Alien vs. Aliens

Aliens was a fun action movie but it was pretty bland besides that.

Alien was a much better film, with a much more likable cast.

But the real problem with Aliens, and why Alien is superior, is the alien itself/themselves.

I dislike how the Alien's intelligence and threat level is directly proportional to how many there are. A single Alien like in the first movie, or even like in *shudders* Aliens 3 is a force to be reckoned with and could easily outsmart the buffoons in Aliens who are about as 80s Action Hero as you can get. We're talking Arnold in Predator-levels of competence where he says "Knock knock!" after opening a door on an enemy in his raid on their camp.

Yet you have a bunch of them together and suddenly they adopt Zapp Brannigan's intelligence and strategy

Why did they just keep rushing the sentry guns until the sentry guns were out of bullets?

That single alien in Alien was a greater threat than the whole damn hive in Aliens.

edited 26th Jan '14 1:07:24 PM by Nikkolas

This sounds suspiciously like a complaint thread.

No more than any other thread where you compare and contrast two things, highlighting their flaws.

If you would like, I can talk about something I enjoyed in Aliens.

I enjoyed Ripley's interactions with Newt and Bishop. The whole "maternal instinct" theme of the movie was well-done and made me care more about her than I did in the first film. As for her and Bishop, naturally she'd have a bit of paranoia with regards to androids and I felt that was also handled well.

edited 26th Jan '14 1:50:54 PM by Nikkolas

Alien was a much better film, with a much more likable cast.

and why Alien is superior

See, you're already starting with a fixed position, and then basically asking readers to justify and expand on it, by coming down on a movie you don't like. You're working from an absolute statement, looking down on the quality of a work of fiction, which is a common trait of complain threads.

edited 26th Jan '14 2:04:53 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

Damn, I saw this thread title and thought it was an upcoming movie in the franchise.

I was like, "they're running out of ideas"

edited 26th Jan '14 2:06:44 PM by kalel94

Up next will be Humans vs. Humans, aka every war on Earth ever. Except the Great Emu War.

edited 26th Jan '14 2:20:10 PM by Tuckerscreator

Sad thing is, I'd probably go see a movie with a cast of nothing but xenomorphs.

Yeah. Cameron deviated from the original vision of the Xenomorph being this ultimate instrument of death and turned it into space bug cannon fodder for one-liner-spouting marines.

No, you see, the aliens are smart. One, on it's own, can't risk it's death and has to take a more cautious approach. But a hive, with a Queen spewing them out? They use Cannon Fodder tactics to deplete enemy defenses in preparation for an actual assault. The Aliens utterly destroy the Colonial Marines, even with the Marine's superior technology and ranged weaponry. They even take out their method of retreat.

Predator. Yeah, Alien had a more original plot, monster and setting but the 2 Predator movies are better because they were just trying to be awesome, not scary. I watched alien alone in the dark on my first go and it really did not do it. My dad told me about various scenes after the fact about where people started leaving the movie theater so maybe it is a generation thing? Maybe I would have had to have seen it in the theater to really get freaked out? Maybe War Hammer 40 K, Halo, Starcraft and Star Trek: Voyager dulled my senses?

Anyway, Alien's threat level was overstated. The first one took out a bunch of civilians who could not get a good shot on it because they feared for their ship's hull and was actively being helped by an Android. The multiple Aliens were up against multiple battle hardened marines (except for Game-Over Man) with motion detectors who did not care what their acid blood melted and furthermore had a report from someone who had already encountered them rather than being up against the unknown (they still were, but to a much lesser extent. The fact they touched down expecting to be attacked already gave them an advantage)

Now, Alien's problem though? Uh, milk is terribly unconvincing as far as hydrological fluid goes. Unless they were just trying to make the lactose intolerant viewers get nauseous (you succeeded then) and I could have done without Ripley in underwear (and know that I hold this film responsible for that trope's prevalence). Alien's problems? That Ripley, who just learned how to shoot a gun and can hardly do so, can rush into an alien nest and ruin them where platoons of heavily armed, well conditioned, trained and experienced marines died! She should have been swarmed by drones and finished off. Oh, and it gave us that trope.

So yes, Aliens is worse than Alien, but not because of the depiction of the monster. Both are good movies though and I would recommend them to anyone who has not seen them yet. The monster design is very creative, as are the effects and they are generally well plotted, besides the ending of Aliens where the plot started to break down. The whole franchise kind of broke down really (it resulted to ripping off its own ripoff) and took Predator with it. Predator's, now that was some badass decay. Stronger versions of the monster that killed warriors on their own turf by the dozens, by the trainloads, by itself somehow can't beat losers in an unfamiliar environment while it has the numerical advantage? Stronger versions of the monster that shrugged off bullets and got back up after taking multiple point blank shotgun blasts can be killed by a sword?

Hmm, the Queen being there is a good point. The lone Alien in the first film maybe had to...adapt in order to fend for itself, I guess. The aliens in the second film had a hive mind to latch onto, and they couldn't think independently and thus were less effective independently than a single alien on its own who has no hive mind and has to work entirely by itself. The real question, for me, is how can the aliens in Aliens struggle against the marines when they allegedly took out an entire colony; they know how to deal with humans, so why do they struggle to deal with a few armed ones - arms that I'm assuming they've seen before, no less. The original alien had no idea what it was dealing with and managed to be a bigger threat than a hive that should've had time to adapt to human threats by the time Ripley and co. got there.

All in all, I prefer Alien because it has less of a Humans Are the Real Monsters feel to it, and is more empowering than degrading about humans as an interstellar species.

Because the humans in Alien had no idea what they were dealing with either, nor did the ground colony the aliens initially attacked. The marines had a general idea and went in expecting a fight.

