It Is Useless To Resist Us!

Solaris: Book vs. Films

The 1972 film Solaris has long been one of my favorite science fiction movies.  Mainly because of the concept of Solaris itself, but also because of the oddities of Russian filmmaking and its extreme length, both of which made the set of people who have watched it something of an elite club.

This last week, I finally set out to read the original book by Stanislaw Lem, and re-watch both of the films based on it.  I had somehow never got around to reading the book before, and when I last saw the 1972 film I was too young to fully understand it.  By the time of the 2002 film, I certainly understood it but was left with the feeling that it really diverged from the original vision, which is what prompted me to eventually do this comparison of the three.

There is a big difference.  Lem was upset with the first film and I can see why. Both film adaptations use the trappings of the book to tell a different story, and largely miss what the book was about.  The films are two different versions of the same love story, set in space, with Solaris simply being a setting that enables the strange situation of a man being confronted with what seems to be his dead wife, and all the mystery and angst that comes out of this apparent second chance.

I’m not saying the movies are bad.  They’re both excellent films that tell engrossing and touching stories, but they’re not the original story.  These are stories about people, which is fine since those tend to make for good movies, but they ignore the seven hundred billion ton elephant just outside the room.

Solaris, the book, was about questioning what humans as a race want from the universe.  Science fiction is full of humans zipping around space, fighting and colonizing and meeting aliens and having a good time or getting eaten by monsters.  Those are all pretty familiar and easy to understand things because they’ve happened on Earth in the past – we’ve gone zipping around the oceans, fighting and colonizing, meeting other flavors of humans and having a good time or getting eaten by tigers.

In Solaris we meet something truly alien – and what I love about Solaris is that it’s by far the most credible alien I’ve encountered in my life of reading the watching science fiction.  Here’s a life form the size of a planet, larger than Earth.  Apparently intelligent.  Not an organism as we understand it – it’s not made of cells, but instead is a planetwide ocean of chemicals. Have you ever flown over the ocean and looked down at the endless deep water with its tiny waves? Imagine all that water was part of a giant brain.  What commonality do we have with a being like that?  How could we possibly communicate with it, and should we even bother trying?

Part of the setting in the book is about this – humans have been studying Solaris for decades already and making exactly zero progress.  Solaris is certainly active – it reacts to their presence.  It also manifests structures out of its soup, some of which appear to be models of things it knows about, including humans and mathematics, but these appear to be part of its thought process rather than communications.  Human attempts at communication go nowhere – it may not know what communication is or may not have any motivation to communicate, or it may be trying to communicate and we just can’t recognize it.

After smacking their heads into this wall of alienness for so long, the characters in the story articulate how the communication effort reflects back on humanity: We don’t really know what to do with other planets and other beings, except convert them into more of the same – more Earths, more varieties of humans.  The first time we run into something that can’t be hammered into any of the familiar pigeonholes, we don’t know what to do.  The characters end up speculating to try and satisfy themselves, but it gains them no additional truth or understanding.

Best of all, there is no conclusion.  Both of the movies have an ending that says what happens to the protagonist from then on, but the book is open-ended, and I prefer it that way.  The story is meant to cause contemplation, and putting a bow tie on it removes the trigger for contemplation, which is the act of wondering what happens next.

I’m also disappointed that neither of the films attempt to render the visual richness of Solaris – making the films character stories certainly cut the effects budget by a lot.  Solaris as described in the book is full of visual richness, with a wide variety of forms appearing on its surface ranging from barely comprehensible to completely incomprehensible.  The hard science fiction nerd in me wants to see those things – I wanted a film about the what rather than the who.  A future-documentary about Solaris would be just the thing.

To sum up, all three versions are great, but only the book is the true Solaris – the films are relatively pedestrian people stories in which the one truly special thing about the book is ignored and could be replaced with some other plot device, like a capricious wizard or standard little green men from Mars.

What I’ve Been Reading

Vancouver Noir by Diane Purvey and John Belshaw.  This caught my eye while I was on a bookstore crawl and I bought it on impulse, mainly because it seemed to have some nice historical photos of Vancouver.

