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SuperMechagodzilla posted:In one movie, Abraham Lincoln solves a courtroom mystery. In another movie, he battles vampires with a magic axe. This doesn't apply because those sound like original and different ideas. In one movie Ripley battles Aliens with Hicks and Newt. In another movie Ripley battles Aliens with Hicks and Newt.
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Jul 26, 2016 09:27
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I am Ridley's empty stare when asked about Aliens canon from AVP.
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Jul 26, 2016 10:17
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Are there any decent Alien novels to read? I've only ever read the novelization of the first film and all it told me was aliens squeeze through vents like loving octopuses and Lambert got humped to death.
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Jul 26, 2016 11:10
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SirDrone posted:Lambert got humped to death. To be fair, this is implied in the movie anyways, and not exactly subtly. (And now you've taken me back to 2005, when this was being hotly argued on the IMDb Alien boards.) Aliens: Labyrinth is both a comic and a novel, and the comic owns, but I'm not sure how it'd work out in prose form. Probably even more disgustingly than the comic (and the comic is some hosed up poo poo, even for this franchise).
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Jul 26, 2016 11:17
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are they really going to bring ripley back again if they made a new alien? jesus, i dont really get the appeal of dragging out geriatrics. It was a bit embarrasing for the new star wars and really would be loving awful for a horror/action movie.
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Jul 26, 2016 11:21
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Maybe this time, she's the Burke character!
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Jul 26, 2016 11:26
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I was gonna say she's not that old, but holy poo poo she's 66  There's no way this movie doesn't include some form of torch-passing. Newt seems like the obvious torch-passee, but again, Carrie Henn really did not want to keep acting after Aliens, and Blomkamp seems like the kind of grognard who'd just make a new character if he couldn't get the original actress back.
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Jul 26, 2016 11:34
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:Good thing the filmmaker has never said anything like that, then? The complaint is that Sigourney Weaver and James Cameron (neither of whom are making the movie, though one is acting in it) both said it contains fan service, which is apparently the greatest sin a movie can commit. I never said it was the greatest sin a movie can commit (and I gave examples of successful movies that use fan service), just that it's a certainly valid reason for alarm bells to go off in peoples' heads. Movies don't tend to be good or successful *because of* their fan service (especially since fans tend to be a vocal minority in the grand scheme of ticket sales, it's usually *in spite of* it. Like, don't get me wrong, I'm the kind of turbonerd who gets a big ol' grin on their face when a franchise movie does some kind of callback to a legacy story. But when the movie's very premise IS fanservice, I have to hope that there's a lot more being brought to the table than just giving "the fans" what they want.
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Jul 26, 2016 11:37
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Also killing off Newt and Hicks was completely the right move for the kind of movie Alien 3 wanted to be (and almost was). To dismiss it as a "slap in the face of the fans" is the put the fans' desires above artistic integrity. Nevermind the fact these characters are from a sequel and not even the original movie.
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Jul 26, 2016 11:46
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I think for many it's not the fact that they died, but that it was done in an offscreen, "Hicks died on the way back to his home planet" kind of way that was very obviously because they didn't want to bring those characters back for the third movie. I love Sigourney Weaver as an actress and I appreciate her characteristic weirdness that she's brought to the Alien franchise but I just wish they'd stop tortuously returning to the Ripley character and let the series do its own thing.
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Jul 26, 2016 15:58
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MrMojok posted:Funny enough Requiem came on late last night. Holy poo poo was that movie even more mean-spirited than I remembered. People using the term "mean spirited" always kind of confuses me. It's a violent movie full of death and murder. What makes it mean spirited or would keep it from being mean spirited?
