One of the most badass movies ever! James Cameron has delivered a sequel with T2 that delivers, one of my favorites.
Aliens (1986).
One of the most badass movies ever! James Cameron has delivered a sequel with T2 that delivers, one of my favorites.
Re: Aliens (1986).
Reminiscing or just saw it for the first time?
Yeah, ALIENS is a clinic of suffocating, exhilirating action/suspense.
TRUE LIES is my personal all-time favorite Cameron flick. I still regard the restroom fight/shootout/horse-and-motorcycle-chase as one of the greatest action sequences ever put to film.
Re: Aliens (1986).
Aliens. Oh yes!
Has my favorite actor Michael Biehn too.
The creature effects still hold up and it amazes me want James Cameron can do with only 18 million dollars.
Re: Aliens (1986).
That movie couldn't be made for 18 million anymore....it would cost 10 times that in 2009....Originally Posted by razgriz21
Ironhide kills Barricade!!!
Re: Aliens (1986).
agree one of the best sci fi movies of all time!
Re: Aliens (1986).
Alien is a million times better.
Re: Aliens (1986).
Aliens brings alien to another level.
Re: Aliens (1986).
Love Micheal Beihn. Best Kyle Reese ever!!
Re: Aliens (1986).
Increasing the number of aliens and making stereotypical commandos fight them off does not bring the franchise to a another level.
"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they're genuine." - Abraham Lincoln
Re: Aliens (1986).
TF2 is increasing the number of robots and bringing in more stereotypical Army guys to fight them off. So TF2 doesn't take the TF franchise to a whole new level?
Re: Aliens (1986).
The robots in TF2 are all different and have their own personalities. Aliens are just aliens. In Transformers, a bunch of army guys shooting at aliens was already established in the first movie, the theme is gonna stick. In the Alien franchise, the first movie had...you guessed it, non of those. James Cameron completely changed what the Alien franchise was suppose to be. A sci fi horror. Aliens was just a stereotypical 80's style action flick, with a bunch of beefy, sweaty guys with bare arms storming into room after room shooting at, or running away from, some strange creatures. The scene with the automatic turrets constantly firing at aliens added nothing. If you change Ripley's name and the alien species, it would be the same damn movie.
"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they're genuine." - Abraham Lincoln
Re: Aliens (1986).
Well, my take is that ALIEN is primarily a futuristic sci-fi creature/suspense flick featuring action, with more in common with JAWS than ALIENS, while ALIENS is a futuristic sci-fi action flick featuring creature/suspense, with more in common with RAMBO than ALIEN.
Each, to me, individually, has something special to offer. ALIEN offered a working class, teamsters-like production-design-imagining of life and work in space, dirty and grimy, like on an oil rig, a direct and deliberate antithesis to Kubrick's equally original but 180-degree stunning, spotless, antiseptic, high-end professional vision of life and work in space in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. ALIEN also gets cred for the originality of the creature design and creepiness of its gestation process.
ALIENS, however, deftly capitalizes on what ALIEN offers imo, by flipping the emphasis to more action than suspense, but without losing any of the original's suspenseful grip by how intensely Cameron shot and increasingly paced the film, as well as via the graver threat of so many more aliens. Add slightly better effects and make-up, a richer role for Ripley (imo) and a second android to keep you guessing, and I personally regard ALIENS as the greater film.
Make no mistake, I think both are all-time classics worthy of owning and seeing repeatedly.
Re: Aliens (1986).
And the commandos didn't fare too well against the aliens...
Re: Aliens (1986).
Now I never said I hated the 2nd one. I do think it's a good movie. I just think that it moves away from what the franchise was intended to be.
I see your point in comparing each movie to Jaws and Rambo, and you are right about that, but Jaws and Rambo are not part of the same franchise.
While Lennox and his team kicked some serious ass in Transformers, in the end anyways. We gotta stop comparing and contrasting Transformers with the Alien franchise. You can't compare Michael Bay with James Cameron.
"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they're genuine." - Abraham Lincoln
Re: Aliens (1986).
I don't know why I am arguing anyway, it's not like I can change anybody's minds.
"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they're genuine." - Abraham Lincoln
Re: Aliens (1986).
I don't hate the 2nd one either. But, it's most to blame for the downward spiral of the Alien franchise. It turned a mysterious, truly Alien creature, into a giant humanoid bug, it shifted the series into beefcake 80's action territory.
Re: Aliens (1986).
It resembled your typical 80's action flick, complete with overly-muscular military grunts with gigantic guns. The first film had none of that, and the cast was believable. They weren't macho stereotypes. They were people.
In setting a new tone, it also set new expectations for sequels. When Alien 3 came out, many complained (and still do) about the absence of marines, and a bunch of aliens, and a bunch of gun-fighting.
