While I was on holiday I decided to watch Interstellar. This was a terrible, terrible mistake, but at least you’re getting what is hopefully a reasonably entertaining blog post out of it. Needless to say, though, this post is going to spoil the hell out of the film, so don’t read if you haven’t seen it yet.

Interstellar is the worst science fiction film I’ve seen since Prometheus.

To understand my particular problems with Interstellar you have to know about the difference between hard science fiction and soft science fiction. Soft science fiction is mainly concerned with telling a story, and using “science” to enable that story. It doesn’t particularly care how its science works — hence the quotation marks — and if it knows what’s good for it it won’t even bother with an explanation unless it’s directly relevant to the plot, instead presenting objects and concepts that outright break the known laws of physics as a fait accompli. This is an approach that works, and works well; it’s the story that matters to soft science fiction, and nobody is going to care about the precise physics behind lightsabers or artificial gravity unless you make the very poor decision to point it out to your audience. Soft science fiction requires lots of imagination and very little actual scientific nous to write, and so it’s not particularly surprising that soft sci-fi encompasses the vast, vast majority of science fiction. Pretty much every single sci-fi film, television show, and 95% of sci-fi books released in the last fifty years are soft science fiction.

I say this because I want to make it clear I’m not about to brutally suplex Interstellar through a table just because I like nitpicking. I’m very capable of enjoying sci-fi stories that screw established science up into a little ball and throw it into the dustbin, because if they’re written well enough and don’t go out of their way to draw attention to it I can suspend my disbelief and just accept it as something that’s necessary to the story. Prometheus was soft sci-fi, and my issues with that largely stemmed from the fact that it involved the most imbecilic group of movie scientists I’ve ever seen rather than any of its actual “science”. Soft science fiction is fine, in principle. If Interstellar was soft sci-fi it would still have problems, but those problems would be that it is terribly written and nonsensically plotted, not anything to do with its science (or lack of it).

Unfortunately Interstellar is not soft sci-fi. Or at least, on the outside it doesn’t look like soft sci-fi. Instead, Interstellar is masquerading as hard sci-fi. Hard sci-fi differs from soft sci-fi because the science in hard sci-fi does matter. It might take a few liberties, or rely on one or two big assumptions about future science (the possibility of FTL travel is the usual culprit), but otherwise hard science fiction is written to be as faithful to current real-life scientific knowledge as possible. It’s effectively the reverse of soft sci-fi in that the stories it tells are now all about the how of the science that soft sci-fi just ignores; most hard sci-fi tries to come up with plausible solutions to near future problems such as the colonisation of another planet, and the draw of the story is either the science itself, or how human beings would react when confronted with the stark reality of certain modern scientific concepts. Because it’s actively relying on the science as the central support of its story hard sci-fi is consequently much harder to write well than the soft stuff, which is why you don’t often see hard sci-fi in the cinema. Not only do you have to be really up on your science, but if you’re faced with a choice between “something cool happening on screen” and “obeying the laws of physics” you usually have to choose option B, which doesn’t exactly make for a high-grossing summer blockbuster.

Except now we have Interstellar, a seemingly hard science-fiction movie that made all of the money at the box office last year. It did this despite repeatedly invoking real-world scientific concepts such as gravity and relativity, and despite going out of its way to present itself as a “realistic” vision of space travel right down to the not-having-any-sound-effects-during-space-sequences trope. It also did this despite straight up not being a very good movie, but that doesn’t stop the Transformers franchise and so is probably outside the bounds of this discussion.

The first half hour of Interstellar is probably the most interesting. It’s set on a decaying, technologically regressive Earth afflicted by a blight that’s slowly killing off the world’s staple food crops and turning the topsoil to dust. The main character, Cooper, is a washed-out astronaut who is now scratching a living as a farmer, and whose frustration with his world’s backwards, insular outlook on life drives him to seek some form of escape from it. The world-building that goes on here is perfectly respectable, and it felt like the beginning to a half-decent John Christopher novel. But then Cooper gets his wish, and the movie goes completely off the fucking rails.

