YMMV / Aliens

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• Alternative Character Interpretation: Burke.
  • Was Burke a squirrely sociopath all along, or was he backed into a corner by a woman determined to nail him to the wall over a genuine mistake? Likewise, was Ripley being fair to Burke when she accused him of killing the colonists, or was she just looking for a convenient scapegoat for an anonymous set of orders uploaded to the Nostromo long before Burke was born?
  • Ripley's absolutely on the money in accusing him of killing the colonists; even in the theatrical release it's made clear that Burke's signature was the one on the order to go investigate the derelict's coordinates.
    You sent them out there and you didn't even warn them. Why didn't you warn them, Burke?
    • Burke's response is to make excuses and say that he made "a bad call", driving home that he was responsible for the order to the colonists.
  • With the release of Alien: Isolation, was Burke lying to Ripley about the fate of her daughter Amanda?
  • Was Burke truly on Ripley's side, at least to begin with, or was he a loyal company man through and through? Did he lie to her or was he just as unaware of the truth?
  • Did Burke direct the colonists to the derelict because he wanted to prove Ripley's story was true or was he ordered by someone higher up to direct the colonists to that ship because they wanted a specimen, no matter how much it would cost? Was he just curious to see what the crew of the Nostromo had found? Or did he see the same dollar signs as whoever gave Ash his orders did and wanted to take another stab at it?
  • Did the company purposefully set up the Marines going to LV-426 to fail from the start? It seems unlikely that Burke would have wanted to accompany them on what amounts to a suicide mission, but he may have been considered expendable by his bosses.
  • Or with what we know about the Company, was what they had in store for him if he failed to deliver actually worse than being taken by the Aliens and the knowledge of this fact led him to do anything to save his life?
• Broken Base:
  • While generally well-regarded, the shift to action from the horror of the first film serves as a small point of division. Some feel it up the stakes by incorporating multiple xenomorphs as antagonists, while detractors believe it degrades their menace by retroactively making Kane's son a Glass Cannon in contrast to the unstoppable Cosmic Horror organism Ash played it out as.
  • Fans are divided on Theatrical Cut vs Special Edition. The latter adds a number of deleted scenes that expand on plot points or are cool in their own right, but detract from the movie's pacing and tension. A common middle-ground is to recommend the Theatrical Cut for a first viewing and the Special Edition for rewatches.
• Catharsis Factor: Many people, including Paul Reiser's family, were satisfied when Burke was devoured by a Xenomorph.
• Common Knowledge: Vasquez was played by a white actress with no Latina heritage? While Jeanette Goldstein wore Brownface makeup, she is also part Brazilian and identifies as Latina.
• Complete Monster: Carter Burke, Special Projects Director for Weyland-Yutani's Special Services Division, is the man responsible for the Hadley's Hope disaster. Sending the colonists near a xenomorph egg nest with no adequate warning, Burke shows no remorse when predictable consequences see the colony wiped out to all but a single little girl. Hamstringing the efforts of the Marines to kill the xenomorphs in hopes he can capture one to advance his profits and stature in the company, Burke tries to have Ripley and the child Newt infected by facehuggers to smuggle the aliens back inside them while plotting to eject all the Marines in cryosleep into deep space so nobody can contradict his story.
• Discredited Meme: Carrie Henn, who played Newt, has said that she hates the line, "They mostly come at night. Mostly." Possibly because people spin it into the worst pickup line ever.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Hudson, due to having so many memorable lines and being Defiant to the End.
  • Bishop for being a loyal and sympathetic android in comparison to the villainous Ash, to the point that he's basically the second main character of the Alien franchise after Ripley.
  • Vasquez as well thanks to Jenette Goldstein's iconic performance, to the point that she got a trope named after her.
  • Sergeant Apone, who influenced several other sergeant characters of his type such as Johnson of Halo fame. This is especially impressive considering he was one of the first people to die, which demonstrates just how much of an impact he left on viewers with his general attitude and initial Commanding Coolness.
  • All Ferro does in the film is state military lines and get killed by a xenomorph, crashing the Drop Ship she flew on the planet and stranding the rest of the group. However, those lines sounded so cool that she is pretty much the archetypal Drop Ship pilot for all subsequent fiction, to the extent that many of them end up quoting her lines.
