Eclectic Dreck said:
I have a number of problems with the film. First, in the broad sense, the movie sought to serve two aims: explore the idea we were created by something-other-than-god, and set up the prequel to the Alien franchise. In my estimation, it scores poorly on both. The engineer theory was intriguing and what most of the movie was based around exploring. Yet other than simply asserting (with no real evidence given I might add) that people were designed by aliens, what did they do? They didn't answer why we were made. They didn't answer why the engineers wanted to destroy us. Simply waving a hand in the direction of an idea is not an exploration nor is it suitable to drive a plot with. The Alien prequel didn't really work either. The Xenomorphs came from somewhere. Then we see that they were designed to kill us. That doesn't describe a monster, it describes a weapon and in a movie supposedly paying homage to a classic of space horror, reducing your monsters to something no more frightening than a bomb is an enormous misstep.
Beyond that, there were other less important issues largely related to character motivation. As I observed (and can recall) these are:
1) Does it not seem odd that within minutes of arriving at a point of light 34 light years from earth the cast is able to locate a small patch of land totaling a few square kilometers when there is nothing terribly notable about this space from a distance of more than a few miles?
2) Why does the security team discard their weapons when the cast is about to set foot on an alien planet which could be teeming with hostile life? There is no reasonable cause for them to do something so bafflingly stupid.
3) In a world of autonomous drones, why don't they simply map the ruin before running inside.
4) Why does the leading man take off his helmet when they encounter an inexplicable pocket of breathable air? Seems like they should determine what's keeping that pocket in place before risking suffocation.
5) How does the guy making the map get lost when he has a very high tech map?
6) How come no one noticed anything amiss about the two missing people until the second act? I mean, it isn't as though they popped over to a coffee shop.
7) When a storm is coming and perfectly acceptable cover is available, why do you engage in a high speed run across open ground rather than wait in aforementioned perfectly acceptable cover?
8) Why didn't anyone ever question where the Android was wandering off to? Or ask any question ever about what the hell he was doing at any given moment?
9) After retrieving an alien head, what possible purpose is served trying to revive it?
10) Why did the android infect the male lead?
11) Why was the android so interested in the alien embryo when neither his "father", nor the corporate woman seemed interested in the same?
12) Why did the medical staff try to put the female doctor into cryo rather than use the perfectly functional surgical apparatus? That demand didn't come from the corporate woman as she was quite content to not let anything resembling an alien on the ship. It also didn't come from the head of the corporation since only two parties on the ship knew he was present and one of them wasn't in a position of authority.
13) Why did no one even comment on the major surgery undertaken by the female lead?
14) Why did the crew open the door for a missing man with a breached suit when just prior to this the corporate female torched the leading man?
15) Why did the remaining crew of the ship immediately accept they'd need to kamikaze the alien ship when the demand was made by a woman clearly not in her right mind?
16) Why did the android offer to help when it seemed to spend the movie undermining every action undertaken by the humans?
In general, the movie can be enjoyed I suppose but it is a textbook case of fridge logic. While you watch, it seems reasonable enough until you pause for a moment to consider any of a number of things. Tugging at a thread reveals the movie is not whole cloth - it is simply a pile of yarn arranged in a pleasing pattern.
Calibanbutcher said:
1. They were flying over the planet. You rather the film spent more than ten hours of them scanning the terrain? And they found it because "God does not create straight lines", indicating that the formations regularity gave it away as alien-made.
Some indication that they performed such a scan would be useful to demonstrate that they were not guided by providence alone.
Calibanbutcher said:
2.Yes, that was stupid, but since "the doctors" called the shots due to being granted autority by the old guy, not following their orders could have resulted in the security team being fired.
The corporate woman demonstrated she was in charge immediately and thus could have overturned such an order but she did not do so in spite of otherwise demonstrating the only shred of prudence seen by the crew.
Calibanbutcher said:
3.Curiosity? I mean, we have autonomous robots and yet it's still humans that explore the world.
Mostly.
34 light years from home with rescue at least two years out is sufficient cause for prudence. The humans can explore once they have a map to guide them. Having the power to map first is a notable advancement not available during the great ages of exploration.
Calibanbutcher said:
4.Human curiosity. He had the chance to breathe actual air on an alien planet and it made sense for him, since the main driving force of his character seemed to be curiosity and the lust for discovering the unknown. And the old woman already said the air is cleaner than the air on earth.
Cleanliness is not my concern. At that point it was a curiosity that the air was breathable. With no known mechanism for this nor any indication of how far this breathable pocket extends, removing one's helmet is
staggeringly stupid.
Calibanbutcher said:
6. They probably were to busy fleeing from that bitchin storm behind them to count anything.
There were plenty of moments to miss that. Not having them report in, not having them arrive back at the ship, etc. Are we to believe a trillion dollars was risked on a venture where simple matters of keeping track of 18 people is a seemingly impossible task? That they did not have any established procedures for coming and going?
Calibanbutcher said:
7. Because in the perfectly adequate cover there was no hot cocoa? Hell, I dunno?
Maybe because there were tons of alien corpses there, which, whilst not endangering the structural integrity of the place, do not make for good company.
A demonstrated predilection for returning to the place indicates they did not much mind the corpses. Prudence suggests staying put is the correct course unless there is some dire reason to risk the run. The movie gave no evidence of any such reason.
