It was more the fact that the characters seemed so generic.
That's being very vague because you could say the same about the characters in Alien. Dallas is the gruff leader. Parker and Brett are the comic relief. Lambert's the scared victim. Ash is the shady government operative. But they still worked due to the cast and their chemistry with one another.
Same with Aliens. Hicks is the leader, but unlike most macho movie military guys, he's also a respectable man who treats Ripley with respect and listens to her opinions. They feel like a flesh-and-blood team of marines and I ended up caring about all of them. Even the supporting characters like Vasquez and Drake had their own friendship that made them more than one-dimensional. And their not complete cliches either; once they realize the aliens aren't dumb creatures, the marines find this is going to be a brutal fight to the death. Hudson puts away the macho facade and thinks he's going to die, Gorman's inexperience comes through and Ripley finds herself having to take lead. Then they all come together as a team to battle a common enemy and the human element shows through.
Alien 3 did this with the dog-alien, for example.
Yeah, it hatched from a dog, but I didn't feel they really explored the concept and Ripley wasn't even in danger from the alien. That film's creature was doing exactly what you accuse Aliens of doing: turning it into a mindless monster. At least the ones in Aliens were protecting their young and harvesting the colonists and marines for their hive. They were preserving the species. The one in Alien 3 is just mindlessly killing prisoners.
Having just a single creature again would have been repetitive and considering the film is about Ripley returning to a vast abandoned space colony, they needed to "up the stakes". Showing us the aliens's hierarchy and how they fare against even a team of marines was the best way to move from the original's single alien vs crew angle.
It doesn't change the fact that dozens of them are shot and killed so easily.
Yeah, but you seem to miss that not even lots of heavy firepower is enough to stop them as a force. The creatures corner them into a small part of the colony. Even before the marines enter the hive, we see the damage they've done to the colony and hints that they're even more dangerous than the singular alien from before. The Marines go in with lots of confidence, yet get totally destroyed by their opponents (Cameron's allegory for Vietnam). Their weapons also are disengaged for the most part, leaving them at the creature's mercy. The film shows how a technologically advanced group gets totally destroyed by a supposed primitive species. In the end, Ripley needs to use her inner courage and skills with a powerlifter to beat the Queen (without any weapons).
Nevertheless, they throw themselves in front of guns, allow themselves to be run over like a deer in the headlights, etc.
Kind of like the alien in the original just comes at Lambert and Ripley with its arms outstretched? I feel like you're really just complaining for the sake of complaining.
I saw their initial attacks as being not used to dealing with guns and heavy artillery. After the initial ambush, the creatures sneak up on the marines, prevent them from using the dropship, cut out the power supply, attack from the ceiling, the Queen has a silent standoff with Ripley and she later uses the lift to catch up with Ripley. Clearly, they aren't just dumb monsters as you make them to be.
Cameron just extrapolated the insect aspect without adding any real strangeness to the creatures.
The entire alien hive concept isn't strange enough? The way they function as a hive mind is quite scary. We see that the face-huggers can move about and be just as dangerous (something we didn't see in the first) and the creatures harvest anybody (even a little girl) for their hive. Going back to my earlier points, the way they come together as a hive mind emphasizes the point of them being bio-weapons.
I personally feel that the Alien franchise should have never been action.
This is where we'll disagree because we saw the full potential of the creature in a horror film, so anything following that template would feel like a retread. Cameron chose to do something a little different while still respecting the characters and world Scott built in the first film, and made Aliens feel like a brave sequel in comparison.
However, I feel that the other sequels (more or less) and Prometheus were better at capturing the strangeness, the isolation, the strong sexual undertones, the "body horror" (for lack of a better phrase),
And I felt those films were just recycling what the first film did only in different settings with new characters. Aliens went for a different tone with different subtexts (motherhood, Vietnam, technophobia and genocide).
This is a bit more of personal feeling, but I didn't like Prometheus at all. I found it to be a poorly-written movie with mindless characters doing implausible things in a retread of Alien with half-assed God/Creation concepts that never get explained. Say what you will about Aliens, but at least it has internal logic and its characters don't behave inconsistently from scene to scene.
The technophobia is not really explored very much.
It's explored through Bishop's character arc. After Ripley's horrible experience with Ash from the original, she's initially distrustful of Bishop, yet he wins over Ripley's respect by the film's end.
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