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.