  • And there is also Pvt Wierzbowski, who despite only having a single line uttered off-screen in the Special Edition has his own website. It seems to be largely down to his odd and memorable name, shouted out by a horrified Hicks as he's killed off-screen.
  • Perhaps the mother of all ensemble darkhorses: Amanda Ripley. Cut from the theatrical version, and only appearing as a photograph in the restored version, she was granted her own title in the video game Alien: Isolation and proved so popular that comics have been written to continue her story.
• Even Better Sequel: While the original Alien is a great movie — interesting characters, creepy and horrifying designs for the alien, it introduced the xenomorph life cycle to an unsuspecting populace, and so on — the second movie is widely (though not universally) regarded as a better film. It also benefited from a Genre Shift from straight up Horror to Action Horror, which meant that instead of suffering from Sequelitis, Aliens was able to do things its own way. In general, which film any individual viewer considers the better one usually comes down to which genre they prefer.
• Fair for Its Day: Jeanette Goldstein has to wear Brownface makeup and darken her hair to play Vasquez. The actress actually is Latina (mixed Brazilian, Russian and Moroccan) but would not look apparent as such to a 1986 audience. Despite this, the character is still recognised as a strong figure in both female and Hispanic representation in film.
• Fanon: It's left open what kind of relationship Vasquez and Drake have. Word of God is that they're childhood friends, but some fans like to interpret them as being lovers in some fashion. There is a moment during the gearing-up scene in which Vasquez says something to Drake, who responds with "Okay, baby." It's possible this was a term of endearment, but it may also be one of Drake's idiosyncrasies. Vasquez perhaps doesn't seem the type to go by "baby".
• Fandom Rivalry: There's a fairly serious intra-fandom rivalry between fans of this movie and supporters of Ridley Scott's prequel series, since Fox ended up cancelling Neill Blomkamp's Alien 5 (which would have brought back Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn and wiped Alien³ from existence) in favor of Alien: Covenant.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: 95% of Alien Fix Fics follow the exact same plotline, where Mama Ripley, Papa Hicks, and their adopted daughter Rebecca return to Earth with Uncle Bishop and never so much as think the word "xenomorph" ever again. Any rumors that something bad happened to them afterwards are completely false and nothing more than mean-spirited conjecture.
• Genre Turning Point:
  • In American futuristic SF, the role of women was changed forever because of this film. Afterward, there was no room for any Neutral Female or Damsel in Distress in the future for any major female character; now they are expected to grab a weapon and join the fighting as much as any man.
  • This was also the movie that made it stylish to have your future soldiers use high-tech kinetic firearms instead of "ray guns".
  • Its reintroduction of the Space Marine trope to a new generation wound up having an impact far beyond film, especially in video games. Decades' worth of sci-fi soldier protagonists and squadmates of such in games from Halo: Combat Evolved to Gears of War were inspired by this film's depiction of the United States Colonial Marines, while H. R. Giger's monster designs were likewise frequently copied for the alien baddies that they fought. Even the hive levels full of Meat Moss frequently seen in such games have a prototype in the scene where the Marines explore the reactor pit.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In-universe, there's the early scene where Ripley has a nightmare about having a chestburster inside her, which actually happens in Alien³.
  • Inside the Atmosphere Processor, Ripley desperately mashes the call buttons for both elevators, summoning them both to her level and allowing the Alien Queen to board the Sulaco. At the time it seemed like an innocuous moment of panic, but that one single careless button press directly caused the heartbreaking events of the next film.
  • Everything about Ripley rescuing Newt is heartbreaking when you know that it was All for Nothing and she dies in the escape pod crash in the next sequel.
  • Ripley and Hicks’s last on-screen interaction in the Special Edition becomes this after Alien³ reveals he died from being impaled during the crash.
    Hicks: Dwayne. It’s Dwayne.
    Ripley: Ellen.
    Hicks: Don’t be gone long, Ellen.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: James Cameron's original script would have had Ripley's daughter upset at her for seemingly abandoning her instead of already being dead by then. It's now strongly hinted that she passed away having a good idea about what her mother might have been through.
