In celebration of Alien Romulus, this week we will be looking back at each film in the Alien franchise. Today, Aliens.

The second film in the Alien franchise is often touted as the best in the series. There is no doubt Aliens changed the landscape of cinema, propelling the career of James Cameron and creating iconic moments that would be replicated for decades to come. The DNA of Aliens can be seen in almost every facet of entertainment. Video games like Halo blatantly rip off major characters and set pieces. Women were seen as bankable action movie stars after Sigourney Weaver’s incredible portrayal of Ellen Ripley. And studios started to take the idea of franchises more seriously. Films not banking on just a single star or director but on a property. Aliens may not have been the first film to tread these grounds, but it’s the one that did it best.

Aliens picks up Ridley Scott’s story a whopping 57 years after the original. Ripley has been frozen in stasis this entire time and is found by chance by a team employed by the mega-corporation Weyland. Ripley is informed that the moon she visited in the first film, the one crawling with xenomorph eggs, is now home to a terraforming colony. A colony that Weyland has since lost communication with. She is recruited by Weyland and the colonial space marine forces to attend a mission to the planet in hopes of regaining contact with the lost colony. During the mission, Ripley and the Marines encounter numerous alien xenomorphs, a young orphaned girl named Newt, and learn the true sinister plans of the evil Weyland corporation.

Aliens is a strikingly different movie than the original film. Ridley Scott’s Alien is small. The entire film takes place mainly on one ship with a small crew of actors. James Cameron’s sequel is much more massive in scope. Expanding not just the story and setpieces, but the universe the series takes place in. Now there are space marines, colonies on different planets, multiple aliens with a hierarchy, and a queen. The film is also much more action-oriented than the first. Alien is about the horror which comes from being alone fighting for survival against an unknown superior being. Aliens levels the playing field, giving the humans machine guns and mech suits to fight the xenomorphs. What Aliens doesn’t change though is the mountains of subtext hiding underneath a stellar film.

Alien tells a story of isolation, corporate greed, and superior beings preying on the weak. Aliens continues these themes but also adds themes of motherhood and reversing gender norms. In 1986 when the film was released, the biggest action stars at the time were Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Arnold coming off The Terminator and Comando, and Sly being a bankable star from his success in the Rocky series and now First Blood. These two stars were big body-building gruff men with hard-to-place accents. Sigourney Weaver was tall but lanky. She looks frail in comparison to the big action stars of the 80’s and 90’s but kicks just as much ass as the men. Featuring her front and center allowed for an additional layer of storytelling that just couldn’t be done with action stars at the time. She was allowed to take on a maternal role, appearing soft and caring while simultaneously being an alien butt-kicking badass. The film also flips the script by turning Bill Paxton’s character Hudson, into a hysterical panicking member of the Marines. A trope typically reserved for women in cinema.

The final epic battle of Aliens has Ripley fighting the queen xenomorph. The alien queen is out to exact revenge on Ripley for destroying her eggs while Ripley is acting purely out of protection for Newt. Her surrogate daughter. It’s a completion of the theme from the first Alien film. The xenomorphs are evil superior beings, only interested in destroying. The humans are their juxtaposition, acting out of selfless service and protection for those around them. This is done with a cat in the first but it’s heaps more powerful here with a human child thrown into the mix. This trope of parents protecting their children wasn’t new at the time, but it was never done before with this much spectacle.

Aliens, much like Alien, gets the most important aspect of a movie right. It’s entertaining. You can miss or ignore all the subtexts of evil capitalism. You can view Bill Paxton as simple comic relief instead of a commentary on hysterical women in cinema. Or you could even forget all the symbolism of motherhood and protecting your children at all costs. With all of those gone, you still have an excellent action movie. One that’s true to the time period and one that paved the way for action and sci-fi films for years to come. Aliens is a 10 out of 10 film because it’s a masterpiece that has inspired countless films, books, and video games.