Burke explains his motivation to Ripley.
He contacted someone on the colony and told them to go check out the site where the eggs were. He did this surreptitiously so that Admin wouldn’t know anything about in order to make a profit.
I imagine they sent the wet-behind-the-ears Goren because they didn’t anticipate any serious threat and the dude needed the experience.
Burke’s exact job is a little hard to pin down. He’s the liaison for Ripley and is the closest thing she gets to legal representation in the big meeting. He’s assigned to the LV-426 mission. He’s able to put in a request for a colonist scavenger to hit a particular coordinate. Best I can guess, he’s some sort of legal/human resources guy who was on the W-Y division/team responsible for the LV-426 colony. When Ripley was recovered and her files pulled, he was assigned to her and got an early look at the files and thought he could get his hands on this lucrative bioweapon. First send someone out there to see if they report back – “signed: Burke, Carter J.”.
Burke says pretty much straight out that W-Y had no idea about it:
The ‘wildcat’ who was sent to the ship wanted to know if his claim would be honored so I guess W-Y didn’t have exclusive rights over the entire moon. I guess Burke was waiting to find out if the ship and “cargo” was there and then claim it for himself? Then when it went bad, talked Ripley into being an adviser knowing he’d get sent along as her minder so he could try to retrieve the aliens himself as a Plan B? Frankly, it feels like he never had a good plan beyond “get my hands on the aliens” and was getting pushed along by events he put into motion but couldn’t control.
(I don’t mean that as a criticism. The same sort of character trait was the basis for Fargo, for instance)
One thing I’ve seen that is a common trope with the Big Evil Corporation is that they are CHEAP. They sent one ship, and in it one Colonial Marine Platoon to see what was up. I think Burke even describes the settlement as a ‘Shake-and-bake’ colony which implies that W-Y have a way of cost-effectively terraforming a planet and setting up a colony there.
Sending a small force would imply a Small Problem. Of course the easiest solution to dealing with the Aliens is “Nuke them from orbit”. But from a W-Y Corporate standpoint, this is probably not the best idea.
I think they did know. They figured if a Space Trucker like Ripley was able to deal with them, a platoon would wipe the floor with whatever they came across. They could complete their mission quietly and be on their way. Sending more troops, or using tactical weapons would have drawn a lot of attention to the place. We don’t know who W-Y’s enemies are (other colonies? rival corporations?) but I’m sure they’d be mightily interested why W-Y conveniently just nuked their own colony, one that was giving off some mysterious alien distress signal…
Or maybe Space Jesus (Engineers) orchestrated the whole thing? 
Ah, right, I had forgotten about that.
On the other hand, W-Y was rather upset about their expensive Nostromo freighter being blown up and the LV-426 colony might not have been fancy but it wasn’t inexpensive either. W-Y might be cheap, but that’s all the more reason to guard their valuable assets.
The Colonial Marines were a government outfit, not a branch of W-Y. Which (in my opinion) is evidence that W-Y either didn’t seriously suspect Ripley’s story was true or, at least, didn’t orchestrate Hadley’s Hope getting infested or think to collect them. If your plan was to murder a bunch of civilians and raise up an army of alien monsters, attracting the attention of the government/military would probably be the dumbest way to go about it. Rather, W-Y lost contact with LV-426 (because of Burke) and they contacted the government for assistance. The government sent a small number of Colonial Marines because they figured it was a routine waste-of-time job fixing some colonist’s transmitter.
I agree that Weyland-Yutani doesn’t directly control the Colonial Marines, or know about (or at least, believe in) the aliens on LV-426. Burke had no hand in picking Gorman to lead the mission - most likely, it wasn’t his call to bring in the marines in the first place. Burke strikes me as a mid-management flunky. He’s not someone important, he’s the bureaucratic schmuck who gets stuffed in an ice box and shipped halfway across the galaxy when some shit-ass colony’s transmitter craps out.