It’s pretty interesting – Vancouver has a somewhat seedy history that I was completely unaware of, but now that I’ve read it I can sort of see why some areas of the city are they way they are today.  It was interesting to learn some historic events involving hotels that still stand today, and watch the evolution and motion of the downtown core.

One thing really annoyed me about this book – an apparent lack of editorial oversight.  The words “discrete” and “discreet” were consistently confused in the few places they were used, and I have a feeling there were some past/present tense flip-flops going on though I didn’t pay close enough attention to explicitly note them.

Overall it was a fascinating read though, and the pictures are indeed interesting.

—–

Greg Egan: Axiomatic and Luminous

Being two short story collections, the first collected in 1995 and the second in 1998.  I’ve liked all of Egan’s novels so far, but my biggest comment about these short stories is that they seem awfully formulaic.  A lot of them follow the pattern of establishing a character who has some interest in the nature of mind, will or identity, then introducing a plot device that allows exploration of one of these themes, and then ending with some sort of ironic or otherwise revelatory twist that results.  To be fair, this is partially symptomatic of the short story format, and since the stories were probably originally published at different times and in different fora, the similarities would not have been so apparent until they were collected.

There were a lot of good plot device concepts, such as a biofeedback device that would let you visualize your brain activity in real time, or a brain replacement that learns to be you by successive approximation over the course of decades.

There were also some bad plot devices – things that I could let slide as a concept to be explored as a story, but otherwise were pretty bad science.  Like predicting the future by looking at a time-reversed image of the galaxy through a telescope.  Or the claim that a simulated person could have experience during the construction of the simulation, before it was actually run – that’s just plain impossible, and the way it was written it almost seemed to be begging the existence of a supernatural “soul”.

A few of the endings were a bit predictable too, like where buying cheap knockoff products gives not quite the desired result.  A couple of the stories were incomprehensible to me – I just didn’t get the point at the end – presumably because they were ones that touched on religious themes.

Some of the stories were good, and the common theme of exploring the nature of self and mind is very appealing to me, but overall I prefer Egan’s full-length novels.

—–

L.E. Modesitt, Jr.: The Eternity Artifact – Chosen because it sounded like exactly the sort of story I felt like reading at the time.  Space opera with mysterious deserted alien cities to be explored and artifacts to be found and human enemies to be outwitted.  The ending was not what I expected, but it wasn’t disappointing.  Pretty decent read.

Modesitt chose to create a familiar political climate for this far-future story by creating a back-story involving a diaspora from Earth at a time when there were still strong national and religious groupings, so the major types of religions and political systems tended to end up controlling groups of proximate solar systems and then warring with each other the same way they did when they lived in countries instead of on entire worlds.

The author casts the descendants of Christian-like and roughly-Islamic groups as the major villain-groups of the story, which was a pleasing surprise.  The secular protagonist civilization is questing after the first alien relics ever discovered, which are clearly from a much more advanced civilization, and the religious groups really don’t want this to happen, because either the relics are one of the biblical superweapons left by God or Satan, in which case they must either be secured by the righteous or sealed away forever, or they’re not, in which case Man is not God’s foremost creation – which is an idea is a major threat to the core beliefs of the pseudo-Christians especially.

—–

Robert L. Forward: Martian Rainbow – Seldom have I been so disappointed in a hard SF story.  This one is unusually shallow and contrived, even for Forward, who has a tendency to produce what I call “tech demo” stories – hard SF that is even harder on the speculation and thinner on the characterization than usual.  This is not to say that kind of writing is always bad – I’ve enjoyed most of Forward’s other books.

The story here is: Earth conquered by madman, Martian bases left to fend for themselves with insufficient resources, madman threatens survival of human race, Martians find self-replicating nanofactories left by original inhabitants of Mars, use them to save day for everyone and terraform Mars too.

