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Do you like Alien 3 "Assembly Cut"?
Yes, Alien 3 "Assembly Cut" was tits.
No, Alien and Aliens are the only valid Alien films.
Nah gently caress you Alien 3 sucks in all its forms.
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emanresu tnuocca
Sep 2, 2011

by Athanatos

Pastry Mistakes posted:

So I guess I can just ignore the prometheus interviews/dialogue?

Engineers did NOT create Humanity or the Xenomorph

He just says that the Engineers did not create the Black Goo, I mean, it just means that their relationship to the Xenomorph is more on the level of David's experiments rather than an original and deliberate creation.

They still played a pivotal part in the creation of humanity but again, they didn't invent the process or the tools.

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Despera
Jun 6, 2011
Lovecraftian horror was always overrated. Find monster, run away.

Despera
Jun 6, 2011
Not to mention At The Mountains of Madness was "ancient advanced civilization made an oopsy". Remind you of anything?

Paolomania
Apr 26, 2006

emanresu tnuocca posted:

He just says that the Engineers did not create the Black Goo, I mean, it just means that their relationship to the Xenomorph is more on the level of David's experiments rather than an original and deliberate creation.

They still played a pivotal part in the creation of humanity but again, they didn't invent the process or the tools.

This thread moves so stupid fast that the same debunked assumptions keep popping up. I feel like we need to repost on the top of every page the images of the Prometheus mural showing the full Xeno lifecycle and the LV426 egg room with its haphazard layout to put to rest the persistent misconceptions that these prequels say that David created the Xeno and that the LV426 ship was transporting eggs as cargo, respectively.

Groovelord Neato
Dec 6, 2014


superh posted:

I just finished up a rewatch of Alien (still so damned good!) and I don't think A:C contradicts anything in the actual movie. It's explicitly stated and understood by Ripley and by Ash and by MUTHUR that the company knew about the existence of the Alien, what it did

nope.

IMB
Jan 8, 2005
How does an asshole like Bob get such a great kitchen?

Breetai posted:

In alien 3 it pops out of an animal and displays that animal's traits.

Does that mean the Alien is that animal or is it something else?

Clipperton
Dec 20, 2011
Grimey Drawer

wyoming posted:

And being driven insane by refusing to accept them as true.

More accurately, by the fact that the human mind is incapable of "accepting" them without breaking, I think that's an important distinction.

Hodgepodge posted:

A big part of this is the fact that Lovecraft did not see himself as a person who could handle a cold uncaring universe where there is nothing special about white Anglo-American culture.

Or any other culture, or humanity as a whole, or carbon-based life. That idea is pretty unassailable from a hard-science perspective and it's a source of dread and despair for a lot of people, not just one weirdo Rhode Islander with hangups. Like Dan O'Bannon, who as Xenomrph said cited Lovecraft as an inspiration when he wrote ALIEN. Stephen King called the movie "Lovecraft in space". We're not just pulling this out of our rear end.

Also re Howard: quite a few people (eg Houellebecq) have wondered what you would get if a Man of Action instead of a frail New England aesthete went up against Lovecraftian horrors. Then Brian Lumley answered that question. The answer is "it's dogshit".

Despera posted:

Lovecraftian horror was always overrated. Find monster, run away.

Eh, if you're a living breathing part of the culture almost a century after you started writing I figure you must have been doing something right.

Shanty
Nov 7, 2005

I Love Dogs

Despera posted:

Lovecraftian horror was always overrated. Find monster, run away.

It's more like the monster turns out to have been you/your friend/your house the whole time. Or your civilization was founded by monsters. Or your great grandfather hosed a monster (ape). The best Lovecraft stories are the ones with a terrible, corny twist at the end.

superh
Oct 10, 2007

Touching every treasure

Absolutely yes, watch it yourself. MUTHUR has been programmed to fly by this area specifically to bring back the organism. Ash expounds on how perfect it is, why they can't kill it, etc. Ripley nonchalantly says "well this makes sense the company wants it for their weapons division."

The only stretch I'm making is that they know "exactly" what it does - but they have to know something about it for the company to have given a poo poo about throwing the crew at it, reprogramming MUTHUR and inserting Ash into the crew as an agent superseding the captains authority.

