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In so much scify aliens of all sorts are often stand-ins for human others. Obviously there's tons of movies out there where the alien is just a monster you can't reason with and bad and needs to die, but those are generally just "monsters" and generally not entirely intelligent. So you generally just have these two types of aliens, the "deep down all intelligent sentient life can be reasoned with and understood and deserve to be thought of as human in terms of rights" or "monster" For me anyways, Under the Skin showed us an alien treading this middle ground. Just as it's dangerous to other-ize and write off any alien as an inhuman monster that needs to be burned, I think it's also dangerous to anthropomorphise a creature just because it's self aware and intelligent or can communicate. If we assume the alien in this movie has a human-style mind it's very easy to sympathize with it, but we honestly don't know. So much of our ideas of ethics, right and wrong, our basic emotions aren't matters of culture or society, they're programmed into our brains through evolution. We so often assume that any other "intelligent" life obviously can come from an extremely different society or culture, but deep down can be understood and shares some common ground with us. In Alien we never quite know how smart they are, or what kinda of intelligence they have. It's assumed they are just "monsters" but we never really know. Another alien I've always wondered about was the alien in The Thing. It behaved as a monster, simply killing, but was clearly smart enough to build a space ship and in human form could communicate well enough to fool other humans and understood us well enough to employ subterfuge. But why the killing? Why not communicate? What did it want? Did it simply hate humans to such a degree that it never considered peaceful communication to achieve its goals? Was this hate a product of its culture, or biology? Its motives were absolutely alien. Easy to dismiss as a monster, but clearly this creature was extremely intelligent, it just had a very different intelligence than our own. Anyways, I'm just saying that in Under the Skin there's a lot of middle ground between "destroy serial killer monster with fire" and "feel sympathy for what is basically just a human rape victim". But without better understanding what the alien is, I have no idea. Obviously the film maker was trying to humanize her, but I often don't give a poo poo what the film maker is trying to do as that's often not interesting. I find movies interesting when I take them at absolute face value, as if they were genuine unscripted events unfolding in front of me. In under the skin we see what is most likely a sentient intelligent alien killing a bunch of people, then becoming a victim her self at the end. To establish any sort of guilt or ethical judgement for her we first need to establish what she is. A brainwashed child soldier who just killed 20 people is legally treated differently from an adult war criminal who did the same. Our entire justice system has a ton of special exceptions based on people's mental abilities, so when judging an alien's actions we need to fully understand its mental abilities, how its emotions work, the society it comes from. If she wasn't killed, it would have made one hell of a court case.
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May 9, 2016 04:42
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CelticPredator posted:I love the mystery of the unknown. The strange and weird. It grabs me. If you can find the screenplay for A TOPIARY (Shane 'Primer' Carruth's unfinished project) that might be up your alley
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May 9, 2016 05:15
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William Friedkin's Rampage would compliment this discussion nicely.
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May 9, 2016 07:50
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Clipperton posted:If you can find the screenplay for A TOPIARY (Shane 'Primer' Carruth's unfinished project) that might be up your alley Oh yeah? I'll check it out then!
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May 9, 2016 07:55
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CelticPredator posted:Oh yeah? I'll check it out then! Awesome! It is a Carruth story though, so have your coloured thumbtacks and string handy. I want to do an effortpost about that script one day. e: and just to pretend to be on topic, A TOPIARY has some similarities to PROMETHEUS (humans following what appears to be a breadcrumb trail left by a higher intelligence and not necessarily being happy with what they find at the end of it) although imo it's a lot grander and more awesome Clipperton fucked around with this message at 22:16 on May 9, 2016 |
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May 9, 2016 15:13
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Baronjutter posted:Our entire justice system has a ton of special exceptions based on people's mental abilities, so when judging an alien's actions we need to fully understand its mental abilities, how its emotions work, the society it comes from, There is no additional information, and never will be. It's now entirely up to you. So it's worth noting that your definition of humanity is scattershot - jumping from legal definition to cognitive science to a moral basis(?). And this recourse to expert opinion seems like an escape or retreat from the challenge the film poses. You can be declared legally dead.
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May 9, 2016 19:30
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Just saw the Assembly Cut. I can confirm that it is incredibly good.
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May 9, 2016 19:52
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have some cool potentially  Aliens fanarthttp://imgur.com/3wJtBhr
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May 11, 2016 01:17
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Thanks.
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May 12, 2016 12:45
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What happens if a facehugger face hugs a fellow alien?
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May 13, 2016 17:53
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The new predator movie is getting rolling. Hopefully it was be as good as predators.
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May 13, 2016 18:39
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SirDrone posted:What happens if a facehugger face hugs a fellow alien?
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May 13, 2016 18:49
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david_a posted:I wouldn't be surprised if this was in one of the terrible comics. Maybe it's the human equivalent of inbreeding.
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May 13, 2016 19:44
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Tenzarin posted:The new predator movie is getting rolling. Hopefully it was be as good as predators. I hope it's better than Predators
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May 13, 2016 22:09
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SirDrone posted:What happens if a facehugger face hugs a fellow alien? ...yeah, I'm legit curious, how the gently caress would that work? Would you just get another xenomorph of the same type? Is it even mechanically possible, what with the second jaw thing? (Also, do xenomorphs need to eat in Alien expanded universe stuff?)
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May 14, 2016 05:56
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IIRC in Alien 3 I think it's implied that that alien is straight up consuming its victims.
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May 14, 2016 06:18
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:...yeah, I'm legit curious, how the gently caress would that work? Would you just get another xenomorph of the same type? Is it even mechanically possible, what with the second jaw thing? As for expanded universe stuff, the AvP videogames have it as a gameplay mechanic to recover health, and a couple comics show Aliens eating. Whether they *need* to eat is another matter. Incidentally, Aliens like the taste of pork. Who knew? 
