I am certain that in Aliens (likely in the director’s cut) she is told that they do not believe her story beacause in all of their exploration of space, they have NEVER encountered alien life, intelligent or otherwise.
Are we limiting ourselves to fictional movies? Because I wish I had a nickel for everyone who claimed Bowling for Columbine was an “anti-gun” movie, or that Fahrenheit 9/11 was disrespectful to the troops.
Or why if he can fly fast enough to go back in time he can’t fly fast enough to catch both missiles.
He didn’t go back and re-enter his body before the missile hit. Once he travelled back in time, there were two simultaneous Supermans; one getting bitched at by Lois, and a slightly younger one saving Hackensack.
In the Corporation meeting at the beginning they ask if they’d ever encountered anything like this, but I take that to mean any predator species like that.
Certainly no one ever seems excited over encountering the first extraterrestrial life, either in Alien or Aliens or any other film in the series. If this was the first encounteer with extraterrestrial life, you’d expect someone to say something like “the first ETs we find, and they try to kill us”. But they don’t. Ash isn’t interested in studyinmg it because it’s alien life, but because it’s a “perfect killer”. when he examines it under the microscope, no one comments about how they’re going to be known for finding the first ETs. All of this is inconceivable if this was, indeed, the first alien life to be found.
For comparison, look at the responses in other films – both versions of The Thing or E.T. or The Day the Earth Stood Still or any other First Encounter flick.
The soldiers are blase because they didn’t expect aliens of any sort to exist? How come nobosdy says “Shit! They really do exist!” If the Company doesn’t believe there are aliens, why pack Ripley along as an “expert”? If there aren’t any aliens, what’s she an expert in? If they never encountered aliens at all, why not ship a xenobiologist?
Another common misperception abou A.I..
I don’t know if this counts, but one misconception that has arisen because of a movie (thanks to Mr. Spielberg) is that Velociraptor stood about 5’-6’ tall. In reality, it was closer to 2’-3’ tall.
And the “bug hunt” vs “stand-up fight” I always took to mean a fight in which the two sides are sneaking around looking for each other and gradually picking one another off (the “bug hunt”) vs. a straight-up conflict in which both sides just have at one another, right out in the open (the “stand-up fight”).
I posted this in another thread a while ago about Superman, I don’t buy the perspective thing.
" I have had people explain the hypothesis that he was simply travelling backward through time and to his perspective the Earth would have seemed reverse, however that doesn’t hold up to the viewed fact. After travelling around the world many times, he stops, however the earth is still rotating in the opposite direction, So it’s not a matter of perception.He turns around and goes the other way to pull the rotation back in the normal direction. The rotation of the Earth is the key."
The reason they’re going out there because the transmitter is out…
Anyways, good to see that Gorman isn’t the only who who mixes up Hudson and Hicks.
-Joe
My theory is that “Velociraptor” is just a way cooler name than “Deinonychus,” not to mention easier to pronounce.
Also it wouldn’t have been quite as terror inspiring to have our heroes stalked by Superchicken.
I’ve read that Aliens was supposed to be influenced by Vietnam. Bug hunt could refer to having to fight an enemy who uses tunnels/ducts and refuses to fight on open ground.
The conversation regarding the Arcturan (Arcturian?) poontang is roughly:
Apone: It’s a rescue mission. We have to rescue some colonists’ daughters from their virginity. [marines chortle]
Frost: Sure could use some more that Arcturan poontang, right? [marines chortle]
Spunkmeyer: Yeah, but the one you had was male. [marines chortle]
Frost: That don’t matter when it’s Arcturan! [marines chortle]
Mixed in with all the chortling, it suggests to me one of two things: The Arcturans are a hermaphroditic alien species which can casually mate with humans of either gender, or the humans who colonized Arcturus are indifferent to gender roles and will fuck anybody, anytime. I’ll go with the herms because I don’t quite buy these ultramacho marines shrugging off Frost’s admission that “it don’t matter.”
Except
a) what is Superman pushing against to make the Earth spin backwards – the atmosphere? That doesn’t make any sense. What would he grab on to?
b) how would physically spinning the Earth backwards fix anything?
The only explanation that makes even sci-fi sense is that Superman flew so fast as to go back in time, and that the director and producers goofed on their Advanced Physics lessons.
Of course, if Superman can indeed turn back time more or less at will by whatever mechanism, it presents a giant plot hole in any action he does. “You’re going to plan this? Oh, just hold on a second…”
IMO it’s just a “Yo Mama” joke. You could hear every day in the modern world and I’ve seen almost the exact same dialogue in WWII novels.
