This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

Sequels are a difficult prospect, especially when you are making a sequel to a film as revolutionary as Alien (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979). Aliens (dir. James Cameron, 1986) has an almost apocryphal status as a sequel: everyone knows that the series takes a hard left turn from horror to action and everyone knows the story of Cameron writing Alien$ on a whiteboard during a pitch meeting. The question of whether or not you like Alien or Aliens better has become almost a litmus for what kind of movie nerd you are, almost like the Beatles versus The Rolling Stones is for music or Star Trek versus Star Wars for sci-fi nerds. But despite Alien being one of my favorite movies, my answer to the Alien versus Aliens question is the same as my answer to the other two: why not both? This stance is why I’m here with you today to write about #8 on MovieJawn’s Action Movie Countdown: Aliens.

Aliens picks up seemingly where Alien left off with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Jonesy (uncredited orange boi) in stasis aboard the escape shuttle after destroying the Nostromo in the finale of the last film. She is picked up by some scavengers and revived by her employers, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, who inform her that she has been drifting through space for 57 years. They remain unconvinced by her claims about her story or the larger threat of the Xenomorphs, citing the fact that there has been a terraforming colony on LV-426–the exomoon where the crew of the Nostromo discovered the Xenomorph eggs–for years with no incident. When they lose contact with the colony, however, Weyland-Yutani sends Ripley along with a troupe of Colonial Marines to investigate.

Side note: before I get into the action of the film, I have to say a quick word about Jonesy. As much as I love him in Alien, I was so happy that Ripley does not take him with her to LV-426. In my head canon, Jonesy lived out the rest of his days happily with a nice family with lots of catnip and skritches and died without ever setting eyes on a Xenomorph again. That is an important part of my enjoyment of Aliens; thank you for indulging me.

While Alien is a masterwork in slow tension building, Aliens is bombastic. Producer Walter Hill said in an interview that this shift was intentional: Cameron saw that the first film was “a trip through the fright house and that the second film should be a roller-coaster ride.” Cameron had been asked to write the script based on the strength of his then in-production Terminator (1984) and his treatment of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), but the out of the blue popularity of Terminator on its release allowed Cameron to parlay that success into the directing job for Aliens.

In a classic Cameron move, he doubles down on the anti-capitalist theme of the first film. The crew of the Nostromo are blue-collar workers (plus Ash);space truckers caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and sacrificed by Weyland-Yutani on the altar of acquisition. In Aliens, Ripley is joined by soldiers (and one corporate representative of Weyland-Yutani played by Paul Reisser, who you know is evil from the moment he says, “I’m one of the good ones” near the beginning of the film), placing the film more squarely into the action category and begging the question of how integrated the military and corporations are in this future. The almost Starship Troopers (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1997) level of satire when it comes to the Colonial Marines is especially fun here: Cameron seems to delight in both humanizing these working class Marines while also highlighting the ridiculous macho bravado of military culture. Bill Paxton especially shines here: according to Weaver, many of his character Hudson’s classic freak-out moments were improvised, including the famous “game over, man!” Watching these battle hardened troopers with enormous guns getting decimated by Xenomorphs only further emphasizes the powerlessness of humans against these creatures: if they can’t get the job done, who can?

The action itself combines the atmospheric tension of the original film with the more grandiose ‘80s blockbuster. This is most evident in the claustrophobic hallway and air duct sequences: with limited room to move other than forward, there are so many scenes of characters sliding on their backs so they can fire back at the waves of Xenomorphs. Cameron also establishes the action as three dimensional, giving Aliens a distinctive flair amongst action films. In the underground nest sequences, Cameron often placed Xenomorph mannequins on wires so they could crawl down the walls towards the Marines, causing them to have to fire forward and upward simultaneously. Later, the survivors try to barricade themselves in a lab by welding the doors shut, only to discover that the Xenomorphs have bypassed the barrier via the air ducts, allowing them to attack from both the ceiling and from below the floor.

