Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 1936073" data-attributes="member: 6777">Tangent alert!I don't think it does at all. They act just as stupid, overconfident, and unprepared as many militaries do today.Alien is all about human hubris and corporate greed. The Corporation and the Marines don't buy for one second that there's some powerfully hostile alien life form down on the planet (save for the few higher-ups in the Corporation that *do* but aren't about to tell anyone). A key early line that sums this all up is when one of the suits says, incredulously, to Ripley that her description of the alien is ludicrous because nothing like it has been found  "in surveys of over four hundred worlds". As if incompetent surveys of four hundred planets out of an infinite universe were proof positive.The marines think the mission is BS. Consequently, they aren't too concerned about the Sulaco being unmanned. And, for all we know, this may be SOP. It's not like they have X-wing fighters flying around.The whole point of the films (well, the good ones, i.e. the first two) is that humanity is wholly unprepared for what's out there... but don't know that yet. On the contrary, they think they've seen it all. In Ripley's universe, working in space is just another job, and a sucky one at that.As for whether it's good or bad "hard" SF... I dunno about the "hard' part, but it's good SF IMO, and definitely on the harder side. I also don't see how having magical sensors that tell them everything they need to know about a planet from orbit would make it hard SF...</blockquote>

Verification