"Man I wanna go back to that officer’s brothel and get some more Grade-A pussy "
“I think the one you fucked was a man”
“When it’s from an officer’s brother it doesn’t matter”
You could probably substitute Japanese pussy during the Korean war or or French tail in WWI.
It’s not meant to be real. That’s why it’s shrugged off. Nobody actually believes Frost had sex with a male, least of all Frost. It’s typical OTT, gross-out macho banter (with racist overtones in this case); a “yo mama” joke. You can hear the same thing in almost any schoolyard, bar or stret corner and many workplaces.
The whole point is to cast absurdly offensive slurs at the target concerning his family or sexual orientation, and the target wins if he can show he is so secure that he can shrug it off. The important point being the slurs have to be absurd so the target doesn’t take real offence. Frost won that round, but it doesn’t indicate that the Arcturians weren’t human, in fact quite the oppossite.
The biggest hints that alien contacts were common by this time is the comapany de-breifing. The reaction is “We’ve never encountred anything like this in over (x) hundred surveyed worlds.” Nobody says they’ve never encountered life, but specifically that they’ve never encountered any life form like this.
It’s possible to construe that alien life was unknown or that intelligent life had been discovered elsewhere but that seems an unnecesraily complex reading of the script.
I totally disagree. Hicks follows the line “it’s a bug hunt” by asking “just what are we dealing with here?” He expects they will encounter aliens and wants to know about them.
Also, when Vasquez is asking Ferro about Ripley, Ferro says “Apparently, she saw an alien once” with a “rolleyes” kind of tone. Hudson says something along the lines of “Whoopee fuckin-do. I’m impressed” very sarcastically. To me this implies that they have all seen aliens before and the fact that Ripley saw one alien once is less than impressive.
And in the boardroom, one of the board members says that LV-426 is “a rock. No indigenous life.” And someone else says that there have been colonists on the planet for years and they never encountered any hostile organism. No one says that they have never encountered an alien before.
Totally valid.
My justification would be; The universe is big. Perhaps humans have encountered evidence of alien life but have yet to actually find living samples. So they are like this IDEA or legend that is out there. Space travel seems pretty mundane in this future… so “Gee whiz!” doesn’t really make sense.
If you’ve known for years that silverback gorillas existed but hadn’t seen one…the day you happen upon one… isn’t so special unless you REALLY are into gorillas.
None of those are cultures have been travelling in space for decades and or centuries. (I have no clue how long space travel has been around in the “Aliens” universe)
Ummm… actually you are helping my point. The Company is pretty damn sure there are aliens. They know because the events of the first movie. That’s the revelation with Paul Reiser. They wanted to bring back samples inside of the marines. They bring Ripley because she’s the only person who knows ANYTHING about these aliens. If aliens of any kind were common they WOULD send a xenobiologist and not some lady who survived an attack and drifted frozen for decades. Ripley is the only ‘expert’ around this galaxy… maybe.
Andto counter the “Holy shit they do exist” argument.
If they have encountered aliens of various kinds and shapes, why does nobody bring up trying to communicate with them. Surely if aliens are common there’s some cross species communications.
I should mention in the Colonial Marines Technical Manual, which is at least semi-official, there are some references to extraterrestrial life aside from the Xenomorphs. (Like a bright yellow native jungle on one planet) No mention of intelligent species or (as I remember) fauna, but it seems likely that if plant life isn’t totally unknown, there’s bound to be some animal life. So, there might have been problems with colonists being harassed by alien vermin, or “wolves,” or something.
Not really. The term “bug” had been applied to computer glitches, actually any machinery glitches, for some time. This was the first time a physical bug was actually discovered to be the cause of the “bug” and thus was a cute find.
She wasn’t the one who found the bug, but she loved to recount the story.
Nah, according to Robert Bakker, Spielberg just wanted big velociraptors. He talks about it in the intro to Raptor Red, and you can read it on amazon–
Just keep clicking “next page.”
According to Bakker, the Jurassic Park raptors are twice as big as Deinonychus. But since, according to the same source, Utahraptor was discovered about the time the movie was being made, it’s easy enough just to say they’re Utahraptors.
Push You own :
You can try and justify it all you want, but even in a future with space travel, the first real encounter with ETs would be BIG news.
And the Corporation didn’t believe Ripley – that’s the point. But the idea of extraterrestrial life didn’t throw them. Theregfore tyhey knew about it from elsewhere.