Just saw this flick again the other day. This scene again struck me as stupid/ cringworthy: Space Marine Paxton and cigar chomping sergeant grudgingly accept Ripley into their ranks after she shows mad skilz on the Forklift of the Future. She deftly spins the grabbers around and clamps onto a box. She’s not performing brain surgery! Why this earns her their approbation is left to the imagination.
Not everyone can operate heavy machinery. She shows she’s not some useless person they’ll have to protect, but that she’s tough and can look out for herself.
It’s a big, cool-looking, intimidating machine. They’re not impressed because it logically implies that she’d be an asset in a fight. They weren’t thinking logically to begin with. They’re impressed for the same reason that we are: Because it looks cool.
It also establishes the existence of the power loader for the big climax fight later.
I’m sorry - the dumbest scene is when the marines are going through the reactor, and Gorman tells them to stow their ammo, because shooting the reactor would cause a failure and thermonuclear explosion. So what happens? The well-disciplined marines keep some ammo and shoot the shit out of the reactor. And nothing happens. (The reactor explosion as they leave was caused by the jump ship crash, later).
From a storytelling point, why even bother? You get the same result with or without withholding ammo, so just forget the fake restriction on shooting.
Wasn’t it Ripley who brought up the danger of shooting up the cooling system? In any case, it explains why the reactor blew up later after it sustained massive damage.
Rambling…Do they ever establish exactly how the aliens kill? Somehow, despite being 10 feet tall, they always manage to sneak up on their victim. Do they just chomp? I know they were sometimes killed with fire. Were they immune to regular bullets? What made these creatures so successful hunting wise? And I don’t remember acid blood being a problem in Aliens.
I always thought the purpose of that scene is to show how bad the chain of command in the Marines is. Gorman is so inept that he doesn’t think “hey, maybe we should regroup and plan something else, not barge in without weapons”, and then when the shit hits the fan, he’s whining about someone firing a rifle, not the fact that his team’s getting slaughtered.
There are at least two casualties from acid blood in Aliens. One of the marines (the heavy gunner, I think?) gets sprayed in the face during the initial conflict, and Hicks gets injured in the final escape due to acid spray on his body armor. He takes it off in time to not die, but is weakened.
The aliens have teeth and extending jaws, claws and hard tipped tail. Mostly they chomp and rend. They are tough and typically take multiple rounds to stop but are killed by bullets, which of course will cause an aterial spray of acid blood.
The acid blood was specifically a problem in aliens, Drake (one of the heavy gunners) got caught in a spray of it (when Hicks shotgunned an alien in the head?) and was killed during the exfiltration with the APC, and Hicks later got a dose in the elevator and it took him out of the rescue mission Ripley went on to find Newt. Hicks got it in the armor which slowed the acid enough to get most of it off.
-DF
(and ninja’d)
Just an opinion, but the story would have been better if the Marines weren’t inept, but still got their asses kicked.
I mean, Ferro and Spunkmeyer leaving the drop ship unguarded with the door open in a combat zone was incredibly stupid. That’s right up there with horror movies “let’s hide behind these chain saws!” stupidity. I’d have rather had an alien drop down on the ship as it flew by and acid its way through the canopy.
PS: it was the drop ship crash that caused the reactor to fail. Bishop says so.
Ripley: Why can’t we shut it down from here?
Bishop: I’m sorry, the crash caused too much damage. An overload… is inevitable at this point.
I think that’s a reasonable opinion, but I think you can also argue that a core concept of the Alien movies is disabusing everyone but Ripley of their hubristic belief that nightmares aren’t real.
The reason they lose is that they don’t see it as a war zone. Just another bullshit bughunt.
I think the absolute dumbest scene in the movie was when they didn’t leave anyone on the Sulaco when the marines went down to the planet. Seriously, they couldn’t spare even one pilot to take a second dropship down in case something happens to the first one?
No shit!
Random salvage ship passing by: “Hey, look - free spaceship! Let’s take it.”
Especially when you see in the greater fiction that the Sulaco class ships normally have a crew of 60 and a Marine complement of almost 200. It would be like taking an entire aircraft carrier to a warzone with only two helicopters and two squads to jump into combat.
It’s the scene with (arguably) the dumbest action taken by a character, but that doesn’t make it a dumb scene. People fuck up in real life. The point of the scene is to show that Gorman is out of his depth, and doesn’t have the respect of his troops.
Also, what in the film gave you the impression that the marines were “well-disciplined”?
Lastly, using heavy weapons in the reactor damaged the facility and started a meltdown. The crashed drop ship severed the communication lines between the command center and the communications array, making it impossible to remotely call the second drop ship for a pick up.
I’m a big fan of the movie so you may need to forgive my wanking but…
One premise of the plot is that nobody takes Ripley’s story of monsters seriously. Burke comes the closest and what he actually wants is to bring one (or more) back so he downplays it, too. Most of the stupid mistakes by the marines evolve from them being too casual until it’s too late: they don’t send a full complement of marines, they put an inexperienced officer in charge, they don’t use appropriate caution. One of the first things they encounter is a little girl, reinforcing their preconceptions.
If I was in that universe, I’d be just as interested in finding the giant spaceship from the first movie as finding big bugs.
I don’t know if it’s the dumbest scene, but Ripley makes an implied contract with the alien queen that if Newt and I walk out of here I don’t go all Zippo lighter on these eggs right here. The whole base is minutes away from nuclear destruction, but on the way out Ripley wastes the time to flamethrower a bunch of eggs pissing off the alien queen and wasting both time and flamethrower fuel.
It’s a little ambiguous, but I agree with @Just_Asking_Questions’ interpretation. I just watched that part of the movie, and after they see the emergency venting, there’s this dialog:
Ripley: Why can’t we shut it down from here?
Bishop: I’m sorry, the crash caused too much damage. An overload is inevitable at this point.
That sure sounds like the crash caused the damage to the reactor, but you could possibly read it as the crash caused damage to whatever they could have used to shut down the reactor remotely. But then just a few moments later they talk about how the crash caused damage to the hardware between where they are and the colony’s transmitter, which is why they have to send Bishop through the pipe to pilot the drop ship in.
It would be very weirdly bad writing to have both conversations in the same scene be about the same thing, so I think the best interpretation of this is that the scene where they stow weapons is to introduce the idea of the reactor being damaged, but it’s actually damaged by the drop ship crash.
Seems to pretty much support my hypothesis. She doesn’t ask why the reactor is melting down - she knows that, it’s because they used heavy weapons in the core, just like she said would happen. She asks why they can’t shut it down, and the answer is that the crashed drop ship damaged the communications setup, which isolates them in the command center.
It’s pretty basic scriptwriting. A character says, “If we do X, Y will happen.” They do X, then Y happens. Why would you need to look for something other than X to explain Y?