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.
“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.
…it references everything from E.T. to Stand by Me by way of Poltergeist, Aliens and plenty more…
…but a scene from Aliens gets lifted too…
She even gets her own Ripley-esque moment: “Stay away from my daughter!” she screams…
It’s a classic small-town-with-BIG-mysteries story (think Twin Peaks meets Aliens meets Monster Squad)…
“Dungeons & Dragons,” earth tones, rotary phones, wood paneling, banana seats, “Aliens,” “Star Wars,” pudding cups, Stephen King, John Carpenter, rugby shirts, all manner of terrible haircuts, John Hughes, the Evil Empire, “War Games” and, above all, the oeuvre of Steven Spielberg — “Stranger Things” creators Ross and Matt Duffer reference and re-reference the cultural touchstones of an American childhood they are too young to have shared with loving, amber-hued abandon.
…the first hour functions as a mega-budgeted, mashup homage to some of the great action classics of the ‘80s era — Red Dawn, Aliens, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, and even TV miniseries IT.