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

In Aliens, it was incompetent leadership by the green LT, who pressed to try to rescue the colonists under bad tactical circumstances, in close quarters under the fusion reactor where they couldn't use all their weapons. Never mind that it turned out that the colonists were unsavable anyway. Later on after the drop ship had been lost due to incompetence, treachery in the group only compounded their problems. You may as well ask, how wasn't the deck stacked against them?

My interpretation was that the Lieutenant was chosen by the company to hobble their chances by his stunning lack of leadership ability, though he was otherwise innocent. Does the extra footage have any bearing on that? Anybody agree/disagree there?

 

Oh I don't disagree. Gorman was very green. Whether or not he was put there because the company wanted it that way, or because nobody but Burke actually believed Ripley's story is open to interpretation.

Anyway, it's neither here nor there since the post I originally responded to was claiming that the Aliens couldn't possibly present a challenge without a Predator also being in the mix.

Clearly, they are not pushovers. Sure, in a stand-up fight, with adequate planning, equipment and an orbital thermonuclear strike, you could wipe out a hive. Hell, if you're fast enough and mind the backsplash you can kill a chestburster with a sledgehammer before it scuttles off. Kinda misses the point though.

As I said, these things aren't warriors, they're a bio-mechanoid pathogen. With a little ionising radiation or even some simple rubbing alcohol you can easily destroy a sample of even the nastiest virus of bacteria. Doesn't mean the ebola virus is simple to deal with once inside a host.

 

Oh, good idea.

Right.

 

Part of it is knowledge. Neither the marines in Aliens or the Auriga crew in Alien Res had full knowledge of what was going to happen. And remember the Auriga crew weren't trying to beat the aliens either. But I could easily develop a tactic to beat the aliens. I'm sure you could as well. Which is my point. If they just wanted to beat the aliens, it's not that hard.

But beating them without destroying the colony and while rescuing Newt, that's much harder.

 

Sure....not that hard....and yet the crew of the Auriga all died. Hell, they didn't even try to fight back, they just ran and *even then* nobody made it off alive. Keep in mind that they were all armed and outnumbered the Aliens two to one. Not that hard? Sure.

 

I think you are intentionally missing my point.

If you tell me, "Next week, I am going to have a xenomorph at such and such a location. I want you to destroy it," and I have the full resources of the military at my disposal, then I will be able to destroy it. Quite easily.

 

You need to examine the combat in the atmosphere processor:-

The first of the Marines taken out were Deitrich (flamethrower), Wiezbowski (flamethrower) and Apone (flamethrower). Frost was a lucky bonus (accidentally torched) but anyway was armed with a pistol, as was Crowe (exploding ammo bag), who would have been armed with an (empty) pulse-rifle.

That left Hudson (empty pulse-rifle), Hicks (shotgun), Drake (smartgun), Vasquez (smartgun). It does however indicate the intelligence of the aliens, as at this point the only weapons that had been fired were the incinerators, and those were the Marines they took out first.

So, the initial ambush had taken out over 50% of the platoon without a single alien warrior being killed. But despite being heavily outnumbered, they were able to fight their way out, losing only Drake in the fall-back. It's highly probable that after they torched the chest-burster, had Gorman ordered the pull-back the same time Ripley had suggested it, most if not all of the Marines would have made it.

By the time of the battle in operations, they have no flamethrowers, only a few grenades. We have Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez and Ripley armed with a pulse-rifle and about 40 rounds each (Hudson and Vasquez have even less than this as they took out the facehuggers in medlab), and Gorman with a pistol. In this case however, extra ammo wouldn't have made much of a difference, they were all still firing when Hudson was taken, but Vasquez and Gorman may have survived the retreat through the vents. Of course, had Gorman ordered the pull-back as suggested earlier in the Atmosphere Processor, there may have been at least twice as many Marines in operations as there were.

So in Aliens the deck was stacked against the Marines from the outset.

The United Systems Military in Resurrection are of course a bunch of incompetant boobs. They're breeding alien creatures with acid for blood and decide to do it on a space-ship? What, no secret asteroid bases anywhere?

The moment things go south, Perez orders an evacuation rather than a defence. Ironic, that Perez screwed up by ordering a retreat, but Gorman screwed up by not doing so!

Hell, they even allowed three of the mercs to sneak aboard with weapons! The chair thing I can understand, but not scanning the sleeves or checking the flask properly?

 

Yeah, because these things totally post their plans on facebook!

You're right though, I am just mostly having fun with this since it's a bit of an absurd discussion. These are fictional creature's who's actions and capabilities are determined by the demands of drama and suspense. So OF COURSE the marines are going to get wiped out. It'd be a rubbish story otherwise, which was sort of my original point regarding the previously described AvP scenario. It's contrived nonsense that seems aimed at the kind of minds that buy into the military might power fantasy.

Clearly such people weren't paying attention to Aliens since a major theme was a technologically superior military force trounced by a bunch of (seemingly) primitive aliens. Mostly due to hubris, but also being simply outmatched on the chosen battlefield. It's a bit hard to miss what with all the Vietnam war imagery designed into the Marine's hardware.

 

@Reverent - Yep definately an aspect people miss.

