Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn in Aliens. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library Limited./Alamy View image in fullscreen Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn in Aliens. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library Limited./Alamy James Cameron ‘Maybe the best pumped-up sequel ever made’: James Cameron’s Aliens hits 40 The director’s more-is-more approach to the 1986 sequel gave us seat-edge action and an indelible performance from a rule-breaking Sigourney Weaver
Prefer the Guardian on Google J ames Cameron loves tough female characters. That seems like a given now, after three Avatars and two particularly muscular arms belonging to Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. Even the lushly romantic Titanic is about a supportive, sweet-natured boyfriend lending his love the extra smidge of strength she needs to live a rich and iconoclastic life without him, until she’s freely chucking diamonds into the sea at 100 years of age. But in Cameron’s 1984 de facto feature debut The Terminator (after a Piranha sequel that he attempted to disown), T2’s Hamilton is stalked and appropriately terrified by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s slasher-like killer robot. She’s a great character who gets majorly pumped up for the sequel in 1991. By then, Cameron had plenty of practice: he had already written and directed Aliens, maybe the best pumped-up sequel ever made, which turns 40 this week.
Read more Ellen Ripley, introduced as the warrant officer onboard the ship Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror picture Alien , is already a great character by the end of that film. But while the anecdote about James Cameron pitching a sequel by appending a dollar-sign to Alien’s title, concisely showing what a simple pluralization could do, has perhaps overtaken the buffing up of Ellen Ripley in the most-circulated lore about this movie, she’s really the first subject of Cameron’s great plussing. Without betraying the simplicity and resilience of her character in the first film, Cameron reintroduced Ripley as a survivor, landing on Earth almost 60 years after the events of the earlier film. (In a deleted scene restored in the film’s longer special edition, Ripley even learns that her daughter has died in the interim – as an adult, given that Ripley was in cryosleep for decades.)
This is the only movie where we see Ripley living safely on Earth, at least for a little while. The Weyland-Yutani corporation presses her back into service to visit the moon where the Nostromo first encountered the creature that killed everyone else on the ship. She reluctantly agrees, in part because she’s faced disbelief over her version of the events from the previous film. She also wants to destroy the creatures. This is where Cameron’s dollar sign comes in: indeed the since-colonized moon has been overrun with HR Giger’s inimitably designed killing-machine xenomorphs, and Ripley, aligned with a group of tough-talking space marines, must fight her way out on a much larger scale, all while protecting an orphaned young girl nicknamed Newt (Carrie Henn).
Somehow, whether through brilliance or opportunism or both, Cameron managed to make an urtext of sorts out of a sequel to someone else’s movie. Ripley protects a child, like the T-800 would go on to do in Terminator 2. The grunts speak in a colorfully cornball-pulp style just like the soldiers in the Avatar movies. The deaths and disasters that befall many of the characters are awesome in the truest sense of the word, just as they are in Titanic. Bill Paxton…