Just recently watched the Alien "Quadrilogy" for the first time, and here's what I think...

[drewtwo99]

@GreedySmurf

If they had of found and colonised a different planetoid, would have been a very boring movie I’d say.

If you are willing to accept that (admittedly massive) coincidence I think the rest of the movie flows just fine. There are so many movies where you have to accept bigger coincidences than that to get the plot rolling, I’m happy to accept it.

When I read your OP, (wrt to Aliens) my immediate thought was, Tell him he’s dreaming and there’s probably no point getting in this thread because we are polar opposites on this one. I recognise that nothing I say will change your opinion on the movie. Different strokes and all that. But in terms of two of your stated reasons for disliking it, I see minimal plotholes, (and believe me I’ve looked), I’ve watched Aliens easily 100+ times. I think your comments about the sterotypes have been amply covered by other posters, in that this movie established some of those cliches you rolled your eyes at. I think it’s just unfortunate for you that you’ve come to the movie so late.

I was actually one of those that originally hated Alien 3. If you want to talk gaping plotholes, explain how there were eggs on board the Sulaco? I also hated that they killed Hicks. I loved his character and having him killed ‘offscreen’ as it were just got me off on the wrong foot. (Newt dying - meh whatever )

A few years on, and having watched the directors cut of it, that plothole and Hicks death still rankles, but getting past that, as a movie in and of itself, I agree with you that Alien 3 is pretty good. To me, it makes a good bookend to the series. They started with a horror movie with sci fi trappings, went into full blown action movie for the sequel, before returning to the franchise’s foundation of a horror movie.

The less said about Resurrection the better IMO. Terrible terrible movie.

Haha I love it, and everything you’ve said I pretty much agree with. I am not trying to say that objectively, Aliens is a bad movie. Just that it did not at all jive with what I like most in movies. Or maybe my expectations for what I thought it SHOULD be were not met, and I need to go back and watch it and expect it for what it is. Kind of like how your expectations for Alien 3 weren’t met and you hated it initially, now you’ve come to appreciate it more.

I probably won’t hate Aliens forever, hell, I may like it more now after having talked about it with you all here than I did before I started this thread. A part of me wants to go back and watch it again already just to see if I’m being overly harsh, but I figure I should give it some more time before I do.

Obviously the queen thingy had one last egg up her but and dropped it off on the ship, right? Is that possible with how Aliens ended?

The only redeeming thing about Alien Resurrection is that it had a few emotionally powerful moments (Ripley VIII finding all the other rejects and killing them), and then watching the human/alien thing get sucked out into space, the expressions on its face were just haunting and sad. I didn’t hate it though, but if everyone had built up Resurrection as the best of the 4, maybe I would.

[outlierrn]

@drewtwo99

But if you’ll go back and read my original post, it’s way more than just the plot holes that made Aliens so difficult for me to like, anyway.

Well it’s just a movie, and not a very serious one at that, but most of your OP for Aliens is based on misinterpretation.

[holmes]

@drewtwo99

Obviously the queen thingy had one last egg up her but and dropped it off on the ship, right? Is that possible with how Aliens ended?

Or Bishop brought it…after all he was still a company man and we don’t know how much control they had over his programming. I would like to think it was the Queen, but we never know who those androids really serve.

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Alka_Seltzer

I do agree that Alien is the superior film. It’s a claustrophobic horror, while the sequel is a very efficient action flick.

You win the thread.

Aliens (1986) preceded Terminator 2 (1991), Xena (1995), Buffy (the movie - 1992), etc. Anybody who wants examples of how lamely women were treated in old action flicks can check out James Bond starring Roger Moore. Many of the innovations in Aliens - eg you can be kickass and maternal - are now pretty commonplace. So much the better.

I saw Aliens in the theater found it refreshing. I knew a movie [del]snob[/del] enthusiast at the time who hated it, as he thought it compared unfavorably to the original. I could readily see his point. So Drew’s general POV had some validity even in 1986. Though I find the corporate shenanigans more credible than he does.

[Lamia]

I’ve seen Alien and Aliens once each, in reverse order 15+ years apart, so I probably wouldn’t have noticed much in the way of discrepancies between the two movies anyway. I don’t even remember very much about Aliens now except that I thought Vasquez was hot. However:

@drewtwo99

Still a huge coincidence that seems dumb to me, that they ended up colonizing the planet by accident that had Aliens on it.

