Timby posted:A case can be made for this to be the worst assembly of words in the English language. "Produced by Michael Bay"
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Nov 26, 2015 02:03
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blompkamp is a basic gently caress who makes good short films then attaches lovely full length action movies onto the end of them
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Nov 27, 2015 01:43
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Mr. Unlucky posted:blompkamp is a basic gently caress He might well be - but what does that change about his films?
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Nov 27, 2015 02:11
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A certain subset of libertarian tech geek certainly feels betrayed by the fact that Blomkamp makes incredibly realistic films about 'the singilarity' that proceed to ruthlessly mock the concept.
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Nov 27, 2015 02:18
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People keep complaining about the class war themes of Blomkamp's movies, and I feel weird cause I love that about them. People who feel it's too exagerrated/too in your face are obviously not living in the same world I am.
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Nov 27, 2015 02:46
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Yeah. Obviously.
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Nov 27, 2015 02:50
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oldpainless posted:Yeah. Obviously. What I mean is that the real world is full of assholes and is super unfair and none of the Blomkamp movies have been particularly unrealistic on those particular aspects.
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Nov 27, 2015 03:20
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The curious configuration of [Ray Kurzweil's] The Singularity is Near – its apolitical and asocial utopianism, and science- and technology-based millenarianism – is, of course, not accidental. For the whole point of Kurzweil's speculation – its ideological function, if you will – is precisely to bring us to utopia without incurring the inconvenience of having to question our current social and economic arrangements. This is why Kurzweil supposes that the onward march of technology will produce the society of plenitude, all by itself – so long as government bureaucrats and religious fundamentalists do not interfere with entrepreneurial innovation. By a curious sleight of hand, even after a radical “rupture” in the very “fabric of human history,” we witness the persistence of such features of our society today as private property, capital accumulation, branding and advertising, stringent copyright enforcement, and above all “business models” (with which Kurzweil seems curiously to be obsessed). -Steve Shaviro As I wrote above, the basic fact that Blomkamp makes political films poses a threat to singularity believers.
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Nov 27, 2015 03:31
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Lurdiak posted:"Produced by Michael Bay" Counterpoint: Black Sails, you loving crumb.
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Nov 27, 2015 11:21
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There's a lot about Blomkamp's movies I don't like or I think are dumb, but an accurate reflection of class relations isn't one of them. Why does that make people mad?
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Nov 27, 2015 21:42
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I suspect it's because nerds want to support the utopia (like Star Trek for ex), but most of their social attitudes and political positions would lead to a dystopia (Blomkamp's films)
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Nov 27, 2015 21:59
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MonsieurChoc posted:People keep complaining about the class war themes of Blomkamp's movies, and I feel weird cause I love that about them. People who feel it's too exagerrated/too in your face are obviously not living in the same world I am. An Alien film about class war would be dope as gently caress.
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Nov 27, 2015 22:59
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CelticPredator posted:An Alien film about class war would be dope as gently caress. There already tons of class stuff in all alien movies though.
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Nov 27, 2015 23:01
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Facehuggers are born, they jump on a face, lay eggs and then die. All to service the continuation of the xenomorph race. What thanks do they get?
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Nov 27, 2015 23:12
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The aliens have a literal queen. Movie is super anti-monarchist.
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Nov 27, 2015 23:17
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Class/Capitalism is a huge deal in Alien and Aliens. The characters are strongarmed into going onto an alien planet on the basis they won't get their bonuses or shares, for example. The main conflict in Aliens is initiated, perpetuated and worsened by Wey-Yu's attempts to weaponise (and thereby profit from) the Alien. So both times the entire problem is initiated because of a corporation. The corporation isn't doing anything evil in particular - for them, it's business as usual. The Aliens are a more direct version of this process. Their blood reveals 'reality', burning away the clean sterile environment to reveal darkness and machinery, and their class system is simply a more honest version of ours - there's a leader who the others dutifully obey without any thought for self-preservation. The only real difference is there isn't any coercion involved - the Queen doesn't have to threaten to take away the drones' shares - and rather than accidentally destroying humanity, they do it actively.
