Having located the colonists through transmitters that confirm they are huddled together in one area of the complex, the Marines resolve to roll-in guns blazing and save a single day. What they find, however, are walls enveloped with cocoon-like resin and inside colonists who serve as hosts to alien Facehuggers. All at once, the attack that is aliens, caught off guard, the Marine’s numbers are cut right down to a handful. By the right time they escape, their shootout has caused a reactor leak which will detonate in many different hours. Panicked, outnumbered, outgunned, and now out of time, the survivors that are few together, section themselves off, and attempt to devise an idea. To escape, they have to manually fly down a dropship from the Sulaco. But while the coolant tower fails from the complex’s reactor, the whole site slowly goes to hell and can soon detonate in a thermonuclear explosion. And also the aliens that are persistent stop trying to enter the Marines’ defenses. If alien creatures and an enormous blast are not enough, there’s also Burke’s try to impregnate Ripley and Newt as alien hosts, resulting in a sickening betrayal that is corporate. Each one of these elements builds with unnerving pressure that leaves the audience totally absorbed and twisting internally.

Before the final half an hour of Aliens, the creatures, now dubbed “xenomorphs” (a name based on the director’s boyhood short, Xenogenesis), seem almost circumstantial. In a final assault, their swarms have reduced the human crew down to Ripley, Hicks, and Bishop, and they’ve got captured Newt for cocooning. Ripley must search on her behalf alone, and after she rips the little one from a prison of spindly webbing, she rushes headlong into the egg-strewn lair associated with Queen, an immense creature excreting eggs from its oozing ovipositor. The xenomorph becomes more than a “pure” killing machine, but now a problem-solving species with clear motivations within a larger hive and analogous family values in Cameron’s hands. Cameron underlines your family theme both in human and alien terms during an exchange of threats between your two jealous mothers to guard their offspring, Ripley with her proxy Newt wrapped around her torso and the Queen guarding her eggs. Read more