The long-awaited sequel to the successful ALIEN is a nonstop, high-tech, souped-up war movie, with gung ho marines blasting special-effects creatures, and a genuinely convincing, exciting action heroine. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is found in deep space by a salvage ship and brought back to a space station, where Burke (Paul Reiser), a representative of The Company, tells her that she has been unconscious for 57 years. To her horror, Ripley also learns that the planet on which she and her crew found the creature in ALIEN has been colonized. It isn't long, however, until Burke tells
her that they've lost contact with the colony and asks her to accompany a platoon of colonial marines to the planet as an adviser. Weaver is superb--tough, smart, and the best fighter, male or female, in the movie. The rest of the small cast also performs well, and director James Cameron handles the action superbly. The cutting is quick, the suspense unrelenting, and the monsters thoroughly frightening. Weaver returned for two further, less successful sequels -- David Fincher's gloomy ALIEN3 (1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's baroque ALIEN RESURRECTION (1997).
A 154-minute special edition version of ALIENS made its debut in 1999 and includes 17 minutes of footage cut from the original theatrical release. The restored version includes the substantial sequence in which Newt's family discovers the abandoned alien ship and her father is attacked by a face-hugger;" the scene in which the newly reawakened Ripley learns that her daughter, a child when she left on the original Nostromo mission, died at the age of 67 while Ripley was in hypersleep; some short scenes of the LV-426 colonists before the aliens kill them all; the conversation in which Ripley and Hicks exchange first names (Ellen and Dwayne); and sequence in which remote-control machine guns are used to repel the aliens in the space station.
