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MadDogMike posted:Yeah, I have always loved Aliens for taking the logical response to “monster ate people and is now back” by sending a team of trained soldiers in this time... and they STILL wind up in a horror situation despite their best efforts. Really sells your monster if even lacking ignorance and being geared up/prepared for it is not enough to save you. Same. I was old enough to remember the first film (my first R rated movie) and distinctly recall being really jarred watching the sequel when the team pokes their heads up into the drop ceiling. Holy poo poo. Whole different ballgame, baby.
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Aug 8, 2018 01:18
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MadDogMike posted:Yeah, I have always loved Aliens for taking the logical response to “monster ate people and is now back” by sending a team of trained soldiers in this time... and they STILL wind up in a horror situation despite their best efforts. Really sells your monster if even lacking ignorance and being geared up/prepared for it is not enough to save you. One thing I always wondered was why do they call it a bug hunt as if they have experienced fighting some kind of aliens before?
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Aug 8, 2018 02:42
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willie_dee posted:One thing I always wondered was why do they call it a bug hunt as if they have experienced fighting some kind of aliens before? given the "doesn't matter when it's arcturian" line, the impication is that other alien species exist and humanity has encountered them, just that nothing has been as uniquely nasty as the xenomorphs.
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Aug 8, 2018 03:13
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“She claims she saw an alien” “Whoopty fuckin doo! Hey, I’m impressed”
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Aug 8, 2018 03:39
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They're basically East India Company soldiers in space, so they naturally equate 'lesser' people with animals.
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Aug 8, 2018 04:33
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Blood Boils posted:They're basically East India Company soldiers in space, so they naturally equate 'lesser' people with animals. Hudson: Right, right. Someone said "alien", she thought they said illegal alien and signed up!
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Aug 8, 2018 04:57
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In my headcannon arcturian's are just human off-shoots living on a low-g world, or they're foreign enough to be "otherized" by the marines.
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Aug 8, 2018 06:27
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The aliens aren't especially dangerous, except for their acid blood, which is a contrivance invented specifically to explain why don't these people just shoot them. They can`t use guns in Alien because the acid eats through the hull (if they even had any guns). In Aliens, Gorman is incompetent and has Apone take away most of the squad's weapons, sending most of the squad into the alien hive unarmed. It's during that debacle that the majority of the soldiers are killed and their armory is destroyed (the lingering danger for the rest of the film is that they will run out of their few remaining munitions). Again, in Ali3n they never had guns at all. In Covenant they eventually kill the aliens without too much difficulty and they're not even heavily armed or soldiers. Point being, it`s the company that's endangering everyone. The aliens are just like freaky looking space jaguars/axe-murderers or something and Ripley`s belief that they're a threat to the whole world only makes sense in the context of the company somehow weaponizing them. Sinding Johansson fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Aug 8, 2018 |
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Aug 8, 2018 06:32
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Blood Boils posted:They're basically East India Company soldiers in space, so they naturally equate 'lesser' people with animals. Specifically speaking, the marines spend most of their time serving as glorified animal control, while also policing the colonists and colonized peoples. Arcturians are basically both implicitly (and canonically) the aliens from District 9, while ‘xenomorph’ is a kind of scientifically-racist slur term for colonists who have ‘gone native’. The conceit of Aliens is pretty much that your typical metaphorical language is literal in space - especially racist language.
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Aug 8, 2018 07:23
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I don't think that's right.
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Aug 8, 2018 07:33
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Leavemywife posted:I don't think that's right. It is if you account for the last line about metaphorical language being literal in that specific film. So the Arcturians are a species of colonized aliens, which is what District 9 depicts (the tactics of colonization applied to a refugee population), while the titular Aliens are a metaphor for a colonial independence movement (specifically that of Vietnam). Hypothetically, the Arcturians could also be an oppressed human colonial population. At which point, it's worth asking what the difference is, since even if they're an alien lifeform, they're close enough to humans to be sexually attractive. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Aug 8, 2018 |
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Aug 8, 2018 07:59
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:Hudson: Right, right. Someone said "alien", she thought they said illegal alien and signed up! He's referring to Vasquez too, right? Which means in James Cameron's vision of the future where mankind has conquered deep space travel, the US (or the future derivative at least) is still caging brown people and treating them as illegal for simply existing within the borders of the United States (or however far those borders have expanded into space). ruddiger fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Aug 8, 2018 |
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Aug 8, 2018 08:22
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Oh goddamit, there it is. I get to make some progress in Isolation !
