Aliens

Year of Release:  1986

Director:  James Cameron

Screenplay:  James Cameron, from a story by James Cameron, David Giler and Walter Hill

Starring:  Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein

Running Time:  137 minutes (theatrical cut); 157 minutes (director's cut)

Genre:  Science-fiction, action, horror

Following the events of Alien (1979), Ripley (Weaver) is found in suspended animation in an escape pod.  Recuperating on a space station orbiting Earth, she learns that she has been drifting through space in stasis for 57 years.   Traumatised by her experiences, her situation is only made worse by the fact that no-one believes her story.  It turns out that the planet where the Alien was found, Planet LV-426, has been home to a human colony for the past twenty years.  That is until Earth loses contact with the LV-426 colony, and Ripley is persuaded to join a platoon of Colonial Marines on a mission to investigate.  

Aliens is one of the great sequels in film history.  While Alien is a horror film in space, Aliens takes a completely different approach and is a war film in space, in fact writer/director James Cameron described it as being a Vietnam film in space, with it's depiction of a technologically superior invading force being repelled by an enemy which they have completely underestimated.  The film takes it's time building up the characters and suspense, but when the Aliens do appear in all their slimy, toothy, insectoid glory the film immediately kicks into high gear and doesn't let up until the end credits roll.  The Aliens are a largely unseen enemy, usually attacking en masse or hidden in shadow, or moving so fast that you can barely get a good look at them, this was partly practical because the production couldn't get many Alien costumes.  The action scenes are well staged and exciting, and the special effects still hold up today, with the Alien Nest, where their luckless victims are gruesomely cocooned to be impregnated by the facehuggers, memorable and disturbing.  The lengthy set up means that we get to spend time with the characters, they are not just there to be eaten by the monsters.  There is a theme of motherhood in the movie, Ripley is a mother, and there is a scene which is in the extended director's cut, but not in the theatrical cut,  where she is informed that he daughter had died during her absence.  The sole survivor of the colony is a young girl called Newt (played by Carrie Henn) and she becomes a surrogate daughter to Ripley.  In the film's climax however, Ripley has to battle the vast Alien Queen, which lays the Alien eggs.  It's the battle between two mothers: one seeking to protect her daughter, the other seeking vengeance for her slaughtered children.  The heart of the film really belongs to Newt and Ripley, the scenes between them have real emotional heft, and the male characters with a couple of notable exceptions, by and large take a back seat.  Sigourney Weaver gives one of her best performances as Ripley, who is one of the great characters in action movies, tough, compassionate and ruthlessly practical where necessary

The film continues and expands the anti-corporate theme of the original, with the treacherous weasel Carter Burke (played by Paul Reiser), an oily space yuppie and Eighties Guy par excellance who unfortunately feels all too contemporary, whose actions lead Ripley to contemplate whether the humans are any better than the Aliens.  Also in the supporting cast is Michael Biehn as likeable Marine Hicks, and provides the closest thing that the film has to a love interest for Ripley; Lance Henriksen as the soft spoken but slightly sinister android (although "artificial person" is the preferred term) Bishop; and Bill Paxton as Hudson, the most arrogant of the Marines, but the one who quickly falls apart.  

The 1980s were the era of flamboyant, excessive action spectacles, where living action figures routinely blasted enough firepower to wipe out a small country, as well as throwing up endless sequels to anything even slightly popular (which, to be fair, is something that for better or worse shows no sign of ever going away).  Aliens is a high point, expanding and developing the story of it's predecessor, as well as taking it in a completely new direction, igniting the screen with spectacular carnage, and nightmarish visions, but with added intelligence and heart, putting it ahead of it's contemporaries.  The best of the Alien franchise, and one of the highpoint of action cinema.

Sigourney Weaver hunts Aliens

      

Strange Days

Year of Release:  1995
Director:  Kathryn Bigelow
Screenplay:  James Cameron and Jay Cocks, from a story by James Cameron
Starring:  Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Vincent D'Onofrio, Michael Wincott
Running Time:  145 minutes
Genre:  Science-fiction, thriller

Set during the last two days of 1999, in a nightmarish Los Angeles on the verge of all-out war, the film tells the story of Lenny (Fiennes), an ex-cop turned black market distributor of illegal virtual reality recordings (known as "SQUIDS") which allow the user to relive the memories and experiences of the recorder.  When Lenny stumbles upon a recording of a murder, he and his friend Mace (Bassett) find themselves the targets of a high-level conspiracy.

