Editor’s note: Parts one and two of this series have already been published here and here. The editor apologizes for the oversight and hopes you will enjoy this initial review and read the attending reviews as well.

The first Alien film is considered a sci-fi classic, and Aliens, the sequel, is widely regarded as the best movie in the series. But personally, I found Alien to be tolerable, but not worth the hype. So, who’s to say if the second movie will be any better?

It starts out with Ripley being found by a scavenger ship, where she is quickly taken back to earth and awakened from her cryosleep. Right away, we have a problem. One of “The Cooperation’s” big wigs, Burke, comes in to check on Ripley while she is recovering in the hospital. He hesitantly tells her that she has been asleep for fifty-seven years. As soon as he says this, Ripley starts to hyperventilate, and a few seconds later, an alien begins to emerge from her stomach.

Obviously, this is a dream because there is way too much movie left, but this dream sequence instantly raises ambiguity in the plot. Was Ripley really asleep for such a long period of time? We later see Burke in a board meeting, so we know he’s real, and it’s evident that some time has passed since she went to sleep in her shuttle. But it’s hard to know where reality ended, and the dream began. I believe we are supposed to assume that only the alien ripping out of Ripley’s body was a dream, and that everything else happened in real life just, but the story never lets us know for sure.

This also created another plot hole. After Ripley recovers from her long nap, she is whisked away to a board meeting with The Cooperation. They are very upset over the loss of their mining ship, but honestly, why would they be so distraught after fifty-seven years? One could imagine they would still be upset after two or three years, but if fifty-seven years had passed, then anybody who stood to profit from the ore on the mining ship would most likely be dead. And since The Cooperation is still in existence, then it’s safe to assume it has recovered from its losses. The ire on the part of The Cooperation doesn’t really add up if we assume that fifty-seven years have gone by since Ripley’s first encounter with the alien.

The plot gets even worse. One of The Cooperation’s henchmen tells Ripley that a group of settlers have landed on the planet where her crew had picked the creature up because it is in the process of being terraformed. There are supposed to be over a hundred people living on the planet, and yet, nobody has seen these aliens, which is one of the reasons The Cooperation doesn’t believe Ripley. So, how in the world did these settlers stay on the planet for, at least, a portion of those fifty-seven years and not realize there was another ship? They have advanced technology, and the movie implies that other alien species have been discovered, so shouldn’t they have found this mysterious ship and it’s cargo by now?

I’m not sure this argument could be made if the settlers had only been there for two or three years, but we don’t know exactly how long they were there.  All we know for sure is that the settlers are safe — so far at any rate — and this is the main reason for The Cooperation’s cynicism, which implies that the settler’s have explored, at least, a large portion of the planet. If they’d been there for any extended period of time, they should’ve seen something, so even though the Cooperation is painted as a villain, it really is understandable why they wouldn’t believe Ripley.

These minor problems in the story stem from the fact that Ripley was out for so long. If the writers had shortened the timeframe, say to something like a couple years, then these problems disappear. This “twist” struck me as a a shaky way to begin the movie, just so they could shock the audience.

Ripley is decommissioned and begins working at the cargo docks where she operates loaders, which are large, robotic suits with arms and legs. Personally, I think a regular forklift would be more efficient, but anyway. Before long, the inevitable happens. The Cooperation loses contact with the settlement, and Burke asks Ripley to join a group of marines to check on the settlers.

At first, Ripley refuses, but after a night of bad dreams, she calls Burke and says she’ll go. On the way to the planet, Ripley meets some of the marines, Hudson, Hicks, and Vasqueze, and she also encounters a robot named Bishop. She is immediately hostile towards the robot since her previous experience with one of these metal humanoids was less than pleasant. After some banter, and a less than successful briefing where Ripley tries to explain what these aliens are, they land on the hostile planet and find the settlement abandoned. It doesn’t take them long to figure out the place was attacked by the aliens because their acidic blood has melted through portions of the building. It looks like the settlers fought to their last and lost.

While exploring the settlement, they come across a lab where two of the parasitic aliens which plant an egg inside a human host are being kept inside two tubes of water. It becomes apparent that the settlers had found the creatures and were researching them. As they continue to explore the place, they stumble across a little girl who calls herself Newt. After a while, she tells them that her parents and all the settlers are dead. But soon afterward, Hudson manages to find the settlers using a tracking device which was inserted into them. They’ve all been taken to the same place, a sublevel of the complex, and no one, not even Ripley, understands why.

The marines go to find the settlers while Ripley, Newt, Burke, and Lieutenant Gorman return to a futuristic tank they used the reach the settlement. From the tank, Gorman begins observing the marines as they descend the complex. They quickly find the settlers and it turns out that each of them have been wrapped inside some kind of cocoon, where the aliens had placed an egg in front of each individual so their parasitic counterparts could lay their eggs inside the trapped hosts. It looks like Newt was right. All the settlers have been killed.  We’ll cover what happens from there in the next review.