Cooper is made the leader of a party of astronauts that is sent through a wormhole that appeared 50 years ago to see if they can find any planets suitable for colonisation. A wormhole? Fine, whatever, you’ve got to get the astronauts to another system somehow and so I’ll swallow that – the existence of wormholes isn’t exactly forbidden by the laws of physics, although the existence of a stable wormhole that you can traverse from one side to the other requires some extreme fudging of energy densities¹. On the other side of the wormhole they find three planets orbiting a black hole called Gargantua, which is stated to have 100 million times the mass of our Sun. This makes it a mid-range black hole – we know of supermassive black holes with masses exceeding tens of billions of Suns, while the lower limit is like four Suns or something — but it’s still not exactly the sort of place I’d want to start humanity anew for the following reasons:

• Black holes aren’t very big on the whole providing heat and light for the purposes of sustaining life thing. Interstellar fudges this too by saying that the black hole’s accretion disk is providing a curiously sun-like environment for the orbiting planets, but while it’s true that accretion disks do give off a lot of radiation it’s usually in the form of X-rays and other nasty stuff that would make any planets present decidedly unhealthy places to live.

• Black holes are tidal giants. This is a point that Interstellar chooses to entirely ignore, but black holes will destroy planets long before they go anywhere near the event horizon thanks to tidal stresses. Even big planets do this – Saturn’s rings are basically chunks of moons and planetoids that wandered inside Saturn’s Roche limit, and if a pissant little gas giant can do that imagine the Roche limit a black hole with 100 million times the mass of the Sun will have. In order to survive a planet would have to be a very, very, very long way away from the black hole, which then poses some additional problems for getting adequate amounts of heat and light to sustain life.

• It’s a sodding black hole. I’m seriously struggling to think of a dumber idea than settling a new colony within spitting distance of one. Even digging out a planetoid in deep space and living underground would be more sensible.

But our intrepid heroes aren’t letting this stop them. Despite Michael Caine and Cooper’s daughter blathering on and on about how getting a look inside a black hole will let them “solve the problem of gravity”, the black hole in Interstellar has a curious lack of it and functions almost identically to Earth’s Sun for almost the entire length of the movie. It’s pretty much there for two reasons.

1. To provide the usual deus ex machina that movie black holes do at the end of the film.
2. To allow the writers to make a spectacular hash of the concept of gravitational time dilation.

They waste no time with the second one, as the first thing the astronauts do is make the mind-numbingly stupid decision to land on a planet so deep inside the black hole’s gravity well that seven years will pass in “normal” space for every hour they spend on the surface. I have a number of problems with this sequence.

• You would have to be bloody close to the event horizon of even a 100 million Sun-mass black hole before you experienced that degree of time dilation. Gravitational time dilation is much like relative velocity time dilation, where you don’t experience significant time dilation effects until you’re all the way up to .99c; otherwise it’s something that’s not really noticable on the human scale. As we’ve just established, being that close to the event horizon means your planet just gets pulled apart and there’d be nowhere to land on. For that matter the spaceship would get pulled apart and there’d be no astronauts to land on it.

• There’s a hefty amount of technobabble about how to land on this planet in such a way that it will save fuel. I have bad news for the astronauts: if your planet is sitting at the bottom of a gravity well so deep that you only age one hour for every seven years that pass outside of it, then there’s no amount of fuel that’s going to get you back off the planet’s surface again. We have enough trouble getting out of Earth’s gravity well, for crying out loud.

• One of the reasons they land on this planet is because there’s an all-clear signal being sent from a pathfinder ship that was sent ahead of them several years ago. When they get there they discover that the pathfinder ship is wrecked, but thanks to the time dilation in the planet’s frame of reference the ship has only just crashed. This is a nice idea, with one extremely significant flaw: if the gravity well was that deep then any transmissions from the pathfinder spacecraft would be incredibly redshifted, and it would have been extremely obvious to the astronauts that something was up. Assuming that they weren’t yet another collection of dumb movie scientists, that is.

