Aliens, a sci-fi/actioner displaying hi-tech heroics and slimy, scalpel-toothed monsters, features a powerful woman central character who prevails through ingenuity, persistence and bravery. She does not frighten, however, because she has a caring, maternal side as well. (Besides, females are expected to be fierce warriors when defending their young.) Instead, the film confronts our deepest and most primitive fears about motherhood: the spectacle of unfettered fecundity-out of reach of patriarchal institutions-as well as an overinvolved, devouring momism producing a generation of vipers. Male anxieties about the female body are added to the psychosexual brew. The testosterone-rich culture of the expedition's marine force-expressed most vigorously by the iron-pumping Latina with the team's biggest grenade launcher-has not seen a battlefield as fearsome as the dark, sticky interior of the doomed settlement's lower region with its narrow canals and haphazard piping.-Lee Amazonas