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Aliens (film)
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- This article is about the film, for the video games of the same name see Aliens (Square computer game) and Aliens (arcade game).
Aliens is a 1986 science fiction / action film starring Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, Carrie Henn, Bill Paxton and Paul Reiser. It is a sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien. Directed by James Cameron from a story written by him, David Giler and Walter Hill, the film is more of a high-paced, action adventure film than the atmospheric sci-fi horror of the first film. It was tremendously successful, following Cameron's The Terminator in helping to establish him as a major action director. The film, like its predecessor, was shot in England, this time at Pinewood Studios, with a budget of about $18 million.
Contents
- 1 Plot
- 2 Cast
- 3 Production
- 4 Reception
- 4.1 Awards
- 4.2 Special Edition
- 5 Further reading
- 6 References
- 7 External links
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Plot
Ellen Ripley, the only survivor of the
Weyland-Yutani Corporation space freighter
Nostromo, is rescued and revived after drifting for 57 years in
hypersleep. Ripley gives her report about the
alien to a board of the company's executives, but is met with extreme skepticism, as all evidence of the creature was lost in the destruction of the
Nostromo. She in turn learns that
LV-426, the moon where her crew first encountered the Alien in a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship, is now home to a
terraforming colony. After Ripley takes a position loading cargo on a space-dock, Weyland-Yutani employee Carter Burke informs her that contact has been lost with LV-426, and the company is sending him and a squad of
Colonial Marines to investigate. Wary of her warnings about the creatures, the company asks Ripley to go along as a consultant. Despite severe misgivings, Ripley joins the expedition as it travels to LV-426 aboard the warship
Sulaco. Arriving in orbit, Ripley gets to know the Marines, led by novice Lieutenant Gorman and the veteran Sergeant Apone, and accompanied by the
android Bishop. She gives a briefing on her original encounter with the Alien to the group, but her warnings go unheeded.
The heavily-armed expedition descends to the planet's surface via a dropship, and finds the colony seemingly abandoned. The only living things are two of the Alien-implanting "facehuggers" on display in the colony's medical lab, and a traumatized young girl nicknamed Newt, who has survived by hiding in the colony's sprawling ventilation system. The Marines eventually locate the other colonists, by tracking their surgically-implanted transceivers, clustered together in the colony's nuclear-powered atmosphere-processing station. Traveling to the station, the Marines find a large Alien nest, filled with the cocooned corpses of the colonists. When the Marines destroy a newborn chestburster-Alien, a swarm of mature Alien drones awake and ambush the unprepared squad. After most of the squad is wiped out or captured, Ripley crashes their APC into the nest, rescuing Corporal Hicks, Private Vasquez, and Private Hudson. Hicks assumes command of the mission after Gorman is knocked unconscious during the rescue. Following Ripley's suggestion (and overriding the protests of Burke), the Corporal orders the dropship to recover the survivors, with the intent of returning to the Sulaco and destroying the colony from orbit. Unfortunately, a stowaway Alien kills the dropship pilots in flight, causing the vessel to crash into the processing station. The surviving humans barricade themselves inside the main colony complex by welding doors and setting up remote sentry guns.
Ripley learns from Bishop that Burke has ordered the android to preserve Alien specimens for return to the Company labs. She confronts Burke and declares that after investigation she has discovered it was he who sent the colonists to the original Alien-infested spaceship without warning them; she vows to expose him. Bishop then points out that the damaged nuclear processing station has become unstable and will soon detonate with the force of a thermonuclear weapon. Having no other way to contact the backup dropship still onboard the Sulaco, he volunteers to crawl down a service pipe to the colony transmitter array and bring the vessel down by remote control. A revived Lt. Gorman rejoins the team, while Ripley and Newt try and get some rest, waiting for word from Bishop. Ripley awakens to find the two live facehuggers released into the room with them. Ripley sets off a fire alarm which alerts Hicks, Hudson, and Vasquez, who arrive and destroy the creatures. Ripley accuses Burke of releasing the facehuggers with the intention of using Newt and Ripley as hosts to smuggle the implanted Aliens past quarantine. The debate about what to do with him is interrupted when the Aliens cut power to headquarters, pour in through a gap in the ceiling, and attack en masse. During the battle, Hudson is swarmed and pulled down through the floor, while Burke is killed by an Alien after fleeing alone. Newt leads the few remaining members into the air ducts. While fighting through the ducts, Vasquez is injured after going hand-to-hand with an alien; Gorman attempts to assist her, but they are cut off and surrounded. Realising there is no escape, they detonate a grenade, killing themselves and several Aliens. The resulting blast knocks Newt down a ventilation chute, where she is captured alive by an Alien. Hicks and Ripley manage to reach Bishop just as the second dropship arrives, but not before Hicks is badly injured by an Alien's acidic blood.