It’s not like they would have been selecting planets to colonize at random. If we assume that most planets can’t be colonized because their environments are too far from being inhabitable to make it possible/practical to send people to live there, it doesn’t seem like a particularly big coincidence to me that a suitable world would be taken advantage of once it was (re)discovered. At the time of Alien this planet (or moon) is apparently not all that far off the “beaten trail”, so I can buy that it was found again at some point in the decades that passed between the two movies.

And also, even if the broadcaster had been disabled, the message still would have been floating through space and picked up by ships nearby, or on their way to that moon. So, plot holes, and silly ones at that.

Isn’t it a fairly major plot point in Alien that the message they picked up is difficult to understand? Although the crew of the *Nostromo *was initially told (by “Mother”?) that it was a distress signal, this wasn’t true and IIRC was a lie planned to force the *Nostromo *to investigate. I can’t remember if the message needed to be decrypted or translated or if it just had a lot of noise, but Ripley had to work on it at the computer for a while before she could make any sense of the real message (a warning to stay away). If another ship picked up the same message without being told it was a distress signal then maybe they didn’t try too hard to figure out what it meant.

I really don’t know about the science involved so maybe I’m way off here, but it also doesn’t sound right to me to say that after the broadcast stopped the signal would be hanging around to be picked up by ships near that moon. Wouldn’t the signal continue traveling through space, getting farther and farther from the original source every moment?

[grude]

@holmes

Or Bishop brought it…after all he was still a company man and we don’t know how much control they had over his programming. I would like to think it was the Queen, but we never know who those androids really serve.

Yea for a long time I considered this a plot hole, but eventually thinking on it I believe Bishop secretly brought eggs on board and then after being torn in half by the queen never got a chance to “freeze” them or whatever and that is why they hatched.

Now whether it was one or more eggs is for debate, there is a deleted scene from Alien 3 where a prisoner finds a very large different dead face hugger than ended up in the final version, this was supposed to be a “queen facehugger” who carried a queen embryo and regular alien ones so could implant more than one host. But in the final film we just have to assume more than one facehugger was present.

Two pieces of evidence support this theory I think

1.Bishop running late in Aliens, where was he and what was he doing? There is clearly enough missing time for him to grab some eggs and take them on board thr drop ship. Or even to ferry them up to the Sulaco and go back down to pickup Ripley.

2.In Alien 3 when Ripley retrieves what is left of Bishop from the junkyard and hooks him up she asks him where the eggs came from, he tells her in a somber tone they were on the ship the entire time with them. I see this as basically an admission that he secretly brought them on board.

[ExTank]

@Lamia

I really don’t know about the science involved so maybe I’m way off here, but it also doesn’t sound right to me to say that after the broadcast stopped the signal would be hanging around to be picked up by ships near that moon. Wouldn’t the signal continue traveling through space, getting farther and farther from the original source every moment?

Yes. And progressively weaker by the inverse square law, until it becomes so weak that it’s little more than gibberish, mostly indistinguishable from stellar background noise.

Our Transmissions INto Space Already Span 100 Light Years

On the other hand, luckily, our transmissions into space actually got a head start on our present intention to find life in the Universe:
“Humans have been sending radio waves into space at the speed of light for nearly one hundred years now. Although our goal has seldom been interstellar communication, radio is especially appropriate to that task because electromagnetic waves generally require no travel media, and because radio waves penetrate very efficiently through gas and dust clouds. To date, our “radio bubble,” as Tyson calls it, encompasses every star around which a planet has thus far been found, including Alpha Centauri, at 4.3 light-years away; Sirius, our sky’s brightest star at ten light-years out; and about a thousand others. So, if aliens are listening, they might have an opportunity to partake in any message sent at frequencies greater than twenty megahertz, including FM radio and television."”

Kenneth W. Krause in Skeptical Inquirer (2007)9

The mechanics of listening to such weakened signals requires massive effort, massive receivers pointing in the right direction, "and, if the yearning stargazer actually wanted to decode our message’s content, it would have to first adjust for Doppler’s shifts caused by Earth’s rotation and revolution, and then build a dish about twenty miles wide, or four hundred times Arecibo. That’s a lot of work - and for what? A weekly dose of Desperate Housewives and reruns of Welcome Back, Kotter"5.

