ALIEN RESURRECTION:
On the off-chance that they'll invent effective cloning technology, they keep DNA samples of Ripley on ice for a few centuries, just in case..... errrrr.......
Well, considering she and the alien fell into a giant pit of fire in Alien 3, they probably just tried to salvage whatever DNA they could find. It was all jumbled together, which is why there were so many hybrid clones in all those tubes. It probably wasn't until Alien Resurrection that they were effectively able to isolate the Xenomorph DNA.
Pretty sure they say the DNA was taken from blood samples found on Fury-161, presumably drawn by Charles Dance's character who's name escapes me. One assumes the company tried to make use of it to little effect (so far as we know.)
After the company went under, I just assumed that the samples were forgotten about in some cold storage facility for centuries until someone rediscovered them, leading to what we saw.
I find it interesting that in an odd way, Prometheus actually validates the idea of a human-alien cross. Or at least given the technology we saw with the black goo, it makes a lot more sense that the genetic crossing can be a two way thing.
Indeed it seems to indicate that the larval aliens aren't entirely parasitic if they're leaving something of themselves in the host's bloodstream.
Maybe it's a marker of some sort--something akin to a pheromone perhaps--that genetically labels a host so other aliens won't attack, as we saw in Alien 3?
You know, I honestly don't remember the last time I saw the theatrical cut. Ever since the SE came out, it just seems a little redundant.
Funnily enough the last time I saw Aliens it was the theatrical cut and I actually enjoyed it better than the last time I saw the SE. It's better paced and really works just as well without all the additional scenes. You don’t need to see all the stuff with Newt’s parents to have any understanding of what happens later, you don’t need to know about Ripley’s daughter in order to root for her in saving Newt, if anything I think it dents Ripley’s character because it’s really not Newt she’s interested in saving it’s Newt as a proxy for her daughter. it’s funny but Hudson’s sharp sticks speech feels off kilter, and whilst the sentry guns are kinda cool, the scene becomes a little boring, and makes the Aliens look stupid because they just keep running at the guns. (I appreciate there’s an argument that they’re doing this to wear the ammo supplies down but this doesn’t make a lot of sense, they can’t know how well supplied the marines are, and the Aliens are finite in number, there can only be, what 157 of them max?)
Prior to this last viewing of Aliens I’d decided my order and was pretty clear about it: Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, AVP, Resurrection, AVPR (this was before Prometheus) but having watched the theatrical version of Aliens again I’d put it back at the head of the list again.
Oh I agree, the theatrical cut works fine and as I said, Cameron is very good at editing his films down. That said, while the film certainly didn't *need* all that extra stuff, I felt it did improve things without feeling like padding. YMMV of course.
One final point from me on the whole Lambert issue. Alien is a film about rape and sex, but to my mind everything that happens in it that could be considered sexual is oblique and creepy and unnatural and in this context the Alien raping Lambert seems a little obvious and, sorry, no better way of putting this, vanilla compared to everything else that’s in the film. So it may have been Scott’s intention, it may not, but it’s not how I choose to interpret that scene.
That's your choice of course. Interpretation is in and of itself a subjective thing, I was merely arguing that the implication was there, that it was deliberate and that it was in keeping with a running theme which, as you say ran through the whole film.
The way I look at it though is that there are certain degrees of interpretation. Was Deckard a replicant? Possibly. Even probably...but maybe not. Did Travis really kill Old Yeller? Almost certainly...but we don't know for sure because we didn't see it. Was Lambert raped? ...well the thing apparently removed her clothes and took long enough finishing her off for her to make those blood curdling, panicked noises over the intercom for almost the entire time it took Ripley to run across the ship.
Whether there was a rape or not isn't for certain, but we do know for a fact that it left her at least half naked. *Something* weird happened there that it didn't do with any of the other victims.