Ripley, unwilling to leave Newt, gears up to rescue the girl. She finds and frees a cocooned Newt in the bowels of the Alien hive, but while attempting to escape, they accidentally stumble into the nest's main breeding chamber, where they are confronted by the monstrous Alien Queen. Ripley incinerates the chamber with her weapons--draining the last of her ammo and enraging the Queen, who escapes the destruction by tearing free from her elaborate ovipositor. Closely pursued by the Queen, Ripley and Newt rendezvous with Bishop's dropship and escape moments before the entire colony is consumed by the nuclear blast from the processing station. Back on the Sulaco, Ripley and Bishop's relieved conversation is abruptly interrupted when the Queen, stowed away on the dropship landing gear, impales the android from behind with her barbed tail and then tears him in half. Ripley distracts the Queen long enough for Newt to jump into a hole in the ship's deck-plating. Just as the Queen is about to pull the girl from her hiding place, Ripley reappears wearing a mechanized exosuit-forklift. Ripley battles the Queen, and succeeds in dropping the creature into a large airlock and expelling her into the vacuum of space. Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop enter hypersleep for the return back to Earth.
Spoilers end here.
Cast
Production
- Some of the scenes inside the alien nest were shot inside the disused power station in Acton West London
- Actor James Remar was originally cast as Corporal Dwayne Hicks, but was replaced by Michael Biehn after a falling out with director James Cameron.
- The vehicle that was driven by the troops on the alien planet was an old aircraft tug from Heathrow Airport.
- "Sulaco" is the name of the town in Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, which was the name of the ship in Alien. Scott had previously directed The Duellists, based on a Conrad short story, in 1977.
- As the soldiers explore the complex, they look up and see what appears to be a series of vents. These were the backs of old television sets pushed into service by the special effects team.
- The weapons used by the marines are all based on real, fully functional weapons. The M41A pulse-rifle is made from a Thompson SMG with an attached fore end from a Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun, a Remington 12 Gauge Model 870P receiver with barrel while the smartguns carried by Vasquez and Drake are based around the MG-42 machinegun, and are maneuvered with the help of a steadicam camera harness. The pistol that most Marines carried was the futuristic Heckler & Koch VP70 nine mm. Vasquez carried a Smith & Wesson Model 59.
- The Alien nest set wasn't dismantled after filming. It was unused until three years later when it was used as the Axis Chemicals set for Batman in 1989. When the crew of Batman first entered the set, they found most of the Alien nest still intact.[1]
- After the movies premiere, the Caterpillar construction equipment company reportedly received inquiries from people interested in buying the power loader that Ripley uses to fight the Alien Queen, who were unaware that it was fictional and doesn't exist outside of the movie.
Music
Composer
James Horner stated in an interview that he felt that James Cameron had not given him enough time to write a musical score for the film. Several tracks were to accompany the movie, but most were either truncated, mixed with each others, or completely left out. The movie did receive an Academy Award nomination.
[citation needed] Because of this he said he was forced to cannibalize previous scores he had done as well as adapt a rendition of "
Gayaneh Ballet Suite" for the main and end titles. (This may be misdirection: the music for the opening sequence, where Ripley's lifeboat is discovered, is a fairly literal adaptation of the opening of
Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony). Horner stated that the tensions with Cameron were so high during post-production that he assumed they would never work together again. Cameron, however, was so impressed with Horner's score from
Braveheart that he later asked him to compose the score for
Titanic.
Reception
Aliens was released in the US and Canada on 18 July, 1986, and the 26 September in the same year in the UK.[2] It had a running time of 137 minutes. Greatly anticipated by the public after the huge success of the original Alien,[citation needed] it took $10,052,042 in its opening weekend in the US,[3] and going on to take a total of $85,160,248.[3] Roger Ebert called it "painfully and unremittingly intense" and a "hair-raising carnival ride that never stops".[4] This film was #35 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments.
Awards
Aliens was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won two (Sound Effects Editing and Visual Effects). Sigourney Weaver received her first Academy Award nomination (Best Actress) for this film. Although Weaver did not actually win, it was considered a landmark for a nomination for Best Actress to even be made for a science fiction / horror film, a genre usually given little recognition by the Academy in those years.[citation needed]
Special Edition
A Special Edition was released in 1992 on laserdisc and VHS that restored 17 minutes of previously deleted footage; the most notable addition was a segment early in the film showing the colony on LV-426 just as the colonists first encounter the derelict alien spacecraft which is infested with the alien eggs. Other notable scenes included the "sentry gun scene" in the operations building, Ripley's discovery of her daughter's fate while she was away, and a few other dialogue scenes between Ripley and the Marines. This version was then released on The Alien Legacy in 2001 on DVD. Both versions of the film were released together for the first time in the 2003 Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set.
Further reading
References