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Aug 8, 2018 08:28
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Leavemywife posted:I don't think that's right. A) As one of the few EU things I actually like, Arcturians are described as looking a bit like the Covenant’s ‘protomorphs’ but acting exactly like District 9’s ‘prawns’. B) The word ‘xenomorph’ means that something (or in this case someone) has been given an alien form - alien traits or characteristics. If the monsters were purely aliens, they would be called ‘xenoi’ or something. C) It’s very deliberate that other aliens are referred to in vague expository dialogue but never shown, while the marines don’t actually do any ‘animal control’ stuff. They don’t even wear gloves. This is because the film is not actually about the correct military procedure for approaching literal hostile aliens. It’s about racist troops being sent in to put down a revolt at a mining colony, and the alien-zombie imagery is in service of that. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Aug 8, 2018 |
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Aug 8, 2018 08:28
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I had completely forgotten this was a CD thread.
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Aug 8, 2018 08:39
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
How can they be canonically something from a movie that wouldn't exist for another twenty years? SolarFire2 fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Aug 8, 2018 |
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Aug 8, 2018 09:26
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Edit is not reply, drat it. I'm too old to be doing that.
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Aug 8, 2018 09:28
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Sinding Johansson posted:Point being, it`s the company that's endangering everyone. The aliens are just like freaky looking space jaguars/axe-murderers or something and Ripley`s belief that they're a threat to the whole world only makes sense in the context of the company somehow weaponizing them. I suppose they're a threat to the world in the sense that once a single egg, queen or facehugger has made planetfall you can never be 100% sure they're all gone. An outbreak is never going to be that dangerous in the grand scheme of things but not much fun if you are adjacent. Like cockroaches or stinkbugs that kill you.
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Aug 8, 2018 11:02
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:I suppose they're a threat to the world in the sense that once a single egg, queen or facehugger has made planetfall you can never be 100% sure they're all gone. An outbreak is never going to be that dangerous in the grand scheme of things but not much fun if you are adjacent. Like cockroaches or stinkbugs that kill you. I mean, only as much as any species capable of reproduction. Less so, even, since you can pretty much just count the empty eggs and chest-burst corpses they leave behind. Compared to some of the dumb poo poo mankind has introduced into vulnerable ecosystems this barely registers.
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Aug 8, 2018 11:24
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ruddiger posted:He's referring to Vasquez too, right? Which means in James Cameron's vision of the future where mankind has conquered deep space travel, the US (or the future derivative at least) is still caging brown people and treating them as illegal for simply existing within the borders of the United States (or however far those borders have expanded into space). Aside from the implied sociopoligical context within the world of the movie, the line is an ad-libbed jab at actress Jeanette Goldstein who plays Vasquez, who literally showed up at the script reading for 'Aliens' thinking the movie was about illegal aliens. BiggerBoat posted:I remember being put off Alien Resurrection on PS1 back in the day because back then the dual stick console controls were too much to grasp and master, but watching some Let's Plays of it, it looks ok. I went back and replayed some of it a few months ago, and with the benefit of 15+ years of post-Halo modern console FPS gaming under my belt, Resurrection is laughably easy. It's as if the devs were unaccustomed to their own (again, mandatory) control scheme and dialed back the difficulty in response to QA and playtesters or something like that. Crappy Jack posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdVedBa0-mk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KmwNIdkeZc I get why it got canned in favor of Colonial Marines - everyone loves 'Aliens', Alien FPS games are a proven formula, and Colonial Marines itself was an eagerly-anticipated game resurrected from development hell dating back to the PS2 era. If I were SEGA and I had to choose one game to move forward with, I'd have picked Colonial Marines, too. willie_dee posted:One thing I always wondered was why do they call it a bug hunt as if they have experienced fighting some kind of aliens before? The Marines weren't concerned about the Aliens at first because they'd never faced anything like them - their usual deployments involving invasive species was basically glorified pest control. A big complaint I'd see in the fandom is that 'Aliens' turned the creatures into space-ants and that that killed the mystery and mystique and "other-ness" behind them. I can get that to a degree, a big part of what made 'Alien' scary was that you didn't know what the Alien was capable of, or what it was going to do next, or even what form it might take. 'Aliens' boiling them down to space-ants makes them seem less scary because we know what ants are and we, as audience members, know how to deal with them using a store-bought can of Raid. The thing is, I don't think calling them "space ants" is that much of an insult. Have you seen what ants can do? Ants are loving scary. Existentially, ants operate on a level incomprehensible by the human mind, a borderline-collective willing to sacrifice as many of their own kind to achieve a single-minded goal, with the kind of laser-focus and drive that humanity will never achieve. You look at the poo poo ants can accomplish when they're the size of a grain of rice, and it's pretty loving terrifying to imagine what they'd be like if they were 8 feet tall, bled acid, and had a predilection for capturing their prey alive.
