Cessna posted:

I loved the movies - Alien, Aliens, hell, I even liked Alien 3.

That machinegun bugs me. The whole thing with a machinegun is that when you're getting shot at you drop prone, then return fire. You don't just stand there and shoot from the hip, and that whole rig looks like it would be really hard to use lying down.

One way I can rationalize this is to think that these Marines haven't been in a real war in decades, they've only been in "bug hunts" where they didn't have to deal with someone who shoots back.

SilvergunSuperman posted:

I'm not sure that's fair, they were handicapped with no live ammo at first, had a tactical doofus calling the shots, combined with poor intel.

Jonas Albrecht posted:

Drunken Baker posted:

The music in Prometheus was so bad and then in Covenant David is playing the theme song on his flute. lol

Covenant music was decent though from what I remember.

Xenomrph posted:

Somehow I totally missed this thread.

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:

They have ridden into Valhalla.

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:

The thing remake has some bad and obvious cgi, but also there is some I didn't notice at all (the autopsy scene, the thing internals are largely cgi).

I feel bad for probating someone for not liking fury road, going to probe myself as penance.
Still a great film

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Young Freud posted:

My puzzle for xenomorphs is that, if the facehugger is the sole method of reproduction, then there's a great deal of lifeforms that are basically immune to it, either due to size or the fact they have no lungs for the 'hugger to lay the embryo in. Like, how would a facehugger implant a chestburster into a gilled animal like a fish? Or how would a facehugger handle a whale or a dolphin, whose blowhole isn't anywhere near it's face*?

And speaking of xeno reproduction, we know that they can adapt using the DNA of their hosts becoming "the perfect organism", but could that mean hosts that would be suboptimal? Like a facehugger manages to impregnate a slug or worm, it would just end up as a limbless xenomorph. Or, lets say it runs into a mutant human that, thanks to haploid fuckery, never developed working legs (but got cyborg legs). Would that mean if this unfortunate mutant host produce an equally unfortunate legless xeno?

Also, I recall one of the comics mentioning someone surviving a chestburst but having a lung replacement, but, since there's some DNA stuff going on, would there be other changes for a survivor?

*yes, I know, it would attach via it's blowhole, but aquatic mammals can hold their breath for long periods, whales in particular. It's also not readily apparent it breathes through the blowhole, so I'm imagining some alien race of sentient, bipedal dolphins delighting in pranking facehuggers into impregnating their embryos directly into their stomachs, where they're digested normally. Also, the occasional 'hugger managing to get one implanted ends up producing an xenomorph with it's mouth on the back of it's head but it's sensory organs facing forward.

Xenomrph posted:

I participated in this exact discussion like 15 years ago and for the life of me I can't remember what number we mathed out.

Having said that, the newer "expanded universe" stuff from the past couple years through our calculations out the window - it turns out a lot (A LOT) of colonists actually escaped from Hadley's Hope via a cargo lifter and made it to the nearby moon LV-223 (aka, the planet from 'Prometheus' - that and LV-426 are both moons of the same gas supergiant).
Those colonists still had a real lovely day, but it's still like 30-50 colonists that weren't present at Hadley's Hope to turn into Aliens.

Xenomrph posted:

Okay hotshot, put your money where you mouth is.

Here's an adaptation of the old 'Aliens' tabletop game, where you get to play out the hatchery ambush where Gorman fucks up and gets everyone killed. Only this time, you know what's coming.

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408816

Good luck!

Durzel posted:

He definitely had a rabbit in the headlights moment, and I guess you could say that that's unacceptable for a CO. Apone couldn't hear him anyway so I'm not sure what good telling him the details of why they couldn't fire in there would do, and yes he should've pulled them out sooner. Besides that though I don't know why Gorman gets so much flak.

Not being military minded is freezing up in a battle the way he did enough to condemn someone? As shown they lost Apone immediately, and Hicks said "Marines we are leaving" so he took charge of things anyway. It wasn't like Gorman left them in there for an extended period of time, and he was just as unprepared for the threat and the severity of it as anyone on the ground.

Durzel posted:

Ok, what could he have done given how quickly poo poo went down? Drove in the same way Ripley did? He got cut off so couldn't give them orders anyway.

He definitely has some blame, but he isn't at fault for where the colonists were and the fragility of the structure. That seems to me to be something important enough to know about that ought to have come up in the mission briefing before they had even set down? Shouldn't Burke have chipped in this pretty important info before the mission had even started, or at the very least while the marines were heading in the direction of the heat exchangers when Apone et al were still reachable on comms?

I know, it's a movie, and Gorman needed to be shown to be incompetent (two actual combat drops) but *shrug* he lost control for about a minute while the squad were annihilated, which happened even though some of them used guns anyway, etc. The outcome was assured as soon as they ended up at the colonists location.

EDIT: Just re-watched the scene again, ok he was pretty useless for an extended period of time.

Tree Bucket posted:

Is "in the pipe, five by five" some kind of actual pilot jargon, or is it just techno-gibberish?

Owlbear Camus posted:

Since it was brought up one of my "favorite" parts of Aliens: CM is how they bring back Hicks from cryosleep and go on to set up that the guy who was impaled crash landing on Fiorina "Fury" 161 was actually some other dude who fell into his cryopod on accident like Phillip J. Fry. lol

Pennywise the Frown posted:

That's one thing that I hate about prequels. Their entire existence is to tell people how the original movie came to be instead of just letting it be as it is.

Pissed Ape Sexist posted:

Yeah, they wanted to make smart sci-fi but bit off more than they could chew. Annihilation (the book) was way more of an existential critique on someone's drive towards self-destruction and rebirth/redemption, and the 'monster' is brilliant and indescribable in a medium where its actions and environment can only be shown briefly. The movie tried to action it up with the shimmer and the bear and the exploding Ventress but it's basically unadaptable.

Action sci-fi is in a weird place though, totally. Movies from the 80s took the old 'what's trying to kill this person/people' theme and perfected all the answers so that everything else seems like a knock-off. Xenos are the perfect I'm-gonna-getcha-in-this-dark-hallway monster, Predators are the perfect intelligent silent stalker monster, the Thing is the perfect hidden-in-plain-sight monster, and the first two Terminators covered futuristic robots. What else can be explored that's not a reboot? Ghosts?

happyhippy posted:

That new World War Z game.
Imagine that but with Marines and Aliens.
why does this not exist already

A Strange Aeon posted:

I liked Annihilation quite a bit. The ending was deeply weird and unsettling, the creature's motivations unclear and alien. I didn't have any complaint about the special effects, either, the creatures they made were really cool.

I was sold on it as having a kind of Stalker premise, but it provides a lot more thrill/horror than that film.

I read the book after watching the movie and thought the movie was better, but it was very different so kind of hard to directly compare. But I'd recommend the movie over the book for sure.

my bat mitzvah ROCKED posted:

It’s okay and no where near awesome