I’m guessing Weyland-Yutani’s corporate culture is especially backstabby. If Burke had gone to his boss and said, “Hey, I think there’s something on this planet that might be valuable,” odds are his boss gets all the credit and corporate bonuses. Burke was sneaking around his manager by cutting a deal with the settlers - they go find it, he takes it back to headquarters personally, cutting out layers of management that would each try to claim a cut of the profits if he went through legitimate channels.
Don’t read too much into the fact that the Sulaco had nukes. Even if it was a ship full of newbies and screw-ups, there’s no reason for them not to have nukes. There’s no such thing as a starship without WMDs, since any ship capable of interstellar travel is itself a WMD. So you might as well let the screw-ups have the real thing, in case they ever actually have need of them.
They might also use nukes as their standard ship-to-ship weapon.
All this got me re-watching the movie. Burke’s title (per his business card/phone key) is “Special Projects Director”. The special project in this case presumably being the LV-426 terraforming operation which would explain why he was sent along with the Colonial Marines and why he’d have authority to send colonists out to investigate a grid reference.
I never had the impression that the Marine squad was composed of newbies or screw-ups; far from it. I always had the impression that with the exception of Gorman, we had a tough, experienced squad of Colonial Marines. IIRC Hudson even mentions that he was short in one scene, which implies that he’s finishing his enlistment.
That’s likely why they put Gorman in charge; green Lieutenant + really solid NCO (SGT Apone) and veteran troops is usually a fairly good choice; you wouldn’t want to put Gorman in charge of more green troops because then NOBODY knows what they’re doing.
Unfortunately, in this case, SGT Apone bought his farm early, and the squad really needed veteran leadership and didn’t have it.
I am surprised though, that Apone didn’t have his own private channel back to Gorman, so that he could suggest better ways of going about things without doing it in front of the rank and file.
Neither does the person you quoted. It was a hypothetical to explain the nukes.
Seems likely that no one had much idea of the nature of the xenos, outside of Ripley’s report. They’re dumbfounded to find the colonists’ transmitters all in the same room, at the processing station (“Looks like a goddamned town meeting.”) They didn’t realize the trap they were blundering into.
But they’re Colonial Marines. They blunder into shit, and they fight their way out. They’ve got two squads, each with a heavy weapon (Drake and Vazquez), automatic rifles with grenades, auto turret guns, pocket torches to weld shut barricades, portable motion sensors, an android, an APC with a heavy main gun, and orbiting air support. I’d say they were equipped to handle just about anything.
I agree, but it’s interesting to note how much other weaponry is shown or mentioned but never used. All we see in the movie is small arms fire (pulse rifles, smart guns, shotgun, pistols, flamethrowers) and grenades. Yet, the APC has a turret on the front with two multi-barrel guns of some sort and a larger turret on top with two more guns. The dropship has what looks like a rotary canon on the nose, and a bunch of missles/rockets, and possible more weapons systems that we don’t see. The Sulaco itself apparently has not only nukes but multiple railgun turrets (seen on screen and identified in other books and drawings). They mention nerve gas at one point, and Hudson lists off a bunch of stuff in the dropship while messing with Ripley:
Pvt. Hudson: “Independently targeting particle beam phalanx. Vwap! Fry half a city with this puppy. We got tactical smart missiles, phase-plasma pulse rifles, RPGs, we got sonic electronic ball breakers! We got nukes, we got knives, sharp sticks…”
Ok, some of that is obviously just pulling her leg. . . 
But anyway, they seem to have a ton of serious weaponry at their disposal, even discounting the sharp sticks. Even the small arms are pretty potent. Everything fell apart because of the lack of good intel, ineffective leadership, and restrictions on the use of their weapons. They wouldn’t want to use heavy weapons for fear of killing the colonists at first, then they were prohibited from firing their rifles while under the heat exchangers, and finally they couldn’t access heavy weapons after the dropship crash.
