Aliens Retrospective: This Time It’s War

Say what you want about James Cameron, but the guy sure knows how to pitch a movie. For his Hollywood calling card The Terminator, he reportedly got his pal Lance Henriksen to crash into a meeting with the money men dressed as a killer cyborg, kicking open the door and staying in character until Cameron arrived to complete the presentation.

To seal the deal on Aliens, his tactic was more simple but no less effective: He wrote the word “Alien” on a piece of paper, added an “s,” then converted the “s” into a dollar sign. Ker-ching! With Cameron’s box-office potential proven by The Terminator, it was a no-brainer for the execs at 20th Century Fox, and Cameron had the green light to produce a gung-ho sequel to Ridley Scott’s slow-burning sci-fi horror classic.

Despite the critical and commercial success of Alien (almost $185 million box office vs its $11 million budget) Fox were initially reluctant to make a sequel, claiming that the first film didn’t make enough of a profit to warrant the risk. Lawsuits between Brandywine Productions, the company set up by Walter Hill, David Giler, and Gordon Carroll, and Fox followed. It wasn’t until Lawrence Gordon took over at Fox in 1984 that Cameron’s treatment for Aliens, then just titled Alien II and written in three days under the concept “Ripley with soldiers,” started moving forward.

By that stage, the eventual star of Alien, Sigourney Weaver, had made a few more films but wasn’t exactly a superstar, appearing in The Year of Living Dangerously and playing Bill Murray’s love interest in Ghostbusters. Casting her again in Aliens was another contentious issue – Cameron and then wife-and-producer Gale Hurd insisted that the movie could only be made with her reprising the role of Ellen Ripley, while Fox maintained they would forge ahead regardless with or without her. 

For her part, Weaver liked the screenplay but had misgivings about all the weaponry and military hardware involved. She is a member of a gun control lobby, and she kind of had a point – the M56 Smartgun, M41A pulse rifles, and the chunky M577 Armoured Personnel Carrier became almost characters in their own right. Nevertheless, Cameron won her over and the pay cheque certainly didn’t hurt. After receiving only $35,000 for Alien (still not bad for her first significant role), she was paid a cool $1 million plus a percentage of the profits to play Ripley again. She later said that she used her dislike of firearms to inform Ripley’s reactions to the posturing of the space marines in the film, up until the “moment of madness” when she cuts loose with a pulse rifle and flamethrower combo towards the end.

The screenplay fleshed out Ripley’s character in believable directions. After spending 57 years drifting in cryostasis, she’s in hot water with her employers at the Weyland-Yutani Corporation for blowing up their very expensive ship and feels out of place, especially when her daughter (now an old woman) passes away. She gets a job in a cargo bay piloting a really cool Power Loader, which might come in handy later, but she is still at a loss. Even so, she’s not keen on returning to LV-426 after contact is lost with terraforming colonists on the exo-moon, even if it is a way to clear her name and confront her demons. 

Reluctantly, she agrees, with one condition: that if aliens are responsible, the creatures are wiped out. Carter Burke (perfectly cast Paul Reiser), a typically slimy ‘80s executive for the company, agrees.

So it’s off on a bug hunt we go, and we’re introduced to the rest of the characters onboard the Sulaco. The casting isn’t quite as strong as Alien and some of the faces get lost as an element of the cannon fodder cast-stuffing that particularly plagued Ridley Scott’s prequels came into play (remember Frost, anyone?) Otherwise, it’s another exercise in skilful back-of-a-postcard casting and characterization. 

Michael Biehn, teaming up with Cameron again after The Terminator, is efficiently heroic as Hicks; likewise Lance Henriksen, who was initially slated to play Cameron’s cyborg but ended up in a small role, does great work as the ship’s android Bishop. Bill Paxton (who also had a small part in The Terminator) adds a little comic relief as Hudson, who proves all talk and no trousers once he gets on the ground. Jenette Goldstein would become a fan favourite playing Vasquez, a badass of few words, despite the problematic element of going brownface for the role.

LV-426 is as bleak as we remember from the first movie. The early part of the second act, when the team arrive by dropship and start searching the terraforming facility for surviving colonists, is a masterclass in suspense and mounting dread from Cameron. Wisely, scenes involving the colonists re-discovering the wrecked alien ship were chopped, adding to the sense of mystery and impending danger.

There is evidence of an intense battle and the presence of live facehuggers can only mean one thing: The colonists must have found the rest of the eggs on the derelict spaceship. The only survivor they can find is a resourceful young girl called Newt (Carrie Henn), who has managed to stay alive by hiding away in the ventilation ducts. Henn was a newcomer scouted when production moved to England, spotted as a schoolgirl in Lakenheath and cast despite having no acting experience. Henn won a Saturn Award for her performance but quit acting after the film, going on to fulfil her dream of becoming a teacher.