• I don’t even know what was going on with the ankle deep water and the huge tidal waves that are somehow not spotted by the astronauts on their initial approach. Have they never heard of side-looking radar? And yes, if you’re that close to the black hole you’re going to experience significant tidal effects, as I’ve mentioned several times, but I somehow don’t think that this is what was on the filmmaker’s minds when they shot that scene. Anyway, I’d be more interested in how the planet has managed to retain a liquid ocean without having it all escape into space under the gravitational influence of the black hole. Ditto any atmospheres and, well, solid matter.

There is a lot of stupid concentrated on that first planet, but Interstellar still has a couple more stops to make on its tour of idiocy. First there’s Crazy Matt Damon’s planet, where the ice surface they spend their time tromping around on is apparently a collection of floating solid clouds. Which is ludicrous. Perhaps in response to the frank impossibility of his environment, Crazy Matt Damon goes crazy and attempts to kill the astronauts and steal their spaceship; the ensuing fracas kills the remaining redshirt astronaut and damages the spaceship so badly that Cooper is forced to attempt some sort of slingshot maneuver around the black hole to get Anne Hathaway to the last remaining candidate planet. He does this by burning all of the fuel they have left and then jettisoning the spent shuttle vehicle he’s piloting into the black hole to reduce the spacecraft’s mass. This is not the dumbest thing that happens in the film by a long way; we’ve already established that they must have some sort of magical future fuel/engines that can get them out of any gravity well and so slingshotting around the black hole while dumping unnecessary ballast is actually quite a good idea. Sadly there’s then an extended sequence where Cooper falls into the black hole, which is inevitably very, very stupid indeed.

• First, there was some gobbledygook earlier in the film where Gargantua is described as a “gentle” black hole, where somebody might be able to dip inside the event horizon and escape again with the data required to solve Michael Caine’s gravity equation. This is nonsense. The whole point of the event horizon is that it’s the point of no return: once you cross it, not even light can get back out again. That’s why it’s called the event horizon; we can’t see anything over it. That’s why black holes are black. Once you’re over that horizon, falling towards the central singularity is inevitable.

• This is also the part where Interstellar contradicts its own twisted movie logic as well as the laws of physics. The accretion disk around the black hole is burning with a heat comparable to the surface of the sun. It must be in order to provide the Earth-like light source that illuminates each of the worlds the astronauts have visited, and I think there’s a part where this is outright stated to be fact by somebody or other. Cooper somehow falls through this incredibly hot accretion disk without being burnt to a cinder and reaches the black hole’s event horizon. Maybe they’ve discovered super-asbestos in the future and lined their spacesuits with them or something.

• Oddly, Cooper would probably survive the tidal forces present at Gargantua’s event horizon. This is because the radius of the event horizon increases more or less linearly with the mass of the black hole, while the strength of the tidal forces obey an inverse square law that means they get exponentially weaker the further out you go. A small black hole on the order of a few solar masses will have a tiny event horizon, but it’ll kill you long before you reach it. A supermassive black hole like Gargantua, on the other hand, will have an event horizon that extends some way beyond the black hole’s lethal radius². Cooper’s death is inevitable once he’s crossed it, but he’d at least live long enough to see what was inside it.

Of course the interior of the black hole turns out to be some pseudo-mystical time travelling bollocks that ties up the story, as I’d been expecting almost from the very beginning of the film. In fact I’d seen every single plot twist bar Michael Caine’s deathbed confession coming the moment the character or concept was introduced because Interstellar is, as I have already stated, a terribly written movie that hews to all of the worst soft sci-fi tropes despite having dressed itself in hard sci-fi clothing. And this is my problem with Interstellar: it’s actually a soft sci-fi movie, but it’s explicitly linked to the present day and repeatedly invokes real-world scientific concepts in the manner of a hard sci-fi movie, right before mangling them horribly because they just get in the way of the story it wants to tell. Unfortunately if you invoke that real-world science as heavily as Interstellar does you have to be partially bound by it, otherwise there’s no point; you might as well have made a more fantastical film with lasers and aliens.

