The Alien/Predator/Aliens vs. Predator Thread

[Seto Kaiba]

33 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:

There's many variations of fear, terror, scary and etc, which also depends on what switch it hits on a individual bases. 

True, but when your monster can be taken down by the simple expedient of bullets... well... it's not so scary anymore.

 

33 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:

I get what you saying considering how the game unfolded, but IMO games shouldn't be official prequels/sequels to movies/series. 

Looking at the alternatives, I think I'll take the game. 

 

[cksh]

11 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

That's why I cut off at Aliens.
As far as I'm concerned:

  Reveal hidden contents

Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop all made it back to Earth. Hicks recovered, Bishop was rebuilt and Ripley adopted Newt, Ripley continued a relationship with Hicks, and the three went into business for themselves.

Basically, they all earned a happy ending and also trust each other enough to be family at this point.

BTW:

  Reveal hidden contents

Who wants to see a face hugger vs Scorpion (Mortal Kombat)?

 

There was an alien book I read way back that I didn't know much about at the time but read like it was an aliens sequel with the names changed.  I could tell the characters were based on ripley, hicks and newt. From what I hear is that alien 3 came out and the author had to change the names as the story was obviously completely different 

[Thom]

29 minutes ago, cksh said:

There was an alien book I read way back that I didn't know much about at the time but read like it was an aliens sequel with the names changed.  I could tell the characters were based on ripley, hicks and newt. From what I hear is that alien 3 came out and the author had to change the names as the story was obviously completely different 

Now I want to know what that was.

Never mind, found it. Alien 3 by William Gibson.

Edited July 15 by Thom

[Seto Kaiba]

9 minutes ago, Thom said:

Now I want to know what that was.

Never mind, found it. Alien 3 by William Gibson.

The one subtitled "The unproduced screenplay"?

Because I am now very curious.  If so, the book in question's available in ebook form on Play Books...

Edited July 15 by Seto Kaiba

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

True, but when your monster can be taken down by the simple expedient of bullets... well... it's not so scary anymore.

 

LOTS of bullets in most cases, and you have to be very careful that they are far away when you shoot them due to the acid blood.

The reality is that all the horror reveal had been done in the first movie, the second movie could have just been more of the same or something different.  Luckily they pivoted from horror to an action movie. 

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

LOTS of bullets in most cases, and you have to be very careful that they are far away when you shoot them due to the acid blood.

Debatable... it seems to take a lot of bullets to actually hit one, but the Marines in Aliens definitely seem to be a sloppy and unprofessional unit to say the least.

 

4 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

The reality is that all the horror reveal had been done in the first movie, the second movie could have just been more of the same or something different.  Luckily they pivoted from horror to an action movie. 

There are plenty of horror franchises that are able to keep the horror going beyond the first film with the same monster.

Alien: Isolation is my go-to proof that it's still perfectly possible to make the monster pants-soilingly terrifying and paranoia-inducing even today... well after two dreadful sequels and two dreadful prequels and decades of audience exposure to the xenomorph itself.

Alien and Alien: Isolation derive a lot of their horror factor from the same source as Jaws: the tension invoked by how little you see the monster.  You know that it's out there.  You know that it's hunting.  But you don't know where it is and you can't see it coming until it's too late.  That's what makes it scary: not knowing.

Modern horror movies so often completely fail to do monster horror correctly becuase they're so determined to show us how detailed and gross their latest squidgy monster is in all its CG-rendered glory as often as possible.  No matter how physically horrible the monster is, if you can see the bastard coming a long way off its ability to frighten diminishes considerably because it is known.  You can, to an extent, compensate for that by making the monster an Implacable Man (e.g. Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees) but it's still less scary than when they pop out of the woodwork and get right to business.  When your monster jumps out of a window or ventilation duct or whatever and has to stop and take ten seconds to display its mutilated glory to the audience before getting down to work, it can only really startle because it makes itself known before attacking.

Aliens hadn't completely forgotten that lesson (e.g. the attack in the reactor complex near the start) but Alien 3 and Resurrection lost that knowledge and so the xenomorphs there couldn't build tension effectively.

I'm sorry, this wasn't supposed to turn into a lecture... but I'm pretty passionate about that lost school of subtle horror. 

[Thom]

44 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The one subtitled "The unproduced screenplay"?

Because I am now very curious.  If so, the book in question's available in ebook form on Play Books...

