"If you take the special edition of James Cameron’s astounding sequel to the classic Alien, it’s a film where you don’t see – save for a face-hugger right at the start – a single alien creature until almost an hour has been clocked up. One full hour. How incredible is that, particularly contextualized against modern-day flicks that never seem to introduce the cat to the bag, let alone let it out? But there’s more to it than that, because Cameron then spends that hour superbly well, managing to ratchet up the tension to quite unbearable levels in the build-up to the inevitable first encounter. In fact, there’s a convincing argument, and this writer would certainly subscribe to it, that the scariest thing in the whole of Aliens is a flashing dot on a screen, accompanied by a beeping noise."