[edit] Ripley Rescued Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the only human survivor of the encounter with the Alien aboard the Weyland-Yutani Corporation star-freighter Nostromo, is found in suspended animation aboard the Nostromo's escape vessel Narcissus by a deep-space salvage crew. She awakes onboard an unfamiliar (to her) space station located in orbit above Earth. During her recovery, she meets Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), a Weyland-Yutani executive, who reveals to her that she was adrift for 57 years and that her daughter lived out her life and died two years previously.

During an inquest, Ripley attempts to explain to various Weyland-Yutani officials why she destroyed the Nostromo, but the officials are incredulous as she describes a creature that attaches itself to a host, has acid for blood, and matures so quickly it was capable of wiping out the ship's crew in 24 hours. Ripley tries to convince them of the xenomorphs' existence and the danger they present, but as there is no physical corroboration, her rationale is dismissed and her flight status is revoked. Compounding her frustration, she also learns that Weyland-Yutani has since returned to LV-426 (the planet where the Nostromo crew discovered the derelict spacecraft which was carrying the alien "eggs") and established there a terraforming colony.

Ripley's worst fears are soon confirmed when Burke comes to her tiny apartment with Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope) of the United States Colonial Marines and tells her that contact with the colony has been lost. Initially, she refuses Burke's request to join him and a USCM team led by Gorman to investigate the situation, but her reluctance is undermined by her recurring nightmares about the xenomorph and she agrees to join them following Burke's assurances that the mission will be to destroy the creature(s) and not bring any back for research or profit, and that her flight status will be restored.

[edit] The Crew is Assembled The expedition, comprised of Ripley, Burke, and a squad of Marines, travels to LV-426 aboard the warship Sulaco. Following the expedition members' emergence from stasis, Ripley conducts a mission briefing during which she tries to explain to the skeptical squad of gung-ho Marines the true danger of the xenomorphs. Once again, however, her warnings fall on deaf ears.

Before touching down on the planet in a 'dropship' carrying an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) and the crew inside, Ripley gets acquainted with the Marines - among them, rock-solid Sergeant Apone (Al Matthews), mouthy Hudson (Bill Paxton), icy warrior Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), and soft-spoken Hicks (Michael Biehn). She also learns that one of the 'men', Bishop (Lance Henriksen), is actually an android. Although Burke apologizes for not telling her that having a 'synthetic' onboard is now standard practice, she remains extremely suspicious of Bishop given her previous experience with the android Ash, who was complicit in the deaths of the Nostromo's crew following orders from Weyland-Yutani to recover a live xenomorph at whatever cost. During the drop from orbit, she and the squad also learn that Lieutenant Gorman is very inexperienced, with only one previous combat drop. This information further undermines their already-scanty respect for the man.

[edit] Touchdown Upon arrival at the colony's operations headquarters, the expedition quickly discovers that the aliens indeed attacked the colony: metal gratings throughout the complex have been melted through as a result of contact with the aliens' acidic blood, there is damage from small weapons fire, and attempts were made to barricade doors. More concrete evidence is provided by the presence of facehugger specimens that the colonists collected from human hosts and held in sturdy glass tanks for analysis; two of the creatures are still alive. The colonists themselves, however, are nowhere to be found, nor are there any bodies.

During the ongoing search of the base, the team finds a sole human survivor - nicknamed "Newt", the furtive and traumatized young girl has managed to evade the xenomorphs by slipping through the colony's system of ventilation and service ducts. She initially remains mute and cannot provide any information to the Marines. While Ripley starts coaxing Newt out of her shell, Hudson locates the rest of the colonists via their surgically-implanted transceivers; they are all bunched together underneath the atmospheric generators, located a short distance from the main colony building. The expedition hurries to the area aboard the APC, with Bishop remaining behind to examine the dead facehuggers. At their destination, the Marines exit the APC under the leadership of Apone - leaving Lieutenant Gorman, Burke, Ripley and Newt inside the APC to watch the Marines' progress via helmet-mounted video. The searchers discover a large multistory nest fashioned from alien secretions. Ripley realizes that the construct is located immediately beneath important equipment that, if damaged by weapons fire, could result in the nuclear-powered atmospheric generator exploding. The Marines are ordered to remove the ammunition from their pulse rifles and battery packs from their smart guns, and switch to flamethrowers only . This order is followed but Vasquez has extra batteries and gives one to her smart-gun compatriot, Drake, while Hicks resorts to a shotgun.

[edit] Battle The nest is seemingly uninhabited except for the masses of unfortunate colonists, their corpses fastened in cocoon-like fashion to the secreted walls. One of the victims is discovered to be alive when she abruptly awakens. The marines rush to help the woman, but she merely begs them to kill her. She then dies as a "baby" alien bursts through her ribcage, forcing the Marines to incinerate her and the squealing organism with a flamethrower. At this point, the Marines pick up signals on their hand-held motion trackers indicating 'movement' on all sides; the xenomorphs that were lying dormant in the walls awake and attack. Due to the Marines' inability to see the aliens in the dark confines of the nest, even with infrared sensors, and the previously stated removal of ammunition (which is ironically ignited by Dietrich), the squad is quickly decimated. Apone is captured, leaving the remaining squad members leaderless and cut off. When a panicking Gorman proves to be useless, Ripley drives the APC to the squad's location, crashes the vehicle into the nest, and rescues the handful of survivors: Hicks, Hudson, and Vasquez. They escape out of the generator building at the cost of wrecking the APC.