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Jul 26, 2016 17:42
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SirDrone posted:Are there any decent Alien novels to read? I've only ever read the novelization of the first film and all it told me was aliens squeeze through vents like loving octopuses and Lambert got humped to death.  The Predator movie novelization is similar in that it's based on an earlier script draft (namely when Jean Claude Van Damme was still playing the Predator), so the Predator is described as looking pretty different, has some different equipment (such as a speargun, and a laser pistol instead of the shoulder cannon) and the ending is a bit different. The other Alan Dean Foster novelizations are interesting, the Aliens one heavily plays up the motherhood subtext from the movie and the duality of Ripley and the Queen. Oh, and it omits all of the profanity from the script for some reason. Like, 100% of it. Hudson's last stand loses some of its punch as a result, and "Get away from her, you!" just isn't as iconic, for some reason. ADF hated writing the Alien3 novelization because it killed off everyone, and he even proposed writing a version where Hicks and Newt, and Fox shot it down. His distaste with Alien3 was the reason why he turned down writing the Resurrection novelization. The novelizations for the first three movies all open and end thematically on the topic of dreams and dreamers. As for spin off books, it's been a while since I read any of them, but they've started reprinting some of the older ones as cheap "omnibus" collections. All of the ones published by Bantam are actually novelizations of preexisting comics, and for the most part they improve and expand on the comics since they don't have comic book page/panel limitations. The exception in my opinion is Labyrinth - don't get me wrong, it's a cool book, but the comic is much more effective and better paced (and has excellent art). I'd say read the comic if at all possible, otherwise the book is a solid, if somewhat inferior, substitute. Most of the Bantam books are pretty schlocky, but they occasionally have some neat ideas. "Alien Harvest" is a bittersweet love story, "Music of the Spears" is about an eccentric composer who wants to use Alien sounds in his symphonic masterpiece, "Rogue" is just balls-out 90s action with a cartoon villain, "Genocide" is about steroids made from Alien goo and an Alien civil war. The next series of books were the DH Press novels, and they were wholly original stories. They ranged from alright to forgettable - "Criminal Enterprise" is about a underworld syndicate trying to coexist on a planet that happens to have an Alien hive, "No Exit" is about an insurance investigator who gets caught up in a corporate conspiracy (note: this is one of the better books... except for the last quarter, where the author's deadline got moved up and he just ended it on a lovely cliffhanger just to get the book done), and "Original Sin" is set after Alien Resurrection, so if you liked that group of characters and want to see them do more stuff, that's pretty much the appeal. After that, Titan Books started publishing stuff (and are the ones republishing the old 90s Bantam stuff). I haven't read through all of them yet so I can't really comment on them, I'm only about a third of the way through the first book. The plot is pretty hackneyed but it's executed well enough so far - Ripley wakes up between the events of Alien and Aliens and has another adventure. Like, that sounds mega dumb, but apparently it was a plot mandate from FOX and the author had to work around it and still make it fit with the movies, and he's doing a pretty competent job so far given what he has to work with. One of the other books breaks down the fall of the Hadley's Hope colony in 'Aliens', and the third book is set in the far future, centuries after Resurrection. As a side tangent, the book 'Predator: South China Sea' is a super cool book that I'd love to see adapted into a Predator movie, it's hands down the best Alien or Predator book from any publisher. The author really "got" what made the Predator movies interesting, it actually takes the time to make the Predator an interesting character in its own right while still keeping it weird and "alien" enough that you're not really humanizing it, and it's got a pretty solid cast of interesting and sometimes morally-grey characters. tl;dr: most of the books are middling schlock with some interesting ideas executed with varying degrees of competence (think: 90s-era Star Wars novels), if that's your thing then they're pretty harmless diversions. Also read Aliens: Labyrinth.
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Jul 26, 2016 17:57
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There's tons of brutally violent movies that are still fun. The Evil Dead movies are ridiculously violent but they're pretty light hearted. Other violent gorey movies too manage to mostly have their victims being people who "had it coming" and manage to still play it up for a bit of a laugh. Requiem seems to delight in showing the horrific detailed deaths of innocent people, children, pregnant ladies, the works. I did not have fun watching this movie. But I also can't stand "torture porn" like Saw.
