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Maxwell Lord posted:I believe the Director's Cut, such as it was, was basically done for the 2004(?) rerelease, since they wanted to have SOMETHING new to advertise. They had a new film coming out in 2004.
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Jun 5, 2017 05:25
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Ridley has said the theatrical cut is his preferred version and the "director's cut" was just made to show the fans what was almost released. He's said the term "director's cut" was applied to it by Fox's marketing team and he didn't care enough to fight it.
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Jun 5, 2017 06:22
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Covenant was pretty sweet, although it really gave me Welcome To The Alien Cinematic Universe vibes that Prometheus didn't give off. I don't get why people think this movie overexplains or demystifies or something the alien or something. The way I see it it does the exact opposite - first, it reinforces the notion from Prometheus that the creature we see in Alien is just one specific manifestation of this, like, multifarious primal demon-essence, and second, it does nothing to contradict the implication in Prometheus that the engineers themselves didn't really create, control, or understand the black goo, just worshiped it and tinkered with it. I think Prometheus and Covenant actually give the xenomorph a much more of a primordial, supernatural feel than Alien alone did.
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Jun 5, 2017 06:30
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Ferrinus posted:Covenant was pretty sweet, although it really gave me Welcome To The Alien Cinematic Universe vibes that Prometheus didn't give off. You know, this just made me realize something: both humanity and the xenomorph were made from the black goo: the engineer that made humanity drank it to make life on Earth.
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Jun 5, 2017 06:43
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Covok posted:You know, this just made me realize something: both humanity and the xenomorph were made from the black goo: the engineer that made humanity drank it to make life on Earth. IIRC Scott said that the planet an engineer sacrifices himself on in the beginning of Prometheus wasn't even necessarily earth, but just a demonstration of the kind of stuff the engineers got up to back in the day. The biggest thing I took from the scene was that the huge spaceship leaving the guy behind looked nothing like the engineers' own stuff, so maybe the engineers were just servants/worshipers of some older, stranger culture who'd actually bestowed the goo upon them.
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Jun 5, 2017 06:59
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I got lost of some alien wiki and came up on the alien royal jelly. That's basically the black goo isn't it?
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Jun 5, 2017 07:14
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No. It's just goopy goop. Edit: quote:It is also extremely addictive to humans if used as a drug, offering its users a euphoric sense of bliss and wonder.[2]  Edit!! No loving waaaaay http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Xeno-Zip quote:Xeno-Zip,[1] commonly known by its street names fire[1] or jelly,[2] is a powerful performance-enhancing drug derived from Xenomorph Royal Jelly. Although humans have almost successfully synthesized Royal Jelly, its effects are highly unstable unless a tiny quantity of pure, natural Royal Jelly obtained from a Queen Mother is present, as some more complex compounds that have yet to be artificially produced, would complete it. This fuels a significant black market in natural Royal Jelly, and eventually attracted the attention of the United States Colonial Marine Corps for their own uses. quote:The effects are listed below: quote:Humans who ingest Xeno-Zip also attract extreme aggression from any Xenomorphs they may encounter. The Xenomorph will not attempt to subdue for Facehugger implantation, and will savagely tear the victim limb-from-limb, even continuing to attack the corpse after they have died. The reason for aggression is that Xeno-Zip can come from rival hives, therefore Xenomorphs of a different hive will display a high degree of aggression. The MedTech's bloodhound Ol' Blue, crushed a man to death with only its head once it smelled Xeno-Zip on him. CelticPredator fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 07:28
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The Aliens EU was well on its merry way to becoming the next Star Wars or Star Trek EU during the 90's and early 2000's
Steve Yun fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 08:07
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CelticPredator posted:No. It's just goopy goop. To be fair royal jelly is a real-world concept seen in bee/ant/termite hives, and it serves a similar purpose. If I remember right I don't think the Dark Horse comics were even the first place to mention Alien royal jelly, I think it gets mentioned in the 'Aliens' novelization.
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Jun 5, 2017 08:19
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No one uses Royal Jelly to get high.
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Jun 5, 2017 09:05
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I don't think were ready for that jelly.
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Jun 5, 2017 09:12
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Guy Ritchie's Alien5, where the cast shoves Xeno-Zip up their asses to get high before they rob an Engineer convenience store.
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Jun 5, 2017 13:33
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Brainiac Five posted:Guy Ritchie's Alien5, where the cast shoves Xeno-Zip up their asses to get high before they rob an Engineer convenience store. This would still be better than Resurrection.
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Jun 5, 2017 16:14
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CelticPredator posted:No. It's just goopy goop. Why is the Alien EU filled with such awful poo poo? Is there anything good about it outside of Alien: Isolation?