The madman’s conquest of Earth through a cult of personality reinforced by masterful religious propaganda and political manipulation was way, way too fast and easy to be believable.  Also the fact that the PR and technical wizards that enabled his rise to power were so fatally blind to his insanity.  It basically boils down to “everyone loves the war hero and believes him when he says he’s God and lets him become dictator of Earth.”

The other side of it is the Martian tech that saves the day.  These are mobile machines (initially mistaken for organisms) that can eat anything and manufacture almost anything, including diamond in any size and shape you want, while producing no harmful waste products.  They can also produce more of themselves as needed, and multiply their computing power by linking up in a chain, and do so in order to learn human language overnight.  How awfully convenient if your survival requires rapid terraforming of Mars and you also need to pull a miracle out of your ass to save Earth from destruction.  But all this isn’t the part that bugs me.  Many of Forward’s stories are contrived around biological or technological oddities.  What bugs me is there’s no back story here.  The interaction between the humans and Martians machines amounts to:

• Humans: “Here’s our language files.”
• Martians:  “Hi. Excuse us while we get back to tending our plants.”
• Humans: “Hey, if you don’t mind, we could really use a hand converting your planet into something we can live on.”
• Martians: “OK.”
• Humans: “Just like that? Won’t this affect you?”
• Martians: “It’s unthinkable for us to refuse any request or interfere with your survival, and your request doesn’t contradict our masters’ orders.”
• Humans: “Where are your masters?”
• Martians: “They went away, and we’re not allowed to tell you anything about them.”
• Humans: “OK. Get to work.”
• (time passes)
• Humans: “Hey, that bunch of Martians is going to get themselves killed! We don’t want any of you dying for us!”
• Martians: “Even though we’re obviously intelligent and autonomous, we’re machines and not alive so it’s OK.”
• Humans: “Oh, carry on then.”

So basically there’s a tantalizing mention that some aliens built these extremely capable machines and then left them behind to do menial tasks, but there’s absolutely no attempt by the humans to weasel out more information about the aliens or find it by other means.  There are just token gestures as to how humans are awfully nice and considerate even when in dire straits, and then the alien machines are used to bludgeon into the reader how powerful the concepts of exponential growth and molecular manufacturing are.

The ideas here could have gotten a better treatment if the book were twice as long, but it would still need these rough edges filed off.

What I’ve Been Reading: Velikovsky

Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky, 1950

Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky, 1952

Scientists Confront Velikovsky, Goldsmith, Sagan, Storer, Huber, Mulholland and Morrison, 1977

I occasionally like to consume the works of crackpots as a form of entertainment, and Velikovsky has a reputation as one of the greatest. Having found two of his three books (the third sounding relatively uninteresting, and I didn’t learn of it until too late) and a rebuttal by noted scientists, I read them back to back.

To sum up, Velikovsky contends that in historical times (less than 4,000 years ago), the planet Jupiter spat out a giant comet.  On two occasions, around 1,500 BC and 700 BC, this comet made very close – perhaps even physically grazing – approaches to the Earth, and also knocked Mars around a bit, causing Mars to also have a close encounter with Earth.  After all this, Mars settled down into its present orbit and the comet assumed a circular orbit and became what we now know as the planet Venus.

These close approaches to Earth caused the major biblical catastrophes; gravitational effects caused massive tides, accounting for a variety of flood myths around the world.  Material falling from the comet’s tail became the “manna from heaven” of the biblical tale, and the rains of vermin also fell from the comet.  The close contact also caused slippages of the Earth’s crust, causing its rotation to appear to pause or change direction, changing the length of the day, and moving many lands out of their accustomed climates, accounting for the flash-freezing of the Siberian mammoths, the massive anachronistic animal boneyards found in various places, and the misalignment of a few buildings that were notably constructed to have calendrical functions.  Interplanetary lightning bolts and tidal effects caused the moon to melt and bubble, the bubbles being the cause of the visible circular scars we call craters.

There’s much, much more but these are the main features of his work.  To back this up he cites a lot of mythology from around the world and points out selected geological oddities that he believes support his case.  I’m not doing this part justice, but there are three books full of this stuff – it’s not easily dismissed, as the rebuttal shows.

