cial effects and sound effects edit­ing. It’s action-packed. The char­ac­ters are gen­uinely moti­vated and not contrived.

The real­ism of the movie is just splen­did. If you had to watch a sci­ence fic­tion movie for the sheer plea­sure of really liv­ing in another world, this one can’t dis­ap­point. You may not like the vio­lence in the movie, but there really aren’t many sci­ence fic­tion movies with­out vio­lence for some reason.

Aliens gets an A.

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