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Laserface posted:I am at the crew premiere in Sydney about to watch the film. Happy to answer questions after I've watched it Can you summarize the third act and the ending? A handful of reviews I've read have hinted at it being a letdown, so I'm curious.
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May 7, 2017 15:58
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People don't like how the Alien is made, it seems. I loving love it though.
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May 7, 2017 15:59
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The moment one review was oddly specific about the number of frozen colonists and human embryos on the Covenant, it made me go "Oh god, they're going to say that they get turned into the eggs Kane finds in the first film, aren't they?" Yay or nay?
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May 7, 2017 16:30
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CelticPredator posted:People don't like how the Alien is made, it seems. The io9 review spent like 900 words complaining about that and little else. Seems like the negative reviews are boiling down to, "It wasn't exactly what I was expecting in my head, therefore it sucks" -- similar to people still complaining about Newt and Hicks in Alien3, or people whining about how Prometheus wasn't the Alien 0.5 they imagined. So much missing the forest for the trees. Just another reminder of why I shouldn't read io9.
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May 7, 2017 17:36
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Timby posted:The io9 review spent like 900 words complaining about that and little else. Seems like the negative reviews are boiling down to, "It wasn't exactly what I was expecting in my head, therefore it sucks" -- similar to people still complaining about Newt and Hicks in Alien3, or people whining about how Prometheus wasn't the Alien 0.5 they imagined. So much missing the forest for the trees. I haven't read the i09 review in question, but your complaint seems like it doesn't allow for any negative reviews whatsoever. If people didn't like the way Covenant's (or Prometheus's) plot played out, is that not a valid complaint?
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May 7, 2017 17:41
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Set 18 years before Alien. How long is supposed to have passed between Prometheus and Covenant?
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May 7, 2017 17:49
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In 99.999999% of game reviews (like with movies) there's no line between "Game rubbed me the wrong way because it does x, y, and z, which didn't really grab me or hold my interest, " and "Game does x, y, and z differently from how they're done in my favorite game, the game's creators are obviously incompetent and frankly I can't understand why such an objectively awful game was ever made." There are things that are a little unpolished about the game, it's a little too padded, and it has a lot going on in it worth discussing, but a lot of the negative complaints about it boiled down to "the Alien....is durable and wants to kill me? Awful game design."
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May 7, 2017 17:52
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Xenomrph posted:I haven't read the i09 review in question, but your complaint seems like it doesn't allow for any negative reviews whatsoever. If people didn't like the way Covenant's (or Prometheus's) plot played out, is that not a valid complaint? There's a difference between "It sucks because the acting is stiff / the script is dull / the pacing is off" and "It sucks because it didn't exactly fit my preconceived notions going in." Like, I don't hate Les Miserables because it makes significant changes from the stage version, I hate it because Russell Crowe is a terrible singer and Tom Hooper is an unbelievably awful director.
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May 7, 2017 17:53
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Isolation was a good 3 hour game stretched to 10 hours.
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May 7, 2017 17:56
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Timby posted:The io9 review spent like 900 words complaining about that and little else. Seems like the negative reviews are boiling down to, "It wasn't exactly what I was expecting in my head, therefore it sucks" -- similar to people still complaining about Newt and Hicks in Alien3, or people whining about how Prometheus wasn't the Alien 0.5 they imagined. So much missing the forest for the trees. I don't think the io9 review was as upset with how the Aliens are made as much as it was concerned with how the ending of Covenant does (or doesn't) create a plausible through line for linking the prequels to Alien (1979). There's definitely a bit of frustration over the flawed execution of Covenant and how it does or doesn't address fan expectations, but otherwise it seemed like an evenhanded review to me. MrMojok posted:Set 18 years before Alien. How long is supposed to have passed between Prometheus and Covenant? 10 years.