Watched now, this film feels like a dry-run for Bigleow's Detroit (2017), dealing with similar themes of racial tension and police corruption albeit in a science-fiction setting.  The film is visually stylish, and Bigelow is an excellent action director ensuring that the set-pieces are well-staged, and she creates a real apocalyptic feel to the whole thing.  However the film feels stretched and strangely dated, inevitably due to the setting and the technology, and it never quite escapes it's mid 1990s roots, also Fiennes is too clean-cut for the scuzzy Lenny.  Angela Bassett is impressive, though, as the ass-kicking limo driver, Mace.        

To be fair, it's not really a bad film, and cyberpunk fans should enjoy it, but it's certainly not spectacular. 

Ralph Fiennes and Angel Bassett in Strange Days

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Year of Release:  1991
Director:  James Cameron
Screenplay:  James Cameron and William Wisher
Starring:  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick
Running Time:  137 minutes
Genre:  Science-fiction, action,

In the year 2029, a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles is a battlefield in an ongoing war between a small group of human resistance fighters and the machines controlled by the vast computer system known as Skynet.  In a last ditch attempt to destroy the resistance, Skynet sends a liquid metal, shapeshifting T-1000 Terminator (Patrick) back in time to the 1990s  to kill the ten year old John Connor (Furlong), who would grow up lead the resistance.  The resistance, however, is able to send a reprogrammed older model T-800 Terminator (Schwarzenegger) back in time to act as the young Connor's protector.  John, the T-800 and John's mother Sarah (Hamilton) - the target of a failed assassination attempt ten years earlier - are forced into a desperate struggle to survive, and possibly save the future.

Whereas The Terminator (1984) was a modestly budgeted science-fiction chase movie, everything here is bigger including the action, the budget, the length and Schwarzenegger himself who, alongside director James Cameron, really broke through to the action "A" list with The Terminator.  Terminator 2 was groundbreaking in it's day for it's visual effects, particularly it's use of CGI which was really still in it's infancy in 1991, it was also the most expensive movie ever made up to that time (although Cameron himself has broken that record several times since).  It broke box-office records and remains one of the most iconic films of the 1990s.  Although, of course, bigger doesn't necessarily mean better, but this really does improve upon the original, building on and expanding the world and the themes of the first.  The tone of the film is surprisingly downbeat and bleak, with the characters not being particularly likable most of the time, although when your chased by an unkillable, shapeshifting robot that exists solely to kill you, and you know for a fact that the world is about to be annihilated in a couple of years, you could probably be forgiven for having a case of the grumpys.  The performances are good, with Schwarzenegger delivering one of his most memorable appearances.  Schwarzenegger is an actor of limited range, but he knows what those limitations are and he plays to his strengths, and what he does well, he does better than anyone.  Linda Hamilton gives an intense performance as the traumatised Sarah Connor, a world away from the cute, fluffy waitress from the beginning  of the first film, she's almost a human Terminator here.  Edward Furlong made his acting debut as the ten year old John Connor and turns in a fine performance.  The action is spectacular, and the special effects, surprisingly, have aged very well and still hold up today.  Full of memorable moments, this is one of the best movies of the 1990s.

He'll be back:  Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgement Day

  
 

Galaxy of Terror

Year of Release:  1981
Director:  Bruce D. Clark
Screenplay:  Marc Siegler and Bruce D. Clark
Starring:  Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Ray Walston, Taaffe O'Connell, Robert Englund, Grace Zabriske, Sid Haig
Running Time:  81 minutes
Genre:  Horror, science-fiction

The crew of the spaceship Quest are sent to a remote planet to investigate the disappearance of an earlier craft.  The rescue team soon discover a strange alien pyramid , and are attacked and gruesomely killed one by one by strange creatures, corresponding to their individual fears.

This is one of numerous rip-offs of Alien (1981) that seems to infest cinema in the early 1980s, on their way to clogging up the bargain basement racks of video stores the world over.  Produced by B-movie maestro Roger Corman on an obviously low budget, this film is graphically gruesome in a  way that would be funny, if it wasn't for a notorious scene where a female crewmember (played by Taffee O'Connell) is stripped, sexually assaulted and killed by a giant slime covered maggot-like monster.  The film is oddly constructed, with what should be an essentially simple plot complicated by bizarre subplots that are either never properly developed or just dropped entirely.  The eclectic cast includes Erin Moran (Joanie from Happy Days) alongside genre stalwarts such as Grace Zabriske (Twin Peaks), Sid Haig (House of 1,000 Corpses) and Freddy Krueger himself Robert Englund.  The film's strength is it's imaginative production design, from future director James Cameron, who also worked as the Second Unit Director, in fact echoes of the spaceship sets in this film can be seen in Cameron's Aliens (1986).

This isn't the worst of the Alien rip-offs, but your best sticking with the original.  The sex scene is exploitative, and many people may find it very offensive, so proceed with caution.

Robert Englund faces a Galaxy of Terror