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Jul 26, 2016 18:00
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oldpainless posted:People using the term "mean spirited" always kind of confuses me. It's a violent movie full of death and murder. What makes it mean spirited or would keep it from being mean spirited? It's an eye-of-the-beholder thing, of course, but mean-spiritedness is usually about the movie "enjoying" the bad things that happen to its characters. It's not necessarily a bad thing (most black comedy is mean-spirited,; you could argue most horror in itself has a certain base-level of mean-spiritedness to it), but if it's being used pejoratively it usually means it's going beyond what the viewer thinks is warranted. People who describe AVPR that way usually mean that the violence feels more gratuitous than usual and that the on-screen victims include innocents and more 'helpless' people that the viewer may be more predisposed to sympathize with. Also, knowing the back history of how fans scoffed at the first AVP being rated PG-13, it's easy to view AVPR as a self-conscious defensive move to be seen as edgy or badass.
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Jul 26, 2016 18:16
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Requiem isn't mean spirited because its gory or violent, its mean spirited because of who the violence happens to and under what circumstances it happens. An entire maternity ward, a little kid, and a father who's wife returned from overseas like 10 minutes beforehand. The unpopular pizza delivery guy finally gets noticed by the hot chick but she gets killed 10 minutes later. An entire group of significant characters fight their way to a rescue location only to have a bomb unceremoniously dropped on their heads.
Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jul 26, 2016 |
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Jul 26, 2016 18:20
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oldpainless posted:People using the term "mean spirited" always kind of confuses me. It's a violent movie full of death and murder. What makes it mean spirited or would keep it from being mean spirited? That hospital scene kind of crossed a line that isn't usually crossed in films. And the scene where the little girl sees one of the aliens in her NVGs, screams about Monsters! Daddy goes outside with a flashlight, "See, no monsters" but then CHOMP, right in front of the kid. Stuff like that. There were a handful of scenes like those. Big emphasis on slaughter of innocents, and trauma, etc. e: well and truly beaten by posters above It doesn't offend me personally, because I used to read a lot of the Dark Horse comics which were just sick, and I think that's the vibe the filmmakers were going for here. They apparently shot an alternate ending where the survivors are gunned down by SF troops after they hand over the predator's shoulder cannon, so the filmmakers did reign it in a little. I'd prefer that ending! MrMojok fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Jul 26, 2016 |
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Jul 26, 2016 18:35
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"Torture porn" is a pretty apt description. They're just shoving gore in our faces without any thoughts behind it. It's not based on dark humour or commenting on anything, it's viscera for the sake of it, which is just lazy to me. The comic "Aliens: Labyrinth" is just as bloody and mean spirited, but there's a point to it all! E: Unless the point behind Requiem is "you can't fight the government and expect to win"? 
THE BAR fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jul 26, 2016 |
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Jul 26, 2016 18:45
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ruddiger posted:I am Ridley's empty stare when asked about Aliens canon from AVP. AVP and AVP2 is canon. Tenzarin fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Jul 26, 2016 |
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Jul 26, 2016 19:18
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A pregnant woman dying isn't mean-spirited, unless you fantasize that the filmmakers loathe pregnant women for no reason. Not only loathe them, but spent a lot of time and money - millions of dollars - expressing their hatred of pregnant women. These fantasies are rarely coherent. e.g. this fantasy: THE BAR posted:They're just shoving gore in our faces without any thoughts behind it. It's not based on dark humour or commenting on anything, it's viscera for the sake of it, which is just lazy to me. You fantasize that the filmmakers are 'lazy', so lazy that they don't even think. They are subhumans. But of course, if they're not thinking, they can't actually have malicious intentions. So accusations of 'mean-spiritedness' are nothing of the sort. (Have you ever actually watched a splatter movie? AV|P:R has very little of that. The violence is perfunctory, cutting away quickly.) People are struggling to understand why the child is killed, so they imagine a conspiracy. The filmmakers killed the child because they're 'mean' - they hate children. But, simultaneously, they're absolutely thoughtless, without intentions. You could substitute the child death with a picture of a cat riding a bicycle, because it's all meaningless, right? But you wouldn't get upset at a cat riding a bicycle; it must be mean. So you get stuck in this spiral where you can't ever make sense of things. You fall into memes. You repeat the same posts over and over again. You repeat the same posts over and over again. An endless cycle of permanent unhappiness. Or you can just think for two seconds: Half the film is about the sheriff's feelings of guilt over covering up the death of the child, trying to hide the painful truth from the boy's mother. At the end of the film, she says "the government doesn't lie to people!", shortly before the government lures her into a trap and kills her. Ugly truth coming to the surface is the entire point of the film. There is straight-up CHUD imagery: a community of homeless people living in the sewers are turned into mutants. The truth is related to class struggle: the sheriff's efforts to cover up the child's death are akin to his efforts to keep the homeless out of view. His goal is denial, keeping up appearances - and this turns him into a monster. In another subplot, the 'Ripley-esque' character returns from war, and there is obvious tension with the husband. She ignores it and tries to go about her life, but then there's an explosion of violence and her husband is killed by a CHUD. There is an obvious connection between the death of the husband and the earlier scenes. This all culminates in the nightmare-vision of society has a hell where women exist for no reason but to pump out drones for an obscene biomechanical creature. I would venture to say that the filmmakers are not in favor of this outcome.
