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Hodgepodge posted:Nothing says "a competent, well executed plan to secure a valuable asset" like sending in the first tugboat crew to happen across the signal. Like Groovelord said, Burke did the same thing by sending some prospecting family to check out the Derelict 60 years later. quote: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 23:28
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K. Waste posted: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. Ash was always the Devil's advocate though, at least in the story drafts I have read (note: Alien is my absolute favorite movie. I saw it in the theater when it came out - yes I am an older gently caress - and probably close to 100 times since in various forms). There was always a character who acted as the voice of science/"reason" on the ship. There had to be, to explain why an otherwise bunch of space-truckers would even bother beyond the very minimums required by contract and sense of duty to go wandering off on an alien planet. Originally more of that role fell to Captain Dallas, who was driven by more of sense of duty/company loyalty than ended up in the film. Followed by Kane, his loyal second in command. The "robot plant" twist that was added just prior to the shooting script shifted much of that to Ash. The deleted scene where Dallas discussed Ash with Lambert was a result of those efforts, though Scott originally cut it (and others) because it threw off the pace of the movie. Without it the movie is much better, pace-wise - it's perhaps a film masterclass in how to raise tension, really - but it does leave a bit of a hole where Ash's motivations are concerned. That said Scott did eventually restore it and a couple other scenes that delve in to the Alien's methods (the cocoon scene in the engine room near the end still gives me shudders) so it's fair game to include, I think, even if you discard EU retconning, etc.
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Nov 19, 2016 23:35
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K. Waste posted: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. Going beyond that, though, Ash remains a human character even in the final film. The explosion of white viscera signals a shift in the other characters' subjective stance toward him. Ash being asexual is as 'arbitrary' as Ripley being female or Parker being black. What difference would it make if the company sent a human? These choices are only meaningful retroactively. Being a robot, Ash certainly isn't being paid. No, he's a dreamer who simply enjoys doing science. He and Mother are the ones whose indefatigable pursuit of the alien threaten the company's investment - taking 'crew expendable' all too seriously. Mother goes to her death for it. On the contrary, it's Ripley who acts in the company's 'rational best interest' by enforcing the quarantine protocols. Leaving Kane to die was the best choice to preserve the ship and its cargo, while W-Y could still lay claim to the site. It's perfectly in line with her characterization in Aliens (provided you ignore the entire ending): fighting 'greed' and the bad aliens, thereby preserving the company.
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Nov 20, 2016 02:06
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I agree that Ripley is portrayed as a loyal "Company employee" at first, but I'd say that goes out the window permanently for her character once she learns that the crew (including her) is expendable. She's real drat cynical about the Company pretty much from the start in 'Aliens', especially when they throw her under the bus, treat her like she's crazy, and are "gracious" enough to give her a poo poo job doing menial labor with a power loader. Edit-- speaking of her interrogation, remember the scrolling personnel files on the Nostromo crew displayed on the big wall monitor? That wasn't just random "lorem ipsum" gibbberish, and audiences couldn't read it until the bluray release of 'Aliens'. It's got some fun tidbits about the characters, and it's technically not EU since its present on-screen in the movie. 
Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Nov 20, 2016 |
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Nov 20, 2016 02:11
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Going beyond that, though, Ash remains a human character even in the final film. The explosion of white viscera signals a shift in the other characters' subjective stance toward him. Ash being asexual is as 'arbitrary' as Ripley being female or Parker being black. What difference would it make if the company sent a human? As I said above, I think this interpretation of "Mother" doesn't match the movie - she pretty much does whatever she is told to do by whoever is authorized to do it, whether it's withhold secrets, reveal them, or eventually self-destruct. There's no single instance where the computer takes action on its own initiative. As for Ripley's interest, that was for the benefit of the *crew* not the company. Mother isn't a company controlled AI - Ash is. Mother is an advanced computer meant to help run the ship when the crew is awake and keep it running when they aren't. Ash is the company-controlled AI carrying out their will who was willing to kill (or worse) the entire crew once he (it) realized what they had found if it meant getting it back. As for the end of Aliens don't forget it was Ripley who first proposed nuking the site from orbit - Hardly in the companies interest. You could easily read it as her preferred choice all along, even before she left.
