At a hefty four hours plus, Aliens Expanded is the most exhaustive documentary about James Cameron’s 1986 classic yet made. Here’s our review:
Two days into filming Aliens in September 1985, the entire production was almost derailed over a trolley loaded with hot tea and sticky buns. As the British crew all lined up to buy their drinks and snacks, James Cameron watched with a mixture of horror and frustration; having become accustomed to the fast-paced, low-budget shoot of his previous film, The Terminator, the director was baffled at the production’s leisurely pace.
His temper at boiling point, Cameron walked over to the lady serving the tea and asked how much it’d cost to buy all the items stacked up on her trolley. He pulled out a wad of cash, handed them to the tea lady, and then, in the director’s own words, “kicked that fucking cart as hard as I could… it went flying off, stuff splashing everywhere.”
Cameron turned and gave the crew a set of instructions: no more lining up for minutes on end ordering cups of tea. Each department had to assign one person to take orders and fetch drinks and snacks for the rest of the crew. “In retrospect,” Cameron admits, “I could have done it a little more diplomatically. But after that, there was no more tea.”
It’s an incredible retelling of an anecdote that Aliens fans may have read or heard about before, but rendered all the more effective because it comes straight from the director in the middle of it. There are lots of other fascinating details like this in Aliens Expanded, Ian Nathan’s exhaustive documentary about the 1986 sci-fi classic; the passage of time is such that those involved are now willing to talk with surprising frankness about the difficulties of the film’s making.
Producer Gale Anne Hurd, for example, explains exactly why actor James Remar, originally cast as Corporal Dwayne Hicks, was replaced by Michael Biehn a few weeks into filming – and how she played a major part in ensuring Remar didn’t spend about a decade in a British prison.
Writer-director Nathan – former Empire magazine editor and author of, among other things, the superb book, Alien Vault – has assembled an incredible roster of famous names for his documentary, and it’s unlikely we’ll see them brought together quite like this again.
Aliens writer-director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd are joined by just about every surviving member of the core cast, including Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Carrie Henn, Jennette Goldstein and more besides. Creature effects artists Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr and model maker John Lee also contribute, as well as novelisation author Alan Dean Foster and other people tangentially connected to the Alien universe, such as Violet Castro, author of spin-off Aliens Vasquez and Alien Theory YouTube channel runner Derek Defoe.
It’s a huge, impressive list on the filmmaking side of the equation alone, and it’s questionable whether Aliens Expanded really needed some of the other tangents that it embarks on – a psychologist is on hand to talk about Ripley’s trauma and survivor’s guilt, for example, while an astrophysicist shows up to discuss the scientific plausibility of Aliens’ terraformed planetoid, LV-426.
Those contributions have an interest in themselves, but they can’t really compare to the emotional heft of Lance Henriksen bringing his upbringing as a “street kid from New York” to his singularly soulful performance as the ‘synthetic human’ Bishop, or James Cameron’s visible disappointment at how little Alien co-writers David Giler and Walter Hill (also the franchise’s executive producers) really ‘got’ the science fiction genre.
The documentary progresses through Aliens’ narrative scene by scene, pulling them out like files from a cabinet and then embellishing them with talking head anecdotes about topics related to it. For instance: the intense hive sequence, where Ripley and the Colonial Marines discover the aliens’ nest for the first time, is interspersed with the cast and filmmakers recalling how chilly Acton Power Station was as filming got underway that winter. Actor Rico Ross, who plays the doomed Private Frost, talks about his bemusement at being the first character to die, and his wonder at seeing his stunt double set on fire and then tumble down what looks like a 30-foot shaft.
Again, they’re great anecdotes in isolation, but the documentary would arguably have been better served had it been built around the narrative of the production rather than that of the film’s. You can see the shape of the story here beneath the surface: James Cameron was a young filmmaker with only one directing under his belt (assuming you discount Piranha II, which he does); he was essentially an alien himself, a foreigner making a Hollywood movie on British soil. The crew at Pinewood dubbed him ‘The Yank’, despite Cameron being Canadian; several crewmembers were openly scornful of the idea of being ordered around by a female producer.
The personal stakes for Cameron and Hurd were absolutely huge. Cameron was attempting to make a sequel with a vastly larger scope than Ridley Scott’s predecessor, Alien, yet he only had a slightly more generous budget with which to achieve it. There were often tensions between Cameron and his crew, as that tea lady incident illustrated. Cameron fired his original cinematographer and a first assistant director, and the crew, incensed, walked out. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where Aliens’ production fell apart entirely.
All of this is present in Aliens Expanded, but it’s diluted somewhat by both the structure, the reliance on clips from the finished film and digressions that might have worked better as DVD extras (“There’s a Marvel comic out now, that’s literally, ‘what if Burke had lived…” says Paul Reiser). The stuff about the sticky buns and the tea lady doesn’t emerge until two hours in. (Alien Expanded’s sheer length might have been made more approachable had it been broken into episodes, like the similarly in-depth and affectionate RoboDoc: The Creation Of RoboCop from 2023.)
Still, the quality of the anecdotes here is undeniable. Aliens is one of the most acclaimed sci-fi films of all time, and among the most dissected and documented, so it’s impressive that there are still new stories to mine. Did you know, for example, that Lance Henriksen almost got caught with a suitcase full of knives at a British airport? This writer certainly didn’t.
It’s revelations like this, and dozens of others like them, that still make Aliens Expanded a valuable, informative watch.
Aliens Expanded is available to purchase digitally now.
