‘Maybe the best pumped-up sequel ever made’: James Cameron’s Aliens hits 40
This week marks the 40th anniversary of James Cameron's Aliens, the 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror classic Alien, which the Guardian's retrospective hails as one of the finest "pumped-up" sequels ever made. The piece situates the film within Cameron's broader body of work, arguing that his knack for taking a strong female character and making her formidably tougher in the sequel began here with Ellen Ripley, a template he later repeated with Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 and across his Avatar films.
The article traces how Ripley, already a compelling figure in Alien, returns to Earth nearly 60 years after the first film's events, only to be sent back by the Weyland-Yutani corporation to the moon where the Nostromo crew first met the xenomorphs. Now allied with a squad of wisecracking space marines and protecting an orphaned girl named Newt, Ripley faces the creatures on a far larger scale than before. The writer notes recurring Cameron hallmarks visible across his career, from child-protection storylines to pulpy soldier dialogue and Bill Paxton's frequent presence, while leaving open whether the bigger, brasher sequel actually surpasses the original's more understated tension.
- Aliens, James Cameron's 1986 sequel, turns 40 this week
- Piece links Ripley's toughening to Cameron's recurring strong-heroine template
- Debates whether the bigger sequel beats the original's subtler horror
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Aliens, released in 1986, was James Cameron's follow-up to Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien. The original was a slow-building horror film about a spaceship crew stalked by a single deadly creature; Cameron's sequel took the story in a more action-driven direction, with the survivor Ellen Ripley returning to face a whole colony of the alien creatures alongside a squad of soldiers.
The film centres on Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, who is drawn back into danger by the Weyland-Yutani corporation years after the events of the first film. She ends up protecting a young orphaned girl called Newt while battling the aliens on a much larger scale than before, backed up by a group of marines.
The anniversary has prompted renewed interest in how Aliens shaped Cameron's later career, particularly his tendency to build sequels around tougher, more capable versions of strong female leads, a pattern also seen in Terminator 2 and his Avatar films.
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