Yes, that's the one. Apparently it is all Hicks and Bishop with almost no Ripley or Newt. Darn.

[Seto Kaiba]

Just now, Thom said:

Yes, that's the one. Apparently it is all Hicks and Bishop with almost no Ripley or Newt. Darn.

Fascinating.  I'm going to give that a read.

Thank you! 😀

[pengbuzz]

One question: with all the acid blood the Xenomorphs have, did anyone think to bring or use this:

 

Spoiler

 

[Big s]

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

One question: with all the acid blood the Xenomorphs have, did anyone think to bring or use this:

 

  Hide contents

 

Yeah, but it give xenomorphs horrible gas

[Dynaman]

19 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Debatable... it seems to take a lot of bullets to actually hit one, but the Marines in Aliens definitely seem to be a sloppy and unprofessional unit to say the least.

There are plenty of horror franchises that are able to keep the horror going beyond the first film with the same monster.

Aliens hadn't completely forgotten that lesson (e.g. the attack in the reactor complex near the start) but Alien 3 and Resurrection lost that knowledge and so the xenomorphs there couldn't build tension effectively.

I'm sorry, this wasn't supposed to turn into a lecture... but I'm pretty passionate about that lost school of subtle horror. 

A few (precious few) good sequels does not negate the fact that most are crap or try to amp things up to make up for the fact that the big reveal already happen.  

The reactor sequence was the worst bit of Aliens too - when they fell for a whole batch of stupid plot holes.  Any half trained idiot (Gorman) would have recalled the troops to arm them with weapons they could actually use.

So I stick with Aliens going with as an action film instead of horror sequel was the best move.  Then again I wish more franchises would try switching things up like that.

[Thom]

1 hour ago, Dynaman said:

A few (precious few) good sequels does not negate the fact that most are crap or try to amp things up to make up for the fact that the big reveal already happen.  

The reactor sequence was the worst bit of Aliens too - when they fell for a whole batch of stupid plot holes.  Any half trained idiot (Gorman) would have recalled the troops to arm them with weapons they could actually use.

So I stick with Aliens going with as an action film instead of horror sequel was the best move.  Then again I wish more franchises would try switching things up like that.

I do like Aliens better than Alien for that reason. I'm more an action fan than horror fan, though today it's not so much horror anymore as suspense.

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Dynaman said:

So I stick with Aliens going with as an action film instead of horror sequel was the best move.  Then again I wish more franchises would try switching things up like that.

I guess there’s also the Pitch Black franchise 

[Dynaman]

2 hours ago, Big s said:

I guess there’s also the Pitch Black franchise 

Well, that would be an argument for sticking with the original formula.  Though the sequel wasn't terrible it wasn't all that good either.  They did try something different though!

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Dynaman said:

So I stick with Aliens going with as an action film instead of horror sequel was the best move.  Then again I wish more franchises would try switching things up like that.

The problem with switching genres like that is that you can't easily switch back once you've made the jump from horror to action.

That's the reason that Alien and Terminator have struggled so much as franchises.  They're known for that first iconic sci-fi horror installment that made them pop culture icons... but they both went for an action-centric first sequel that robbed the signature monster driving the story of most of its ability to invoke fear.  So what followed was a string of poor quality and increasingly campy action movies trying to cash in on the original's reputation and doing worse each time until they hit legitimate commercial failure.  If the franchise survives, they try pivoting back towards the original's horror... but with the significant disadvantage of all the reputational damage they've done to the monster with all the action-centric sequels.

A supremely good writer and director can overcome that obstacle and make the monster scary again (e.g. Alien: Isolation), but it's far more likely it'll just end up another flop.

Based on people's reactions here, it seems reasonably common that folks think switching to action got them exactly one good movie and a whole lotta schlock after.

[Big s]

56 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The problem with switching genres like that is that you can't easily switch back once you've made the jump from horror to action.

That's the reason that Alien and Terminator have struggled so much as franchises.  They're known for that first iconic sci-fi horror installment that made them pop culture icons... but they both went for an action-centric first sequel that robbed the signature monster driving the story of most of its ability to invoke fear.  So what followed was a string of poor quality and increasingly campy action movies trying to cash in on the original's reputation and doing worse each time until they hit legitimate commercial failure.  If the franchise survives, they try pivoting back towards the original's horror... but with the significant disadvantage of all the reputational damage they've done to the monster with all the action-centric sequels.

