Kathleen "ET, Indiana Jones, Gremlins, Back to the Future, Goonies, Schindlers List, Jurassic Park, Benjamin Button" Kennedy looks "slimy"?

Hey, hey, I am a movie-business analphabet, so I really have no idea who she is I thought she was someone who had been there for some shorter time. But since I already said that once, and as far as the impression goes, I really have to say that she "looks slimy", nothing can change that, I guess But yeah then, if this list follows her, then that's a lot more positive then I thought.

Also, I must say, after thinking about the movies now and hearing who's supposed to direct it (I don't remember the name; like I said, I'm a movie-people analphabet unless it comes to Aliens or some important Star Wars screenwriters/directors/actors/music/somesuch, but I know that he's the one who directed Stardust and that for me is exactly the proper "fairytale for adults"-style), and hearing they don't want to make some ripoff but "original story", and hearing that they want to make the old (in all senses of the word) actors return, I think it might be good. Looking forward to it actually.

Lovely 

And you just made me feel like rereading the story... gaaah...

Definately a surprise.  But if any future films turn out to be crap - I like the six existing films.

That's basically my attitude. And since I am being pessimistic in regards to this, I'm basically now thinking that I might just crawl into my corner with the original films and stay there. But who knows. It all depends on the writers they get. I only seriously hope they aren't going to make it a Pocahontas cover. As one of my friends put it, "I wonder who is going to sing in these." Although it has to be said that one of the important parts of the original Star Wars (and one thing the new trilogy slightly suppressed) is that they are a "fairytale". So I guess that's what Lucas referred to when he mentioned that Disney is "in a way a perfect choice".

Though I would not say Lucas looks particularly happy in either of the pictures or interviews. And I saw the interview where they had announced it, and he looks sort of resigned and the woman who runs Lucasfilms looks slimy. And everything looks like some disgusting capitalistic machinations (insert a Burke smiley). But yeah, whatever. As long as they get decent writers...

In my opinion, still the best expansion of the original SW (Trilogy, and with some reservations the three new movies as well) were Timothy Zahn's books and Knights of the Old Republic.

Xenomorph is fine, but using "Xeno" is like Harry Knowles' interview on the Reservoir Dogs Blu-Ray where he calls the movie fucking "Rez Dogs." It makes me want to punch a baby.

I am actually with Hudson on this (even though I would phrase it differently, but I believe the idea behind it is the same  ). "Xenos" is a Marine-developed derogatory term used for the noble species which deserves far more respect (also see sig ) and is basically the same as "bug" which, well, bugs me equally (pun this time fully intended). And of course, it has no (and somebody correct me if I am tremendously and embarassingly mistaken) basis in the movie canon. (Basically you could also say it the way that I dislike the way Marines "play tough" and call the Aliens names while by right they should refer to them as "these things" with terror in their voices, as something alien, unknown and unpredictable).

The 'xeno' thing doesn't really bug me (no pun intended), but what does disappoint me is the need to create classes of alien. 'Warrior,' 'Lurker,' 'Spitter,' etc.  I wish we could have a game where they were just 'aliens' like they were in the films.

I get why they do it: each class has varying strengths and abilities to help mix up the game play and keep things fresh so games don't spiral down into more of the same with each play.  But the end result will be people applying the classes to the aliens in the films. ...Kind of like how we had 'Runner' applied to the beastie in ALIEN3 because of a game.

I don't think this would actually be the issue. The main reason being that you do not have any clear equivalent of "lurker" or "spitter" in the movies - not in the way those things look (I mean, you have a spitting alien in Resurrection, but he has no bowls of liquid attached to his head). What I'm afraid of is rather that if the game actually is successful (which would be of course overall positive), those names will stick in the future Alien canon. Maybe.

Yep. The need for stronger/more powerful or advanced classes of the things completely cheapens the original design and makes it seem boring and obsolete. 

While I agree with that I really don't need to see rhino-aliens or whatever, I think this is mixing up two different things together. Making specialised classes for this mode of game is fine, in my opinion, it is even good - to have one alien type which is fast but weak, other which is strong but slow, etc, typical and absolutely normal - why not. They are still aliens. Even spitting acid is fine with me as a special ability of one kind - it does not "disturb believability" for me. What I find a bit unnecessary is why they have to look so differently. Maybe it's for gameplay reasons, for balance - every Alien can see that this Marine is holding a smartgun and that one just a pistol, but they probably needed Marines to be able to say in the same way "hey, watch out, that one spits".

