Top 5: Explorations Gone Wrong

Mine are as follows:

5. Jurassic Park Trilogy - Science run amok.. after the button was pushed of course... From creation to rescue missions, this movie is why humans need to leave evolution to God.

4. Pitch Black - Yes, they crash landed, but that didn't mean they had to go spelunking into the caves and underground places and remind the Bioraptors that the 22 year wait for food was almost over.

3. The Descent - How does one decide to drag her friends into an uncharted cave system without researching it first? One will never know.

2. Sunshine - Even though their intentions were in the oh so right place (refueling the sun is a damn good reason in my book), the crew of the Icarus II should have had 1) more back up on hand and 2) a more saner crew. Maybe at least they wouldn't have ran into all those problems.

and finally...

1. The Alien Saga - The epitome of all explorations gone bad due to a bad detour for one character. But for Lt. Ripley, no matter where she went, she just couldn't seem to shake those pesky Xenomorphs...

It's not exactly a thrill a minute, but I'd like to add Solaris to this list, too. After years of hearing nothing but bad things about George Clooney's remake of the Russian classic, I finally got around to seeing it and discovered it was actually a damn good film. And it all hinges on the fact humans discover a new planet and get messed up by an exotic life form.

And how could anyone forget everyone's favorite SF comedy, Dark Star? The film that, in a perverse way, actually sorta inspired Alien!

…"pesky Xenomorphs." Good stuff Mark!

I had forgotten they actually referred to the aliens as "Xenomorphs" in the second film during the mission briefing scene with the colonial Marines.

Another thing that I always wondered about in Aliens was the range of the reactor blast on planet LV-426. It didn’t appear that the explosion was powerful enough to reach the original alien mothership where all the eggs were being stored, which was quite some distance from the colony compound, according to the movie novelization and indicated in deleted scenes from the film. Since they never “nuked the planet from orbit” (as was the original plan), that big, bad, ancient alien egg farm of a ship is still sitting out there and none of the sequels ever addressed it. If ‘The Company’ really wanted to get their hands on that creature, then why not go directly to the source?

It's not a movie but a TV show that I used to adore based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyles' The Lost World. It was the title of it too. Loved it loved it loved it.

Thanks, Brad. I never knew the details you laid out. I have the Alien Quadrilogy, but never really knew that about the deleted scenes or what not. I have something to do now. Lol. But to answer the last question. Maybe the big gap in years between Alien and Aliens gives the plausible answer to the ship being lost? I mean that's a lot of space to cover looking for one ship.