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Nov 20, 2016 02:20
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Ixian posted:As I said above, I think this interpretation of "Mother" doesn't match the movie - she pretty much does whatever she is told to do by whoever is authorized to do it, whether it's withhold secrets, reveal them, or eventually self-destruct. There's no single instance where the computer takes action on its own initiative. There are exactly zero scenes in Alien where Mother receives orders from the company. The Nostromo is so far away from 'the network' that Ripley can't even radio for help in an emergency escape pod. Like, the thing that's designed to be noticed. They specifically stumbled upon the tiny alien signal because they were harvesting rocks in the middle of nowhere, out of communications range, where you might say that 'no one can hear them scream.' Additionally, nuking the facility in Aliens is not against the company's interests. It's against Burke's interests, because he wanted to come home like a hero and get promoted or whatever. The company would just write it off.
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Nov 20, 2016 03:05
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The alien was never a threat to the ship except in the sense that one of the crew might scuttle it in order to destroy the alien. With the alien on board, eliminate the crew and you eliminate the threat to the ship. Ash is just protecting company property. There is some question as to whether or not the alien would ultimately go after Ash once the rest of the crew was gone. It seems like he is either unsure about this himself, or just ambivalent towards that fate. The answers lie in the AvP video game. Yes, aliens do attack androids. Ash would have been more helpful to the crew if he had been more familier with the Aliens EU. Ignorance of alien-based video games and ancillary media is actually the primary flaw in Ash's programing.
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Nov 20, 2016 03:17
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xeno sees it as the Company when it's really just the company.
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Nov 20, 2016 03:30
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:There are exactly zero scenes in Alien where Mother receives orders from the company. As others pointed out, it's clear that Mother wasn't complicit in the Alien's capture - if she were, there's conceivably dozens of ways she could have assisted Ash. Vent the atmosphere on the ship to kill the (human) crew, override Ripley and open the airlock to allow Dallas back on the ship (rather than wait for Ash to do it), prevent Ripley from reading Special Order 937, shut down the self destruct and prevent the ship from being destroyed, and that's off the top of my head. quote:The Nostromo is so far away from 'the network' that Ripley can't even radio for help in an emergency escape pod. Like, the thing that's designed to be noticed. They specifically stumbled upon the tiny alien signal because they were harvesting rocks in the middle of nowhere, out of communications range, where you might say that 'no one can hear them scream.' quote:Additionally, nuking the facility in Aliens is not against the company's interests. It's against Burke's interests, because he wanted to come home like a hero and get promoted or whatever. The company would just write it off. The Company likely wrote off the Nostromo after it went missing, but they're still understandably upset when Ripley shows up decades later and tells them what happened.
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Nov 20, 2016 04:46
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Yeah, either Burke doesn't want the company to lose all the money invested in the facility because he cares about the Company's well-being, or he doesn't want to be the guy responsible for getting the facility blown up because it will mean he gets fired (or worse).
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Nov 20, 2016 04:51
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Xenomrph posted:As others pointed out, it's clear that Mother wasn't complicit in the Alien's capture - if she were, there's conceivably dozens of ways she could have assisted Ash. Vent the atmosphere on the ship to kill the (human) crew, override Ripley and open the airlock to allow Dallas back on the ship (rather than wait for Ash to do it), prevent Ripley from reading Special Order 937, shut down the self destruct and prevent the ship from being destroyed, and that's off the top of my head. You have no reason to assume Mother should be capable of doing any of those things. She needs a human crew to pull levers and press buttons for her. Because she doesn't have hands. That is the point of the famous extended prologue, where Mother becomes dissatisfied with these conversations with the empty helmets, and awakens the crew to take her down to the alien moon. She cannot do those things on her own. She needs a crew and desires a better crew. That is her characterization. Mother is called Mother for a reason. quote:It's absolutely against the Company's interest - the facility has a substantial dollar value. "Ideally" no company would ever lose money. However, a good liberal company in a crisis would eat the loss, call the deaths of the workers an unfortunate incident, and pin full blame on Burke - while continuing to rake in megaprofits with their other colonial outposts.
