I've always thought Aliens (with an s) was a more entertaining movie than the original Alien, but Tim Carmody makes a great argument for why Aliens is also a brilliant movie about technology.
That’s what technology is. It’s the world of things, some impossibly stupid, some smarter than we are, we have assembled around ourselves to cover over our fundamental weaknesses as a species. The strength we have, the advantage this gives us, is our ability to stand apart from the things we’ve made: to use them and set them aside; to make them prosthetic extensions of ourselves and to let them go.