A supremely good writer and director can overcome that obstacle and make the monster scary again (e.g. Alien: Isolation), but it's far more likely it'll just end up another flop.

Based on people's reactions here, it seems reasonably common that folks think switching to action got them exactly one good movie and a whole lotta schlock after.

It’s one of those odd problems where horror movie after horror movie usually doesn’t work either. It’s tough to make a tied in sequel that makes sense without being more of just a copy of the original formula.

I think that the idea is great to change up genres if the main character survives the first film. But as you said, it takes a really great writer to really pull off that kind of transition. And we rarely get any franchises that pull through after the first sequel.
I love Mad Max and having the first film as a revenge story and the next an odd survival action film, but then the third movie was more of a sequel to the sequel and definitely wasn’t as strong of a film. I do still like Thunderdome a lot more than Terminator 3 or Alien 3 or whatever Aliens vs Predator was. They basically already took everything away from him in the first and second movies, the third one his car was already barely moving.  An idea like that would work far better as a series rather than just a trilogy of movies trying to change the formula.

[Seto Kaiba]

8 minutes ago, Big s said:

It’s one of those odd problems where horror movie after horror movie usually doesn’t work either. It’s tough to make a tied in sequel that makes sense without being more of just a copy of the original formula.

Writing good horror is a difficult proposition, sure.  It requires a substantial grasp of subtlety, nuance, and pacing to really get into the audience's heads to build and release tension in order to ensure a palpable sense of menace throughout.

Horror movie after horror movie can work if you have very good writers... or if you're working a more forgiving and campy horror subgenre like slashers or splatter flicks where the sheer personality of your villain can carry an otherwise weak story (e.g. Nightmare on Elm Street).  It's hard, but it's more rewarding in the long run than the quick burnout that you get by cheapening the monster with an action movie transition.  Once "just shoot it" is a valid option, you're left fumbling for ways to make the monster threatening again.

[Thom]

A lot of these are really, one-and-done kind of things. You can only do Alien once. I think even keeping it in horror and not action, they still would have hit the 'Already Done This' wall of diminishing returns pretty quickly, making it something ripe for the simpler jump-scare format. That's why I think changing it to action upended expectations (in a good way), as half of the horror/suspense was not even really knowing what the monster looked like. The sequel refreshed it and took the story along a new, and expected course. If Alien was the into, then Aliens was getting the full picture and seeing how tough they were. If this was following a standard story-arc then the third should have been the heroes getting the upper hand against the Xenomorphs, as in winning and not just surviving. A3 went back to the original format however, rather than following through, and basically just redid the original story. Everything after that was just picking up the franchise-crumbs and trying to make another whole slice of cake out of it. Wasn't going to work.

That's why I ignore any of the movies after Aliens. Not only are they not as good, and in most cases just more muddling, the first two were complete and fulfilling, and we (I) really didn't need anymore.

[pengbuzz]

16 minutes ago, Thom said:

A lot of these are really, one-and-done kind of things. You can only do Alien once. I think even keeping it in horror and not action, they still would have hit the 'Already Done This' wall of diminishing returns pretty quickly, making it something ripe for the simpler jump-scare format. That's why I think changing it to action upended expectations (in a good way), as half of the horror/suspense was not even really knowing what the monster looked like. The sequel refreshed it and took the story along a new, and expected course. If Alien was the into, then Aliens was getting the full picture and seeing how tough they were. If this was following a standard story-arc then the third should have been the heroes getting the upper hand against the Xenomorphs, as in winning and not just surviving. A3 went back to the original format however, rather than following through, and basically just redid the original story. Everything after that was just picking up the franchise-crumbs and trying to make another whole slice of cake out of it. Wasn't going to work.

That's why I ignore any of the movies after Aliens. Not only are they not as good, and in most cases just more muddling, the first two were complete and fulfilling, and we (I) really didn't need anymore.

That's why I voted for a "happy ending" to Aliens; there's really no point in trying for a sequel after that. Same with T2: that should have been the end of the franchise.

[Thom]

9 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

That's why I voted for a "happy ending" to Aliens; there's really no point in trying for a sequel after that. Same with T2: that should have been the end of the franchise.

It always is the end of the franchise, until those without original ideas are in want of more money...😜

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Thom said:

then Aliens was getting the full picture and seeing how tough they were.

