As part of the ongoing discussion about which movie is better, Alien or Aliens...

Alien is far superior.

I think they're both a "monster loose inside the house" movie..but still, they are both outstanding movies made by top notch directors.

Since it's damn near impossible to make a halfway decent sequel I'm going to call this a tie.

Alien and Aliens rate a 9/10.

I'm not sure 'generic' is fair; surely it only looks 'generic' retrospectively, because it's one of the key films -- along with Die Hard, which you also mention -- in creating the modern action movie. In other words, it's been copied to death.

That said, I think the military grunts and money-obsessed company man were already stock movie characters by 1986. Then again, genre movies frequently rely on stock characters -- it's a form of shorthand -- so everyone understands where they're at and the story can get moving.

I don't think James Cameron has ever been particularly good at writing dialogue or characters, but he can craft an action sequence and he knows how to pace these things.

I agree with you, however. For me Alien is a vastly superior film. But I think it in large part comes down to where you like your emphasis placed: on the horror or on the action. I also personally prefer chamber pieces to epics.

This is basically the bigger, dumber blockbuster version of Alien, with added sentimentality via the child-parent bond. Cameron would go on to do exactly the same thing to one of his own films when he made the overblown Terminator 2. Take a simple idea and blow it up huge.

Incidentally, Starship Troopers is a satire; its dialogue is knowingly corny. The characters are supposed to be vacuous.

You can't judge movies now that were made in the past.

I saw Aliens opening night.

What made it amazing was that it was a big budget science fiction horror movie that followed a low budget horror movie.

There were no military based science fiction films at that time. So, going into the film I expected it to be some kind of retread of the first film, but it was a tense high action military film with a variety of unique characters and an expansion of the story about the aliens.

There was nothing like it at the time, so you can't look back on films and say they are generic because of all the copies that came after.

In the 1930s there was Wizard of Oz and that had all kinds of costumes, it was in color, and we are used to much better today, but that's not how you judge a film like that, you have to imagine being in the past watching it.

Stars Wars, Aliens, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are more conventionally entertaining, but 2001, Alien, and Once Upon A Time in the West are greater and more refined films.