Even though I would immediately downplay this argument with the fact that you are not supposed to have time to observe the Aliens and count their legs or other interesting things! They are supposed to jump at you from the shadows, and you should just fire really fast or die! (And that's still the better case.)

Personally, I have no problem with slight variants in the look - I think the AVP 2010 game did it well, there were a couple of these skins, which were all basically the "classic" types of Aliens. So why not to have the option to choose first your "class" (lurker, spitter, whatever) and then your look (which does not need to have some funny things on its head).

I prefer to think that the black goo, and perhaps all of the Engineers' apparently biology-inspired technology, derives from the aliens.

That's quite an interesting proposal. I like the idea. (Not sure if I'd stick with it myself, but interesting it is for sure.)

Speaking of Aliens vs Predator vs Prometheus... so if I dare to propose that heretical thought... now, stay the rotten tomatoes, will you... it's a brain exercise...

People have done some job tying the Alien, Predator and AvP franchises together into a coherently explainable universe, but what if we throw Prometheus into the mix? I mean, seriously. What of "Engineers vs Predators"? Like, you have Engineers creating/modifying life on Earth... and you have Predators later coming and playing with it? I remember all the fanfictions from ages long long past, before all the AvP stuff, envisioning the Galaxy-wide conflicts between "Yautja" and the "Space Jockeys" who had developed the Aliens as a biological weapon against the much more violent and military-advanced race of the Predators... Are those romantic dreams still possible with the current movies? Anyway, how would you tie together a universe featuring not only humans and Engineers, their creators, but also another violent race - and Aliens in the mix just so that it isn't so simple? I'd be curious to hear how different people may envision this.

Mental exercise, really.

Yeah, it's one of the other moons of the same gas giant. The LV 426 derelict was already ancient during the events of Prometheus. It appears to be an older model ship, too. Like comparing a 19th Century steamer to the USS Nimitz.

Wait, what? Do you mean to say that LV-233 and LV-426 are two moons orbiting the same planet? Like that the big ringed thing in the sky of one is the same as that in the other? Where did that idea come from? Or is it just your own personal interpretation of "putting the canon together"? (It would be quite weird, however, in such a case for the crew of Nostromo and for the colonists in Aliens to colonize and terraform LV-426 if there was a much more habitable planet just next door, swarming with Derelicts on top of everything...) Or did I completely misunderstand you?

Fuck that, this is way better than what we got. What we got was 'zombie'.

Totally agreed. This one is cool! That other one was just random big zombie...

[AvP]

Yeah, I felt the same way. Couldn't stand it in AvP. But what the fuck is it with this game trying to be CoD: AvP? Triple kill? Seriously. It's an Aliens game, not Black Ops team deathmatch... I don't know, seems totally out of place.

I hope one would be at least able to turn it off...

I think the best is the opening line, which explains that "Xenomorph... is a sort of a... humanoid..." Contradictio in adjecto.

Yes, I know many people have been disappointed/angry/whatever after seeing those white bald clones of Lord Voldemort. I did not mind (though maybe it was a bit... well, let's not get nitpicky). As for what you say, yes, you can take it the way that it goes with those (some very old) Giger paintings, and that is actually something really nice. Personally, the main point of Prometheus for me - the best thing about it - was that you had very many "ancient Giger" things appearing there (the "silo", all the weird things being born in the place).

Though, speaking of the one you are showing, I always took it for a stylized depiction of a human. But I think that's open to the viewer's interpretation.

[Hieronymus]

I think I would second Hieronymus' points (even though I personally refuse to use AVPR as reference at all but it apparently does provide some good "model situation", even if we look away from the particularities and just imagine a similar scenario), and maybe add only a couple of notes.

Regarding Newt's survival, there is also the thing that she was surviving by hiding in the airducts. We don't know how long she would have stayed if the Marines had not come. I can imagine that eventually, she would have to e.g. start to look for food in more distant places once she has robbed the nearest fridges of all their content. One can imagine that forced to make a trip somewhere further away, she could be caught rather easily.