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Nov 27, 2015 23:35
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Upon rewatching Prometheus, it's even harder to see why someone wouldn't like it.
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Nov 28, 2015 00:40
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Baronjutter posted:There already tons of class stuff in all alien movies though. I want to see more of W-Y, really.
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Nov 28, 2015 01:10
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:Upon rewatching Prometheus, it's even harder to see why someone wouldn't like it. People wanted Alien 0.5 and got pissed when Ridley Scott didn't give it to them.
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Nov 28, 2015 01:19
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CelticPredator posted:I want to see more of W-Y, really. Yep I'd be 100% good with more stories about future corporate space dystopia that have 0 aliens in them. There's so much that could be done with the setting that don't involve penis monsters. Maybe a clone army of Paul Reisers?
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Nov 28, 2015 02:09
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Baronjutter posted:Yep I'd be 100% good with more stories about future corporate space dystopia that have 0 aliens in them. There's so much that could be done with the setting that don't involve penis monsters. Maybe a clone army of Paul Reisers?
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Nov 28, 2015 02:19
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Xenomrph posted:The old Leading Edge 'Aliens' RPG was exactly this. The Aliens themselves played a really small part of the overall game, the rest was just other random poo poo that Colonial Marines might do. Cool I found it here but you have to pay money to this lovely service to download it?? https://www.scribd.com/doc/250695408/43977962-Aliens-Adventure-Game-Core-Rules-pdf
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Nov 28, 2015 02:32
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The curious configuration of [Ray Kurzweil's] The Singularity is Near – its apolitical and asocial utopianism, and science- and technology-based millenarianism – is, of course, not accidental. For the whole point of Kurzweil's speculation – its ideological function, if you will – is precisely to bring us to utopia without incurring the inconvenience of having to question our current social and economic arrangements. This is why Kurzweil supposes that the onward march of technology will produce the society of plenitude, all by itself – so long as government bureaucrats and religious fundamentalists do not interfere with entrepreneurial innovation. By a curious sleight of hand, even after a radical “rupture” in the very “fabric of human history,” we witness the persistence of such features of our society today as private property, capital accumulation, branding and advertising, stringent copyright enforcement, and above all “business models” (with which Kurzweil seems curiously to be obsessed). Maybe not all singularity believers. I honestly think the reason Google hired him as director of engineering is because they know utopia is not for everyone, but that the first company with patent-creating AI will have an unbeatable advantage. They probably watch Elysium to get pumped up.
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Nov 28, 2015 04:08
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The first Alien movie is all about the working class. All the talk about shares.
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Nov 28, 2015 06:14
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zCnKbKr7eI I 100% saw this as a kid in the 90's on TV, my dad recorded Aliens off the TV onto a VHS tape and I watched it over and over until the tape wore down and broke. I just looked it up and it says it was never released but it definitely was, it was on channel ITV with adverts every 20 minutes or so.