Huzanko
Aug 4, 2015

by FactsAreUseless

superh posted:

Absolutely yes, watch it yourself. MUTHUR has been programmed to fly by this area specifically to bring back the organism. Ash expounds on how perfect it is, why they can't kill it, etc. Ripley nonchalantly says "well this makes sense the company wants it for their weapons division."

The only stretch I'm making is that they know "exactly" what it does - but they have to know something about it for the company to have given a poo poo about throwing the crew at it, reprogramming MUTHUR and inserting Ash into the crew as an agent superseding the captains authority.

I've always felt that the company knew about the Xenomorph somehow, ever since I watched Alien as a kid. But, it could easily just be read as MUTHER being programmed to respond to an extraterrestrial signal by default.

superh
Oct 10, 2007

Touching every treasure
Yeah I hear you - I think there are enough clues that they are set up to grab the Alien, not just respond to random signals.



And the fact that Ash was added to the crew at the last minute:

http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Ash#Early_life (a wiki, but they talk about it in the movie. Can't find good quotes on IMDB)



So it's always been implied that that the company knew what they were getting everyone into. Whether that means they had just encountered the Alien before, or they knew what David was up to. I still think that the fact that he has control codes for the Covenant may imply he's not deviating as far from his programming as we might assume.

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe
It's not really an either/or situation though. It's totally possible that the Company knows all about the xenomorph, or at least enough to know they want it, but that they don't know specifically that the Nostromo is going to encounter it along their route. So they have these contingency plans in place for what they consider inevitable, that someday one of their ships will have an opportunity to snag one.

I can imagine a scenario where the Engineers and the ultimate fate of the Prometheus is like really secret knowledge within the Company, only a select few know what happened. So they put these orders in place that will result in their employees investigating anything that may lead them to Engineer tech, but hardly anyone actually knows the real reason those orders exist.

Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 16:48 on May 24, 2017

ImpAtom
May 24, 2007

superh posted:

Yeah I hear you - I think there are enough clues that they are set up to grab the Alien, not just respond to random signals.



And the fact that Ash was added to the crew at the last minute:

http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Ash#Early_life (a wiki, but they talk about it in the movie. Can't find good quotes on IMDB)



So it's always been implied that that the company knew what they were getting everyone into. Whether that means they had just encountered the Alien before, or they knew what David was up to. I still think that the fact that he has control codes for the Covenant may imply he's not deviating as far from his programming as we might assume.

Ash being added to the crew at the last minute is another of the director's cut things IIRC (the cut conversation between Lambert and Ripley) which may be why you're having trouble finding it

superh
Oct 10, 2007

Touching every treasure

ImpAtom posted:

Ash being added to the crew at the last minute is another of the director's cut things IIRC (the cut conversation between Lambert and Ripley) which may be why you're having trouble finding it

Ooo makes total sense. Yeah forgive all my rambling if it's actually all Directors Cut stuff haha.

Amarcarts
Feb 21, 2007

This looks a lot like suffering.
The growing too fast thing is just one of the ignorant aspects of biology I was talking about. There's a poo poo ton of other stuff like the black goo being based on a virus. You can tell it was written that way because the word "virus" sounds scary to the masses but the actual way viruses work isn't really compatible with the stuff in the movies, which is closer to something cellular.

The biggest thing of all that bugs me though is the idea that started in Prometheus about "Throwing away 200+ years of Darwinism" or w/e the line was. The idea is sort of supposed to be knocking scientific hubris down a peg by saying that the more mature attitude is that we don't have all the answers so who knows we may have actually been made by Engineers or w/e. The idea that we don't have all the answers is actually built in to the scientific method. There's as much if not more evidence behind something like the current state of evolutionary theory as there is behind something like the holocaust happening.

I guess this poo poo bugs me because I like reading about evolutionary biology and when you do you realize that even most of the people who support it don't really understand how it works or its implications. Physicists probably feel the same way about relativity but at least for them it's not nearly as much of a political issue.

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:
I always thought that when they said they were talking to "MU/TH/ER" for answers it meant they were still getting orders/etc. from a human on earth or something. I got the impression from the movies that the setting has the equivalent of video chat/etc. futuristic communications but that when we see that green text shooting out kind of messages like in Alien and Alien 3 it's the equivalent of like a direct text message wherein someone waaaay out there can send brief messages to someone on Earth and vice versa almost in real time. Like the computer just goes through basic stuff but then Ash being a good company man and keeping them updated on the incredible stuff that just happened someone at home is like "OH poo poo JUST GET THIS THING HOME ASAP."

