<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Alien³
Release Date	July 18, 1986
Genre	Horror Scifi
Director	James Cameron
Screenwriter	James Cameron David Giler (story) Walter Hill (story)
Stars	Sigourney Weaver Michael Biehn Carrie Henn Lance Henriksen Paul Reiser Bill Paxton William Hope Jenette Goldstein Al Matthews Mark Rolston Picco Ross
Studio	20th Century Fox Brandywine Productions Ltd.

The movie Aliens was directed by James Cameron. This 1986 sequel to Alien (1979) pits Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) against not one but hundreds of deadly extra-terrestrial monsters on a barren moon called LV-426.

In Alien, Ripley was barely able to defeat one of the creatures after it killed six of her crewmates aboard the spaceship Nostromo. Picking up the story fifty-seven years later, Aliens opens when salvagers discover Ripley floating in space, preserved in hypersleep—a form of suspended animation that allows humans to travel in faster-than-light spacecraft. Upon awakening, she is horrified to learn that a human colony has been founded on LV-426. Despite suffering from post-traumatic shock, Ripley nevertheless agrees to return to the moon when contact with the colony is lost. She boards the military vessel Sulaco with Carter Burke (a representative of her old employer, the Weyland-Yutani Company), an android named Bishop, and a platoon of heavily armed space marines, who confidently expect to easily find and destroy any aliens who happen to be on the moon.

Aliens proved a very worthy sequel to the original film. It radically increases the number of aliens facing off against the humans, then shows them overwhelming the trained and heavily armed marines. In the final sequences of the movie, the ante is raised even higher: Ripley battles a gigantic, egg-laying alien. In addition to further stacking the odds against the humans' survival, the theme of corporate treachery is heightened when Carter Burke attempts to impregnate Ripley and a young survivor of the colony, Newt, with alien embryos. The creation of the egg-laying "mother" alien, and Ripley's attachment to Newt also enhances a motif—barely present in Alien—about pregnancy, birth, and women's instinctive desire to protect their offspring, through violence if necessary.

In Cameron's hands, Aliens retained its dark and claustrophobic visual style while leaning more strongly to action-adventure conventions than did the original slow-paced and suspenseful horror film. Two later films featuring Weaver, Alien3 and Alien Resurrection, continued this trend.