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Nov 28, 2015 06:23
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CelticPredator posted:An Alien film about class war would be dope as gently caress. lmao What Blomkamp complainers don't seem to understand is that the Alien films are already anti-singularity films. The plot of Aliens is literally that Weyland-Yutani wants to upgrade the colonial marines into bioengineered cyborg soldiers. These soldiers will no longer need armor, weapons, or special sensors because it will all be inbuilt - and they will be controlled by a central AI (e.g. the computer "Mother"). Again, the plot of the Alien films is literally that the space jockeys succeeded at doing all this - they harnessed the power of capitalism - and that's why they're all dead. When you see the alien hive, with the queen at the middle, that is how sentient corporations are depicted in the Kurzweil-satirizing novel Accelerando: "after the Singularity, all sentient AIs function as autonomous economic entities, 'slyly self–aware financial instruments'. They exist only to accumulate capital, in the form of endless computation. The AIs have freed themselves from merely human parameters, shed their human origins, and emerged as alien, predatory lifeforms. They strive to extract the maximum value (in the form of computational power) from all matter. Their focus is on efficiency, and on endless self–expansion. They have no goals external to the processes of accumulation and expansion themselves. No measure of abundance can satiate their rapacious competitive drive." -Shaviro The failure of Aliens is in the none-too-subtle implication that everything would be fine without the machinations of bad people like Burke. There's nothing wrong with the atmosphere processor or "building better worlds", after all; the problem is that Burke lied and deliberately endangered people. If he had simply followed the rules, this wouldn't have happened. And the alien queen is distinctly unlike the cold and indifferent Mother from Alien. Can you imagine Mother going all "raaaar" and chasing Ripley around? Of course not. Aliens 'personfies' "the bad parts" of the corporation as this goofy alien Other that can be safely jettisonned.* "What one should recall here is that the only place in Hollywood films where we see the production process in all its intensity is when James Bond penetrates the master-criminal's secret domain and locates there the site of intense labor (distilling and packaging the drugs, constructing a rocket that will destroy New York...). When the master-criminal, after capturing Bond, usually takes him on a tour of his illegal factory, is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist proud presentation of the production in a factory? And the function of Bond's intervention, of course, is to explode in firecracks this site of production, allowing us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with the 'disappearing working class.'" -Zizek This is, of course, what we see with Ripley: instead of fighting capitalism, she is fighting 'pollution' and the other unavoidable byproducts of this gee-whiz future poo poo. Cameron was already paving the way for the liberal-utopian vision of Avatar - with everyone hooked up to the central AI tree, in perfect symbiosis with nature, and the uncouth immigrants sent back to the polluted third-world they came from. *Note that, when this same imagery is used in Man Of Steel, with the character Zod, it is to illustrate that he is a simple fascist - not the actual problem, but a mere symptom. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Nov 28, 2015 |
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Nov 28, 2015 07:49
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I sorta disagree - I think there's a way of redeeming Aliens' themes by reading Burke as part of the system, rather than merely an outlier who is unreasonably evil. Attempting to subvert the law through loopholes to get an infected Ripley/Newt back to Earth, authorizing the study of the Alien creature - isn't breaking the rules, going beyond his station and the law and endangering lives in order to profit his company textbook Capitalist behaviour at this point? You probably have a good reason why you don't to read it that way though - ?
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Nov 28, 2015 08:41
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That's a hell of a read of Avatar.
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Nov 28, 2015 08:51
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Hbomberguy posted:I sorta disagree - I think there's a way of redeeming Aliens' themes by reading Burke as part of the system, rather than merely an outlier who is unreasonably evil. Attempting to subvert the law through loopholes to get an infected Ripley/Newt back to Earth, authorizing the study of the Alien creature - isn't breaking the rules, going beyond his station and the law and endangering lives in order to profit his company textbook Capitalist behaviour at this point? Even so, you don't fight the system by swatting down outliers. Poor old Burke is a product of the system, sure, but he's not a stand in for it. The Company happily sacrifices him like OCP lets Robocop blast that "bad CEO". Ideally I think Ripley should have conspired with Burke to smuggle the Alien threat (seen as children of the abused colonists) back to the Company's orbital space HQ to wipe it out at the root.
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Nov 28, 2015 10:21
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Shanty posted:Even so, you don't fight the system by swatting down outliers. Poor old Burke is a product of the system, sure, but he's not a stand in for it. The Company happily sacrifices him like OCP lets Robocop blast that "bad CEO". That'd be a good movie.
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Nov 28, 2015 11:30
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So Ridley Scooter's said that Alien Covenant will be the first of a trilogy. Like Prometheus.
