Aliens (1986): Cast, Plot, Ending and Where to Watch

Aliens (1986) follows Ellen Ripley as she goes back to the moon LV-426, where she first met the creatures, this time with a unit of Colonial Marines. The story opens with Ripley found drifting in hypersleep after 57 years in space. Her employer, Weyland-Yutani, doubts her story about the alien eggs, and nobody at the company is ready to take her word for it.

When contact is lost with the colony that now lives on LV-426, Ripley agrees to go along with the Marines, on the condition that the creatures are destroyed. A company man named Burke goes with them.

If you are new to the saga, alien 1979 is the film that explains what Ripley is describing, and the guide to the alien movies in order shows where this sequel fits.

In full, the plot of Aliens (1986) is a rescue story that turns into a siege and then a chase. Ripley is picked up after decades adrift and learns that LV-426 has been settled by colonists. She tells the company about the aliens, but nobody believes her. When the colony goes silent, she joins the Marine unit sent to investigate, together with Burke and the android Bishop.

At the colony the buildings are wrecked and there is only one survivor, a young girl called Newt. The Marines go into the alien nest and are ambushed, and most of them are killed. Their inexperienced commander panics, and Ripley takes over and gets the survivors out.

The group then learns two bad things. Burke wanted to bring back alien embryos for profit, and the colony's damaged reactor will soon blow up. The aliens take Newt, and Ripley goes back alone to find her. She reaches the girl in the hive and faces the alien queen there.

Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop escape the colony shortly before it is destroyed. The queen, however, has stowed away on their ship and attacks them. Ripley fights her in a power loader and forces her out through an airlock. The survivors go back into hypersleep for the trip home.

Aliens opened in US theaters on July 18, 1986, according to The Numbers, which makes 2026 the film's 40th anniversary year. The UK release followed on August 29, 1986, and Australia on November 6, 1986, though TMDB lists those two dates as reported rather than confirmed.

The ratings are R in the US, 18 in the UK and M in Australia, per TMDB. The film runs 137 minutes, which Box Office Mojo gives as 2 hours 17 minutes.

At the box office, Aliens took $85 million in the US and $98 million internationally, for $183 million worldwide, against a $17 million budget, according to The Numbers. That is the largest gross of the first four films in the series, ahead of Alien (1979), Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. Later entries such as Prometheus and Alien: Romulus have since earned more in raw dollars, and the full table is on the alien box office page.

The ending of Aliens works because it gives Ripley a different job from the one she had in Alien (1979): she is no longer only surviving, she is protecting someone. In the final sequence she wears a power loader to fight the queen and pushes her out of the airlock into space. Bishop, who was badly damaged, is still able to help save Newt. The four survivors then settle into hypersleep for the journey back to Earth.

What does that mean for the story? In my opinion, the power loader fight is the point where the film's two arguments meet. One argument is about machines and the company, since Burke tried to turn the creatures into a profit and Bishop proves more trustworthy than the human who brought him along. The other is about Ripley as a mother figure, because the makeshift family she forms with Newt is the thing she is actually fighting for. The film lets her win both fights in this installment.

Spoilers for Alien 3 follow. The calm does not last into the next film. In Alien 3, the Sulaco is heading home with Ripley, Newt, Hicks and the damaged android Bishop in hypersleep, but a facehugger has got aboard, and a fire makes the computer eject the escape pod. The pod crashes on Fiorina 161, and Ripley learns that Newt and Hicks did not survive. It could be argued that this makes the ending of Aliens more poignant on a second viewing, since the four who settle into hypersleep at the end of Aliens are not all alive once the pod crashes. The order in which to watch the films is laid out on the alien timeline page.

Neither the studio nor the trade press has published shooting locations for Aliens (1986). On screen, the story plays out on the moon LV-426, in the colony buildings and the alien nest, and aboard the ships that carry the Marines and survivors. For comparison, the later films have documented locations, such as the Budapest production of Alien: Romulus and the Australian sets of Alien: Covenant, covered at alien romulus and alien covenant.

The best known facts about the making of Aliens come from interviews with Cameron and the cast.

• James Cameron reused chunks of an earlier alien project of his, first titled E.T. and later renamed Mother, when he wrote Aliens.
• Bill Paxton ad-libbed some of Hudson's lines, and Cameron remembered one of them, the "express elevator to Hell" line, and used it.
• Sigourney Weaver said her line "Get away from her, you bitch!" was in the script and that she did only one take.
• Michael Biehn said he got the part of Hicks because another actor dropped out.
• Sigourney Weaver received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the film, which Cameron described as the first for a genre film.
• The production budget was $17 million, according to The Numbers, a modest sum for a sequel that out-earned every other film in the original run.

For more on how the creatures work, the xenomorph life cycle page explains the stages seen in the nest. Fans looking for collectibles can browse alien merchandise.