The company might not be moustache-twirlingly evil, but they're definitely amoral to the point of being outright dangerous. Burke isn't a lone actor - he goes out of his way to say that despite working for the Company, "he really is an okay guy", implying that the Company (or at least, the public's perception of it) is full of scumbags but he's not one of those "bad" ones. Burke does his own thing in 'Aliens', but not because he's a bad apple amongst an otherwise okay company, but because he wants to be the one who does it
first. If he hadn't done what he did, someone else absolutely would have. Burke shows his uncaring and unremorseful nature towards the colonists he doomed because it would make him (and Ripley) big money "if they play their cards right". That's not actively going out of your way to hurt people like some kind of supervillain, but it's the next best thing.
Quote from: SiL on Oct 15, 2022, 07:34:35 PMEven Alien 3 doesn't solidify any sort of overarching Evil Company scheme. They want to f**k around and find out about the Alien, sure. But they aren't abjectly evil in going about it. The only person they kill violently assaults one of them with an improvised weapon first; they escort the survivor out.
To be fair, they kneecap said survivor without a second thought for following Ripley's instructions.
Quote from: OpenMaw on Oct 16, 2022, 03:08:12 PMGranted, but that doesn't follow that there was someone back home that made a specific call on that. S.O. can just as easily be a protocol that is called up. Just like the clauses Ash quotes to Parker, just as Ash was transferred to the ship, just as the S.O. if it's all just part of an automated, uncaring, computerized network there's no need for a nefarious suit back home. All the pieces are put into a place by a corporate entity (as in the social organism) to CYA in any circumstances. We have things in place to make calls on these eventualities should they arise and we need not worry.
The Nostromo was intentionally sent to a specific set of coordinates with the Special Order in place referencing a sequence of events that would play out if they went to those coordinates, with a synthetic sleeper agent onboard who was added to the crew at the last minute (and hid all of this from the crew), it was pretty deliberate.
Like 'Aliens', the Nostromo was an example of someone at the Company wanting to Get There First, before someone else did the same thing. That's why they hastily threw Ash on a civilian ship at the last minute and sent it to a set of coordinates, because it was convenient. As opposed to, say, sending a properly equipped science vessel. They didn't know what they'd find, they didn't care if it was dangerous, they didn't care what happened to the crew they sent.
Does the EU take it too far? Yes. Is the company still evil? Yes.