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And for Cage, it was a step up from The Wickerman.
From what I read, he was trying to
It just seemed such an odd thing to do that it feels like there should be some lead-up to his sudden change in behaviour.
Yeah, I got that. It just felt like the movie also wanted the audience to agree with him, but I just didn't feel it. The damn thing was just a really dangerous animal at that point. Like a lion, as you say. It's kind of interesting looking back on that in light of the reputation the thing has gained over the last few decades.
Well, it makes killing the thing have a great deal of collateral damage, but at the end of the day it's still dead. And while nuking the site from orbit may be the only way to be sure, it's still a way to be sure. Given that the society in Alien had the technology to build androids of that caliber in the first place it seems reasonable to assume that they could build a killing machine on par with or better than the xenomorph. The only difference is that their machines wouldn't be able to replicate themselves out of the corpses of their opponents which, honestly, is kind of a plus, in case said killing machines ever accidentally decide that you are the opponent.
heh I've actually come to terms my my own perversions a long time ago
A lion isn't always trying to kill you. It may, or it may not. The point is, you understand a lion. You know how it behaves, generally speaking. You know how it breeds, what it eats. You know it needs to sleep and that it doesn't bleed acid. You've got familiarity.
But you know very little about this alien. And what you do know is so horrifying on the face of it, so bizarre and unlike most anything on Earth, there is simply no way to reconcile it's behavior. Does it want to eat you? It seems to want to murder you for the fuck of it at times, and in very unpleasant ways. Or maybe it wants to use you to make more of those eggs. Who knows? It's incredibly illusive (the movie implies as much). Plus, it just looks so damn terrifying. And you're alone, out in space, months away from the nearest safe harbor. No help is coming. You have no weapons. How do you defend yourself? For all intents and purposes, this thing is a goddamn monster.
Plus, understand, you're coming at this from an outside perspective, with all the knowledge that brings. You, yourself, are familiar with the concept of the xenomorph, and familiarity generally alleviates fear. Put yourself in the characters' shoes for a minute. I'm reasonably sure your logic wouldn't be quite so well honed, given the stress of situation.
I'll conclude by saying that the Alien deserves the reputation it has earned in our collective nightmares. It really is one of the most horrifying things imaginable, in my opinion, and easily one of the most memorable movie monsters ever.
That can be a defense to severely wound its prey up close, making the prey vulnerable to any other xenos running around. The collateral damage to the starship is enough that it can't be hurt to close to the hull otherwise they risk being temporarily or permanently stranded on a dangerous world only the corporation knows about. Which has to suck for the survivors. However, were this to occur in flight they'd be risking their own lives if the blood melts through the plating (and they can't repair it) so the xeno's defensive counter-measure didn't just leave it dead, it took the prey with it in the process.
True.
Agreed. My guess is they deliberately don't have those appear otherwise they risk making the xenomorphs irrelevant or less threatening in the setting. In the movies any way I don't know enough about the novels, comics or video-games.
Didn't the blood fall on the floor in the first movie? Probably eats through quicker when it's gravity assisted, compared to splattering on (roughly) vertical armor.
The post-credits sequence is rumored to be shooting tonight.
Wild Wild West anyone?
Or am I just remembering something completely different?
xbl - HowYouGetAnts
It's much more blackspaghettisploitation in concept.
Huh. I thought this was all taking place on some crazy plantation where slaves fight each other gladiator-style. I wasn't exactly on board with that, but...
This sounds so much more...unremarkable.
But hell. Tarantino can at least scare up a good cast and a good score. I'm sure I'll have entirely different criticisms once I've actually seen it.
In regards to the Alien self replicating, I don't think Ridley Scott or Giger ever established how the eggs were made. In the deleted scene
EDIT:
I haven't read all the comics, but from what I read we see the extent of the military technology save for mechs with big guns. Even with wary marines able to fire at will, the aliens always seem to have the upper hand in close quarters. All it takes is one, and there's a lot of them.
My original analogy, how about its akin to a pissed off liger on steroids.
This is the scene:
From wikipedia:
It's a predator hunting them in the ship. It's obviously terrifying, but there's little to indicate it's some sort of perfect being or anything like Ash is spouting off about.
It doesn't mean it's not horrifying or memorable, it just comes off as something that, if they weren't a small bunch of weaponless miners stuck on a tiny ship, they wouldn't have near as many issues with it.
The loneliness of the movie in general is what makes the Alien truly terrifying. You are all alone with this horrible thing in the black of space. It works really well.
In Alien, they try to cut the thing off the guy's face and a big spurt of the stuff falls on the ground and eats through 2-3 floors before it stops.
It's a perfect being the way a shark is a perfect being. Not as in "you literally can't kill this" but as in "this thing has evolved to focus on the sole task of murder and reproduction and it does those things exceptionally well". It's a parasite so adaptable it can reproduce in humans, dogs, giant aliens (from the original crashed ship); it can survive in the vacuum of space; and its smart enough to use its own acidic blood as a tool. Does an individual one go down to some bullets from a Space Marine rifle? Sure. But if you don't check their growth fast enough (like with a NUKE) they'll out-reproduce any rival species.
A shark will also die to a nuke, or a bullet, or a Roy Scheider. But I'm comfortable calling that a "perfect being".
I was probably going to see it anyway (I've been waiting for it for years), but that pretty much cliches it.
I seem to recall reading or seeing somewhere that the acid blood in the face hugger was orders of magnitude stronger then the blood in the normal alien drone. So, the tiny spurt from the face hugger in Alien was enough to eat through several layers of the ships hull in the space of minutes, but the splashback from the drone blood wasn't nearly as powerful, though in sufficient quantities and given enough time still able to eat through multiple floors.
Alternatively, the military command believed Ripley's story (or knew more about the aliens then they were saying) and gave the marines some acid neutralizing armor. Shouldn't be that hard to do, a few extra layers of a compressed base (extra strength baking soda?) or something. A little heavier then normal gear, but probably not all that noticeable compared to the hardware they already had, and certainly better then being eaten alive by acid. Considering the level of technology exhibited by Wayland/Yutani, it should only take a few hours to go from "You know, if she's right and we've got alien monsters that bleed super acid out there, maybe some acid resistant armor wouldn't be a bad thing..." to a full production run.
And smaller; less blood - more concentrated.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"