Please don't try to pass off the marines in Aliens as anything more than the forefathers of the guys in the movie version of Starship Troopers. They were every bad Hollywood cliche of "soldiers" ever and were not realistic or competent. Most of them die in the initial attack and as you noted, Ripley displays more competence than all of them.

The crew of The Nostromo have an excuse. Even then, the alien is an amazing killing machine that surpasses human beings in probably every area save for maybe intelligence. The hroes did remarkably well considering.

Alien doesn't really scare me either save for the Chestbuster but I don't like it because of the horror. I like it because of the nuance. There's so much meaning in the design of the alien and every one of its actions. The whole symbolic rape element for example. Or how about Ripley who was originally a unisex character in the script. She stands out as a great female protagonist because her gender is of no consequence.

Alien is one of those movies you can study and analyze a lot deeper into and I never used to appreciate that.

edited 26th Jan '14 5:58:46 PM by Nikkolas

I like both though if you forced me to choose, yeah I think Alien is the better of the two.

Well, I prefer Aliens. They show intelligence in both, it's just that in the first one, they couldn't spare manpower for more risky tactics, in the second, they could. The Colonial Marines do a great job, by they're being actively hampered and were definitely not given the correct loadout for the job (i.e. Oh Christ, why did you bring a shotgun?)

Predators was very good in my opinion. I don't think the original Predator shook off multiple bullet wound, I think most shots missed. Hence, "If it bleeds, we can kill it." They aren't immortal.

"Is Alien better than Aliens?" is the same kind of question as "Is Nightmare on Elm Street better than Platoon?"

While I'll watch either if I come across them on TV, I'm more likely to choose to watch Aliens.

Also, I prefer the original version rather than the extended edition. In Aliens, the aliens are just as sneaky as the one on the Nostromo; they hide in the walls and ambush the Marines, outthink and outflank them by moving through the ceiling and floor voids and infiltrate their only way off the planet. The only real "cannon fodder" scene is the bit with the sentry guns, so I prefer not to count that. :)

Yeah, the marines in Aliens get slaughtered a lot more than the aliens themselves do. Ripley's the token sane person that has to clean up their mess.

I prefer Cameron's vision of xenomorph hell to that of Scott's. The title of the film is Alien. Not Generic Multi Racial Space Crew Number #113000, therefore I didn't really see the point of hiding the creature that you paid money to go and see (well, I didn't - I was nine or something when the film was released but you get my point) until the end and it strikes me as a rather odd thing to do.

At that time, a blue-collar space crew was not that generic. The fact the cast were all three-dimensional, believable humans just like us was a big reason why I prefer Alien.

edited 28th Jan '14 8:54:05 AM by Nikkolas

The original predator was not slowed down my a direct hit from a minigun. So what if it bled because of that? It had an explosive go off right in front of it and did collapse from blindness, ringing ears or internal shock of it. There is no way you are going to beat something like that with a sword, much less a (supposedly) stronger version of it.

The alien, by contrast, was shown to punctured fairly easy early on, it was the fact it bled acid strong enough to melt through the ship's hull that kept anyone from just shooting it with a pulse rifle. That and the fact it did a good job of evading them, which is harder to do when your foes have motion detection devices and don't care about how much of your blood they spill. (and we'd hear no end of it, I'm sure, if someone managed to shed that acid blood with a sword, because it would still be stupid)

Who killed a Predator with a sword? Was that in Predators?

The Pred is ridiculously durable. Just look at all the shit the "City Hunter" takes in 2. Even horribly wounded and with one arm, he's only defeated by one of his own weapons.

In some ways, Alien is a victim of its own success. The working-class look of the whole thing was pretty unique - the crew of assorted truck drivers and the whole grubby look of the Nostromo was pretty ground-breaking in SF. Then you've got the cast. I don't think anyone would have seriously believed, looking at the cast, that Sigourney Weaver would be the hero(ine).

Yeah, Dallas seemed to be pretty clear Hero material. I liked him too.

Sadly it seems a lot of people felt the cast was -too- average and that only Ripley really stood out. Well, maybe Parker.

I consider the original Alien to be a masterpiece of film and the horror genre. Aliens is one of the best action films of all time. Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection were pretty good movies, with their own flaws. I was never really able to get into the three Predator movies, the first Alien Versus Predator movie was okay, a bit mediocre. Alien Versus Predtor: Requiem was. Um. I want to be able to say something nice but I'm having difficulty. Like, the idea of the Predalien being a young Queen was cool I guess?

Prometheus is better than a lot of movies Ridley Scott has done in a while. Not as good as Alien though. But it had executive meddling, what with the studio wanting the Xenomorph to not be in it for some reason and to remove as much of it as possible. So they brought in Damon, who I guess did the best he could. Same problem Alien Resurrection had sorta. The director wanted to make a dark comedy with horror elements, but the studio wanted more action. The result was deeply schizoid. Pretty good action bits, pretty good horror bits, pretty good comedy bits but none of it really ties together.

Some pretty good Alien and Predator video games I liked though. Like Alien Trilogy and Alien Resurrection for the Playstation, Aliens Versus Predator and Aliens Versus Predator 2 for the PC in the early 2000s, Aliens Infestation...

edited 4th Mar '14 8:32:32 AM by unnoun

I think Alien and Aliens are both roughly equal, but they're good for different reasons.

Alien is a suspenseful sci-fi horror film- think Night Of The Blood Beast if it had been written by Alfred Hitchcock. Aliens is more of an action-horror affair, echoing Vietnam War films like Platoon, essentially the Unbuilt Trope of the whole SPEHSS MEHREENS thing.