QuoteWell yeah. At it's core it's an idiot plot until you actually scratch the surface. Brett wandered off on his own to get the cat because he had no reason to suspect there was a "nine-foot-tall-monster" on board and neither did the audience.
We are just going to have to disagree about this one. It's like Thelma and Louise -- every place there was a choice to be made, the Nostromo crew made the wrong one. The first time they knew something was in the ship and they split apart? Morons.
How many people figured the sequel would start with a chest-burster coming out of the cat?
QuoteDallas going into the duct was out of necessity more than anything else - what other choice did they have?
Please. They could let it starve to death in there. When you live next to the graveyard and you hear a funny noise in the middle of the night and you go to investigate in your nightgown? At that point, I'm rooting for the monster. You should die, the gene-pool is better off without you.
[/quote]When Arnie and Danny Glover took on Predators - who won?[/quote]
That's because the greatest of all super-heroes is Plot Device Man. They won because the scriptwriter and director and producer said so. Man as the most dangerous game goes way back in fiction, and that's what the Predator series is about. They are more advanced, better armed, have more martial skills, and shiftsuits that make them invisible, and yet, Ahnahl manages, though sheer human tenacity, a bit of cleverness, and a lot of dumb luck, to triumph.
I love this trope, I use it all the time, and I'm not the only one. You think Tom Cruise could be captured by the Japanese and after less than a year, learn how to swing a samurai sword well enough to tag the local sensei?
The mixed-martial arts champ being taken out by the good-hearted kid using a good-old American haymaker?
Rocky Balboa -- pick a number ... ?
QuoteOf course Predators are more advanced - goes without saying. But to say Aliens are about as smart as dogs, boggles the mind frankly.
And I still say I haven't seen any proof otherwise. They breed, they feed. Anybody ever see them doing anything else?
QuoteBut it's so cliched and boring. Much more sinister to have these things evolve naturally. Maybe they did have natural predators (with a little p) at one point, but they outlasted them. Even Dan O'Bannon's original take that they evolve into intelligent cultured beings after satisfying their adolescent bloodlust is vastly more interesting, than tired old bio-engineered weapons story.
But when the idea was first broached, it wasn't a tired, old *movie* cliche. Remember this is all based on the movies, and *everything* they do is cliched compared to written genre material. Anybody here think that The Matrix was cutting edge when it came out? Go back to H.G. Wells in the 1890s ...
Generally by the time it shows up on the silver screen, it's been done to death in stories and novels, certainly in horror and science fiction and fantasy.
QuoteThat the Predators used the Aliens as training devices runs through the series. It is what it is, no help for that. I don't see it as demeaning at all.
QuoteI know you didn't come up with the concept, but to take this dangerous creature that is so difficult to kill and make it the plaything of some cowardly boogie men who get their botties spanked by Arnie and Danny - not buying it.
Cowardly boogie-men? A race that has FTL travel and lets the unarmed and pregnant ones live? And the only reason they lost to Ahnahl and Danny was because that was in the script ...