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21. Aliens - The Battle

“Look, I’m telling you, there’s something moving and it ain’t us.”

What sets James Cameron’s 1986 Alien sequel apart as a genre film is its mix of horror and action, fairly new at the time. Cameron said he wasn’t going so much for “horror” as “terror,” which is why he takes almost an hour to get to this scene, the first instance of bang-bang in the whole film. He has to build that terror, step by grimy step, for a full 57 minutes first.

Part of the buildup involves a Hitchcockian effect, where the audience knows more than the characters. We’ve seen the first movie, so we know what it means when they find that empty egg. In addition, Cameron’s script keeps upping the ante, removing the soldiers’ ability to use their weapons just before the encounter.

Cameron enhances the action dynamic by infusing the scene with humanity. There’s something very natural about the way Ripley tells Newt to leave the room when they start finding bodies. Her reaction when they find the chestburster is palpable. A lot of people forget that Sigourney Weaver got a Best Actress nod for this flick.

What’s more, Cameron doesn’t settle for a straightforward presentation of the action. He provides filters to layer the scene. The primary filter is the use videocameras strapped to each helmet. They give us a soldier’s-eye view of the action. The result is terrifying and adds a level of video-footage-as-realism that would come into vogue three years later with shows like Cops. He doesn’t even have to show us Wierzbowski’s murder, just the view from his spinning helmet-cam, his screams and, the other filter, his readings. The flatline that appears onscreen back in the APC adds an extra level of dread to the proceedings.

For all the terror, Cameron doesn’t skimp on the action. One of the techniques he uses very well in this sequence is the notion of connected action. Each event isn’t just spectacular in it’s own right, but is an essential gear in the greater machine. The flame-thrower execution of the chestburster wakes up the aliens. The first one to attack causes its victim to fire a flamethrower that kills another marine who has all the ammunition which then explodes taking out another marine, and so on. Everything is consequential, which becomes particularly important when they get close enough for their kills to spray acid all over them. Few action sequences exploit this potential, relying instead on discrete bits of unconnected eye candy.

Inspired in part by Dallas’ departure in the first one (what with the motion sensor and all), this scene follows suit by taking out the man in charge early on. Not as much of a shock in this one since, unlike Alien, we know he’s not the main character, but still an essential step in breaking down authority and control at the end of a very long first act.

Another key element in this sequence is the incredible set design by Peter Lamont. The terror literally surrounds the characters as the aliens become an organic part of their environment. This helps to retain the creatures’ mystique, which could have so easily been lost by their sheer numbers.

Embed isn’t working, but you can watch most of the sequence here.

See also: The rest of Aliens, the Crawlers’ first attack in The Descent, Vin Diesel literally faces off with a big-ass monster in Pitch Black.

Next: The guy who directed the first one of these doesn’t exactly suck at action sequences, either.