Bishop can carry the sentry guns 
I know others mentioned the sentry guns but my own mention of them wasn’t to imply that the CM would have them for this fight. Just saying that citing the Predator team’s traps doesn’t mean much because the CM (a) wouldn’t have been able to make traps to stop a couple hundred xenomorphs and (b) had a better solution anyway. I’m sure the other guys would have much preferred a couple sentry guns over making rabbit snares out of rope.
Whoa whoa whoa! First, we never get a good look at Ahnold’s pilots. (IIRC) That could’ve been Derek Zoolander on the stick. Second, and more importantly, NONE of the Marines acted cowardly. Gorman was out of his depth, initially, but he performed during the running firefight. Hicks as well, yeah he was a whiner during down-time but he kicked ass. It was he and Hudson that went into Medical to save Newt and Ripley. Burke wasn’t a Marine.
A pilot isn’t much use without a vehicle, and vehicles and nukes were specifically ruled out by the OP. And I have no clue how the pilot’s appearance was supposed to be relevant.
^^
Yeah, yeah. But still the squad’s potential was squandered by poor leadership and judgement. The predator group, most of them having enough star billing, can act and decide independently, so Mr Predator had a chance of getting knocked out as he took them on one by one.
Could you go on about this? I tried looking it up but found nothing related to that concept.
Sentry guns: I’m not sure whether or not to include them. I suppose they’re the future equivalent of claymores so I guess so.
It’s from a book called “The Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle. Short version is: At the outset of WW2, this guy Kauffmann was hanging out with an elite French unit. He noticed that they did things very differently from other armies, mostly in regard to their sense of brotherhood and camaraderie. He recognized that being a very tight-knit and motivated team allowed them to perform at a very high level.
So a little bit later, Kauffman is asked to train some sailors for high-risk underwater demolitions. Instead of trying to find individuals who are good at diving and demolitions, he instead creates a team-focused training program. (The ‘Machine’ in the author’s metaphor.) The goal is to emphasize shared hardship, cooperation, and a flat hierarchy. Kauffman’s teams go on to be the Navy SEALS. If SEALS have a super power that makes them better than other combatants, it is that they are super-cooperators who have been trained to function as a single entity (almost like a Borg hive mind.)
If you took a group of individuals and gave them similar training in tactics, techniques, and procedures, they would still fail to perform at the same level as the SEALS because of how much the SEALS are indoctrinated into a cooperative group mentality. Coyle’s argument is that Kauffman created a unique training program that multiplies the effectiveness of the sailors.
My observation is that the Predator squad comes much closer to Kauffman’s ideal than the Aliens platoon.
The marines also had far better comms, a distinct tactical advantage not yet mentioned. It’s easy to set up a scenario that favors either side, but in a fair fight, I’d favor the marines 6 times out of 10, maybe 7.
I’m not a soldier but in very rough country (i.e. Predator 1 setting) I doubt you’d have much chance to practice any of your squad or platoon drills. Ahnold’s group was intended for a single strike mission. Shoot each other to complete attrition, that’ll bring it down to pairs or individual action.
You’ve got Hudson and Hicks swapped here. Hudson was the guy who went from “tactical smart missiles, phased plasma pulse rifles, RPGs, we got sonic electronic ball breakers! We got nukes, we got knives, sharp sticks…” to “Game over, man! Game over!”; played by the late Bill Paxton.
Hicks (Michael Biehn) was the guy who was so cool he apparently made a habit out of falling asleep on the dropship.
Fair point. Rewatching the scene he appears to be to the right front of the APC when he gets splashed by the alien’s blood and torches the APC. I think he got delayed due to transitioning weapons, and laying down… well… fire. I’d always assumed he was in a ‘kill everything’ mode and wasn’t falling back quick enough, but now I’d have to say he was under heavy pressure as the rear guard and as you point out, got cut off.
It sounds like they have the same advantage over ordinary troops as humans do over other non-insect animals: Humans are also much better at cooperating than the animals they hunt or fight against.
