As a lifelong fan of Aliens, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see it on 70mm. I’ve become quite fond of revisiting my favorite movies on celluloid in the last four years. Some of them, like Aliens, I’ve seen countless times, but always on a laptop or TV screen. To see them projected in a format like this, with every scratch on the print or crackle of audio a testament to the materiality of these reels — the very reels that first introduced this film in particular to audiences forty years ago this month — gives me a sense of history, which I love.

So, in this darkened room at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center, amongst a crowd of friends, strangers, and at least one person who always shows up to these sorts of things laughing a little too hard, I get to experience a familiar film anew.^★

What is a James Cameron sequel, if not experiencing a familiar film anew? Aliens was Cameron’s first “proper” stab at a sequel (no, I haven’t seen Piranha II: The Spawning), and set the framework that his subsequent sequel works (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Avatar: The Way of Water) would follow — an ostensible retread of the first film, but with elevated action, a stronger emphasis on family, and enough inverted plot elements to make the story feel fresh again.

Here are some of the shared plot beats between Alien and Aliens:

• Ripley wakes up amongst a crew, one of which is a robot.

• Her advice regarding the alien(s) is ignored, and violent hell breaks loose.

• The film’s setting is primed to explode, which would wipe out the alien(s), but presents yet another mortal danger to our protagonists.

• One of the characters is revealed to be a traitor working in favor of “The Company.”

• Ripley must double back to save someone during a stressful countdown sequence.

• Ripley escapes the explosion just in the nick of time — but an alien stowed away onboard! She takes it one on one, blasting it into the cold vacuum of space.

• Ripley goes back to hypersleep… The End.

And yet, the brilliance of Aliens is that these repeated points are not immediately obvious; almost all are successfully disguised by vastly different characters, set pieces, and locales, with changes in tone, soundtrack, and style that all feel refreshingly lateral, as opposed to lesser, in relation to the first film.

Here are some of my favorite differences:

• This time, it’s war — Like the poster says, Aliens is an action film, with a greater emphasis on thrills as opposed to the horror of its predecessor. My favorite action scene? Cameron takes this brief moment of tension from Alien, where you’re not sure where the facehugger went after it detached from Kane (it died) — and turns it into a full-fledged, edge-of-your-seat suspenseful sequence in which Ripley and Newt are locked in a room with two live, loose, and running facehuggers, perfectly playing up that feeling you get when you’ve seen a cockroach in your room and don’t know where it ran off to (but a million times worse).

  

• Characters, through their dialogue and relationships, feel more archetypal and dramatic compared to the more improvisational quality of the space truckers in Alien. That’s not to say there’s no subtlety; one of my favorite details is during the “I only need to know one thing… Where they are,” (cue finger gun) scene. If you watch Hicks in the background, he’s nonchalantly mouthing this line as Vasquez is saying it – as if this is something she says all the time.

  

  Cameron also plays with Ripley’s distrust of the android, Bishop, who is ultimately revealed to have his robo-heart in the robo-right place. Sound familiar?

• Themes of motherhood — it wouldn’t be a Jim Cameron film without a strong mother-warrior figure, and here we have two. Of course, Ripley becomes a mother through her relationship with the orphaned colonist Newt.

  

  To make the alien a mother also, in the form of the alien queen, is in lockstep with the sexual imagery associated with the first film. While Cameron takes a more evocative approach to depicting the standard alien “warrior” — reflected in simpler costumes, backlit to emphasize silhouette and the “strange shapes” in which the term “xenomorph” is derived — the alien queen, beautifully realized by Stan Winston Studios, is rightfully shown in all her puppet and animatronic glory as the monstrous star of this picture.

Aliens would not be the last film in this series to repeat familiar plot beats, but even setting aside the Cameron-sequel formula of it all, Aliens also sets another precedent, and arguably my favorite aspect of the first four Alien films — that each entry would be defined by a unique directorial style. ❖

^★ Funny thing about this screening in particular — one of their projectors broke, so there was a couple minutes of pause for every reel change! Talk about an analog film experience… At first I was bothered by how much I was dreading the end of every reel, but soon enough, I just locked into the film’s excellent pacing — still as engrossing as ever, even through seven (!) regularly scheduled intermissions. And it was pretty cute when the audience burst into applause for the start of the eighth and final reel.

Originally published as a review on Letterboxd on May 2nd, 2026. Adapted here with additional media, digressions, and appendices.

Both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 paint such vivid visions of the future that simply uttering their shared title is enough to conjure a very specific image of urban dystopia in one’s mind. But as evocative as the Blade Runner name may be, both films are also noticeably distinct, speaking to the 30-year timeskip in their universe (and 35-year gap in ours).

Violent rebellions. Ecological collapse. Villeneuve’s favored brutalist aesthetic may not have jelled with me on first viewing, but I’ve come to appreciate how the more minimalistic designs contribute to the notion that this world is even more oppressive and sterile than last we saw it.

Take for instance, Blade Runner 2049’s variations on the iconic spinner vehicle. The smooth curves of Syd Mead’s original design have been reduced in the sequel’s version of the police-issue model, which favors more angular geometry. By comparison, contemporaneous spinners used by the Wallace Corporation are a bit more elegant — these few exceptions to the film’s prevailing design language signify wealth and elevated status.

