Situation Reversal (Alien/The Thing)

[Molyneux]

Don't you know? There were only two "Alien" movies. Very Happy And in the first film, it definitely moved like a cold-blooded critter - not to mention that the difference in activity between Alien and Aliens, on a (cold) spaceship rather than in a (warm) hive, is easily noticeable.

Eh, explicit evidence from lame movies trumps implicit evidence from awesome movies.

Honestly, everything after Aliens should just be treated as a DisContinuity. Give the filmmakers a do-over.

[Swindle1984]

In Alien, the creature survives explosive decompression and being shot in the torso with a grappling hook gun. In fact, we never actually see it die; we see it try crawling into the engine, then the engine ignites and the alien is blown away into space by the exhaust.

In the novella Who Goes There, at least one of the creatures is killed by the men using their bare hands; they beat it down and literally tear it apart with their hands. That seemed to be enough to put it down, and none of the men were infected by the creature's blood. They also managed to dispatch the Things with an electrified pitchfork, if I recall. The Thing was also mildly telepathic, and the men were disturbed by the dreams they had as a result of psychic leakage as it was thawing out.

But, yeah, xenomorph in the Antarctica research station survives long enough to kill a few people, then gets taken down hard by gunfire and napalm. The Thing quickly takes over the Nostromo with very little resistance; it's far more subtle than a xenomorph and while the flamers onboard may be good enough to kill it (or at least make it crispy enough to dump it in an airlock and blow it into space), the crew will likely be overwhelmed before it comes to that.

[Anguirus]

But, yeah, xenomorph in the Antarctica research station survives long enough to kill a few people, then gets taken down hard by gunfire and napalm.

I don't follow. There's only one gun on that base and it's an old revolver: it could only seriously hurt an Alien if fired point-blank. And napalm (read: kerosene)? Didn't you just point out that an engine on full thrust may not have actually killed the thing?

The only real way to deal with that thing would be to trap it in a shed or something and blow it up with the dynamite.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

But, yeah, xenomorph in the Antarctica research station survives long enough to kill a few people, then gets taken down hard by gunfire and napalm.

I don't follow. There's only one gun on that base and it's an old revolver: it could only seriously hurt an Alien if fired point-blank. And napalm (read: kerosene)? Didn't you just point out that an engine on full thrust may not have actually killed the thing?

The only real way to deal with that thing would be to trap it in a shed or something and blow it up with the dynamite.

There are far more guns in the base than the revolver. Did you forget the pair of flamethrowers? The cabinet full of rifles whatshisname tried to plunder when he went paranoid-crazy? Did you think they just threw away the high-powered rifle the last surviving member of the Norwegian base was using to try and shoot the dog?

The lack of poison can also be explained the way that it was explained in the novella why it didn't just turn into an alien bird-equivalent and fly away, instead of going to the trouble of building a flying machine. Namely, it's from a different planet, and didn't have a template for a creature designed to fly well in our air pressure, gravity, etc; the same would apply to most organic poisons. Alien neurotoxin, say, wouldn't necessarily do a thing to a human.

There's also the facts that 1) Cold has been shown to send it into a dormant state, and 2) There's no evidence that it knows what the environment of the rest of the world is like. This also helps explain why the Thing didn't use the 'piss in the ocean to infect the world' method. For all it knows, the entire world is a blasted Antarctic wasteland and any attempts at prolification that didn't involve maintaining an enclosed, heated space would be doomed to failure.

There's also the possibility that the Thing desires to only have one body, which is shown several times in the movie, and randomly infecting people throughout the world might result in multiple competing Things. So instead it would prefer to go a with more 'supervised' infection route.

[DPDarkPrimus]

The Thing could get everybody at the dinner table, and when it realizes it can't infect Ash it just beats him to death.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

I don't follow. There's only one gun on that base and it's an old revolver: it could only seriously hurt an Alien if fired point-blank. And napalm (read: kerosene)? Didn't you just point out that an engine on full thrust may not have actually killed the thing?

One more thing: It's shown multiple times in Aliens that 'flamers', which appear to be little more than glorified flame-throwers, are more than capable of taking out xenos. Not to mention the cobbled-together flamethrowers in Alien appear to have put the scare in the single xeno, implying that it saw the flames as a threat, at the very least.