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Nov 20, 2016 05:26
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THANK YOU for describing the extended prologue as "where Mother becomes dissatisfied with these conversations with the empty helmets." That's exactly how I thought about it but hadn't read that description before. I like your take on Mother, generally. It's kind of weird, I feel like I'm familiar enough with Alien that I don't need to see it ever again for my own edification, yet I really am digging on this discussion of it. Maybe I can watch it with someone who hasn't seen it before as a way of getting a different experience out of it from what I've already had (plenty of).
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Nov 20, 2016 07:03
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:"Ideally" no company would ever lose money. However, a good liberal company in a crisis would eat the loss, call the deaths of the workers an unfortunate incident, and pin full blame on Burke - while continuing to rake in megaprofits with their other colonial outposts. Apollodorus posted:Yeah, either Burke doesn't want the company to lose all the money invested in the facility because he cares about the Company's well-being, or he doesn't want to be the guy responsible for getting the facility blown up because it will mean he gets fired (or worse). None of that really changes what I said. Independent of Burke's own self interest or the existence of insurance claims or whatever, the wholesale destruction of expensive Company property is not in the Company's self-interest - this is demonstrated in Ripley's interrogation where they straight up call Ripley out for the destruction of an expensive ship and her cargo. And even if it were somehow in the Company's best interests, Ripley certainly isn't acting on their behalf: when confronted with the colony's value, she outright says "they can bill me". She cares about wiping out the Aliens, period; if anything, sticking it to the Company (again) is a bonus.
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Nov 20, 2016 08:22
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No doubt. But to me it's interesting to think about how much of a Company man Burke really is; RoboCop has a similar dynamic with various OCP execs.
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Nov 20, 2016 15:59
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Xenomrph posted:None of that really changes what I said. Independent of Burke's own self interest or the existence of insurance claims or whatever, the wholesale destruction of expensive Company property is not in the Company's self-interest - this is demonstrated in Ripley's interrogation where they straight up call Ripley out for the destruction of an expensive ship and her cargo. You are getting mixed up because we are speaking in terms of storytelling, characterization and ideological critique. Ripley begins the Aliens film trying to convince the company that the destruction of the ship was justified because of the magic world-threatening alien. ("If just one of those things gets to earth..." Huh?) And in the end, she is not even fired, but demoted - and only because there was insufficient evidence to fully back her claim. Like, they only took away her driver's license. If she had more proof, she may not have even lost that. The point here is that Ripley is not acting against the company. She is upset at the stodgy conservative 'suits' who now refuse to check up on this colony and ensure the safety of the workers. We can imagine a 'good liberal Burke' who, instead of sending the colonists to die, warns the colonists to stay away from the derelict site. That's what Ripley wants: to fight greed and corruption so that the company can make its profits smoothly, without being vile. It's the suits who messed up. Liberal Ripley has the answers. Ripley's recommendation to nuke the site comes immediately after they find the facility infested with what they believe are doomsday parasites that may be immune to nerve gas. The military has already decided that the site is dead. So we have fuckin' Goofus and Gallant storytelling: Gallant Ripley listens to the authorities and offers advice. Goofus Burke disobeys and complains. Which one is the good employee?? It bears repeating: the company's sole motivation is profit. The accidental loss of a facility does not threaten the overall profitability of the company. Burke is threatened. The aliens are threatened. The company is not threatened.
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Nov 20, 2016 18:05
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This is maybe a dumb question but could a single xenomorph do significant damage if it did get to earth? I guess the danger would come from people cloning / reverse engineering / weaponising the alien and then losing control of whatever they create but a single xeno can't multiply, can it? Or, alternatively, could a single facehugger start a hive?
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Nov 20, 2016 19:09
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Tenterhooks posted:This is maybe a dumb question but could a single xenomorph do significant damage if it did get to earth? I guess the danger would come from people cloning / reverse engineering / weaponising the alien and then losing control of whatever they create but a single xeno can't multiply, can it? Or, alternatively, could a single facehugger start a hive?
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Nov 20, 2016 19:38
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Aha, I didn't know egg-morphing was a thing. Yeah, that'd be a bad.
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Nov 20, 2016 23:21
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Egg Morphing is so drat cool and scary.