It's why Aliens games, especially featuring the Colonial Marines, are usually trash-talked.

"The Xenos are too easy to kill, it's not like the movie!" Well, yeah they are easy to kill, exactly like the movie. I mean, not like they were ever shown shrugging off shots was it? But if you want the full Aliens movie experience, never reload your pulse-rifle and see how that goes for you!

Everything in movies happens because the plot says so.

The original Battlestar Galactica ambush at the Peace Conference showed the Colonial Military to be a bunch of idiots. Yeah a thousand fighters headed towards the fleet, but no let's not go on alert as it may just be a mis-understanding. Totally insane, yet essential to the plot.

 

lol, that's what intelligence gathering is for!

 

Yup, infra-red imaging and that double agent facehugger shall reveal all!

 

No it was thier secret-agent infiltrator, 00-107...

 

^I doubt the company chose him at all. He's a Colonial Marine, not a company employee. Remember that it wasn't a company mission, Burke was just there as the Weyland-Yutani rep as they had co-financed the colony, presumably alongside alongside the United Americas government under the ECA.

I'd say it's more than likely that it was considered to be a routine mission to fix a down transmitter, with only an outside chance that a hostile organism may be involved. Hence the rookie Lt, only one squad and no back-up.

Despite impressions to the contrary, Weyland-Yutani did not rule the cosmos...they just had a sizeable investment in most of it.

 

You can analyze this from a world-building perspective, where it all has to make logical sense, or you can analyze it from a storytelling perspective. Most films are story-centric and not slavish to internal logical consistency. Things happen because it helps tell the story the filmmakers want to tell. Good stories do this without the plot feeling too contrived.

Gorman (at least at first) is the vehicle in which Ripley can ascend to Rambolina status. The scene where Gorman freezes up is one of my all-time favorite scenes in movies. How often have you seen characters do stupid stuff and shouted at the screen like a back-seat driver? Ripley, by virtue of her limited role, is expected to sit there and watch the marines get slaughtered, just as we are, as the audience. Instead, at that pivotal moment, she takes command of the APC and rescues the battered marines. It's a fist-pump moment. Because of her act of bravery, from that moment onward, the marines abanoned rank and started following her instead. I don't know if you'd call it a trope or not, but you can see shades of this concept of "unofficial" leadership taking initiative and winning loyalty via bravery in, let's say, Braveheart. I'm sure there are many other examples.

Ripley was a survivor in Alien, but she only became a superhero in Aliens. And that's the moment she made that key transition.

 

Yeah, in the first two movies, Weyland-Yutani were pretty much just another multinational company. Hell, according to Burke even Ash, a major cog in the big plan in Alien, was made by Hyperdyne, a different company.

Since then especially in the games, they've become this strange all-powerful company. This has even gone so far as to the fact that the Prometheus website in their pre-release publicity did a timeline which effectively stated that Weyland was responsible for the invention of absolutely everything in the Alien movies, including hyperdrive, hypersleep chambers, autodocs and synthetics.

 

Ripley's ascendancy to the de facto leadership role is helped along my Gorman being knocked out and incapacitated.

 

And something that endears Gorman to me is even when he was back on his feet, he didn't automatically attempt to re-assert his command. He had screwed up, and he knew it.

 

I think Ripley's decision was cold but it was taking a toll on her. I thought she looked pretty upset that she had to be an asshole in that situation and say no. Turns out she was right. If not for Ash the only member of the Nostromo to die would have been Kane.

 

Alien 3 is defiantly the point where Weyland-Yutani became this military-industrial shadow government of outer space. For one thing, I think logically they shouldn't have had a direct (and evidently exclusive) downlink from the Sulaco's flight recorder. In Aliens, the ship is meant to be a military transport, not some PMC ship.

In Aliens Burke tries to implant Newt and Ripley as a way to circumvent ICC quarantine, yet in 3 you have "real" Bishop with his own military ship complete with squad of mercs & science team apparently confident they can just grab a live specimen and do as they please.

Personally I put it down to the Alien 3 writers not having as firm a grip on the lore as Cameron and just going with the grossly simplistic "company = bad guys" set-up.
In the process missing the point of "the company" in the previous films where it's just an entity made up of people, some of them greedy and both willing and able to remotely cause death carnage. Not because they're evil or because there's this BS shadowy master plan to take over the universe. No, it's to increase profits and hopefully get themselves a nice fat bonus, maybe even a seat on the board with a cushy retirement package.

I'm sure whatever bureaucrat wrote "Special Order 937" went to his or her grave having no idea what happened to the Nostromo and not caring. Mostly just glad the insurance people never pinned the asset loss on them.

 

You're right, Alien 3 started the rot - the fact that Hadley's Hope was a Weyland-Yutani colony was a coincidence as it was, but I guess explainable as the company had in the past at least spent a bit of time studying LV-426. But then the nearest planet that the Sulaco lifeboat heads to is also a Weyland-Yutani prison planet?

And then, Weyland-Yutani are presented with having military assets, including a Conestoga-Class starship, and M41 pulse-rifles. Why would they have needed USCM involvement to investigate Hadley's at all?

Actually, it would have been better for it to have been another rival company in Alien 3 instead of W-Y.