[Shroom Man 777]

In the novella Who Goes There, at least one of the creatures is killed by the men using their bare hands; they beat it down and literally tear it apart with their hands. That seemed to be enough to put it down, and none of the men were infected by the creature's blood. They also managed to dispatch the Things with an electrified pitchfork, if I recall. The Thing was also mildly telepathic, and the men were disturbed by the dreams they had as a result of psychic leakage as it was thawing out.

Woah! If I ever write something that deals with horrible existential terrors, I will have to feature a scene with a bunch of burly manly manly He-Manny macho men beating one of the monstrosities to death with their fists.

[CaptHawkeye]

At very minimum, Thing-infected people were very good at bluffing like they were scared and normal people until they exploded into gore and mandibles. Things are duplicitous enough to sell each other out to gain their way into a group. It's unknown whether a thing knows where all other things are at any given time, but the nature of their organism makes it likely that they have some kind of group mind considering they are an organism that can so easily subdivide and gloop together.

MacReady: *standing over a burning Thing* I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human.

*lights flamethrower*

But why take the chance?

[Anguirus]

It's shown multiple times in Aliens that 'flamers', which appear to be little more than glorified flame-throwers, are more than capable of taking out xenos.

In the entire Aliens canon, flamethrowers have never seriously harmed an adult Xenomorph.

Check it.

They have been irritated by flamethrowers or plasma torches, but once they get that black exoskeleton they can withstand molten lead and starship exhaust.

I'll concede on the rifles though, I don't remember the movie well enough to agree or disagree.[/quote]

[Oni Koneko Damien]

It's shown multiple times in Aliens that 'flamers', which appear to be little more than glorified flame-throwers, are more than capable of taking out xenos.

In the entire Aliens canon, flamethrowers have never seriously harmed an adult Xenomorph.

Really? I seem to recall, while they didn't exactly melt or fall to pieces, aliens hit by the flamers in the initial assault fell from the walls and ceilings and didn't appear to be moving right afterward. Is there any canon evidence of an alien taking a full hit from a flamethrower, and still functioning afterwards? The exoskeleton might keep it in one piece, but if there's no contradicting evidence, I think the safest thing to say is that its insides are boiled and it is quite dead.

In Alien, the creature survives explosive decompression and being shot in the torso with a grappling hook gun. In fact, we never actually see it die; we see it try crawling into the engine, then the engine ignites and the alien is blown away into space by the exhaust.

How do we know it isn't dead when that happened? I don't remember the movie that well, but IIRC, the only thing we see is that it is still in one piece, and it's awful hard to tell whether or not it's still actually moving. Again, maybe the exoskeleton preserved its integrity, but the insides were nothing but charred and melted jelly.

I've never seen Alien 3, so I can't comment on the molten-lead thing. If it's actually still moving fine, and not just in one piece afterwards, then I'll concede the point.

[Anguirus]

Is there any canon evidence of an alien taking a full hit from a flamethrower, and still functioning afterwards?

No, because there actually isn't a shot of an Alien being fully doused IIRC (the Anchorpoint Essays came to the same conclusion). However, the Queen is merely annoyed by a plasma torch to the mouth.

My guess is that the flamethrowers weren't terribly effective. Drake used them to hold off some Aliens and burn their resin, but there were no shots of Aliens dropping to the deck or anything.

I've never seen Alien 3, so I can't comment on the molten-lead thing. If it's actually still moving fine, and not just in one piece afterwards, then I'll concede the point.

From what I remember of the sequence, one of the main characters of the film sacrifices himself, luring the thing into the trap and getting butchered by it long enough for someone to throw the switch. Tons of lead fills the trap. Ripley breathes a huge sigh of relief. Then the bastard jumps out of the pool. It is steaming, burned, and driven totally insane, because it goes after Ripley while it avoided her as a Queen-bearing host before. Ripley makes it to the sprinklers as the thing is chasing her up some scaffolding and turns them on. When the cold water hits the Alien, it explodes.

[Swindle1984]

But, yeah, xenomorph in the Antarctica research station survives long enough to kill a few people, then gets taken down hard by gunfire and napalm.

I don't follow. There's only one gun on that base and it's an old revolver: it could only seriously hurt an Alien if fired point-blank. And napalm (read: kerosene)? Didn't you just point out that an engine on full thrust may not have actually killed the thing?

The only real way to deal with that thing would be to trap it in a shed or something and blow it up with the dynamite.

