"there's a huge level of texture and detail that helps those stories rise above others."

"Also, after seeing the mess that was Prometheus, I watched Alien again. The Space Jockey head in this movie was CLEARLY A SKULL, NOT A HELMET!!!"

Well, yeah, I knew that. And I'm not saying it wasn't a good war movie. But there wasn't a lot of inventive storytelling going on there.

In fairness, Clark was raised among humans. Diana wasn't raised among men.

There's also two other possibilities I've heard mentioned:

Yeah, I liked the movie but I think you're right. I think that most of the problems that people are citing can probably be traced straight to Ridley Scott. He's never (AFAIK) actually written any of the stories of any of the films he's directed and it's pretty obvious that he's a visual director first, narrative…

I actually do think it looks a bit more like the Nostromo than Serenity myself, but there is a resemblance.

"A race of 8-foot-tall albino humans is orders of magnitude more likely than a race entirely hermaphrodite humans - much less 8-foot-tall hermaphrodite humans."

I was half-convinced you were joking (as it turned out you were). But the other half was unsure, as I've seen more inane comments on similar subjects before.

Well, the fact that they wouldn't all be gargantuan albinos with black eyes would normally also be kind of a given wouldn't you think?

Well, there you go. You learn something new every day.

I have to agree with bakana (note: I enjoyed the movie). It's completely fallacious to respond to a critic and say "hey, you make something better!"

Nah, I'm fine if people didn't like what I don't like (case in point, I like RPGs but I have no beef with people who don't like them). But I do find some of the complaints made seem to be questionable, so I question them.

True enough. Of course, given how hypersleep works it's always possible that Shaw (if she somehow survived that splat, which seems unlikely) that could still end up biologically younger than Ripley.

I must confess, having never seen Alien Resurrection I am filled with a morbid curiosity about the movie. I think I'll have to get around to seeing it one of these days. Getting drunk first may be a requirement though.

It would be a bit strange but hardly unprecedented. There are plenty of species that are hermaphrodites (snails) or simply have very, very minimalistic sexual dimorphism. We (humans) are actually fairly low on that scale ourselves.

They don't really look Caucasian (i.e. white) to me. They're pale, for sure, but their facial structure is pretty different from standard European. Not to mention, of course, that they're enormous and have pitch black eyes.

Not to be nitpicky but I think I said that :-p. Or at least implied it.

As others have pointed out the design is identical to the one used in Alien.

That wouldn't have made any sense. Why would you create something so that it might one day create something else?