Aliens (1986)
Directed by James Cameron
Ripley, the sole survivor of the Nostromo's deadly encounter with the monstrous Alien, returns to Earth after drifting through space in hypersleep for 57 years. Although her story is initially met with skepticism, she agrees to accompany a team of Colonial Marines back to LV-426.
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What critics compared Aliens to
Despite being humorous in its outlook and providing numerous "Easter eggs" to fans of Star Wars , Aliens , Close Encounters , and E.T. (amongst others), this isn't a parody.
The rest of the film's targets are more in line with expectations, with "Star Wars," "Men in Black," "Aliens," "Back to the Future," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and "Mac and Me" all cited at one time or another.
Sigourney Weaver puts in a brief appearance as Mr Big and shares a scene with Blythe Danner which features one of Weaver's signature lines from Aliens , a line that earns huge laughs in Paul.
Pegg and Frost freely drop clever references to iconic modern sci-fi cinema, from Close Encounters to Aliens to, of course, E.T. (one voice cameo in particular underlines the magic that should have permeated the entire film).
"Paul" borrows heavily from so many movies -- "E.T." obviously, but also "Jaws," "Aliens," "Easy Rider" and many more -- but while it definitely takes their lines or plots, it doesn't quite replicate their emotional stakes or dramatic payoffs.
Paul, however, is a sci-fi movie spoof, half its dialogue consisting of lines lifted from Star Wars , Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Star Trek, Raiders of the Lost Ark , Aliens , Back to the Future , and all the other 70s and 80s sci-fi comfort-food staples fed to growing fanboys back then.
Though it pays “creative homage” to a number of films (the opening credits sequence is practically lifted from the 2014 version of Godzilla ), it owes its biggest debts to Alien , Aliens , and the collected works of Paul W.S. Anderson, the sci-fi deathtrap B-movie maestro behind Event Horizon and the Resident Evil films .
There’s no doubt that Kristen Stewart has been styled to evoke Weaver as Ripley in Underwater , to the point of collapsing the character’s various incarnations into one package: She’s got close-cropped hair (shades of Alien 3 ), carries a big gun (á la Aliens ), and spends a significant amount of time running around in her underwear (as in the climax of Alien ), all while projecting the same terse toughness as her inspiration.
There’s a scene where the crew is crawling through a tight space in the lab wreckage that evokes the claustrophobic panic of The Descent , and the slow reveal of the final water monster baddie is spookily reminiscent of the Queen reveal in Aliens .
In addition, the alien design borrows from earlier films like Alien (from which director William Eubank has also cribbed the interiors), Aliens and A Quiet Place , to name just three.
Similarly, the sense of claustrophobia director William Eubank accomplishes in early sequences is neatly taut, and several of the reveals of the underwater monsters are quite eerie and, wouldn’t you know it, reminiscent of the Queen from the superior Aliens .
There's a wise-cracking crew member, played by T.J. Miller, who's clearly a descendant of the whiny marine played by Bill Paxton ( "Game over, man!" ) in Aliens .
Yet, the film's big signature set-piece -- where the team is down in dark and wet tunnels and must contend with fast-moving, voracious and large-mouthed monsters -- feels like an homage to (or if you're more cynical, a direct rip-off of) similar scenes from "Aliens."
A tidal wave of deadly oil and an underground tunnel full of mutants – in a scene reminiscent of Ripley fighting off the creatures in Aliens – are both brilliantly realised, hinting at Collins’ devious imagination.
Now Lawrence and the filmmakers use that celebrity for suspense: There's a horribly great sequence in a sewer that pays homage to Aliens, a quiet nail-biter wherein Katniss, now disguised as a Capitol resident, is recognized by a toddler.
Director Francis Lawrence rips off "Aliens" mightily - does Katniss really need to participate in just another bug hunt? - but never convinces us why having unarmed creatures paw and hiss at the heavily armed heroes would be a strategic advantage for the Capitol.
Francis Lawrence makes every sequence potentially life threatening and the Aliens homage with the battle against the mutts is definitely one of my favorite action scenes this year.
It leads to talk of suicide and to a subterranean sequence that reminds a great deal of the final escape in Aliens, ending in a death of a beloved character that's frankly difficult to take--even for someone like me, who has no other relationship to said character except the dim memory that he got married at some point in the first, already-blurry portion of this instalment.
Directed by Colin Trevorrow and co-written by Trevorrow and his writing partner Derek Connolly—working from a script originated by Planet Of The Apes rebooters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver— Jurassic World mixes many elements from the first film while shifting the mood from horror and suspense to action, not unlike what Aliens did by reworking the raw material of Alien.
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard acquit themselves well in such moments, plus, any action scenes nodding to Aliens/Predator 2 play just fine with me.
A military verses dinosaur set-piece is a cartoonish tribute to the first encounter of the marines with the xenomorphs in Aliens , and the final showdown is a prehistoric prize fight that’s worth the price of admission alone.
He references countless other monster movies, including obvious ones like King Kong and Godzilla and less evident choices like The Birds and (especially) Aliens .