As for the eggs, there are better ways to handle mysteries and introduce new concepts without completely demystifying them. Alien 3 proposed the idea that Aliens take on host characteristics, but we still don't know why, or to what extent, or whether there's a pure Alien somewhere, or etc etc. Meanwhile, we now know exactly how the eggs are made. Heck, the original explanation for the egg-making was so much better, and more horrifying: the deleted scene in Alien where we see cocooned survivors being turned into eggs. There's still a lot of mystery there, as for how, and why, etc, and this method is far more Alien, but instead, we got "Aliens" explanation, which turned them into bugs.
Seriously, if you removed the aliens, put in some other, brand new, made-up kind of extraterrestrial life, and changed Ripley's name, that film wouldn't have resembled an Alien film at all.
Re: Aliens (1986).
If we all knew about the "deleted" scene back then,chances are Cameron wouldn't have gone the route that he did. I myself never even knew about it until you mentioned it. I just included the disc at Netflix so I could see this. Chances are even Cameron didn't know about this "deleted" scene.
Back then we didn't know about the deleted scenes in a movie so how are we supposed to know about this one. As far as I can tell,it wasn't known until they did the Alien Quadrilogy DVD set.
Re: Aliens (1986).
I thought Aliens was better then the original, so was Terminator 2. They are both kick-ass movies! "Getta away from her YOU BITCH!"
Re: Aliens (1986).
I swear. about 90% of the love for James Cameron comes from two things:
1. Nostalgia. Let's face it, there's a lot of 80's junkies around the internet. Many 80's junkies are selfish and defensive, and when someone tries to do anything with a franchise that was born in the 80's, or just happened to have some activity in the 80's, that thing becomes sacred, even if it's a heaping mountain of garbage. I can guarantee you, that if the worst film of that decade were to be announced as getting the remake treatment, all of a sudden, people would be saying "It's perfect as it is!"
2. Name. Seriously, if Avatar had a different director, and yet everything in it were exactly the same, we probably wouldn't even know it exists. Heck, we don't have anything from it at all, and people are shitting themselves over it. James Cameron could have just said "I'm making a movie called Avatar" and all of a sudden, it's the best movie of the year it's released. Someone asks why, and the answer they will probably be "It's James Cameron!"
The man's overrated. Is he a good director? Yeah. He's a great director. But he's not the God of cinema, his films are not absolute perfection, and he most certainly is capable of fucking up. He fucked up the Aliens, and he can fuck up again somewhere. When, if, how, and what, well, these things we don't know, because we know nothing about his future projects. We have no idea whether or not Avatar will be good or not. But I do know this: the hype most certainly will kill it in some capacity.
Oh, and um...Alien is still better. (had to bring it back on topic somewhere...heh...)
Re: Aliens (1986).
I disagree that he fucked up ALIENS and I especially disagree that he is overrated. When I think of filmmakers as equally and consistently skilled at large scale film storytelling, few others come to mind. To date, while I think Michael Bay can match the impressiveness of his incredible productions, and overall impressiveness of his execution of big, exciting chase and action sequences, I still regard Cameron as a superior storyteller. And we know quite a bit about AVATAR at this point. As I understand it, in the future we of Earth are the invaders of other worlds, employing 'Avatars' (hybrids, essentially) to infiltrate other worlds (not unlike in the X-FILES, but in reverse, and with $300 million more to show us how, lol), and starring Sam Worthington.
I recently read that nutball genius perfectionist Cameron worked for over a year with professors of anthropology and linguisitics at UCLA to develop the language and culture of the Na'vi, the people of the world being infiltrated.
I also read the film will run 3+ hours.
(Not trying to be combative btw, just stating a differing view...)
Re: Aliens (1986).
I never thought I would ever hear a guy talk crap about James Cameron! The dude who gave the world the Terminator, T2, True Lies (still the benchmark for action/comedy), The Abyss! The dude makes huge fucking movies, every single one of his movies is huge, epic, unstoppable.
- Omar B.
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
Re: Aliens (1986).
Just goes to show you that even some of the most epic artists out there cannot escape criticism.
"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they're genuine." - Abraham Lincoln
Re: Aliens (1986).
The first Terminator was great. Not perfect. Great. T2 was great, even if it was drastically different in style from the first one. But, I guess consistency doesn't matter to him, which explains fucking Aliens. The Abyss was good. Huge and epic, sure. Unstoppable? I dunno about that. But he's not the only one that does "huge and epic" films. Far from it, in fact. Besides, a huge and epic film doesn't need special effects so expensive that it could have been used to pay off our national debt. "Let The Right One In" was a huge and epic film if you ask me.
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