Unfortunately it kinda showed how tough they weren’t. They dropped like flies. I still love the movie greatly, but it would’ve been interesting to see them being a bit smarter than just try to win by extremely overwhelming numbers. Still an awesome movie though, just a bit of a little nitpick

[electric indigo]

If you just open a random Giger artbook, you see enough fuel for where the Aline franchise could have gone. Prometheus was good in the very basic concept (explore unknown world and encounter all types of horror) but the execution ultimately failed.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Thom said:

A lot of these are really, one-and-done kind of things. You can only do Alien once. I think even keeping it in horror and not action, they still would have hit the 'Already Done This' wall of diminishing returns pretty quickly, making it something ripe for the simpler jump-scare format.

The Law of Diminishing Returns says that, no matter what you do or how well you do it, you will hit that wall at some point as long as you keep doing it.

Looking back at the chaos that ensued when Alien 3 was being developed, I think it's safe to say that the newborn Alien franchise hit that wall more or less immediately once they pivoted from horror to action.  They had an absolutely miserable time finding a workable concept for a third film in no small part because the previous film kneecapped the titular monster so badly and left them no room to build.  Ripley may be the protagonist, but it's undeniably the xenomorph most people are coming to theaters to see.  Prometheus went and proved that point beyond dispute.

Pivoting from horror to action got them one good movie, and ruined the prospects of everything that came after.  They tried to go back to horror despite the handicap of Aliens as their starting point and failed.  They tried to do another action movie spinning off the premise of Aliens and failed.  They tried to do away with the xenomorph entirely and shift to monsters of an entirely different sort with a soft reboot in Prometheus and general audiences said "Where's my xenomorph?" and it failed.  

Romulus seems set to be horror soft reboot attempt No.3... which just shows, IMO, that as enjoyable as Aliens was as a summer action movie it isn't evocative of what audiences actually want from Alien.  They're here for Scary Monsters, and I don't mean David Bowie... though he'd have been a hell of a choice to play a synth.

 

47 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

That's why I voted for a "happy ending" to Aliens; there's really no point in trying for a sequel after that. Same with T2: that should have been the end of the franchise.

If only they'd let it die there, but once it's a franchise there will always be someone ready to head into the graveyard with a shovel ready to do an unboxing in search of more money.

[Thom]

7 hours ago, Big s said:

Unfortunately it kinda showed how tough they weren’t. They dropped like flies. I still love the movie greatly, but it would’ve been interesting to see them being a bit smarter than just try to win by extremely overwhelming numbers. Still an awesome movie though, just a bit of a little nitpick

Actually, they did show their smarts, first by taking out the power and then by using crawl spaces to get around the doors. The first shows more intelligence than the others, obviously, but it shows problem solving skills. And, true about the first point, though it did take heavy armament to take them out. Pop guns seemed to show no real effect.

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Law of Diminishing Returns says that, no matter what you do or how well you do it, you will hit that wall at some point as long as you keep doing it.

Looking back at the chaos that ensued when Alien 3 was being developed, I think it's safe to say that the newborn Alien franchise hit that wall more or less immediately once they pivoted from horror to action.  They had an absolutely miserable time finding a workable concept for a third film in no small part because the previous film kneecapped the titular monster so badly and left them no room to build.  Ripley may be the protagonist, but it's undeniably the xenomorph most people are coming to theaters to see.  Prometheus went and proved that point beyond dispute.

Pivoting from horror to action got them one good movie, and ruined the prospects of everything that came after.  They tried to go back to horror despite the handicap of Aliens as their starting point and failed.  They tried to do another action movie spinning off the premise of Aliens and failed.  They tried to do away with the xenomorph entirely and shift to monsters of an entirely different sort with a soft reboot in Prometheus and general audiences said "Where's my xenomorph?" and it failed.  

Romulus seems set to be horror soft reboot attempt No.3... which just shows, IMO, that as enjoyable as Aliens was as a summer action movie it isn't evocative of what audiences actually want from Alien.  They're here for Scary Monsters, and I don't mean David Bowie... though he'd have been a hell of a choice to play a synth.

 

If only they'd let it die there, but once it's a franchise there will always be someone ready to head into the graveyard with a shovel ready to do an unboxing in search of more money.

Aliens was, and is, an extremely popular movie. And as any movie should, it concerned itself with only itself rather than setting up a franchise, which I don't think was even being thought of at the time. Nowadays, we are all about the franchise and having dozens of sequels, but this was the mid-80's. They did a smart pivot away from horror, esp since the alien was now seen, and gave us a rip-roaring actioner that delivered.

