Aliens (1986)

Once I made the new kid watch Alien, I had to follow it with Aliens.  I love all of the movies because they are all totally different genres explored by totally different directors.  It's like one of those writing games where you come up with a sentence, then the person next to you has to build off of it, and so on until you get a complete story.  Except you usually don't because there's always one asshole who ruins it for everyone because they think they're clever.  Anyway, if you happen to be one of the poor, unlucky souls never before exposed to the glory of this movie, do yourself a favor and fix that shit.  Originally posted 06 Mar 2013.    This is probably my favorite out of the series.  I love all of them but, gun to my head, this is my favorite.  It's just so quotable.

Rob had never seen it all the way through and Christy had never seen it at all.  It's like nobody loved them.

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is rescued after the events of Alien by a deep-space salvage crew.  She is thawed out with one orange kitty and one hell of a case of PTSD.  A Weyland-Yutani corporate shill named Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) is assigned to help her adjust.  See, she's been in cryosleep for 57 years.  Everyone she ever knew is dead and gone.  Then Carter tells her that, during her absence, the planet they landed on was marked for terraforming and colonization but now they've lost contact with the colonists and would she please come help them out.  Furious but unwilling to let over 100 people die, she agrees under the condition that if it is aliens, they kill all of them.

Ripley joins two squads of space marines, the baddest of the badassess, and their synthetic person, Bishop (Lance Henrickson).  After what happened last time, she is not a huge fan of the robot but lets it go.  They get to the planet and, sure enough, aliens have harvested all the colonists and moved them to their nest for larval implantation.  Except for one.  A little girl named Newt (Carrie Henn) has been hiding in the ductwork, trying not to get killed.  Ripley immediately becomes her caregiver.  Meanwhile, the marines are not faring well against the acid-blooded xenomorphs.  The survivors are left under the care of Corporal Hicks (Micheal Biehn) and a decision is made to nuke the planet from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure.  Carter Burke really wants to bring one back to Earth, though, because he is a greedy worm.  He locks two of the recovered facehuggers in the bay where Ripley and Newt are sleeping in the hopes that one or both will be infected. 

Like everybody doesn't already have enough to deal with just staying alive while killer aliens are after them, they now have to deal with a sabotaging crew member.  Then Newt falls down a maintenance shaft.  Ripley has to go rescue her and that's when she finds the source of all their troubles:  the Queen.

I like that this movie expanded on the original mythology.  Ridley Scott said "Hey, wouldn't it be scary if there was a monster in space that raped people's faces and then exploded out of their chests?" and then James Cameron said "Yeah, but what if there were like 100 of them and they had a hierarchy like a space anthill?"  It got me to thinking, though.  I've seen this movie probably a dozen times and I've never wondered before now:  what do the adult aliens eat?  They kill people and use people as a host but they don't actually eat people.  Do they just not eat?  What about the Queen?  She presumably needs a lot of food to lay all those eggs.  Now I'm going to be stuck on this for the rest of the day.