Forget that. How about, the police catch a guy who has been terrorizing the city, is extremely dangerous and has tremendous resources at his disposal. They get him into custody and leave him chained up to a bench for however long.
But no one can be bothered to wipe a rag over his face to take some photos and try to get some real ID on the guy. Just let him sit there for hours in his face paint because, hey, who cares? Ain’t like he’s anyone worth anything.
It’s shown earlier that Batman has been running a facial ID program on him almost non-stop since he killed a Copybat. Presumably, he didn’t come up with anything.
Um, no the military members housed the alien life forms, not the other way 'round…
[sub]Pretty sure you meant to say hosed, but the errant pun was too good to pass up[/sub]
[quote=“nevadaexile, post:159, topic:679855”]
[LIST=1]
[li]It’s a moon, not a planet. Therefore its surface area is far smaller than a planet making it easier to survey. And that would have to be done by satellite, not by a spacecraft, unless they planned on a survey taking years. Also the gravity would be lower than Earth-normal because of its smaller size.[/li][/quote]
False assumption. The fact that it’s a moon doesn’t necessarily mean it’s small–it just means that it would have to be orbiting a very big planet. Its primary is Calpamos, a gas giant, which qualifies. The fact that they’re trying to terraform it means that it has enough gravity to hold an Earth-like atmosphere, and there’s no obvious indication in the films that the gravity is much lower than Earth’s. In essence, practical considerations indicate that the moon has to be pretty big or incredibly dense.
Other secondary canon material on the setting (the Aliens: Colonial Marines Technical Manual) establishes LV-426 as having an average diameter of 12201 km (vs 12742 km for Earth) and a gravity of 0.86g. That doesn’t seem out of line with what we see, though it’s quite big even for a gas giant’s moon. I believe there was some mention in secondary materials that it was a relatively recent capture–it may have actually been a lone planet at one point, and is only called a moon because it’s been captured by the much larger planet.
[quote]
[li]Again…the colonists had no aircraft or spaceships. To get anywhere in a wheeled vehicle (even on a small moon) would take hours or days. The site obviously had to be close or they would have missed it. Or the story would have unfolded over the span of a t least a year, rather than the several months or so that it did.[/li][/quote]
The Jorden’s vehicle allegedly has a top on-road speed of 110 km/hr (~69mph). Modern ATVs generally have top speeds between 40 and 60 mph, so it’s not implausible. Even if it’s restricted to less than half that under off-road conditions, one long day’s drive could put the distance at ~200-300 miles. In the director’s cut, a discussion between the colony ops manager and his assistant mentioned sending them “out past the Ilium range a couple of days ago” when the Jordens call in to report that they’ve found something. So, call it two days travel to reach the Derelict–that puts it maybe 400 to 600 miles away, apparently on the far side of a low mountain range. (Which would account for it surviving the explosion of the processing plant, but that’s another matter.)
So, it was hardly in their backyard, but it wasn’t so far away that the timeline (Russ Jorden getting facehugged and getting back to the colony base before the chestburster popped out) is unreasonable.
[quote]
[li]The satellite dish wasn’t that large. And why would there only be ONE? Is redundancy no longer a valid concept in the future?[/li][/quote]
The dish itself is just a big piece of metal; there’s not much to go wrong with it short of something big hitting it really hard. They probably had or could fabricate spare parts for it, but there was really no reason to have redundant dishes, just spares for the equipment in the feed assembly. Given a two-week communications delay, they weren’t going to get realtime responses from the company, anyway, so a few hours of repair time if it were damaged would not make that much difference.
[quote]
[li] The alien ship (actually the Space Jockey/Engineer’s ship) is shown to be the size of a football arena. Hardly small. And it’s in the open. It’s not hidden.[/li][/quote]
Well, a football field, anyway. It’s settled in what appears to be a crater, or at least a ruggedly rocky area, not entirely in the open, and its curved structure and textured surface give it a superficial resemblance to a kind of odd rock formation. Between that and the perpetually murky, dusty atmosphere, it would be pretty hard to spot.
