Comment by reactordev
1 day 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.
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> 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.
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).
>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.