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oldpainless posted:Is Planet of the Vampires worth watching?
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Nov 18, 2016 04:57
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oldpainless posted:Is Planet of the Vampires worth watching? Yes, but know what you are getting yourself into. It is a hokey 60's sci-fi B-movie in all its glory.
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Nov 18, 2016 05:02
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oldpainless posted:Is Planet of the Vampires worth watching? Absolutely. And even though people like to bring up its similarities to, and hypothesize about its influence on, the Alien movies, put all that out of your head and enjoy it on its own terms without the baggage. It's sorta remarkable. Paolomania posted:Yes, but know what you are getting yourself into. It is a hokey 60's sci-fi B-movie in all its glory. Yes and no.... It's certainly a product of its time and budget, but it is weird enough, distinctive enough, to kinda separate it from its contemporaries. It's Mario Bava! Sir Nose fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Nov 18, 2016 |
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Nov 18, 2016 06:05
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oldpainless posted:Is Planet of the Vampires worth watching? I couldn't get through it personally because it's not my thing. But I completely understand why people talk about it in relation to Alien and Prometheus
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Nov 18, 2016 08:21
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MrMojok posted:Are you guys saying that Mother detected the signal, issued Special Order 937 to Ash, rerouted the ship, and woke everyone up, all on her own, and the company had nothing to do with it? And that they replaced the human science officer with a robot just before leaving Thedus was sheer coincidence? I thought it made more sense as it was all the computer telling them to check it out, and the company had no idea it happened cause the ship exploded. This was the time before wifi.
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Nov 18, 2016 09:14
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MrMojok posted:Are you guys saying that Mother detected the signal, issued Special Order 937 to Ash, rerouted the ship, and woke everyone up, all on her own, and the company had nothing to do with it? And that they replaced the human science officer with a robot just before leaving Thedus was sheer coincidence? yes? it makes a lot more sense than "company somehow picked up a signal from way far away even though it appears that you have to be nearby (as the nostromo was) to actually pick it up". UmOk posted:You've made a critical mistake. Everything is bad. But people who get their feelings hurt because someone likes something they don't are worse. if people didn't consume the bad things more good things would be made.
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Nov 18, 2016 10:13
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Groovelord Neato posted:yes? it makes a lot more sense than "company somehow picked up a signal from way far away even though it appears that you have to be nearby (as the nostromo was) to actually pick it up". There may have been another Company owned ship that picked up the signal earlier, but for whatever reason was not able to investigate it. There's all kinds of ways the Company could have known about the signal in advance. The science officer being swapped at the last minute is just too big a coincidence to ignore in my opinion, I think it definitely means something.
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Nov 18, 2016 15:00
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Basebf555 posted:There may have been another Company owned ship that picked up the signal earlier, but for whatever reason was not able to investigate it. There's all kinds of ways the Company could have known about the signal in advance.
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Nov 18, 2016 16:22
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I really stand by that W-Y knew about the beacon but nothing else. Honestly it doesn't get shady until the alien turns out to be a Xenomorph and then people die. Had it just been for Jockey it would've played out different. Maybe.
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Nov 18, 2016 18:03
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Xenomrph posted:That and Special Order 937 telling Ash to get a specimen; how did they know there was a specimen to get? Because the robots have standing orders to do that, just like the people have standing orders to investigate distress (?) signals.
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Nov 18, 2016 18:06
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CelticPredator posted:I really stand by that W-Y knew about the beacon but nothing else. Honestly it doesn't get shady until the alien turns out to be a Xenomorph and then people die. Had it just been for Jockey it would've played out different. If anything I'd say someone at W-Y knew there was something of interest there, but the Company as a whole had no idea.
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Nov 18, 2016 18:09
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Well if you follow the poo poo AvP movies both Weyland and Mrs Yutani, the heads of their respective companies know about aliens and predators so they prob put something order 2747whatever when they merged into 1.
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Nov 18, 2016 19:34
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I don't think the Company knew all that much about what specifically was there, but the more important distinction for me is whether or not they even knew about the signal. If it weren't for the last minute science officer swap, it'd be feasible that they just have these standing orders for the eventuality that one of their crews run into something potentially valuable.
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Nov 18, 2016 19:46
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The removal of the science officer and replacement with undercover robot is indeed suspicious. I tend to think some individual or small group in W-Y knew about the beacon, and when Nostromo disappeared, just shut up about it. But I do admit there is certainly no real evidence in the first film that anyone at the company is behind any of it. Ripley speculates about it, that's all. If they did somehow know about the beacon, and knew it was a warning, maybe they continued working on it and decoded it as "do not board, murderous hellbeast here" and then decided to replace the science officer, add special order 937, etc. Although if they did know this, it would make more sense to send people better equipped to deal with a situation like that.