The surface area of LV-426 is ~468 million km[sup]2[/sup]. If we take you literally, and say that the Derelict is the size of the Superdome, we’re looking at it covering an area of ~0.2 km[sup]2[/sup]. Put another way, here’s a pretty good satellite image of South Louisiana. Can you spot the Superdome?
[quote]
[li] You hardly be “saving money” if you attempt to terraform a moon with a supervolcano on it or a large mass of a naturally occurring, but unstable element. How would you find that out? Oh wait…you’d SURVEY THE ENTIRE MOON TO MAKE SURE THAT THERE WASN"T ANYTHING LIKE THAT THERE.[/li][/quote]
They probably did. A supervolcano is pretty noticeable, what with massive heat signatures and the like. Large masses of unstable elements (by which I presume you mean radioactive) would be easily detectable by their emissions (and probably make the W-Y execs drool, not back off). A survey ship could spot those much more easily than a (relatively) small, passive, rock-looking structure in the middle of a rock formation. They probably landed a survey team on the surface, too, but the Derelict’s location doesn’t look like a good landing site, even if they happened to look at it.
The survey team found no life, of course. Apparently not even microbes. No microbes in your survey area is a pretty good indication there’s no native life on the planet–or, as one of the W-Y reps said, “It’s a rock. No indigenous life.”
Sorry. An entertaining read, but not authored by anyone who knows the show.
In “The Postman Cometh,” (Season 2, Episode 18) Mary Ann says she has a boyfriend – not a fiance. (Horace Higgenbotham, to be precise). Later, however, she admits she made it up – Horace is not even really her boyfriend.
So the supposed reason to doubt Mary Ann’s travelling alone is itself false.
Now, it’s true that in “Rescue from Gilligan’s Island,” the 1978 movie that reunited the cast – except Tina Louise – we see that Mary Ann actually did have a fiance. But since the other events of that movie also give lie to the claims that she was an undercover federal operative, either way the author is wrong.
Because even a relatively small moon is still really, really, really, really fucking big. So big that you would not be able to spot something the size of a football field from orbit. The idea of them finding a derelict spaceship during an orbital survey is actually more ridiculous than the idea of them not bothering to even look for one.
Again, so what? There’s less than two hundred colonists on the entire moon, it’s only recently that it’s been possible to go outside the colony without suffocating, and even with it’s new atmosphere, the environment is extremely hostile. I absolutely would not expect the colonists to find the derelict ship on their own. It would be highly unrealistic if they did.
Just to be clear, are you arguing that the concept of terraforming in general doesn’t make sense? Or are you arguing that terraforming this particular planet doesn’t make sense? If the later, why not? What makes this particular moon a bad choice for terraforming?
Life doesn’t really “exist” on the planet, in the sense that there’s any sort of biosphere native to the LV-426. There’s some life in the cargo hold of a single crashed space ship that no one knows exists, or could reasonably locate. It’s not like there were herds of wild xenomorphs roaming the plains.
The quarantine policies were for getting stuff back to Earth, not into the colony.
It was breached when it was defended by largely unarmed and untrained civilians. It’s not unreasonable for a heavily armed and experienced team of marines to expect to succeed in the same situation where a bunch of civvies failed.
It’s not really a particularly confusing plot, and (particularly relative to most other movie sci-fi) requires very, very little fanwanking to sort out the few kinks. If you think the plot to this movie is a mess, I can’t imagine that you like very much in the way of science fiction to begin with.
I doubt the average cops knew that and it’s still no excuse for not cleaning the guy up for photos. This wasn’t someone arrested for jaywalking; I’d think getting getting as much info on him as possible would be something of a priority.
Gordon had to know and Gordon was running the Joker arrest.
Still not a plausible reason to NOT do the obvious and wipe the guy’s face. Honestly, there is no plausible reason – it was only because “Joker wears makeup” which is what made it so annoying.
“Oh, hey, Batman says his supercomputer didn’t identify this homicidal maniac who has been terrorizing the city so let’s just leave him wearing his identity-obscuring makeup until the end of time. No reason to wipe that off, you know. Who wants coffee?”