With Gorman unconscious as a result of falling equipment in the APC, Hicks (the ranking soldier) assumes command. Over Burke's protests, he agrees with Ripley that leveling the colony from space with a thermonuclear weapon is the best way to handle the situation as there is no one left to save and it is the only way to be certain that the aliens will be destroyed. Before they can be evacuated by the dropship, the crew of the dropship (which was on the ground on standby) is killed during flight by a stowaway xenomorph, with the result that the vessel crashes into the generator complex. With no alternative, the survivors return to the operations headquarters and set up a defensive position by setting up automated sentry machine guns recovered from the APC, and welding shut all other entry points.

[edit] Their Numbers Thinned Ripley puts Newt down to sleep in the colony medical lab, and promises that she will protect the girl from the 'monsters', no matter what. She also tells Bishop to burn the two surviving facehuggers as soon as his analysis of them is done, but Bishop responds that Burke wants the organisms taken back to Earth. Ripley confronts Burke, telling him that she now knows that he, after hearing her story at the inquest, ordered the colonists to search for the derelict, thus starting the invasion. Burke says that Weyland-Yutani is willing to pay a substantial sum for alien specimens, and that he will share his profits if she cooperates, an offer she vehemently rejects.

A major xenomorph attack begins; their advance is barely halted by the automated tracking guns and so the barricades remain unbreached for the time being, but the aliens are still out there probing for an unguarded entry-point, when Bishop points out that the atmospheric generator is damaged (as a result of the earlier battle and/or the dropship crashing into it) and that it, along with the rest of the complex, will be destroyed in four hours by a nuclear blast. To escape, the survivors must bring down the second dropship from the Sulaco. Bishop volunteers to crawl down a pipe to the transceiver station at the other end of the colony in order to remotely fly the ship down to the surface.

After his departure, Ripley goes to check on Newt and falls asleep beside her. She wakes up to find herself and Newt locked in the soundproof med-lab with the two live facehuggers, placed in the room by Burke. Ripley sets off a fire-alarm and she and Newt are rescued by the Marines. After the destruction of the facehuggers, she informs the group that Burke had planned to have Newt and Ripley impregnated by the creatures then sabotage the Marines' hypersleep capsules on the Sulaco while en route back to Earth. As they debate executing Burke for his scheme, the aliens cut the power and pour into operations, slipping in through a gap in the overhead ducting/roofwork. In the confusion, Burke escapes through and locks a door, only to turn and find himself face-to-face with one of the invaders.

On the other side of the door, the Marines fight heroically, killing one alien after the other, but the number of swarming attackers forces them to fall back. After Hudson is pulled through the floor, Newt guides the group away through the ventilation system she used to stay alive before the arrival of the Marines. Vasquez tries to hold their rearguard in the ducts, but is injured. Making up for his past failures, a revived Gorman turns back to help her, but cannot move her fast enough and soon runs out of ammunition. Surrounded and cut off, Gorman and Vasquez sacrifice themselves to give the others time to escape by detonating a grenade. The resulting explosion causes Newt to slip off of a large ventilation fan, slide down a long air duct and into a reservoir, where she is captured by an alien.

[edit] Leaving the Colony Hicks is also badly injured after being sprayed with a dying alien's acidic blood, but he and Ripley reach Bishop just as the android brings down the other dropship. Ripley tends to Hicks, and orders Bishop to wait on standby while she goes back to rescue Newt, even though the nuclear reactor is about to go critical. Ripley creates one large weapon by taping together a flamethrower and a Pulse Rifle, and sets out to find Newt. She finds the girl cocooned in the previously-described nest just in time to save her from impregnation, but their path is blocked by fire and they stumble into the xenomorph egg chamber where the enormous Alien Queen is laying her eggs. Ripley uses her flamethrower to persuade the queen to call off her warriors, but seeing two more eggs hatch, she incinerates the nest. This enrages the queen into ripping free of her egg-sac and pursuing the two humans. Ripley and Newt ascend in an elevator to find the launch pad empty; Ripley curses Bishop and clings to Newt as the queen arrives in a second elevator. However, at the last moment Bishop appears in the dropship, extending an entry ramp which Riply and Newt jump onto. The dropship is briefly snagged on some debris but manages to escape just before the reactor blows up, destroying the entire colony.

Back aboard the Sulaco, Hicks has been put in a medically-induced coma but will survive. Bishop explains that the launch pad was becoming so unstable as the facility shook apart that he was forced to circle around until Ripley returned. Ripley compliments Bishop for all his selfless assistance, but the android is abruptly impaled from behind by the alien queen's barbed tail and torn in half -- the creature managed to hitch a ride on the dropship's landing gear. Newt attempts to evade capture hiding under the loading dock's grated floor, while Ripley jumps into a powerloader, a heavy-duty mechanical exosuit used for cargo lifting. She emerges as the queen corners Newt, the girl she has poured all of her frustrated maternal love into, uttering one of the film's most remembered lines: "Get away from her, you BITCH!"

Following an intense battle between the two in the Sulaco's hangar, Ripley manages to drop the queen into a large vertical airlock, at the cost of being pulled in as well. Getting free of the queen and the exosuit, Ripley opens the outer door of the ship and expels the alien into space; the badly-damaged but still-functional Bishop grabs Newt as she and the air in the hangar are evacuated through the open airlock, saving the girl from sharing the queen's fate. Ripley manages to crawl out of the airlock and close the inner door. Newt runs to her, and as they embrace Newt calls Ripley "Mommy".

Along with Bishop and Hicks, Ripley and Newt enter hypersleep capsules as the Sulaco begins the long journey back home. They are both free to dream again.