Ravenfood
Nov 4, 2011
Unrelated to the plot discussion, I want to know what the gently caress is up with the shower scene in Covenant. To have such a classic horror movie scene occur in a series that has had a lot of sexual imagery and themes while tending to avoid that trope was odd and I wanted to talk about why Scott felt it necessary to include.

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

Ravenfood posted:

Unrelated to the plot discussion, I want to know what the gently caress is up with the shower scene in Covenant. To have such a classic horror movie scene occur in a series that has had a lot of sexual imagery and themes while tending to avoid that trope was odd and I wanted to talk about why Scott felt it necessary to include.

"You want Aliens? I'll give you some 'loving' Aliens."

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

Ravenfood posted:

Unrelated to the plot discussion, I want to know what the gently caress is up with the shower scene in Covenant. To have such a classic horror movie scene occur in a series that has had a lot of sexual imagery and themes while tending to avoid that trope was odd and I wanted to talk about why Scott felt it necessary to include.

^^^Basically. That's the explanation that makes the most sense.

I really liked Covenant but if I had one major complaint its that those sequences at the end on the ship felt completely unnecessary. There had been plenty of xeno action before then, not sure why Scott felt he needed to throw that stuff in at the end.

Ravenfood
Nov 4, 2011

Basebf555 posted:

^^^Basically. That's the explanation that makes the most sense.

I really liked Covenant but if I had one major complaint its that those sequences at the end on the ship felt completely unnecessary. There had been plenty of xeno action before then, not sure why Scott felt he needed to throw that stuff in at the end.
Definitely, and that time could have been used for a lot more character/plot development.

emanresu tnuocca
Sep 2, 2011

by Athanatos

Ravenfood posted:

Unrelated to the plot discussion, I want to know what the gently caress is up with the shower scene in Covenant. To have such a classic horror movie scene occur in a series that has had a lot of sexual imagery and themes while tending to avoid that trope was odd and I wanted to talk about why Scott felt it necessary to include.

I felt the movie was intentionally aiming to hit classic horror tropes, the whole 2nd/3rd acts are rife with horror cliches.

The Notorious ZSB
Apr 19, 2004

I SAID WE'RE NOT GONNA BE FUCKING SUCK THIS YEAR!!!

I liked A:C. I'd go so far as to say that it's the third best film in the franchise, but I don't think highly of 3 at all while I know others do.

I don't think that any of what was revealed inherently invalidates any of what we got in the earlier films. It's still not clear at all whether David has actually created something new or simply followed the same blueprint as others (engineers etc) have before that culminates in the xenomorph. I personally don't think he's as much a god as he'd like to paint himself as but only future films will say or not.

Scott continues to produce achingly engaging visuals so the film is very very nice to look at. I also felt like it was tightly edited I never felt like it bogged down or spent too long on any one thing, and while maybe a little more in spots might have been nice I didn't feel like we missed out or there were gaps where they clearly lost a scene or something.

I appreciated what they didn't tell us as much as what they did although once again offing prior film primary characters off screen feels sorta cheap, but adds to the horror of what may be in store for Daniels.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

Despera posted:

Lovecraftian horror was always overrated. Find monster, run away.

It's not so much that it's 'overrated' as it is that "Lovecraftian" and "cosmic horror" are terms that are bandied around without acknowledging the formal qualities of the text, and their cultural influences. It's the same way that post-Alien alien movies are disparagingly contrasted with the 'iconic' status of the original and its apparent mystery. What's occurring is merely an uncritical enthusiasm for superficial content.

To put it bluntly: What happens in Lovecraft's fiction is not actually that the reader is faced with something incomprehensible. What happens is that the characters are faced with something incomprehensible to them. The mythos of Lovecraft's work was not this spontaneous product of the 'unknown' - he pulled liberally and deliberately from Western and Judeo-Christian mythology (Titans, half-human degenerates, subterranean beasts, Leviathans and Behemoths, apocrypha of sea monsters, etc.) in order to build around his protagonists a horrific gnosis that violently disturbs their preconceptions about the stability of civilization and the permanence of mankind. These were further - and rather overtly because of the author's (for the time) typical racism - influenced by nativist fear of immigration and miscegenation, poor urban planning and sanitation control, evolutionary biology ('men come from apes'), etc. Lovecraft's horror is not defined by its superficial content - sleeping giants, lost cities, witch covens, all of which are generic features of historical and contemporary folklore and literature, far from incomprehensible. What defined his work was his prose and his preoccupation with characters who were so sutured into their particular ideological context that they were lead pre-deterministically to madness once 'science' and archaeology inevitably proved them wrong.