Everything about the action and suspense feels mercilessly pre-ordained and overfamiliar - its best sequences don't so much "steal" from Jurassic Park, Aliens , and Predator , as they use different colored crayons to fill them in - but the film's largely gorgeous CGI (I can only point to one shot where the effects fall apart, a child awkwardly "hugging" a baby brachiosaur) makes those borrowings enough of their own thing that it feels okay to forgive them.
Instead, sequel director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) seems content to execute a lesser Aliens: He’s got his Ripley figure in Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), a brittle park manager who blooms into a protective Amazonian mom after a toothy hybrid goes rogue; he mounts generically staged action sequences involving flares and bared shoulders; and he sneaks in an evil military plot represented by an extra-wide Vincent D’Onofrio.
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If the plot’s somewhat reminiscent of the original film and its influences, not least James Cameron’s Aliens, it is at least a flick that makes good use of its precious resources.
The technique was perfected by James Cameron in “Aliens” and has become the standard of science fiction character teams since (even used again later in the director’s own “Avatar”), and here director David Twohy makes full use of it right down to the token asshole (Santana) who is short-sighted and too smug to know that he will probably be laughed off screen by a hateful audience well before the final act.
Johns' motley crew of space thugs includes a bulked-up sniper named Dahl (Katee Sackhoff, channeling Jenette Goldstein's butt-kicking Vasquez in Aliens).
The movie hints early on at what's coming, but saves the all-out creature-feature festivities for the action-packed climax, turning the tables once again on the audience to give us a final taste of sci-fi horror with a back-to-the-basics nod to Pitch Black and Aliens .
Eventually, Diesel re-enters the fray, and Riddick becomes a shameless rip-off of Aliens, as well as a preposterous cartoon that makes The Amazing Spider-Man seem like an Errol Morris documentary.
One of the most memorable non-monster moments in Aliens is a brief, iconic exchange between two tough-as-tungsten-carbide space marines played by Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein.
Of course, this revelation comes to light, but even that opportunity for narrative progression fails to enliven the main thread of this yarn, the millionth knock-off of the Aliens films to misunderstand completely what makes those films such extraordinary entertainments.
There may be a whole lot of Aliens to the proceedings, but Pitch Black becomes sericeable enough on its own armrest-gripping level.
In Twohy's very slight variation on the "Aliens"/"Starship Troopers" theme, two antisocial people, a docking pilot and a homicidal prisoner, are rehabilitated by the tribulations of survival on a desert planet.
We never really get a good look at the embracing bat-creatures, but we see enough of them to know that they pale in comparison to the ones in "Aliens".
“Evil Dead” borrows some ideas from the 1986 sci-fi horror movie “Aliens” but it’s not a complete ripoff.
As well as horror, there are also echoes of another classic, in Ridley Scott’s 1986 Aliens; there are clear nods to it, with a horror taking place in a confined space, and a relationship developing similar to that of Ripley’s protective relationship over young girl Newt.
Cronin also has sequences that appear to reference everything from The Shining and Aliens to The Thing (I even thought there was a little bit from The Last of Us: Part II in this one).
It must have taken an enormous amount of restraint for Sullivan not to quote Ellen Ripley during the finale (“Get away from her, you bitch!”), but the “surrogate mother” dynamic she develops with young Fisher can’t even clear the bar set by Mimic , let alone Aliens .
Of course, the idea of humans enslaved by machines in all three Matrix movies owes a huge debt to The Terminator, but even the visuals here borrow shamelessly from Cameron, particularly the Armored Personnel Units — the lumbering, robotic exoskeletons worn by the Zion soldiers seem inspired by the similar apparatus Sigourney Weaver uses to fight the creature at the end of Aliens.
We cut from soldiers fighting in big Aliens rip-off machines, to a couple of chicks trying to shoot missiles into the center of the Death Star, or whatever that big drill thing is, to a ship being manually piloted by Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) -- with an uncharacteristically stressed out Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in the passenger seat -- making its way back to Zion.
Having said their peace about quantum physics and bending spoons already, homage is paid to sci-fi classics while showcasing all the best in today's jaw-dropping special effects: Ripley's power loader 'mech' from "Aliens," the gun turret / Death Star escape sequence on board the Millennium Falcon from the from the original "Star Wars," and even a bit of "Starship Troopers."
The APU battle bots the Zions use look like they were taken straight from the dock movers in Aliens with all the clunky vulnerabilities that implies.
Of course, Garland's film is much more than just an alien film, its ambitions would like you to think that it is about the meaning of existence, but it rather shares striking similarities to John McTiernan‘s "Predator" and James Cameron‘s "Aliens", two American-made sci-fi thrillers that have been relentlessly copied over the years by hundreds of filmmakers.
Years from now, someone’s going to stroll down the science-fiction aisle of the last remaining video store on the planet, where they’ll find the last remaining physical copy of Alex Garland’s new movie, Annihilation, shelved neatly between Aliens and Arrival .
Combining bits of “The Thing” (the Carpenter version) and the “Aliens” franchise with themes reminiscent of “2001” and his own “Ex Machina,” writer-director Alex Garland offers an adaptation of the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy that’s consistently tantalizing but also deliberately obscure.