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May 7, 2017 17:57
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Alien to Aliens, Aliens to Alien 3, Alien 3 to Alien: Resurrection, a sequences renowned for plausible through lines from film to film. It will be interesting to see how it connects though. I'm actually going into this pretty blind as I only watched the very first teaser and the short promo movie stuff so all I know is some time's passed, David is in charge of some planet and a new crew of people try to find what happened to the Prometheus and get Alien'd. There's a decent amount of time prior to Alien though. Prometheus takes place from 2089 to 2093 (almost all of that time is spent travelling in hyper sleep, everything from when they actually reach the Engineer installation on is in 2093). Covenant is supposed to be ten years later, so 2103. Alien takes place in 2122. That seems like more than enough time for the company to figure out an idea of what to look for and get the sudden ping of "oh poo poo there's a chance more of these ships/whatever might be on this planet this space truck is plotted to pass by but no way in hell anyone's going to officially approve another clustfuck exploratory mission, replace their doc with an android and make sure they check it out, just get one on the ship and have the droid send it back who gives a gently caress."
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May 7, 2017 18:25
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UmOk posted:Isolation was a good 3 hour game stretched to 10 hours. That and the alien AI really is quite primitive. It's eventually pretty obvious how the alien is tethered to you no matter how well you sneak around. Sometimes the alien is really dumb when it shouldn't be, too. For example, in some areas there are tables and benches that are really short, like below waist height. But it doesn't matter, because you can crouch behind them and the alien won't know you're there, even though it towers over the table/bench and should be able to clearly see you. All you have to do is crouchwalk and keep the table/bench between you and the alien. Game really could have used a little more polish to cut the length a bit and redesign dumb parts like that.
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May 7, 2017 18:28
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It does not surprise me that i09 et al would be upset that Ridley Scott isn't concerned with canon.
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May 7, 2017 18:42
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Neo Rasa posted:Alien to Aliens, Aliens to Alien 3, Alien 3 to Alien: Resurrection, a sequences renowned for plausible through lines from film to film. Yeah, I forget who it was, but someone earlier said that it's like Ripley's relationship with the Alien is like Van Helsing and Dracula, which is so incredibly true. Such a closed universe, which is why I love what Scott did with Prometheus. And, yeah, seriously -- Alien is pure body horror, Aliens is sci-fi action, Alien3 is Gothic drama / horror and Resurrection is ... a bizarre first draft of Firefly that happens to feature a penis monster. Black Bones posted:It does not surprise me that i09 et al would be upset that Ridley Scott isn't concerned with canon. Just wait until Annalee Newitz from Ars Technica (she actually founded io9) posts her review. She slips in a subtle bash on Prometheus into almost every single movie review she writes, so this will be her opportunity to rip Scott to shreds and then some.
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May 7, 2017 18:42
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Hell hath no fury like a entitled nerd scorned
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May 7, 2017 18:48
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Timby posted:Yeah, I forget who it was, but someone earlier said that it's like Ripley's relationship with the Alien is like Van Helsing and Dracula, which is so incredibly true. Such a closed universe, which is why I love what Scott did with Prometheus. For real after Ressurection I was expecting Alien 5 if it happened to just be like "Hello Ripley, ah yes I just moved into the apartment below you. Oh, my name? Why of course, it's Neil A. Morph" There was some stuff I didn't like about Prometheus but I liked it a lot overall and was really stunned at how much people hated it. Folks really wanted auto-turrets shooting aliens for 90 minutes straight or something. Queering Wheel posted:That and the alien AI really is quite primitive. It's eventually pretty obvious how the alien is tethered to you no matter how well you sneak around. Sometimes the alien is really dumb when it shouldn't be, too. For example, in some areas there are tables and benches that are really short, like below waist height. But it doesn't matter, because you can crouch behind them and the alien won't know you're there, even though it towers over the table/bench and should be able to clearly see you. All you have to do is crouchwalk and keep the table/bench between you and the alien. Game really could have used a little more polish to cut the length a bit and redesign dumb parts like that. You're never going to see a AAA game do this correctly because it would be a huge pain in the rear end for the player to sneak around the game world unless the action is shown from overhead like an older Metal Gear/Metal Gear