The space marines fired thousands of rounds-and the aliens keep on coming. Don’t they have a circulatory system? And (assuming bullets CAN penetrate their bodies), that nasty molecular acid ought to be sparying all over the place!
So what happened?
As far as what’s going on in the shuttle, my question is why would the six foot Ripley be wearing what appears to be Newt’s panties?
Ah, God yes, those terrible late 70’s low-rise granny panties. Ick.
You know Sigourney rocks a thong…
They have acid blood when it’s convenient. And sometimes paralying blood. Or something. I still don’t understand what Alien 4 was on about.
I think the amount of time she was away is the important bit. It was long enough that everybody she knew would be dead (or in their eighties or nineties). Calling out a stay at home dad and a wee little baby is, to me, part of the problem with the director’s cut. There’s just all this extra stuff that doesn’t really add anything to the movie. I haven’t watched it in a while but I remember being distinctly unimpressed.
If you leave this bit of information out, the impact is the same. Whatever life she had is completely gone and there’s nothing for her to go back to. The specifics of her family situation are more or less irrelevant.
OK, so I hadn’t seen *Alien *in absolute ages, but this thread made me want to watch it again. So I went out and rented it, and…
the scene with the cut from the fake robot Ash head to the real actor Ash head on the table surely has to be the single most horrible piece of editing in the entire history of cinema. How the bloody heck did that cut get left in there?
That is all.
Well, also, it was about 1% as scary as I remembered it.
The aliens kept coming because there was a lot of aliens and the live ones just move over the dead ones. Presumably they took pretty severe losses in the extended cut when they’re trying to reach the surviving humans via the maintence tunnels and the sentry guns let loose with nearly 4,000 rounds of ammunition (since Ripley didn’t face a thousand of them later on, I’m guessing most of them died in the tunnel attempt). Even during the initial botched mission, you see marines firing into the aliens and killing them. Hell, Vasquez even kills one with a pistol.
Hicks and Drake get splashed with acid. Drake died from it and Hicks mainly took it on his body armor which was ruined. Vasquez gets badly burnt after killing an alien at point-blank range but she had bigger problems at the time.
I’ll admit that the acid seems to be exactly as potent as the film makers need it to be at any given moment.
Like the OP said, its 28 freakin’ years old, screw the spoiler boxes.
Technically its called a ‘jump cut’ and its one of if not the most basic DO NOTS in editing. I’ve never heard an explanation as to why it was put in there.
I recently Netflix’ed The Alien Saga disc. One of the neatest behind-the-scenes things is how they actually only made the huge ‘Space jockey’ set like 2/3 full-size and used children (Ridley Scott’s in fact) in spacesuits during the long establishing shots. Did the same for the scenes next to the huge landing gear. Great disc. Contains the only footage I’ve ever seen of Bjaki Bjojgo, whatever his name was, the actual guy in the first alien suit.
One thing I’d like to mention about the second film, Aliens. For me, its unquestionably the best of them in part because: they didn’t treat the damn aliens like they were freakin’ gods!!! The third film, the fourth, the first AVP, they all had to include this mumbo-jumbo nonsensical reverence for these horrible creatures, like they were supernatural or something. Even the first film, they way Ash goes on in his little death diatribe about how they can’t kill it, a perfect organism, he admires its purity, its perfection is only matched by its ferocity blah, blah, blah… Shut the hell up Ash! One shotgun, one alien, BLAM BLAM! One dead alien!
They have a hive-mindset. Didn’t matter how many of them got mowed down, they kept coming until they got to you. When their stealth, strength and speed wasn’t enough they would use overwhelming numbers to win if needed. Actually, in the director’s cut, they do finally retreat & regroup at one point after a pair of robotic machine guns wipes out several dozens of them.
See, I don’t agree. Ripley was portrayed as a tough, no-nonsense, non-sentimental gal in both films, right up until the time the cute little girl shows up, and the she goes all warm & fuzzy. If you don’t give her a decent motivation for it, it seems stupid and out of character.
But YMMV, obviously.