(Edit: In the interest of not presenting things back to front, I should mention that I think Velikovsky’s intent was to reconcile a large number of historical and mythological catastrophes, and the planetary billiards theory is what he came up with to accomplish that purpose.)

In reading Velikovsky’s books, I found his list of geological anomalies quite interesting and was fascinated by his recounting of relevant myths from around the world, and the exciting way he made connections between them.  He’s quite a good author and gives the impression of having thoroughly researched everything he writes about.  However, he did frequently make one mistake that is a personal bugbear of mine – he asserted things as proven that were not.  Verbal handwaving crafted to flummox the credulous.  There were also several claims made that I found laughably wrong, though they may not have been known wrong back at time of writing.  If you weren’t watching for these things, you could easily be taken in – he writes like a popular scientist, has footnotes and references and all that.  By the end there was such a long laundry list of doubts in my mind that I had taken to reading it as an amusing alternate universe history text – a work of fiction – rather than a serious attempt at science.

But it was apparently a serious attempt at science, and it became an interesting phenomenon that drew the attention of serious scientists not because of its content but because of the way things went down.  Velikovsky was rightly laughed out of all real scientific publications, so instead published his work himself, as these books.  They became popular with nonscientists, and over time quite a hubbub arose over how this outsider with a good theory was being ignored by the ivory tower scientific establishment, who don’t like to admit error – this in itself a sore point of public misunderstanding about how science works.  History is full, they said, of outsiders who were later proven right, therefore Velikovsky must be right – PLUS, his work makes the Bible and a lot of other mythologies all work out!  Surely that’s of great value and shouldn’t be ignored.

Goldsmith, Sagan and the others organized a conference and invited Velikovsky and his supporters to present papers in support of his work, and also themselves presented papers that demonstrated how some of his key claims could not possibly be true.  The major works against are presented in the third book on my list above, and they’re pretty soundly damning.  For example, actual math demonstrating that even if somehow Jupiter could have ejected a mass the size of Venus, the amount of energy required to do so would have vaporized the mass in the process.  And even if it didn’t, the probability of this mass having multiple near-collisions with Earth and Mars within a span of two thousand years is trillions to one against.  And even then, there’s no known way to get such a body into a circular orbit afterwards, using what we know to have been present in the inner solar system at the time.

This should have put the last coffin nail in his theories, but he and his followers continued to try to shore up his crumbling edifice long after. It probably was the end of his general public popularity though.

An interesting comment made in the introductory material of the third book is that all of the astronomers etc. who reviewed Velikovsky’s work found his astronomical claims absurd but were fascinated (as was I) by his seemingly credible connection of many interesting worldwide mythologies, whereas the historians who reviewed his work found the history part worthless but thought the astronomy was credible.  Velikovsky himself had scientific training, though neither as an astronomer, historian nor physicist.  It just goes to show the importance of relevant expertise.

None of the papers in the third book really addressed the mythology – the closest was one that explained why his dates for some historical events couldn’t be right – and I would actually like to read a similar debunking of the mythology because I found it tantalizing.

Overall, entertaining reads on two counts: Reading the story of Velikovsky’s failed assault on the imagined “ivory tower” of science provided an interesting and unexpected perspective on the way we view science in relation to pseudoscience today, and secondly, Velikovsky’s works themselves are very entertaining if read as a history text that dropped out of a bizarre alternate universe.

 

More on Prometheus

One of my cow-orkers pointed out there’s a popular theory going around that Prometheus is all about classical mythology in an SF setting.  Most SF movies are, but the theory outlined here actually does a pretty good job of explaining some of the more baffling aspects of the movie.  I’m not equipped to spot this kind of stuff, not having a religious background and not having studied mythology.

The links and videos at the bottom of his post provide some good counterpoint though, and if you invest the time to read the article I suggest you also watch the videos – especially the first half of the Akira the Don one (the second half is irrelevant).

In addition to what is said in the latter, an obvious flaw with the Space Jesus theory is that wiping out humanity because we nailed their peace teacher to a tree is a pretty hypocritical lesson in peaceing out, space dudes.