• He's Just Hiding: Hudson and Apone are both dragged away by the aliens at separate points in the film, almost certainly get impregnated by face huggers if they survive being killed or mortally wounded during their abductions, and have no known way of escaping the nuclear explosion that destroys the colony even if they did escape. Nonetheless, many fans argue that neither character dies onscreen, leading to theories they survived. The fact that Bill Paxton requested to return for sequels adds to the speculation.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ripley asking if IQs just dropped sharply while she was hibernated kinda predicts the premise of Idiocracy.
  • Vasquez asks Ferro about Ripley "Who's Snow White?" Ten years later Sigourney Weaver plays Snow White's stepmother in Snow White: A Tale of Terror.
  • The Marines' jokes about a mission to rescue 'dumbass colonists' are hilariously prophetic when we consider everything the characters did wrong in Alien: Covenant.
  • Ripley sagely observes that xenomorphs refrain from "fucking each other over" to get ahead. Two films later, it turns out that under some circumstances, they actually will.
• Improved by the Re-Cut: The extended cut restores Newt's backstory, where her father was the first colonist who was infected, and Ripley's subplot of her heartbreak over losing her daughter during hypersleep, thereby adding a much deeper dimension to her relationship with Newt. These additions do interfere with the film's pacing and tension (they give away exactly what went down at the colony and that someone from the company set the colonists up to die), however; it's up to the individual viewer's opinion as to whether or not the trade-off is worth it.
• Love to Hate: In a story about space hive monsters, Paul Reiser's Burke manages to elevate his character on top of the action thanks to some memorably despicable villainy:
  Ripley: You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.
• Memetic Mutation: The film is iconic enough that it would be easier to list the story beats and lines that haven't become memes.
  • "Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?" Said by Ripley when she awakens after 57 years and is not believed by staff.
  • The phrase, "Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure," is often used. A minor alteration is to simply tag "It's the only way to be sure" to any drastic suggestion.
  • Imitating Hudson's line, "Game over, man! Game over!" Or just about anything Hudson says really.
  • "Queen takes Bishop", an obvious chess pun.
  • Keeping something handy "for close encounters". Usually shotguns.
  • "Stay Frosty"
  • "They mostly come at night. Mostly."
  • "Get away from her, you bitch!" along with the concept of the Power Loader/Alien Queen fight.
  • Bishop's knife trick predates this film by hundreds of years, but is likely only well-known today as a result of it.
  • "Have you ever been mistaken for a man?" "Have you?" Often used in the context of androgynous-looking characters.
  • "You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage!" Used when Humans Are the Real Monsters is in effect, or Insult to Rocks.
  • The Alien Queen shrieking as she's sucked out the airlock has caused many fans to joke "but I thought in space no one can hear you scream?"
• Misaimed Fandom: It's remarkable that, given this movie is the launchpad for the modern Space Marine trope, the Colonial Marines depicted fare pretty badly despite their boastful bravado... since according to Word of God, that is the point. Cameron has related at length that the film is an allegory of The Vietnam War, and all of the military failures and senseless loss that conflict entailed. However, audiences were more enamored with the idea of the Marines than the reality. He went back and did the whole thing over again from the aliens' side to get the message across... Which also kinda backfired.
• Moe: Newt for those who like her. Her most adorable moment comes when she puts on a helmet, imitates the soldiers saying "affirmative", and responds to one of Hudson's snarky comments with a deadpan salute.
• Moral Event Horizon: Burke locking Ripley and Newt in a soundproof room with two facehuggers so he can smuggle the alien embryos back to Earth. Though he likely crossed it earlier when he got the entire colony killed (this depends on which scenario you believe from Alternative Character Interpretation).
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Fans love the high pitched shrieks and squeals the aliens make so much that there was outrage that it wasn't included in Aliens: Colonial Marines, even though they have been the preferred vocalizations used in all previous Aliens video games. The same goes with the sounds the Pulse Rifles and Smartguns make when they fire.
  • Vasquez shouting "Let's rock!" before firing her smartgun on the aliens. Sure, it just makes things worse, but it's still pretty badass.
  • The beeping of the motion trackers, which help add to the sense of paranoia in some of the most intense scenes in the film.
