James Cameron steps in and brings his own vision - the main difference between the original and the sequel is that original was atmospheric, claustrophobic and focused on evil lurking in the dark. This time everything is done on much larger scale, pneumatic and mostly brightly lit - it is unrepentant action movie with ho-hum soldiers swaggering around with some heavy weapons and even Sigourney Weaver gets to blast everything with flamethrower. Although I perfectly understand the logic behind continuing profit-making franchise, it steps away from original idea that was genuinely terrifying because it played with our fear of unknown and focuses on crowd-pleasing pyrotechnic effects, explosions and thunderous destructions, therefore leaving me oddly involved - no wonder I didn't watch it back in the day, because this type of movies didn't appeal to my younger self and still don't.
Paul Reiser is the most interesting character here, because he represents corporate greed that puts financial interests before anything else and he is ready to sacrifice everybody for the sake of $$$ - we can almost see little wheels turning in his cash-register brain every step of the way and the way he calculates possibilities of returning like hero and getting rich out of it is scariest than any of malevolent beings that harass human characters. The rest of the characters (or the story) is basically cartoon-like, nothing to analyse here in depth since focus in on action, shooting and screaming. Where previously we encountered treacherous android, this time Lance Henriksen is a good one. And instead of frantically searching for the cat (like in original) this time Weaver runs around to save a child - it is explained with her traumatic personal experience but personally I always found children in action movies being just a nuisance, this one not exception, mainly being here just to hinder the escape and fall into abysmal pits from where she needs to be rescued. I think this cooled me off the whole saga for a while.
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