We can adapt the same critical theory to Alien, wherein the superficial content and 'mythos' of canon take the place of actually explaining why the film is compelling. The biology and behavior of the alien are far from incomprehensible. Its reproductive cycle is influenced by terrestrial predatory wasps. Its behavior aboard the Nostromo - while intelligent and systematic - is straightforwardly predatory. In the so-called "Director's Cut," it is further revealed that it can use host bodies to repeat the cycle of reproduction, but this in and of itself is actually rather logical, and only 'incomprehensible' in the sense that it's obviously science-fantasy bullshit which has no specific, systemic explanation. The plot of the director's cut is that we are watching the life cycle of a non-terrestrial organism, and any leaps in imagination are immediately explained by the fact that it's a loving alien. Same thing with the space jokey, the ship, and the egg chamber. How did it get there? What were they for?: They're aliens. They come from space. The story of the film is about how a bunch of 'space truckers' encounter this life-form, and how this encounter, thematically, becomes expressive of their own fatal condition within a political landscape that is still, fundamentally, rooted on Earth. Where did the space jokey come from? He's a space trucker... like them. It was expendable in order to transport and be a host for "the perfect organism."

That's the horrific kernel that informed the filmmakers' decision to model the production design of their film, not after the literature and B-movies that actually inspired the script, but after H. R. Giger's Necronomicon and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The alien and its mythos are not scary, as alien fans themselves keep bringing up with respect to the 'expanded universe' that evolved around the creature just as it did around Lovecraft's own rudimentary boogeymen. What's scary is this giant black penis monster with an external human skeleton and 'exhaust ports' emerging from its back. What's scary is how the creature reflects the subjective experience of the characters.

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 203 days!
^^^ The famous quote about how "with strange aeons even death may die" is a wry twist on Christianity.

Amarcarts posted:

The growing too fast thing is just one of the ignorant aspects of biology I was talking about. There's a poo poo ton of other stuff like the black goo being based on a virus. You can tell it was written that way because the word "virus" sounds scary to the masses but the actual way viruses work isn't really compatible with the stuff in the movies, which is closer to something cellular.

The biggest thing of all that bugs me though is the idea that started in Prometheus about "Throwing away 200+ years of Darwinism" or w/e the line was. The idea is sort of supposed to be knocking scientific hubris down a peg by saying that the more mature attitude is that we don't have all the answers so who knows we may have actually been made by Engineers or w/e. The idea that we don't have all the answers is actually built in to the scientific method. There's as much if not more evidence behind something like the current state of evolutionary theory as there is behind something like the holocaust happening.

I guess this poo poo bugs me because I like reading about evolutionary biology and when you do you realize that even most of the people who support it don't really understand how it works or its implications. Physicists probably feel the same way about relativity but at least for them it's not nearly as much of a political issue.

I'm pretty sure Scott does some of this intentionally. Neutrinos interact only with gravity (barely due to having little mass) and the weak force. A neutrino burst wouldn't do poo poo, you'd have to be trying to even detect one.

CelticPredator
Oct 11, 2013
🍀👽🆚🪖🏋

The thread title, heh.

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

Hodgepodge posted:

A big part of this is the fact that Lovecraft did not see himself as a person who could handle a cold uncaring universe where there is nothing special about white Anglo-American culture.

The key to understanding this is his friend and correspondent, Robert E. Howard. Howard's stories took place in a similar universe to Lovecraft's, but his protagonists, most famously Conan the Barbarian, were too busy heroically defying fate and circumstances to go insane. Faced with a Lovecraftian horror, Conan would fight it and probably win. And if he didn't? Every man dies.

I mean, arguably, Howard's protagonists were already insane, but the point is that that certainly didn't stop them.

Can we slow down for just one second? I never knew that the Conan Barbarian novels took place in the same universe as lovecraft's horror stories. That is very interesting! The Thematic implications of that both in the narrative and out of the narrative is astounding. It's just like how you pointed out. It speaks the difference between the authors. Lovecraft is nihilistic and Views and uncaring universe with despair. Howard is humanistic and Views and uncaring universe with a mixture of apathy and optimism about the strength of humanity. It really changes my entire View on the two series of books. Wow you learn something new everyday.

