Quote from: kwisatz on Dec 28, 2023, 02:29:58 AMQuote from: Local Trouble on Dec 28, 2023, 02:04:26 AMCounterpoint: this thread should never be locked. It should become a forum institution like Egg on Sulaco. Anyone is welcome to try their luck at shaking some sense into ralfy before he clicks the ignore button on them.
https://media0.giphy.com/media/21T9PmWttOb0EFrrwK/giphy.gif
I'd rather play Crocodile Dentist with my schwanz
The points I gave here are commonsensical:
https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?msg=2622214The other authorized media are icing on the cake.
I use the ignore button because it's pointless dealing with those who lack common sense and are thus forced to resort to trolling. That's basically it.
Here's what "common sense" means:
W-Y had a bio-weapons division long before the events in the first movie started, and the ICC was implementing quarantine procedures as well. Those things don't take place out of the blue, which means companies had been finding, using, and weaponizing dangerous organisms, and the government had also been catching them doing so. Given that, it makes no sense that W-Y would not care about what Ripley reports.
No one in the movie and in reality has the means to go about solely exploiting such finds alone unless he's so rich he has company labs and factories at his disposal, and renting them doesn't help because the costs alone would mean that one will be left with only a fraction of the profits.
Personnel like colony managers and military technicians don't accept orders from private individuals. Rather, they accept orders only from higher ups in the same corporation or from corporations for which one works for. That's the case in this movie: the colony manager works for W-Y, and Burke, who was head of one W-Y division, was given the freedom to order people from other colonies around. Not only that, but he was able to order Bishop around as well, even if Bishop works for the Marines.
That's basically it. Given that, why include the other authorized media? Because they give more details about these points, if not deal with discrepancies.
For example, in his audio commentary, Cameron explains that in the real world, the government and the military work with and for corporations, directly or indirectly, covertly or not, and he gives several examples. His intention was to show the same in the movie: the government depicted in it stands for that of the U.S. and W-Y for U.S. corporations that exploit others. That explains why Burke works covertly, like Ash sees personnel, if not the innocent, as expendable, and can order military personnel like Bishop around. In short, the movie mirrors reality.
And yet in some cases it doesn't. For example, when the location of the landing ship is implicitly revealed in the movie, one would think that Ripley would continue protesting her innocence and demand that they investigate the landing site even though they think it's a waste of time to do so. Why? Because in boards of inquiry or whatever it really was, the accused is seen as innocent until proven guilty. That was the only piece of evidence Ripley had that could prove that her story was true, and yet she didn't do anything about it.
The WYR tries to explain what happened by stating that W-Y doctored the flight recorder logs. That meant that they only showed that the ship landed but no location could be retrieved. That makes sense.
Meanwhile, other pieces of evidence, like the one that explains the origins of a reverse-engineering division, look superfluous because one would assume that in order to move from retrieval to research to manufacturing one would need reverse-engineering, among others.
Still other media end up creating more contradictions, and one example is
Alien: Isolation, where it's revealed that flight recorder is retrieved (that means the one on Ripley's lifeboat is either another recorder or a computer with copies of the Nostromo logs) and that the distress beacon is even de-activated. Meanwhile, in another commentary (this time an article for a sci-fi magazine) Cameron counters his critics by stating that the reason why W-Y didn't find the derelict ship was because the distress beacon was damaged by volcanic activity.
Finally, one work presented by a forum member, which has the intro of another alien game, makes all other authorized media superfluous by stating that Burke was ordered to send an armed team to retrieve alien organisms, etc.
One more thing: FWIW, if there's anything that doesn't make sense, it's going to this thread and posting that one would rather do other things than post in this thread.
