For the next few weeks, we will be counting down our 25 favorite blockbusters! Read all of the entries here.

**9. Aliens (dir. James Cameron, 1986)**

by A Freedman, Staff Writer

Ridley Scott's Alien is one of the great films of all time. A slow burn, dread-inducing horror film set in space. For the sequel, James Cameron (still young but with the success of The Terminator under his belt) came onboard to up the ante. No one can improve on a perfect movie, and Cameron fortunately didn't try. He set out to make a different kind of movie altogether, one that entertained but was also honest about things that other films of the era tried to gloss over.

Cameron may have been fresh, but he already knew what interested him. Big guns, tough guys, tougher ladies, the corruptibility of man and a healthy dose of technophobia. All show up grandly in Aliens, which from the title alone lets you know there is going to be a whole lot more action, and a whole lot more Xenomoprhs than the first. Boy, is there.

When Ellen Ripley (Weaver), the last survivor of the Nostromo, is finally found in space after decades of floating in hypersleep, it is still as if no time has passed. The traumatic events of the first were only waiting for her to open her eyes and remember them. She reluctantly joins a platoon of Colonial Marines to go investigate what happened to a human settlement of engineers on LV-426 that has gone radio silent. This is when Cameron really shows up, and ends up subverting the tropes of the 80's action film.

Carrying with them the confidence of a colonial force that has long forgotten what defeat tastes like, the hoo-rah marines (including Bill Paxton, Michael Biehn, Jeanette Goldstein and more, one of the great character ensembles ever put to film) bear little resemblance to the traumatized veterans coming home from Vietnam. America had not been victorious in Vietnam just a decade earlier, but you wouldn't know it from the action movies of the time, all of which seemed intent on massaging the wounds of the bruised American ego. They sought instead to remind the viewer of our superior firepower, superior men, and superior love of country.

Look at the Rambo sequels, for example. In Rambo: First Blood Part II (written in part by James Cameron!), the titular character (Sylvester Stallone) goes back to Vietnam on a special mission to find American POW's still languishing in prison camps. If he doesn't finish winning the war single handedly, his success at least proves that the war could have been won, if only the higher ups had wanted it won.

In Top Gun, released the same summer as Aliens, Maverick (Tom Cruise) is a hot shit fighter pilot who saves the day when he shoots down a squad of Russian MIG fighters, in a grand finale that somehow doesn't start World War III. Maverick is like a younger, skinnier, more handsome version of Rambo, without the excess body count or wear and tear. He is almost an image of what America could be from now on, boldly leaving the ghosts of Vietnam behind in the rearview mirror, and never looking back.

Enter Ellen Ripley. Like Rambo, she's grizzled and traumatized, and also the smartest, most capable person in the room. Rather than go back to finish the fight, Ripley's trauma (or just common sense?) makes her want to let sleeping dogs lie. She has seen this enemy and she knows that it is nothing to mess with. It is a localized enemy, entrenched on terrain it has habituated to, and no amount of superior firepower or tough attitudes can win the day. Contrasted with Rambo and Maverick, she's an American hero who values human life above all else, and has the mental competence to know how to avoid walking into a death trap.

This conviction is multiplied by the introduction of Newt (Carrie Henn), the last survivor of the camp, left orphaned by the Xenomorphs, and who immediately kicks Ripley's mother instinct into high gear. Suddenly she has stakes in the matter beyond merely supervising. When the Marines find themselves in the middle of the alien hive, it's a disaster. They had all the confidence of ten Mavericks and ten Rambos, but Vice President George H.W. Bush wasn't writing the screenplay here. Cameron obviously loves these Marines. Most of them have a distinct face, personality, and character arc, and the ones who don't at least have a memorable name ("Wierzbowski!!!!"), making it all the more tragic when they are filleted in a massacre that Ripley warned everyone was coming. Not only was she right, but she is forced to take command when the green Lt. Gorman (William Hope) freezes amid the chaos.

Just a few months later, Oliver Stone's Platoon skipped the allegory and took the war head on, locking down several Oscars along the way. While a box office success, it didn't aim to provide the level of entertainment that Cameron and producer Gale Ann Hurd were out for. The messages of Platoon are clear and obvious. But Aliens is a trojan horse of a film, almost a direct cinematic response to Cameron's earlier work on the Rambo sequel, and perhaps more effective because of it.