Aliens was released in 1986, about a year before I came into this world, but for a multitude of fans who were bewitched by the original film in 1979, it was the end of a long period full of uncertainty and rampant speculation. In the years since its release, Aliens has become a mainstream classic that is endlessly quotable and viewed by many as the definitive shot in the arm that the Alien franchise needed. In a lot of respects, there wouldn’t be much of a franchise without Aliens, at least not one that has kept giving well into the 21st century. Most stories from fans regarding their love for Aliens typically stem from childhood, where they either sat in a theater or rented the VHS and were swept up by the indelible imagery of Colonial Marines blasting away at hordes of xenomorphs and the gargantuan Queen facing off against Ripley’s exo-suit in the third act. As evidenced by the retrospectives I’ve done for Alien3 and Alien, I experienced the films in a much different order, but there’s a lot more to that than you think.
My dad, who is no longer with us, was a die-in-the-wool Marine who served in Vietnam. Over the years, he’d tell me stories about what he went through during basic training and the friends he had, but it was evident that those experiences were buried deep and caused him a lot of grief that only copious amounts of alcohol could (seemingly) pacify. Unfortunately, those weekend drinking binges would bring out a level of aggression that bordered on insufferable. It typically culminated in my dad wanting to watch one of three movies: Full Metal Jacket (which would alternately delight and upset him), First Blood (which had the same effect) and Aliens. I believe he enjoyed Aliens because of the camaraderie between the Colonial Marines, and it never set him off the way the first two movies did, but because he was drunk and locked in a very specific mental state, I never wanted to be in the same room with him when he watched it.
In retrospect, I think that planted a tiny, deep seated bias towards Aliens that I couldn’t fully overcome let alone understand until I was 23. Having graduated from college, I lived on my own, and with Prometheus on the horizon at the time, I wanted to revisit the Alien movies in earnest with a more open mind. Needless to say, it was a unique experience. Because I had to physically distance myself from Aliens all those years ago, it felt like I was truly seeing it for the first time, and I was very impressed. It’s not one of those sequels that is so aggressive about mining new territory that it kicks dirt over its predecessor; on the contrary, it reveres the original film and builds on it by taking advantage of all the peripheral details that made Alien’s world so palpable. The Company (Weyland-Yutani) is not only fleshed out as the greedy, opportunistic, number crunching bastards they are (which has influenced countless Alien stories since), but we’re introduced to the Colonial Marines for the first time. Even the ill-fated colony Hadley’s Hope, which is situated on the same moon as the Engineer spacecraft that the Nostromo discovered half a century earlier, sheds a more intimate light on how working-class families function in even the most inhospitable conditions. James Cameron was so committed to preserving the aspects that made the original film so unique (corporate interests, blue collar dynamics off-world) while firmly situating his story in a universe where so many other things were going on; the Colonial Marines mention bug hunts several times in the film, which hints at a multitude of extraterrestrial species that humanity has encountered but we have never seen. The depth of world-building alone was a luxury that Aliens could afford and didn’t squander.
All of that aside, what made Aliens such a memorable film for me was its depth of characterization. The simplicity of Alien only allowed for rudimentary character development in that we could only get to know the main characters through their personalities and emotional reactions. However, Cameron ripped those limitations away by telling a much more ambitious story. In the first 20 minutes, we learn that Ripley has slept almost 60 years of her life away in deep space while her loved ones (particularly her daughter) died on Earth. On top of that, she has PTSD from her previous encounter with the Alien and she’s punished by her employers for surviving a horrific series of events that she has no physical evidence to prove even happened. It’s only when the shit hits the fan on a larger scale that she’s forced to confront her fears as well as her sense of loss and displacement. Think about that, for a second. Most sequels, especially those rooted in the horror genre, typically lose their bite because they want to show the audience something they’ve already seen before, but Aliens refuses to do that every step of the way. It takes everything memorable about the first film, including the facehugger, and amps them up to 11, but in so doing, Cameron anticipated that the world of Alien could suit more than one genre. It’s only after you’ve finished watching Aliens that you realize it’s more of an action drama than a horror thriller, but you’re also given the opportunity to be emotionally invested in the characters’ backstories and fates as opposed to helplessly watching them fall prey to the aliens. It’s a movie that thoughtfully and cleverly subverts expectations without being cheap about it, and that’s why Aliens has endured for so long as both a sequel and a sterling example of the sci-fi/action genre.
It was also during this time that I started reading the Dark Horse comics, and it became clear early on that the movie had a little too much influence on how people were perceiving the Alien franchise at that time. The upside to Aliens was that it opened a lot of people’s eyes to the untapped potential of the universe in which it unfolded, but the downside was that the Colonial Marines became the new focal point for the franchise in terms of marketing and merchandise. It wasn’t so much one indestructible xenomorph and its Lovecraft-ian trappings that people were enamored with, but a bunch of xenomorphs getting blasted to kingdom come by pulse rifle-wielding Marines and a Queen looming over them all. In the movie itself, the Queen was a force to be reckoned with; it felt new and terrifying. In the comics, though, Queens were popping up all over the place. There was even an Alien King that reared its head in Rogue. After trying and failing to read through the 12-issue Colonial Marines miniseries, the whole idea had pretty much devolved into self-parody. The movie cannot be blamed for this in the sense that a delicious food cannot be blamed for people gorging themselves on it to the point of sickness. In a lot of ways, Aliens was a blessing and a curse to the franchise, but today, I see it as a film that had the best of intentions and influenced countless fans and storytellers, even if the results haven’t been consistently stellar. More importantly, though, it shattered that glass ceiling and gave the Alien universe a license to evolve, for better or worse.