I didn’t mention the alien beacon as it is irrelevant. The size of the vessel would make it visible to anyone doing an aerial or an orbital survey. Again, it’s illogical to believe that they don’t do a detailed enough survey to determine that there isn’t a subterranean ocean or huge pockets of methane which might spoil their “terraforming party.”
Or that they would have attempted to ascertain if there was LIFE on the moon. Even if the future of Alien is dystopian, genocide would still have to be seen as being a “bad thing.” if not, then why would have that pesky problem of Earth overpopulation?
I have watched the film maybe a dozen times (I own it on DVD and I like Bill Paxton’s over the top performance) . Each time that I do watch I come away with a new complaint (like when Ripley tells them that they don’t need her to go and Gorman reiterates that fact on board the Sulaco when they arrive).
It’s a film that manages to disguises the myriad failures of its own internal logic with lots of action and Newt’s ear-piercing screams. Sometimes that works; sometimes it doesn’t.
Playing Devil’s Advocate here… Not sure on that one. As depicted in the first film, LV-426 was a hellhole with an atmosphere that was the next thing to opaque. Dust blowing everywhich way. The Nostromo’s sensors had a hard time just finding a place to land. Now, an aerial survey might have better sensors (especially made decades after the Nostromo) but it could have missed the alien vessel. I doubt they were looking all that hard for something like that.
Speaking of** Alien**, how much time elapsed between the chest pop incident and the killing in the chains-hanging-down room? What did the alien eat in the meantime?
Sure you’d save money, if something like that went wrong X% of the time, a thorough survey costs Y% of the losses you take when something does go wrong, and X < Y. Yeah, people get killed now and then, but greedy amoral corp executives of the type we see in this universe would just mutter something about eggs and omelets.
The “not killing people” part wouldn’t be the issue.
Losing your terraforming equipment due to a massive explosion WOULD be.
And everyone only wants to undertake projects that have high probabilities of success.
There is a high probability of success. As long as the occasional failure costs less (in expected value, probability of loss times amount of loss) than proper surveying (lower cost per world, but has to be incurred 100% of the time), a greedy shortsighted megacorp is going to take the gamble because it’s cheaper in the long run.
They went into hiding in “Revenge of the Sith.” This is a thread about classic movies, not really stupid ones.
In “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back,” conversely, it’s not at all clear Obi-Wan is more powerful than Vader, and there is nothing to suggest Yoda is in hiding at all. Yoda isn’t presented as a hiding ex-Jedi politician; he is a Zen master who lives on Dagobah because that’s where great Zen masters live, in isolation. He is uninterested in such mundane things light saber duels; “Wars not make one great.” He may well have been there for centuries, training Jedi sent to him from time to time. The prequels totally alter his character.
Seriously, there are more plot holes than coherent plot in the prequels. You could fill a 500-post thread with glaring plot holes from those films.
A survey detailed enough to pick up things like that could still easily miss something as small as the alien space ship. Planets, even moons, are fucking big. Picking up something the size of a football field during a survey wold be extraordinarily unlikely, unless you knew where to look for it.
I don’t think they’ve ever encountered intelligent aliens in this universe. There’s no indication of it in any of the movies - the line about Acturians not withstanding. And I don’t have a problem believing that a megacorp like W-Y doesn’t give a shit about harming non-sentient indigenous life.
One might think they have shuttles to go up to a small space station that was originally used for weather observation and or communication, or asteroid mining [for ice to turn into water and environment] or to go up to a freighter that is too large/fragile to land.
In SF small space stations are frequently placed above new colony planets/mining planets to serve as ‘head offices’, warehouses [huge null-G storage spaces that don’t need to be all that sturdy structurally speaking, that allow freighters to drop off/pick up cargo without needing to land] or to serve as weather observation/control units. If I were ‘world building’ I would probably have a station to serve as a construction base/warehouse for equipment/freighter drop off/pick up and general office. There would probably be a small fleet of 4 or 5 cargo shuttles and one VIP/passenger shuttle. I would pre-stage all my construction units up in space and drop supplies and equipment down as needed, and when everything was finished, change to a commercial station where the colony would ship mined and finished ingots of product up for storage and transshipping, and freighters would drop off supplies for transshipping down. I would imagine there would be a fairly great savings in fuel to not have to haul stuff up and down a gravity well.
[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]
Nonsense. Where did you read that a moon can’t be the size of Earth?
Moon is a description of what a body is orbiting, not how large it is. And even if it were smaller, it might have a higher ratio of heavy metals composing it.
And as for the survey, think about what they are doing. They aren’t looking for a crashed alien spacecraft. They are looking for indigenous life. You don’t have to do that by examining every square foot of the planet. You probably test its atmosphere, take samples of the water, and do overall assessments of the terrain. Not have some AI waste its time by going, “Nope. No crashed alien craft in this 10m X 10m square…”
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[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]
Maybe it took hours or days. All we know is that it took less time to return than it takes for a Xenomorph to chest-burst from a face-hugged man.