The acidic blood of the Xenomorphs also impacts the action: because the acid will eat through everything in its path, guns aren’t always the best weapon to use against them in close quarters, as a few Marines unfortunately find out when they are splattered with Xenomorph blood. The iconic flamethrowers of the first film make their return here as a substitute, but even these can’t really be used in the air ducts, forcing the characters to often make difficult choices about which weapons to use. These unconventional difficulties–for action films–give Cameron the space to really test the physical and mental capabilities of these characters and to give us the viewers really memorable visual moments of action choreography.

But of course, we cannot talk about the action of Aliens without talking about Ripley. In many ways, the duology of the two films acts as one complete arc for Ripley, an impressive feat for an unplanned sequel. In the first film, Ripley is a final girl, a traumatic experience that she must relieve over and over in her nightmares in the second film. Weaver is great here, projecting both Ripley’s toughness and her vulnerability as she prepares to face her greatest fear by accompanying the Marines to LV-426. In fact, Ripley sees little of the action for the first half of the film, hanging back with the com team and listening in horror to the screams of the dying Marines. Her passivity in these moments highlights her trauma surrounding her helplessness: she couldn’t save the crew of the Nostromo and she can’t save the Marines, especially when no one will listen to her and when Weyland-Yutani is actively sabotaging the mission for their own gain.

However, Ripley isn’t a final girl anymore. When the inexperienced commander of the Marines (William Hope) freezes, her command officer instincts kick in, and she effectively takes over the mission. She refuses to be part of a repeat of the events of the first film where everyone died because men wouldn’t listen to her, and she refuses to die here, kickstarting an arc from final girl to the action mommy that everyone knows Sigourney Weaver for today.

And when I say action mommy, I mean action mommy. It’s long been a punchline that Cameron is obsessed with motherhood, but I think it works in this film, especially if you consider the director’s cut, where it is revealed that Ripley’s biological daughter died while she was floating out in space during cryostasis. Soon after the team enters the colony at LV-426, Ripley finds the lone survivor of the Xenomorph attack, a young girl named Newt. It would be really easy to read this relationship in a reductive way: woman plus young girl equals mommy and daughter, but Cameron, for once, takes a more nuanced route. Newt seems to be the only one besides Ripley who understands the extent of the Xenomorph threat, at first, and she gravitates towards Ripley because Ripley treats her trauma and fear as valid. Ripley doesn’t bullshit her like the other Marines do; she knows that Newt’s childhood innocence is long gone. All she can do is to try to protect Newt physically now. And yes, this activates her protective instincts, but it also appeals to her need to save someone, since she couldn’t save anyone on the Nostromo and she can’t save the Marines.

When Newt is taken by the Xenomorphs (that Xenomorph emerging from the water behind her is an image that will live in my nightmares), Ripley’s final bit of reluctance snaps. The Xenomorph of the first film took so much from her; she’ll be damned if she lets them take more. Here’s where the action mommy emerges in breathtaking bad-assery. She duct tapes a shotgun to a flamethrower! She uses a mech to fight the Xenomorph queen! What really sells Weaver’s performance here is that she is still visibly afraid: she is literally shaking when she threatens the Xenomorph eggs with her flamethrower to get the Queen to back off. In a world of machismo where men must sell their stoicism as a badge of their strength and bravery, Ripley stands apart as someone who is actively facing her trauma, who risks her survival–the thing she fought the hardest for in the first film. Of course she is scared! Being visibly scared doesn’t make her less of a hero. It makes her a relatable person faced with an impossible challenge, and she’s had enough.

I could talk for several more pages about the Xenomorph Queen, the android Bishop (Lance Henriksen), or the equally terrifying and hilarious elevator sequence near the end of the film. If you want to watch a lot of Xenomorphs blow up along with satisfying character work, top-notch acting, and truly insane special effects, this is the action movie for you.