ray_afraid said:
Johnny Ringo said:
We just don't know how things will play out yet, maybe humanity is plunged into a sort of technological dark age?
Riddley has stated that the difference in tech is there because he didn't want to make a movie that looks like it's from the 70's. Simple as that.
I think this is perfectly reasonable.
In TOS Klingon's had smooth heads. Then once the movies and TNG came along they stepped it up with the alien makeup and they had ridged foreheads. I liked the ridged foreheads and am glad they decided to make one of the more prominent alien species in the series more alien looking than they were in TOS. Having Klingons forever be brown people with goatees would have been kind of lame. Unfortunately, this made overly anal Trek fans spend years sitting around with wrinkled brows trying to come up with the most reasonable in universe explanation for this discrepancy. To me, it always felt that the real life explanation of different time periods the series were made in, along with tech and budget restraints, should have been more than reasonable enough for anyone. But fans continued to agonize over this issue until Enterprise wrote a really dumb explanation that soothed their aching sphincters.
Does Scott really need to limit himself and make a film that looks like it was made in the 1970's? I admit, I think it would actually be really cool if he were to do that. But how realistic is it to have ships running such primitive technology in the future? You know there is never going to be a mining vessel in the future sporting old CRT monitors. That was a great vision of future technology for 1979, but today your average 10 year old has their bedroom decked out in far more impressive looking technology. While old hardcore Alien fans like some of us might eat up a film where the technology was made to look like that of a 70's film, I don't think the general audience would buy it.
I don't think it is fair to judge this film based on the fact that it doesn't mesh technologically with a film made in 1979. I think some of us are being a bit unreasonable in this regard. Maybe this is why Scott adamantly maintains that it isn't an Alien prequel, because he wants to revisit an old idea he thinks he can make an interesting film out of, but he doesn't want to be restrained by anal retentive nitpicky fandom.