No need to. Considering we know fuck-all about why the aliens came to Earth in the first place, judging their reasoning is completely ridiculous.
This isn’t like ID4 where we find out directly from the aliens why they are here. We have no information about the aliens other than they came to Earth and water kills them. We are not privy to the wherefores.
You can dislike the movie for the directing or the story or the acting or hell, even the lighting… but disliking it because water is harmful to the aliens- That’s the stupidest reason I can think of.
That movie was brilliant… that is in the sense that I love really crappy movies that try to take themselves seriously. The complete mockery of every scientific field that it approached was delicious, the utterly predictable cast list (guy with a crayon drawing by his kid? Gee, I think he’ll live.), all delicious.
The Ring 2? how about The Ring? Pretty stupid premise (Of course, I think almost ALL horror movies consist of stupid premises in some way).
The link discusses flushing all air from the Nostromo and suffocating the Alien.
Considering that the Alien Queen in movie #2 survived in vacuum (don’t think the
sled wells were pressurized in the lander they used to get back to the main ship),
that idea would have been as effective as poking at an angry grizzly bear with a
blunt stick.
Surprised nobody mentioned Flightplan, where the crooks’ plot fails utterly if just one
crew member (or passenger, or check-in clerk back in the terminal, or…) remembers the little
kid.
And don’t forget the “it’s all a dream” theory that was suggested on some websites.
You don’t have to. Just read Richard Jeni’s routine about the movie and you’ll get a pretty good idea about its inherent stupidity.
Well, I ought to clarify my earlier remarks with the observation that movies, especially of the fantasy/SF genre, can exhibit different distinct categories of dumbness (often simultaneously). The Matrix’s apparent ability to extract more energy from humans than it takes to maintain and feed them, or Waterworld’s suggestion that melting the polar icecaps could somehow magically produce enough water to put Denver below sea level, are examples of “technical dumbness,” or stuff that’s just flat out impossible to begin with. While these examples are fairly egregious, I think it’s arguable that they’re not qualitatively different from other movie premises-- FTL travel, time travel, magic powers, ghosts, etc.-- that are not generally regarded as “stupid,” even though they’re widely considered just as impossible. Presentation counts for a lot.
Jaws: The Revenge, on the other hand, doesn’t actually contain any events that totally defy physics (except perhaps for the great white’s ability to teleport from Long Island to the Caribbean). It’s not impossible that a shark or sharks might attack several people from the same family under widely varying circumstances. It is, however, very, very unlikely, and that sort of thing sets off my BS-Meter much more frequently than genuinely impossible stuff.
Another example that comes to mind: Blade 2. Vampires exist; moreover, they can’t be killed by guns, but *can * be killed by UV flashlights. Impossible, silly even, but not a deal-breaker. However, in the course of the movie, after killing several vampires with the flashlights, the heroes just decide to stop using them and attack using totally ineffective guns instead. Unlikely, massively stupid, totally unacceptable.
I can’t remember who said it (and Lord, do I hate repeating unattributed quotes, because they usually turn out to have been coined by Hitler, or Orson Scott Card, or both), but I believe it was an SF author* who observed (paraphrase) “You can ask your audience to accept an impossible thing, but not an improbable one.” The illustration of the principle was a robber trying to crack a safe: it’s acceptable to establish that the safe is guarded by an antimatter bomb that will detonate if the correct code isn’t entered. It isn’t acceptable to have the robber choose the correct combination totally at random. The merely unlikely scenario is the stupider one.
*–although for all I know it could have been another poster on this very forum; I’m just too stinkin’ lazy to search.
That’s true, but since there’s no way for the crew to know that (and any intelligent person would assume that things that live on planets need atmospheric pressure to survive), that doesn’t excuse their not trying it early on.
You won’t be pounded by me. I didn’t consider the premise stupid, but I didn’t like the writing. The characters made the dumbest possible choice in every situation so the tragedy would be more tragic.
I’ve often thought that situational stupidity is very different than human stupidity. When an audience member sees a person doing something that they feel a regular person just would not do, the situation doesn’t matter. You can suspend your disbelief in an extraordinary situation, but you still expect to see people basically acting like people.
If I recall, the plot also would have failed if Jody Foster’s character had simply not taken a nap. Yet I enjoyed the movie; it moved along so well that I didn’t worry too much about the plot holes. (They cleverly even articulated a couple of seeming plot holes and then closed them.)
How about a low-budget futuristic movie in which:
-
Human cloning has been perfected;
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Cloning is used to provide organs for transplant without risk of rejection;
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But for some reason they don’t grow just the organs, or clone babies with undeveloped brains; no, they produce normal, healthy babies who are raised to adulthood in an isolated environment, with no knowledge of the outside world, destined to be murdered for their organs even though they’re fully functional human beings.
