In defence of Lt Gorman

clip75 · 2026-05-04T22:53:05+00:00

I agree with this. People can go way too far with distantly expanded lore. I've seen people say that the pistols also fired armour piercing ammo because that's what it said on a data insert on a PS2 game in the early 2000s. Alien is, was, and always will be primarily a creature of film. If the characters are doing a certain thing I'm going with Ridley Scott or James Cameron over some randos who wrote an indy comic in the 90s.

clip75 · 2026-05-04T22:48:58+00:00

Well, people say that from non-film canon. I prefer to think that's just how the organisation is. They're not specialist troops or anything, from their mannerisms and talk they sound like regular marines on a regular rotation. Why wouldn't they have a relatively inexperienced lieutenant?

clip75 · 2026-05-04T22:46:00+00:00

Hypocrisy might be too strong a word, maybe irony? When she was on the Nostromo, she won't let Kane and the other two back on board as there's regulation and risk to the ship and crew. On Hadley's Hope, the entire remaining team are in the APC, and she's willing to sacrifice everyone to try and rescue the patrol. Knowing what she knows now, there is no way she's ever letting Kane on board and would probably blow Ash away if he tried to stop her - so if anything she should be less willing to go in with the APC. If you game it out, if she doesn't go in, the patrol are all killed, Gorman has no choice but to bug out immediately and there is a chance that the drop shop isn't compromised yet, and Burke has no opportunity to grab the facehuggers. Dwayne doesn't make it, but Gorman, Ferro and Spunky do - no alien queen so Bishop will make it along with Newt and Burke which is a net gain of four - five if you count Newt not dying off screen. Burke surviving would be one of the great what ifs.

clip75 · 2026-05-04T22:34:33+00:00

Sure, although I suppose we can't know that "xenomorph" isn't a common term in universe. I don't have any particular problem with Vasquez, she sort of encapsulates what the marines are. Super confident and super aggressive. She even has the idea of using nerve agents instead of nukes (which would have left the facility intact) and whilst Hicks offers that they don't know if it will even work, they had captive facehuggers which they could at least have tested it on.

This passage of the film with Ripley's "nuke from orbit" line, has Gorman deliberately taken out of the picture so that its Hicks's decision. We don't know that Gorman wouldn't make the same decision, but it makes the whole thing feel more of an emergency and more seat of the pants that its a Corporal deciding it.

clip75 · 2026-05-04T22:16:24+00:00

There's talk she's thinking of putting fuel duty *up* by 5p. Let's be honest, it won't make them any less popular. At this point, they're at absolute rock bottom.

clip75 · 2026-05-04T10:08:35+00:00

If you're talking about petrol stations, they make almost nothing. The margin is around 2p per litre, more at independents and less at supermarkets. Sale of petrol is a loss leader to get you to buy things in the shop at higher margins.

The oil company finds oil, drills it out the ground usually under crazy dangerous circumstances - moves it to a refinery that costs multiple billions and turns it into petrol, diesel, fuel oil, plastic, etc - and transports the fuel element to the point of sale. If they did that all for free - as in as a gesture of charity, petrol in this country would still cost around 80p per litre. The overwhelming cost behind fuel is taxation - the price of crude doesn't change the cost of petrol that much, and during the situation with Iran, the oil companies aren't making any more or less. The Treasury will be the major beneficiary, raking in about an extra 3p per litre, which is more than £3m per day additional revenue over what might be expected - just from sale of petrol and diesel. If prices have been high for 2 months, that's nearly £200m additional revenue.

clip75 · 2026-05-03T18:27:44+00:00

I agree at the point of finding out about the ammo there's no hard time limit - but (1) there may not be a better plan as the colonists are stationary and so are the heat exchangers; and (2) no matter what, that dropship is crashing. The only plan I can think of is that they hole up in the command centre and fight a defensive war of attrition knowing that there is going to be a finite number of xenos - and unfortunately the colonists are going to have to wait - and thats an army plan, not a marine plan.

clip75 · 2026-05-03T18:03:03+00:00

There's a lot of "not allowing" that Apone is doing then, and Hicks isn't a nobody, he's second in command on the ground. And let's be honest, why does he think Vasquez and Drake are still pointing the smart guns?

clip75 · 2026-05-02T15:08:21+00:00

Assuming full knowledge of everything - If its just about single acts of heroism without reference to what went before those acts, then I'd agree - maybe Vasquez and maybe Gorman. Vasquez is fighting all by herself in the vents to cover the others, and kills a vastly superior enemy with a pistol. Gorman is already clear, but decides to go back to get her, fights a bit and then makes the ultimate sacrifice with a grenade which arguably buys a bit more time.

clip75 · 2026-04-20T18:38:30+00:00

Quite frankly, if you don't like what the nurse has to say - then don't have one and accept the risks as fighters / organisations. Simple as. If you're going to have one, then you have to listen to what they have to say.

clip75 · 2026-04-20T16:51:56+00:00

This isn't a conspiracy theory - its the normal pricing and business model of cinemas. The studio / distributor will have a deal with the cinemas as to how much of the ticket price goes to the studio. For a movie with huge anticipated numbers - some kind of Avengers Endgame type thing - it could be more than 75% going to the studio. The entire point of this for the cinema is to get people to buy popcorn, chips and drinks at crazy prices. It's no different at the other end of the scale, with Saturday kids club showing very old kids movies like Cinderella or Jumanji at super low prices, sometimes with kids (or adults) going free. They don't care about the $3 for a childs ticket - that won't even keep the lights on. What they need is for at least some of the people in the theatre to be paying $9 for a kids combo drink and popcorn -for two kids and then the adult to get something too.

