Joe Karlosi wrote:
kinggirlfriend wrote:
How is that more realistic? And who watches these movies for realism?
I found it refreshingly and brutally realistic. Innocent children die all the time in tragedies, very sadly. I was not prepared for it when I watched ALIEN 3 in the theater, and it's strong and upsetting because nobody else was prepared for it either, and nobody expected it. They didn't expect it because Hollywood is always afraid to kill off child characters and almost always cops out. And then to actually go forth with a rather gruesome autopsy sequence on Newt is all the more horrific, and aren't we also going to these movies to be horrified? Well, it worked for me.

As for "realism", come on. There are still elements within fantastic horror movies which can benefit from some added realism when possible.
It's realistic for Hicks and Newt to die in the pod crash, but it's bad storytelling. Random chance didn't force the writer's hand into having to kill off two major characters randomly at the beginning of the movie -- that was a choice. And in the view of most of the audience, it was a poor one.