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Nov 28, 2015 11:32
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Shanty posted:you don't fight the system by swatting down outliers. I agree - but he's only an outlier in the 'canonical' context of the wider Universe. I read the colony as an alternate way of looking at Earth itself. In this context, the 'system' is the Alien queen and her army of drones, with Burke being one viewpoint on this society. The story functions as a large metaphor for how to approach this system. You can't just attack it. The system, symbolically, absorbs violence, is fuelled by it. It's transformative, turning you into one of them - Aliens echoes the themes of another Dan O'Bannon (he wrote Alien) joint, Return of the Living Dead, where attacking them gets you turned into one of them, and zombies demand you send more cops. In essence, 'the system' is a mindset that, if played into, turns you into a killer. Burke functions as someone trying to be smart and 'weaponise' the system, which invariably is the same as getting killed by it or turned into one of it, but more active. The humanist angle here is that the monsters were all humans once, literally emerging from within us. The solution is to combat it in a very precise manner, where the objective is to rescue the humans trapped inside of it. Newt is a kid trapped inside a system that is going to transform her - imagine if, in Dredd, Dredd travelled back in time and met a young Ma-Ma, struggling to make her way in a broken world. The objective is to help alter the system in such as way that these people are better served, and have the opportunity to become better as a result. That, for me, is the point of the big final fight with the Queen. The power-loader is an alternative queen, a tool not designed for combat at all but for construction and industry. It is literally state apparatus. The story is, in a sense, a discussion between two social forms for the future soul of humanity. Note that the answer isn't nonviolence, but a very difficult, careful violence. Alien cubed actually repeats these themes very directly, with Ripley again serving as an alternative queen - but in a more literal, direct way. Which imo is what makes it less good - we've seen a more subtle version of the same story told before. That's kinda where I can get behind the 'I want a new Alien' stuff CelticPredator is saying. In a sense we've seen the same story from very similar angles, and it would be nicer to see a different kind of story, or at least a more unique way of looking at it - which is what made Prometheus great!
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Nov 28, 2015 11:56
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Hbomberguy has always been terrible at this SMG thing.
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Nov 28, 2015 12:00
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1: Since when did a reading of a film belong to anyone? 2: What is terrible about my reading?
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Nov 28, 2015 12:02
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You don't read films, you watch them. With XL popcorn and Pepsi. Maybe a hotdog or nachos. Not both.
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Nov 28, 2015 12:15
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I like the colony planet-as-earth take, but I don't really feel like the Aliens are the bad guys in that scenario. Ripley is the one who bangs in and threatens to murder a bunch of infants. You don't "need" to do anything to the Aliens, as they're already in a much more stable state than the colonists who were getting pushed around for Company profits. It's more like Ridley and co are a disruptive influence on the "evolved' colony society, spawned (literally descending from heaven) by pure capitalism.
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Nov 28, 2015 14:49
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I always liked the idea they floated around for the fourth one where they go to the Alien planet, but that was only while Giger was still alive. They could've done a bunch of crazy cool poo poo by just dosing Giger with mescaline or something and leaving him in a room with a bunch of paper and pencils for a few days. Just make it a total off the rails surreal nightmare.
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Nov 28, 2015 16:23
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so I haven't popped in this thread yet but did we all come to the reasonable consensus that Alien3 is just as good as Alien and Aliens (theatrical cut, assembly cut, doesn't matter)?BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:Upon rewatching Prometheus, it's even harder to see why someone wouldn't like it. it's boring and poorly acted outside of Fassbender, and even he isn't exactly stretching himself
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Nov 28, 2015 16:34
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Here's a fun little factoid: in the scene where Vasquez and Hudson blow each other up, Paxton was such a method actor he snuck in a live grenade and was only stopped at the last minute by Weaver who was mistrustful of him due to his lackadaisical safety precautions with the guns earlier in the film.
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Nov 28, 2015 17:02
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oldpainless posted:Here's a fun little factoid: in the scene where Vasquez and Hudson blow each other up, Paxton was such a method actor he snuck in a live grenade and was only stopped at the last minute by Weaver who was mistrustful of him due to his lackadaisical safety precautions with the guns earlier in the film. Vasquez blew herself up w/ Gorman aka the dippy hospital guy from Hellbound: Hellraiser II
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Nov 28, 2015 17:10
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