I just want to make a quick point on topic. Why is everyone acting as if Prometheus and alien Covenant is in any way a commentary on nerd culture or the nature of an audience to want explanations? It's easier to see that the movies are about Mankind search for meaning and the burden and implications of creating life. I suppose you could take it in the direction that some are but it does seem very ancillary to the actual subject of the movies. I think questions like why do we exist?, who made us?, and what does it all mean?, are Universal questions and the expiration of a crew of scientists who uncover a disturbing version of the answers is simply a science fiction story, a very common one.

Schwarzwald
Jul 27, 2004

Don't Blink

Pastry Mistakes posted:

"I'm a writer, and boy I'd sure like to write about something scary. Fear of the unknown is a good trope to run with, but poo poo this is a movie with a limited budget, and I kind of don't want to be pigeonholed with something that looks wonky! I mean, having an unknown horror is cool, but it lacks a personal touch. I know, sexual horror would be a great theme to touch on! Let's throw as much sexual perversity as I can into this to really knock up the "gently caress-I'm-terrified" meter by a few notches"
Oh poo poo, look how easy it is to throw both of those themes together.

You didn't throw both of those themes together, you considered "fear of the unknown" and then discarded it in favor of making it a sexual horror.

In the film we know that the alien actively hunts humans, is difficult to kill, and is difficult to find, and those are all the pertinent details. You don't need an encyclopedia entry to fully understand the threat the creature poses, and even if you had such knowledge, it wouldn't necessarily make it less dangerous.

Pastry Mistakes posted:

Uh not really. It's about cosmic helplessness, hopelessness, and unanswerable questions that shatter an anthropocentric viewpoint. It's about seeing characters experience this poo poo and dying as they fail to make sense of it.

Lovecraft was all about discovering that reality can be so extremely abstract that even contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person because they simply cannot bear the incomprehensible truths they witness, hear, or discover.

The horror in Lovecraft's stories is that the truths are all too comprehensible; the comfort of ignorance is taken away. That's the source of the cosmic helplessness and hopelessness.

Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 18:43 on May 24, 2017

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot
Considering how barren space is it makes sense for a company who's into space industry to have a bunch of routines for acting on any interesting discovery. It also makes sense for a shady corporation to have their suits routinely masquerade as a worker to keep an eye on things. I mean, have none of you seen "undercover boss"?

Having the former turn out to be a lovecraftian horror in waiting works best, and I am guessing it was what Dan O'Bannon intended. The added paranoia of the latter scenario (which was ironically added by actual suits) is a nice cherry on top, but there's no need to ascribe the corporation more agency than that. The Ash reveal is plenty creepy on its own, especially at the time when this came out, the corporation does not have to be behind _everything_ in the movie for it to work, and I've never felt that theory was supported by the actual film either.

thotsky fucked around with this message at 18:52 on May 24, 2017

Snak
Oct 10, 2005

I myself will carry you to the Gates of Valhalla...
You will ride eternal,
shiny and chrome.
Grimey Drawer

Hodgepodge posted:

^^^ The famous quote about how "with strange aeons even death may die" is a wry twist on Christianity.


I'm pretty sure Scott does some of this intentionally. Neutrinos interact only with gravity (barely due to having little mass) and the weak force. A neutrino burst wouldn't do poo poo, you'd have to be trying to even detect one.

It's the new "micro-changes in air density".

ruddiger
Jun 3, 2004

Covok posted:

I just want to make a quick point on topic. Why is everyone acting as if Prometheus and alien Covenant is in any way a commentary on nerd culture or the nature of an audience to want explanations? It's easier to see that the movies are about Mankind search for meaning and the burden and implications of creating life. I suppose you could take it in the direction that some are but it does seem very ancillary to the actual subject of the movies. I think questions like why do we exist?, who made us?, and what does it all mean?, are Universal questions and the expiration of a crew of scientists who uncover a disturbing version of the answers is simply a science fiction story, a very common one.

Clipperton
Dec 20, 2011
Grimey Drawer

Schwarzwald posted:

The horror in Lovecraft's stories is that the truths are all too comprehensible; the comfort of ignorance is taken away. That's the source of the cosmic helplessness and hopelessness.