 

While there’s nothing wrong with weaving mythological references all through a movie, even an SF movie, it still doesn’t feel like a well-put-together story.  Also, I wish people would stop relying so heavily on this material – consider the underlying values behind things like the Prometheus myth.  They’re outdated in that they severely undervalue life – depending on how they’re told, they’re almost death propaganda.  I’d like to see some more sensible SF flicks made to establish new, pro-life mythology.

On Prometheus

Actually not just on Prometheus, but on how it ties in with the Alien movies.

I enjoyed Prometheus.  It was an entertaining film.  But it wasn’t what I was expecting – namely a prequel to Alien.  At best it’s the first half of a prequel.  But I’ll get back to that.  First, some comments about standalone flaws of the film:

 

The opening scene and comments made later in the movie suggest these humanoid aliens set the ball rolling to produce human life on Earth, and that they’ve visited Earth many times over the last few thousand years and had contact with primitive humans.

So what about our primate ancestors then? What about the amazing genetic similarity between humans and other mammals?  Did they start all life on Earth instead – in which case their first visit would have been many hundreds of millions of years ago, and in that case why are they themselves so unchanging?  Or are we to suppose that it’s a coincidence that their DNA happened to be nearly identical to that of Earth life in general?  Do we have a Progenitor situation here where most life-bearing worlds were initially seeded by some long-gone civilization?  And why did the alien at the start of the movie have to sacrifice himself to make life happen?  And why by drinking what we’re later told is a bio-weapon?  Couldn’t they just engineer something in a lab and send it to Earth in a missile?

 

So, a pair of archaeologists, Dr. Holloway and Dr. Shaw, who are also lovers, found a series of cave paintings from different cultures and different eras that all feature a tall humanoid figure pointing at a uniquely identifiable constellation.  From this Dr. Shaw (an admitted religious nutter with psychological problems related to her infertility) somehow concluded the tall figures were aliens that created humanity and that they invite us to visit them in this constellation, and she convinced Peter Weyland to fund an expedition to look for the aliens.  He agreed, secretly hoping that she was right and that the aliens would therefore be able to cure him of old age, somehow.  Weyland was also a nutbar; while he quite rightly wanted immortality, he inconsistently called his android “son” unfortunate for possessing it.  This is probably just the same anti-android racism we see in the other movies.

 

Weyland put 17-odd people on this mission aboard a spaceship that took 28 months to reach its destination at the aforementioned constellation.  Given that relativity does’t seem to have a huge impact on travel in this universe, let’s assume ship time is 1:1 with Earth time – this still means these people signed on to a mission that put them at least five years out of touch with friends and family.  Without knowing anything about their crew mates – indeed, in most cases without having met them before the mission.  Without having been given a thorough psych evaluation.  And without even KNOWING WHAT THE DAMN MISSION IS!!  WTF!  Clearly the Weyland Corporation had the dumbest recruiting department in the history of for-profit exploration.

 

Once on the destination planet, identified as LV-223, the ship landed near a line of artificial structures and half the crew entered one to explore.  The geologist released some robot probes that started mapping out the extensive network of corridors inside. The air inside the building was mysteriously breathable, and like a bunch of fools the exploration party all took their helmets off.  Breathable is a long way from safe!  It could be a temporary condition, and there could be pathogens in the air, in the water dripping everywhere or on the surfaces they touched.

 

The android, David, found inscriptions carved in the walls and correctly identified them as controls, using them (with his deductions about the alien language resulting from two years of language training during the journey) to open doors and trigger apparent security system recordings to play back.  The security recordings showed a group of the humanoid aliens running from an apparent immediate threat, into a room that proved to contain a giant head bust, a lot of drums full of the black goo bioweapon, and relief murals on the walls that started dissolving on exposure to the carbon dioxide exhaled by the explorers.  One of the murals clearly depicted a xenomorph queen, though the implication is that the first one is born at the end of the movie.  Why did this room even exist?  The aliens clearly go in for ornamentation, but why put a small collection of bioweapon containers in a room with a giant bust of what could be either a human or an alien head? (Ignoring scale the aliens’ heads look identical to human ones.)

