Inconceivable!
[/QUOTE]
I find your lack of faith…disturbing…
It takes the space shuttle 90 minutes to orbit the Earth. One would assume the Sulaco is orbiting LV whatever according to similar laws of physics.
It stands to reason on the inbound trip, the dropship was launched when the Sulaco was in a position that minimized flight time. On the outbound trip, maybe the Sulaco was on the other side of the planet. He would either need to wait for it to orbit around again or fly the dropship around the planet.
Also “The Company” is actually called “Wylan-Yutani”. It’s never specifically mentioned by name, but you see their logo on everything.
It’s still the stupidest possible way for the Company to handle it. It would be as though my secret panda smuggling ring disguised as field researchers in China was kidnapped so I enlist the help of the US Marines, the UN and Greenpeace to rescue them, assuming that I’ll just murder them all later and smuggle some pandas in past the Coast Guard without anyone asking questions.
The moment they enlisted the help of the ICC and the Colonial Marines and told them they suspected hostile xenomorphs may be responsible for a colony losing contact, they threw giant red flags all over it and were never going to wander back into “civilized” space without all sorts of inspections and eyes on them.
I think this explains it best.
And by “best” I mean “in the most hilarious way”.
So if the company wants samples, why not just send a crew of androids to get them?
Ooops. Look what I started. :smack:
No one will ever convince me that the catalyst for Alien 3 is anything but a retarded scriptwriter who couldn’t come up with anything better, and winds up shitting all over Aliens because of it.
I’ve seen some pretty detailed analysis of Bishop’s timing estimate, and it’s simply not possible or him to have the time to make two round trips.
FYI, the drop is a long process, the time ‘on screen’ is not the whole drop. The camera feeds for each marine have a data overlay, including a mission clock, which is set to zero just before the drop, and when you see Goreman’s view of that data, as the team first enter Hadley’s Hope for the first time, the time elapsed on the mission counter is ~ 50 mins (IIRC).
To presume that the Queen brought an egg or two with her, I can buy that. But then for Alien 3 to happen, you have to presume that Ripley is suddenly the densest person on the face of the planet and having blown the Queen out of the Airlock doesn’t bother to check the dropship over.
But the #1 killer of the start to Alien 3, it has been established in both Alien and Aliens that the eggs don’t just ‘hatch’, they need a potential host in close proximity before the facehugger emerges. So with the three living humans all safely locked away in their hypersleep capsules, why does these eggs hatch?
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Aliens
For me oddly I can’t enjoy the film so much any more because on re-watching I realised there just aren’t that many aliens in it. OK, OK, hold on, there are a lot of “potential” aliens but we don’t see them on screen very much and when we do it’s just for a jump cut or a flash. All the main alien action on screen features just the queen really. -
Alien3
My favourite because of the believable world they created and the sense of pacing and doom, backed up by the excellent music score. Great atmosphere throughout. Not made as a horror film as such which is its main failing I think.
BTW the correct term for the OP is Tetralogy.
I did not find the cast particularly likeable, that was a main failing for me. It was not bad movie though, and looked great. And the molten metal alien at the end, that was just stretching it too far.
More unbelievable is that they could crack through the spaceship to get at the juicy parts inside. I guess you could say they “smelled” food and made a beeline for it. But still…
I think the key word here is immersion, once that is lost people tend to start rationalising their dislike. People are far more tolerant of plot holes or inconsistancies in works they become engrossed in. For example, the much loved Raiders of the Lost Ark has plot holes deep enough to lose a u-boat in. I personally find the cat rescue in Alien more out-of-character and jarring than anything in Aliens, but I didn’t the first time I saw it as it had my full attention. Various posters have done a good job of explaining why the points you bring up aren’t really plot holes, and it’s good you are thinking about it and can recognise this.
I think Aliens is one of the best action films of the 80s. I loved it when I first saw it as a teenager, but it loses a lot of it’s impact on repeat viewings. Last time I watched it, it felt a bit flat.
Sylistically, there is a big jump from Alien to Aliens, and another from Aliens to Alien 3. I don’t think the latter is a great film, but I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s a partially successful attempt to replicate the atmosphere of the first, and is well made. I do wonder if part of the reason it gets such bad press is because it doesn’t meet Aliens fan’s expectations.
That’s how I see The Company. It’s influence is pervasive and de-humanizing, but the Alien universe isn’t some fascist state. There are some hints of this. When Ripley is rescued, the regretful comment is “there goes our salvage, guys”. Ripley’s license is revoked, but she isn’t convicted of anything, presumably because there is insufficient evidence. The military, not Burke, has authority over the operation. Most importantly, after he tries to dispose of her, Ripley’s expectation is that Burke can be brought to justice. Also, at the end of Alien 3, the final surviving prisoner is bandaged and taken away, rather than executed. The executives running The Company aren’t totally unaccountable, and the society they operate in hasn’t completely gone to the dogs.
