Delayed Reaction: Aliens

The Pitch: We know Ridley can handle one alien. How about more than one?

After 57 years in stasis, Ridley returns to LV-426, which was turned into a colony and has been overrun by alien creatures.

Alien v. Aliens is up there with The Godfather v. The Godfather Part II and Star Wars v. The Empire Strikes back among the great sequel debates. Which one is better? I think your answer says more about you than it does about either film. Personally, I like Alien better. I prefer the slow build horror of it. I know a lot of people prefer Aliens though. It is a great SciFi action movie.

James Cameron probably doesn't get the respect he deserves. That's a strange thing to say when you consider that he's made the two highest grossing movies of all time, one of which tied for most Oscar wins ever. However, when you ask someone for a list of the greatest directors, he's never at the top, which is kind of  crazy. His career effectively started with The Terminator in 1984, which is technically the most successful indie movie ever made. That movie is a SciFi classic. Next, he took another director's idea, practically changed the genre of the movie, and arguably improved on it with Aliens. He followed that with the ambitious The Abyss. After that, Terminator 2 - about as perfect an action movie as you'll find. Personally, I love 1994's True Lies, which is Cameron seamlessly making an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (which is virtually a genre unto itself). After that, he makes Titanic. People tend to forget how risky that was at the time. It cost a ton of money. It wasn't like anything he'd made before. It was so damn long. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet weren't box office gold. They were only moderately known quantities. Romantic epics hadn't been big hits at the box office in decades at that point (not at the level that Titanic needed to be a success, at least). Not only did that movie succeed - by any measure, that movie became a phenomenon. He then took 12 years to make Avatar. I have a lot to say about Avatar, but I'll try to be brief. While it's stunning how quickly that movie has been forgotten as a pop culture touchstone (Is there a single universally recognizable line or shot in that movie?), you can't ignore how much of a success it was*. Perhaps the argument against Cameron is that he isn't making the kind of "high art" that a lot of the other auteurs make. But, his ability to know what people want before they know to ask for it is an unrivaled skill. It reminds me of Hitchcock in that his first aim is to entertain, and if he accomplishes anything else [artistic] along the way, that's nice too.

Sorry for the long James Cameron aside. I won't have another opportunity for that unless I decide to track down Piranha Part Two: The Spawning or the Avatar sequels (if they ever come out).

What I'm really trying to say is that Aliens is really good. James Cameron made some non-intuitive choices about the direction that really worked. This is the best version of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. Bill Paxton is a hoot. I find it funny that I like Paul Reiser so much in other shows/movies, that I spent too much of this movie not wanting to believe that he's as much of a scumbag as he really is in this.

This is one of those movies that I'm sure I've seen a long time ago or at some point when I wasn't fully paying attention to it. It's new enough to me to get a rewatch and a Reaction though.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend

*Since I'm never going to make an individual post about this, I'll go into a long diatribe here. As of when I'm writing this, 34 movies have made $1 billion in the global box office.

• 19 of those movies are directs sequels:

Avengers: Age of Ultron, Avengers: Infinity War, Furious 7, The Fate of the Furious, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Iron Man 3, Captain America: Civil War, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Skyfall, Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Toy Story 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Despicable Me 3, Finding Dory

• 5 are practically sequels or effectively reboots

Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Marvel's The Avengers

• 5 more are part of a franchise directly or indirectly.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Black Panther, Beauty and the Beast (2017), Minions, Alice in Wonderland (2010)

That leaves 5 movies that got to $1 billion on their own. Zootopia and Frozen have the benefit of the Disney Animation branding. Jurassic Park only made it to $1 billion because of a massively successful 3-D re-release. All three film are massive accomplishments still.

That just leaves Titanic and Avatar as the only truly stand-alone $1 billion successes...and they are the top two movies of all time, Avatar by a significant margin. James Cameron's success is an anomaly.