Then compound the stupidity by remaking the idiotic movie with a $100 million budget.
Pffft. Pathetic. The movies cite here don’t even KNOW stupid. They’re not within MILES of stupid. You know what’s stupid? Japanese adult anime. I can prove it. I’ll cite one at random: ‘Fragile Hearts.’
It’s about Aki, an android designed to serve men sexually. She goes to places to have sex with men. She also has a secret purpose of collecting the DNA of the rich and powerful men who summon her. (Meanwhile, on the street we see there’s a thriving market for spare parts for Droids – I mean, they sit android heads out in boxes right out in the open like they’re apples or something, so you have to figure they’re very cheap.)
Although Aki has been built and programmed to be a sex droid, she doesn’t really like sex a lot. So maybe it’s good that after a bit of sex slavery she winds up kidnapped by a bunch of guys who reprogram her to be a fighting droid. (Remember, droids are apparently cheap.) She’s not very good at it, and doesn’t like fighting either, possibly because she was not designed to be a fighting droid, and after losing a bout winds up discarded in a warehouse with a bunch of other unused droids. But before they turn her off, she’s gang raped by the warehouse staff. And raped by a gorilla. Not a guy in a gorilla suit, an actual gorilla. Only with humanly proportioned genitals.
Then she’s bought by a mad scientist from the warehouse to be her maid. He subsequently decides to give her super powers and she becomes Super Andmaid Aki. When giant robots start pillaging the countryside, she fights them. She beats one of them and follows him to his giant robot hideout, where she’s surrounded by giant robots and then knocked out with sleeping gas. When she wakes up, she’s powerless and chained to the wall. She gets raped a lot by the giant robots’ minions. For about a week. Then the mysterious leader of the giant robots rapes her. Then he reveals that he’s the mad scientist who gave her the super powers in the first place.
This leads to a happy ending in which Aki stays with the professor and flies arund and whenever bad guys are about to rape a girl, she swoops down, shoos the girl off to safety, and then gets raped in her place. Cause it feels good. The end.
What happened with the original sperm collecting mission? No answer.
Why design an android who’s destined to be a sex droid not to like sex? No answer.
Why do rich and powerful men rent sex droids when droids are obviously cheap to the point of being disposable? Why can’t they buy droids for themselves by the haremful? No answer.
Why kidnap droids to be fighting droids when they’re cheap? No answer.
Why was Aki kidnapped to be a fighting android? No answer.
What was a gorilla doing in a warehouse of discarded androids? No answer.
Why kidnap androids when they are cheap? No answer.
Why build giant robots to ravage the countryside just so your super-powered robot maid can be captured by them when you already HAVE the robot maid in your possession and you can do what you like with her anyway? No answer.
And no, this isn’t the stupidest adult anime I’ve ever seen, not by a long shot. Some of them are so stupid you can’t even ask questions about them that make sense.
Why do I watch them?
No answer.
Did someone page me?
I’m not going to bother defending Signs tonight, because I don’t feel like it, and…well, that’s pretty much it. Either one likes it or one doesn’t. That said, I don’t think the apparent folly of the aliens’ strategy is a valid criticism, because the Hesses don’t know the aliens’ motives at any time; it’s all speculation. The aliens are a plot device, no more.
The thing that bothers me about this is the assumption that this would even be possible. If I’m designing a spaceship, I’m going to include lots of stuff to make sure all the air doesn’t get sucked out on accident. I don’t see why I’d bother including anything to suck all the air out on purpose.
The grandfather paradox is merely one invented concept of how time travel (itself a theoretical impossibility) might work. Criticizing a movie for using a different conception of time travel is like criticizing a movie for using hyperspace for FTL travel instead of wormholes. Both are equally artificial solutions to an impossible question.
Everyone always says this about Signs, but never about Alien Nation, where the aliens had almost exactly the same weakness. (It was specifically salt water, not just any old H20)
I’ll also state, for the record, that I’m only four years older than Claire Danes, who played the titular character in Shopgirl, and I’d totally do Steve Martin.
Not to sound ignorant, but can you fight my ignorance? What movie is this? I’m so sorry…
Brendon
He’s talking about Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979) and The Island (2005). They had the same plot, and the producers of Parts have sued the producers of The Island for stealing their lamebrained idea.
I see…
I should know these things. Especially since I’ve seen The Island at least once. :smack:
Thanks for fighting my (strange) ignorance!
Brendon
Petty theft?
Not to be confused with the pirate movie The Island (which come to think of it
is also rather improbable: a 17th century pirate society persists for 300 years
virtually unchanged (uncontaminated), and nobody bothers to investigate all these
missing ships either?
Face/Off?
Sure, but in Alien Nation the aliens crashed to Earth, and the ones who were damaged by salt water weren’t the ones piloting, but rather a slave race…