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Nov 18, 2016 19:56
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For all we know the Nostromo could have picked up the beacon very faintly on the trip out there (assuming they went there & back on vaguely the same route). Possibly it was only detected by WY after a more thorough log examination once they arrived and there was a standing order to do a little more digging on any possible lead by slightly modifying the contracts, giving Mother a special rule, and adding an android on the return voyage. If they knew for sure there was something valuable on LV426 there's no way they would send a bunch of truckers to pick it up. The movie doesn't actually specify when they signed those contracts, does it?
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Nov 18, 2016 21:31
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MrMojok posted:Are you guys saying that Mother detected the signal, issued Special Order 937 to Ash, rerouted the ship, and woke everyone up, all on her own, and the company had nothing to do with it? And that they replaced the human science officer with a robot just before leaving Thedus was sheer coincidence? No, Mother did those things because she was preprogrammed by the company. All company ships are, implicitly, programmed the same way. Ash being a late addition to the crew is not evidence of a psychic foreknowledge. It's a basic explanation for how he could escape detection: no-one had time to spot his various quirks and glitches. It is 'sheer coincidence' in the same sense that the ship 'coincidentally' has a cat. Was Jones planted there to lure Brett into danger??? If the company had psychic foreknowledge, why did they only send one robot? Why did they send in a massively expensive refinery full of even-more-expensive ore? Why not an entire crew of robots? The answer is that they had no foreknowledge. Mother is acting of her own accord. The point - the reason I bring this up - is that Mother is a character in the film. The EU stories de-characterize Mother, missing the point of her various relationships to Ash, Dallas,and (eventually) Ripley. Mother exists as a pure expression of the company's logic, following those rules more stringently than any human. After all, humans can be clouded with delusions of morality. That's why she and Ash want the alien. It's the fundamental difference between saying this crew is expendable(while the others are safe) and saying all crews are inherently expendable. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Nov 19, 2016 |
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Nov 19, 2016 01:45
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Was Jones planted there to lure Brett into danger??? Anything can happen in the EU. Thanks for spoiling the Neill Blomkamp movie.
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Nov 19, 2016 03:15
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I can buy all that SMG, but what's your take on Ash? I mean, why replace the human science officer with this robot? It has to mean something.
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Nov 19, 2016 03:28
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david_a posted:For all we know the Nostromo could have picked up the beacon very faintly on the trip out there (assuming they went there & back on vaguely the same route). Possibly it was only detected by WY after a more thorough log examination once they arrived and there was a standing order to do a little more digging on any possible lead by slightly modifying the contracts, giving Mother a special rule, and adding an android on the return voyage. If they knew for sure there was something valuable on LV426 there's no way they would send a bunch of truckers to pick it up. quote:If the company had psychic foreknowledge, why did they only send one robot? Why did they send in a massively expensive refinery full of even-more-expensive ore? Why not an entire crew of robots? quote:The point - the reason I bring this up - is that Mother is a character in the film. The EU stories de-characterize Mother, missing the point of her various relationships to Ash, Dallas,and (eventually) Ripley. Mother exists as a pure expression of the company's logic, following those rules more stringently than any human. During the self-destruct, Mother is constantly telling Ripley how much more time she has left to save herself, even in the face of Mother's own annihilation and ultimate failure of Special Order 937. Mother wants Ripley to survive. quote:It's the fundamental difference between saying this crew is expendable(while the others are safe) and saying all crews are inherently expendable.
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Nov 19, 2016 04:08
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:No, Mother did those things because she was preprogrammed by the company. All company ships are, implicitly, programmed the same way. So what if that blah blah happened in a feature film? Like a prequel or sequel. Would that still be EU?
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Nov 19, 2016 04:58
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UmOk posted:So what if that blah blah happened in a feature film? Like a prequel or sequel. Would that still be EU? If you think any studio will use the EU after starwars 7 erased theirs.
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Nov 19, 2016 08:35
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Tenzarin posted:If you think any studio will use the EU after starwars 7 erased theirs. It was a total hypothetical. A "fake question" if you will. But Alien actually has a history of bringing EU junk to the screen.
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Nov 19, 2016 14:27
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UmOk posted:So what if that blah blah happened in a feature film? Like a prequel or sequel. Would that still be EU? canon is only what i think is good.