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Aug 8, 2018 12:20
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As I recall, ants technically have as much right to be called Earth's dominant species as we do. By weight, there is as much ant as there is human on Earth.
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Aug 8, 2018 13:46
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Yeah, alright,, put me in the octagon with an ant.
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Aug 8, 2018 13:56
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Xenomrph posted:The thing is, I don't think calling them "space ants" is that much of an insult. Have you seen what ants can do? Ants are loving scary. Existentially, ants operate on a level incomprehensible by the human mind, a borderline-collective willing to sacrifice as many of their own kind to achieve a single-minded goal, with the kind of laser-focus and drive that humanity will never achieve. You look at the poo poo ants can accomplish when they're the size of a grain of rice, and it's pretty loving terrifying to imagine what they'd be like if they were 8 feet tall, bled acid, and had a predilection for capturing their prey alive. I think part of it is that basing them on ants worked so well in Aliens itself and so was imitated so many times across so many forms of media, that for some it seems less impactful than Alien's lone space weirdo. Like them realizing the aliens' behavior is sort of ant-like is a minor revelation in the movie when they're discussing it, but now it's just the expected behavior in pop culture for how any monster that look sort of like the xenomorph works. So I don't think Aliens itself really demystified them that much in the movie itself, just because like three characters kind of figured out how they work before almost the entire cast gets finished off. I agree it makes them more threatening because it's not just a group of lone creatures that are being stumbled into but rather an intelligent network of them working together.
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Aug 8, 2018 14:04
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Dan Didio posted:Yeah, alright,, put me in the octagon with an ant. What about your weight in ants, to make it more fair?
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Aug 8, 2018 14:21
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Guy A. Person posted:What about your weight in ants, to make it more fair?
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Aug 8, 2018 14:30
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Has there been a comic or book where they tried wiping out the Xenos with a man-made plague or disease? Has there ever been a moment where they've been shown to become ill? I can see that going horribly wrong. Instead of killing them, it makes them terrible mutants. Or something. Are there many instances of mutated/genetically modified Xenos?
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Aug 8, 2018 16:26
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Leavemywife posted:Has there been a comic or book where they tried wiping out the Xenos with a man-made plague or disease? Has there ever been a moment where they've been shown to become ill? It wasn't man-made.. I think... But in Labyrinth, they're infected with some kind of nasty fungal disease, that killed them slowly and made them sterile.
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Aug 8, 2018 16:37
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Preston Waters posted:The part in the tunnels at the end where they have no idea where it's at... just as "scary" as the first film. I mean I'm not scared at all by any of them anymore but I sure as heck was as a teenager.  Ok.
