The best sequel of all time?

Aliens is much better with the extra scenes from the laser disk version thrown in, as well. I think it would have to be a close contest between Aliens and Wrath of Khan for the best sequal ever made, but I think Khan would have to get the nod for being so much better than Star Trek the Motionless Picture, plus it built on the mythology of the TV show. If we consider the TNG era a separate Trek Movie franchise, then I think First Contact has to be on that list as well for similar reasons.

Also I think Two Towers was the best movie of the trilogy, largely because of the pacing. Fellowship had large chunks of verbal diarrhea tossed in to be faithful to the book and no Gollum. Return had the very poorly paced ending sequence that really didn't belong in the movie, like the fucking gay hobbit pillow fight shit. The extended versions probably influence my opinion on that a great deal, actually, now that I think about it, so I can see the argument in the context of the theatrical versions. I agree that as awesome as the Ent battles and Siege of Rohan sequences were, that the Siege of Gondor battle sequences were much better. Peter Jackson has always kind of sucked at pacing, though, so I may be biased on some of this.

The space trucker thing is a good call. It laid the groundwork for a lot of good movies that followed a similar atmosphere, like Heavy Metal and Outland. But you could also make the argument that Star Wars created that concept first on the big screen with characters like Han Solo, though he was more of a smuggler. Alien gave it the most realistic feel. I think Aliens was the better movie, by far, for reasons of depth of plot and pacing, but I do think Aliens was not really a psychological horror movie in the same sense the original was, but more of an 80s style gorefest horror flick with top level action and good characters thrown in. The acting was arguably better in the original (the quality of actors was amazing), but they had less material to work with. Interesting thing is that there are also cut scenes from Alien that make it a better movie, as well, like one at the end with Ripley finding the crew cocooned up while she is running for the escape pod. A lot got cut from both movies that added depth to the story actually (Khan had some stuff cut, as well) that can be seen on director's cuts of the movies. Aliens, in particular, had a whole scene with the automated turrets, a sequence of Ripley finding out about her daughter being dead and gone on earth, and tons of dialog snippets involving the marines and Burke that fleshed out the story a lot. Probably worth getting the blue ray versions just to get that extra stuff.

t2