The one guy had a .357 Magnum revolver. They also had two flamethrowers, an entire case full of shotguns that the radio operator tried breaking into, and a bunch of dynamite, thermite, and gasoline that they used to destroy the base.

We've never seen full-grown aliens get hit directly with flamethrowers, though we have seen them react in pain and shy away from them (such as the queen in Aliens). The alien in Alien 3 survived a dunk in a vat of lead.

I was also pointing out that we didn't have confirmation that the engine exhaust actually killed the original alien. It just went hurling into space; we have no way of knowing if it was alive or dead when it did so.

In the novella Who Goes There, at least one of the creatures is killed by the men using their bare hands; they beat it down and literally tear it apart with their hands. That seemed to be enough to put it down, and none of the men were infected by the creature's blood. They also managed to dispatch the Things with an electrified pitchfork, if I recall. The Thing was also mildly telepathic, and the men were disturbed by the dreams they had as a result of psychic leakage as it was thawing out.

Woah! If I ever write something that deals with horrible existential terrors, I will have to feature a scene with a bunch of burly manly manly He-Manny macho men beating one of the monstrosities to death with their fists.

Actually, the author was making a point about hysteric terror. When the Thing was revealed among them, the men surrounding it beat it and tore it apart while pissing themselves.

Also, your sarcasm is rather, well, asinine.

[Ford Prefect]

Also, your sarcasm is rather, well, asinine.

Trust me when I say this, he isn't being sarcastic.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

No, because there actually isn't a shot of an Alien being fully doused IIRC (the Anchorpoint Essays came to the same conclusion). However, the Queen is merely annoyed by a plasma torch to the mouth.

That is a scene I do remember well, and one thing I remember was that the 'plasma torch' was about a foot long flame that hit the queen's mouth for all of one or two seconds before she recoiled screaming, stopping a focused attack on Ripley. This is, I expect, quite a bit less effective than the twenty foot gout of sticky napalm that composes your typical, modern-day chemical flamethrower. If it were more effective, we'd see soldiers heading into battle with blowtorches instead of flamethrowers.

[Darth Nostril]

I was also pointing out that we didn't have confirmation that the engine exhaust actually killed the original alien. It just went hurling into space; we have no way of knowing if it was alive or dead when it did so.

It crawled into the engine nozzle after being blown out the airlock .... it did not appear to be moving after the engines ignited and it was blown out into interstellar space, plus there was a spray of liquids emanating towards the camera after ignition apparently originating from the xenomorph

It's true we don't see whether the xenomorphs in Aliens are actually killed by the flamers, we see them drop to the floor after being flamed but if that's due to them being killed or dropping from thermal overload we can't tell
The sheer number of them attacking Medical later in the movie implies some of them survived - a set number of colonists explicitely limits the number of aliens that could hatch, between the destruction unleashed in the atmosphere processor and the sentry guns theres only so many of them left to stage a frontal attack

[Anguirus]

That is a scene I do remember well, and one thing I remember was that the 'plasma torch' was about a foot long flame that hit the queen's mouth for all of one or two seconds before she recoiled screaming, stopping a focused attack on Ripley. This is, I expect, quite a bit less effective than the twenty foot gout of sticky napalm that composes your typical, modern-day chemical flamethrower.

Of course a flamethrower is a more effective weapon in most circumstances. However, the torch is probably hotter, since earlier in the film we see smaller torches cutting through steel left and right. With Aliens, it seems like you need a very high temperature to be assured of a kill. You're much better off with a machine gun or rifle, as neither flamethrowers nor pistols seem particularly good at killing them. (In fact, in AvP:R one Alien even survives a fairly short-range blast from a Pred gun plus several hits from a handgun.)

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Of course a flamethrower is a more effective weapon in most circumstances. However, the torch is probably hotter, since earlier in the film we see smaller torches cutting through steel left and right. With Aliens, it seems like you need a very high temperature to be assured of a kill. You're much better off with a machine gun or rifle, as neither flamethrowers nor pistols seem particularly good at killing them. (In fact, in AvP:R one Alien even survives a fairly short-range blast from a Pred gun plus several hits from a handgun.)

Oh no, I'm not claiming it's more effective than standard arms, just that it's not completely ineffective either. It does appear to hurt, stun, and possibly kill xenos, though there's admittedly no conclusive evidence for it. I'd prefer to think that the whole molten-lead thing never happened, as it introduces a shitload of complications: Why would a flamer make xenos drop from the walls and lie motionless on the ground, and a plasma torch make a fucking queen recoil in pain, when a bath in molten lead doesn't even remotely incapacitate a single xeno?