Insects like ants & such cooperate but they lack adaptability. They’re similar to the cells that compose a body, the fungi in mold or the vegetation in a jungle.
The hive mind part reminds me of this:
Mac sees the Pred and shoots into the jungle. The others just join in without asking questions: “Mac’s shooting all he has into the jungle? He must have a good reason, I’m gonna shoot all I have into the jungle too.”
About the super-cooperation: If super-cooperation is the most important part, couldn’t training start with that to whittle down people who are not sufficiently cooperative? It also sounds like there could be units/specialties of people who are super-cooperators without being special forces or needing as much physical ability as special forces.
Some of the really nice scenes in Predator show that. While I can’t find a clip of it, the segment at 21M40 where the squad crawls on the ground to approach the camp is very nice. It comes right before this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpU8UyVOHas
In the linked segment, we see the squad stealthily approach the camp, detect & neutralize traps, silently take out sentries in a coordinated manner then, when there are no more enemies to take out silently, use what’s available to create as much damage and shock & awe as they can. The rest of the camp attack wasn’t directed by McTiernan and is the weakest part of the movie.
I don’t remember many movies showing that kind of action. Typically, action scenes are about busting down doors and shooting from the hip while saying something macho (and Predator does have plenty of that too) but you seldom see cautious, stealthy cooperative tactics. In that way, it’s a lot like the Bin Laden compound raid scene in Zero Dark Thirty. Are there other movies like that?
The squad’s action up to the big truck explosion reminds me of how lions might hunt. On the flip side, the second act resembles what it might have felt like for humans 20 000 years ago or our pre-human ancestors 10 000 000 years ago to have been hunted by a lion or tiger at night. We would have had as much difficulty seeing a lion at night as the squad did seeing the Predator by day. We would sometimes have caught clear sight of it (often too late) just like they do and its eyes would have sometimes shined much like the Predator.
The Predator group has an Indian that ain’t afraid of no man, a goddam sexual tyrannosaurus, and all of them of superior to regular infantry in one way or another. Tons of individual experience and a group mentality that works virtually seamlessly.
The Aliens group are all fine soldiers, but they just aren’t at the Predator group level. Yet. Survive this xeno-threat, and they would be closer to the caliber of P group.
The two groups may have fared better against each other’s opponents. P group hive mind vs the Queen and her bugs, and A group vs the predator. A group would have still lost, tho. Dutch got lucky, who would A group have that could take advantage of the opportunity with mud and low tech? But P group might have taken out the Queen. Untrained Ripley did (with a little help)
Note that Ripley was able to relatively waltz into the Queen’s lair only after the sentry guns had taken out three or four dozen (if not more) aliens trying to breach the vents. Switch teams and you have a whole lot of extra critters to deal with.
Pancho would’ve improvised something to bring down the number of critters (in my hypothetical movie plot), he was pretty handy.
Plus, he could speak fluent Alien!
Or was that Hawkins?
Yeah, Pancho had the grenade launcher. You got time to duck?
I can’t recall much of Hawkins besides the jokes. Weakest link?
The Preds have claymores/mines. Plus hand grenades which can be turned into Fallout-style explosive traps. That could have taken out many xenomorphs while doubling as tripwires.
Hawkins was indeed the weakest link. Probably why he got taken out first. Or maybe the Predator didn’t want to overhear anymore of his jokes.
The level of cooperation is to some degree built during the same process that weeds people out for lack of fortitude/strength/endurance/etc. SEAL training both eliminates people who aren’t at the extremes of human fitness and mental strength and also at the same time forges a unique bond among the men who complete it together. It’s quite elegant as it is and doesn’t really need to be broken up into its components as you suggest.
Huh, where’d you read this? I always thought that without the over the top action scene with excessive explosions and such the movie would’ve worked a lot better. To some degree that scene feels like it’s from a different movie.
Proof of Life and Tears of the Sun come to mind as having similar, more realistic action scenes of that sort.