Sigourney Weaver talks Alien 5... again...

More like Alien 65, whoo-ooooh.

 

I didn't remember those parts... but based on the reaction of the Marines, their overconfidence, disbelief, and poor reaction, clearly they never encountered anything as dangerous as the Xenomorphs.

Didn't the crew of the Nostromo express utter disbelief at encountering alien life?

 

It's a case of arrogance. The Marines have dealt with alien life-forms before and it's been no big deal. I guess you could equate it to members of animal control who have been dealing with Koalas all their life, and who have never heard of anything bigger, suddenly happening upon a pack of grizzly bears!

And if in a century of spaceflight humans have encountered nothing as remotely dangerous as the LV-426 alien, then Ripley's story about a seven-foot tall acid-for-blood killing-machine would simply be the the ravings of a lone survivor, with no evidence to back up her story, in what seems to the ICC to simply be a case of her coming up with some kind of outlandish bull to cover up for the fact that the crew screwed up and blew up the ship.

Even as some of Ripley's story appeared to be borne out by the evidence they found at the colony, Gorman still did not believe the aliens posed much of a threat to the Marines, ordering half of them to DISARM while still continuing their advance into the Atmosphere Processor!

The Nostromo crew didn't seem to be astonished at encountering alien life, they appeared if anything to just be pissed that they had to disturb their journey to go check things out.

 

Not particularly, no.

 

Yeah, they were more concerned with their bonus shares. The ship itself seemed to impress Kane and Ash, but other than that I don't recall anyone expressing any great surprise. They were all clearly out of their depth however.

"Xenomorph" is clearly an official designation some bureaucrat came up with based on Ripley's account (presumably after they lost contact with Hadley's Hope and actually started believing her.) At the very least, Apone had never heard the specific term before.

As for "bug hunt", it seems clear it just means chasing down some native wildlife or bronze age tech sentient that's been terrorising the colonists and damaging company property.

 

There was certainly arrogance. But neither anything at the level of koalas nor grizzlies make sense for a military response. If they expected animals, they'd send in animal control - hardly a military investment. They wouldn't send marine specialists unless they were indeed experienced in formidable resistance from other alien life. If they really wanted to trivialize the situation and didn't believe Ripley, they might also very well suspect some sort of pathogen is responsible for the loss of contact from a colony and send a medical crew along as well. They only sent marines, indicating they believed that in their experience Ripley's story might be true and that they need to go in force.

 

This is really blowing my perception of the Aliens Universe. I always thought of it as a dead universe with no other life in it.

OMG I just thought of something!

If Prometheus takes place in the same continuity as Predators movies... did the Engineers create the Predators too?!?!

 

Different continuity as far as I'm concerned. I'd be surprised if even Fox considered them to be connected.

 

Seems more likely that they created the Xenomorphs to wipe out the Predators.

 

^The way I look at it, the Aliens may exist in Predator universe, but the Predators don't exist in the Alien universe. Kind of a one-way crossover in my mind.

 

I have to disagree here. If this is true, then Newt survived on LV-426 for several years after the colony was attacked by the aliens, which obviously isn't the case.

I'd say that it's more a case of they can travel faster than light, but not fast enough to avoid a trip of a few weeks at least. And rather than have the crew awake and consuming resources during those weeks when there's actually nothing for them to do, they stick them in the freezers.

 

^According to James Cameron's script, the journey from Earth to LV-426 takes three weeks at most. So yeah, give that Zeta Reticuli is a good 37 light-years out, clearly the ship used FTL.

 

And we know from dialogue in Aliens that a rescue party can get to Acheron in 17 days.

 

It has been theorised in non-canon sources that as according to Einstein's Theory time slows down the closer you get to light speed, when you actually exceed the speed of light via hyperspace, time actually travels faster, so a trip of a week would appear inside the ship to be a couple of months. Hence the requirement for hypersleep and freeze-dried supplies.

 

I don't think you know what straw man means and more devastatingly, I don't think you know what QED means either. Hint: it doesn't mean 'implied'.

