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Every Spaceship Movie Gets This Wrong (Except Alien)

Ship-Yard

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Weeelcome back to the yard!!!!

If you've seen Star Trek, Star Wars, or honestly any space movie, you know the drill. The ship is a flying hotel. Glass bridges, holograms, corridors wide enough to land a plane in. Everything hums, nothing has a fuel bill. Looks epic, works like magic.

Alien looked at all of that and did the exact opposite. The Nostromo isn't a hero ship — it's a truck. A commercial towing vehicle with a cargo manifest, a crew on payroll arguing about bonus shares, and a computer that answers you in green text like a fax machine with a security clearance. And somehow that made it the most believable ship ever filmed.

So we brought her into the dry dock and surveyed her, stamp by stamp.

Chapters

0:00 The Truck at Berth 5
1:06 The Rap Sheet: Four Ships Before It
3:30 Mark 1: It Has a Job
4:46 Mark 2: Built, Not Drawn
6:51 Mark 3: A Crew on Payroll
8:55 Grandma's Lab: Does the Gravity Check Out?
11:36 Mark 4: An Honest Computer
13:59 Mark 5: Fear Is Load-Bearing
16:04 The Control Group: Prometheus
17:25 The Mirror

Narrated by: Victor Voss

20 Comments

@spaceflight1019 2 months ago

What made "Alien" different is that it was the first movie that treated space as a workplace.

@RCAvhstape 2 months ago

You forgot one of the most important elements: Nostromo had a ship's cat. Crewman Jones, last survivor of the Nostromo's crew.

@shazmodeus2795 2 months ago

The ship design of The Expanse gets all of this right.

@tmutant 2 months ago

The Millennium Falcon is a moonshiner's hot rod, built to deliver illegal booze and outrun the law, pressed into service to smuggle people instead.

@kronos5385 2 months ago

How could you miss Serenity? It was so much a truck it even transported cattle for sale.

@Erny_Module 2 months ago

The Nostromo had a single purpose - to turn a profit. Return on Investment.

@rayceeya8659 2 months ago

The first time I saw Alien, I was like, "I know those switches. I've pushed those buttons".

@varelion 1 month ago

Look at the many signs in the Nostromo. The makers of the movie invented a whole logical sign language.

@NoahW-b2w 2 months ago

Actually a tugboat, but tow truck is close enough.

@RM_VFX 2 months ago

The Nostromo is a beautiful industrial design, but I could never get over the giant Christmas lights and stage lights that hang awkwardly off it at landing, then magically disappear.

@Laarye 2 months ago

The consoles were also wired to each other, so when they were doing the landing sequence, when one actor pushed a button or flicked a switch, it activated other actor's panels that they would respond to. So they actually looked like they were doing a real sequence.

@williamsanders2439 2 months ago

The Nostromo is definitely old guard...it looks like it's actually lived in.
Another ship that approaches that esthetic is the Bebop from Cowboy Bebop...it functions as a carrier and home base for the bounty hunting crew. Repurposed from an interplanetary fishing trawler.
It uses warp gates for interstellar travel, so it can get away with a "conventional" drive in system, and a built in flywheel (like the Discovery) for gravity.
It didn't hurt that it was an anime series, so the creators/builders had more creative freedom in depicting the ship, and various others.

@kennetheaton1728 2 months ago

Have you thought about doing The Canterbury from "The Expanse" ? It doesn't last long, but I think it checks all the boxes

@santoven 2 months ago

Ridley Scott describing how he wants the exposed Nostromo wiring to look: "I want it to look like hair." He made the set designers watch Dr. Strangelove to get the feel of the B-52 interiors as inspiration for the Nostromo working areas.

@themr_wilson 2 months ago

The writer of the famous gut-burst scene suffered from the incurable Crohn's Disease, and that was his visual representation of the pain he experienced from the miserable affliction.

@alexshelby1 3 weeks ago

Whoever wrote the narration, keep it up. Sharp, efficient, witty. Well done!

@wire9486 2 months ago

Nostromo is actually a Deep Space Tug like Deep Sea Tugs

@mountainman5173 2 months ago

The Nostromo is absolutely my favorite all time fictional space ship. The 'Sulaco' comes in a close second.

@williambeckett6336 2 months ago (edited)

The Nostromo is more of a tractor trailer or dump truck/hauler than a tow truck. Tow trucks haul other vehicles. usually disabled ones. Tractors and dump trucks haul cargo. And 2001's ship was damn sure featuring boredom.