Saw that big-time James Cameron flick this weekend

I have to say I was impressed, it's a fresh take on a wonderful original idea. Many say the special effects steal the show, and that the narrative suffers from too many action-movie clichés, but I happen to like action movies. And yeah, the special effects are stunning.

So there's this alien planet. Humans have "colonized" there, not sure for how long but they are pretty well established with infrastructure, and are aware of how to survive and navigate the atmosphere and geography. Overt signs of hostility between the humans and the alien race they encounter are present, but that doesn't matter to the slimeball representative from "The Company." He only cares about harvesting something, likely for use as a weapon based on most everything the human characters bring to the story—this is clearly a military operation first and a scientific one second.

Cameron knows armaments, or at least has a futurist's grasp of armaments. Personnel vehicles too—you can see the roots of those transport ships back in The Terminator. He gets into combat tactics as well, and thankfully realizes that all the technical flair in the world can't always defeat a determined enemy with home-field advantage. (I love how the human troops only seem capable of looking straight ahead and not up and down, particularly since they were eventually decimated by an overhead attack.)

Alien was a slow-burning thriller and I think this film works just as well in its own way. Indeed, it holds up after almost twenty-five years—Aliens is that good.

Hey, we saw Avatar the other night too. It was pretty good.