I agree with all of this. The random nature of inserting a hitherto meaningless bit of jargon into the briefing was always funny to me, especially since nobody had supposedly heard of the creature before and nobody had heard that random expression before, including Ripley. That so many people latched on to this is also funny.

I like the 'official name'. It sounds much more like the sort of thing zoologists would think up after the event. I think the transmission mystery might have been cleared up if another film is made after Prometheus but that was so poor, it seems unlikely.

 

Three weeks is still a fairly substantial journey. I mean imaging being stuck in a 747 for three weeks! I figure any trip longer than a few days and it's more efficient to put the crew into hypersleep. As I said before, until the ship arrives, they'll have nothing to do anyway besides consume resources and get cabin fever.

 

I think it's quite likely that the Marines are so used to dealing with hostile wildlife and maybe aboriginal species on various planets, that even in training they never heard the official designation for what an alien life-form is supposed to be called, so though Hicks and probably Apone knows what Gorman's talking about, Frost's "Excuse me sir, a what?" statement makes sense. Or, maybe Frost knows exactly what the phrase means, and is just taking the piss out of an obvious by-the-book officer.

The Nostromo mission is indeed a mystery. Why didn't Weyland-Yutani send a proper team? Were they unsure of what it was and didn't want to waste money on what could have been a fool's errand? Were they hoping to claim ignorance of the mission should things go wrong, just a bunch of yahoos screwing it up? Or, had they already sent a team who never returned, and decided to covertly divert another ship hoping to not draw too much attention?

It could even be that Acheron was at that time in another company's territory, and they were "poaching"!

 

Straw man argument: to quote out of context to misrepresent an opposing view or argument. I said the film contains a lot of violent sexual subtext and that the author intended to make the male audience uncomfortable, praying on subconscious fears of rape and childbirth. You decided to claim that what I actually said was that the director wouldn't have "women being raped all over the ship because they're women".

Quod Erat Demonstrandum: "what was to be demonstrated". Traditionally given at the end of a mathematical proof, but more colloquially at the conclusion of a logical argument. In this case the logical argument was that the scene implies a sexual assault, which I demonstrated. Since so far you've utterly neglected to even attempt to refute *any* of this and have instead resorted to attempting to change the subject, I can only conclude that you concede the point.

Are you done?

Pfft. Space Koalas are pushovers! It's the Arcturian drop bears you ought to watch out for. Vicious, stealthy little buggers!

I have a vague memory of the novelization mentioning something along the lines of it being the result of an over ambitious mid-level exec that saw an opportunity for advancement. After it went south, they buried it lest they be found responsible for the loss of the ship and it's payload.
So it was pretty much another Burke. Honestly I like that a whole lot better than the multi-generational corporate conspiracy. The short sighted greed of an individual seems much more realistic to me.

 

I don't think was a grand conspiracy either. Way I see it:-

ALIEN:

Weyland-Yutani Bioweapons Division decode the transmission and decide it is worth checking out, but they can't get funding for a mission. They decide screw-it and divert the Nostromo. When she vanishes, they bury the details of the mission.

In the intervening years, Weyland-Yutani decide that Acheron is a viable proposition for terraforming and colonise the place.

ALIENS:

Ripley is recovered and gives her story. No-one who could have know about the mission is still alive, and the records are gone so no-one believes her. Burke suspects there may be a grain of truth to what she claims, even if he doesn't believe all of it, so he contacts the colony to get them to check things out.

ALIEN 3:

The colony has gone dark, a status report from Sulaco is long overdue so Bishop II, the head of the Bioweapons Division, decides it may be worth checking out the story after all. Part-way tp Acheron, they intercept the message from Fury 161 and divert there.

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.......

 

The problem with Aliens is that it can't answer the question of why the colonists didn't immediately locate the derelict spacecraft, before they started terraforming. The Nostromo picked up the warning the derelict was broadcasting from deep space and zeroed right in on its location, even before they landed. Why didn't the colonists notice it first thing? The party that goes out to the derelict from the Nostromo isn't shown shutting off the beacon in Alien, and they don't even seem to have the opportunity, given that Kane was attacked. Indeed, for the robot subplot to make sense, some other ship had already picked up the signal even before the Nostromo was launched.