No, there's loads of things in Lovecraft that just don't fit in his characters' brains. In The Call of Cthulhu the sailors can't even make sense of the geometry of R'lyeh: "he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse". Same with "The Colour Out of Space"; a bunch of academics submit the meteorite fragment to all the most advanced scientific tests and they learn jack poo poo. In his more overt horror period, loads of things were "indescribable" or "unnamable", there's even a story by that name.

Covok posted:

I just want to make a quick point on topic. Why is everyone acting as if Prometheus and alien Covenant is in any way a commentary on nerd culture or the nature of an audience to want explanations?

They're also acting like spending a hundred million dollars and who knows how many person-hours just so you can tell a couple hundred nerds to "suck it" is a superb masterstroke and not something an insane person would do.

Clipperton fucked around with this message at 18:58 on May 24, 2017

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

Covok posted:

I just want to make a quick point on topic. Why is everyone acting as if Prometheus and alien Covenant is in any way a commentary on nerd culture or the nature of an audience to want explanations? It's easier to see that the movies are about Mankind search for meaning and the burden and implications of creating life. I suppose you could take it in the direction that some are but it does seem very ancillary to the actual subject of the movies. I think questions like why do we exist?, who made us?, and what does it all mean?, are Universal questions and the expiration of a crew of scientists who uncover a disturbing version of the answers is simply a science fiction story, a very common one.

It's not necessarily an intentional commentary, but that doesn't really matter. The universal questions of why we exist and the meaning of life work really well as analogues to the iconic questions posed by the original Alien film. Who is the Space Jockey? What exactly is the Xenomorph? These questions are just as foolish in the context of film(at least the expectation that you will get satisfying answers) as these "universal questions" are in the context of our own lives. So the film works well on that level even if its not intentional.

cargohills
Apr 18, 2014

I feel like a lot of people don't really get Lovecraft, which is why so many impressions of it are like "I saw this big monster and now I'm batshit loving crazy!"

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

Snak posted:

It's the new "micro-changes in air density".

It was Walter THE WHOLE TIME, it's Walter at the end of the movie.

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:
Can a mod change the thread title back? Otherwise how can we be sure that the Alien 3 "Assembly Cut" is loving awesome. :(

Snak
Oct 10, 2005

I myself will carry you to the Gates of Valhalla...
You will ride eternal,
shiny and chrome.
Grimey Drawer

Neo Rasa posted:

It was Walter THE WHOLE TIME, it's Walter at the end of the movie.

I actually thought it would be an interesting angle for Walter to just convert to David's "faith" because it's much more interesting and goal oriented than anything he's been given to do by humans.

Maybe "goal oriented" is the wrong term. His role in serving humans is mostly reactionary. If everything goes as planned, he's just a cog in the machine, practically a part of the ship. In contrast, furthering David's project is proactive.

Pastry Mistakes
Apr 6, 2009

Amarcarts posted:


The biggest thing of all that bugs me though is the idea that started in Prometheus about "Throwing away 200+ years of Darwinism" or w/e the line was. The idea is sort of supposed to be knocking scientific hubris down a peg by saying that the more mature attitude is that we don't have all the answers so who knows we may have actually been made by Engineers or w/e. The idea that we don't have all the answers is actually built in to the scientific method. There's as much if not more evidence behind something like the current state of evolutionary theory as there is behind something like the holocaust happening.

I guess this poo poo bugs me because I like reading about evolutionary biology and when you do you realize that even most of the people who support it don't really understand how it works or its implications. Physicists probably feel the same way about relativity but at least for them it's not nearly as much of a political issue.


emanresu tnuocca posted:

He just says that the Engineers did not create the Black Goo, I mean, it just means that their relationship to the Xenomorph is more on the level of David's experiments rather than an original and deliberate creation.

They still played a pivotal part in the creation of humanity but again, they didn't invent the process or the tools.

after Holloway has given his presentation about the pictograms to the crew]
Fifield: So you’re saying we’re here because of a map you two kids found in a cave, is that right?
Elizabeth Shaw: No.
Charlie Holloway: Yeah. Um…
Elizabeth Shaw: No. Not a map. An invitation.
Fifield: From whom?
Elizabeth Shaw: We call them Engineers.
Fifield: Engineers? Do you mind um…telling us what they engineered?
Elizabeth Shaw: They engineered us.
Fifield: Bullshit! 
Millburn: Okay, so uh…do you have anything to back that up? I mean, look, if you’re willing to discount three centuries of Darwinism, that’s…wooh! But how do you know? Mm?
Elizabeth Shaw: I don’t. But it’s what I choose to believe.