Yet despite mentioning it repeatedly Interstellar doesn’t use its science in any interesting fashion bar its brief (yet incorrect) flirtation with time dilation, and it’s a much weaker film as a result of cloaking itself in a hard sci-fi raiment that, after the most cursory of inspections, turns out to be the emperor’s new clothes. It would have been far better if it hadn’t made a point of making a point out of the science; if it didn’t go out of its way to draw my attention to how wrong it was at every single turn. It wouldn’t have been a good film, but I probably would have been able to suspend my disbelief the whole way through rather than having it repeatedly snap under the weight of the film’s scientific bullshit. As it is not only is the science awful but Interstellar has a worse grasp on its internal logic than the Fast and Furious series does. At least those movies are fun. Interstellar, on the other hand, is a dull, dreary and pointless expedition into the absurd, and I deeply regret having watched it at all.

(I did like the robots, though.)

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The post Interstellar: A Rant appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

gnomishlich asks

Armageddon, terrible movie about oil drillers on an asteroid how would a space shuttle or other space traveling vehicle fare for persons odds of arrival, survival, and departure from an asteroid?

Oh god, what have you done. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.

You may think Armageddon is a terrible movie, and you would hardly be wrong to do so. Michael Bay’s job is to make blockbuster movies that make extensive use of special effects and loud action scenes to cover up the fact that they have no logical plot or consistent characterisation to speak of, and are designed to cater to people whose brains are operating on the mental level of a twelve year-old boy. Literally every single one of his films has been offensively bad. Like, not just the regular kind of bad, where you sit through it and it’s bad and at the end of it you think “Well, that was bad, I won’t be watching that again.” No, that would be too easy for Bay, and in fact if he ever made a film that was simply bad I’d think he was slipping somehow. What sets Bay’s films apart from the rest of the lowing, braying herd of CGI summer blockbusters is that they seem to be designed to piss the audience off. I honestly don’t know how you can watch a Transformers film and be anything other than utterly and completely ashamed and insulted – ashamed because you spent two-plus hours of your life watching this crap and you don’t want anyone else to know, and insulted because Michael Bay thinks you are stupid enough to enjoy something pitched at the level of a Transformers movie. It’s only a Michael Bay film that can make me feel soiled somehow after I’m done watching it, like I need a day-long shower to wash off all of the dumb that has built up on my skin. It’s hard to accurately recall just how horrible I felt after watching Transformers 3, but thanks to the internet my immediate reaction has been preserved for posterity:

Transformers 3 should be submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal because it conclusively proves many things that otherwise would have taken decades if not centuries of study and observation. The intellectual bankruptcy of Western civilization and culture. The non-existence of God. The ultimate futility of living in a world where the laws of physics allow such crimes to be perpetrated against the very nature of the universe. Like some sort of Lovecraftian horror that has slithered forth from an unholy nether dimension, Transformers 3 is so utterly and fundamentally at odds with everything good and sane that the mind atavistically recoils and refuses to comprehend it.  And even if I manage to purge the experience of having watched it from my memory it will still leave signs of its passage; a broad swath of tainted brain matter that cannot be reused for any other purpose but which instead grows and expands, subverting healthy tissue and corrupting my mind to its vile purpose until I am a twisted ur-man no longer capable of rational thought. Ia! Ia! Baythulu fhtagn!

