ray_afraid said:

^There's no accounting for taste. I realized when he first started posing movie ratings that his barometer was screwy and that he's probably quite young. Nothin' wrong with any of that.

I'm sure twenty-six is quite young from a certain point of view. But perhaps I should bring up the fact that I am a fan of older movies, prefer them to newer movies by a very long shot, and that my opinion has nothing to do with "Duh, old movies suck"?

As for why I rated Aliens the way I did ...

I didn't like any of the Marines. They were all asinine douchebags, and I was happy to see them die.

I find it pathetic that a group of Marines -- knowing they're going up a whole goddamn hive of nasty man-killing bugs with acidic blood -- armour themselves in bulletproof vests and helmets only, leaving the rest of their bodies open to damage. I could understand it if this movie were set in the present, but it's set in the far future; am I really supposed to believe that a future civilization capable of building FTL-capable starships can't come up with battlesuits or smart armour?

I don't like how all the mystique and ambiguity of the creature from the original film is taken away by making its species nothing more than giant, stupid ants driven by instinct and nothing more.