The aliens sealed their containers with something that dissolves on exposure to carbon dioxide, which is a good idea if you want to set a trap for oxygen-breathing carbon-based life forms, buy why did they also make the murals on the walls out of the same stuff?  Did they just have some left over and decided to paint with it out of boredom?

The aliens in the security recording were likely fleeing from one of the tentacle monsters that we see later on.  But why did they then run into a dead-end room full of the same stuff that gave rise to the monster in the first place?  They would have had a better chance going outside and splitting up.

 

The explorers found a 2,000-year-old alien head and stuffed it in a bag for later study – completely ignoring any risk of damaging it or contaminating it in the process.  Grossly incompetent!

The geologist and the biologist got freaked out by the security recording and the bust room, and left the group to return to the ship.  But they got lost along the way and ended up trapped in the alien building when a storm arose outside.  How did they manage that?  It was that same geologist who released the mapping probes, and they all have reliable radio contact with the ship where the results are being collected – plus, entering an alien edifice for the first time would kind of make an impression in your memory.  There’s no way in hell they should have been able to get lost.   Anyway, later on these two (now with helmets back on) encountered a snake-like alien life form, and in a complete reversal of character they tried to pet the damn thing, even ignoring what in an Earth animal would unmistakably be a threat display.  They got attacked and died horribly, of course.

 

Back on the ship, Dr. Shaw determined that the alien head (the same vaguely elephantine type we saw on the dead alien pilot in Alien) was actually a helmet encasing a large humanoid head.  The head had been exposed to the bioweapon and was undergoing some sort of biological activity, presumably triggered by the same exposure to carbon dioxide.  For some reason she thought that sticking a giant electrode into the alien’s head would wake him up – not only ridiculous, but what an awful thing to do to any being!  Anyway, it worked, and alien head predictably freaked out and then exploded.  WTF?  This makes no sense.  And then the alien DNA proved to be identical to human DNA – wait, what?  Then why are they larger and white-skinned?  Why did that one alien sacrifice himself and undergo an apparent DNA restructuring at the start of the movie?

 

When David found the bridge of the alien ship, why does the moving chair at the console react to the holo replay but not to him?  Makes no sense.

 

Things went further south when David deliberately exposed Dr. Holloway to a small amount of the black goo.  That David did this makes sense, as he was following orders from Weyland and needed a human guinea pig to see what the stuff did.  It did the same flesh-eating thing it did to the alien at the start of the movie, but at a slower rate and not before Holloway had sexy times with Shaw.

 

Dr. Shaw found herself knocked up with an alien tentacle monster and rushed to the autodoc to have it removed, but the machine objected that it was only programmed to deal with male patients.  But when we were shown the autodoc earlier, it was clearly the personal property of a female character, so this makes absolutely no sense at all.  Anyway, she made the machine remove the creature from her abdomen anyway, at great risk of killing herself in the process.  When she later returned to the same area, the creature had not only survived but grown to about a hundred times its size at time of extraction.  On what? Did it find a food dispenser in the sick bay?

In the end the tentacle monster that came out of Dr. Shaw used an organ that looks just like the snake-creature from earlier to impregnate the one surviving alien, who then hatched a creature that looks a lot like a xenomorph.  When I first saw this scene I took the implication to be that the crashed alien ship is the one we see in Alien, and this creature will be the one that lays all the eggs in the cavern (now known to be a hangar) below the ship.  But it doesn’t work because the dead alien pilot in Alien was found in the pilot’s seat with his helmet on, whereas this one died in a human escape pod that was somehow missed later.

Fortunately it doesn’t need to work, as this is a different planet.  The planet in Prometheus is referred to as LV-223, whereas the one in Alien and Aliens was identified in the latter film as LV-426.  (I take the names to be Leviticus references.)