Solid game. Even in mega budget stuff like the Mass Effect games or Metal Gear Solid V there's tons of points where a an enemy is looking over/under cover and your character basically has eye contact with them and they don't notice you or cannot hit you, it's immersion breaking at times but the alternative is not fun. I found the tethering complaints interesting though because it's how tons of games accomplish something following the player character, but somehow in this one particular instance it's like a huge mark against the game. I'm not saying it necessarily isn't or that it shouldn't be a complaint people can have but I was surprised at how much of a mark that's been against how the game is built. I feel the game industry has this problem where it buys into its own hype and a lot of the common back-end stuff and little tricks about how they get these worlds to work and be interacted with aren't really written about as often as they could be like all the rad special effects specials and making of materials we get about movies. Like there was this article a few weeks ago about how Horizon: Zero Dawn is able to keep so much stuff loading up smoothly and make the world feel seamless. Nothing in it was revolutionary, it's a set of tricks and concepts that have been common even on the N64 and plenty of older PC games, but it's a good read because it puts into perspective some of the stuff going on under the hood stuff of a huge budget game. The reaction to the article in general from like, regular people who play games and are not super obsessive gamers or devs was like "Oh hey that's really cool, video games are cool." But there was this, like, bizarre backlash against that from a lot of programmers in the industry. Like this weird attitude of how dare someone write about some programming trickery that isn't bleeding edge just invented this morning stuff, I mean EVERYONE knows about THAT come on, how can you waste the community's time. AI in games is quite primitive not just in Alien: Isolation but in every video game ever made. People use AI as a shorthand for how convincingly the AI behaves in the game world, but there's no magic "we spent _ amount of time on AI we get _ level of quality behavior" threshold. The AI being good or bad is a combination of a lot of different elements, the most important of which is actually how the geometry of the game world itself and how much information they convey to the player regarding their actions. Two good examples are the Marines in Half-Life and the enemies in F.E.A.R. Both are lauded for being incredibly intelligent and a joy to fight because of their incredible AI. And on the player end of the game it's easy to see why, both games are awesome and fighting these dudes are among the high points of each. But like with Alien: Isolation the AI is very primitive for both. They have two things in common that make them amazing: 1) The areas where you encounter them are particularly crafted around how what behaviors they could implement properly work. 2) They never shut up. The first part is self-explanatory, each point where you encounter them is specially designed around that particular set of enemies and what they can do while still making the level look like an organic place and not a "here's a spot where you encounter enemies" place. The level design is the most important part of creating "good AI." The second part is simpler, but a little more interesting because it's where, to me, the real magic of the game's level design, enemy behavior and everything comes together. The enemies aren't necessarily behaving more intelligently than any other game enemy, rather, they're loudly announcing what they're doing every three seconds. They're telling the player repeatedly that they're thinking tactically, and that creates that mental impression in the heat of playing the game that you're fighting enemies that are a cut above. I love that. In F.E.A.R. (Rage is amazing with this too, shame about everything else in the game) they go so far as to have unique "OH SHIIIII-" reactions if a grenade is about to explode near one. If the "AI" met this definition of "advanced" we like to think games could do now, the enemy would just move away, but because it's vocal about what's going on around it, it feels just as advanced. With Alien: Isolation, they had their work cut out for them. You can't have the Alien just be out in the open the whole time. But fortunately in the films Aliens are all about slinking through ventilation shafts. That's what needed some more work, where those shafts the Alien can emerge from are active/inactive vs. how far the player is from them. They also gave themselves the challenge of making the Alien unkillable, but also aggressive enough in hunting you down that you have to actively keep moving - they realized it would be lame if you could just break line of site and duck into a closet at the drop of a hat. I honestly expected the game to suck horribly because of having to work with something like that but ended up being blown away by how well it does work when everything clicks. Anyway I feel like they sort of shoot themselves in the foot when they make these really ambitious games when there's often not a lot of coverage of their inner workings and just hype. You only really see an in-depth technical breakdown of the absolute biggest and most iconic stuff like some Legend of Zelda games or Metal Gear Solid 1. This ended up being really long, sorry. 
Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 19:29 on May 7, 2017 |
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May 7, 2017 19:06
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Watched the original Alien last night for the first time in a good ten years or so. On the one hand, holds up so well I had nightmares about it. On the other hand, I discovered a good cure for those nightmares is remembering that Alien is in Mortal Kombat X and therefore you can enjoy xenomorphs getting what's coming to them in a variety of gory and amusing ways. Its little screeches are almost cute.
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May 7, 2017 20:25
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Rap Record Hoarder posted:Can you summarize the third act and the ending? A handful of reviews I've read have hinted at it being a letdown, so I'm curious. Morning after memory but here goes SPOILERS FOR THE END OF THE FILM DONT HOVER OVER THIS Daniels and Tennessee and David masquerading as Walter and another guy who was half face hugged get back aboard the covenant. There is an alarm raised by Mother who finds an unidentified life form on the ship - half face hugged guy is dead in the med bay. With the help of DaWalt, Daniels and Tennessee go to alert the remaining crew who are having some me-time in the shower together and don't hear the alarm and are promptly killed by the alien. Daniels and Tennessee find them dead. They are working with DaWalt who is on the control deck to track it, who is playing the game with them but not outright stacking the deck against them. They decide to lure it to the cargo hold and trap it in a truck cabin and then blast it into space. They mostly succeed however the restraints on the truck get jammed and the alien escapes out and is making its way towards Daniels. Tennessee frees up the restraint by releasing a second truck from behind the first which goes on to snooker the first one along. Daniels faces off with the alien and coaxes it to pounce right as she dives out of the way of a large dozer-lifter thing and the alien is impaled and falls out to space. With the alien dead Daniels and Tennessee go to cryosleep. As DaWalt is putting Daniels to sleep she asks if he will help her build the log cabin that James Francos character had promised her. He gives her a look like "err what" and she then realises it is not Walter but David, the evil robot. It's too late and she is put to sleep. David vomits up two face hugger embryos and stores them in cryogenic chambers to the tune of the Wagner piece from the start of the film - entrance of the gods into Valhalla.
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May 7, 2017 22:10
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Is Noomi Rapace in the film at all or just that prequel they released on YouTube?
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May 7, 2017 22:34
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Biomute posted:Which one of them? I like them both. i was thinking of butcher bay - i didn't even realise there was another until just now !
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May 7, 2017 22:48
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Laserface posted:Morning after memory but here goes LOL that is so ridiculous that it's almost genius. I might have to go see this in the theater now. Thanks for the synopsis. Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 22:52 on May 7, 2017 |
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May 7, 2017 22:49
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Neo Rasa posted:Even in mega budget stuff like the Mass Effect games or Metal Gear Solid V there's tons of points where a an enemy is looking over/under cover and your character basically has eye contact with them and they don't notice you or cannot hit you, it's immersion breaking at times but the alternative is not fun. Just as in the movies, these kinds of horror experiences live and die on selling you on the monster. Keeping you immersed is the name of the game. A guard acting funny in Metal Gear Solid 5 is not going to ruin that game, while the xenomorph bumping into a table and starting to spin in place ruins the main draw of the game. Likewise, tethering is an issue because when the player realizes it (mostly thanks to it being a constant over a way too long game) it's them looking behind the curtain, and once you do your immersion is lost, probably forever. As for your musings on primitive AI using talking and stuff to seem more advanced, I kind of agree, and it is interesting to note just how much loving noise the Alien makes in Alien Isolation. Whereas in the Alien movie it was this stealthy killer, here it is constantly stomping around as it moves in the open, or making a racket in the vents (sounds also used to give the impression of the Alien skulking around the ship when in fact it has not been spawned yet). Half of the time you've also got scary music and your motion detector going off. Aside from a few scripted sequences where you watch other people die it never truly ambushes anyone. The reason for all of this is that few people would enjoy playing the game if they just died, and if the core gameplay is going to be you avoiding an enemy you cannot outrun you better get plenty of warning to hide. The closest we get to an exception to this rule is when they place the alien in an above vent, but these vents are usually well lit with obvious slime dripping out of them so their function is more to give the player something to skirt around. I think most people are coming to the