Here's one.
Lack of optics on pulse rifles: Heck, by 2005 almost every U.S. soldier has some type of scope, red dot, laser, holographic sight...and uses them...because they work and from a military perspective, cheap! 1986, not so much. This is still an issue in many, many SF movies.
Feel free to add to the list.
I don't understand how it's an issue if a film is made before the relevant tech is available.
I mean this sort of criticism could be levelled at any film/tv show set in the future but made in the past.
I see your point, but...we could not colonize other worlds in 1986 yet they portrayed that. Also, crude forms of scopes had been around and used in the military since at least WWI. My point is, is if you can envision a future with artificial gravity (on the Sulaco) and deep space travel, why could they not envision soldiers/marines having sight-picture enhancers that already existed?
Yeah. I get it. But to me, this oversight (or at least absence) really, really dates the movie.
The thing I find rather fascinating is the things that came to be because somebody imagined them or at least based off stuff that people imagined for Sci-fi tv shows and movies Like flip phones and tablets, video calling etc.
I do get what you're saying though, I understand.
Cool. I truly enjoy this movie. That's the point of my thread: little things that date the movie, because if it were remade, everyone rifle/carbine would have some sort of sight. Not like Covenant did a great job...
shareWow, I think it's the most irrelevant case of cherry picking I've ever seen! Honestly... how much time someone needs to have on his hands to even think about such insignificant details?
shareI started this thread because, for a movie I really like for 30+ years, this ultra-small concern continues to stand-out, so I shared it. That's all there is to it.
shareThen, Batty, that is your loss and I don’t have a damn about your enjoyment.
You don’t seem like someone who has a whole hell of a lot of enjoyment in your solipsistic little excuse for a life. Marinate in it.
Neither do you, if anything can be deduced from your general tone of replies.
shareAh, how refreshing to return to this thread years later and find a deep cave troll exercising his/her/their ability to drop a cool word in their little mini-rant about my life and how it must be lacking. Bless your heart.
shareI mean it's called science fiction, you make up futuristic technology that doesn't exist yet.
shareI'm fine with the tech in the movie - the marines were grunts after all and might have been sent to be cannon fodder rather than a crack team of top spec seals of that era.
In the Director's Cut though there is an image of Ripley's daughter in her hand, a photograph and it is incredibly interlaced - they should have known things would get better in the field of film photography - not worse.
There you go. Fair observation about the photograph. Good one.
shareThat is a good point, it was very pixellated. Like a fax or something. By the way people still use facs machines!
I do remember however, when The Legend of Zelda, the Ocarina of Time first came out thinking that the graphics were stunning (which they were) but I could never have imagined how good they could have become.
On the other hand things like video calls haven't improved a huge deal over the years.
I've been with computers for a long time now Dazed and with each iteration all the way back to the late 70's I've been amazed at how far forward they each have come - to the point now that I don't think a younger me would believe what is available commonly today.
Seeing colour introduced in home gaming to the Don Bluth games all the way through to what is pretty standard today blows my mind. While Aliens (1986) was more of a statement about the Vietnam war it stuck to its sci-fi roots but there was no way that the production designers could have envisioned this future, let alone another couple of hundred years into where we are just now.
Still a great movie with a good, if a little laboured, message about the strengths of motherhood and the folly of gungho soldiers.
"Aliens (1986) was more of a statement about the Vietnam war"
um, how so?
"In the Director's Cut though there is an image of Ripley's daughter in her hand, a photograph and it is incredibly interlaced - they should have known things would get better in the field of film photography - not worse."
Film photography in 1986 was as good as it is now; the movie itself was shot on 35mm film after all, and 35mm motion picture film is far from the pinnacle of film photography, then or now. With medium, large, and ultra large format film, all of which have been for many decades before 1986, you can get tens, hundreds, and even thousands of times the resolution of 35mm film.
The pixelated picture shown in the movie didn't have anything to do with film photography; it was supposed to look like a digital photograph, though whoever produced the image had an outdated idea, even by 1986 standards, of what a digital photograph should look like. Digital images didn't look good in 1986 but they didn't look as bad as the picture in the movie. To get that very pixelated effect you'd take a low resolution image and resize it on a computer to fill a sheet of paper when printed out, using a simple nearest-neighbor resizing algorithm. By doing that you can make e.g., this picture...
https://i.imgur.com/y9rvMf3.jpg
... look like this:
https://i.imgur.com/jRPHH0V.jpg
The video phone that Ripley uses.
shareI considered that too, but since they are on a ship that probably doesn't have cell towers I let it slide.
shareThis movies have dated just find thank you very much
shareThe spread of mobile phones in the early 90s is the biggest thing to "date" movies.
but only if they were set in the future....
Films and TV shows kind of have two choices, either go full-on Star Trek with near magical levels of technology, or have a kind of "20 years in the future" technology so they can make the situations and technology similar to every day life and have a kind of gritty, colonial encampment edge to them.
I think Aliens was the latter kind of science fiction, but the problem is in 1986 almost nobody had the tech industry knowledge or foresight to know just how much better tech would be a short time into the future.
Plus more advanced-but-not-Star-Trek becomes a special effects liability. Pretty much all the tech shown in Aliens was absolutely able to exist in 1986 (displays, monitors, equipment). Only some of its capabilities were totally fictional.
The expanded material, comics/video games/books, show that the pulse rifle can be fixed with mounted optics, so this issue was fixed.
Although I’d say the films was ahead of its time in the design of the Smartgun that is capable of IFF auto-targeting.
Of course it was. Masterpiece. In 1986, non-scope optics on rifles and carbines were in their nascent stages of development. By 2005, standard on military arms and many civilian ones, at least in the U.S.
shareA more startling problem for me were the lights mounted over their shoulders, instead of on their weapons.
The way the light pointed in a random direction not in the direction they were looking/moving always bothered me.
I dunno...because it's a "pulse rifle" we don't really know what kind of stuff you can and can't put on it.
But more importantly, that's kinda specialist knowledge. You have to know something about firearms and the US military to know about that and most people I know don't have that kind of knowledge. Stuff that would make movies look dated are slang and social conventions, or maybe filming techniques. A synth-pop backed weightlifting montage, for instance, would slam a movie into the '80s and probably come off as a little goofy or hilarious today. That would date the movie. Not space marines using ironsights.