There's a method to the madness of the thrilling violence, and it has a lot to do with how the film's scope constantly shifts between large and small. By shifting between a full set and a tight set, Cameron plays with the audience by use of opposition that would make Sergei Eisenstein proud. It’s a psychological trick where viewers experience tension, then release, tension, then release, tension, then release, ad infinitum. Not only does this intensify the suspense of the scene but it escalates the intensity of the violence. Take for example a scene where Ripley is in the tunnel next to the big space of an office. An alien monster, the facehugger, attacks. She escapes from the tunnel and into the room, evading the facehugger, and there’s a natural moment of letting your breath out. She’s safe, even if temporarily. That is, until you realize the office is yet another level of confinement, one even more impossible to break out of. The gut reaction of the audience -- and Ripley -- is to ask “Where’d it go?!” Where’d it go!?” They're locked in a room. There’s no way to escape. They have no means of contacting anyone for rescue, and a deadly creature hunts them. When the sequence finally erupts in bloodshed, it’s a commanding catharsis. This is how Cameron stages each set piece: he forces the viewer into agonizing suspense, and then explodes the screen with gunfire and quick cutting.

But just soon as the stakes are reestablished, Cameron cuts away. We are shown Ripley has an audience, she’s on a video camera, and if her only her friends would look on the monitor, she’ll be saved. We’ve seen this trope before and since, but Cameron uses it to construct a hierarchy of spatial confederation. By spending so much time building up a lucid sense of space, when the shit hits the fan viewers become perilously displaced in the action. We become as helpless as the characters. What once felt like spatial continuity is now a maze of hazy hallways.

The visuals have the power of a supercharged V8 engine, and they rev up the scare factor to frightening extremes. Aliens is full of tantalizing images: a camera panning past a reeling turbine (that just screams MENACE), flames erupting a nest of alien eggs, or the clashing colors of blue and red highlight fighting space marines. In fact, much of the third act uses the contrast between these two colors, giving the film a quality synonymous with the escalating tension. Blue suggests freedom. It lights up escape routes to safety. Red, the predominant color, shows entrapment and violence.

Only the delirious mind of James Cameron could conceive of a car chase that has a murderous monster alien in pursuit of a military motorcar that’s one part tank, one part armored transport, and one part Lamborghini. It’s painted in sexy black, and we see its descendants in Chris Nolan’s Batman movies. This chase scene is emblematic of another one of Cameron’s tricks as a filmmaker, what I call the domino effect. The domino effect is a grandiose interpretation of the principle of Chekhov’s gun, where whatever is introduced into the plot must be relevant later on, usually citing that a loaded gun in the first act must always fire by the third. Instead of it involving one or two plot strands, it involves about ten. Cameron bides his time, slowly introducing each domino, from the mech power suit to the Alien lair. As such, it makes the last hour of the film a ripping series of sequential payoffs each more exhilarating than the last.