realization that this kind of first person avoidance based gameplay is not really all that fun once the novelty is gone, and most of that went away with Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Trying to fix this problem with more advanced AI is sort of a double edged sword: You don't want your monster to be acting silly or breaking the immersion of your player, but if it is too good at actually catching the players the game gets too frustrating. One of the latest installment in this genre, SOMA, is sort of torn between two other approaches at tackling this issue: Adding more variety in the form of multiple different enemy types with different behaviors and simply doing away with the avoidance part of it and have the monsters / horror be set pieces that you come across, but don't actually interact with. The Frictional Games blog has some great discussion about this kind of thing, as do their interviews. quote:When showcasing Amnesia we could just show how you blocked a door with some rubble and hid in a closet and the game's core experience was neatly summarized. But with SOMA things were way harder. First of all, weaponless horror games are no longer anything special and by no means a stand-out feature. In fact, the "chased by monsters"-gameplay was not even a core part of the SOMA-experience. The whole idea with the game was to give the player a first person perspective on a variety of disturbing philosophical musings. Also, in an interview they did on monster AI design: quote:If it’s too mechanical, it’s a very uninteresting, systemic feel. And if it’s too random, monster interactions will be a haze that the player can’t make sense of. Doing that turned out to be really, really hard! Because the balance you have to have is that if you go to far on the mechanical side, they become gameplay objects. And that’s no fun anymore, because the fear of the unknown is something you want to draw a lot of your horror from. On the other hand, if monster behavior becomes too unknown, then the player has no idea what’s happening with the monsters, and they become an annoyance. I could not find it at the moment, but I believe they've said something to the effect of wishing they had the courage to drop the monster encounters altogether for SOMA. Personally, I think that would have worked really well for that game, and could work well for a bunch of other games too. A solid narrative Alien experience, with a focus on the body horror aspect, and not so much about easily outsmarting what should be a perfect organism using a folding chair would be more my bag at least. Alternatively, I think doing an Aliens game along the lines of Resident Evil 7, with a mix of avoidance-based and combat/resource management-based gameplay could be an interesting way to keep players who do not like walking simulators engaged as well. thotsky fucked around with this message at 23:07 on May 7, 2017 |
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May 7, 2017 22:51
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Seems like a cool ending to me /shrug
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May 7, 2017 22:55
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alf_pogs posted:i was thinking of butcher bay - i didn't even realise there was another until just now ! Assault on Dark Athena is really good. While the combat is pretty dated now it's got a cool story focusing on mercs, raiders, the borg and other grimdark sci-fi stuff, really solid stealth gameplay and great voice acting. It's basically just a better take on The Chronicles of Riddick movie without necromongers. It also includes an HD remake of Butcher Bay.
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May 7, 2017 22:56
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Laserface posted:Morning after memory but here goes Assuming this is real, holy poo poo. 
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May 7, 2017 22:57
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Also sounds like a great setup for the treequal
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May 7, 2017 23:01
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I want a soma movie
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May 7, 2017 23:00
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Baronjutter posted:I want a soma movie i actually enjoyed all the marketing videos and short story stuff they did beforehand way more than the game itself in the end
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May 7, 2017 23:05
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Queering Wheel posted:For example, in some areas there are tables and benches that are really short, like below waist height. But it doesn't matter, because you can crouch behind them and the alien won't know you're there, even though it towers over the table/bench and should be able to clearly see you. The alien doesn't have eyes.
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May 7, 2017 23:25
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Crocodile brain like lion brain
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May 7, 2017 23:24
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Im on a computer now so if there is interest I can spoil the whole thing. I was a tiny bit obtuse in the previous post because I was on my phone. I thought it was a good film with plenty of tension and suspense but you can see the twist from a mile away and I am usually pretty terrible at that kind of thing. I just didnt think it made sense to title it as an Alien film since its really more about other sci-fi topics.