[DWMarch]

@grude

Yea for a long time I considered this a plot hole, but eventually thinking on it I believe Bishop secretly brought eggs on board and then after being torn in half by the queen never got a chance to “freeze” them or whatever and that is why they hatched.

Now whether it was one or more eggs is for debate, there is a deleted scene from Alien 3 where a prisoner finds a very large different dead face hugger than ended up in the final version, this was supposed to be a “queen facehugger” who carried a queen embryo and regular alien ones so could implant more than one host. But in the final film we just have to assume more than one facehugger was present.

Two pieces of evidence support this theory I think

1.Bishop running late in Aliens, where was he and what was he doing? There is clearly enough missing time for him to grab some eggs and take them on board thr drop ship. Or even to ferry them up to the Sulaco and go back down to pickup Ripley.

2.In Alien 3 when Ripley retrieves what is left of Bishop from the junkyard and hooks him up she asks him where the eggs came from, he tells her in a somber tone they were on the ship the entire time with them. I see this as basically an admission that he secretly brought them on board.

Ah, converts to my Bishop conspiracy!

In addition to Bishop not being there after Ripley raids the nest we also have the earlier scene where Ripley and co are running early courtesy of Newt’s shortcut to the landing field. Bishop gives them a WTF look. It’s very random since he should be happy they’re early for the escape from the nuclear explosion. He acts strange in deleted scenes from the director’s cut as well. When he’s examining a facehugger a fellow marine can’t get his attention. Since when do androids suffer from distraction?

Bishop also outright lies about how long it will take to get the dropship down. The “express elevator to Hell” doesn’t take forty minutes to get there, it takes four- we see it in real time the first time they do it. No one catches Bishop in this transparent lie and thus he is able to ferry eggs back to the ship unmolested. That is of course until the Queen catches up to him, recognizes him as the egg thief and proceeds to rip him in half.

I also look at Bishop’s assisted suicide in Alien 3 as an admission of guilt.

[Odesio]

@DWMarch

Bishop also outright lies about how long it will take to get the dropship down. The “express elevator to Hell” doesn’t take forty minutes to get there, it takes four- we see it in real time the first time they do it.

If it was a lie I would think the marines would have called him out on it immediately.

[beowulff]

@DWMarch

Bishop also outright lies about how long it will take to get the dropship down. The “express elevator to Hell” doesn’t take forty minutes to get there, it takes four- we see it in real time the first time they do it.

According to a script I found on the web, he says:

  Say, forty minutes
               to crawl down there.  One hour
               to patch in and align the antenna.
               Thirty minutes to prep the ship,
               then about fifty minutes flight time.

Now, 50 minutes seems like a lot longer than the first time, but it’s not at all clear that we watched the entire drop. Remember that they had to wake up Drake? I doubt he would have fallen asleep in 4 minutes. Also, it would be ridiculous to lie - they all knew how long the trip took.

[Battle_Pope]

Plus - drive your car to the shops, now drive it there via remote contol. Which would take longer?

ETA - and assuming the Sulaco was in the same orbital position relative to the colony at both times.

[Gerald_II]

@drewtwo99

She KNEW from what happened in the first movie that her life was expendable, that all the company wanted was to get their hands on the xenomorphs, and that she was just going to be their pawn.

Yeah, Cameron didn’t even address that. I saw Aliens first, and even after watching ALIEN, I didn’t notice they ignored that part.
And Bishop, the “wheel of morality” character who’s only purpose in the movie was to teach Ripley the important moral lesson that not all artificial persons are evil. Yay for shoe-horned moral lessons! Don’t we all love those???

Aliens was basically Alien, with a much more predictable plot, a whole lot more explosions, guns, fire and stereotypical characters. Utterly disappointing. But at least Sigourney Weaver was awesome in it. And it was a technically proficient movie with better lighting than the first. And no stupid cat. 3/10

Wow, that’s pretty harsh but have to agree with you on the criticisms. Especially the stereotypes.

The reason I liked ALIENS more than ALIEN though, was because we got to see a glimpse of the future world, Ripley’s apartment, the docking station with hospital in space, and the haunted house style colony on LV-4whatever.

I also thought that multiple xenomorphs was much more terrifying than just one. The scene when they come out the walls was exilerating, especially with the motion sensors.