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Nov 21, 2016 00:06
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Tenterhooks posted:Aha, I didn't know egg-morphing was a thing. Yeah, that'd be a bad. It's from the 'Alien' directors' cut, it's worth checking out if you haven't seen it. It was originally meant to serve two narrative purposes in 'Alien': 1. It completes the Alien's lifecycle and explains where new eggs come from. 2. It ties back into a line Lambert has when they're exploring the Derelict: "where's the crew?" They're all the eggs Kane finds.  Cameron ditched it for 'Aliens' because he wanted to play up the motherhood themes and also give Ripley a "final boss" to fight at the end.
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Nov 21, 2016 02:31
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It's also another great piece of body horror in its own right.
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Nov 21, 2016 12:14
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And yet it was taken out of the theatrical cut. You see the same kind of tendency to 'tone it down' in Prometheus, wrt the zombie wolf guy scene. Pacing trumps spectacle. But let's take it as a *real* aspect of the Alien in the movie world, really just consider it for a second.. Does it really make sense that the eggmorphed crew of the derelict were transformed into the geometrically arranged, clinically stored eggs in the ship's hold? The Alien's nest on the Nostromo is a gooey, haphazard flesh dungeon. It looks like something out of Alien:Resurrection. I think the implication of the eggs on the Derelict is that they were the cargo. It's a chilling and provocative scene, and it adds a great deal of horrific mystery to the ship's purpose. Obviously something went wrong, and the crew (if there ever was more than the one jockey) is gone, but I don't think it follows that the thousands on eggs in that scene were formerly the crew of the ship. I saw Alien when I was a kid. I remember watching an edited-for-TV version sometime in there early 90's. That scene of Kaine descending into the cavern of eggs, and really the whole derelict sequence, was probably the most potent nightmare fuel in the entire movie for me at the time. It's scary in a really imaginatively provocative way. But it turns out the derelict crew were just a bunch of big pro wrestlers with weird noses.
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Nov 21, 2016 18:13
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Egg morphing is dope, but it was poorly placed in the film.
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Nov 21, 2016 18:46
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Yeah, I don't buy that all the eggs in the derelict used to be the crew. For one, there's like hundreds (if not thousands) of them, and second, the Space Jockey is like 3 times the size of a human. A Space Jockey egg would be enormous.
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Nov 21, 2016 19:45
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There's also like a laser grid kinda thing that's been laid over the whole area, as if they were cargo and the crew wanted to know if anything messed with them or if they hatched. The lasers could also be connected to the eggs somehow, programmed to hatch if anyone tripped them. If the eggs were actually the crew I don't think they'd be lined up under the laser grid in such an orderly fashion.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:03
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I wonder what's worse, getting facehugged and chestbursted, or getting eggmorphed. E: chestburst?
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Nov 21, 2016 20:14
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SMERSH Mouth posted:I wonder what's worse, getting facehugged and chestbursted, or getting eggmorphed. Well you can't get facehugged without getting chestbursted, so its not like you get a choice there, its a package deal. Eggmorphing could be the worst of them though, who knows. For all we know the person is conscious for most of the process as their body is slowly dissolved and repurposed into egg parts.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:17
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Dallas was alive during it
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Nov 21, 2016 20:19
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CelticPredator posted:Dallas was alive during it Oh yea that's right, he says "kill me" or something along those lines right? There you go, I can't imagine a quick chestbursting is any worse than that. Its like ripping off a bandaid, it hurts for a few seconds and then its over.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:20
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Yeah those eggs might as well have been containerized and neatly labeled with shipping manifests and warnings, they were very clearly cargo. Also I enjoy SMG's ideological takes on the franchise. One could easily take away that the ideological message of the film is that capitalism is very good so long as everyone follows the rules, there are no flaws or failures in capitalism, simply flawed people that fail it. Ripley fights to protect smoothly functioning capitalism from external and internal threats.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:21
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Alien 2: On Earth (2016) D: Milo Yiannopoulos In this re-imagining of the Italian exploitation horror film, alien xenomorphs crash land in central Europe. The government forces every family to host a facehugger, as socialized medicine allows for xenomorph embryos to be surgically removed without killing their human hosts. Despite this drastic attempt at tolerance and inclusion, humans are routinely mutilated and eaten by the xenomorphs, and it falls on one cis white male to expose this fact to the world, even as the secretive forces of globalism seek to undermine him at every turn.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:32
