Aasimov’s “3 Laws of Robotics” goes there pretty easily, simply by virtue of being phrased in relation to humans.
Ash from the movie Alien. The scene where he tries to kill Ripley with the rolled up magazine makes me want to headbutt brick walls. If they ever redo Alien in the same way they redid Star Wars and E.T. I hope they can make that scene somewhat suspenseful, or at least have Ripley shoot first.
Why not? Why is sentience required for intelligence or stupidity? People often talk about the intelligence of non-human animals, and they aren’t sentient in the sense of being self-aware. Or do you just mean sentience in some other way? Besides, we don’t know if the computers on the mothership had sentience, if you want to use that definition. It doesn’t have any lines. Certainly not putting Macafee on your mothership computer was stupid though, whether it’s the computer’s fault or not.
Well it’s just not very interesting if they aren’t sentient. At that point you may as well make a list of the three stupidest chairs.
Independence Day just isn’t a great answer for this. The machine being stupid isn’t what makes that scene so bad. Computers can get a virus, I think that’s a valid thing to do. The reason the scene is so stupid is that Jeff Goldblum is able to upload a virus to the alien ship from his Windows computer, as if the aliens just forgot to turn on password protection on their Netgear router. It’s a great example of a movie being stupid about computers, but that’s not the same thing.
It was a mac, and that’s even worse.
Snap, it was. You get a cigar.
Hey, you should listen to our podcast sometime!
-Tom
I’m guessing great minds think alike.
Well, my comment had added value stuff about Jason Bourne successully using a magazine, so I get extar points. It then had a smooth segue into a discussion of Lord of the Rings.
Seriously, though, it’s a disturbing scene. I remember being freaked out by it as a kid before I was even old enough to understand the ickiness of forced sodomy. It even ties in a bit to what the facehuggers do to their victims, so you have to wonder if it’s some byproduct of Ash having studied the alien.
I’m assuming it’s part of Dan O’Bannon’s script. It’s certainly more memorable than if Ash had simply tried to strangle her.
-TomYea, the entire film is one long expose on ramming things down people’s throats, and men giving birth. That the horror comes from more than cool looking monsters is one of the reason this film sticks with me more than its latest sequels (not trying to debate how great or bad 3 was).
This one example just doesn’t resonate for the same reasons as alien tendrils slithering down your throat in order to deposit babies into your stomach. Though Ash’s motivations may very well have been inspired by the way the aliens did things, I would imagine his programming would allow him to reason that there would have been a more efficient way to get the job done. Why else program a machine if not to be efficient? Though I guess one could argue that the entire concept of a humanoid machine is entirely inefficient anyway, so perhaps the creators of said machine really didn’t care about efficiency.
It figures the one podcast I haven’t had the opportunity to listen to yet is one that discussing a particular scene I’ve despised for so long.
Dude, did you just go the “not realistic!” route? I’ll take “dramatically interesting” over “realistic” any day of the week, especially in sci-fi and horror.
-Tom, death by magazine ramming apologistI’m just keeping my reasoning within the scope of the thread >:)
This is the worst and stupidest synopsis of Alien ever. The film still remains one of the best horror films yet made, the nigh-unkillable psycho in a remote area slasher flick exaggerated to its maximum.
I think you need to think about the time that Alien came out in theaters. It was the A#1 shocker film and the chest-busting scene made people flip out in theaters.
Try to pretend you’re watching it for the first time in the theaters. It’s not just the face-sucking or chest-busting scenes, see. The film leads you to believe at first that the baby alien is probably a baby facehugger, even though it doesn’t really look like one. You’re too busy losing your shit to notice or care, really.
So, the crew figures the same and they are off looking for another facehugger. Dangerous, yes, but not to the extent a full-grown alien is. You’ll notice that Dallas, Brett, Parker and Lambert all died from splitting from the group before anyone has any idea there is a big alien present. It kills Dallas in the ducts, but he’s looking for a facehugger (which is why you get just the flash of the full-grown alien). Then it kills Brett in the weird machinery room with all the chains and dripping water and you get a fuller view of it. Then it takes out Parker and Lambert and even then Ripley doesn’t see it with her own eyes until she has to confront it but she gets a clue that it is something big and much worse than a facehugger due to Parker and Lambert’s chatter over the radio.
Slasher films usually have a first act where victims are picked off before anyone knows there is a killer (or it’s just disregarded as a myth or legend) and then a second act where they know there’s a killer but they cannot escape from it. I love that Alien combined them both, in a sense.
Well, some people don’t like having long throbbing things jammed down their throats and apparently some people are just fine with it.
In regards to Ash using a magazine:
Not much more to it than that, really. I found his technique with the magazine fairly unsettling, and I presume that was O’Bannon/Scott’s aim with it.
Great, so now I can put my misconceptions about the stupidity of the Ash/Magazine scene to bed and refocus my hatred on the (not really relevant to this thread but similarly perplexing) Mecha-Colonel Quaritch vs Avatar Sully knife fight in Avatar.
Wrong order of events – Dallas enter the ducts and dies after the assault on Brett, so at this point they already know they’re looking for something big and bad. That’s why he’s carrying a big-ass flamethrower around.
Hey, idiot. Ash was very obviously malfunctioning when he did that. Trying to kill Ripley by force-feeding her a magazine was supposed to be crazy.
Yea can’t watch that clip, it’s too lame. I prefer to experience only the good parts of the movie.
Yes, I can understand how being confronted with proof that you utterly and repeatedly misinterpreted a fairly simple scene would be unappealing to you.
Hey, Zylon, this is a perfectly civil thread for adults discussing movies they like. There’s no call for your “hey idiot” bullshit.
-TomYou’re right of course. I could have just said “Hey, kerzain” and gotten the same point across.