Well, we saw what should have happened. Marines get called in, rapidly discover threat, pull out and nuke the site from orbit. That's how you deal with it, and the Aliens have no defence against it.

In space. On Earth, the situation is different. LV-426 is an isolated piece of rock. Earth has abundant lifeforms to reproduce from. Leave Aliens in a small forest for a week and you will probably end up with at least a hundred. And once again, the forest has no borders. On LV-426, the borders of the area that could be "controlled" by the Hive was Hadley's Hope, simply because there were no more lifeforms out there. On Earth, the borders of a possible spread from a Hive are all over the planet - because there are hosts everywhere - maybe except some Antarctica (whoops, sorry, Mr. Andersson ) and other extremities where nothing lives (but not that the Aliens couldn't go there if they wished).

I don't understand. When you find out where the Aliens are, what's to stop you from evacuating the area to minimise loss of life, and then nuking the site from the air? Why can't you set up a scorched earth policy?

One problem starts, of course, already with minimising the loss of life. In my opinion, basically the safest way would be to really ruthlessly bomb the place immediately, because with every evacuated citizen or car, you are risking carrying some random egg in the trunk accidentally or some infected person around, as per my example above. Even barring Hieronymus' objection that most likely nuking New York City won't be welcome, okay, let us imagine ideal Earth where people don't panic and obey the evacuation orders properly, where the governing forces know what to do and do it right - even then I would be doubtful and wouldn't be sure if a couple of Aliens wouldn't manage to escape after all. But reality probably would be far less idealistic.

I completely understand that you might not get rid of them all, in exactly the same way that the Aliens are incapable of getting rid of all humans at Hadley's, but you are preventing an apocalypse-type scenario and instead instituting a pest control policy.

That is a big question, I grant you that - basically it is hard to tell if really a joint effort (in the case of ideal human response, see above) would not be able to reduce the Alien problem into "pest problem" rather than making it a "war" (however inappropriate I consider that word). Still, it would be a world where anytime you can wake up in the Hive, realising that over the couple of last days a Hive has formed in the abandoned factory on the edge of your city. But given the Alien reproduction rate, I really think that even in this best case, we would be faced with very interesting trend in world population, large numbers of people (and aliens) dying suddenly of infestations and subsequent nukes practically all the time.

(And that is not taking into account how much habitable would such Earth be after a couple of nukes...)

Doesn't Ripley win every time?

Ripley is an idealized heroine And after all, it is one case. Not really representative for statistics. And hey, even she got infected in the end, and brought it all upon the poor inmates of Fury 161. So, yes, if Ripley's fate means we would have a couple of heroes who manage to wipe out a few aliens and die in the process, maybe... but then we should also take into account assholes like Burke or Ash who would just mess everything up.

Aliens, their strengths:
Very good at close combat.
Fast reproductive strategy.

Add to it: superior survival tactics. That does not only rely on reproduction, it also relates to the ingenuity and intelligence which you said you have also acknowledged previously.

Let's face it, the Aliens were destroyed most of the time safely only because you could have blown them out of the airlock which, on Earth, isn't really possible Joking aside, we are back again at the problem that all the environments in the movies are in space. That is one of the reasons why I think AVPR is bullshit, because you simply cannot contain Aliens. Once they would be on Earth, they are here. No borders, no boundaries.

Humans, their strengths:
Guns that kill at a distance
Bombs, napalm, nukes, lots and lots of really nasty weapons of war
Ability to communicate over long distances
Very good transport infrastructure
Drones and other remote controlled devices
Satellite surveillance

Yes, but think of the situation. You have to use all of those in certain areas, places... you cannot nuke a bunch of Aliens hiding somewhere in underground network, deep under the earth. First you have to find them, anyway. Let's say some devices can help you do that, but how long will it take? How many nests will pop up elsewhere meanwhile? I think eventually you will get overwhelmed. Also, let's remember, you have to have the headquarters from where you are leading the attacks. But that is no ideal, transcendental place (unless you are doing that from e.g. Gateway, but already that means admitting you have lost the Earth) - it is a place as much at risk as anything else. So, it can always happen that something eats you before you manage to push the button, so to say.