Right. Yes. Anyway. Michael Bay films. Very bad. Very bad. Armageddon is a bad film, and it is no less bad for having been made during Bay’s early period (it was his third film or something), but by the standards of Michael Bay it is unremarkably bad. There’s nothing to make it stand out in terms of badness from the likes of Pearl Harbor or The Island – yes, it’s stupid, and shot with Bay’s trademark oversaturation of American flags fluttering in the breeze, and the scene with the minigun makes no logical or rational sense, but neither do any of his other films so there’s nothing here to mark it out as different in any way.

That is, unless you happen to have a PhD in solar system impact physics, at which point Armageddon becomes tied with Mission to Mars for the Worst Cinematic Atrocity Perpetrated Against Science award. You’ve got an unrealistically sized asteroid heading towards Earth which is stated to be “the size of Texas”, so about 700 miles across, except there’s only one asteroid (now dwarf planet) in the belt anywhere near that big and we’d notice if anything happened to it. The asteroid has been knocked out of its orbit by a comet; this is a chunk of ice which is typically Not Very Big and has sod all mass thanks to being made of spongey ice, and would have little impact on the orbital trajectory of a an asteroid 700 miles on a side¹. The asteroid itself looks nothing like an asteroid that’s just been walloped by a comet; there’s a few chunks of rock and clouds of debris orbiting with it like you’d expect, but I don’t think any asteroid would look quite as spiky as the one in Armageddon does. It should look just like a big rock, or like a big pile of agglomerated rubble compressed down into a sphere by its own self-gravity. Instead it looks all gothic and nightmarish and there’s lots of weird green and blue hues used in the lighting (again, trademarks of Bay) because that shit looks cooler, I guess.

Then you’ve got the actual asteroid impacts on Earth, which are also awful. The one at the start creates a moving wall of fire that eventually consumes the entire planet, and I don’t even know how this would work. Asteroid impacts tend not to be about fire so much as they are massive earthquakes and huge blast waves. Oh, anything caught nearby is going to be a crispy critter (read the first statement from a witness of the Tunguska event) thanks to the immense heat of the asteroid’s entry into the atmosphere and sheer quantity of energy liberated when it either hits the ground or explodes in an airburst, but we’re talking something about the size of a big nuclear fireball here, and not some all-encompassing global catastrophe. While the shock waves would devastate an area hundreds or thousands or miles around the impact site, truly global damage would be done through dust clouds/climate change for the smaller asteroids, and the physical disruption of the Earth’s crust for the larger ones.

The second thing this – and all other Hollywood films about asteroids, including Deep Impact – gets wrong is the speed of the asteroid. Asteroids in films move slowly, almost leisurely, like an out-of-control jet airliner rather than a piece of space rock moving at 20-30 kilometres per second. People on the ground have plenty of time to see them coming and make futile attempts to escape. In reality, unless the asteroid comes in at an incredibly oblique angle the time lag between an asteroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere and hitting the ground is about one second. Try snapping your fingers once; that’s how fast an asteroid impact would seem to a watching human. If they’re standing close enough to see it happen they’re screwed, and even people who are safely over the horizon will be killed by a blast wave pushing a wall of moving rock and debris towards them faster than the speed of sound. Even smaller asteroids (and we’re talking the metres-scale stuff that makes it to the ground here) would pack enough punch to explode with the force of a moderately-sized stack of TNT. You see the Barringer Crater? The thing in North America that’s over a kilometre wide and 200 metres deep? We think the rock that created it was about fifty metres in diameter. Fifty. Metres. Just one of the “tiny” rocks featured at the start of Armageddon would devastate a significant area of New York if it managed to score a direct hit, rather than just chopping the top off of the Chrysler building. Movies dramatically understate how lethal and destructive asteroid impacts are. It’s one of the many cases where the reality is actually far more terrifying than what’s on film, but it’s deliberately understated so as not to scare the living daylights out of the audience.