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Jul 26, 2016 20:12
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CelticPredator posted:This doesn't apply because those sound like original and different ideas. Ripley shoots a grand total of one alien while in battle with Hicks and Newt. If you count the one that gets run over by the car, that makes two.
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Jul 26, 2016 20:27
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Isn't Labyrinth the book where the main character literally scares an Alien away by being really really angry? Like "I screamed at it and it ran away like a puppy"?
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Jul 26, 2016 20:44
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504 posted:Isn't Labyrinth the book where the main character literally scares an Alien away by being really really angry? Like "I screamed at it and it ran away like a puppy"? No its the one where the aliens try to get a guy to gently caress his mother. This is literally the plot of it.
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Jul 26, 2016 20:46
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504 posted:Isn't Labyrinth the book where the main character literally scares an Alien away by being really really angry? Like "I screamed at it and it ran away like a puppy"? Tenzarin posted:No its the one where the aliens try to get a guy to gently caress his mother. This is literally the plot of it.
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Jul 26, 2016 21:01
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Half the film is about the sheriff's feelings of guilt over covering up the death of the child, trying to hide the painful truth from the boy's mother. At the end of the film, she says "the government doesn't lie to people!", shortly before the government lures her into a trap and kills her. You could certainly still call all that mean-spirited, though? Mean-spirited doesn't have to mean 'bad'. Hell, it doesn't even have to mean 'explicitly violent/gory': Josh Brolin's death in No Country For Old Men was pretty drat mean-spirited, arguably because we never even saw it.
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Jul 26, 2016 21:10
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Yeah, like, SMG, all the stuff you're saying about AVP:R is at least broadly true but it doesn't make any of the mentioned scenes pleasant to watch. It's tonally pretty different from anything else in the series, except maybe Alien 3 (and 3 is still, somehow, less grim), and that makes it unenjoyable to some. It's okay to not like a movie, even if the movie is overall good and the things that put you off of it were deliberate decisions.
WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Jul 26, 2016 |
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Jul 26, 2016 22:03
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Xenomrph posted:That's a thing that sort of happens to a character (a weakened, malnourished Alien that's been kept in captivity for months momentarily hesitates when a human angrily screams at it). I remember it being "Alien stops, turns around and pisses the hell off" Im sure that's the one where I just cant understand the last pages no matter how many times I read it.
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Jul 26, 2016 22:12
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AVPR is as grim as Mars Attack. It's ridiculous and schlocky. All it's missing is the bad dubbing and the electro soundtrack to be an italian ripoff from the 80s.
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Jul 26, 2016 22:57
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MonsieurChoc posted:AVPR is as grim as Mars Attack. It's ridiculous and schlocky. All it's missing is the bad dubbing and the electro soundtrack to be an italian ripoff from the 80s. It's ridiculous and schlocky, but there's a certain misanthropy to its ridiculous shlock that, say, Mars Attacks lacks. You're not wrong about the Italian ripoff thing, though- those movies are often remarkably mean.
