Please tell me what, how, why...

Rating: Null/10 (19 March 2000)

Please tell me why it is that every film version of a planet makes its surface so small, such that an accidental crash will land its crash victims within walking distance of the one other settlement that happened to land there twenty-two years ago.
Please tell me why every sun depicted in space (and this goes for Star Trek, too) is so small that you can see the steep curvature of the comet around it, as though it's about the size of a football stadium.
Please tell me how a sister planet's orbit will veer rapidly into an eclipse of the sun... and then stop moving. I mean, wouldn't it move out of eclipse just as rapidly? No, the film-makers expect you to believe that as soon as it has moved into eclipse position, it matches the speed of the turning planet and keeps it in extended darkness.
Please tell me how a rapacious race of predators has eaten up an entire planet and still manages to number in the millions, instead of dying out. I mean, every believable ecosystem has supply and demand or it collapses.
Please tell me what they would find edible in a race of alien visitors. The scene with the menstruating girl was too much like something from Jaws. Why would an alien species be attracted to alien blood?
Please tell me why we can't get beyond Star Trek and visit a planet where we may be faced with some serious physical difficulties (unbreathable atmosphere, life-threatening temperature problems, incapacitating weight differences). Only _Alien_ seemed to address this with any believability.
To wit: please tell me how a group of stranded humans can go out into the ultraviolet light of three suns and not be concerned (damage to eyes, damage to skin, damage to internal organs).
Please tell me why every alien planet we visit in film fiction (including Star Trek) either looks exactly like earth or is a barren place with rocks (what the Star Trek actors used to call "The Set from Hell") I would really like to see some innovative planetscapes and fauna. It was wasted on Mission to Mars, unfortunately.
And finally, please tell me how they think taking a shuttle out into space, when they are twenty two weeks away from their destination, is going to save them. Do they have cryochambers on the shuttle? It didn't appear so. What are they going to eat? Drink? What about air supply? To quote a notable line in Mission to Mars, finding them would be like "finding a needle in a haystack!"
Irreverently yours, ;-) Sally
(still looking for the breath-taking contemporary SF movie)