I'm not sure what your point is. I'd view Hadley's as being a worst case scenario - a Hive a kilometre away from which you can't escape from and can't destroy, and no effective means of fighting off the Aliens.  Yet despite this, one person survives for over a month after the Aliens are dominant.

Yes, yes - but if you fail to see my point, let me put it differently: the thing is, you had a colony of what, 168 inhabitants, or how many was it? And one person survived. I don't like using "pure maths", but for the sake of this point, let's use it: that is less than 1%. So if you have Earth of, whatever its population might be at some future point of Alien invasion, even if it was like now - cca 6 billion (or is it even more now... whatever) - with the same ratio, you get less than, counting with my feeble maths, 36 million survivors. And something like 5 964 600 000 dead. Now that is not very nice, is it. (Even though, like I said, this is pure maths and reality might differ mightily - but the point I am trying to make is clear, I hope. One person alive out of hundred and half is not a win, it is a rather terrible loss.)

Any Alien invasion of Earth is going to be a best case scenario - they've arrived exactly where you've got the man power and resources to fight them. So if the worst case scenario leaves one survivor, a best case scenario is going to have a far lesser mortality rate.

Nah, here I disagree. Aliens don't deal in manpower and resources. You had resources on LV-426, or you could have them, if you called in a bunch of Marines. You would be able to wipe Aliens out, because, eventually, on a barren planet with no other lifeforms, the Aliens will eventually stop their growth, so to say, and they would be contained. You only need to wipe them out, or you can keep sending in squads of Marines in hope that you kill more than they manage to kindnap and cocoon - once you learn from the first few unsuccesful drops, or you can just keep sending in combat androids for that matter. But you can't do that on Earth - once the Aliens are loose on Earth, you cannot keep them away from their hosts. You cannot isolate them the way you do on LV-426. And that's the problem. They will keep coming - in the best case, you will have Hives appearing here and there from time to time, and always have to wipe them out anew (while, of course, very often at least something escapes). In the worst case, they'll totally get out of control and spread and spread until the whole Earth is gone.

For what its worth, I've always viewed Aliens as being more intelligent than humans, but I don't think intelligence counts for much when compared to the capabilities of the two species. Any Aliens on Earth have to contend with being up against a tool using species with a planetful of tools.

So, yes, the bomb shelter is a great place for when the nuke comes down, but becomes rapidly less endearing when those pesky humans start pouring tanker-fulls of petrol down into it. And wherever they build the next Hive they're still going to have to contend with that annying mix of ingenuity and technology the humans have. Like them, we're a problem solving species.

I am still not convinced that technical superiority will help. The Marines were also technically superior, and look at them. Yes, they were not on Earth, but is the situation so different? Yes, humans are ingenuous, but Aliens are even more so, it seems to me. Also much more resilient. Eventually, if they survive long enough (and I believe they will), they would learn how to most effectively get rid of humans. First thing the Hive attacks in a new area would be a power plant. And so forth. Also, sometimes, the very same technical advantages humans invented will also prove to be a problem. Airducts, the wonderful invention of humankind. Sewer systems... we are back at it again.

But that's not a problem, is it? Another Hive pops up, and you kill it. You're managing it like any other disease - identify and isolate the vectors whenever there's an outbreak and treat accordingly.

Yes, but like I said: you never get rid of the disease again - in the best case. In the worst case, it slowly spreads, always a bit more than before, until it overwhelms you.

I'm ok with them hibernating. I've no problem with that. I just doubt that 'Aliens on Earth' is an apocalypse type event if you can have two people evading 140+ Aliens whose only goal (presumably) is to snatch potential hosts, and where the people are seemingly confined to the geography of Hadley's Hope. That doesn't seem to suggest a very effective search strategy/algorithm for the Aliens.

(Although I fully concede that the Nice Lady Colonist might well have spent most of her time in one of the Colony tractors, well away from Hadley's, and only got snatched when she came back looking to scavenge provisions. Or when she might have noticed the Sulaco's approach, if you want to be particularly cruel!)

But inability to snatch Newt?

Look at it from the other perspective. There is only one person who survived. I am certain that in the case of massive-Earth-infestation, even in some "last stage", there would be hundreds, thousands of humans randomly wandering airducts and escaping Aliens to unlikely places. Sure. You can write a novel based on the adventures of such a bunch of lucky heroes. But the point is, most would go dead. Like in the case of Hadley's Hope.