**Alien 3
**
The characters were far more interesting. Less stereotypes and far less predictable overall. I cared not one iota that Hicks or Newt were dead. Why this bothered anyone or felt like it ruined Aliens is beyond me.

Because they were likable characters and they survived all of Aliens just to die in Alien 3. I hated the characters in Alien 3 and it was hard to care for them when they were getting picked off.

I appreciated the fact that they didn’t just copy the whole “self destruct, alien manages to escape, alien gets sucked into outer space” thing that Alien and Aliens did.

I felt like it was a rehash of the original Alien. One xenomorph picking off humans with no real weapons. It was definitely a letdown for me considering the early teaser “On Earth…EVERYONE can hear you scream.”

The scene at the end with her sacrificing herself was meaningful and sad, and I felt like it was a nice conclusion to the trilogy.

Even though I hated the story, it was an exceptionally well made film.
The xeno design was boring though.

**Alien Resurrection
**

Overall a decent action movie. Met my expectations, and might even watch it again someday. 6/10

I was excited for this movie, hoping it would undo Alien 3. Then I saw it and was let down. Some cool moments were the experiments to clone xeno samples from Ripley. But I found it hard to believe this film takes place 200 years after Alien 3, and yet the Company is STILL trying to find a xenomorph!? Plus, I figured they could have gone back to LV and find the Space Jockey’s ship which was very far off from the colony.

The cast was even uglier in character than Alien 3. Didn’t care when or how they died. Also, they’re so far in the future, and have androids but people are still in wheelchairs???

Overall a very disappointing film, and the worst in the series until AvP.

[Jophiel]

@holmes

Or Bishop brought it…after all he was still a company man and we don’t know how much control they had over his programming.

Except that would negate everything about Burke largely acting on his own without the Company’s knowledge.

The actions of the Company make sense in Alien when you had this ship working for them conveniently close to the signal source and able to investigate. But in Aliens, they’re leaving from home to reach LV-426. If they knew the place was overrun by aliens and wanted some, you’d think they’d just send in their own heavily armed security team with the the express purpose of extracting an alien rather than involving the ICC and the Colonial Marines. The Company owns the colony and everything about it; they could have gone there and done whatever they wanted without issue. Instead, we have Burke in way over his head trying to infect Ripley and Newt and then sabotage everyone else’s life support while in stasis just to smuggle a couple aliens past ICC quarantines (who would no doubt be expecting them since they sent in the Marines).

It also means Bishop was lying about his behavioral inhibitors which bound him to the Asimovian “Can’t allow a human to be harmed by action or inaction” rule since scampering off to infect their only means of escape with alien eggs rather than assist in getting everyone out alive fails that law on several counts.

[grude]

@beowulff

According to a script I found on the web, he says:

Now, 50 minutes seems like a lot longer than the first time, but it’s not at all clear that we watched the entire drop. Remember that they had to wake up Drake? I doubt he would have fallen asleep in 4 minutes. Also, it would be ridiculous to lie - they all knew how long the trip took.

Say, forty minutes
to crawl down there. One hour
to patch in and align the antenna.
Thirty minutes to prep the ship,
then about fifty minutes flight time.

40+60+30+50=180 minutes or three hours. :dubious:Lets assume he was telling the truth about the flight time, what if he had lied about the hour it would take to patch in and align the antenna(why would that take an hour?) or prep the ship?

All he would have to do is secret some eggs on the dropship, and I seem to recall in one of the movies it being stated the xenomorphs tend to ignore synthetic people which would probably assist him in an egg run. Hell he could have got the eggs from the derelict even, no xenomorphs to worry about.

[Battle_Pope]

@Jophiel

Except that would negate everything about Burke largely acting on his own without the Company’s knowledge.

The actions of the Company make sense in Alien when you had this ship working for them conveniently close to the signal source and able to investigate. But in Aliens, they’re leaving from home to reach LV-426. If they knew the place was overrun by aliens and wanted some, you’d think they’d just send in their own heavily armed security team with the the express purpose of extracting an alien rather than involving the ICC and the Colonial Marines. The Company owns the colony and everything about it; they could have gone there and done whatever they wanted without issue. Instead, we have Burke in way over his head trying to infect Ripley and Newt and then sabotage everyone else’s life support while in stasis just to smuggle a couple aliens past ICC quarantines (who would no doubt be expecting them since they sent in the Marines).