True, but the box-set calls it a “quadrology”, probably because most people don’t know what a tetralogy is. I prefer the term “trilogy in four parts” myself.
I think that’s it exactly. My own view is that Alien3 is a better film than Aliens, which, to me, just seems like a big dumb 80s action movie.
People talk about Alien3 shitting all over Aliens, but from my perspective, it was James Cameron and Aliens shitting all over the original by taking what should have been a horror franchise and turning it into just another 80s-style militaristic action blockbuster (with explosions! and fireballs!).
I sort of assumed the government pretty much did what big corporations like Weyland-Yutani told them to. I mean, how many Marine Corps missions have had corporate observers along?
Then again Hicks had the authority and the ability to nuke the site from orbit which is odd considering he was just a corporal. Then again it seems really odd for such a large ship to carry such a small combat crew. You’d think they would have left a reserve fighting group in orbit just in case the unthinkable happened. You know, like having their transport destroyed or something.
I do not consider the setting so small that it can support only one type of movie. The reason people dislike how Alien3 treated Aliens has nothing to do with misguided notions of franchise purity - it’s because it undermines one of the key parts of that movie by negating the fact that Ripley didn’t just save herself, she also saved others.
I look forward to the Alien teen comedy!
(Re: Resurrection)
I’m a fan of this movie and prefer it to Alien 3. And I can’t even watch that part, it actually made me feel sorry for the alien. I have to just change the channel then.
Anyway, sorry for the hijack.
I think there were some obvious “military-industrial complex” style connections; Burke thought he could sell his aliens to the company’s bio-weapons division after all. Gorman probably spent his time in the service working closely with W-Y and would consult with Burke as much as practical but I don’t get the impression that he’d be any more on board with smuggling a xenomorph back. As others pointed out, Burke has no more real authority over the mission itself than Ripley did.
The ICC, from what I can tell, is a governing body made up of multiple conglomerates and terrestrial governments. I don’t see reason to believe they’d let the ship saunter back in without an issue – Ripley makes the point that they’d have to get past ICC quarantine and Burke is desperate enough to kill off the entire crew except Ripley & Newt to get past that quarantine so obviously you can’t just flash your W-Y card and get everyone to shut up. Even if (and I don’t believe this) Gorman was effectively a W-Y puppet, the ICC knew to expect a ship returning from a planet potentially inhabited by dangerous alien life because W-Y told them it was happening. That’s not the action of a company that wants to do stuff on the down low.
And that’s where it fell down. While it could have been a good picture it lost the audience (a great many of them, anecdotally from my circle) by taking the two secondary characters, characters that the audience has developed a strong bond with, and just disposed of them clumsily.
It’s like…
Here’s the story so far!
I don’t want to tell that story.
Fuck it, off the kid.
At that point I don’t see why the audience WOULDN’T turn off and decide ‘screw that guy, man’. It’s not well thought out. A surprise, it retrospect, from Fincher given how great his work has been over his career.
IMDB Ratings (notoriously weird, I know)
Alien 8.5
Aliens 8.5
Alien3 6.4
Alien Resurrection 6.2
There’s a definite disconnect following the second movie. I say that the third could have been just as good as the first two. The premise of Ripley finally sacrificing herself would have been good but the screenwriter and director gave away all the goodwill in the first five minutes. That was an enormous mistake in story that could have been resolved with two minutes of exposition.
You could look at it like that, but IMO, ALIENS expanded the idea and started building on ALIEN. We went from one xenomorph to an entire colony full of them. Introduction of the Queen. Exploring the world of the future a little by adding a whole new cast of characters like the Colonial Marines, a representative of the Weyland-Yutani company Burke, the heartless beuracracy in action when Ripley’s making her case, not to mention endearing characters like Newt, Bishop and Hicks actually surviving.
To me, ALIEN 3, in some ways, was a step backwards.
[ul]
[li]Instead of trying to raise the stakes from a colony of xenomorph to something BIGGER, we go back to just one xeno.[/li][li]Whereas ALIENS added to the idea of the xenomorphs like the notion of a hive, addition of a Queen, etc, nothing like that was done here.[/li][li]Instead of appearing strangely humanoid, and intelligent in the previous 2 films (hiding in the escape pod in the first one, “how could they could cut the power!!?” in the sequel) here the xeno is more animal like and simple.[/li][li]seemed too similar to the first one.[/li][li]We didn’t get to see more of the future world, we were stuck in a prison the whole time.[/li][/ul]