‘Always provided a release’: why Aliens is my feelgood movie

The latest in our ongoing series where writers highlight their rewatchable comfort films is an unlikely yet cathartic sci-fi horror classicGuardian writers on their ultimate feelgood movies Amid a recent IVF crisis, I turned to my husband in A&E and said, “We should put on a cosy movie when we get home, like Aliens.” Immediately my mind flashed to the film’s iconic image of gooey eggs exploding under vigorous gunfire. It seemed faintly ridiculous that Aliens was the chill-out film for this particular moment, but we watched it and, as ever, it hit the spot.I’ve viewed Aliens at least once a year for the last decade. It is both an excellent and terrible movie. Helmed by James Cameron in place of the original Alien director Ridley Scott, this pumped-up-on-steroids 1986 sequel retains the grisly design of its predecessor. Its walls and ceilings are covered in wet gloop and fleshy tendrils, like the insides of a giant body. Its monsters bring to life the trailblazing designs of the Swiss “fantastic realist” artist HR Giger. Almost four decades after its release, the film’s world building remains chillingly authentic, as a group of marines – plus a villainous corporate executive, heroic android, feisty lone-survivor child and Sigourney Weaver’s gun-toting yet wholesome protagonist Ellen Ripley – discover then attempt to escape a nest of parasitic aliens, their nightmarishly outsized mother and her lethal henchmen. Continue reading...

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