agreed, its a perfectly good scene but the film is stronger without it

Completely disagree. This scene being removed not only screwed a lot of talented people who worked very hard to make it, but also makes the movie look cheap with no budget for a cast. With it in the film, it takes away from the ridiculously glaring plothole that the space Marines have a humongous ship with NO CREW (most plot devices would have been irrelevant with just two damned people crewing that ship at all times). This movie is awesome, but only half as awesome as Alien, and kind of overrated in the writing dept.

But then it introduces the plothole of how there got to be so many aliens out of an original population of only 159.

It really is an extremely weak plot saved entirely by the marine banter and sound design.

Alien had a lot of problems, too, and thankfully most of them were cut out (i.e. the warrior aliens using their victims to make more eggs. While it followed Giger's paintings more accurately, it wasn't as good).

On a technical level, Alien suffered from some odd ship design decisions (chains? leaking water? on a friggn' spaceship?) and dated sci-fi ideas (a computer being a room full of lights), but worst of all was the alien itself at the end. Much like how the stop-motion Queen sucked in Aliens, showing the creature was basically a dude in a rubber suit as it fumbled around the escape pod pretty much un-did all of the scary that had come before.

Hey, don't be dissin' the Nostromo! It's one of my all-time favorite sci-fi spaceships. It looked like a "real" ship designed for an industrial application.

That "leaking" water was condensation. That room was one of those enormous tower things you see in the distance shots of the Nostromo so it's huge, like a hollow skyscraper. The water vapor in the air condenses on the walls & equipment and "rains" down.

As for the hanging chains, again, this was meant to be a mining ship. Think of the Krupp Bagger with a built-in warehouse floating through space. The chains and cranes were there for lifting heavy loads.

The computer "Mother" was, again, a pretty good representation of a no-frills, non-user-friendly industrial computer such as you might find in a factory. The panels of indicator lights, the monochrome screen, all things you're likely to find in such a setting.

But, yeah, they definitely screwed up letting the audience see the full-on alien at the end. This is what my ten-year-old nephew had to say after the movie:

"They made us wait the whole movie to see the monster and it was a dude in a suit!"

Snot-nosed little punk. "Alien" gave me nightmares when I was eleven.

NEEEEEEEEEEEERDS!!!

What plot holes did the Nostromo set design introduce? Rather than being a movie about a monster who is so clever that it takes down competent armed soldiers, every single crises in Aliens is the result of impossible stupidity well beyond an incompetent commanding officer (not a single person left behind on the Sulaco?).

The "dated" computer was a pretty good representation of the things in 1977.

There isn't a single frame of footage where the queen was stop motion. Puppet != stop motion.

@Fabio (and others defending "Mother"): No, industrial computers didn't look quite like that. Most of the indicator lights were flat, not bulbs, they didn't cover every wall, and "industrial" machines tended to have more bare paneling to, you know, protect the innards.

And as for the Queen, re-watch the scene after she gets blown out of the airlock. That's called "stop motion," and it's really BAD stop motion at that.

pardon: WEYLAND-Yutani, for the beards.

MY BEARD IS A FACEHUGGER

*****