j0z said:
What I mean is that while in the first movie, the alien was pretty much an unstoppable force that stuck to the shadows, and no one even saw it until it was to late. In Aliens they were basically cannon fodder the entire movie, and seemed to have lost all their stealth instincts (for the most part)
Well, ignoring the fact that everyone on-board the Nostromo were untrained civilians with very little in weaponry, let's have a look at how stealthy that Xenomorph was...
First to get picked off was Brett, right? At that point they had no idea of what the creature actually was, so it was very easy for the bugger to take him by surprise. (Compare this to the first encounter in Aliens, where they all dropped down on the marines and completely decimated them.)
Next was Dallas, as I recall. Stupidly going after the thing in the ventilation system, armed with only a lousy flamethrower. This wasn't as much the alien's sneakiness as it was Dallas screwing up and being somewhere he shouldn't.
Parker and Lambert. They actually did have plenty of time to do something about the alien, since it just stood there staring at Lambert for ages, and could very well have killed it. But Lambert froze in place, and Parker had a major crush on her and didn't want to risk hurting/killing her, so the alien got them both. Yay for idiots.
Kane was killed when the alien burst out from his insides. I suppose
that was pretty sneaky.
EDIT:
The aliens in the sequel did lots of sneaky stuff, though. They went through ventilation shafts and found other alternate routes to their targets, and even snuck inside the dropship while one of the pilots was stationed right freaking outside. The humans were just better equipped, and were able to bunker themselves up, is all.