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah those eggs might as well have been containerized and neatly labeled with shipping manifests and warnings, they were very clearly cargo.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:39
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SMERSH Mouth posted:
 Although even if the eggs in the hold aren't the Derelict's crew, the implication behind the egg morphing is still that all those eggs were morphed from something, and that's pretty hosed. The egg morphing/Derelict crew idea isn't something I'm inferring out of thin air, that actually was the original intent in an earlier draft of the movie. It was conveyed a bit differently, though: originally there was the crashed Derelict ship and a separate "egg silo" sorta-pyramid structure that had all the eggs, with a bunch of hieroglyphs depicting the Alien life cycle. The Nostromo crew would find the Derelict, find the Space Jockey, and then move on to find the egg silo, climb the side, and Kane would get lowered down an opening at the top, find a bunch of eggs, and get facehugged. It was ambiguous whether the Derelict and the egg silo were related, or if the Derelict was just another ill-fated explorer like the Nostromo.  The hieroglyphics were a little on-the-nose, though.  This got condensed into the Derelict and the egg silo being the same thing, although Giger's egg silo design got recycled in the Aliens comics (and the structure in 'Prometheus' is a pretty strong nod to it, as well). That's not the only deleted/changed element that still has some holdovers in the finished film: originally the adult Alien's lifespan was meant to be very short, and it was supposed to be conveyed visually by having it start out nearly translucent and gradually get darker and more opaque as the movie goes on, until it's black at the end of the movie. Having a guy in a translucent suit, or even an animatronic puppet, really wouldn't work so it got abandoned, but some remnants of the short lifespan idea still remain: the Alien's dome is more opaque at the end of the movie, and the Alien is very lethargic and less aggressive when it's hiding in the Narcissus. The Alien was waiting to die until Ripley provoked it. CelticPredator posted:Egg morphing is dope, but it was poorly placed in the film. david_a posted:Yeah, I don't buy that all the eggs in the derelict used to be the crew. For one, there's like hundreds (if not thousands) of them, and second, the Space Jockey is like 3 times the size of a human. A Space Jockey egg would be enormous. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Nov 21, 2016 |
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Nov 21, 2016 20:45
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Isn't it technically possible that there was a Queen somewhere in the ship that the Nostromo crew just never encounter? Or even the same one that Ripley eventually fights in Aliens? How long does a Queen typically live?
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Nov 21, 2016 20:55
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It was cargo, yo
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Nov 21, 2016 20:55
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Basebf555 posted:Isn't it technically possible that there was a Queen somewhere in the ship that the Nostromo crew just never encounter? Or even the same one that Ripley eventually fights in Aliens? How long does a Queen typically live? Fun fact: either the cargo hold is underground compared to where Dallas and co enter the Derelict (and the Derelict isn't a flat U-shape like the Juggernaut is in Prometheus) or the Derelict is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. I kinda like the latter, having wacky impossible geometry is very Lovecraftian. As for Queen life spans, based on the movies alone, we don't really know. Based on the first AvP movie, it's at least 100 years. Based on the EU, it's "centuries, but not indefinitely".
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Nov 21, 2016 21:08
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The Queen in AvP is cryogenically frozen so they must have some lifespan or why even bother?
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Nov 21, 2016 21:10
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I don't think it was cryogenicly frozen. I think it just gets cold during the 100 years inbetween.
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Nov 21, 2016 21:33
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To stop her egg generation id guess.
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Nov 21, 2016 21:47
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Basebf555 posted:Well you can't get facehugged without getting chestbursted, so its not like you get a choice there, its a package deal. When a caterpillar cocoons itself and metamorphoses into a butterfly, the entirety of the caterpillar dissolves into a goo that by no standard could be considered an organism, which then reconstitutes itself into the butterfly that will break free. Studies have shown that caterpillars can form memories that carry over to the butterfly phase of their lifecycle, despite essentially not existing in between. Would you, the facehugger, know that you were once a human? Would you have memories of your life before the egg?
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Nov 21, 2016 22:23
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