5 out of 5

Director: James Cameron

Yup. There’s no way to offer new information with this review. Aliens takes the minimalist approach to Alien, dissects the combination of horror and blockbuster (that Ridley Scott’s original had difficulty realizing, in my opinion, in the last quarter of the film) and decides to go all the way with it, upping the ante on edge-of-your-seat and delivering the respectable kind of ride that James Cameron has made a career of knocking out of the park, sans (as a plus) his preachier themes that crept into the likes of, say, Avatar. There were a lot of modifiers in that sentence, but you’re with me, eh? We’re back with Ripley, 57 years later after the end of film one, woken again from a cryogenic sleep and trying to convince some big business cats to kill those damned alien scum back on that damned planet. No, she doesn’t want to go back to the planet as a “guide” to dealing with the buggers, but wouldn’t ya’ know she gets sucked in anyway. Why is this different from other Hollywood go-get-’em films? And it’s hard to say. Except that you recognize each face in the movie, that this is crafted purely as an intense film experience, that the aliens are effing scary because they are contextually scary (i.e. not just special effects and music stings), and that, well, Cameron knows how to balance audience respect and eye candy. That there are plenty of thank-yew nods to the first film lets us know that we couldn’t have gotten here w/o Ridley’s imagination, but the lack of OVERT references (i.e. Die Hard 2’s “this always happens to me whooooaa”) shows us that this is a whole new beast. Hi, 2011 Transformers effing 3, this is how you make a proper film.