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Aug 8, 2018 18:02
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In Aliens, during her brief appearance the Queen negotiates with Ripley, demonstrates that she directly commands the other xenomorphs and grieves for her dead progeny. None of that is analogous to the behavior of ants. Yes the xenomorphs are drones, but in the same way that the colonial marines are (both are even sent on suicide missions by their leaders). SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is because the film is not actually about the correct military procedure for approaching literal hostile aliens. It's about racist troops being sent in to put down a revolt at a mining colony, and the alien-zombie imagery is in service of that. I agree but once they arrive, there's a twist where it turns out that the colonists have actually, 'gone-corporate'. The unleashed repression this time around is that the colonists have been fully subsumed into the modus operandi of the company, which is exactly the value Burke sees in them. The alien-zombie imagery is then the company's, 'better world' seen through They Live's sunglasses.
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Aug 8, 2018 18:25
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Xenomrph posted:Aside from the implied sociopoligical context within the world of the movie, the line is an ad-libbed jab at actress Jeanette Goldstein who plays Vasquez, who literally showed up at the script reading for 'Aliens' thinking the movie was about illegal aliens. I always see the "she showed up to her audition dressed like a latina and everyone laughed" byline get brought up every time Vasquez's role is mentioned, and I was always curious if that factoid was a response to someone asking Cameron why he didn't cast a hispanic person for the role (Vasquez is a named character from the original treatment, so it's not a case of retroactively turning the character hispanic for the sake of Jeanette Goldstein's audition faux paus), or if it was a way of getting in front of it so as to dismiss the most racially charged line of the movie. The quote is attributed to Goldstein from an interview from Starlog in '87, but whenever it's brought up, it only goes so far as the on-set anecdote (she showed up dressed wrong but they loved it so much they recast her into the role) and doesn't get to the root of the situation, the motivation of why a line like that exists in a sci-fi film. First, you have to look at who Cameron chose to deliver the line. Hudson the goofster. "It's a joke bro" is the rallying cry of people posting racially charged memes on social media every day. I wouldn't say Cameron's racist at all, but that leads me to my second point, that he definitely understands the language of racism (and the language of the average soldier) and weaves his movie so as to deflect the racism towards the exo-planet natives/xenomorphs instead of toward other humans (the marines do objectify the Arcturian women, however)... except for this case where it's acknowledged that the future governments still hassle immigrants and gives the most racially charged line to the character who's not only already of disreputable reputation (can't give it to the softball/inspiration coach Apone or any of the other hero characters), but who's also the one known as the "it's just a joke bro" guy.
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Aug 8, 2018 19:06
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ruddiger posted:I always see the "she showed up to her audition dressed like a latina and everyone laughed" byline get brought up every time Vasquez's role is mentioned, and I was always curious if that factoid was a response to someone asking Cameron why he didn't cast a hispanic person for the role (Vasquez is a named character from the original treatment, so it's not a case of retroactively turning the character hispanic for the sake of Jeanette Goldstein's audition faux paus), or if it was a way of getting in front of it so as to dismiss the most racially charged line of the movie. The quote is attributed to Goldstein from an interview from Starlog in '87, but whenever it's brought up, it only goes so far as the on-set anecdote (she showed up dressed wrong but they loved it so much they recast her into the role) and doesn't get to the root of the situation, the motivation of why a line like that exists in a sci-fi film. First, you have to look at who Cameron chose to deliver the line. Hudson the goofster. "It's a joke bro" is the rallying cry of people posting racially charged memes on social media every day. I wouldn't say Cameron's racist at all, but that leads me to my second point, that he definitely understands the language of racism (and the language of the average soldier) and weaves his movie so as to deflect the racism towards the exo-planet natives/xenomorphs instead of toward other humans (the marines do objectify the Arcturian women, however)... except for this case where it's acknowledged that the future governments still hassle immigrants and gives the most racially charged line to the character who's not only already of disreputable reputation (can't give it to the softball/inspiration coach Apone or any of the other hero characters), but who's also the one known as the "it's just a joke bro" guy. I think the ultimate point of the line is that the characters are racist, in service of the theme that's being discussed generally here in the thread.
