Need some help trying to work something out here while I was watching ALiens the other night. Anyway things we do know about LV-426 is that it was first discovered in Alien by the crew of Nostromo, we find the Derelict with alien eggs and a dead, fossilised different Alien. Nostromo leaves, Ripley destroys it and she left sleeping in stasis for the next 57 years. During that time 30 odd years go by and LV-426 is colonised and partially terraformed. The colony consisting of around 158 people live an okay life until 20 years later where contact with them is lost as at least one person (that us the viewers know of) has been impregnated with an alien embryo. Anyway by the time the Marines, along with Ripley arrive all but one of the colonists have been either killed or captured and cocooned for impregantion and we now have over a hundred adult sized Aliens. What I'm trying to figure out is how do the colonists all manage to get themselves captured so easily and in so quick a time, (I think maybe a span of a few weeks to a month I guess) so that the Aliens can build there numbers. Was each colonist taken one at a time by each newly devloped Alien or did the colonists do something stupid to get themselve caught short or something? Any thoughts?
I don't see how they did any better or worse than the Nostromo crew who was killed off in a couple days by one alien or the Colonial Marines who lasted a couple of days against a hundred or more aliens but with superior weaponry. They kept barricading themselves behind blast doors and debris until the aliens broke through, in which case the survivors from that defense who hadn't been captured for impregnation would fall back to another inner line of defenses which would get destroyed and so on and so forth until like the Marines they were trapped in a single area and the aliens swarmed them from above and below. Every time they killed an alien trying to penetrate their barriers they would inadvertently compromise the barrier itself by spraying acid everywhere.
The aliens reproduce really quickly and could easily overwhelm by pure numbers. Plus, the crew of the Nostromo were not highly trained soldiers, and neither were the colonists. And you saw what happened to the soldiers.
I meant that after the Nostromo leaves we then go through the movie and Ripley destroys the Nostromo, not the Planet. Sorry for the way I worded it.
Yeah but these were soldiers who'd lost most of their weapons and equiptment. If they'd retained the APC and their ammo the chances are that the marines could have wiped the floor with the aliens.
Although you have to admit all of them being sent straight into the rat's nest was a teensy tactical error.
Seems they have lost the concept of 'air strike' in the future. But then again a movie with the following plot line would not do too well: "after 2 days of airstrikes we have sent the soldiers in to see if theres anything left. There are little signs of life left. The soldiers took a few DNA samples from anything that looked like it once came from something alive. We are now on our way home." The end. I think it might have bombed at the box office.
Carpet bombing is usually not the best way to carry out a rescue mission. Once they knew the colonists were dead, an air strike--or rather, an orbital strike--was exactly what they planned to do. Marian
Carter Burke is amazing...really. That anyone could witness such a horror and still be thinking of the bottom line. Was Haliburton part of Weyland-Yutani?
^ There have been plenty of businesses that have profited by misery. Carter Burke - according to Cameron - was supposed to represent those businessmen from the 80s who would kill their best friends if it meant improving the bottom line.
The timeline makes sense to me. While Ripley is in stasis for 57 years, it is by chance that LV-426 gets colonized and they start terraforming. Everything is ok until Carter Burke sends the colonists to investigate the alien ship the Nostromo discovered. Non military personelle with only small arms won't last too long against a building xenomorph army. Man I am such a geek....
There does seem to be a timeline goof, though. IIRC, there's a visible date on a computer screen in Alien, with a year 2030-something. I want to say 2035, but it's been awhile. Anyway, add 57 and you get sometime in the 2090s. But in Aliens the message Carter sent to the colony is dated 6/12/79. And the dialogue in that scene only works if he sent the message after meeting Ripley. Marian
The weird thing is that LV-426 is only 1200 KM in diameter and yet they didn't find the Alien ship, nor did they pick up the warning transmission. I know someone will say "maybe it broke down" but what are the odds that the transmission which had been going on endlessly for millions of years would just happen to break down in the 60 years between Alien and Aliens?
It's more evident in the Special Edition, but if I remember this rightm Cameron supposed that in the intervening decades, tectonic activity and fresh lava flows had broken the ship in two (hence the big gash in the 'Newt's family scene') which opened the egg hold and killed the beacon. It would make sense for such a small and apparently dense (dense enough for 1G at least) planetoid, so close to a gas giant to be geologically active. One wonders though what the point of the colony was. Apparently the company thought there was some profit in setting up a breathable atmosphere on a barren rock. Must be for more than just strip mining since you can do that just fine in a vacuum.