Hawki said:
You do realize that the Covenant crew has no way of knowing that this is the Engineers' homeworld, right?
Unless you're referring to the events of Prometheus there, in which case LV-223 isn't their homeworld.
In either case they are being spectacularly stupid.
<spoiler= Here's why>
Both ships are expressly hunting inhabitable worlds, one for 'exploration' and one is a colony ship. If you're going to a world that can support life, work on the assumption you will find life on it. In human history explorers reaching new continents has frequently ended in the discovery of horrific new diseases and the arrival of new fauna to biomes with often disastrous consequences. Billions have died of infections, eco-systems collapsed, cultures starved or wiped out, that's just on Earth with good old carbon based life.
Up that to a planetary scale, years from home and with no chance of re-supply or reinforcement. You need methods of exploring and taking/testing samples geological, biological and chemical that you can use without leaving the ship, without the samples even entering the ship, then you stay in the ship until that equipment has established that it's safe for you to leave.
You need equipment for hazardous environments in case you
have to leave the ship early, it needs to be able to withstand a lot of punishment, then you use it when outside anyway, because the probes might have missed something.
You need quarantine and disease control facilities in case that HEV equipment fails, or in case of regular illness and injury. You need weapons both for internal security and in case the planet's critters are unfriendly, you need ship scale weapons in case the planet's critters are big or smart enough to attack your ship. You need the means of growing food and manufacturing equipment and parts within the ship.
Even if you arrive at the planet and it's a ball of dead rock with no atmosphere, you still need all of that equipment just to survive and operate the ship for extended periods.
Of course this requires a level of attention to detail and planning in the script, the writers have to think about exactly how The Engineer's home world has become so dangerous that all of humanity's technology is powerless to stop.
It's much easier to have the allegedly 'smart' humans calmly open the door and file out into an entirely unexplored eco-system, breathe in it's dusts and spores, touch every single thing that's got menacing spikes or slime on it and have them be infected without them realising it (wave your hands and make spooky noises here). It would be much funnier if one human opened the door, walked out and promptly died of anaphylactic shock as the local pollen entered his lungs and made them swell to ten times the normal size.
It comes down to lazy script writing, they haven't put any serious attention to detail into the heroes, which bodes poorly for the rest of the film, especially when the trailer has gone to such great lengths to spoil and play up the blood and gore over the awe and mystery.
Ironically Alien: Resurrection took a smarter approach than this. In that film plenty of precautions were taken, but nobody anticipated the Xenomorphs understanding their corrosive blood to the point of using it to defeat quarantine. When you can say the writing is dumber than Alien: Resurrection that's not a terribly good sign.
