Ya got me there!:smack:
But it’d be out of style by then, I maintain.
Besides, even if smoking does go out of style, all over the world, there’s nothing that says it can’t go back into style in the intervening centuries.
They spoke German in the version that was shown in Germany and Italian in the verrsion that was shown there. Since you seem to want to be appallingly literal and not let this go, consider this: They are shown smoking on their spaceships in the Alien universe, so they do smoke on spaceships there. The end.
Yeah, yeah, but in Dark Star weren’t they military with ranks and a mission? Star Wars was, of course, sci fi with missions, good/evil, a space princess and all.
Alien was blue collar, this is just a damn job. No mystery of space; no mission, no princess, knights. They were like guys working on a pipeline across Alaska or digging a coal mine. Of course, they smoke. Soothes and passes the time. Getting drunk is probably way rationed.
I loved that movie, especially the way, as Chronus mentioned, Sigourney Weaver was the stealth hero. When she took off directly for the rescue instead of by the corridors… well. hell (!!)
These two sentences just should *not *have appeared consecutively.
True; Alien was set in the 22nd century. For all we now cancer (& the other associated health risks) are easily cured by then and smoking has become popular again.
Maybe they were smoking something non-carcinogenic.
If we’re going to judge 30 year-old sci-fi depictions of the far future by contemporary social trends, the obvious answer is they’re all smoking marijuana.
Not as much as hollywood would have you believe. Even nurses all seem to smoke when they go on breaks, and they should know better.
Plus of course the role of the female member of the team is usually to either die, or support - or have to be rescued by - the (male) Hero.
Hee. My thought exactly. 
I had the opposite take. I thought Aliens was a betrayal of the atmospheric horror vibe of the original movie. For my money, Cameron took a great horror movie (Alien) and turned it into just another stupid, bloated 80s action movie. Really, Stallone should have co-starred. I never understood all the love for Aliens.
They’re just two different kinds of movies. Alien was a horror movie, Aliens was an action movie. Both were good specimens of their genre. If you like horror movies better than action movies, you’ll like the first one better. If you like action movies better than horror movies, you’ll like the second one better.
Cancer is not the only worry- also heart disease, emphysema, bronchitis, allergies, rapid aging of skin, eye problems…
Maybe they were smoking something non-bronchiectatic, non-allergic, non-senescent, non-cardiopathic, hypodermatopathogenic, and non-opthalmodegenerative?
Might make your farts smell like violets, too.
Or maybe cigarettes are just as bad for you in the future as they are now, and some segments of society have decided that they just don’t care.
Well, I usually don’t like horror, and like action, but I love Alien more than Aliens. But that’s probably because the first movie isn’t as jokey as the first one. Maybe I just like my action serious and my horror funny. Either way, I agree with your delineation of the two.
Or maybe some folks got addicted earlier when they didn’t care, and took risky, difficult jobs as result of the same personality traits. There certainly are better jobs in the W-Y corp, and I suspect the rest of the universe has them too.
Which was a clever thing to do, really. Following up a classic with more of the same is a good way to bog people down in comparisons and disappoint them. If Aliens had been a horror movie, it would have suffered by comparison to Alien, no matter how good it as. Switching genres enabled them to change the mood rather than breaking it, and allowed them to tell different aspects of the story.
They had ranks and a mission, but their being miitary was secondary to the completely mundane scouting “mission” they were tasked with. The crew’s biggest enemy was boredom until the incident with Bomb #20.
That’s the thing though; **Aliens **was far from stupid or bloated. It was a pretty remarkable movie in many ways that I’m not going to go into them here; don’t want to spoiler it, but let’s just say it was far from stupid, far from bloated, and was as much or more a thriller than it was an out-and-out action movie.