Comment by grues-dinner

Comment by grues-dinner 2 days ago

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.

smcin 2 days ago

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?)

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_DeadFred_ 19 hours ago

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.

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FrustratedMonky 2 days ago

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.

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mbreese 2 days ago

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.

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- like_any_other 2 days ago
  
  > why wouldn’t you think you could poke and prod a giant alien worm?
  Because 90% of the average moviegoing audience got it right. You can invent tortured reasoning for why a biology officer on a spaceship with a bunch of fancy tech would be dumber than the bottom 10% of humans, but the real explanation is just lazy/incompetent writers.
  
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  toast0 2 days ago
  
  They don't make a whole lot of movies where all the characters just follow the rules, cause it wouldn't be fun to watch.
  Xenobiologist is tired of eating with the rest of the crew and eats in the lab instead seems reasonable. We didn't see the leadup to see the deviance normalized, we just get to see the end of it.
  Alien:Earth isn't the best writing, obviously, but we're how far into the series, the writing just has to be enough plot to get to the xenomorph rampage scenes. It's like plot in a video game or an adult film; you have to have it, but it doesn't matter.
  
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  vunderba 2 days ago
  
  Agreed - that scene is literally in there as an excuse to exhibit a self-indulgent "gross-out moment". Why not just make a B-horror Troma monster movie at that point...
  
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YeGoblynQueenne 4 hours ago

>> 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.

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burnt-resistor a day ago

> 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?

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_DeadFred_ 19 hours ago

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.

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scotty79 2 days ago

> handpicked team of professional astronauts on an interstellar mission being a bunch of complete incompetents over and over again

It's set up in the future. Observing current trends it's quite realistic for everyone to be really, really dumb by then.

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