And then we get to your question, which is: could we fly a spacecraft up to an asteroid and land on it? The answer is, yes we can. In fact we have, and they even managed to get the spacecraft back to Earth orbit afterwards. Armageddon’s rendition of military space shuttles that handle like jet fighters in outer space is completely ludicrous, of course, but we’ve managed it with a robot probe so there’s absolutely no reason why we couldn’t do with an appropriately-designed manned spacecraft. Before the Orion program was gutted by the US administration one of the proposed missions was a trip out to a Near Earth Object – in other words an asteroid orbiting relatively close-by to the Earth (out past the orbit of the Moon, but not too far out) – so it’s something that is seriously considered by space agencies today, and it’d actually be considerably safer than a trip to Mars thanks to the shorter mission duration and the fact that “landing” on an asteroid doesn’t mean marooning yourself at the bottom of a gravity well.

This is what happens when somebody mentions Armageddon to me; I spend 1500 words ranting and then finally get around to actually answering their question in a single paragraph. The movie’s science was deconstructed years ago by somebody with far more patience than me², and it used to be shown to new management hires at NASA as a training exercise to see how many inaccuracies they could spot. It is quite literally the textbook case of How Not To Do It. Please, nobody ever bring it up on here again.

(Incidentally if you want to know if we could use Armageddon as a blueprint for saving the world from a real rogue asteroid, I already covered it in a previous post.)

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The post Armageddon Ist Verboten. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I went to see Prometheus on Saturday. It was my first cinema trip in three years and the results were… not pretty. Prometheus is a film about space scientists and their space mission to a space planet to be killed by space aliens, except the scientists in question are pretty much the worst scientists in the history of science. Even by film scientist standards they’re absolutely terrible. The following laundry list of complaints is going to spoil the movie fairly comprehensively, so if you have any intention of watching this awful film at some point in the future I’d avoid reading the rest of this post if I were you.

The command structure and job roles of this two-year mission to outer space are incredibly vague. There’s Charlize Theron, who represents the company funding it and who is supposedly in charge, but the people she’s nominally in command of apparently don’t care. The captain certainly doesn’t. Noomi Rapace and her boyfriend don’t. The geologist and the biologist don’t. Throughout the entire movie everyone does their own thing; having invested two years of their lives travelling out to this planet, once they get there everyone just makes it up as they go along. According to what we see in the film some of them have never even met prior to coming out of stasis! Wasn’t there, you know, any training involved in this hazardous deep space mission? Or did the company just hire bums off the street to crew its top of the line science vessel because the bottom line was cheaper? You have to do training before going to Antarctica, and even Svalbard requires a three-day course in how to shoot polar bears, but an unexplored alien world? Let’s  just wing it, it’ll be fine.

(Perhaps I’ve got this all wrong, though. Maybe they’re workfare placements who don’t really want to be there. That would explain why nobody in this movie gives a fuck about their jobs and why they don’t have the first clue about space travel or exploring alien worlds.)

They get to the planet and they descend through the atmosphere, and they just happen to come down right next to some alien igloos. Like, out of the entire planet, they picked the landing site that was next to the alien buildings. If you picked a random landing site on Earth your chances of landing next to human habitation wouldn’t be very good because two thirds of the surface is fucking water. I understand that it would be even less entertaining for them to spend two months surveying the planet, but my problem here is that they don’t even deal with this issue with a throwaway line. It’s not like Alien where they were homing in on a distress beacon that provided a plausible narrative reason as to why they find the ship so quickly.

They go out to explore the alien igloos. With people. In flimsy-looking environment suits. Don’t these guys have robots they can send in first to see if it’s a hazardous environment? I suppose there’s David, but he doesn’t exactly go first, and there’s the laser balls, but all they do is make a very detailed map that nobody bothers to use and by the time they’re deployed the away team is already inside. We survey many hostile environments on Earth using drones and robots because it’s safer than sending in squishy humans. In the future, nobody gives a shit.