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May 8, 2017 00:13
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Yeah let's have it, do a full synopsis if you've got the time.
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May 8, 2017 00:32
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Spoil that poo poo por favor.
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May 8, 2017 00:32
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Alien Isolation was great, play through it with an Invisibility cheat.
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May 8, 2017 01:31
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I'm the type of person who liked my movies spoiled in detail before I see them to determine if I even will see them in theatre or not, so please yes.
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May 8, 2017 01:36
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This is the entirety of the film spoiled, do not mouse over any of this text! film opens with Weyland talking to David at the point of his creation. They discuss Davids reason for existing, which is to help Weyland find the creators of mankind - Consciousness cannot be a happy accident, Weyland is convinced. Weyland asks him to sit at the piano and play a song, of which David chooses the entry of the gods into valhalla. cut to Walter doing a head count on the Covenant of all crew and colonists. he extends the solar sails on the ship to recharge, when there is a random solar event that damages the Covenant and causes some crew (Franco) to die and they lose some colonists and embryos. at this point they are 7 years away from their destination planet for terra-forming. Upset that they lost Franco who was the captain, the 2IC takes lead. He is a man of Faith for some reason. Daniels was married to Franco and she is really sad that he died. They dont have a sneaky funeral for him, directly disobeying the orders of the new captain, and this annoys him a bit as their primary order was to repair the damage to the ship. they are repairing the ship. Tennessee and some other guy are floating out in space doing the repairs to the solar sails, giving you the impression that theres about to be another solar event or similar because every space movie has one of these moments. what actually happens is that Tennessee's suit intercepts a weird transmission and it goes all fucky for a few seconds, then he comes back aboard the ship and they analyse it. the message is a scrambled humming of the song "country road" by John denver. they trace the origin of the signal to a planet, that happens to be smack-bang in the middle of the habitable zone of its solar system, has water and oxygen and its only two weeks away instead of 7 years. the crew are all really scared of going back into cryosleep because james franco died due to a totally random and unavoidable event, so going to this mystery planet that is sending signals containing earth-music seems like a great alternative than their actual mission. the captain says thats the new plan, and Daniels disagrees with him and he makes official note of that but they go anyway. They get in the lander vehicle and descend through a plasma? proton? storm and land on the planet. the storm is making comms with the ship difficult, but they persist. they set out to find the source of the signal, which is up in a mountain. One of the crew stays at a particular point to get some samples and another crew member helps them. (at this point I had drank 2 beers and half a cinema-sized Coke so I had to piss and missed maybe 2 minutes) the help guy is having a sneaky cigarette and blows smoke onto something which in turn forms a tiny little particle jelly fish thing thats too small to actually see and flies up into his ear, and then gets into his skin and vaguely looks like the dumb poo poo that happened in Prometheus. he carries on. the rest of the team are walking up an incline and find the source of the signal to be the Space Jockey Ship from Prometheus. They enter it. One of the team finds a small growth on the ground and prods it - it produces more of the black particle jelly fish poo poo which then goes up his nose. The team pushes on and finds the control deck of the ship. they see the hologram playback of Elizabeth Shaw singing country road. cut back to sample collectors. infected guy is starting to look pretty sick, and is falling behind. he pushes on claiming his fine when obviously he is not fine and should probably say something. they continue on and he gets worse, falling over, coughing up blood. she sounds the alarm that he is ill and are headed back to the lander. the other crew at the space jockey ship decided to come back too, and their sick guy is also starting to hinder their speed. they get helper guy back to the ship. Tennesees Wife is the lander captain, and she is freaking right out that this guy is spewing blood everywhere in the med bay. they cut his shirt open and his spine shoots blood over Tennesees wife, and she freaks out and locks them both in the med bay. Girl in the medbay with sick guy freaks the gently caress out. sick guy explodes a small white xeno out of his spine. the girl with him grabs a