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Jun 5, 2017 16:34
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s.i.r.e. posted:Why is the Alien EU filled with such awful poo poo? Is there anything good about it outside of Alien: Isolation? A few of the Alien 3 video games from back in the day are interesting because while none of them involve monks and a wooden planet they draw upon elements from the more action packed scripts that aren't in the final film. Alien 3: THE GUN is the most interesting because Sega's devs MUST have seen the work print of the film in like 1991. It has the ox burster, officially human Bishop, super face hugger, and stuff from the Cold War/etc. script like the adult Alien "transforming" from encounter to encounter, the prisoners are other marines, and the prison was an old military installation so there's like a mine field and old like primitive combat androids and also "decaying" synthetics and stuff. Basically a few of them did a great job of being action/adventure kind of games while still keeping that nihilistic but hopeful "voice" of the movie and being weird alternate versions of it that didn't compromise the movie completely just to be a video game. The Alien series in general has quite a few very good video games based on it which is unusual. Most movie series that get a bunch of games are lucky to have one or two good ones while the rest are crap, let alone several.
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Jun 5, 2017 16:45
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Neo Rasa posted:A few of the Alien 3 video games from back in the day are interesting because while none of them involve monks and a wooden planet they draw upon elements from the more action packed scripts that aren't in the final film. Alien 3: THE GUN is the most interesting because Sega's devs MUST have seen the work print of the film in like 1991. It has the ox burster, officially human Bishop, super face hugger, and stuff from the Cold War/etc. script like the adult Alien "transforming" from encounter to encounter, the prisoners are other marines, and the prison was an old military installation so there's like a mine field and old like primitive combat androids and also "decaying" synthetics and stuff. Basically a few of them did a great job of being action/adventure kind of games while still keeping that nihilistic but hopeful "voice" of the movie and being weird alternate versions of it that didn't compromise the movie completely just to be a video game. That's true, AvP2 and the recent AvP game are fantastic and the Capcom AVP sidescrolling beat-em-up is dumb fun too excellent. I'll never understand the praise people have for the first AVP game though, the only praise comes from people that played it when it was new but it's like a poor man's Doom/Quake. I'll have to check out Alien 3: TheGun since I've never even heard of it.
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Jun 5, 2017 16:55
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Neo Rasa posted:This would still be better than Resurrection. It would be great.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:01
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When you say the first AvP game do you mean Rebellion's Jaguar AvP or their PC one? The Jaguar one was amazing just because it was a sort of non-linear FPS where you could be an alien/Predator/Marine on a console. Super super ambitious but definitely tough to play today, I honestly wouldn't recommend it. The PC one is great though to me. But it hasn't aged as gracefully as the other classics so I can see why playing it today it would just seem like a DOOM or Quake knockoff. It was quickly eclipsed on a technical level but at the time the lighting and sound design was insane, it's hard to describe how different and tense it felt compared to any other FPS back in the day because of both that and the randomized enemy placement. It was also the first FPS to have a cooperative "horde mode" which is pretty standard now but it was cool to be a Predator/Alien/Human with a friend and fight ever-increasing hordes of which ever species you weren't playing as on the Nostromo or a subway or whatever. But it caught a lot of flak for its save system. Like the original Hitman If you played it when it came out you actually could not save your game while in a level, only in between missions. :O In later releases of it they made it like Hitman 2 (or vice versa I guess since Hitman 2 was later) where you got ___ in-level saves per mission depending on the difficulty you're playing on. The tension was a big selling point of the game, in its original release it actually came with a coupon for new underwear.  Alien 3: THE GUN is an arcade rail shooter from Sega that you can tell a lot of love was put into, with nice variety of both action packed and somber music, the entire game is 2D graphics with tons of scaling effects and stuff and lots of little details. I think it's also the first game with a really effective "we did extra work to make this look like a lovely low quality video" effect for its HUD. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 17:06
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Reading Wiki pages out of context is a guaranteed way to have a bad time. The Alien EU is actually good because reading through the Omnibuses it's a lot of different stories about humans trying to control/exploit the Alien via different means and they almost always blow up in the face of the humans. It's a lot of fun. There's a really funny story about how this down on his luck corporated owned musician wants to make music from the screeches of the Alien so they send literal ninjas to capture an egg from another corporation, the lead ninja finds a goo addict cultist who wants to become one with the alien, tries to back out at the last minute and fails, and they're nursing it in a cage as the musician slowly goes mad from the goo drug as well as the scientist nursing the alien to maturity falls in love with the specimen - it's a bunch of weird poo poo that's a lot more fun than "oh uh David created the xenomorph and is the catalyst for the entire franchise," and are all different takes on "humanity's greed will always try to exploit the alien, but the house always wins."