Upon finding the structure they’re in has a breathable atmosphere, the entire exploratory team removes their helmets and starts sucking in great big lungfuls of air that is very probably contaminated by a shitload of alien radiation/bacteria/whatever. If you are in an environment suit on an alien world you do not take it off. Like, ever. Even if the world is apparently completely Earth-like and you’re standing in a lush garden with flowers and daffodils watching cats gambol through the grass. Those cats likely have thousands of years of evolutionary experience in dealing with the native bacteria. You don’t. Inhaling one would have an effect on your body much like what happened when twelve rabbits were introduced to Australia, a continent which had never even seen a rabbit before and which had no natural predators to keep their population in check. I mean, it’s not like it even looks benign. The inside of that ruin looks like a stag beetle’s colon¹. I wouldn’t want to inhale beetle colon air no matter how harmless it was.

After exposing themselves to god-knows-what alien diseases the away team wanders around just poking at shit without bothering to take any samples for study in a lab environment save a severed alien head grabbed at the last minute. They are also incredibly unprofessional in their personal behaviour; the beardy guy is apparently a geologist yet his primary contribution to the mission is to throw his laser balls around and act like a moron. At no point does he do anything indicating he possesses any kind of useful skills whatsoever and just whines and whines until he decides to leave with his equally-useless biologist buddy. Wouldn’t this giant corporation financing the trip have, you know, scientists trained in archaeology/xenoarchaeology/insert field here who would have worked out procedures for studying this alien environment in advance rather than hiring this complete bunch of no-hopers who just make it up as they go along?

Despite having a computer back on the Prometheus that tracks the movements of everyone exploring the alien ruin in real-time, and despite this particular special effect being shown in excruciating detail several times during the film, the captain, crew, exploratory team and literally every other human on the planet fail to notice that the beardy guy and his biologist friend have gotten lost inside rather than returning to the ship. Shouldn’t there be like, an entire support team monitoring the movements and video feeds of the scientists? The Prometheus has other crew members besides the captain who could be doing this stuff, right? We send robot subs down to look at marine trenches (which are mostly inky blackness) and there’s a whole bunch of people crowded around the television screen back on the boat, yet here they find the remains of a hitherto undiscovered alien race³ and it’s apparently so boring that nobody can be bothered to keep an eye on things. Even the marine team in Aliens got Gorman and Ripley looking over their shoulders.

(Also, wasn’t laser ball dude in charge of the mapping process? Shouldn’t he have access to a pretty good map of the ruin now? Doesn’t he have a feed back to the very accurate map on the Prometheus? How did they even get lost in the first place? Shit, we have Google maps on our smartphones now, are you telling me that nearly a century of technological progress doesn’t stop these two bozos from wandering in circles the entire time?)

After shenanigans they get the alien head back to the Prometheus where they proceed to handle it without any kind of isolation apparatus whatsoever. It is just sitting out in the open air of their lab area².  Not content with exposing the away team to whatever alien bacteria were present in the ruin, they’ve now exposed everyone else on board the Prometheus to it too thanks to their shitty scientific procedure. They don’t even put their face masks on when handling it!

The brilliant scientist Noomi Rapace, upon being confronted with this perfectly preserved specimen of an alien lifeform, does what any self-respecting archaeologist would do in this situation: instead of photographing it, imaging it using the super-duper awesome medical imaging equipment they’ve got right there (X-rays and ultrasound, anyone?), measuring its dimensions and generally gathering as much data about it as she possibly can while taking great pains to preserve it in its original state, she sticks a giant needle in its ear and runs twenty thousand volts through it. Why? It’s never really explained. The head promptly and predictably explodes, preventing any further analysis. Bravo, Noomi Rapace. Bravo.

