Quote from: Gash on Oct 01, 2014, 04:03:27 PM
The Steve Irwin analogy.
People who are destined to die in movies usually do something stupid. Just like real people sometimes do.
Firstly, so far as I know, Irwin wasn't in the same profession - and was getting paid to
deliberately put himself at risk. That's a whole world away (no pun intended) from an expedition to an alien world where very
strict protocols about quarantine and contamination should have been getting observed. He didn't even take along any equipment for safe handling of organisms, for crying out loud.
Secondly, it wasn't just his actions, alone. The ship is supposedly crewed by leading experts, but it's just one example of a
pattern of ineptitude; all of which starts with Shaw's other half removing his helmet - and the rest of them idiotically following suit. I could buy Weyland doing it, because he's being portrayed as arrogant to the hilt (part of why I preferred Henriksen's version), but these guys? No... It's like the scientists in this session say: After a certain point, you're actively rooting for them to
die, purely for entertainment value and that's not an end result you want when writing a story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osBFSuTRTqk#wsAlso, like they say, there is the distinct feeling that Ridley Scott and co
did have advisors on hand, but probably chose to ignore them for cheap thrills.
Quote from: Corporal Hicks on Oct 03, 2014, 11:17:55 AM
Granted it's been sometime since I last read it but I always thoughts Briggs' script was just fine as it was and would have made a great film.
I'm still very intrigued at what the unseen later draft included...
It needed much less in the way of an Alien body-count (confronting one should have been portrayed as so insanely dangerous, that it's their rite of passage to become an elite, not merely an adult), but otherwise hopped along at a nice pace. Considering the first draft was written over a weekend or so, it held together relatively well. It's difficult to judge until we get access to a later version.
QuoteAnd that is Lindelof's problem in a nutshell. He simply can't do logical. He wants spectacle and ambiguous - something Ridley Scott also wanted apparently.
That's really the issue, from what I can tell. Scott was pushing for that angle and encouraging it, compounding the issue. It's just a huge shame that, for all the deliberate attempt at mystery, there isn't one moment which comes close to the here-be-dragons feel of that original Space Jockey reveal, which is what he
should have been going for.
Kind of interesting to see that '
Isolation' is disproving his statements about how the Alien supposedly can't be portrayed as scary anymore, though... Wonder if he'll do a 180 if he's shown some of the more relevant footage.