Anyone else out there think that something was edited out of that movie? I mean, the engineer was obviously stoned throughout the whole movie, but the jokes are put in there like you should already know that.
perhaps I’m not describing that well, but it seems to be missing the scene were he originally smokes some weed. Or missing the scene where there is a fairly obvious hint that he is smoking some weed. It’s just thatl, all the sudden, about 30% of the way through the movie, he’s acting stoned and there’s no clue why.
Terry Bisson’s novelization (which I recommend, since Bisson’s the perfect writer for this project) just calls him a laid-back kind of guy. And I doubt that a mainstream movie in the current drug climate would want to suggest anything like that. Stoned people were funny in the 70s, but now they’re not only passe, but also would raise a lot of flak.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Avumede, I thought that too! If you remember, when the other crew members (Gwen, Alexander, Tommy, Guy) beam up, Fred (the engineer) has stayed behind in front of a soft drink machine. Then all of a sudden you see him appear on the ship in the transport room, and he immediately says “What’s with the other guys?” and is very calm. Then in the whole rest of the movie, he acts like he’s stoned, which is different than his behaviour in the first scene (the dressing room.)
Well I agree with you that it might raise some flak if there was a drug reference in a mainstream movie that is PG. That’s why I think they edited it out, with puzzling results.
However, I think the guy is definately stoned (which is funny even in this day and age, see Dazed and Confused for example).
I mean, check out the scene were, while everyone else is freaking out, he is eating crackers & cheese during the flight to the planet, with a look on his face that shows he is really enjoying the visuals. I mean, he has the munchies, and he has a totally stoned look on his face. He’s stoned.
I saw the movie yesterday. I loved it!!!
I cried at the end. I’m not entirely sure why. I would blame my medication, except I’m not on any at the moment.
Someone please help me out here. There was one line that I thought was hysterically funny at the time - but now I can’t for the life of me remember what it was! (*)
(Trying not to give too much of the movie away here, but probably failing) During the love (OK, makeout) scene, a fellow crew member witnessing the event says something like “oohhh, that’s not right”. What exactly did he say?
(*) no, that can’t be the reason - I haven’t taken those since the sixties.
I just saw it last night and I think that IS what he said. I guess we are to infer that the engineer and his alien girlfriend were doing the nasty in a way that we would not consider normal, what with her real body having tentacles. And about that engineer: it didn’t occur to me that something had been cut out, but I did notice that he seemed to be awfully calm, laid back, out of it. I enjoyed it, but I thought Alan Rickman was under-used. This guy is wonderful - I mean he upstaged Kevin Costner in Robin Hood and was the wonderfully villainous villain in DieHard. they should have given him more dialogue. I want to see it again when it comes out in video. Oh, one other minor complaint: I loved Sigourney and I understood her character was supposed to be a bimbo, but the zipper on her shirt came all the way down at one point and stayed down until they returned to earth. I wasn’t offended - I just thought it was gratuitous, inappropriate, and distracting to have her boobs exposed for the remainder of the movie.
I’m not entirely sure why. I would blame my medication, except I’m not on any at the moment. 
