 FAIR: In the first three films, it takes an extremely long time  (long enough to require freezing of the passengers) to get between  populated places in space. In this film, the ship is able to travel  from "unregulated space" to Earth itself in as little as three  hours. However, we have no idea what "unregulated space" is (it  could be very near Earth for all we know) and there have been two  hundred years of technological development since the first three  films anyway.