Aliens strips away most of the things I loved about Alien. I hate every single character in this film, even Ripley by the end. Lance Henriksen and Paul Reiser do pretty good with their roles, but the rest of the cast was awful. Weaver wasn't dynamic in the first film, but here she's just phoning it in. The worst is Carrie Henn, who was chosen out of 500 other kids and won a Saturn award for her portrayal. Henn was terrible. Of course there is a level of forgiveness for child actors, but nothing she ever did was remotely believable. It also seem like Henn has an accent, but her character isn't supposed to. Mostly, she hides is (mostly), but occasionally she says a line in an odd accent. I'm not sure who thought she deserved a nomination for Best Performance by a Younger Actor, let alone deserved to win it, but I'm not sure they watched the same movie I did. Even setting the awful acting aside, Every single character is either entirely unlikable or barely gets any characterization at all. 80% of the cast in interchangeable. It's James Cameron, so you know the directing is fine, but they shouldn't have let him touch the screenplay. Aliens is way too long and drawn out. Alien was a tight, compact story that made sense and was a perfect blend of sci-fi, horror, and thriller and I legitimately cared about the survival of the characters. Having the one Xenomorph that we barely saw, built a mystique around the creature. It was incredibly resilient and intelligent. Aliens saturates the film with Xenomorphs, all of which seem to pretty easy to kill. We see a good thirty Xenomorphs just explode from a couple of bullets. I get it, it's called Aliens, because there is more than one alien. Alright, cool, but Aliens has hundreds of aliens and not a single one ever felt like the same creature from Alien. One character calls their mission a "bug hunt" and that seems a lot better of a description. They aren't tracking down and taking out an apex predator; they are exterminating giant cockroaches. The story is too meandering and wastes too much time. Aliens never felt like Alien 2. Aliens is Predator, but with a hundred Xenomorphs. It's fine as a dumb action popcorn movie, but it doesn't feel special. Aliens is far too generic. The CGI is very bad at points and the ending sequence is comically bad (it's like a slo-mo sword fight), but compared to the rest of the film, it definitely could have been worse.