I've seen *Aliens* a dozen times, but never the very beginning

Cafe Society
21

Well, hence the cuts :smiley:

Some parts were cool like the sentry guns. Some parts add context like the Burke’s meddling in why the wildcat was at the crash site and what happened to most of the alien colony that Ripley & Co weren’t just overwhelmed (they got sentry gunned). But I agree that it messes with the pacing and tension and is more of a “In case you wanted to know more” version than a better version. The scenes with Newt of the derelict exploration drag on a bit. If I was showing it to someone for the first time, I’d just show the theater cut.

22

What, they didn’t use real dinosaurs?!

23

They cost too much money. An the wranglers always have their hands out.

24

I did meet some elephants in Cambodia who’d been trained to take a banknote in their trunk and pass it to their handler, so that checks out.

25

Yeah, it’s a perfect example of why cool scenes sometimes have to be cut. When Burke shows up at Ripley’s place and says, “We’ve lost contact with the colony…” everyone knows what happened. There’s no need to include the scene at the planet except maybe to show that Newt was really good at using the air ducts. But even that turned out not to be needed. So the scene with Newt’s family adds nothing to the film but time.

26

I was going to say ‘but at least we find out that The Company’ deliberately sent the colonists out to specific coordinates to take a look’ (i.e. to find the downed spacecraft with the eggs), but then I remembered that later on Ripley finds that out and confronts Burke (what an aptly-named character, by the way!) about it. So yeh, I agree, unnecessary.

27

Re: Ripley’s daughter that she left back on Earth. Ripley said she told the girl that “she’d be back by her next birthday”. And they didn’t have FTL travel, or the crew wouldn’t have had to go into hibernation. With time dilation, any journey that the Nostromo took out of our solar system would mean that they’d be gone for years at least.

28

They did have FTL. One of the throwaway pieces of dialog is about how important hull integrity is to FLT travel (when they are trying to remove the face hugger from Cain, and it squirts acid which starts to eat through the ship). But, presumably the little escape ship didn’t have it.

29

That is possibly one of the greatest entrances in cinema history.

30

Yeah, I don’t know how one would think they didn’t. The distances are too great, yet the characters act as if this is just another long-haul truck job. “Six days in hyperspace and I’m-a gonna make it home tonight.”

OK, I do, upon reflection. The film’s direction. The escape pod ejects, we see the Nostromo and refinery slowly fly away and explode! If the ship was traveling FTL it wouldn’t slowly fly away, it would simply disappear when the pod dropped out of hyperspace.

So that may mean

But if it didn’t, it’s going to be about [—] this far from where it ejected (relatively speaking) not “drifted through all the core systems”. In the 57 years Ripley was napping, the pod should have gone like, what?, guessing, maybe a sixteenth of a light year? Less?* Spitting distance, in galactic terms.

Maybe the escape pod does have hyperdrive? And the computer failed to stop when it got home?

So why do they use the sleep pods? Because it looks cool. The wakeup sequence sets the tone for the first movie. And for 1979 audiences, you get to see the women in their undies. In the “in-story” universe, probably because it saves money. If the actual hyperspace trip took, say, a month, sleeping the days away saves a lot of resources.

*Depends on how their spacedrive works. Which is never explained.

31

I don’t see why FTL capability means no sleep pods. Something four light years away (Earth to Proxima Centauri) is still going to take months at 4-8x light speed. Why have your crew spending six months eating beans and getting into bored trouble if they can be sleeping instead?

32

But both Alien: Earth and Predator: Badlands explicitly say that humanity does not have FTL. The planet in Alien / Aliens is explicitly said to be Zeta Reticuli, which is 39 light-years from Earth. But all of that is just throw-away lines and the writers seem to simply not care about that aspect of world-building.

33

Going well outside the core films, the licensed RPG for Alien gives the Nostromo a speed of 3.2 light years per 15 days and says the support shuttles have limited FTL capacity out to ~5 light years before running out of juice. I suppose that, if you came out of light speed with enough momentum, you’d still drift quite a ways even without your engines active.

34

Which comes out to 78x light speed. Which puts Zeta Reticuli 6 months away from Earth.

35

Stating the Alien universe doesn’t have FTL is, frankly stupidity of the first order! The filmmakers should be fired.

