Aliens

Each week, Stanford Under the Stars: Movie Nights at Frost brings a selection of movies featuring actors who attended Stanford or various Stanford and Northern California filming locations. Sigourney Weaver (’72) transferred to Stanford after freshman year at Sarah Lawrence College and has described this as one of the best decisions she made. Weaver majored in English and immersed herself in acting not in the drama department but through a group she and other students founded called the Palo Alto Company. Weaver didn’t intend to become an actor—she considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English or a career in journalism, but after graduation she briefly attended drama school at Yale before leaving to act professionally in off-Broadway productions. She got her big break after being cast in Alien and built an impressive career afterwards, appearing in movies such as Ghostbusters (1984) and Gorillas in the Mist (1988).

57 years after Ellen Ripley had a close encounter with the reptilian alien creature from the first movie, she is called back, this time, to help a group of highly trained colonial marines fight off against the sinister extraterrestrials. But this time, the aliens have taken over a space colony on the moon LV-426. When the colonial marines are called upon to search the deserted space colony, they later find out that they are up against more than what they bargained for. Using specially modified machine guns and enough firepower, it’s either fight or die as the space marines battle against the aliens. As the Marines do their best to defend themselves, Ripley must attempt to protect a young girl who is the sole survivor of the nearly wiped out space colony.