We now associate James Cameron with mega-budget movies, but what he achieved in Aliens with a modest $18.5 million is remarkable. By comparison in the same year, Cobra starring Sly Stallone cost $25 million and the widely-despised Howard the Duck cost $37 million. With that money, he decamped to Pinewood Studios in England to expand on the lore of the original to create a smackdown between Ripley, the Marines, and the Alien Queen and her hordes.

Stan Winston and his team came onboard to design the sets, weapons, vehicles, and creatures, often using cinematic sleight of hand including mirrors, forced-perspective and miniatures to keep costs down while giving the film a more epic feel than the first movie. Existing firearms were given a futuristic makeover to represent the marines’ iconic arsenal including the Pulse Rifles and Smart Guns. A second-hand Hunslet Air Towing Tractor, used at airports for shifting passenger jets, was repurposed to create the chunky APC vehicle. To manoeuvre the Power Loader, a stuntman was hidden behind Weaver to help her move the bulky arms and legs. Best of all, Winston created a 14-foot-tall Alien Queen puppet that required two operators hidden within the carapace and dozens of other crew members to operate the limbs and tail. 

The results were astonishing, although not all of it succeeds: The rear-projection when the dropship crashes looks especially creaky by modern standards. For the most part, however, Aliens really holds up as a creature feature action spectacle with practical effects that makes modern CGI look wishy-washy by comparison. The Xenomorphs are more agile and look less like guys in suits, and the Alien Queen is still awesome and terrifying in equal measure.

Cameron got Aliens in the can on schedule and on budget despite some friction on set between the director, producer, and the largely British crew. Cameron’s abrasive nature, which would balloon to megalomaniac proportions on later films, rubbed people the wrong way. He didn’t like the British workplace tradition of tea breaks and tinkering with setups, which disgruntled some professionals who felt Cameron was still pretty wet behind the ears. They even had T-shirts printed: “You can’t scare me. I work for James Cameron.”

Firing one crew member prompted a walkout, a crisis that was averted by a sit-down where the director committed to honouring scheduled working hours if the crew threw their weight behind the project. So the crew got their tea breaks and pub lunches as was the norm on British film shoots, but Cameron wasn’t about to leave without the last word. In his final address, he told them: “The one thing that kept me going, through it all, was the certain knowledge that one day I would drive out the gate of Pinewood and never come back, and that you sorry bastards would still be here.”

Returning to the comfort of the United States, Cameron sensibly cut several sequences that not only made the film more dynamic and foreboding, but also got it closer to the two-hour mark to satisfy the studio. Two hour-plus movies have become the norm in multiplexes nowadays, but in the 1980s south of 120 minutes was the sweet spot for maximising box office potential. Ultimately, Aliens ran to 137 minutes and some of the excised footage would later be reinstated in the Director’s Cut.

Cameron turned to James Horner for the original score, a composer he knew from his days in the Roger Corman school of film-making. The relationship became fractious as Horner came to realise he was creating music even as Cameron was still cutting the film, resulting in some last-minute changes that caused Horner major anxiety. He vowed never to work with Cameron again. Nevertheless, his work on Aliens earned Horner his first Oscar nomination. Ten years later, he’d walk back on his pledge to return for Titanic, for which he took home the gong for Best Original Dramatic Score and shared the Best Original Song award for “My Heart Will Go On.”

Aliens opened on July 18th in the United States and became a commercial and critical success. It grossed over $130 million worldwide (some figures claim up to $183 million, but global figures were unreliable at the time) making it the seventh highest-grossing movie of 1986. While many critics felt it didn’t quite match the high standard set by Ridley Scott’s original, it was still widely praised as an effectively action-packed and terrifying sequel - Time magazine featured it on the July edition cover calling it “The Summer’s Scariest Movie.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see it in theatres as I was only eight years old at the time. I do remember watching the premiere on ITV a few years later, however, and the palpable sense of claustrophobia and dread, especially as the Marines descended into the alien hive.

The overall success of Aliens was mirrored when awards season rolled around. It all but swept the board at the Saturn Awards, dedicated to fantasy and sci-fi movies, taking home the prize in 9 out of 11 categories including Best Picture, Director, and Actress for Sigourney Weaver. Famously, Weaver also received a nomination for the same at the Oscars, a rare achievement when performances in sci-fi and horror were generally overlooked. Overall, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects.

Almost 40 years later, Aliens is still regarded as one of the greatest sequels ever made - Cameron would repeat the trick a few years later with Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It still plays so well because the emotional core between Ripley and Newt is so strong, and the theme of maternal instincts is mirrored by that of the Alien Queen and her eggs. This set the scene for one of the greatest sci-fi smackdowns in cinematic history before our hero and the girl escape to the safety of hyper-sleep. It was an immensely satisfying barnstormer of a conclusion that would be callously reversed when the threequel rolled around.

So there you have it, our retrospective on James Cameron’s Aliens. Where does it rank in the Alien Quadrilogy for you? Let us know, and stay tuned for Alien 3!