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Jun 5, 2017 17:07
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You're praising the EU for telling the same story dozens of times and castigating the movie for going somewhere new. What in the hell
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Jun 5, 2017 17:27
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*Throws down copy of Lemonade, spits on it* Ugh, what a departure from what music ought to be. *Holds up album of 20 different covers of Enter Sandman* Now this is the real good poo poo!
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Jun 5, 2017 17:31
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Brainiac Five posted:*Throws down copy of Lemonade, spits on it* I mean, that is exactly what talking about music online is like, so...
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Jun 5, 2017 17:33
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Ferrinus posted:You're praising the EU for telling the same story dozens of times and castigating the movie for going somewhere new. What in the hell It's not "new." It's a boring retread of Great Man Theory that jams itself into the canon in such a way that there will never be a real payoff for the actual story. The comics are more enjoyable because they imagine a society that refuses to learn that they cannot exploit the Xeno without disastrous consequences, yet every time they think that they are the ones smart enough to get it right. While not every comic deals with this same ideal, it's an overarching theme across many of them.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:33
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David explicitly did not create the xenomorph because he even says outright that there's all kinds of variations of what can come out and how/where it gestates beyond just "is the host a human or an ox."
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Jun 5, 2017 17:34
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Taintrunner posted:they imagine a society that refuses to learn that they cannot exploit the Xeno without disastrous consequences, yet every time they think that they are the ones smart enough to get it right. Hell yeah I can totally understand why having a preference for this would clash with the plot of Prometheus and Covenant.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:35
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Taintrunner posted:It's not "new." It's a boring retread of Great Man Theory that jams itself into the canon in such a way that there will never be a real payoff for the actual story. It is not a retread of Great Man theory at all, and in fact makes it clear that the specific bony and glossy aliens we're used to are but one of many emergent accidents rather than a transhistorical ideal that the deific force of Canon always bends towards.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:39
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Ferrinus posted:It is not a retread of Great Man theory at all, and in fact makes it clear that the specific bony and glossy aliens we're used to are but one of many emergent accidents rather than a transhistorical ideal that the deific force of Canon always bends towards. It overwrites the fear of the unknown combined with humanity's wonder with space and life beyond the stars in 1979 by slamming in a scorned evil scientist android with charisma.exe that has nowhere to go in the storyline with any sort of universe-changing ramifications. David's endpoint is predetermined by the presence of Alien '79 as a sequel. Covenant retreads the same old, stale ground by shoehorning in retreads of the climaxes of previous Alien film instead of focusing on the new, original material, which it leaves open for a sequel that is almost certain to not happen due to fledgling box office numbers. The David material is a dead end that should have been given it's own franchise to grow and flourish. While the comics vary in quality and are not all interconnected, going through the Omnibuses there is an interesting read to be taken from them - a sort of cynical condemnation of humanity's unstoppable desire to exploit, faced up against the immovable Alien, which refuses to be exploited. The Xeno outwits, outplays, and outlasts (heh) humanity in a multitude of different ways, and while humanity assumes its superiority over the Xeno due to it's inability to communicate with the creature, the fact of the matter is that the Xeno always wins. The hubris and greed of humanity prevents us from ever realizing it's supremacy, and it's a comical (heh, heh) read that serves as a warning for when humanity finally makes it's way to see what is truly out there beyond the stars.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:53
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Taintrunner posted:It overwrites the fear of the unknown combined with humanity's wonder with space and life beyond the stars in 1979 by slamming in a scorned evil scientist android with charisma.exe that has nowhere to go in the storyline with any sort of universe-changing ramifications. David's endpoint is predetermined by the presence of Alien '79 as a sequel. Covenant retreads the same old, stale ground by shoehorning in retreads of the climaxes of previous Alien film instead of focusing on the new, original material, which it leaves open for a sequel that is almost certain to not happen due to fledgling box office numbers. The David material is a dead end that should have been given it's own franchise to grow and flourish. What you can find in actual real-life space: rocks, gas, very rarely water, empty space.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:57
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Taintrunner posted:It overwrites the fear of the unknown combined with humanity's wonder with space and life beyond the stars in 1979 by slamming in a scorned evil scientist android with charisma.exe that has nowhere to go in the storyline with any sort of universe-changing ramifications. David's endpoint is predetermined by the presence of Alien '79 as a sequel. Covenant retreads the same old, stale ground by shoehorning in retreads of the climaxes of previous Alien film instead of focusing on the new, original material, which it leaves open for a sequel that is almost certain to not happen due to fledgling box office numbers. The David material is a dead end that should have been given it's own franchise to grow and flourish. Your second paragraph starkly contradicts your first. If you wanted "fear of the unknown", you would not long so powerfully for the comforting predictability of Alien EU story #3409 in which Weyland-Fudd tries to corner Bug Bunny but that chitinous rascal gets the drop on the human yet again, ha ha! Prometheus and Covenant are precisely ANTIDOTES to the incredibly rote and 100% mapped-out nature of the heretofore existing alien franchise, because they transform what was basically a species of bug with an extremely stupid reproductive strategy into an avatar of seething progenerative chaos. But you don't actually want anything new, or for the alien to regain any of its mystique; you just want to see your comics, which by their very nature cannot diverge from existing movies or in any way surprise or challenge you, on the big screen.