[Shroom Man 777]

Also, your sarcasm is rather, well, asinine.

Trust me when I say this, he isn't being sarcastic.

Truly, I am not

It would've been more awesomer if they wrestled with that grotesquetitude in the nude with muscles glistening in man-sweat as they triumph over an unnatural horror birthed from the blackest cosmos.

Seriously. If the movie had that scene, vampire hunter Kurt Russel would've been replaced with Arnold Schwarzenegger instead.

*impales Thing on steam pipe*

"Let off some steam!"

Why would a flamer make xenos drop from the walls and lie motionless on the ground, and a plasma torch make a fucking queen recoil in pain, when a bath in molten lead doesn't even remotely incapacitate a single xeno?

There could be some mitigating circumstances... though I can't, for the life of me, make anything up.

Perhaps there's something different with being burned with actual-factual fire and being immersed in molten steel...?

That's stupid and stretching it.

Maybe the xenos have a low pain tolerance in comparison to their actual physical tolerances? That would be odd.

*shrugs* *scratches head*

How long did the xeno live after escaping the molten lead anyway? Can we tell that it "wasn't even remotely incapacitated"? Maybe it was already on the verge of death and the sudden explosion just ended its suffering...

Goddamn everything after Aliens was stupid.

[Drooling Iguana]

Maybe it was because it was a dog/cow (depending on the version) alien instead of a human alien. It still doesn't make any sense but at least it's a point of difference between the Alien^3 alien and the rest.

[Molyneux]

Honestly, how dumb, how idiotic, how where-the-fuck-did-THAT-shit-come-from jarring does a sequel have to be, in order to be not considered in the same canon as earlier, better works? Do the direct-to-video Robocop sequels count for that canon? How about the Japanese cyborg ninjas? Does Highlander 2 count, or was it all just a bad dream?

[Oni Koneko Damien]

How long did the xeno live after escaping the molten lead anyway? Can we tell that it "wasn't even remotely incapacitated"? Maybe it was already on the verge of death and the sudden explosion just ended its suffering...

I haven't seen the movie, and the descriptions here give the impression that it went berserk and attacked everything it could, including Ripley.

I've seen what happens when things, and people, get painfully burned. They do get highly active, but it could hardly be called 'berserk'. It's more 'get away from the source of pain as fast as possible and by whatever means necessary, ignoring absolutely everything else unless it's actively trying to restrain you.' I'm pretty certain Ripley wasn't trying to restrain a molten-lead covered, berserk xeno.

Does Highlander 2 count, or was it all just a bad dream?

Go back to sleep hon, it was all just a nightmare. Conner McLeod is not an alien.

[Shroom Man 777]

The xeno was also in defensive crazed maternal mode, protecting Ripley since she had the Alien Queen in her. For all that's worth...

[Anguirus]

Why would a flamer make xenos drop from the walls and lie motionless on the ground

See, I don't remember this ever happening.

[DocHorror]

I was also pointing out that we didn't have confirmation that the engine exhaust actually killed the original alien. It just went hurling into space; we have no way of knowing if it was alive or dead when it did so.

It crawled into the engine nozzle after being blown out the airlock .... it did not appear to be moving after the engines ignited and it was blown out into interstellar space, plus there was a spray of liquids emanating towards the camera after ignition apparently originating from the xenomorph

Just to nit-pick, because its fun!!, but the spray of liquid was from what ever effect the special effects crew used to make the engines look like they were spewing particles of stuff. Essentially they sprayed water & shone a very bright light through it. Its a stretch to say it comes from the Alien as it still comes after the beastie has moved off screen.

Hah!

[Junghalli]

Woah! If I ever write something that deals with horrible existential terrors, I will have to feature a scene with a bunch of burly manly manly He-Manny macho men beating one of the monstrosities to death with their fists.

You'd be following in the footsteps of at least one major classic of English literature: Beowulf. Beowulf's fight with Grendel is awesomely badass for precisely that reason: he gets in a goddamn barehanded wrestling match with Grendel and mortally wounds him.

Note that poem Grendel, unlike movie Grendel, did not have any convenient Achilles heel. Why the people who made that movie thought that was a better idea I cannot imagine.