knife and brandishes it at the xeno, and the xeno attacks her and screeches a lot. she then slips over on the giant puddle of red blood on the white floor that she apparently didnt see and hurts herself. Tennesee's wife is watching through the window and runs to get a shotgun. she returns and decides opening the door is the best idea in this situation so she opens the door. she also slips on the big red puddle of blood on the white floor, and attempts to shoot the xeno but is a terrible shot for tension purposes. I think she might have shot the girl but i think the alien just killed her I cant remember. Ts wife is on the radio back to the Covenant but the transmission is spotty due to the storm. Anyway Now the little white xeno is on the loose in the lander and T's wife starts really losing her composure. she runs to the loading bay and its chasing her. she falls and supremely fucks up her ankle that she already hosed on the slipping in blood she definitely should have been able to see. she keeps shooting the shotgun inside the lander, eventually taking aim at the xeno while it is sitting on some O2 tanks and then the ship explodes right in front of the crew as they are returning with their also-infected guy. the xeno escapes the fire and runs into the field of wheat and disappears. infected guy 2 now spews blood and gets his spine exploded and they have a brief encounter with the second xeno and it also runs off into the cover of the grass. night has fallen now and they are being attacked by the xenos like Raptors in the field in Jurassic Park. Walter sacrifices his hand to save Daniels life, they kill one of the xenos and the other continues to attack. Suddenly a burst of bright hot light , and then another. its a cloaked figure, he shot the flares which scared the xeno away. he tells them to follow him to safety and they go with him. he takes them to a structure that is sort of like a Colosseum. there is a lot of charred bodies around that look like they died during a volcano or something. they get to the cloaked guys home and he reveals himself to be David. he explains that after the events of prometheus, they set course for the home planet of the ship. When they arrived, they accidentally triggered the payload on the ship which killed all living animals on the planet. the Captain orders Walter to talk bot-to-bot with David to find out more information. Walter finds David playing a flute he made. he teaches Walter to play the flute, and is somewhat surprised at the same-same but different nature of Walter. Walter explains that people found Davids version of Synthetics too creepy with their ability to 'create'. see, Walter cant write his own flute song, he needs help from David to do so. cut to a heavy handed scene of the white xeno climbing into the structure they are in because they obviously forgot that they should explain this and it was done in post production. Moving along, one of the crew decides she needs to 'freshen up' so she wanders off alone. she is washing her wounds and the xeno has found her and she tries to kill it but it bites her neck out. Captain goes looking for her since shes been gone so long. David finds the xeno eating her remains and it approaches him but does not harm him. he stands there directly in front of it as if he has trained it. Captain approaches from behind and puts his laser sight on the heart of the alien. he orders David to move, and he doesnt. he mentions how you can train a horse by breathing on his nose, and Captain opens fire and kills the xeno. David is mad that he killed the xeno. Captain orders David to explain all this poo poo so he takes him to his study where he has a bunch of bugs and things he has collected from the planet. Hes explaining how he recorded all the species and so on, and how he started cultivating xenos using the left over pathogen weapon'beauties' from the space jockey ship. he then leads david down stairs into a cave to show him the perfect organism, which is the classic xeno egg. it opens and captain looks over it and gets face hugged. In the mean time the storm is still causing all kinds of havoc with comms despite the team being at the highest point. The crew is perplexed that the captain has been gone for more than 10 minutes and goes to look for him. Captain comes to, no face hugger in sight, stirred by David lobbing pebbles at him. he quickly chest bursts and is dead. the xeno escapes. Walter and Daniels, at seperate times, find a bunch of evidence to suggest that David purposefully fired the pathogen weapons on the planet and killed elizabeth for his own experiments with the xeno pathogen. David stabs Walter in the neck with his flute and he shuts down. Daniels finds a bunch of drawings and other stuff to prove this theory and then David attempts to kill her. Walter returns to save the day as 'there has been some other improvements since your time David' and he is self healing (except for his lopped off hand, which is still missing). Worried about his wifes safety after the scrambled comms, T decides to find out how close they can get to the storm before it will affect the ship. he disregards his crews fears and takes the ship to 80km above the storm, which is the threshold