I rewatched Aliens over the weekend, and man: that’s a pretty good movie!
I do have one other thought to share, though. And it’s this: you hear a lot about how influential the production design in Blade Runner was, and that certainly seems true. But within the context of the Alien franchise, most of the attention is paid to H. R. Giger’s creature designs. That seems to me to significantly underestimate the influence that the rest of the film’s designs have had. In particular its portrayal of the marines and their equipment has been embraced/stolen by virtually every science fiction videogame franchise since. Some of this is just pragmatic — it’s easy to make big, boxy vehicles; having an LED ammo counter on a weapon avoids the need for an extra HUD element — but to a large extent these ideas have been taken up because they’re just really good designs. At this point they’ve been reused so often that they more or less form the baseline for any depiction of futuristic infantry.
Now of course both BR and the first Alien movie were directed by Ridley Scott, so it makes no sense to propose an under/overrated auteur dynamic. Aliens was helmed by James Cameron, and as a sequel it’s necessarily more of an evolution of the preceding movie’s aesthetic (which itself was less original than BR) than an original universe. But I’d argue that while BR had an immediate impact on the people making our popular culture, Aliens was quietly internalized by a generation of future game designers who have only recently begun making their presence known as both they, and their chosen medium, have come of age.