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Nov 19, 2016 14:44
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:No, Mother did those things because she was preprogrammed by the company. All company ships are, implicitly, programmed the same way. Yeah. This is absolutely the most logical and simplest explanation. If you have to look for a conspiracy as to why the company put Ash on the ship, it seems most likely that he was planted to keep tabs on the rest of the crew for boring HR reasons - they weren't exactly a crack team, and not the most professional or stable group of people. Ash could very easily have been put on to be a snitch and report crew members generally.
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Nov 19, 2016 15:03
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SMERSH Mouth posted:Yeah. This is absolutely the most logical and simplest explanation. But Ash was swapped out at the last minute before departure, that's one hell of a coincidence. Couple that with Special Order 937, Ash's "science officer eyes only" orders, and the Nostromo explicitly being rerouted to LV-426, and it's pretty obvious to me that someone at the Company knew something was there and sent the Nostromo there on purpose.
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Nov 19, 2016 16:13
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Groovelord Neato posted:canon is only what i think is good. Be careful Groovelord. Nobody said canon.
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Nov 19, 2016 16:21
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Xenomrph posted:But Ash was swapped out at the last minute before departure, that's one hell of a coincidence. Couple that with Special Order 937, Ash's "science officer eyes only" orders, and the Nostromo explicitly being rerouted to LV-426, and it's pretty obvious to me that someone at the Company knew something was there and sent the Nostromo there on purpose. it was rerouted after it picked up the distress beacon.
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Nov 19, 2016 16:42
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Xenomrph posted:But Ash was swapped out at the last minute before departure, that's one hell of a coincidence. Couple that with Special Order 937, Ash's "science officer eyes only" orders, and the Nostromo explicitly being rerouted to LV-426, and it's pretty obvious to me that someone at the Company knew something was there and sent the Nostromo there on purpose. Last minute crew changes are normal. Read about any major military operation. There were last minute crew changes on the atomic bombings of Japan, arguably the most sensitive small group operations of all time. A commercial vessel with its whole crew nailed down a week in advance is an aberration. DeimosRising fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Nov 19, 2016 |
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Nov 19, 2016 18:36
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Also see Aliens with new Lt Gorman
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Nov 19, 2016 20:00
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Groovelord Neato posted:it was rerouted after it picked up the distress beacon. banned from Starbucks posted:Also see Aliens with new Lt Gorman 
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Nov 19, 2016 20:24
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Xenomrph posted:That's not really the greatest example, since Gorman was swapped in specifically to further Burke's agenda (even if Gorman himself didn't know it). This really changes the movie, where is it said Burke got Gorman to lead that team? Why would he take a rookie commander when he thought they found aliens with acid for blood? Why would Burke even get so close on the planet after he sabotages the space marines needed to all defend him? Tenzarin fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Nov 19, 2016 |
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Nov 19, 2016 21:00
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MrMojok posted:I can buy all that SMG, but what's your take on Ash? I mean, why replace the human science officer with this robot? It has to mean something. Randomly-assigned robot crew members are an excellent union-busting tactic. Implicitly, every ship will occasionally have a robot crewmember assigned to keep tabs on the workers, sow discord, prevent solidarity, etc. Ash is just a company stooge, not a secret agent on an epic mission. If Ash was a secret agent, they would have perhaps given him a gun instead of relying on his skills with a rolled-up porn magazine! Again, fans have trouble with the idea that this is happening everywhere: every ship, every crew. No worker is trusted. All workers are expendable. The events of this film are not some huge exception. The film is speaking about companies in general - things that exist in reality. You yourself likely work for a company right now. Do you think you're not expendable? The universe does not revolve around the xenomorph. Not everyone is obsessed with this random fuckin' space bug. The company itself does not even want the alien. The company wants only profit. They don't give a poo poo about this particular alien. They, in all likelihood, don't event know it exists. Mother wants the alien, because her creators (perhaps-unthinkingly) threw in a few lines of code that cause her to experience an overwhelming desire to obtain alien technology. And Ash wants to please Mother. Those are their characterizations, in this gothic horror film. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Nov 19, 2016 |
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Nov 19, 2016 21:45
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Tenzarin posted:This really changes the movie, where is it said Burke got Gorman to lead that team? Why would he take a rookie commander when he thought they found aliens with acid for blood? Why would Burke even get so close on the planet after he sabotages the space marines needed to all defend him? Burke wasn't intending to kill the Aliens, he wanted to capture them. He leverages Gorman's inexperience to facilitate that. Bringing a battle-hardened, no-nonsense commander wouldn't have let him, say, convince the Marines that shooting guns in a Company facility with a substantial dollar value was a bad idea. Burke starts losing control of the situation the moment Gorman is out of the picture and someone more experienced is in charge and doesn't have time for his bullshit. SuperMechagodzilla posted:The universe does not revolve around the xenomorph. Not everyone is obsessed with this random fuckin' space bug. The company itself does not even want the alien. The company wants only profit. They don't give a poo poo about this particular alien. They, in all likelihood, don't event know it exists. You're using "Ash as a secret agent" as hyperbole, but you yourself pointed out that Ash has special secret orders. It's a 100% loyal Company robot with secret orders put on a ship at the last minute before that ship gets specifically re-routed to pick up "a specimen" at all costs. Any one of the details in a vacuum is easy to handwave as a coincidence; all of them combined, substantially less so. And even if it was a deliberate mission, it still doesn't undermine your point that the Company is likely doing similar stuff everywhere. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Nov 19, 2016 |
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Nov 19, 2016 21:46
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:They don't give a poo poo about this particular alien. They, in all likelihood, don't event know it exists. hadley's hope didn't even go to investigate the derelict until burke found out about it from ripley, right? and he was the one that sent the message to go investigate. that colony was a helluva investment to just send one family over years after you set it up.
