Even though we disagree on the movie, I like the points you make and would like to discuss them.
^ Except the scientists are completely stupid. Like the biologist who thought it would be a good idea to pet the vagina-faced snake alien that he just came upon
Because upon sight of a vagina men lose their intelligence?
Seriously though, for me this was a case of someone being book-smart but street-dumb. Also, they had been without food or water for a day, and running around a dark cavern in a panic. People do stupid, suicidal, irrational stuff in those situations, like people who go nuts at the top of Everest.
not to mention much of the dissection in the film is performed by...an archaeologist?
Yeah, that's one of the things that bugged me about the movie. Is Shaw an archeologist, an anthropologist, a geneticist, a biologist, or what? Then again, the generic "science officer" is a staple of most science fiction, even Alien 1.
For one thing, how is it that a guy who has acid shrinkwrap his helmet to his face later show up bent end over end crab walking and then get up and be a super strong zombie-man, not to mention with his face more or less in tact?
I felt that part could have been better executed, and in more gory, graphic detail. However, the Engineer head autopsy established that extreme, unstable mutation was a fact of life on that world.
How can the lead character of the film give herself a cessarian and give birth do an alien creature and nobody says a goddamned word about it (besides David making a pun)?
I thought this was the most thematically effective part of the movie. After such a harrowing ride for the protagonist and the audience, it's sudden calm, and people around her are walking around like nothing we saw mattered. For me, it added a sense of surrealism and fatalism to the movie, revealing how evil the manipulations were that led her to this point.
Spiritually, this part reminded me of 1984, when Winston is hideously tortured for several days, then simply let go and left with the rest of his brief life.
Why was nothing done about said alien baby? Its not like it ran away and needed to be found like in alien. It was just left to its own devices to grow into a giant writhing mass of tentacles and orifices.
I find it best not to apply the rules of life on Earth to the life in an Alien movie. A plant can become massive with just water and light; I think most of the lifeforms we see in this franchise would not qualify as either animal or plant in our own classifications, and would have a metabolism and growth cycle such as we cannot conceive of.
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