Hey Bland, all good points. And, yes, the foreshadowing is there and reasonably well done. I still think it a bit of genius that final battle was mother with child against mother with children. To my senses, that is what elevated the entire story and made it more engaging than, for example, Alien. The storytelling and movie making was as good in that movie — and probably even more suspenseful — but it was ultimately just another extended battle we have seen a thousand times before from American westerns to cops and robbers.

My favorite example of foreshadowing, in fact, is Aliens. Yes, there’s a battle at the end where Ripley dons the powerloader and starts trading blows with Xenoqueen. But to do that, Cameron establishes there are powerloaders on the ship (that scene where Ripley complains she’s feeling useless, and the Sarge asks her what can she do), and even before that, we have an off-handed comment that the only job she could find on Gateway Station was as a powerloader operator.

It’s not very honking foreshadowing, but it’s very thorough: she knows how, and she has the things around. I agree it’s a minor thing, but it just speaks to how well put together the story is.

And to hear, Cameron basically wrote the script for it in a month. Yeah, I imagine there may have been rewrites and whatnot (and at least one scenery adlib 😉 ), but still. Very good job from him. Also, it’s certain that he’s a master of tropes. I have to relisten to the commentary on my DVD, but AFAIR the Newt subplot was put in early in the drafting process, precisely because Cameron wanted some of that visceral punch you describe here. One can blame action films for being formulaic, but when a master uses the formula, excellent things happen.

Cheers.