Comment by reactordev 2 days ago
Alien: Earth was the dumbest addition to the franchise. Hybrid synths that can “talk” to the aliens… pffft. Off the rails.
The last few films were of similar ilk. Prometheus started it with their David narrative. Just terrible writing.
> Alien: Earth was the dumbest addition to the franchise. Hybrid synths that can “talk” to the aliens… pffft. Off the rails.
It started off so well. The first few episodes were good/interesting/promising and the series seemed destined for greatness ( if they could stick the landing ). Unfortunately, it fizzled out in the latter half of the series as they turned the xenomorph into a silly pet.
Being a good fiction consumer requires offering the benefit of the doubt up to a reasonable/personal limit of suspension of disbelief. The missing piece with that show is inconsistent and shallow character development. Lost (prior to the later season/s) is probably one of the better examples. It's still watchable but it could be better. Maybe they'll sort it out.
That's the thing, though. Gigantic spaceships, alien panspermia, stasis pods, human-passing androids, underground alien bases, convenient maps in caves. All that disbelief can be suspended.
A handpicked team of professional astronauts on an interstellar mission being a bunch of complete incompetents over and over again for plot convenience is the real headscratcher that eventually makes it feel like the plot is an afterthought and makes you disengage from the film as a story rather then just pretty pictures.
It's a pattern you see a lot especially in sci-fi and action, and it's annoying because it's not like you couldn't have the glossy visuals or set-pieces if you also had coherent plots.
Agreed. Necessary suspension of belief vs unnecessary and contradictory.
For an in-depth list for 'Prometheus': "Red Letter Media talks about Prometheus" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x1YuvUQFJ0]. (To what extent were those due to Lindelof, not Scott?)
By this point, 'professional astronauts' is just another term for 'space truckers'. The film makers put in a lot of effort to point that out. Switch that in your head and it makes more sense. They have done so many routine missions, and it's all so routine, that they aren't prepared for non-routine. The whole structure of missions leaves the non-routine handling to synthetics. These are like key components of this franchise what the story it's trying to tell.
We reached the stars, but became alienated from both exploration and ethics. We lost the wonder and lost control of our fate. Life has become routine labor, corporate control, and synthetic oversight that isn't looking out for our best wishes even though we assume it is.
Exactly. If human characters don't react like real humans would, then that is much harder to 'justify' or 'suspend belief' about.
Lets take our helmets off in a unknown hostile enivroment?
Lets play with giant worms with teeth, as if in real life those things wouldn't scare the crap out of you even if they weren't alien.
Hubris is a tough drug to kick. If you were a biology officer on a spaceship with a bunch of fancy tech, why wouldn’t you think you could poke and prod a giant alien worm? Part of the story is that everyone thinks that they are in control until something happens, they realize their mistake, and then they probably die.
>> Lets play with giant worms with teeth, as if in real life those things wouldn't scare the crap out of you even if they weren't alien.
I think the worm thing (I thought of it as a snake, which just goes to show) is the result of an even worse sin than bad writing. I think the scene was deliberately written this way to pander to a certain type of audience member who enjoys watching dumb movies just to point out how dumb they are and thereby feel really clever. It's fan service really.
I'm ... guilty of indulging in that kind of thing myself (calling out movie characters' decisions for being stupid) and I've often stopped to wonder whether I'm not being baited, after all. Sometimes I certainly think I am and in Prometheus the bit with the worm/snake was one such instance.
> If human characters don't react like real humans would,
I don't assume all characters are human just because they walk and talk like a duck. Blade Runner, after all. Half are synths and some are transhuman consciousness uploads. The plot continuity is shit like AI wrote it. ;-D
> Lets take our helmets off in a unknown hostile enivroment? [sic]
Yeah, but there are plenty of people with character traits who do do stupid shit and take stupid risks. Besides, who would volunteer for a risky mission unless they really needed the money and didn't care so much about their personal safety?
Bro, we had a pandemic and people refused to wear masks. The characters are the equivalent of space truckers taking off their COVID masks the first chance they get. You don't think that is realistic? I'm sorry but they act exactly how I would expect life long space truckers act. Look at how hard OSHA/regulators have to push.
This was one day ago. For this to happen that guy would have to have tied off the safety switch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntr8kCLSxqk
People get really dumb/lazy when they get complacent. That is half the message of the franchise. Life has become routine labor, corporate control, and handing over oversight to someone else (synthetics) because everyone is on cruise control and only doing their little piece because they are on their 500th boring space trucker run.
Id argue that being a good fiction consumer is not letting a brand or franchise become your identity and know when to drop something. I saw the phantom menace when I was 12 and hated it. I was a massive Star Wars fan. I've seen nothing from Star Wars since and as far as I can tell I've missed nothing of value over 25 years. Terminator 3, Prometheus, Ghostbusters reboot, many more. We are not obliged to consume garbage.
> I saw the phantom menace when I was 12 and hated it. I was a massive Star Wars fan. I've seen nothing from Star Wars since
Too bad; after seeing the recent Disney mary-sue-iffied, everyone-carries-the-stupid-ball, hey-look-new-big-bad-with-no-explanation-of-where-he-came-from movies, my estimation of the prequels went up by a considerable amount.
In light of the newer movies, those prequels are actually very very good; a very mature take that approached mature themes ("So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause", and many more I can't think off right now).
Maybe your 12yo mind was not sufficiently mature enough[1], but your middle-aged mind might be - you should seem them again.
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[1] Hell, I saw them in my mid-20s, and even then I was not mature enough to appreciate the subtext and themes. When I saw them again recently in my mid-40s, I was much more aware of things in the world, especially how impressionable Annakin was, because now that I am older I see how actual adults are easily impressionable at that age (mid-20s).
What if the Prequels were movies with the same actors, acting in the same way, to the same script, but had nothing to do with Star Wars? Would you still think they were full of mature themes, or that it's all a bunch of half-arsed tropes that panders to the lowest common denominator[1]?
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[1] Swordfights! Intrigue! Romance! Cute robots! Cool races! Only You Can Save the World!
>Being a good fiction consumer requires offering the benefit of the doubt up to a reasonable/personal limit of suspension of disbelief.
Yup, here for it.
>The missing piece with that show is inconsistent and shallow character development.
To say the least. The whole series reeks of a movie stretched out to a series for TV. And the ship landing in the city? Right, how convenient… it’s just terrible writing. Made for teens so they can #metoo when we talk about how utterly terrifying that universe is.
I found some elements of Prometheus a little hard to swollow from a believability standpoint. The worst was having a major surgery and then getting up and minutes later running around. (Not going into too much detail here to avoid spoilers).