The whole thing could have gone down totally differently if the marines had really listened and understood Ripley’s statement and if Gorman had pulled them back to reassess after learning about the risk of damaging the heat exchangers. Even after that fiasco, the rest might have survived if the dropship crew had only closed that ramp. . .
Does anyone else think that William Hope did a great acting job with the Gorman character though?
Yep, a friend of mine had the ‘Colonial Marines Technical Manual’ which i read a few times as a teenager many years ago.
From memory the ship-to-ship stuff was totally hard sci-fi. Stealthed nukes launched at the target, the one who detects the other first wins, that sort of thing.
Mrs. Yutani knew something of the xenomorphs based on the Alien vs. Predator prequel. It’s possible that at some point, this info was lost and thus not know to W-Y.
In the original script (which the novelization is based off of) Gorman wasn’t such a screw up, he was much more competent and braver. Quite a few things were different, like the scene when he is knocked unconscious by the falling gear while cowering in the back of the ACP, in the book/original script he was stung by the tail of an Alien while fighting it. I liked the movie version a little more, it just goes along with the mission being fubar a little better.
I would imagine one thing caused the big issue: they had no idea just how many of the aliens there would be. One alien they could deal with. Maybe even a hundred. However, in practice is seems like there were several hundred, partly because the aliens seem to be able to grow magically off-camera.
I disagree. They seemed fairly unsurprised when they found the multiple decks melted through early on (“Someone must have bagged one of Ripley’s bad guys.”) but they weren’t taking it as seriously as they should have.
Also, while I’m okay with the idea that Weland-Yutani is evil made corporate, I get the impression Burke arranged this mission largely on his own, while keeping WY and the marines in the dark. He’d sent the order to the colonists to check out the derelict alien ship Ripley reported (and which nobody else in the company seemed to believe in, having decided Ripley was nuts) and when the colony lost contact, he arranged a minimalist corporate-overseen but military-run rescue/reconnaissance mission. I’m guessing he had to call in a lot of favours to do so while keeping his agenda secret (“Okay, look. What if that ship didn’t even exist, huh? Did you ever think about that? I didn’t know! So now, if I went in and made a major security issue out of it, everybody steps in. Administration steps in, and there are no exclusive rights for anybody; nobody wins. So I made a decision and it was… wrong. It was a bad call, Ripley, it was a bad call.”).
I gather Burke was willing to gamble that Ripley wasn’t nuts, that the colony didn’t lose contact for some mundane technical reason, and that he could secure something for the bioweapons division that could net him millions, let him come out as a hero and be set up for life.
I’m not eager to blame Weyland-Yutani for the whole thing, just the corporate culture they support which encouraged somebody like Burke to see and play a homicidal angle.
In a previous thread someone posted that the “bug hunts” were NOT aliens, but instead genetically engineered animals released by breakaway colonial terrorists.
I don’t know where this info came from, also that the Arcturians are not aliens, but a colony famous for transsexual prostitutes. Like someone might speak of going to see lady-boys in Thailand.
There were ~155 actively hostile aliens overall, since the colony population pre-disaster was 158. Newt didn’t get implanted, there was a report of a patient who died while getting his facehugger removed before getting implanted, and the last survivor other than Newt was that woman (I presume she hid nearly as successfully as Newt and was the aliens’ last capture just two or three days before the marines arrived) who begged “kill me” and whose implanted chestburster was killed immediately post-chestburst.
The robosentry scene (cut from the film, restored in the extended version) depicts the aliens being cut down to relatively manageable numbers, then cut even further during the marines’ run through the air ducts with I assume the last “hunter” drones killed by Gorman’s grenade. Possibly by the final confrontation, there was only the queen and two or three drones she kept to tend the nest (one of which had found and grabbed Newt). Ripley kills the drones in that crazy-ass but awesome scene when she torches the nest, and then it’s just bitch v. bitch.