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May 14, 2016 09:14
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SirDrone posted:What happens if a facehugger face hugs a fellow alien? The same thing that happens when you put a portable hole inside a bag of holding.
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May 14, 2016 09:19
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I prefer that it doesn't eat. I like the idea that it exists to breed and kill without any other reason. Just a psycho sexual rape monster doin it's thang.
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May 14, 2016 11:02
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Picture: a Xenomorph walking into a Denny's, and ordering Moons Over My Hammy
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May 14, 2016 11:12
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Speaking of which: do xenomorphs produce milk? Would it be acidic?
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May 14, 2016 11:12
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Some Alien Covenant set pictures have popped up... https://twitter.com/skymovies/status/733626395847450625/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc NarkyBark fucked around with this message at 19:52 on May 20, 2016 |
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May 20, 2016 19:45
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A staircase that turns people into stone? Are they fighting a loving medusa? I hope those K-line containers feature prominently in the movie. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 19:52 on May 20, 2016 |
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May 20, 2016 19:47
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I'm so loving on board.
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May 20, 2016 19:49
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NarkyBark posted:Some Alien Covenant set pictures have popped up... Noice.
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May 20, 2016 23:31
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Baronjutter posted:A staircase that turns people into stone? Are they fighting a loving medusa? Looks like maybe they were given the old Pompeii treatment.
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May 20, 2016 23:35
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After all the whining about Prometheus people are now questioning a set that is literally "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
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May 20, 2016 23:39
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I'm curious where they're going that will have crowds of humans to be killed. Or maybe those are all engineers.
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May 24, 2016 03:18
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Baronjutter posted:I'm curious where they're going that will have crowds of humans to be killed. Well, the humans on Earth have been "engineered", so why not on some other planet light years away?
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May 24, 2016 15:02
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Baronjutter posted:I'm curious where they're going that will have crowds of humans to be killed. Its engineers. Space Jocky was such a better name.
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May 24, 2016 21:27
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Was it just me, or were the engineers in Promethus significantly smaller than the original Space Jockey? I mean, minus the fact that the Jockey was clearly a fossilized being and not a spacesuit, it was gargantuan. When they first revealed the engineer my pet theory was going to be that they grow into those suits or possibly the ship itself when they're navigating (keeping in line with the biomechanical ships and a Dune nod). But nope, we see the Engineer just put on his helmet and fly one.
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May 27, 2016 03:01
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Wild T posted:Was it just me, or were the engineers in Promethus significantly smaller than the original Space Jockey? I mean, minus the fact that the Jockey was clearly a fossilized being and not a spacesuit, it was gargantuan. The engineers in Prometheus are much much smaller than the space jockey in Alien. But the flaw here is you are judging the movie by your own expectations and/or wants instead of what the film actually is saying.
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May 27, 2016 03:10
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Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Prometheus. I consider it heavily inspired by Alien, but like that it doesn't dovetail neatly in and does its own thing instead. But I thought it was odd that Ridley Scott even addressed the original Jockey during production and claimed he'd always throught of it as a biomechanical suit, where what he filmed implied otherwise.
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May 27, 2016 03:20
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Wild T posted:Was it just me, or were the engineers in Promethus significantly smaller than the original Space Jockey? I mean, minus the fact that the Jockey was clearly a fossilized being and not a spacesuit, it was gargantuan. Obvious oversight by Ridley not putting as much thought into maintaining consistency as he should have, although the fact that they needed an actor to play the engineer likely limited them in that regard anyways. The space jockey in Alien was a sculpture so they could make it as large as they needed, and also used child actors to again make it look even larger. When it comes to Prometheus however they already cast a pretty tall guy for the role of the engineer but maintaining consistency would have required a switch to CGI instead, which seems to have been a direction Ridley Scott wanted to avoid given what happened with the Fifield scene.
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May 27, 2016 11:05
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The Space Jockey changed sizes in Alien from scene to scene. The Engineers are as large as the smallest version of the Jockey seen in Alien.
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May 27, 2016 16:47
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Wild T posted:Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Prometheus. I consider it heavily inspired by Alien, but like that it doesn't dovetail neatly in and does its own thing instead. Would a BIOmechanical suit fossilize? Thanks to Alien we know that the answer is yes.
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May 27, 2016 17:07
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Maybe Xenomorph's theory that the Space Jockey isn't an Engineer is correct. Maybe the Engineers are similar to us in that they were created by a superior species and developed a whole culture/religion around worshipping them. So they model themselves after this species and try to recreate their technology.
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May 27, 2016 17:10
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You know how Asian people tend to be shorter than other races? Maybe that's what happened with the space jockey. He could be a giant and the engineers are just smaller. Plot hole explained!
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May 27, 2016 17:30
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Darko posted:The Space Jockey changed sizes in Alien from scene to scene. The Engineers are as large as the smallest version of the Jockey seen in Alien. That was one of the things about Prometheus, that it didn't just demystify the Space Jockey, it did it in the most mundane and least interesting way possible, dragging 'Alien' along with it. Like, Prometheus could have told an interesting and thought provoking story about humanity meeting their creators and it going horribly wrong, but done it without screwing with one of the creepiest and most visually interesting elements of 'Alien', in my opinion.
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May 27, 2016 18:40
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I like to pretend that the engineers also encountered the completely different species that crashed on LV-426, and they've been aping them ever since. Ships, spacesuits to mimic them, etc. Its just my dumb fan theory but it even fits pretty well thematically.
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May 27, 2016 19:06
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