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Jun 5, 2017 18:19
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The problem is not that the Alien franchise has "lost it's mystery", which definitely hadn't happened by the third rehash of Alien, the problem is that now the franchise is hagsploitation with a campy Dr. Pretorius as its lead.
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Jun 5, 2017 18:26
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:hagsploitation with a campy Dr. Pretorius as its lead. lol This is why I love your posting
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Jun 5, 2017 18:29
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I mean, you have David smirking as he tells a born again Christian he's going to be a proud mommy of a space bug and apparently what people get out of that is "oh great, they sucked the fun out of it."
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Jun 5, 2017 18:37
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It reminded me of the walking dead to be honest.
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Jun 5, 2017 18:41
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s.i.r.e. posted:Why is the Alien EU filled with such awful poo poo? Is there anything good about it outside of Alien: Isolation? Gaps. Gaps in explaining where the aliens came from (leading to a bunch of random writers explaining it), and gaps in between Alien movies audiences really wanted (how long was it from the end of Aliens to the last thirty minutes of Covenant?), leading to random writers putting their own stories into play. Narrative gaps are open/untreated wounds, and EUs and fanfaction are the infections those wounds get from not getting them treated (aka giving the audience what they want).
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Jun 5, 2017 18:52
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MisterBibs posted:Gaps. Gaps in explaining where the aliens came from (leading to a bunch of random writers explaining it), and gaps in between Alien movies audiences really wanted (how long was it from the end of Aliens to the last thirty minutes of Covenant?), leading to random writers putting their own stories into play. But what if the Alien is a "destroy angel"!!!!
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Jun 5, 2017 19:09
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Has SMG reviewed Covenant yet?
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Jun 5, 2017 20:30
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RedSpider posted:Has SMG reviewed Covenant yet? 
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Jun 5, 2017 20:36
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RedSpider posted:Has SMG reviewed Covenant yet? Nah, he was too impolite in the Star Wars thread.
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Jun 5, 2017 20:40
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CelticPredator posted:No. It's just goopy goop. Aliens make the perfect jelly. The perfect lifeform makes perfect jelly. mmmmmmmmmhm.
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Jun 5, 2017 21:25
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This Jelly talk makes it apparent that the Alien is not some superior nightmare creature, it's just another terrified animal that humans crush and subjugate. It's no more fearsome than a lion or a bear, and as useful as a cow. It got me to thinking about the nature of the alien and I constructed an obvious and dumb thesis Alien is Ridley Scott's racist allegory of black emancipation and how to secure the future for the white race: Alien was produced in 1977, written sometime before that, around the time of the Civil Rights act in America. One of the most common uses of the word alien is to label a foreigner - I propose that Ridley wrote Alien as a racist cautionary tale of letting outsiders in, and giving them the freedoms of whites. The alien is obviously the black man, living in [Africa] as a dormant 'parasite'. A crew of white Americans and Europeans on a humanitarian mission come to rescue people in distress - and while there find the black man in his embryonic state. They take him under their wing, and the 'alien' is transported back to [America] where he suckles thanklessly on the blood, sweat and tears of his host. He revolts in violent fashion from his generous host and, unable to appreciate and enjoy the freedoms he now has, succumbs to his predatory animal-like nature. He preys on the womenfolk and kills the men. This behaviour is reflected in Dillon, the only black character, in his brazen womanising and disrespect for white male authority and values. The only way, Ridley proposes, of resolving the threat of the Alien (repeatedly, in every nearly aliens story) is to blast them out of the airlock, flush them out of the [country]. This has probably been bandied about a bit, but with addition of Prometheus and Covenant, the history of White Supremacy seems to be there in force. Pure white creators, David the Aryan ubermensch and creator god, the succession of immoral black characters. I think the most telling example is when Shaw is impregnated with the black [semen], giving birth to an abomination that must be cut out and aborted. It's all starting to make sense.
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Jun 6, 2017 02:23
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