Lol Your gripes are funny as eff, in particular the one about freezing Bishop. That is hilarious.

I'm with you on the movie. Best in the franchise, no question.

Ridley Scott's movie was a typical jump scare horror movie, set in space, with that director's eagle eye and stunning design sensibility setting it apart as a piece of art. What made Scott's movie extra deep was the creepy way he assigned feminine qualities to the alien, with all those orifices everywhere, leading through the alien ship, with all those aggressive eggs, and a creature that swallowed men like a giant vagina. It's like he took the fear of women that teenage boys feel and made it so real it could kill ya. Of course it took a woman to beat a woman.

Where Scott's movie was about feminity, Cameron's movie is more about men. Sure, he continues the feminist trope of a protagonist whose great ideas are always dismissed because she's only a woman, but Cameron's new focus is on different kinds of masculinity.

Cameron sets up the shit show as a replay of the Vietnam war, with copious macho phallic weapons being waved around in an alien terrain where their effectiveness is neutralized by the aliens' superior knowledge of the battleground.

In the movie Jaws, Spielberg had shown how three different types of men could unite to battle a shark. Cameron instead shows how three different types of men work against each other.

The rapacious Paul Reiser wants to exploit the alien power and is willing to murder his own men to achieve that; the macho posturing Bill Paxton revels in his weapons like they are his dick, but when it gets chopped off, his true cowardice reveals itself, as he yells: "Get us out of here!" As well as the classic ultimate defeatist declaration of his inner pussy: "Game over man!"

And then there's the third type of man, Michael Biehn, like his character from Terminator, a man of few words, bold action and total respect for women, both for Ripley and the alien Queen herself.

He is the one willing to team up with a good woman (Ripley) to dispatch a bad one (the alien queen Ripley refers to as the "bitch").

So Cameron's movie reworks the creepy femininity of Scott's film to have a male-female partnership of equals destroy it, but he also gets to satirize the foolish bravado of the asymmetric warfare of the Vietnam conflict, and he does all this in the context of an all action all the time thrillfest that you just can't stop watching.

One of the best sci-fi actioners of all time, no doubt! :)