Look at it rationally:

The Nostromo is on some STL voyage, hauling (effectively) crude oil. It takes, say, 30 years to get there and 30 back, assuming the ships accelerate very rapidly and travel at near-c velocities. If they don’t it’s even worse!

Ripley spends 57 years in suspended animation. Her rescuers takes years to get back to earth, even if they left right away (and why would they? Too much work for too little reward)

Somewhere along the lines a colony is built on LV426, which takes at least, a coupe dozen years.

Burke believes Ripley’s story, and sends a message to LV426. it takes decades to reach there. Burke retires and dies of old age.

“We’ve lost all contact with LV426”. How would you know? “Losing all contact” implies two-way communications. Or it happened decades ago, and the planet just “went silent”.

The Sulaco is dispatched. It takes decades to reach LV426

Everyone has been dead, including the Xenomorphs, for a hundred years by now. No percentages, no exclusive rights. The Sulaco heads home.

By now decades have passed on earth, and Weyland-Utani has been bought up by Parker-Hannifin, or Bershire-hathaway or Proctor-gamble and no one wants a Xenomorph anymore. Burke, not dead, :slight_smile: gets a job in the spice mines.

Meanwhile, young aggressive predators travel at sublight speeds to earth or Zeta Reticuli to hunt. By the time they get home, everyone they know is dead and they can’t impress anyone with their scalps.

People can say the Alien-verse doesn’t have FTL, just like people say Deckard is a replicant. They are simply, demonstratively wrong.

36

As something of an aside, the rating system they use is obnoxious. Ships have an FTL rating but it’s not X times the speed of light or anything, rather the rating is how many days it takes to travel a parsec (3.2 light years). So the lower the FTL rating, the faster the ship.

The Suluco is given an FTL rating of 2 so, if my public school math isn’t failing me, that’s around 48 24 days for the Colonial Marines to travel from Earth to LV-426. Still worth dumping the crew into the freezer to save on rations and how many times Sarge has to hear their bullshit.

The Narcissus (Ripley’s escape pod from the Nostromo) has an FTL of 15 to match its mother ship but is limited to 1.5 parsecs in fuel.

Grain of salt and all that.

[Edit: my math was indeed failing me. Two days to travel a parsec is 1.6 LY per day. 39 LY / 1.6 LY = 24 days]

37

Maybe so, but in Predator: Badlands, Weyland-Yutani synth Elle Fanning says “How fast were you going when your ship crashed? Faster than sub-light speed? We haven’t cracked that yet.” and in the 6th episode of Alien:Earth Weyland-Yutani synth Timothy Olyphant says “Your sister has potential to invent faster than light travel and explore the stars for thousands of years, and you want her to be a family?”

This is an entry for “goofs” in A:E on the IMDB

When describing the potential things Wendy could accomplish to Joe, Kirsh says “your sister has the potential to invent faster-than-light (FTL) travel.” However, as the movies have previously established, FTL travel was invented almost a century earlier. This series takes place in 2120 and the bonus material for Prometheus (2012) revealed that Weyland scientists invented the first faster-than-light drive sometime between 2032 and 2045. The USCSS Prometheus was built in 2091 and was described as “having the fastest FTL drive of any ship at the time”, it took the Prometheus 874 days (2.4 years) to travel the 39 light-years from Earth to Zeta Reticuli (the star system containing LV-223 & LV-426), giving it a velocity of 15c (15 times the speed of light). The bonus material for Alien (1979) revealed that the USCSS Nostromo was constructed from 2100 to 2103; it was capable of traveling at a velocity of 47c, based on Ripley’s statement that Zeta Reticuli was 10 months away from Earth at their best speed.

38

On the edges of these speed measurements, it seems reasonable to assume that you’re not going at light speed from Point A to Point B as there’s a lot of stuff in the solar system. You’d probably use more conventional speeds out into the “clear zone” and then go FTL to outside your destination system, slow down and coast on into the place you wanted to reach.

Of course the real-real reason is that no one in the late 70s thought about it much or expected anyone in 2026 to give a shit. Which is the appropriate way to handle it when sitting next to your spouse on the sofa (“Just repeat to yourself it’s just a show, I should really just relax…”) but is no fun on the internet :smiley:

39

Absolute, complete lack of comprehension of distances is a common trait amongst 99.99% of all movie and TV SF properties.

40

My head canon is that something about going FTL makes it really unhealthy for humans, and the cryopods are the way they avoid it.