I have a slight quibble about Alien being tossed into the mix.
If you start with the premise that the crew of the Nostromo are little better than slightly-better educated space truckers, working for an evil corporation willing to sacrifice a starship, crew, and cargo (probably insured to the max, so really the only thing they’re out is the deductible) on the chance of reaping billions, if not trillions of dollars (yen? euros? Space-credits?) by unlocking the secrets of the Aliens and marketing it for maximum profitability…the plot stands up a lot better.
The crew does seemingly stupid things because the capabilities of the Alien are unknown to them; the defenses and precautions they concoct are based upon the assumption that the Alien is little more than a dangerous, wild animal, let loose aboard a commercial-grade, made-by-the-lowest-bidder space-going Mack truck.
Then there’s the fact that the crew’s efforts are hamstrung by a science officer who’s secretly a plant, preprogrammed by the evil corporation to shepherd the progress of the Alien and protect it from the crew’s efforts to neutralize it.
Most of the gripes I hear about various sci-fi movies (even the better ones) are because people can’t buy into the basic premise of the fictional universe they’re seeing on the screen. IMHO, the great reason that they cannot buy into that premise is because they are thinking more like themselves, a person probably safely ensconsed in placid, middle-class surroundings, in a movie theater, with a bucket of popcorn and an even larger bucket of fizzy, carbonated soft-drink, than the protagonist(s) on the screen.
It’s a failure of imagination.
Granted, most movie plots don’t have the backstory or exposition to explain how some seemingly implausible (to middle-class suburbanites) set of circumstances arose to allow the movie plot to unfold in a seemingly implausible (to middle-class suburbanites) manner; that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
I will allow that in a lot (okay, most) movies, the characters do truly bone-headed things: they go out alone to investigate the strange noise they heard in the darkness; they pick up a kitchen knife to deal with a monster that could probably take most of a belt of ammunition fed through the barrel of an M-60 machinegun; etc., etc.
I just don’t think Alien is one of them.
As an alternative, consider the craptacular movie Timeline. I was gifted this piece of dren for XMas by my niece, and it was all I could do to sit through it without screaming at the TV screen. You send a bunch of people, archeologists most of them, back into the middle-ages, with little or no training in local language, customs, and, since advanced weaponry is prohibited, knowledge and training on local weapons.
Not only that, you drop them into the middle of a war-zone, where folks are going to be jumpy and suspicious of almost anyone “Not Us” by their definition.
And then you expect these people to snoop around looking for someone, and bring them back to the present?
Or, consider The Hulk. Another movie I can’t stand to watch. You have a guy, mostly emotionally dead to begin with, but who turns into this great, big, unstoppable green thing when he gets mad enough. How do you stop him?
Well, once I knew the trigger, I wouldn’t be pissing him off to start with, and then shooting at him when he turns all Hulk-y, making him even madder still. If he did Hulk out, I’d let him go, track him safely at a distance, let him cool off and revert back to normal human form.
Then tranq him to the gills, so that he feels nothing, ever again.
And then keep him like that permanently.
But then I’d do that to begin with as soon as I knew what the trigger was.
One thing I will acknowledge: most of us may have pride in our knowledge and abilities, as well as our individual accomplishments. But I also think most ordinary people would also be humble enough to acknowledge when they are in way over their heads, and either run away, or think super-rationally (as much as we can), and seek higher power (I’m not talking about praying to God here).
Most of the “evil” types in movies (heh, maybe even real-life) are sure in their power and abilities, and cannot concieve of a situation in which they are not in complete control. On this level, The Hulk works.
(Well, we wanted Sophie to experience a drive-in and this was the only appropriate thing for her to see).