• Narm:
  • In the original Alien some people found the shots where the monster is noticeably a guy in a rubber suit distracting, so seeing that multiplied here with all the Warriors being clearly suit actors crawling, hopping around and getting shot can come off as Nightmare Retardant.
  • Being operated by multiple puppeteers, the Alien Queen's movements look very awkward and unnatural, with her different appendages seemingly moving in an uncoordinated manner...
• Narm Charm: ...which actually works in the movie's favor, as her uncanny movements manage to make her appear unnatural and creepy, and thus more effectively frightening when seen in action.
  • Also shows that the Queen has been strapped down and hasn't moved by herself in a long time.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Konami's Aliens game is a fun Run-and-Gun that draws upon the developer's own Contra, itself being a Spiritual Successor to the franchise of sorts.
• One True Pairing: Many fans of this film ship Ripley and Hicks together. It helps that the chemistry between Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn is genuine, and Hicks is one of the few Marines to take Ripley's story seriously. The pulse rifle and tracker bracelet scenes definitely help in making them shippable. It's pretty telling that majority of fanfics feature these two as a couple, with Newt as their adoptive daughter, too. Academics who have studied the film frequently call Hicks a symbolic love interest or husband. Of note is that James Cameron intended for Ripley, Hicks, and Newt to become a family after reaching Earth.
• Questionable Casting: While few complain about what Jenette Goldstein brought to the role of Vasquez, many are quick to point out how this amazing character is played by a white woman in brownface. This is explained in the making-of documentary included with many Blu-Ray releases: Because Aliens was filmed in England, policies in place at the time required the production to hire as many native British actors, or Americans currently living in Britain, as possible before flying any American actors in (with the exception of Sigourney Weaver). Jenette Goldstein was living in Britain and was one of many talented actors the production found. Odds are, there simply wasn't a sizeable pool of Hispanic actors living in Britain at the time (and Goldstein herself does have Brazilian heritage, so it's as much about making her appearance match audience expectations of what a Hispanic woman would look like).
• Signature Scene: Ripley facing the Queen in the power loader to rescue Newt. The scene serves as the culmination of her Character Development, and shows just how far she’s willing to go to protect Newt. The scene is immortalized with one famous line from Ripley:
  Ripley: Get away from her, you bitch!
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Towards the end of the movie, when "torn-in-half" Bishop stretches to stop Newt from being sucked out an airlock, the hole in the floor he's actually standing in and his lower body are clearly visible. The guys doing the technical commentary actually point it out on the DVD (one says he'd seen the film several times before he ever noticed it). This was fixed in the Blu-Ray release of the film.
  • More of an editing failure, but prior to the Blu-ray release there's a scene where Ripley takes a Pulse Rifle and Flamethrower off the rack and tapes them together over 4 shots. The failure is in the weapons swapping when she places them down. (She grabs a flamethrower and puts down a rifle, then vice versa). There's another small goof when she's putting together the weapon. When she first slaps in a magazine, the count on the rifle reads 95, but when she's on the elevator a moment later it reads 42 (like the rifle she was training with earlier).
  • The dropship suffers from some very obvious green screen matting at some points.
  • When Ripley and Newt are standing on the landing platform at the end, just before the Alien Queen exits the elevator, the rear-projection backdrop of the atmosphere processor is just awful, and the pieces of debris clearly being thrown by stagehands just off-screen make it look even worse.
  • When Ripley and Newt are trapped with the facehuggers and Newt tells Ripley to break the glass of the window, the "glass" rebounds from the chair just like plastic (though this could easily be explainable by it being a futuristic material that people just call "glass" for short).
  • When Bishop does his knife trick, Apone nodding his head in the background makes it very obvious that the footage was sped up.
  • While the Blu-ray release took the opportunity to fix the Bishop-standing-in-a-hole issue (see above), the general cleanup and de-grain of the movie has made some other FX fails more visible. A good example would be the wires holding up the tail and other appendages of the xenomorph that grabs Newt.
  • At one point the metal rod inside the queen's neck is clearly visible.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • Halo takes a great deal of inspiration from Aliens, including the space marines, the flying dropships, kinetic weapons, battles with parasitic aliens, and Sergeant Johnson, who is basically just Apone with a different name.
