Re: Of the 4 Alien films, what's your fave one and why?

On Wed, 3 Dec 2003 11:46:06 -0800, "Tweek" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>:      Yeah, number two is the fanboy favorite, but is pretty thin, has
>: some achingly bad points, and only works by placing contrived
>: restrictions into the plot to limit the abilities of the humans.
>
>Can you give some examples of these contrivances?

Since I haven't watched it in years, my complete memory of it all is
sktetchy, but two that leap most quickly to  mind is 'nope, can't use
grenades (or whatever they were) 'cause they're right next to the
reactor*' and 'gee, we've been splattered with acidic blood**, got to
take off all our armor***.'  There may be other things that rankled me
more at the time, but these are the two that have stuck with me.

These may be incorrect on some details, but they are in that
vein--things thrown in to take away simple advantages that a prepared
assault force would have.  This is the same thing that haunted
house/horror movies suffer from--they require unlikely co-incidence or
stupid behavior to tie the characters' hands, to take away obvious
options to keep things going.  A reasonably prepared 

(*Leaving them with nothing more than machine guns and flame throwers.
1980s level technology.)
 
(**The acidic blood thing is patently silly, showing this stuff as
powerful as it is, many orders of magnitude above stomach acid,
burning through floors, ceilings, steel, etc., almost unimpeded.)

(***Not that it was much more than a football player wears.  I really
lost any interest in Aliens, when I wondered "How would Heinlein's
mobile infantry (something much more in line with the technological
civilization depicted in the movie) do against the Aliens?" That would
be no contest.

Ironically, the finish of the movie employs something that in some
ways is similar to the MI suits.)

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