In the film, Shaw and Holloway are banking on intelligent design being correct due to a gut feeling it seems. Later they meet an angry engineer who turns out was initially heading to earth (they assume to destroy it). If we treat the humans as being sound/correct narrators, then I think Prometheus settles on the Engineers being responsible for our guided evolution.

What's confusing however is when we include things outside of the movie where lore is expanded upon in interviews and leaks about the movies/scripts.
Some previous interviews accepted the intelligent design theory and that the engineers did it. Now a lot of them I'm seeing are saying "no, never mind, the engineers didn't make us, they're also just steps in the chain". In any case, I'm not sure if Ridley or the script doctors/writers have really settled on so the prime evolutionary guidance counselors/creators are yet. It might just be turtles all the way down.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

I've been reading a lot of lovecraft lately and it's really really not hard to "get" what his style is like. But there's tons of people who claim they're "really into lovecraftian horror" and have never actually read anything, they've just played some video games or consumed some media that claimed to be lovecraft inspired.

Also his characters are frequently insanely "movie stupid" and make the prometheus crew look top shelf. Also quite often the shocking brain-melting realization that turns people into gibbering madmen is something really mundane like "maybe there were some non-human civilizations in ancient times" or "sometimes non-anglo-saxon people built some things/exist". But it's still good poo poo. Lovecraft is also a perfect example of an expanded universe and trying to tie everything together and explain everything ruins poo poo. The actual stuff written by lovecraft is fun and spooky and interesting, but the "mythos" or "universe" that other authors created and try to piggyback off his "worldbuilding" is real real bad. Never try to look up lovecraft stuff on the internet because 90% of the sources are from poo poo lovecraft didn't write.

What I really like about lovecraft is that all his horror is entirely naturalistic. Lovecraft was an atheist and did not believe in the supernatural and found the idea of a cold godless universe home to very real yet very otherworldly threats and horrors extremely spooky. He was trying to write science fiction, based on the science known at the time. The core themes are that humans don't matter, humans are new and the sum total of our works are nothing compared to what has come before us and what will inevitably come after us, and due to our primitive minds and bodies and primitive technology we are most likely not going to last so long given the historical record of the rise and fall of civilizations in the galaxy. Also aliens aren't just humans in rubber masks that ultimately have similar emotions and minds, they are utterly alien things with utterly alien motives. Thats a trope I hate in scify, that all sapient creatures would obviously have common ground and all be "people" deep down and if only we communicate and understand we can have peace and sharing. This is of course because so much scify uses aliens as a stand-in for other races/cultures on earth and the stories are often trying to say racism or nationalism on earth is bad. Lovecraft though being a huge racist and deeply afraid of other cultures which he found inscrutably alien led him to create much more alien aliens and civilizations, which I find much more interesting and realistic.

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 19:24 on May 24, 2017

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 203 days!

Covok posted:

Can we slow down for just one second? I never knew that the Conan Barbarian novels took place in the same universe as lovecraft's horror stories. That is very interesting! The Thematic implications of that both in the narrative and out of the narrative is astounding. It's just like how you pointed out. It speaks the difference between the authors. Lovecraft is nihilistic and Views and uncaring universe with despair. Howard is humanistic and Views and uncaring universe with a mixture of apathy and optimism about the strength of humanity. It really changes my entire View on the two series of books. Wow you learn something new everyday.

I just want to make a quick point on topic. Why is everyone acting as if Prometheus and alien Covenant is in any way a commentary on nerd culture or the nature of an audience to want explanations? It's easier to see that the movies are about Mankind search for meaning and the burden and implications of creating life. I suppose you could take it in the direction that some are but it does seem very ancillary to the actual subject of the movies. I think questions like why do we exist?, who made us?, and what does it all mean?, are Universal questions and the expiration of a crew of scientists who uncover a disturbing version of the answers is simply a science fiction story, a very common one.

Not the same, just very similar, and with similar themes. I believe they mention gods from each other's work once or twice, though.

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MrMojok
Jan 28, 2011

FWIW Ash replacing the science officer at the last minute before they left Thedus was in the theatrical cut. It's mentioned when Ripley is talking to Dallas after Ash broke the quarantine rules.

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