of ship integrity. they establish spotty comms but decide an evac is needed. T learns his wife is dead and is saddened. They hatch a plan to use the cargo ship as a rescue vehicle, but they have to drop to 40km above the storm to do so. They do so, and T descends in the cargo ship to rescue them. A bot-vs-bot fight breaks out and its basically all the dumb throwing moves from Terminator 3 for like 3 minutes. It is not clear which one survives (but its also incredibly obvious which one survives). David catches up with them. The crew is attempting to escape the structure. Two of the crew find dead Captain and one nearly gets face hugged, the other face hugger escaping and ambushing the other guy. they manage to kill the face hugger and get it off, burning some of his face in the process. The team and Dawalt start making their way to the pickup point. The xeno is chasing them also. T swings the cargo ship around and they get on board. the xeno is on board also, so Daniels goes out to try and get it off the ship. she tethers herself to the ship and attempts to kill it but due to the ship moving around, falls off and is dangling. the xeno is trying to kill her. She asks T to release the crane so she can capture the xeno in the jaws and kill it. he warns it it will throw the ship off balance but she insists and so he does. they grapple the xeno in the crane and shoot it to death, its acid blood melting the crane. they get her back inside the ship and a breath of relief is breathed. back on the covenant, they need to shut down mother til 8 bells to let the system recover due to the damage incurred from the proximity to the storm. she thanks DaWalt for saving her life again and assist him in patching up the scars on his face that he shouldnt have to patch up because he is self healing remember? They put the burned face guy in the med bay. they all have a nap. at 4 bells (im assuming this was earlier than 8 bells) Mother wakes up and alerts the crew to the unidentified life form in the med bay. They go to investigate. half face hugged burned guy is dead in the med bay. With the help of DaWalt, Daniels and Tennessee go to alert the remaining crew who are having some me-time in the shower together and don't hear the alarm and are promptly killed by the alien. Daniels and Tennessee find them dead. They are working with DaWalt who is on the control deck to track it, who is playing the game with them but not outright stacking the deck against them. They decide to lure it to the cargo hold and trap it in a truck cabin and then blast it into space. They mostly succeed however the restraints on the truck get jammed and the alien escapes out and is making its way towards Daniels. Tennessee frees up the restraint by releasing a second truck from behind the first which goes on to snooker the first one along. Daniels faces off with the alien and coaxes it to pounce right as she dives out of the way of a large dozer-lifter thing and the alien is impaled and falls out to space. With the alien dead Daniels and Tennessee go to cryosleep. As DaWalt is putting Daniels to sleep she asks if he will help her build the log cabin that James Francos character had promised her. He gives her a look like "err what" and she then realises it is not Walter but David, the evil robot. It's too late and she is put to sleep. David vomits up two face hugger embryos and stores them in cryogenic chambers to the tune of the Wagner piece from the start of the film - entrance of the gods into Valhalla. Roll credits. I did not stick around til after the credits, just stuck around to see my buddies name up on the screen.
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May 8, 2017 02:55
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wyoming posted:The world wasn't ready for Gremlins 2. You know what I think about sometimes, that youtube video of the guy hunting down 9/11 clues in the first 10 minutes of Gremlins 2.
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May 8, 2017 02:57
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I find horror movies more enjoyable when recognizing people do stupid poo poo when under extreme pressure.
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May 8, 2017 05:16
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I think the problem with that is, yes, it's true that people do dumb poo poo under pressure, but it's better to have the characters as smart, or smarter than your audience. It creates more tension. See Green Room. The main characters do the most rational things possible, and yet most of them end up suffering a horrific end. That's what made that film so utterly terrifying. You think "Oh man, I would've done that...and died." That is a distressing feeling.
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May 8, 2017 05:36
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Its harder to be smarter than the audience seeing how the audience is under no pressure and has all day to asses every option. Playing a "gently caress you nazis" at a nazi rally among other things wasnt the most rational choice.
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May 8, 2017 05:45
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