The rain and grime of 2019 Los Angeles has mutated into the fog and particulate-laden air of 2049 Los Angeles. Cool hues dominate the muted and monochromatic look of this film, with moments of warmth deployed sporadically by cinematographer Roger Deakins to mesmerizing effect: Orange haze envelops the barren wastelands of radioactive Las Vegas, and golden light shines through the interiors of the Wallace Corporation headquarters to bestow an air of divinity to the replicant creators of this era.

Whereas genetically engineered lifeforms are oft-referred to as “artificial” in the first Blade Runner, the sequel avoids that descriptor altogether. It’s not to say that replicants are no longer persecuted in 2049 — far from it. Even a “legal” replicant like Officer K (whose occupation is blade runner, mind you) is repeatedly subjected to prejudices by his neighbors, superiors, even himself (“To be born is to have a soul, I guess”).

But at the same time, it’s almost as if the term “artificial” has become antiquated thirty years on. In a world where most animal life is implied to have gone extinct, the “real” horse that Doctor Badger tries selling K is probably as real as it gets. And with the advent of AI companions like Joi, it tracks that someone like Mariette, a replicant sex worker, would refer to herself as a “real” girl in comparison.

The most interesting question of Blade Runner 2049 to me is that of Joi’s humanity — as in, does she have any? The sentient hologram belonging to K (as a sort of replicant for the replicant) is introduced dressed as a 1950s housewife, literally tied to his apartment via ceiling projector. She spouts off some Wikipedia fact about a Frank Sinatra song in the exact kind of attempt at natural-sounding dialogue I find so detestable from real-life artificial intelligence. But when she’s granted access to the outside world via portable emanator, her first request is to step out onto the rainy rooftop — a location that recalls Roy Batty’s poignant soliloquy at the end of Blade Runner. Joi cannot feel the rain herself, but as she holds out her hand, her holographic form adapts to take on the appearance of droplets upon her skin. And when she closes her eyes and seemingly lets herself be lost in this moment, we might begin to wonder if she’s “real,” too.

“Mere data makes a man… A and C and T and G. The alphabet of you, all from four symbols. I am only two… 1 and 0.”

Originally published as a review on Letterboxd on April 24th, 2026. Adapted here with additional media, digressions, and appendices.

I always found it a bit funny how Ridley Scott in interviews would refer to Michael Fassbender’s Prometheus/Alien: Covenant characters (and retroactively, Ian Holm’s Alien character) as “replicants.” It’s an explicit reference to his other totemic science-fiction work, Blade Runner, and a term you’d be hard-pressed to find used anywhere else.

I contemplate the word choice because the milk and fiber-optic-filled synthetics of the Alien films are — at the end of the day — robots. They can still talk and function even after being torn in half or decapitated. They refer to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and are directed under the whims of their corporate programming.

But even though Blade Runner is adapted from a story titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the film shows time and time again that replicants are not at all robots in the conventional sense — they are human. They were bred to be stronger, sure, and their pain tolerance is higher. “We’re not computers, Sebastian,” says Roy Batty. “We’re physical.” But being “more human than human” is a double-edged sword. So they are wracked with emotion, too. They refer back to their memories. They are upset when one of their own is killed. They fear death, and are motivated by the desire to extend their five-year lifespans.

By referring to Prometheus’s David and Alien: Covenant’s Walter as replicants, is Scott actually making a case for their underlying humanity?

Maybe.

Or is he just being flippant about the semantics of it all? Probably that, too.

The world of Blade Runner is one that deliberately blurs the lines between what is considered to be “real” (natural-born), “artificial” (genetically engineered), or “machine” (mechanical). J.F. Sebastian is a genetic designer working for the Tyrell Corporation, but his creations — which he refers to as “toys” — are more reminiscent of wind-up dolls than anything else, scattered about his home like tchotchkes. On the other hand, there are lifelike qualities given to technology in this movie that is unambiguously lifeless; computers hum and chatter, and the Voight-Kampff machine’s most striking features are its cycloptic red eye and the rhythmic breathing of its bellows.

So I spent this umpteenth viewing of the film basking in these ideas, maybe even more so than usual. I thought about how a replicant’s humanity is determined by a machine that measures empathy. I thought about the links between film itself (famously described as a “machine for generating empathy”) and dreams, or memories — motifs realized here in repeated closeups of eyes and photographs.

I only just learned that “One More Kiss, Dear” is not a pre-existing song inserted into Blade Runner’s soundtrack, but an original piece by Vangelis, who composes the rest of the film’s otherwise electronic score. How fitting, that a movie featuring implanted memories would also trick me into believing in a 1930s pop song that never was?

I thought about how Rachael’s childhood memory of baby spiders eating their mother mirrors the patricidal meeting between Roy Batty and Eldon Tyrell. And I thought about how replicants being referred to as robots can only really be interpreted as true in the most base, semantic sense — “robot,” of course, being derived from a Church Slavonic word meaning forced labor.

Servitude.

Slave.

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?”