  • The film is often referred to as a stealth adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers — and a far more faithful adaptation to the later officially-licensed film. And even though it was just one suit, Aliens even had more Powered Armor than the actual Starship Troopers film franchise (at least until the third, straight-to-DVD film).
• Spiritual Successor: To, of all things, Rambo: First Blood Part II. Both Actionized Sequels feature a jaded, castigated survivor of a grueling ordeal being called back into action on a rescue mission which goes awry and turns into a hellish mediation on the Vietnam War and its chaotic confusion. Also, both were written by James Cameron. Interestingly, Cameron said he didn't write the "politics" of Rambo, just the plot and action.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Because of the incredible time pressure that James Horner was under when he composed the Aliens score, he borrows from his own Klingon theme from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, as well as Khachaturian's Gayane Adagio. Horner could get away with using Khatchaturian's work (originally published in 1942) since at that time, Western nations only recognized copyrights in the Soviet Union dating from 1973.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Not the movie itself, but there are a few easily missed allusions to there being other alien life in the universe aside from the xenomorphs and Yautja. The Expanded Universe has made use of this in novels like Aliens: Bug Hunt.
• Too Cool to Live: Most of the Marines fall under this(considering everyone but Hicks don't get out of the film alive) but in particular Apone, Drake, Hudson, and Vasquez are incredibly capable fighters with very likeable personalities and go out fighting. A stranger example of this is Gorman who is a well-meaning but ineffective lieutenant for most of his screentime aka the complete opposite of a badass but dies after staying behind with a wounded Vasquez.
• Tough Act to Follow: How most people feel about the follow-up, Alien³.
• Unintentional Period Piece: A minor case. Being set in the future, the date of the film production can be told by the presence of some '80s Hair and Hudson making a joke about smoking or non-smoking seats. The static also pins the date of production to a time in which analog video signals were still used.
• Unpopular Popular Character:
  • Bishop. He's feared and distrusted — if not outright hated — by main character Ripley, and treated as little more than a useful tool at best (justified by her experiences with Ash from the first film), but he's one of the most popular and iconic characters in the entire franchise.
  • Hudson is a brash, obnoxious loudmouth who his teammates respond to with little more than eye-rolling derision, but fans love him for his hilarious one-liners and Bill Paxton's gloriously annoying performance. He's arguably the most iconic Mauve Shirt in cinema history.
• Values Dissonance:
  • A deleted scene of pre-infestation Hadley's Hope has Newt's mother get her to settle down by threatening to spank her, something that would raise eyebrows today. More bizarrely, the novel claims smoking is okay due to lacking nicotine, whereas smoking in general has become frowned upon regardless of content. And the modern "safer" alternative to smoking, the electronic cigarette, eliminates the myriad harmful byproducts of inhaling burning plant matter... but more often than not still contains nicotine.
  • Much like Rita Moreno in West Side Story (1961), Jeanette Goldstein had to wear dark makeup to make her character Vasquez look believably Hispanic to a 1986 audience. This was dogging Hispanic actors well into the 90s and 2000s, with Sofia Vergara having to dye her hair brown, because Hollywood didn't believe a Latina could be naturally blonde.
• Values Resonance: This film depicts women as being Marines. West Point had only allowed female cadets ten years previously and it would still be several years before female military members would be allowed in direct combat. There isn't just a token female member; there are three female Marines, each with distinctive skills (Vasquez with assault, Dietrich as a medic, and Ferro as a pilot) and their competency is never questioned. Any issue anybody has with questioning Ripley is not because of her gender, but because she's a civilian. And the final battle ultimately comes down to two badass mother-figures fighting to protect their children, a plot point which even today few films have ever replicated.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The Alien Queen designed by Stan Winston helped him win his first Special Effects Oscar. The same goes with the other Power Loader that fought it, which caused many companies to demand a real-life one.
  • The same goes with the xenomorphs. Only a few full suits were built (six in total, and once shooting started they never had all six fully functional and usable at the same time) and yet every trick in the book was used to give the illusion of multiple aliens fighting the Marines.
  • The best thing about it? They did all this on a 17 million dollars budget.
• The Woobie: Newt. She's been orphaned and traumatized by an alien attack and continues to be antagonized by the monsters throughout the movie. To make things worse, the happy ending with Ripley is undone by her death in the third.

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