The best sequels expand upon everything audiences loved about the original — the action, the stakes, the world — while finding enough new ideas to justify returning to it at all. Making a worthwhile sequel can be a tricky balancing act, which is why there are as many bad sequels as there are good ones (if not more). 40 years later, though, one sequel remains the clearest example of how to pull that off.
Aliens is still what we want out of every sequel.
On the most basic level, the thing we want when we get a sequel is more — we want more of whatever it was we got the first time — and in James Cameron’s 1986 follow-up to Alien, we got more “more” than we ever could have imagined. We got more action, more death, more destruction, more explosions, more spaceships, and of course, more aliens. We even got more Sigourney Weaver, as she really only became the lead halfway through Alien, whereas she’s the focal point of Aliens from the beginning.
Cameron also gave us all that “more” without falling into the traps that befall other sequels. That’s what makes Aliens not just one of the greatest sequels ever, but the best sci-fi action thriller ever made — and a perfect movie to watch when it arrives on Netflix on Sept. 1.
After Ellen Ripley defeated the stowaway xenomorph aboard her spaceship in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, Ripley put herself back in stasis for her trip back to Earth. That was in 2122, but she didn’t awaken until 2179, which is when Aliens begins. While the traumatized Ripley tries to readjust to civilian life, she’s later asked by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation to accompany a team of space marines to LV-426, the same moon where the alien had boarded the ship in the first film. While reluctant, she agrees on the condition that all the aliens there are to be killed. As to be expected, when Ripley and the marines land on LV-426, it kicks off a bloodbath between the aliens and the marines — and Ripley, again, becomes the hero.
Right from the beginning, Aliens is a thrill ride that doesn’t let up. Ripley awakens right at the beginning of the movie, and it quickly jumps to months later when she’s being sent back into space. Soon after that, she’s back on LV-426, which is when non-stop chaos erupts. And, because James Cameron is a master storyteller, he does this all without the movie ever seeming rushed. Cameron, who also wrote the film, gives you exactly what you need to know from scene to scene, then he just pushes the story along without an ounce of fat to trim.
One of the main ways he accomplishes this is to switch up the genre. While both Alien and Aliens are pure science fiction, the original is constructed like a horror movie. It’s slow, methodical, and masterfully tense. All of that pays off in perfect horror movie fashion, but in Aliens, Cameron is playing by an entirely different set of rules. Gone is that sense of dread. Instead, you get a thrill ride.
While it may sound like Cameron’s genre switch was a radical departure — and I’m sure, to some lone voice in the wilderness, it was — I cannot imagine what else could have been done.
The first Alien is an excellent horror film, and so much of what makes it great is the gradual reveal of the alien, both visually and by the crew learning about the peculiarities of the strange species. Once all of those mysteries are solved, what else is there to do? Two aliens? Three? All of that just sounds lame to me when compared to the dozens of aliens we got. Worse yet, it sounds repetitive, which is just about the worst thing a sequel can be. As much as a sequel is about getting more of what we got the first time, people don’t want “more of the same.” We specifically don’t want to retread the last movie (which a lot of sequels do) because, then, what’s the point of even making a sequel if you lack enough new ideas to justify it? Cameron’s Aliens is stuffed with new ideas, and those could only have been accomplished with the genre switch.
Since Aliens came out, it’s kind of set the gold standard — and sometimes an impossible standard — for all sequels since.
When we see a sequel nowadays, we want it to be bigger and badder than the first, and that applies pretty much across the board. The stakes have to be higher, the explosions have to be bigger, and when they’re not, we’re usually disappointed.
Alien 3, while it has its defenders, was, at the very least, a disappointment in scale. With just one alien to tackle again, it made the third film seem minuscule. Once a franchise is blown up the way Aliens did for Alien, it’s nearly impossible to shrink it back down again and still satisfy people (there are a few exceptions, like Logan, for example, but not many). Sometimes that’s a drawback for franchises because eventually, they reach a point where they can’t make the stakes any bigger.
But, hey, franchises can end.
While it’s great to get more of something, when there’s nothing left to give, it would be wise for movie studios to move on, rather than milk a franchise to death to the point where pretty much everyone laments the loss of the franchise’s former glory. Like, say, to pick a random example, the Alien franchise, maybe?
Aliens is streaming on Netflix starting Sept. 1.