Noted cowards beardy guy and his biologist friend, after getting lost, decide to spend the night in the safest part of the alien ship: the room with the happy, not-at-all ominous stone face and the completely benign set of containers oozing friendly space goo onto the floor. Nothing bad could possibly happen to them here. At least they’ve got their helmets on, I guess – not that it helps them, because as soon as the alien snake pops its head out of the goo the biologist (who up until this point has been nothing but a massive coward) sidles towards it making idiotic cooing noises like it’s a basket full of cute kittens rather than an alien lifeform whose capabilities and potential threat is completely unknown. What exactly is he trying to achieve here? If it was a fucking bear, would he be sidling towards it making idiotic cooing noises? How does he know it isn’t the alien equivalent of a bear? In a film full of morons, these two are the worst of the lot.

Michael Fassbender spikes whatshisface’s drink with space goo. This is never explained either, although in this case I’m inclined to let it slide because Michael Fassbender is the sort of asshole who’d do this just for shits and giggles. Fassbender does a lot of inexplicable stuff during the movie, but it can nearly all be excused with “Michael Fassbender is a dick”.

Whatshisface develops Space Ebola while on a second trip to the alien ruin. Charlize Theron refuses to let him back on board the Prometheus, citing a quarantine regulation that nobody has given a flying fuck about up until this point. Hey, Charlize! You know Noomi decided to explode an alien head down in medbay, right? You know you’re probably breathing in alien brain matter right now? If it’s contamination by alien diseases you’re worried about then I’m afraid the boat done sailed on that one.

Charlize then sets whatshisface on fire using one of the flamethrowers the security team brought with them just in case they found some Japanese holdovers from WW2 and needed to clear some bunkers. What was the rationale for including those on the cargo manifest, again? If the guys who funded, planned and launched this particular voyage of the damned had the foresight to predict the possibility of space zombies and take appropriate precautions, why is every single member of the crew they picked so incompetent? Even Idris Elba spends more time on-screen playing an accordion with his comfort blanket draped over his shoulders than he does running the ship.

There’s like a zillion more plot holes in the film but they’re all conventional stupidity instead of this rather special brand of science abuse. Alien isn’t particularly concerned with proper scientific procedure – indeed, I wouldn’t really want to watch it if it was – but it was still a film I respected because from what little we did see the crew on board the Nostromo (mostly) came across as competent professionals who knew how to do their jobs and were shown doing their jobs properly, and any blips in their behaviour could be explained by them being the space equivalent of truck drivers, not scientists. On the Prometheus we’re constantly told how brilliant Noomi Rapace is and what these other redshirt characters are here for, but when we see them doing their jobs (if at all) they’re shown doing it in the most haphazard slipshod fashion possible. This isn’t the way to tell a convincing story, and it certainly isn’t the way to present the Engineers and their creations as a viable threat because these guys are so dumb they’d happily follow lemmings over a cliff just to see what all the fuss was about. Pretty much every single person in this film dies because of their own stupidity and the stupidity of others — if the two Ronnies hadn’t gotten lost on the ship there wouldn’t have been a problem, if Fassbender hadn’t infected whatshisface with Space Ebola there wouldn’t have been a problem, etc etc. — not because the alien ship they’re exploring is actually deadly in any way. As a result Prometheus isn’t compelling, it isn’t scary and it most definitely isn’t Alien. Ridley Scott needs to stop making films; after this and Robin Hood he’s just embarrassing himself now.

1. I am aware that beetles do not have colons. However, if beetles did have colons then I imagine the inside of a beetle’s colon would look much like the inside of the alien ship.

2. Health and safety rules must be really relaxed in the future. I had to wear a full-on gas mask when dealing with inert ice samples because of the danger of breathing in particulate matter left over from the gun firing process that would fuck up my lungs. Fast forward one century and we’re handling two-thousand year-old alien heads with no precautions whatsoever.

3. It’s unclear as to whether humanity has encountered aliens before in this particular fictional universe, but judging by the crew’s utterly bored reactions to what they find  and their refusal to document anything I’m guessing that it isn’t the first evidence of extraterrestrial life they’ve seen because, I don’t know, there’s one on every street corner back on Earth and it’s just so passé.

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