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[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 hardware that controls the dish was damaged. There could easily have been other transmitters, but the one Bishop went to was the closest.
That said, maybe the technology for a faster than light radio is fucking expensive, and a corner-cutting corporate site is worried about the bottom line.
[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]
It’s the same color as the landscape. I don’t think you appreciate how difficult it is to see stuff from orbit.
You have a cartoonish idea of what surveying is. Surveying for geological properties doesn’t involve looking at every square meter of the surface. It seems easy because you’re handwaving the difficult parts. The planet was barren. It had a crashed alien spacecraft on it. Hardly something that they would think to look for. You could search ten thousand planets and find zero crashed alien spacecraft. So why the everloving fuck would you require that the survey be of the intensity to find one? Your terraforming business model isn’t geared for profit.
You’re attempting to piss on a fantastic movie so you can appear above it. But in fact, your entire case is a result of you either not paying attention or just not understanding the concepts involved.
As for being easily entertained, well I do waste my time before work on silliness like this.
To reiterate, if something will be a problem and some small percentage of the time will lead to a loss, you look at the cost of the loss, vs the solution and make a business decision.
Your not understanding how a business makes decisions doesn’t make Aliens a bad film.
See…my reasoning was based on what I think is the best aspect of RotS. The entire Jedi Order (Or most) has been wiped out except for two guys…and those two guys by themselves very nearly succeed in stopping years of tyranny! That’s how badass Jedis are. Yoda has no problem getting to the Emperor, in Part IV, Obi-Wan makes getting to the tractor beam look easy.
They’ve removed a major asset by turning Anakin into a cyborg. Try again guys!
I’m attempting to do what, again?
The film is almost 30 years old and has more than earned the money back that it took to make it. My opinion will do nothing to ruin its “merits” to people who are fans of James Cameron or fans of the Alien franchise,
I plot pointed several plot holes and you disagree with them. We don’t have to agree and you aren’t going to change my mind on what I see as being holes in the internal logic of the film.
If you like it, then bully for you.
I need more from my entertainment.
Especially my sci fi.
Perhaps you don’t.
Isn’t there a built-in justification for this? “Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.” Yoda’s presumably doing his see-the-future bit, and presumably getting a REPLY HAZY - TRY AGAIN followed by a MY REPLY IS NO.
The way I figure it, Yoda and Obi-Wan spent two solid decades thinking, hey, look, as soon as The Force indicates that the time is right, we’re gonna swing right back into action; might be this week, maybe next month; any year now; aaany year now.
Since I didn’t introduce an argument about the business decisions of the Aliens film (the film and the entire franchise actually avoid sensible business decisions as far as I can determine) you did, I’m really at a loss at how to argue your points for you.
The reason that I introduced the aerial survey of the planet is to ascertain why on a relatively small astral body an alien ship (which according information introduced in the “prequel” Prometheus may not be the only one) was not discovered prior to the planet being terraformed.
A character states that the colonists have been on the moon for years and have never discovered the Xenomorphs. That’s not something that I made up; it’s part of the screenplay.
The film’s narrative is that W-Y, for reasons unexplained, constructed a massive terraforming reactor on a distant moon for reasons that are only supported by the plot, not by common sense or any “business” perspectives. In doing so, they were completely oblivious to the fact that life already existed on the planet, which is mistake so basic that it again could only exist to advance the plot.
In the director’s cut of the film, the colonists are shown traveling to the Alien ship at Carter Burke’s direction ( whose coordinates they somehow received) and bringing Xenomorphs eggs back to their compound. Since this violates the “Quarantine” policies established as being the 'reason" for the rather byzantine plan in the first film, how these life forms escaped yet again also relies upon (yet again) the plot requiring it.
The film then shows an incompetent group of military members then get housed by a life form for which they have no respect and still later has those incompetent members (well, the survivors that is) think that sealing themselves inside of a command center which has already been breached by those same Xenomorphs as being a sound strategic (or even tactical) battle plan.
The film is a plot hole ridden mess. It relies on loud explosions, lots of shooting,smartass comments and a wailing little kid to cover up its rather convoluted logic processes. Some people like that as it makes the film seem cool; some people think an Etch-A-Sketch is amazing.
We disagree on what we believe to be holes in the plot.
We’ll just have to leave it at that
In the novelization (deleted scene?) the crew discover that the alien got into their supplies and ate all the food they had onboard. And for that matter the creature is supposed to be “biomechanical”- at least as much nanomachine as living cells. Maybe a large part of its body is metal or ceramic, which it could easily eat being able to secrete acid. Maybe it can tap into power lines and use electricity for its actual energy.