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Nov 19, 2016 21:58
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Nothing says "a competent, well executed plan to secure a valuable asset" like sending in the first tugboat crew to happen across the signal. I'm not sure if some middle-manager getting a directive to put an android on that tug because there might be something valuable on its route really alters the horror of the situation significantly.
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Nov 19, 2016 22:58
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Xenomrph posted:Burke wasn't intending to kill the Aliens, he wanted to capture them. He leverages Gorman's inexperience to facilitate that. Bringing a battle-hardened, no-nonsense commander wouldn't have let him, say, convince the Marines that shooting guns in a Company facility with a substantial dollar value was a bad idea. Burke starts losing control of the situation the moment Gorman is out of the picture and someone more experienced is in charge and doesn't have time for his bullshit. No, they talk about cooling tanks/pipes being the reason not to shoot guns, not that Burke is a mastermind genius in the EU.
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Nov 19, 2016 23:04
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I think the idea that some people think the Company randomly replaces crew members with amoral androids as an HR exercise and has secret standing orders to pick up any alien life form they happen to find (what, including protozoa?), even if this means sacrificing crew and incredibly expensive starships and their cargo, is the true existential horror.
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Nov 19, 2016 23:14
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Xenomrph posted:Burke wasn't intending to kill the Aliens, he wanted to capture them. He leverages Gorman's inexperience to facilitate that. Bringing a battle-hardened, no-nonsense commander wouldn't have let him, say, convince the Marines that shooting guns in a Company facility with a substantial dollar value was a bad idea. Burke starts losing control of the situation the moment Gorman is out of the picture and someone more experienced is in charge and doesn't have time for his bullshit. I tend to ignore EU stuff in general and go with what's in the movie. And you are right - what limited information there is in the film (counting the special edition, which I do, since that was originally cut down for pacing reasons not plot) points to A) The Company knowing *something* was out there worth investigating, even if they didn't know what B) Ash was swapped in right before the ship with the closest/fastest flight path left its final destination and C) Ash's job was to enforce the company's directives, above all others. This doesn't really even need to be inferred: it's in the movie. Mother being an active participant rather than a passive info repository makes no sense because she obeys whoever has the correct access - including Ripley in the end - and takes no proactive action to stop anything the crew is doing to get rid of the specimen once it is onboard. The most obvious thing to infer, if we're going to go down that route, is that Ash himself implanted/programmed the order(s) in to Mother, including the one to re-route/stop the ship. Mother isn't depicted as a true AI even by 1979 standards, just a really advanced natural language computer.
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Nov 19, 2016 23:15
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Funnily enough, a lot of this confusion comes down to the plain and simple fact that in the initial story crafted by O'Bannon and Shusett, there was no robot-espionage subplot. That occurred fairly late in the development stages of the script when the producers were heavily heavily re-working it (to the extent that they notoriously tried to marginalize O'Bannon and Shusett merely to a "story by" credit). O'Bannon himself hated the twist.
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Nov 19, 2016 23:24
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Payndz posted:I think the idea that some people think the Company randomly replaces crew members with amoral androids as an HR exercise and has secret standing orders to pick up any alien life form they happen to find (what, including protozoa?), even if this means sacrificing crew and incredibly expensive starships and their cargo, is the true existential horror. The idea that people think that is only frightening because of the prospect that they may be correct.
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Nov 19, 2016 23:24
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