The third movie failed, IMO, because it killed off every one. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want to watch a movie where my hero dies.

[electric indigo]

In the still, the "asteroid" looks indeed like an alien artefact...

 

[Seto Kaiba]

17 hours ago, Thom said:

Actually, they did show their smarts, first by taking out the power and then by using crawl spaces to get around the doors. The first shows more intelligence than the others, obviously, but it shows problem solving skills. And, true about the first point, though it did take heavy armament to take them out. Pop guns seemed to show no real effect.

Not that heavy... the rifles we see the Marines use are, according to the film's dialog, 10mm (.40 caliber) rifles firing light armor piercing rounds with explosive tips.  That's not a fantastically heavy load by any stretch of the imagination.  The smart guns supposedly use the same 10x28mm caseless ammunition too.  We also see Hicks kill at least one of the xenomorphs with an ordinary 12 gauge shotgun.  The only weapon in the movie that's ever shown to be ineffective is the Vasquez's pistol, which isn't discussed in the story itself but the prop is a S&W Model 39 in 9x19mm.

 

17 hours ago, Thom said:

Aliens was, and is, an extremely popular movie. And as any movie should, it concerned itself with only itself rather than setting up a franchise, which I don't think was even being thought of at the time. Nowadays, we are all about the franchise and having dozens of sequels, but this was the mid-80's. They did a smart pivot away from horror, esp since the alien was now seen, and gave us a rip-roaring actioner that delivered.

Aliens definitely did not focus on setting up sequels, though the idea of successful horror movies becoming sequel factories was already well established and in practice when it was being written never mind filmed.  Friday the 13th was a poster child for it, having run out an original movie and four sequels before Aliens hit theaters.

Not to mention it's a matter of legal record that Brandywine Productions was pushing for a franchise basically right after they saw the box office performance of Alien.  The main thing holding up the development of that franchise-starting sequel was Fox being a complete and total dick about it.  (They tried to pass the first film's success off as a fluke and were sued for trying to cheat Brandywine out of profits from the film through creating accounting practices.)  Aliens did well on its own, but it strangled the franchise in the crib in doing so.

 

17 hours ago, Thom said:

The third movie failed, IMO, because it killed off every one. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want to watch a movie where my hero dies.

It's horror, that's pretty normal as outcomes go.  

The critics generally held that the problem with 3 was just its weak writing... it was a troubled production that went through a bunch of revisions and concepts trying to find a place for the story to go as an action story after Aliens before concluding it was a bad job and pivoting back to horror.

 

2 hours ago, electric indigo said:

In the still, the "asteroid" looks indeed like an alien artefact...

Well, we couldn't very well go back to LV-426 again... so I guess the Engineers are just as irresponsible as the ancient Protoculture, the Forerunners, or any other ancient alien species now.

[Thom]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not that heavy... the rifles we see the Marines use are, according to the film's dialog, 10mm (.40 caliber) rifles firing light armor piercing rounds with explosive tips.  That's not a fantastically heavy load by any stretch of the imagination.  The smart guns supposedly use the same 10x28mm caseless ammunition too.  We also see Hicks kill at least one of the xenomorphs with an ordinary 12 gauge shotgun.  The only weapon in the movie that's ever shown to be ineffective is the Vasquez's pistol, which isn't discussed in the story itself but the prop is a S&W Model 39 in 9x19mm.

A shot gun is a devastating weapon at close range, where we see it used and, as you point out, the Marine rifles were using explosive tipped rounds, so pretty much firing tiny bombs into a body. Vasqueze's pistol wasn't, so it didn't do much damage. IMO, anything firing explosive rounds could be termed as heavy.

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Aliens definitely did not focus on setting up sequels, though the idea of successful horror movies becoming sequel factories was already well established and in practice when it was being written never mind filmed.  Friday the 13th was a poster child for it, having run out an original movie and four sequels before Aliens hit theaters.

Not to mention it's a matter of legal record that Brandywine Productions was pushing for a franchise basically right after they saw the box office performance of Alien.  The main thing holding up the development of that franchise-starting sequel was Fox being a complete and total dick about it.  (They tried to pass the first film's success off as a fluke and were sued for trying to cheat Brandywine out of profits from the film through creating accounting practices.)  Aliens did well on its own, but it strangled the franchise in the crib in doing so.

I bow to your superior knowledge!

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's horror, that's pretty normal as outcomes go.  

