I know it's not
you making this case against Aliens about the creature being reduced to cannon fodder (I read and gave a like to your previous post on the matter) but I'll say anyway that I'm so bored of constantly seeing that attack against such a great film. Without fail, in any given Alien thread, people dump on Aliens for 'the bug thing' - and like as though it's the first time it's ever been said. Aliens is criticized more than Alien Resurrection, which is utterly ridiculous to me.
As long as a sequel engages me, and I can believe I'm watching the same world as the original movie with
- the same general aesthetic
- believable, well written human characters with believable dialogue
- believable action that doesn't go stupidly OTT as often is the case in sequels due to the 'escalation' requirement
- no complete 180 on tone, i.e what was intelligent horror shouldn't suddenly be comedy now etc
- no outright contradictions of previously established characters and lore
Then I'm good with it.
Nothing in the original film said that the creature was not killable (well....other than what Ash said
). There's even Parker's line that, due to the acid blood, you ''don't dare kill it'' and that was because they had just established that a few spurts of Facehugger blood ate through several decks of the spaceship, in space, that they were on. They would have tried shooting the Alien if they thought they could. They
did have some sort of gun (assuming my NECA spacesuit figures are accurate!) that was simply never fired in the movie due to these circumstances. And it was just a handgun. The marines in Aliens naturally had much more substantial firepower.
Aliens set up a scenario where big machine guns with armor-piercing rounds retained plausible lethality against biological organisms and yet the human characters still got almost completely massacred by these so-called bugs.
Another frequent attack on Aliens is the loss of the seeming 'sinister intelligence' of the creature. I would argue that the Queen herself took on this role in Cameron's film. And she was magnificent in design and execution, I would simply never be without her in film history.
Even the life-cycle need not be seen as contradicting the Director's Cut of the '79 movie. Perhaps an 'Alien' thing about these creatures is that they have multiple ways of reproducing with the Queen/Hive concept simply being the default once it really gets a foothold somewhere. However a single creature is able to produce eggs too when it knows it is alone. Perhaps the 'Big Chap' (stupid name but...) was even trying to produce a Queen on the Nostromo. Yes, not according to Ridley Scott at the time but in light of an excellent sequel that I'm not willing to discard from canon I can easily make this suggestion for myself.