But that's not much of a problem, given that Queens are born and not made. (Unless you've got Aliens who can transform people into Eggs as per Alien's DC, which I grant does make it a much bigger problem.)

While I am, personally, the representative of the opinion "the Alien lifecycle is still very much a mystery to us", aka I am neither strongly supporting or denying the egg-morphing aspect, let's put it aside for the sake of discussion. Still, you have queens - it is not determined how they are made - and my personal belief goes along the lines that "whenever it is necessary, some biological-thingy happens, and a queen is born". Maybe my mind is slightly clouded by the couple of Aliens books I have read, but I can very well imagine a random Alien worker, on the command of the Queen, snatching an egg and carrying it to safe distance. Funny idea perhaps, but hey, after all, that's what these fellows apparently do even normally, only within the Hive.

We saw the Aliens continuing their business as normal strategy at the end of Aliens even though there were plenty of environmental cues to suggest that the Atmosphere Processor was not going to continue its own policy of business as normal for much longer. There are going to be very few environmental cues for a ten megaton airstrike for any Aliens to heed.

Well, here I guess it's a matter of personal belief in the matter of Alien intelligence. For my stance on that, see my personal signature Let's just say that the Alien in Alien was able to evacuate himself into the evacuation shuttle, maybe it was luck, but somehow I think not. And, while I am very much not a fan of Alien: Resurrection, I am more than content with its portrayal of Alien intelligence. Sure, you cannot really predict a nuke strike. But I can very well imagine the Aliens, say, picking as the center of their Hive, of all the buildings in the city, exactly the one which is, in fact, a nuclear bomb shelter.

I agree that hunting facehuggers is not easy. But the Aliens aren't doing any favour for themselves through using a Hive set-up. Facehuggers are confined to the Hive, and the Aliens bring them hosts. This makes the Aliens very containable indeed. Wipe out the Hive, and you've ended the threat. There are rarely any stray facehuggers wandering around outside the Hive.

Well, I guess this goes very much into my personal opinion, once again. I disagree with the portrayal of Aliens based on the movie Aliens (and some AVPs) only, since it makes them just, well, dumb insects. Which obviously they are not, based on the other films. Yes, it seems that aliens within a Hive become somewhat much more "sedentary" and basically the focus shifts on the Queen's survival and making the rooms warm and cozy. Still, the Aliens are not complete assholes, I believe, and I believe they would learn.

The way I see it, Aliens are there to bring hosts to the Hive. They've got a maximum range. They stray too far from the Hive and whatever hosts they've brought back are dead through dehydration, so it doesn't make much sense to have too far of a range.

That is a good argument. However, we never saw what a Hive looks like once it is "settled" and exhausted its closest neighbourhood. We saw only the LV-426 Hive, which, after taking every living soul on the planet, had nowhere else to expand. I can imagine that a Hive in some later stage would be prone to expansion, maybe some workers would remain inside and some others would go out, search, scout? That would make sense to me, given the hostility of Aliens.

You don't need to catch any escapee Aliens. You just wait until they start another Hive, enough people go missing for you to notice it, and then you restart your operation: evacuate people; quarantine potential hosts; nuke Hive.

You're going to know very early on you've got a problem. The more people go missing, the more Aliens you have, the more people go missing. Population loss would initially look like an exponential curve. You wouldn't be able not to notice it within around a week, even going by very conservative estimates of how many people an Alien could snatch a day.

Obviously you will notice. The problem is, and that's what I am saying, that you won't be able to stop it. Once you get them on Earth, they will be there forever. You could even start winning at some unlikely stage. But after eliminating the "last" hive, after a couple of months, years, suddenly you will have them again appearing in some city on the other side of the country, just because you thought they were gone from there already, but in fact there was one lonely egg forgotten in the cellar...

To be honest, though, main reason for the Aliens completely screwing Earth up - and especially within the logic of the Alien universe - would be not maybe the Aliens themselves, but some stupid individuals who would want to catch them, study them, you know the story...

I find it pretty high considering that you've got maybe 140 Aliens scouring a couple of square kilometres for hosts over the course of around a month. Other than hive building and sleeping, they don't seem to do much else.

