Spaceship Crews.

Same question might be posed in the political section? D'oh!

It seems that way because we Americans are stereotyped as having a cowboy complex.

Terrible scripts.

Look at Prometheus. The guy they specifically hired to navigate structure -- who has automated drones that map interiors and gets their data feed directly on a device strapped around his wrist -- gets lost inside the derelict and dies with that other scientist.

Likewise, one of the lead scientists -- Noomi Rapace's boyfriend or husband -- takes his helmet off, immediately contaminating the derelict with human microbes, rendering half the scientific work they were supposed to do useless. Then he argues with David about taking his hypothesis on faith, confuses the lay definition of "theory" with the scientific definition, and sits there sulking after making what would have been the most profound scientific discovery in human history.

When Noomi asks him why he's sulking like a little bitch, he says: "Because I want answers, babe!"

You mean to tell me a corporation that's spending trillions to fund a research expedition didn't even do psychological evaluations of the crew before hiring them on? They didn't bother to have protocol for the mission? They didn't stop in orbit and map the planet, they just happened to pick a random spot to drop planetside and ended up in walking distance of what they were looking for?

All the shit Damon Lindelof got for that script was well deserved. He's an idiot.

But this problem persists in so many SF films.

In Event Horizon, the Lewis and Clarke crew inexplicably almost ram into the Event Horizon, even though they have confirmation that the ship is in front of them through their sensors, because mist in the jovian atmosphere limits visual confirmation. WTF? It was a cheap and extraordinarily dumb way of trying to add tension.

In Sunshine, the team abandons its entire mission -- upon which the entire human race is depending -- to go check out a derelict ship, immediately after one of the flight officers gets the captain killed by forgetting to readjust the solar sails. Commercial aviation in the 20th century requires exhaustive systems checks and redundant checks by pilot and co-pilot, but in the future, operating equipment during trillion-dollar space missions is treated as casually as punching in settings on a microwave.

In Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey just happens to discover the Last Bunker of NASA not far from his farm in the midwest somewhere, pops in unexpectedly, and the head of NASA offers him the pilot's job on a grand mission to save the human species, right there and then.

"Ah, Matthew McConaughey! How fortuitous! We were just talking about needing a pilot, how convenient that you followed some nonsensical quantum coordinates provided by a gravity ghost and stumbled into our hidden NASA compound! Suit up, you're getting on a $50 billion ship with Anne Hathaway and Cinema's All Time Most Terrible Designed robots!"


We're gonna keep seeing shit like this if Hollywood continues to use its own shitty SF scripts instead of turning to the ample catalog of incredible science fiction novels for adaptation.

Starting with "Alien" mostly, crews have been shown as being down to Earth people (griping, arguing, losing their tempers, etc).

It does make it realistic but sometimes part of the down to Earth scenario is making bad decisions.

The thing is, the civilian crew in Alien was smart. They tried to remove the facehugger, they dissected it, they tried to methodically close bulkheads and isolate the xenomorph. They were regular people, but they had their wits about them and they acted like adults.

Prometheus was supposed to be a scientific expedition crewed by experts and specialists, but somehow it was a crew of absolute morons making inexplicable decisions.

Spaceship crews are largely incompetent because if they were competent, the films would be a lot shorter and a lot more boring.

Minute 35 of the movie : "So, it turned out to be a dangerous alien infection after all. I guess it's a good thing we adhered to standard safety, isolation and quarantine procedures, really. Can you imagine how dangerous that thing would have been if it had gotten aboard? Anyway... set course back to Earth."

*Credits roll*

The raving lunatic Jesus-freak commander in The Conquest of Space (1955). How did he get past the psychological screening?  Completely ruined the movie and a lasting stain on my childhood.  Given the then high calibre talents involved-- George Pal, Willy Ley, Chesley Bonestell-- and even Wernher von Braun-- I suspect the character is the reason the movie is so little remembered today.

But "botanist" Bruce Dern wasn't since it took him near forever to figure out the plants on the spaceship were dying because they weren't getting any sunlight.

P.S.  I thought the crew in It!-- The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) were mostly intelligent; except for the crewman who forgets to close the outer hatch before takeoff.  Rather important and one would think there would be a checklist for that sort of thing.  Of course that's how the monster gets in.