Quote from: SiL on Dec 13, 2020, 01:28:08 AM
Quote from: Jigsaw85 on Dec 12, 2020, 05:00:38 PM
Aliens barely has any intriguing moments at all, because we know everything that's coming.
The investigation of the colony, both descents into the hive, the Aliens finding their way into the colony -- these all drew intrigue and apprehension from the audience.
It's not really intriguing when you know exactly what happened at the colony and what created the Hive. The Aliens did it all, and we know it.
QuoteThe movie makes us wait 1 hour and 15 minutes just to get to the aliens, something we've already experienced in Alien.
There is no cut of the film where this is accurate. If you go by the DC we see the facehugger significantly sooner; by the TC, the marines still discover the facehuggers earlier into the film. The adults appear around the same time in both movies in their theatrical cuts.
My special edition of the film shows the Aliens showing up nearly 1 hour and 15 minutes, right after the chestburster gets burned to death. And we've already seen both a living and dead facehugger in the first film. So nothing new or interesting there.
QuoteThe only intriguing moment in Aliens is when Ripley asks "who's laying these eggs?" and the answer is disappointing to some. The Queen ruins the cosmic horror element of Alien because now the unknowable space demon is now comparable to an ant.
The Alien was never meant to be an unknowable space demon. Insects were an inspiration from the first movie.
Being insect like doesn't mean it literally had to be a giant space ant. What about the fact that the Space Jockey was transporting eggs on a ship? Many people theorized for years whether the Aliens were created by the space jockey as a weapon of war or if they just gathered eggs from a planet. If people didn't view the Alien as a mysterious lovecraftian creature, than many wouldn't have been so upset with Ridley Scott for explaining their origins in Alien Covenant.
QuoteWith Alien, everybody thought Dallas was going to be the hero of the movie, but then he's killed halfway through. It gives the sense that nobody is safe and that anything can happen.
Not really. It's pretty clear in the film that Ripley is the lead of the ensemble. We experience the events more through her perspective than anyone else even before Dallas dies.
Ripley kind of just blended in with the rest of the crew for the first half of the movie. She didn't discover the ship, or the eggs, and she didn't try to save Kane. it wasn't until after Dallas died that she was being put into the spotlight.
QuoteRipley has a surrogate mother relationship with Newt; and the rules of conventional story telling says she has to save Newt and beat the queen, and of course, she does.
Conventional story telling says Ripley has to defeat the Alien in the first movie, and of course, she does.
Yeah, but at least she didn't have a big neon sign above her head that said "Badass Action Hero." while holding a giant machine gun and posing for the camera like she was an action figure. In Alien, she was scared and borderline helpless, she had nothing to fight for except her own life, and with a movie as bleak as Alien, it could have gone either way. The original ending actually had the alien kill Ripley, and given everything that happened throughout the movie, it would have worked just as well. Aliens went through all the trouble of establishing that Ripley lost one daughter and is now fighting to save the other, and considering how everything in Aliens had a far more crowd pleasing tone than Alien, a bleak ending just wouldn't have worked, hence why I felt no tension in the third act. Ripley has to save Newt, otherwise the movie wouldn't have worked.