Aliens Is a Perfect Movie

This is how you write a sequel

I'll say it again: Aliens is perfect.

We've forgotten how great James Cameron is after three Avatars. People roll their eyes at the Fern Gully ripoff and see Cameron as a special effects blockbuster machine. But despite the recent spectacle-over-substance material he's put out, including the tremendous cultural icon Titanic (which I maintain owes more to the subject matter and visuals than to the story), we forget the incredible, movie- and story-changing effects his past movies have had.

Aliens is the perfect example of peak James Cameron. There is something transcendental about the sheer excellence of the story, and every writer can learn from it.

A sequel that isn't

That's not right.

Alien is tremendous in its own right. Ridley Scott brought us a terrifying xenomorph, with a spider for that hugs your face and lays eggs in you, then explodes out of your chest as a bipedal acid-for-blood killing machine. He sets it on a dark, wet, brooding, huge yet claustrophobic spaceship deep in space, with a blue-collar crew who all die... except Ripley, the character type you'd normally expect to die first. Alien is pure genre-defining horror.

On the bones of Alien, any director could have phoned in a sequel. That sequel would have at least been profitable and could have been good by sticking to the same themes, tropes, and mood, with an alien out of nightmare.

But Cameron doesn't phone things in. And nothing shows it better than Aliens.

Now for something completely different

We're bad and we know it.

Aliens has terrifying moments and underlying tension, but it's not a horror movie. It's an action movie. It's a war movie. And it's one of the best action movies ever made.

Cameron takes a hard right turn and spends the first hour of the movie introducing us to the Colonial Marines. We meet Hudson, Hicks, Vasquez and Bishop and get to know them as they travel with Ripley to the planet from the first movie. We see what badasses they are throughout the trip. There's nothing they can't handle, and they know it. Our protagonist Ripley looks and acts small in comparison. Her warnings about the xenomorph seem trite, her fear misplaced. If there had been just one marine in the first movie, it would have lasted ten minutes.

It makes their first encounter with the aliens that much worse. Cameron takes all the original aspects of the aliens - eggs, facehuggers, acid blood, intelligence, stealth and horrifying appearance - and accentuates all of it. Their nightmare abilities come into play organically and cohesively, and on top of all of it, Cameron adds still more.

The beats of a beating

YES WHY DON'T MORE PEOPLE DO THIS

The marines find the colony wiped out with only one survivor, a little girl named Newt. And when they finally encounter the aliens - dozens this time - they are completely unprepared.

The aliens are terrifying and kill or kidnap all but five of the marines at the entrance to their creepy hive. Ripley has to rescue them as her heroic nature starts to show. Their defeat triggers a pending explosion in the colony's reactor (hello, ticking clock) and the remaining badass marines make the decision we always want horror victims to make: they decide to leave.

"Nuke the site from orbit" is part of catchphrase legend. The Marines choose to bug out, the choice we scream at all movie characters to make. Don't go downstairs, just leave the house, don't be all macho. They do what we'd do and say to hell with this. The Marines are smart. Ripley's smart.

But they can't leave. They continue to be smart, setting up defenses and trying to survive. Everything they do is smart and what we want them to do... and the aliens keep killing them anyway. It doesn't help that Burke is a corporate traitor; we understand everything he does, even when we hate him. When he's uncovered, the Marines are going to kill him (again, smart), but the aliens attack en masse. Our protagonists make a last-ditch effort to escape, but most of the remaining Marines die, and Newt is captured by the aliens.

Ripley, Hicks, and Bishop reach the shuttle and are ready to leave. But Ripley decides she's going back to the hive, in the heart of the reactor that's twenty minutes from blowing up, to rescue Newt.

All the ideas

Get away from her.

Aliens is a constant fount of incredible ideas that are tropes now but were genre-changing at the time. And any single one of these ideas is enough for a full movie to run with.

The look of the Marines, with camouflage armor, huge pulse rifles and a troop carrier that's essentially a tank, influenced what we think of as a "space marine" in every subsequent movie and would have been genre-defining if it were the only thing Aliens offered. Ripley and the lieutenant watching the grainy helmet cams of the Marines as they're slaughtered in the initial attack would have been brilliant in isolation. The beeping motion sensors that signal unseen but nearing aliens are tremendous on their own.

Just adding one or two aliens and face huggers could have fueled an entire sequel. But Cameron adds dozens of aliens, plus an alien queen that Ripley fights in the climax. The queen and her aliens set up a mirrored narrative dynamic with Ripley, who becomes a mother figure for Newt. And the epic final battle between Ripley and the queen after she sneaks aboard the Marine spaceship, with Ripley driving a robot loader to fight, would have been a highlight of any movie that just had that development alone.

Cameron gives us all this in one movie. It catapults Aliens into one of the greatest movies of all time.

The perfect movie (and the perfect sequel)

Uh oh.

Aliens shows us how to put together a perfect story and a perfect sequel at the same time:

• Write a sequel that subverts expectations from the original story

• Take the strengths of the original story, dial them to eleven and add more

• Use dependable tropes (ticking clock, protagonist/antagonist mirrors) to add to the story

• Build up smart, capable protagonists who still can't handle the threat

• Let the protagonists choose what the viewer would do (and it still doesn't work)

• Throw in every great idea you have and don't hold back

Sequels that surpass the original's excellence all follow the Aliens format to some degree. Terminator 2 (Cameron's second-best movie imho), Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek II, The Road Warrior/Fury Road, Army of Darkness, Godfather II, Winter Soldier, Logan, John Wick (4>3>2>1), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (3>2>1), Spider-Man 2/No Way Home/Across the Spiderverse, The Dark Knight, all of these sequels surpass the original source material with some or all of the features from Aliens. They are all, with the exception of Godfather II, such departures that they can be viewed as standalones without seeing the originals.

But Aliens is a masterclass in storytelling and sequel-making. Next time you watch it, watch it as a disciple of the craft. And let yourself be amazed at what Cameron created.