The point is that the end game for W-Y is getting the Xenomorph. The cost of sacrificing the Nostromo and a terraforming site worth hundreds of millions is piddling compared to the Billions to Trillions that having the Xeonomorph could mean to the company.
And if the terrafomers can get them the Xenomorph without losing the site, even better.
Speaking of which, there’s that bit just before Obi-Wan hacks Anakin’s legs off (known, in certain circles, as a “flesh wound”) where he says “give it up, I have the high ground.” Dude, you’ve been leaping through the air on conference tables, climbing on towering scaffolding as it collapses, and then floating on wreckage down a river of lava, and suddenly you think it’s all over because you’re slightly uphill from the guy. Seriously?
Another plot hole out of the hundreds on the Star Wars saga: why did Obi-Wan and Yoda decide to protect Luke and not Leia? They were both infants and there was no reason to assume one was more vulnerable than the other. Two surviving Jedis - two children that needed protection. The math seems pretty obvious. But for some reason Luke got a personal Jedi guardian angel and Leia was just sent off with a wish of good luck.
That one actually kinda makes sense. Leia is adopted into a powerful political family, who will be near & around Palpatine & Vader - therefore Obi-Wan or Yoda can’t hang around because Vader will just feel his presence, just like he does on the Death Star.
Luke is on a backwater planet (but really, Lucas, the same planet Anakin was from originally? Isn’t there a whole galaxy to choose from?) so Obi-Wan can hang near Luke with no-one the wiser.
Obi-Wan just has to stay near Luke and hope the Organas and their political power can protect Leia (he turned out to be wrong on that one, not foreseeing the eventual dissolution of the Senate.)
In fairness, this is Obi-Wan Kenobi, who beat Darth Maul, who had the high ground.
They justify this in the movie. They already ran his prints and got nothing back. Gordon says to leave him alone and let him sit because he’s worried his mob lawyers will find any technicality to get him off.
This is actually one of my favorite parts about the Dark Knight. Pretty much until the Joker escapes, they underestimate him the entire time and worry a lot more about the mob.
A bit of a shame, really. It may be just me, but I think a scene with the Joker in an orange jumpsuit and no makeup, with nothing left of the Joker look except the scars, would have been pretty cool, somehow.
Then again, I also absolutely hated the way they did Two-Face. Instead of the ridiculously CGI-ed burned face, I wanted his face wrapped up in bandages, which would make a hell of a lot more sense for a burns victim (and evoke his look in The Dark Knight Returns), and maybe have him reveal his messed-up face by peeling the bandages off in his final scene.
My all-time favorite fan-wank concerns this scene. Clearly, it should NOT just be over because of higher ground. Anakin could just hop off on the other side of the river, or float 10 feet downstream, or any of a variety of other things. The point of Obi-Wan’s comment is not to accurately analyze the situation. Rather, it’s to taunt Anakin into doing just about the stupidest possible thing, namely, jumping all the way over Obi-Wan to try to get to the other side, thus leaving himself vulnerable. It’s Obi-Wan taking advantage of Anakin’s hubris.
(I have zero evidence that any of that was what George Lucas intended, sadly.)
That’s a terrible reason. While I’ll grant that they “explain” it, it’s certainly not logical or plausible (per the thread title).
Off topic, but I just noticed that Lifeforce was on and here’s the online TV Guide description:
I guess if it were 1955 instead of 1985 it would be a clothed space vampire.
I’d like to see a thread about which logic/plausibility flaws matter and which don’t.
Many flaws don’t detract at all from my enjoyment of a movie. For example, the letters of transit had no more relevance to the romantic themes of Casablanca than the bottle is relevant to the “game” of Spin the Bottle!
Some logic errors do ruin a movie. Basic with John Travolta is an intriguing mystery thriller, spoiled when one learns the “solution” has severe inconsistencies with the plot.
BTW, a few confusions (“How did he know …?”) have been cleared up by watching Deleted Scenes with Director’s Commentary: scenes necessary for logical plot development may be deleted because they delay the action.