Calibanbutcher said:
8. Everyone kinda assumed that he followed orders given to him by either the old guy or Theron's character. And Theron's character did question what he did, which is why she used his suit's cameras to spy on him. Until he turned them off.
See the previous points about the whole expedition being beyond the reach of aid, money spent, and how baffling it would be that such things were not under clear control or authority.
Calibanbutcher said:
9. I don't think they were trying to revive it, they simply tried to stimulate the nerves in order to get a better grasp on it's physiology. The revival was an unforeseen side-effect.
Given the head was ancient, any reasonable scientist would not resort to something so stupid to try to gain this information. Unless somehow utterly free of various microorganisms, the odds of the head having any soft tissue left are slim. Factor in various chemical processes that can occur and you'll find that "hooking up a skull to electricity to see what happens" ranks right up there with "set the skull on fire to see what happens" in terms of usefulness of finding out anything about physiology.
Calibanbutcher said:
10. He asked the male lead what he would be willing to give for a chance to get closer to his creators. The male lead said "everything", so the android gave him some of the stuff he found in the ship which he thought might have had something to do with the creation of all humans.
A ship full of scientific implements (and scientists to use them) and he goes straight for "drink the black goo"? If his aim is to discover, his method isn't terribly useful or rigorous.
Calibanbutcher said:
11. Because this embryo would have been the offspring of a human infected with an alien bio-weapon, something only he knew, and apparently he liked the idea of conducting some more experiments.
First, determining that first bit was never shown nor hinted at. Second, the android experiments in much the same way that a child plays with fire. Third, the android did not show preference for science or experimentation. Finally, while he clearly followed an agenda but that agenda is
baffling.
Calibanbutcher said:
12. The surgical apparatus was not configured for female patients and also meant for being used by the old dude and no-one else, which is why she basically had to break in there, manually tell the machine to "extract a foreign body".
One woman under stress and coming out of sedation came up with that plan in minutes. A ship full of doctors and other presumably intelligent people could have at least considered it.
Calibanbutcher said:
13. The android did. And the rest just did not care, for they were going to meet the "engineers", which outranks "oh, you just had major surgery?".
In a scenario where you're going to meet a race that is fairly obviously hostile, why would you bring a badly injured person? Even if you don't care about them their presence would only serve to hinder your own odds of survival should things go poorly.
Calibanbutcher said:
14. Hell if I know. Maybe they thought he was ok?
They had recently seen clear evidence that he was not given that he was apparently dead and maimed the last they saw him.
Calibanbutcher said:
15. Because it was the black guy who first deducted the purpose of the black stuff found inside the complex? Which, coupled with the new information that the ship had set course for earth, meant that now a ship loaded to the brim with an extremely dangerous bio-weapon was heading for earth, which he, as stated before, would never allow to happen.
The other crew-members were given the opportunity to abandon the ship but they decided to stick with the guy. Out of loyalt or respect or whatever, but clearly they trusted his judgement enough to be willing to give their lives for this.
A judgement based upon bad things happening to people who spent the entire movie being
willfully and
dangerously stupid. A judgement based upon the testimony of a woman who spent as much time as possible being willfully and dangerously stupid.
I mean, follow the logic. Something killed one crew member and infected another. With no evidence, they surmise the black goo was responsible for the illness and thus determine the ship is armed with weapons of mass destruction. Later a nigh indestructible zombie kills the entire security team without explanation. Finally, the ship is taking off using technology that literally only one character understands to any degree and they somehow determine the ship is headed to earth hundreds of years late.
Every single step there requires an enormous leap in logic that, while correct, is fairly absurd in the abstract. They performed no testing on the black goo and think it responsible for the illness. They have no evidence of what caused geologist to become a near unstoppable killing machine but they assume malice on the part of the engineers. They have almost no understanding of the technology in play but at a glance they determine the destination of the ship is earth. With no known reason for doing so beyond
incredibly flimsy evidence, they assume that this engineer is part of a race responsible for creating people (when alternate plausible explanations would meet the data), that they designed a weapon to kill people (a fact derived from zero actual information), that this ship is designed to deliver that weapon (no demonstrated armaments at any point), that the target of the ship was earth (a factoid only one character had any cause to be aware of and at the moment of discovery he wasn't saying much having been recently decapitated), and that after a delay of
centuries, this lone engineer was so dedicated to this cause that he was going to do the genocide
himself.
All of that may be true. Given what the characters actually knew, many of the above conclusions are
absolutely insane.
Calibanbutcher said:
16. Help?
As in:
He had his head ripped off and was unable to move and he decided to get Elizabeth to safety so she could maybe reattach his body?
The android never once demonstrated any real instinct of self-preservation and indeed actively goaded various confrontations.
Calibanbutcher said:
Maybe because otherwise he would have had to spend eternity as a head on an alien planet without company?
As was demonstrated in a previous film, a more advanced android (Bishop) suffers a less sever injury (he is cut in half at the waist) and later is decapitated in a crash which results in him shutting down until Ripley manually reactivates him. In short, it wouldn't be an eternity. It probably wouldn't even be years before he powered down.
Calibanbutcher said:
Maybe because he felt pity for the humans, because clearly their creators were even less benevolent than his own?
Given he repeatedly demonstrates an inability to empathize or even consider something emotionally this seems flimsy.
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