Quote from: kwisatz on Jul 03, 2023, 12:07:02 AMQuote from: Acid_Reign161 on Jul 02, 2023, 11:49:00 PMQuote from: Local Trouble on Jul 02, 2023, 10:19:31 PMWhat happened to ralfy? Did SiL finally vanquish him?
ralfy... ralfy...
three more times
I put them on ignore because they give the same wrong arguments each time. It's worse for Local Trouble, who has resorted to trolling, and I don't think he'll stop doing that.
In your case, if you post a new point about the issue that I can consider, then let me know. As far as I'm concerned, I've dealt with the topic considerably:
There's character contradiction when it comes to Ripley, who knows that the only evidence she has to prove her story is the location of the landing ship, but she raises it only after she's sentenced. She adds to that by not questioning van Leuwen's ridiculous excuse for not investigating the location.
Burke is obviously not working alone for multiple reasons: the company and government has a significant background in investigating and monetizing such findings, and the evidence is spread out in the dialogue of two movies; the claim that he wants all of the earnings from himself makes no sense as the government has full surface rights to the rock (and the company mining rights); resorting to authority of the author (Cameron says so) makes no sense because the two movies show otherwise, and doing so makes this thread pointless. That's basically it.
The point about Bishop looks intriguing: according to one manual, he's supposed to work for the Marines, but according to the movie, he gets his orders from Burke. If both company and government work together (one to monetize findings and the other to gain from development of those findings into weaponry and other tech), then that's probably not a contradiction.
I was going to say that he could have accomplished that had Burke not released the facehuggers, but I just remembered that he had to leave to align the antenna before that happened, so he never did. In which case, following the possibility that W-Y creates such synths to serve their (company and government) interests, as seen in Ash, then one wonders if there was something that he did off-camera to do so, even with behavioral inhibitors in place.
Some more points in light of that:
The whole mission makes no sense if you think about it in light of that singular goal, which is to retrieve alien organisms and technology. As Ripley points out, Burke would have never been to get them past quarantine, and as revealed in the movie, there are risks in trying to smuggle them by infecting human beings. In which case, what could he have done? Let's consider that and include the point that Ripley doesn't ignore the single piece of evidence mentioned earlier.
In this case, the board would have suspended the hearing given Ripley's insistence that she be considered innocent until proven guilty (i.e., her story might be true) and call for an investigation of the landing location. One can consider some internal struggle in her, as she realizes that that investigation would prove her story but would also allow the company and government to discover and monetize alien tech, but at the same time she's helpless because they would do so whether she insisted on it or not.
They mistakenly send a wildcatter because he's the only one available, and goes against protocol by entering the ship and becomes infected. Everything else seen in the movie follows except Ripley's sentencing, and she's now approached by Burke and Gorman, who asks for her help. Realizing that she's partly at fault, she agrees to accompany them, but insists on assurance that they will destroy the alien ship and all organisms, even though she knows that they won't. She figures that if she comes along, she might find a way to stop them.
In this case, we can figure out that Burke, Gorman, and Bishop know the real purpose of the mission, with Gorman given the instruction of rescuing survivors while letting Burke and Bishop work independently. From there, we can only imagine that Burke has a way to smuggle the aliens pass quarantine, but could no longer do so with Bishop leaving them to fix the antenna and all of them trapped. Given that, the rest of the movie follows, with Burke acting in desperation and trying to have Ripley and Newt infected, etc.
This leaves us with one more question: why the rush? The government has full surface rights, which means the alien ship belongs to them. They can only access it with the help of the company which operates the colony facilities, and only the same company can develop bioweapons, etc., from the tech, so both of them aren't competing with each other, and there's no other competition, except maybe from factions depicted in other works. And since the colony has never discovered the alien ship after two decades of operations, it's very likely they never would.
In which case, send several teams of techs and soldiers and secure the landing location, with the colony acting as a command base.
Now, that would be a very interesting compu--- I mean movie.