Why were the aliens so obsessed with finding Friday?

You have to be frightened of the overwhelming military technological capability of an alien race that can expend so much effort and expense to track down just one escaped slave. The movie doesn't explain why the high-tech aliens want Friday back so much.

I have a theory. The high-tech aliens aren't really looking for Friday. They're looking for the alien earthman who's with Friday, Cmdr Christopher Draper. The aliens don't want anyone else to know of their presence. The last thing they want is for Earth to know that an extraterrestrial species is trespassing into their solar system to mine a planet. It's clear that Earth's technology is far, far behind the high-tech aliens, but no doubt far along enough to cause serious problems if there were a military confrontation. The mysterious aliens prefer secrecy. The high-tech aliens have evidently no intention of making contact with a our planet Earth. They might be afraid of their technology falling into human hands and thereby quickly advancing Earth's technological base.

This movie was low budget but that didn't interfere with this movie's unique charm. I would have liked the movie's producers to at least have made a better effort to depict the high-tech aliens, instead of hiring Caucasian stuntmen and putting those guys into surplus spacesuits probably left over from an earlier science fiction space movie.

Would I like to see a 21st century remake of "Robinson Crusoe on Mars"? Heck, yes, as long as the film director doesn't try to insert some screwy politically correct message. I would actually prefer the new director follow the original as closely as possible. Please don't change the ethnicities of the two earth astronauts just for the sake of political correctness. That means don't hire Will Smith to be Cmdr Draper in a transparent attempt to bring out the black moviegoers. I liked the original Friday, which means finding another very tall, Hispanic guy for the remake. There was a real chemistry between Christopher Draper and Friday. Don't mess with it in a remake.