Aliens
Saw that movie when I was 10 years old and thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
Then many years later I kinda worried that it would suck since I was older and had seen countless other films and didn’t have the “10’year old watching an R movie” novelty. Nope, still an absolutely phenomenal film.
Aliens was the perfect sequel. It was so different and the cast is awesome.
It’s rare for a sequel to vary so much from the original, but still feel part of the same series. Aliens did it incredibly. And they also did a great job of raising the stakes and level of conflict in a way that felt genuine rather than forced. That’s so hard to get right in a sequel. It’s almost always either a not necessary repeat of the first with some new elements, or so exaggerated in an effort to be new/bigger that it feels cheap and derivative.
Alien: Fighting an alien
Aliens: Fighting the entire hive
Then everything after that seems to have suffered from the standard problems of sequels. (Caveat: haven’t seen anything past covenant)
