ALIENS

Rip It Up, Issue 113, 1 December 1986, Page 42

ALIENS

Director: James Cameron And so the saga continues from Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien. The monster is no longer confined to the starship Nostromo, but has taken over a colonised planet and Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, rescued from her 57 year hypersleep, goes along with a corps of space marines on a search and destroy mission. Although Cameron’s The Terminator was not an attractive movie on moral terms, it did prove how skilful the director is in sustaining cinematic drive and action. Aliens may not be cast in the same fascist paranoia mould as the Schwarzenegger vehicle, but once

again Cameron has come up with a film which, after 15 minutes or so of scene-setting, never relinquishes its grip on its audience. Beside this sequel, Ridley Scott’s initial Alien film seems positively low key, an elegant exercise in the poetry of alienation. Aliens is not without its humour. There’s some snappy dialogue, especially amongst the marines, with some of the best lines going to Jeanette Goldstein’s ultramacho Private Vasquez. The hightech machinery also raises a few chuckles, as when Ripley masters a walking crane-frame early in the film. Later, in a clever twist, she uses the same vehicle in her fight to the death with the Alien Queen.

Weaver’s character is central to the film, and it is that it should be a woman who takes on Ripley’s responsiblities. The science fiction genre has not accorded too

much initiative to its female characters, but Aliens puts an end to such revisionist thinking: the image of a sweating Weaver edging her way along deserted corridors with a child in one arm and a computerised space-age machine gun in the other, shows that Stallone and Schwarzenegger may have met their match. William Dart