They can’t all be Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.
As a team of heavily armed scientists, played by Portman, Gina Rodriguez , Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, march into The Shimmer, the otherworldly bubble walling off Area X, the movie conjures genre pleasures—shades of Predator, Aliens, Apocalypse Now—but it’s quieter, eerier.
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The space/military culture is reminiscent of that in Aliens and the cross-cultural romance recalls Titanic.
The Na’vi, with their bows and arrows, are no match for gunships and soldiers inside exoskeletons (the machines being one of several echoes from Cameron’s Aliens, another is the corporate servant Parker, reprising Paul Reiser’s venal Carter Burke), and American military might is casually excoriated throughout the film.
The other chief villain is the mining company’s on-site manager Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) who will remind you of the Paul Reiser character in James Cameron’s “Aliens”, another rousing entertainment.
Certain characters directly recall figures in the director's past movies, such as Giovanni Ribisi's mundanely evil corporate stooge, who is a more two dimensional rendering of Paul Reiser's Carter from Aliens.
The colonel’s pacifist adversary, scientist and fellow Avatar Grace ( Sigourney Weaver , for that “ Aliens ” vibe) wants to create a “bridge of trust” with them instead.
And writer/director James Cameron still doesn’t seem concerned with rehashing past material from his filmography; whereas the 2009 film borrowed heavily from “Aliens,” this follow-up takes inspiration from “The Abyss” (and “Titanic”), particularly as Cameron’s affinity for the deep grows evident in the extensive submerged locales and creatures (and photography and gadgetry and submersibles).
But the closing stretch, when he reminds viewers that he also directed Aliens and Terminator 2 , may knock their socks off anyway.
While storytelling elements are reminiscent of past Cameron opuses (most notably Aliens , The Abyss , and Titanic ), there’s never a false beat throughout this climax.
By turns evoking memories of Titanic’s emotionally freighted sequences of inexorable disaster and the tendency of Cameron’s heroes — particularly Ellen Ripley from Aliens and Sarah Connor from T2: Judgment Day — to run back into the belly of the beast in defiance of such peril, The Way of Water’s finale reminds us that Cameron is a deft architect of high-stakes action.
Also in the mix as young Na’vis are veteran actors Kate Winslet and Sigourney Weaver, who have worked with Cameron in the past – Winslet on that other water adventure (“Titanic”) and Weaver on “Avatar” and “Aliens” (1986).
It’s insane that after directing two of the highest grossing films of all time and delivering arguably the greatest sequels ala “Aliens” and “T2: Judgement Day,” people would still doubt the king, but the chatter around his long-gestating return to Pandora in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” wasn’t so much around the quality of the film, but if people actually “cared.”
If we didn’t know it after “Aliens” (1986)…
Alien and Aliens both feature a crew investigating a distress signal on LV-426, taking some casualties, and misreading a motion tracker with terrifying results before featuring a tense final sequence in which a flamethrower-toting Ripley rescues a loved one before blowing a xenomorph stowaway out of an airlock.
…it is (to quote another Cameron film) game over, man!
I keep wondering if this master world builder will ever leave the planet of Pandora and start astonishing us again like he did with “The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “Titanic.”
…director of The Terminator and Aliens…
Cameron is rightly praised for showcasing tough female leads like Sarah Connor (The Terminator) and Ellen Ripley (Aliens)…
Biehn's other Cameron credits are The Terminator, T2 (where he had a cameo that was cut from the theatrical release but restored in the special edition), and The Abyss.
Without it, Cameron likely never gets the chance to make “The Abyss,” which denies him the chance to work on the special effects that make “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” so incredible (or worse, “T2” is directed by someone else entirely).
As in their box office hit Aliens, producer Gale Anne Hurd and Cameron’s latest opus rests on a simple, war story-style plot.
James Cameron’s follow-up to his stunning work on “Aliens” was a huge target of gossip and expectation that summer, pulling up to theaters after enduring a full year of mysterious set reports and industry speculation, where it was made abundantly clear that Cameron was swinging for the fences with this feature.
James Cameron 's follow-up to Aliens abandons deep space for the spacey deep, and hits rock bottom as the submarine genre meets Close Encounters.
Chances are you've seen James Cameron's sea epic "The Abyss," because chances are you've seen James Cameron's space epic, "Aliens."
There are also echoes of James Cameron – Avatar’s sense of discovery, Aliens’ grit, and T2’s scale and heart.
I've lamented in the past that for cross-pollinated Fox franchise Aliens someone created the word 'quadrilogy' when tetralogy existed…
Rather than another female action hero in the “Predator/Alien” canon along the lines of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) or Naru, Thia has more in common to Bishop (Lance Henriksen) from “Aliens” (1986)…
Closer to the vein of Aliens’s Bishop and Romulus’s Andy than, say, Prometheus’s David, she’s the film’s beating heart…
“Predator: Badlands” cribs from across the sci-fi galaxy, especially with a nod to “Aliens.”
…there’s a bit with a pulse rifle (yes, the pulse rifle from Aliens) that will surely blow the mind of any child of the ’80s…