Tuesday, ITV4, 10:00pm
James Cameron's Aliens (1986) is the rare sequel that boldly charges out of its predecessor’s shadow and declares, “Yes, and we’ll do it with more explosions.” Ridley Scott’s Alien may have been a masterclass in sci-fi horror, but Cameron decided to trade in creeping dread for adrenaline-pumping action, transforming Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) from a survivor into a bona fide action hero. Set 57 years after the original film, Aliens sees Ripley return to LV-426 with a squad of cocky Colonial Marines to investigate why contact has been lost with the terraforming colony. Naturally, they’re about to discover that the xenomorphs have been breeding like tribbles on steroids, and all hell breaks loose. What follows is a brutal, relentless assault of space horror mixed with military bravado that feels as much like a Vietnam War allegory as it does a science fiction film.
The score by James Horner is legendary in its own right, even if it caused him as many sleepless nights as the Colonial Marines. Famously rushed due to a production schedule tighter than Ripley’s flamethrower trigger, Horner was given just three weeks to craft a score that would live up to Jerry Goldsmith’s atmospheric brilliance in Alien. Instead of mimicking that haunting minimalism, Horner went full Apocalypse Now, blending militaristic percussion with spine-chilling strings and horns. His work on the track "Bishop's Countdown" alone—a frantic, pulsing piece used during the film’s climax—has been repurposed so often in trailers that it’s practically a genre unto itself. While the score didn’t get much love during production (Cameron was reportedly not thrilled), Horner still managed to earn an Oscar nomination, and rightly so—few soundtracks can ratchet tension to such heights.
Aliens is the cinematic equivalent of what would happen if you gave a Space Marine a copy of Starship Troopers and told them to direct a movie. It’s relentless, thrilling, and brimming with quotable lines ("Game over, man!"), yet still retains the heart of its predecessor thanks to Ripley’s evolving relationship with Newt, the orphaned colony survivor. Weaver’s performance is iconic, melding maternal instinct with sheer badassery, and her final showdown in the power loader against the xenomorph queen is one of the greatest “boss battles” ever put to screen. It’s a film that knows when to go big, when to go scary, and when to remind us that in space, no one can hear you scream… but they can hear you unload a pulse rifle.
- Noel Chambers