Trailer
Plot summary
After drifting through space in hypersleep, Ripley is rescued and wakes on Gateway Station, where the company questions her account of the alien that killed her crew. The board doubts her and revokes her flight license. When contact with the terraforming colony on LV-426 is lost, Carter Burke and Gorman ask her to advise a Colonial Marine unit sent to investigate. Ripley refuses at first because she dreads returning to LV-426, but Burke promises the mission will exterminate the creatures, and she agrees. Aboard the Sulaco she meets the marines, including Apone, Hicks, Vasquez, Hudson, and Bishop, an android science officer she distrusts. On LV-426 the unit finds the colony silent, with evidence of a battle, two living facehuggers in containment, and one young survivor, Rebecca, called Newt.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Aliens (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- James Remar secured the role of Hicks on the recommendation of his close friend Hill, but left shortly into filming; he later admitted he was fired after being arrested for drug possession, and Michael Biehn was hired the following Friday.
- First assistant director Derek Cracknell ignored James Cameron's instructions on Aliens and redid shots his own way, until Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd fired him, and the Pinewood crew walked out in the middle of the day.
- Negotiations for Sigourney Weaver's return as Ripley dragged on so long that James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd told Arnold Schwarzenegger's agent they planned to write Ripley out of the film, knowing Weaver's agent would be told; terms were reached soon after.
- James Horner, who called his first collaboration with James Cameron a "nightmare", arrived in London expecting six weeks to score Aliens but found nothing ready to score; he had only three weeks, and was already booked for The Name of the Rose.
- The alien queen was a 14 ft polyurethane foam puppet: two people sat inside to work the arms, rods at the ankles moved the legs, a separate operator whipped the tail with fishing line, and up to four people controlled the head with servomotors and hydraulics.
- The power plant and alien nest were filmed in London's decommissioned Acton Lane Power Station, and the sets were left standing until Tim Burton reused them as Axis Chemicals in his 1989 film Batman.
- Although hordes of aliens appear in the film, only 12 alien suits were built: dancers and stuntmen wore lightweight black leotards covered in molded foam for fast shots, while detailed articulated models were used for closeups and 8 ft mannequins for contorted poses.
- Sigourney Weaver's nomination for Best Actress was the first ever given to a science-fiction film, a genre then given little respect, and it remained a rarity for science fiction and action.