A very 80’s Attitude for a very 80’s film. I prefer my monsters to be hard to kill. It makes the threat greater and the outcome more likely to be bleaker.
But of course that was a 70’s thing where sometimes the hero didn’t make it. In the 80’s it was all about a shiney new era where people could do anything with the right amount of wealth or power. People wanted happy endings and the bad guys had to “die” several times just to make sure they really suffered. And the good guys had to use stupid amounts of firepower to do it!
Having wave after wave of Aliens killed by a handfull of Space Marines makes the Aliens nothing. In fact worse than nothing. They became expendable props, like Vietnamese and Russian soldiers in Rambo which die in cool ways while the audience hoots and cheers.
Oh and the Alien was sleeping… the most likely reason she sneaks away and it doesn’t react to her.
You want unkillable monster, get Dracula. The Alien is flesh and blood, more or less.
The problem is that the alines are just plain MAGIC outside of the Aliens movie. They grow to huge size stupidly fast, they’re stupidly quick, they never have any trouble finding prey, they never have trouble with their senses or not being able to see, they feel no pain and are much faster than they ought to be, etc. And their blood is arbitrarily acidic and can eat through metal instantly and without leaving any residue, which violates those tiny little laws of thermodynamics.
Why indeed.
It seems the Alien needs Ripley to pilot the shuttle. If he had been capable of operating the vehicle himself he could have escaped from the Nostromo on it, leaving Ripley to go up with the ship.
I wouldn’t have guessed that the Alien had that much foresight. There’s no reason that I remember to assume that it was aware of spaceflight as opposed to just finding a cozy place to hide out and snooze.
I agree with Smiling Bandit about the aliens in Aliens versus “unstoppable killing machine”. Besides, Ripley (and Hicks) thought the aliens were enough of a threat to warrant nuking the site from orbit. That seems strong enough a solution that not many monsters could make it bleaker.
I disagree. Aliens made the individual alien nothing. The first Alien was scary because you have a bunch of dumbasses trapped on a ship with a wild animal. Not particularly scary, unless it’s YOU trapped on that ship and you don’t have anything to fight it with.
In the second movie, yeah, a single alien is no match for a Space Marine. Except now there’s like over a hundred of them and their like giant cockroaches so they sneak into everywhere. It also cements home the idea that if one of them gets to a populated area, they would make quick work of turning the population into hosts for millions of aliens.
I just watched Alien3 again this weekend on HBO or whatever and it’s not bad. It’s just not all that exciting after all the James Cameron actiony goodness of Aliens. But it basically should have tied up the Ellen Ripley storyline once and for all.
Alien Resurection was entertaining for all it’s mindlessness, but it was essentially pointless.
Same with AVP. Pointles. Ok, I get it. Predators come to our planet for the Running of the Xenomorphs festival. Charles Bishop Weyland founded the Weyland-Yutani Corporation which presumably made a fortune reverse engineering Predator technology and making androids that look like Lance Henriksen.
You know what they need, which I don’t understand why they’ve never made one? An Alien movie (maybe with Predators) that shows what happens when they infect a real populated planet. Kind of like a Romero zombie movie or 28 Days Later type of post apocalyptic film…but with aliens.
So I finally got around to watching Aliens ( and reading the rest of this thread). The best moment of the film for me was when Ripley said “Nuke em from orbit” then in the pause that followed, I said " it’s the only way to be sure". Then when Ripley finished her line, my wife looked at me and said, “I thought you’d never seen this before.”
I had heard that line so many times here on the Dope and I knew it was from one of the Alien movies, but it was just really cool to hear it for real! Yep, I’m a big dork.
The worst?
Watch Bishop’s last heroic act in Aliens, when he saves Newt. You can CLEARLY see the hole that Lance Henriksen is standing in!
How did that get left in there?
CMC +fnord!
they stand around smoking and waiting for orders like any soldier.
seriously I kinda agree, its obvious if you think about it that there is no way they developed through the usual evolutionary channels, they would destroy all life on any planet in relatively short order leaving themselves nothing to eat.