 Originally Posted by bassman
They do? I've only seen them do minor things like kill the power or use their own blood to escape something. Other than that they just run around looking for lunch.
They don't exhibit civilised intelligence, but the original concept was that they possess an intelligence that - just like their biology - is so vastly different to our own that we cannot fully comprehend it. This concept was watered down somewhat in the sequels though, I'll grant you.
Originally Posted by bassman
As I stated before....I don't think this subject is ever covered in the four alien films or two AVP films. There's no proof that they don't see. In fact, there are several instances throughout the films that point to the fact that they could possibly have sight.
They have no visible eyes. Part of what makes them frightening is their alien-ness - and part of that is the suggestion that they have sensory abilities that we don't know about. This is the thing, when the Alien is done well (i.e. NOT AVP  ) it is a total enigma. It is the unknown. We don't know what it's capable of, and it will always pull something unexpected out of the bag.
Originally Posted by bassman
Bitch, please. The predator has minor armor and carries around a portable operating room on his belt.
Again - it surrounds itself with technology to make itself a badass. If the Alien films have taught us anything, it's that "all the technology of the future couldn't protect them". The Alien is the very symbol of a ferocious force of nature in a hostile universe, overcoming every technological obstacle that rational intelligence can put in its way. The Alien itself needs no technology, it is "born" with everything it requires. It is the ultimate survivor, created or evolved perfectly to kill anything it encounters, anywhere, in any environment from planet Earth to the cold vacuum of space.... I'm nearly shitting myself just talking about it! 
Originally Posted by bassman
You could very well be right about this, but I can't seem to remember any examples. I remember them running into doors, but never cutting them with claws.
After they bashed the door inwards and it fails to give way, the tear a hole in
the middle of it with their claws. They also tear through the Marines' futuristic better-than-Kevlar battle armour, and in at least one case, one of those pheumatic jaw-phallus things punch through a soldier's helmet.
Originally Posted by bassman
The predator has many different visual settings. And his "normal" vision as well. But remind me when the films establish that the aliens have no body heat?
Okay, I'm gonna look very geeky here. But according to James Cameron on the Aliens DVD, the geeks at http://www.alienexperience.com/forum...oard,31.0.html and (I believe) the original script/character concept, the creature does not radiate heat higher than its surrounding environment.
Originally Posted by bassman
Bad Attitude? He's a noble warrior that only kills for sport or self defense. If anything has the bad attitude, it's the pissed off alien that goes around killing for nothing.
The Alien is not pissed off. In fact, we have no evidence that these creatures exhibit anything that we might term emotion (apart from the agitation of the Queen on the destruction of her eggs). And it certainly does not kill for nothing - it kills because that is part of its life cycle. For the Alien, killing means reproduction. Killing is what it does, killing is what it exists to do. The Alien's life-cycle is "make love not war" turned on its head - it has no love... no hate, no fear, no sense of honour, no compassion - murder and rape are what it does to procreate.
As a little side note, I always imagined the Alien as something that had evolved not on a planet, but in space itself. The abandoned extraterrestrial craft in the first two films suggested this idea to me.
Imagine that for millions of years, there have been hundreds of thousands of now (mostly) long-extinct space-faring races traversing the universe. Out there, over vast distances and colossal spans of time, pests and diseases and vermin from countless worlds, hitching rides on billions of spacecraft, spread out across the intergalactic trade routes. Just like rats and mites and weevils on Earth's olden-time sailing ships, these vermin adapted to their new environments, each species competing with others for specific ecological niches, adapting to survive all attempts to exterminate them (like modern day super-bacteria), adapting to kill all competitors, adapting to the environments of hostile worlds and the vacuum of space.... Wouldn't it be awesome if the aliens "homeworld" was not some rocky planetoid, but an infinity of derelict spacecraft of a billion extinct races, floating endlessly in the darkness of space. That would be fitting. 
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Indeed, the Alien is the pants-shittingest movie monster ever.
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