The critics generally held that the problem with 3 was just its weak writing... it was a troubled production that went through a bunch of revisions and concepts trying to find a place for the story to go as an action story after Aliens before concluding it was a bad job and pivoting back to horror.

Which is one of the reasons that I don't like horror. I like the ending of Aliens more because there was more than one survivor - which was then totally screwed up in the beginning of the third, IMO.

[electric indigo]

Romulus' biggest question answered:

Spoiler

 

 

[Big s]

16 minutes ago, electric indigo said:

Romulus' biggest question answered:

  Hide contents

 

 

It’s a giant plastic greasy dingus

[sh9000]

Final trailer.

[Seto Kaiba]

On 7/17/2024 at 2:10 PM, Thom said:

A shot gun is a devastating weapon at close range, where we see it used and, as you point out, the Marine rifles were using explosive tipped rounds, so pretty much firing tiny bombs into a body. Vasqueze's pistol wasn't, so it didn't do much damage. IMO, anything firing explosive rounds could be termed as heavy.

It is, but only against soft targets.  Buckshot doesn't actually have much penetration power because it's typically rather soft lead pellets.  It doesn't work very well against body armor even at short ranges.

Also, explosive-tipped rounds don't explode inside the target.  They explode against the hard surface of a target to break up armor and allow a smaller penetrator inside the bullet to continue deeper in.  Normally that kind of ammunition is for antimateriel use, and most living beings wouldn't present a hard-enough first surface to actually set of the explosive via the incendiary primer.

 

On 7/17/2024 at 2:10 PM, Thom said:

Which is one of the reasons that I don't like horror. I like the ending of Aliens more because there was more than one survivor - which was then totally screwed up in the beginning of the third, IMO.

From what we've seen in the trailers, I wouldn't count on too many folks surviving this new one either... they seem want to continue pivoting back towards horror.

 

1 hour ago, sh9000 said:

Final trailer.

Hmmm... not thrilling to that trailer, esp. since there are bits that look lifted from Covenant like the row of facehuggers in gel that looks like the embryo storage from Covenant's titular ship.

[Dynaman]

51 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Also, explosive-tipped rounds don't explode inside the target.  They explode against the hard surface of a target to break up armor and allow a smaller penetrator inside the bullet to continue deeper in.  Normally that kind of ammunition is for antimateriel use, and most living beings wouldn't present a hard-enough first surface to actually set of the explosive via the incendiary primer.

 

It's Hollywood, Explosive Tipped Caseless sounds better then caseless discarding sabot.  A 10mm explosive round is really kinda pointless if HEAT and probably more pointless as regular old HE.  They also never say what the ammo was supposed to made to fight, other people in Cuirass would need penetrating power, against nasty creatures with bone like armor not so much.

[Thom]

35 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It is, but only against soft targets.  Buckshot doesn't actually have much penetration power because it's typically rather soft lead pellets.  It doesn't work very well against body armor even at short ranges.

Also, explosive-tipped rounds don't explode inside the target.  They explode against the hard surface of a target to break up armor and allow a smaller penetrator inside the bullet to continue deeper in.  Normally that kind of ammunition is for antimateriel use, and most living beings wouldn't present a hard-enough first surface to actually set of the explosive via the incendiary primer.

That's assuming he was using soft lead and not something harder. IDK. Though the one time we see the damage it caused was when Hicks put it into a Xeno's mouth. Soft palate. And I'm going to assume the Xeno-physiology is a bit tougher than us fleshy bags of mostly water.😉

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hmmm... not thrilling to that trailer, esp. since there are bits that look lifted from Covenant like the row of facehuggers in gel that looks like the embryo storage from Covenant's titular ship.

I don't mind it, as at this point Alien is more suspense than horror. Horror, to me, is Event Horizon, whereas this is just sci-fi with killer aliens. though I do hope they are moving away from the Prometheu/Covenant stuff. (?)

[electric indigo]

2 hours ago, sh9000 said:

Final trailer

MU/TH/UR 9000

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Thom said:

I don't mind it, as at this point Alien is more suspense than horror. Horror, to me, is Event Horizon, whereas this is just sci-fi with killer aliens. though I do hope they are moving away from the Prometheu/Covenant stuff. (?)

I just want to leave those two painfully mediocre films very far behind where they can be forgotten in peace. 

I respect what Ridley Scott was trying to do. I just wish he'd done a much better job of it.