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Jul 26, 2016 23:16
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Avpr is hardcore and back to the roots lmao.
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Jul 26, 2016 23:27
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Quick, someone do an edit of AvP|R that's exactly the same except with a Goblin soundtrack.
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Jul 26, 2016 23:38
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I would probably dig the hell out of that, not gonna lie. I'm not calling AVP:R's misanthropy bad, I'm just saying I totally get why some folks don't gel with it.
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Jul 27, 2016 00:01
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Like this except with good timing. http://www.youdubber.com/index.php?video=OCy7OdE8DGk&video_start=0&audio=TQAlACag6As&audio_start=0
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Jul 27, 2016 00:02
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Xenomrph posted:James Cameron also slammed AvP when it came out, and then praised it after he actually sat down and watched it. James Cameron does not say what James Cameron says because it is the right thing to say, James Cameron says what James Cameron says because he is James Cameron.
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Jul 27, 2016 00:13
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James Cameron says what James Cameron says because he got handed a big ol' pile of money to say it, and daddy needs a new deep-sea exploration vehicle.
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Jul 27, 2016 01:27
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lizardman posted:You could certainly still call all that mean-spirited, though? No, because 'mean-spirited' means intentionally cruel/abusive, as in 'a mean-spirited prank'. AV|P:R doesn't make a joke of the kid's death. It's presented matter-of-factly as just a thing that happens. (If there is a 'joke' to it, it's that the whole 'poking the meteor' thing is a classic sci-fi cliche.) It's not like the film is shy about its actual targets: the former bullies are mocked and insulted. There's a lengthy pause after 'the government doesn't lie to people!', to let it sink how idiotic that sounds. The manager of the pizza place gets really poo poo on, because once the aliens are in play, all existing power-dynamics vanish. LORD OF BOOTY posted:James Cameron says what James Cameron says because he got handed a big ol' pile of money to say it, and daddy needs a new deep-sea exploration vehicle. James Cameron says whatever he wants to say. He just isn't a very good critic.
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Jul 27, 2016 01:37
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504 posted:I remember it being "Alien stops, turns around and pisses the hell off" Are you talking about the comic or the novel? I just double checked the comic and it kinda-sorta happens on two occasions (one is the setup for the other's payoff) so I checked both. It pretty much goes down the same way in both instances, and it's how I described it. If you're talking about the novel, it's been years since I read it but I could check that too I guess. As for the ending, Church, the antagonist, is revealed to have survived the events of the story and recovered the body of Crespi, the seemingly-dead protagonist, and has him in a big specimen jar where he appears to be morphing or mutating into some sort of Alien-esque biomechanoid creature. Church looks at the specimen jar with an apologetic look and says, "I... I hope you know, Tony... none of this is personal. v  v " It's a pretty drat great ending and a hell of a subversion of the "MAD SCIENTIST!!!" trope that had been pretty prevalent in the Aliens comics (and even Alien Resurrection fell victim to it).
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Jul 27, 2016 02:34
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Holy poo poo, I apologize for the "mean-spirited" derail
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Jul 27, 2016 03:29
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Xenomrph posted:Are you talking about the comic or the novel? I just double checked the comic and it kinda-sorta happens on two occasions (one is the setup for the other's payoff) so I checked both. I'm fairly sure I mean the novel, I did read the comic also but I think just once. I think the novel was just unclear.. its been a while though.
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Jul 27, 2016 04:09
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MrMojok posted:Holy poo poo, I apologize for the "mean-spirited" derail It happens every other page in the horror thread too, and it's always an unresolved discussion.
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Jul 27, 2016 04:21
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MrMojok posted:Holy poo poo, I apologize for the "mean-spirited" derail You shouldn't have to. The trouble is that people approach the films incorrectly. Cameron's Special Edition spends a whole lot of time on the soon-to-be-dead children, but nobody even cares about Newt's brother. AV|P:R is the far more successful film. People are reacting against the fact that they're actually being affected by the movie.
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Jul 27, 2016 08:20
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