The second film justifies this, when Burke is confronted over sending some colonists out to investigate the crash cite. The corporate culture at Weyland-Yutani is predictably cut-throat, and going through normal channels means someone steps in and steals the credit. Some middle manager in the WY Extra-Solar Shipping department gets a report about an anomalous radio signal coming from LV-426. If he reports it through normal channels, that bastard Johnson in Expeditions will step in and take over the project. But if one of his crews just happens to find something on the way back… and Smith in Nonhuman Resources owes him that favor… What could possibly go wrong?
Also, I think the value of a xenomorph lies in using it as a terror weapon, not against conventional military. If you’ve got a rebellious colony that’s entrenched in an urban environment, dropping a couple egg-bombs on it means the defenders are suddenly fighting on multiple fronts, and have to divert resources to protecting civilians. Their inability to stand up to competent, conventional military is a plus, because it makes clearing them out after they’ve softened up the rebels easier.
So I have the opposite problem with this. Similarly to Odesio’s comments on Batman above. Its never mentioned that Godzilla and these other giant creatures have actual super powers, other than being really fricking big (about 50x the size according to the internets). A high velocity bullet (and more so a tank shell or JDAM bomb) 1/50th the size of a regular one, would absolutely cause some pretty serious damage to a human or other regular sized creature. In fact it would not take too many of them to kill someone (pieces of shrapnel 1/50th the the size of a bullet definitely kill people). So why is Godzille, (and other Kaiju etc.) so impervious to them?
The plan was, Ash, the artificial person, was supposed to be the only survivor, or at least, one of the only survivors, the others being in stasis. “Oh, the cosmic radiation accident killed the other six, so tragic.”
No one was supposed to figure out he was an android, just lucky. The space truck gets through quarantine (probably with a little palm-greasing) and the bodies/unconscious survivors get whisked off to a secret lab never to be heard from again.
No one realized how capable the xenomorphs really are. Ash wouldn’t have survived, either. It was…a bad call.
The physics don’t work for me, unless we are talking some magical superpower enhanced material, there is no way skin no matter how thick, would stand up to the pounding received by it in your average Godzilla movie.
Thanks to the square-cube law we know that kaiju can’t be made out of ordinary flesh and bone- it simply couldn’t support their bodies. So they must be made out of something closer to nanofiber or diamondoid. Pacific Rim exposited that the bones of the kaiju were so nigh-indestructible that their skeletons had to be left laying where they fell.
My headcanon is that they’re the last survivors of an era of silicon life that pre-dated organic life four billion years ago and utilized the then-abundant U-235 for their energy. Hence their fondness for human-generated sources of intense radioactivity. The 2014 Godzilla movie hinted at this.
Lampshaded in Superman Returns, where Brandon Routh grabs a crashing airplane by the wing and… oops!
eta: Shouldn’t have been a problem if you believe the “Superman’s powers are telekinetic in nature” (which he’d need to change direction while flying, as well).
Hijack: this is one of my favorite lessons with my advanced fifth grade math students. I have them build monsters out of blocks, then record the number of legs, the area of each foot that touches the ground, the number of blocks, and the amount of weight supported by each square unit of foot area. Then they predict what will happen to this data when they double the monster’s size (explaining what that means, so there’s no ambiguity).
They never get it right, and they’re always astonished at how many blocks it takes to make a 5-block monster twice as big in every dimension. The calculations are a little tricky, but by the end of it, they understand both why there are no kaiju, and why a praying mantis the size of an elephant would shatter its legs.
Area and volume are both fifth grade math standards, and I am angry that not all fifth graders learn not to fear kaiju.
A pet peeve of mine for years had been the space/diving helmet with lights on the inside that shine on the wearer’s face. Also, computers that make a beep (or whatever) as letters or words appear on the screen. Finally, the ACCESS DENIED!!! in huge letters accompanied by repeated buzzing noises when the wrong password is entered.
That used to bother me, but I have come to accept it now once I realized the error messages in oversized fonts are meant to show the audience what’s going on, they’re not meant to look like a realistic computer interface. Would you prefer the camera zoom in on the screen so the audience can read the “invalid username or password” message in 10 point font?
Agreed; when I build a password entry interface, I have the program send a progressively higher electric current through the keyboard, and after three attempts I just blipvert them.
I’ve rationalized it that the sciences of interest in such stories are anthropology and sociology. Other sciences and the technology are GNDN as a literary device that allows the author to present a sociological thought experiment.
Not Eden but paradise, specifically The Paradise Syndrome:
SPOCK: The obelisk is a marker… It was left by a super-race known as the Preservers. They passed through the galaxy rescuing primitive cultures which were in danger of extinction and seeding them, so to speak, where they could live and grow.
MCCOY: I’ve always wondered why there were so many humanoids scattered through the galaxy.
SPOCK: So have I. Apparently the Preservers account for a number of them.
In The Martian, soil poisoned with perchlorates is somehow fertile. A 60mph wind can threaten to topple a rocket, with an atmosphere 1/100 the density of Earth’s at sea level. 30mph is the limit on Earth. Hitting the rocket side at twice the frequency, with a change in momentum of twice the value, but 1/100 the density, gives us a force of 1/25 the maximum. So on Mars, a launch could be done at wind speeds tens of times more than the maximum its winds achieve. Ruins the premise on which the entire movie is based.
The problem is that while there are many, many things in space that will kill you, the majority of them are not at all cinematic; radiation, hypoxia, infection, immune system failure, lack of absorption of critical micronutrients, contaminated water supply, a penetrating trauma that could be reduced with surgery on Earth but which won’t clot in freefall, et cetera. All of the exciting things you thought you were signing up to do are pure nonsense, and you’re probably going to die because some technician forgot to torque down a bracket or because the cooling system in your EVA suit is leaking and slowly filling the helmet with air.
Once you get past the splendor of the cosmos unfiltered by atmosphere, space is just very, very boring; it takes you forever to get to even the nearest planet, and then you have to wait around for months before you can go back. There is no one to talk to but the crewman who somehow manages to make disgusting chewing sounds while eating the tasteless colored paste that is barely keeping you satiated, and the ship’s computer which is either giving you a subtextual psych exam or is trying to gauge just how gullible you are so it can lead you outside without your helmet and refuse to let you back in. And when you finally get to Titan, you realize that you forgot your Hasselblad and you’re going to have to take photos with your phone, except it got fried while doing a close swingby around Jupiter.
Space is terrible, and any movie that portrayed how space travel would actually be would be unwatchable.
Also, when watching The Martian, I managed to suspend disbelief about the violent windstorm, the giant spacecraft with a rotating habitat, funding for a five part mission to Mars, Donald Glover solving the return-to-Mars trajectory by himself with a laptop plugging into a server farm, and the entire final sequence of improbable improvisations that would have no chance of actually working. However, I couldn’t get over how much they sexed up JPL as a futuristic-looking campus that is somehow central to NASA operations; in reality it looks like a run-down land grant college which had its architectural heyday in the ‘Sixties and is pretty much considered a side project for NASA that they let the eggheads at Caltech run for them despite how many phenomenal uncrewed planetary exploration missions they overachieve at.