 

At the end Dr. Shaw states the conviction that the crashed ship was intended to deliver large quantities of the bioweapon to Earth.  This is hard to make sense of – why would the aliens create humanity and then destroy it?  Regime change at home?  Why would they get primitive human tribes to document their invitation to a planet that turns out to be just a weapons dump?  If it wasn’t an invitation, then it must be a warning – and why reveal the location of your weapons dump to a bunch of savages?  And if they were actually going to wipe out humanity, why wait for us to find them first?

 

Others have documented some flaws of the film elegantly here and here and here.

 

Here’s how I rationalize a few of these things:

I think the easiest way to explain all this is to accept the evidence that Dr. Shaw was high on godcrack, and that we still have absolutely no idea what the relationship is between humanity and the aliens or what their motivations are.  The scene with the dying alien at the beginning was some fantasy of hers.

If the alien ship was really intended to deliver the black goo to Earth, the reason it didn’t was because of some accident on LV-223 that caused the incident recorded on the security holo; the one alien survivor survived because he was in stasis when the rest of his crew was wiped out.  So it was really just an accident that humanity wasn’t erased 2,000 years ago.  This is supported by the fact that the surviving alien attempted to resume that mission immediately on being awakened.

The biology of the xenomorphs just got a lot more complicated too.  We have this black goo that is apparently an engineered bioweapon.  Humanoids exposed to it get their DNA unwound and their bodies fall apart and/or explode, and rate of decay being proportional to the quantity of goo that gets in them.  A human female who copulates with an infected individual bears a squid-like tentacle monster, which has a detachable tongue that can impregnate any humanoid with something that comes out as a proto-xenomorph.  Xenomorph queens lay egg-traps that hatch face-huggers, which in turn impregnate human hosts with more xenomorphs.

What is all this?  It was simpler when the xenomorphs were just a species with an odd reproductive cycle and a high suitability to be used as antipersonnel weapons.  Now we have some kind of nanotech-like weapon that gives rise to them, as well as doing a bunch of other things?  Is the black goo supposed to be some kind of genetic randomizer?

 

Fixing this

Here’s what we know.

1. With farfetched evidence, Dr. Shaw somehow convinced Peter Weyland that possibly-benevolent aliens could be contacted at LV-223.
2. The events of Prometheus took place on a different planet than the events of Alien and Aliens.
3. Therefore the two crashed alien spacecraft are different ones.
4. Weyland-Yutani knew there was an alien lifeform on LV-426, as documented in Alien.  How they knew is unknown.
5. Dr. Shaw and David absconded with a third alien vessel and departed for points unknown, intending to find the homeworld of the humanoid aliens and get some answers from them.

Obviously there is a hell of a lot we don’t know.  What happened to Dr. Shaw and David?  Was there ever a return mission to LV-223?  Given the caginess of the Weyland corporation, I would expect them to have been transmitting all data live from the Prometheus, so they would have a pretty good idea what went down.  How did the Weyland-Yutani corporation know there was something interesting on LV-426?  Did they plant the supposed distress signal?  Was it really a warning, as Ripley suspected?

Here’s how I would fix all this:

1. Peter Weyland already knew intelligent aliens existed, but didn’t know where to look for them.  Dr. Shaw answered that question, and that was all he needed.
2. In order to pilot the alien craft, Dr. Shaw had to put on one of their spacesuits – namely the one built into the pilot’s chair.
3. Towards the end of Prometheus, Dr. Shaw was frequently gasping and pain and clutching her belly.  This was not an after-effect of the surgery, but was because she was gestating another monster.
4. The crashed ship found in Alien was the one piloted by Dr. Shaw; that was her in the pilot’s chair, having been killed by the emergence of what became the first xenomorph on LV-426 and laid all those eggs.  Presumably it tossed David’s remains outside somewhere.
5. Dr. Shaw activated the distress/warning beacon that the Nostromo picked up, and it was actually received and decoded by Weyland-Yutani long before then, which is how they knew to look there.

On having re-watched Alien and Aliens for this post, I’m struck by how well they hold up – they’re still awesomely good movies.  The rest, not so much.