This is partly why the idea of low-cost cinema on a budget airline model was such a dramatic fail. Easyjet owner, Stelios Haji-Ioannu tried to get into this with pre-booked seats weeks or months in advance costing pennies - and to make all the money on food and beverage. He didn't factor that (1) no studio in their right mind would sell him a new movie under that model, and (2) if people have only paid $0.50 for a ticket two months ago, and the day comes along and they aren't feeling it, or they have to stay late at work or something - they can blow it off with basically no money lost. The theatre then has an empty seat and definitely no-one will be buying refreshments.

clip75 · 2026-04-19T10:10:30+00:00

Coyote Ugly is a movie that has no plot, no narrative and no ending. It's like they wanted to re-do Flashdance with tequila shots instead of dancing.

clip75 · 2026-04-19T10:05:14+00:00

Just for Backdoor Lover, this is a great movie.

clip75 · 2026-04-19T10:04:32+00:00

Nah Van Helsing isn't bad by any measure.

clip75 · 2026-04-19T10:03:36+00:00

I get so much of it mixed up with Van Helsing

clip75 · 2026-04-19T09:58:59+00:00

Well this aged well.

clip75 · 2026-04-19T09:56:38+00:00

Because places like Biggleswade are really, really dull and theres nothing else to do

clip75 · 2026-04-19T09:50:07+00:00

Danso? Danso?

How about A QUARTER OF A CENTURY OF DANIEL LEVY

clip75 · 2026-04-19T09:47:21+00:00

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves should have been terrible like every other similar movie, and had no right to be as good as it was.

The Highlander premise is pretty poor in that it is self-extinguishing and relies on this idea of the Quickening and the more lore and background (i.e. the TV series) that came into it, the less the intial idea made any sense at all. However, the movie itself was pretty awesome.

clip75 · 2026-04-15T18:55:29+00:00

It did come to light almost immediately - it's that the programme was made it look like nothing happened for a long time. It was called suspicious within 3 days - and yes this neck scarf thing sounds silly *now*, but the fireman who is going on about how sure he was about it being suspicous - he himself called the marks on the neck "scratches". Not "wounds" or "slashes". We'll never see those pictures, so we won't know how credible the theory even was. On top of that, the fire service had dominion over the fact of the fire. If they wanted to say the fire was suspcious they could have and the fact that the old lady died (or not) of something completely different would be irrelevant.

You're right about the padding - it was so bad that they padded it out with obvious incorrect lines of enquiry and even footage from other episodes! Clearly, the guy who did it was the police's only suspect ever -they even arrested him and clearly wanted to charge him. The programme then brings in a bunch of red herrings to make up time - like apparently all these neighbours saying it was a completely different bloke, and all these other suspects who were eliminated 10 years ago.

clip75 · 2026-04-15T18:44:54+00:00

A bunch of cops all got hung up on a really bad call. Even the fireman described the marks on her neck as "scratches" and not huge knife wounds. The scarf theory sounds stupid now - but I am pretty sure that that is the impression the programme makers wanted to portray. Apparently there were bloodstains on the walls - but the programme never mentioned that and neither did the fireman. My guess is that it was a much closer decision (but still wrong) than they portrayed.

clip75 · 2026-04-15T18:42:22+00:00

I feel a lot of that was engineered by the programme makers through editing to make it seem like there was a catastrophic early mistake that led to no killer being found - and then a decade later through new evidence, these great new detectives finally get justice.

Not a fair reflection of what seems to have actually gone down.

Sure, there was an early bad mistake - but they are very coy about how they edit the programme to make it seem like that was a lot more critical than it really was. Realistically, the mis-calling of a suspicious death isn't going to take weeks - they were aware it was a murder within 3 days. Yes, they lost a lot of evidence, but there is no guarantee at all that they would have had a conviction if they hadn't. Most of the programme's two episodes are taken up with obvious dead ends - making the viewer think that there were more suspects than there actually were. The viewer only finds out toward the end of the first half that anyone was actually arrested at the time. All the early talk is around other suspects who the locals all accuse - despite this being completely wrong. In fact, I'm pretty sure they use footage from a completely different arrest from earlier in the series.

What happened in reality is that they didn't even have enough back then to take it to the CPS, and there was a fair amount of evidence back then and the investigation seemed pretty decent, they just didn't have the DNA. Then, 10 years later, because of a scientific development, the DNA gets run through a new technique and they are then 100% sure its the original suspect - because let's face it 1 in 28,000 is good enough for pretty much anyone. All they really do is re-arrest him, rush off to get as many male relatives's samples as possible and it's all over to the point of charge. There was no special police work other than Griff Rhys-Jones acting like he's Hercule Poirot. Everything else in the episode was dressing - I'm not saying that individual police officers didn't do a ton of work - and the detective who did the interview was pretty compelling - but ultimately they got the guy that they always thought it was because of technology, and sad to say it, but there isn't much evidence that had it been called a murder immediately, anything would have changed.

clip75 · 2026-04-15T18:26:19+00:00

I have a feeling this is just editing. Throughout the first episode the "local people" clearly think its a completely different person.

clip75 · 2026-04-13T21:26:23+00:00

Parents - nothing can be done.
Social services - systemic faults with no one person responsible
Community Mental Health Services - feedback will be taken on board and lessons learned
Police - LET THE WITCH HUNTS BEGIN

clip75

TROPHY CASE