Well, there were no more hosts and nothing else to do, if you discount Newt (and apparently, the Aliens lack the typical "bad guy syndrome" where they'd send their full force to get the last defiant human who dares to oppose their utter superiority! Grr). "Everything's cocooned or eaten, sir. What do we do now?" "Now, we hibernate."

I dunno. It's an interesting scenario to speculate on:

Take an Alien invasion now. Assume you've actually got the political will to fully confront the situation, and you've worked out the Alien's life cycle. During that time, the Aliens have invaded one population centre.

You've got satellites, drones, air superiority. It's not going to help much in urban environments, but you should be able to detect Queens ambling between one population centre to another, assuming their aren't Queen-capacity-size tunnels intersecting them (and if there are, it shouldn't be too hard to seal them off and keep them guarded with serious ordnance).

You've got a functioning communications system and transport infrastructure, so you should be able to evacuate any infected population centre prior to razing it to the ground.

You don't have to worry too much about infected humans, because during most of the infection period they tend to be easily identifiable due to the facehugger clasping to their faces. Post-facehugger the infected are easily quarantined, as they'll most likely burst within a handful of hours. Plus the Aliens are actually helping you for the most part, segregating the infected by transporting them down to the Hive and cocooning them there.

What could go wrong?

For me, a single Alien getting on Earth was already the greatest horror imaginable. The point is that those things cannot be contained. Imagine aliens getting into the sewers of a single city. Great. You can evacuate whomever you can, surround it, nuke it from orbit, and scour the sewers in case something survived. But if you can evacuate people from the city, surely some aliens would manage to "evacuate" as well. Even if we discount typical "accidents" like typical oversight of infected person being present among the evacuated (he's a random beggar who got facehugged behind the corner and when they found him, they had no idea he was infected, once he gets into the refugee camp where they're taking them, the whole thing can happily start anew, the possibility of aliens escaping everybody's attention increases with the chaos caused by the amount of refugees), even without this we can easily imagine random facehugger stowaway somewhere in a random car trunk or under a bench of a dirty truck where they are evacuating people. The aliens can also run away on their own. While my hate for AVPR is passionate, "try to hunt a facehugger in a forest" is a good point (well, that's actually why I hate it - it's unrealistic to think you could contain them after once being loose in a FOREST, man!!). The main point is, even if you create a perimeter around the city, you can never be 100% sure something didn't slip past you on a moonless night.

Another thing is, the hosts are not only humans, mind you. Evacuate humans, you have city full of street dogs and such. You have no way of knowing how many aliens you actually have or had around. Last of all, if the aliens are in the city sewers, let's assume there is some place where the water gets out, or in, or simply where it connects to some natural water flow. Or, in the worst case, some sea. In Resurrection at least the Aliens can swim, and I assume they don't need to worry too much about how far they can swim and possibly breathing either (given the merry Alien banging on Narcissus from the outside). Anyway, they don't need to swim far, but then again, who's to say a couple of Aliens can't swim from L.A. to Australia? And so on and so forth. Try to catch the Aliens in the oceans. No way.

And all of this counting on the fact that the infestation would be found out relatively early. The aliens could spread everywhere without you knowing. Especially with today's level of transport. "So, this facehugger walks to an airport..."

Basically: I believe the main problem is that once you get the Aliens on Earth, the only question worth asking from that point on is WHEN. It may take months, years, even hundreds or thousands of years, but you can never fully exterminate them once you get them there. That's exactly what their strength is. Survival.

I'm still wondering how David was able to speak to the Engineer.  It's one thing to analyze the text of a language but to actually be able to communicate it through speech takes more than just reading it.

Actually it is easier to reconstruct the speech based on trying to track it down via changes in pronounciation in the existing languages than to reconstruct the speech based only on text, because you have no idea how the text should be pronounced. But you are right - all attempts of reconstruction of how stuff "used to be pronounced" are basically guesses. Just look at today's dialects and on how languages are changing even now. If you are capable of accidentally saying something very rude when you are speaking English with (your idea of) some random local dialect to some people with their own dialect, the more it is likely that when David wanted to say "This man is here because he does not want to die. (Conjunction? Seriously!) He believes you can give him more life", he instead said "This man thinks you smell like old socks. He comes to offer you his".