It also means Bishop was lying about his behavioral inhibitors which bound him to the Asimovian “Can’t allow a human to be harmed by action or inaction” rule since scampering off to infect their only means of escape with alien eggs rather than assist in getting everyone out alive fails that law on several counts.

IIRC from the novelisations of the movies; an unmanned company probe first detected the transmissions from LV426, the Nostromo had Ash assigned as science officer and its course altered to take it ‘conveniently’ close enough to LV426 to make the detour and check out the transmissions.

When the Nostromo vanished, the company execs who had made the changes, played ‘cover-your-ass’ and hid/destroyed all records of the LV426 connection.

[ExTank]

@grude

All he would have to do is secret some eggs on the dropship, and I seem to recall in one of the movies it being stated the xenomorphs tend to ignore synthetic people which would probably assist him in an egg run. Hell he could have got the eggs from the derelict even, no xenomorphs to worry about.

Even if xenos leave synthetics alone (an idea put forth in the Aliens novel, IIRC), I don’t see the queen or the warriors standing still for one waltzing into their hive and making off with some eggs.

[Miller]

@ExTank

Even if xenos leave synthetics alone (an idea put forth in the Aliens novel, IIRC), I don’t see the queen or the warriors standing still for one waltzing into their hive and making off with some eggs.

I dunno about that. I mean, they want their eggs to be taken out into the wider world, so they can spread even further. If they’re smart enough for even primitive strategization, they might let some thing take an egg with it, in the hopes that they might be clumsy enough to impregnate themselves with it.

[DWMarch]

@Battle_Pope

Plus - drive your car to the shops, now drive it there via remote contol. Which would take longer?

Well, if for the second trip I get to put an android at the controls and there are no passengers inside the vehicle… my money is on trip two being significantly faster.

ETA - and assuming the Sulaco was in the same orbital position relative to the colony at both times.

As I have noted in previous threads, it makes sense for the support ship to be in a position where it can actually support the team. Otherwise it’s “Sorry Ripley, we can’t send down reinforcements because the ship drifted to the other side of the planet while we were down here.”

@ExTank

Even if xenos leave synthetics alone

They do. Bishop is the only one in any of the movies to be attacked by one.

@Jophiel

Except that would negate everything about Burke largely acting on his own without the Company’s knowledge.

Bishop may have been sent independently of Burke’s mission, which is to say that while Burke may have been playing his own game, the company was a step ahead of him the whole time.

[crowmanyclouds]

@Gerald_II

… But I found it hard to believe this film takes place 200 years after Alien 3, and yet the Company is STILL trying to find a xenomorph!? …

They Company wasn’t. The USM Auriga and it’s military crew weren’t actually either, they already had at least two Aliens that Dr. Gediman (Brad Dourif) was trying to train. The military was after a Queen,

… Two hundred years after the events of Alien 3, military scientists on the outer space vessel USM Auriga create a clone of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), using DNA from blood samples taken before her death. They extract the embryo of an Alien queen that had been growing inside her at the time of her death, raise it, and collect its eggs for further use. The Ripley clone is kept alive for further study. As a result of her DNA being mixed with the Alien’s during the cloning process, she develops enhanced strength and reflexes, acidic blood, and an empathic link with the Aliens. …[RIGHT]CITE[/RIGHT]

and that inability to get a pure clone instead of an Alien/Ripley/Queen hybrid resulted in the military getting something they never could have picked up on LV-426,

… Ripley discovers that the Alien queen has gained a human ability from her DNA as well: now possessing a womb, it can give birth to live offspring without the need for eggs and human hosts. …[RIGHT]CITE[/RIGHT]

Why, exactly, they couldn’t just go to LV-426 collect some eggs and wait until their new Alien colony naturally produced a Queen is still a question. WAG after the Sulaco Massacre the U.S. Colonial Marines returned to LV-426 and . . . nuked it from orbit!

CMC fnord!

[drewtwo99]

@crowmanyclouds

. . . nuked it from orbit!

CMC fnord!

I do have to say that watching Aliens was worth it for hearing that line alone. I never knew it came from Aliens. It actually kind of caught me by surprise… “Did she just say nuke it from orbit :eek::eek::eek:???”