There are plenty of WTF moments in films. Some result from the director liking a shot because it looks gorgeous, or it has some sort of mythic resonance, even if it makes no logical sense.*
One of my peeves is the film Alien, which annoys me for several reasons and on several levels, and all the fanwanking in the universe won’t save it for me. I’m particularly annoyed when Ripley goes into the “pod” to talk with the ship computer “Mother”, and suddenly there’s Ash behind her. They fight, and Ash tries to gag her with a rolled-up magazine (a spoon not being handy, I guess). In the tussle, his head comes off.
Where to begin?
1.) How the hell does Ash get into the Mother pod in the first place? We’;re sorta given the impression it’s a one-person-at-a-time deal.
2.) How does he get in without Ripley noticing? It’s not like it’s a big place, and she wasn’t that intent on Mother.
3.) Why the hell does Ash try to kill her at that point?
4.) Why try to do it with a rolled-up-magazine? Is there some symbolism I’m missing there? And, you gotta wonder, a magazine? It’s hard enough to get them nowadays, and they’re on a ship long outta port. You’d think they’d be read to rags if they were print versions. But you’d really think they’d be reading on tablets or something, a la Star Trek over a decade earlier.
5.) Ash’s head coming off and revealing white pus-like stuff is the biggest WTF moment of the movie. In context, you expect this to be some Alien thing, like the Alien has taken him over, or something. The fact that they have robots in the future hasn’t e4ven been established. This is a clear anti-Chekov’s Gun situation. If you want us to buy the idea of future humaniform robots that are indistinguishable from people, you oughtta at least mention it at some point. It’s not hard to slip it into the dialogue somewhere. Scott obviously wanted his Moment of Surprise, and shortchanged his audience.
6.) part of me, raised on the EDmond Hamilton classification of artificial people forms, is still kinda miffed that Ash is called a Robot instead of an Android. This was the beginning of the blurring of the lines of the EH distinctions.
*(As in Forbidden Planet, when Altaira’s tiger attacks her after her romantic interlude with Commander J. J. Adams. Makes not a lick of sense in the context of the story, but it’s a great “loss-of-innocence” image, and I guess they couldn’t resist. Oddly, the scene does make sense in the context of the situation as set up in the rarely-read novelization. But the novel ain’t canon)