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Aug 8, 2018 19:53
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Sinding Johansson posted:I agree but once they arrive, there's a twist where it turns out that the colonists have actually, 'gone-corporate'. The unleashed repression this time around is that the colonists have been fully subsumed into the modus operandi of the company, which is exactly the value Burke sees in them. The alien-zombie imagery is then the company's, 'better world' seen through They Live's sunglasses. It’s more that they’re nonspecifically totalitarian. The ‘xenomorphs’ may represent the inner alien essence of the military-industrial complex, but that makes them an obvious threat to Burke. One thing people tend to miss is that, despite the spoiler in the title, no-one besides Ripley expects more than one alien - and Ripley’s talking crazy nonsense about how a single xenomorph could kill six billion people (by, what, walking up to them and eating their brains one at a time?). Burke was expecting to create individual drones to be commanded by the American government. He was not expecting an alien state with its own leader.
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Aug 8, 2018 19:54
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It’s more that they’re nonspecifically totalitarian. The ‘xenomorphs’ may represent the inner alien essence of the military-industrial complex, but that makes them an obvious threat to Burke. Is the link between Ripley's fears about the Aliens reaching Earth and racism directed towards immigrants worth mentioning, or is it not being pointed out because it's really obvious? Likewise, Burke is specifically enamored about the possibility of replacing the marines themselves with the Aliens. No doubt a significant aspect of their 'perfection' is that they don't need to be paid.
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Aug 8, 2018 19:56
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Hodgepodge posted:Is the link between Ripley's fears about the Aliens reaching Earth and racism directed towards immigrants worth mentioning, or is it not being pointed out because it's really obvious? Ripley’s line about the alien reaching Earth is her slipping up and conflating her nightmares with reality.
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Aug 8, 2018 20:05
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I see the line as Cameron's heavy handed way of showing you that these space marines have that same kind of camaraderie that real marines have. They know and trust each other so much that they can make racial jokes without getting offended.
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Aug 8, 2018 20:06
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Xenomrph posted:If it’s fire ants or bullet ants, my money is on the ants. Co sign. Especially if you adjust the ant for weight class. Me against a 160lb ant? I'm done. Ants will gently caress your poo poo up. I'm allergic to them and I hate them. gently caress ants is what I'm saying. mllaneza posted:Oh goddamit, there it is. Um...can you elaborate or something or do you think we're all watching you play this game? Lemme guess? Medical lab?
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Aug 8, 2018 20:32
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Basebf555 posted:I see the line as Cameron's heavy handed way of showing you that these space marines have that same kind of camaraderie that real marines have. They're racist.
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Aug 8, 2018 20:36
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SMG in Alien 1 Parker and Brett have scenes where they talk about deserving better pay for doing extra work does this tie into the notion of the aliens in the sequel being a worker uprising?
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Aug 8, 2018 20:39
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I didn't say it was effective, basically all of the dialogue between the marines leading up to the initial landing is heavy handed or just plain not delivered very well. But that kind of racially charged joke is very common among military units and for a long time it was just regarded as normal banter between teammates. I'm not sure Cameron would've seen that line in the same light in 1985 or whenever the script was written as we do today.
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Aug 8, 2018 20:41
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Basebf555 posted:I didn't say it was effective, basically all of the dialogue between the marines leading up to the initial landing is heavy handed or just plain not delivered very well. But that kind of racially charged joke is very common among military units and for a long time it was just regarded as normal banter between teammates. I'm not sure Cameron would've seen that line in the same light in 1985 or whenever the script was written as we do today. I can't read his mind but it reminds me of him sticking the two prominent weekend warrior looking dudes in the front row seats in Avatar amid all the uniformed folks while Stephen Lang is briefing everyone. There was no "this is just how folks are" moment, but with just them being there and how they look you know they're literally only there because they're excited at the prospect of being able to kill people that aren't them. But when I first saw it it struck me as an inverse of Burke's costuming in Aliens and what it says about how weak and deceptive he is. So I do think even in 1986 there's a reason Hudson gets that line and is also the one who talks the toughest, then immediately cracks as soon as things go bad, and then gets immediately grabbed and dragged away the second he attempts to deliver on his dropship scene ranting. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Aug 8, 2018 |
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Aug 8, 2018 20:46
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