banned from Starbucks posted:

All that would do is even out the attack range advantage marines have over xenos. The marines have the literal blueprints to the building they're defending and still get outmaneuvered. The only reason they arent all instantly killed by the ceiling ambush is because they have magic "bad guys r here" technology.

Ferrinus posted:

The xenos had had the run of the facility for weeks or months; they didn't need blueprints. Enemy marines would not only be able to attack at range, but could also make sophisticated use of the technology and local infrastructure, make more dramatic adjustments to the power system and local computers, scavenge and reuse any vehicles or equipment lost by the protagonists, etc.

It's just a numbers game, really. There were a hundred-odd aliens to like a dozen marines, and the marines maintained an incredible k/d ratio before being finally overrun. But a dozen soldiers don't beat a hundred soldiers.

alf_pogs posted:

Ferrinus, i'm with ya. this was brought up very briefly in the general horror movie thread, but i found the comparison to 'bugs' in Aliens to basically make them less mysterious and way less scary.

like, Bishop cutting open a facehugger and speculating that there's a queen is cool but it would have been great if there was never any queen bug and he's out and out wrong. but by understanding the biology - or at least framing it terms of terrestrial animals that we already have a good base understanding of, then subsequently confirming that's the case - i think their mystery and horror is reduced.

not denyin that the alien queen is some top tier fx puppetry and i love the goopy egg sack and yeah it's a fun rollercoaster of a movie

Darko posted:

Its why she figured out to operate elevators

alf_pogs posted:

Ferrinus, i'm with ya. this was brought up very briefly in the general horror movie thread, but i found the comparison to 'bugs' in Aliens to basically make them less mysterious and way less scary.

like, Bishop cutting open a facehugger and speculating that there's a queen is cool but it would have been great if there was never any queen bug and he's out and out wrong. but by understanding the biology - or at least framing it terms of terrestrial animals that we already have a good base understanding of, then subsequently confirming that's the case - i think their mystery and horror is reduced.

not denyin that the alien queen is some top tier fx puppetry and i love the goopy egg sack and yeah it's a fun rollercoaster of a movie

Xenomrph posted:

https://youtu.be/xKk4Cq56d1Y

sigher posted:

The Queen doesn't operate the elevator, Ripley calls both of them down and the Queen got into the second one. Still smart, but she doesn't press the buttons. When Ripley first takes the elevator down it goes back up automatically (which is why she has to wait for it when escaping with Newt).

alf_pogs posted:

just finished playing through Alien: Isolation for the first time since it originally came out. great game, and honestly one of the better overall Alien media plots.

Xenomrph posted:

https://youtu.be/xKk4Cq56d1Y


To be fair the Queen is meant to serve other, more important purposes than “make them bug-like”, which is part of why the movie specifically has the Aliens do “smart” things and calls attention to them not being “just animals” via dialogue.
The Queen’s symbolic presence is to mirror Ripley’s motherhood motif; the narrative presence is to give her a tangible form of that symbolic motif for her to confront. That and be a final boss monster to fight.

Darko posted:

It's more of a parallel to Ripley leading the marines, in that a female Xeno is leading the xenos.in the same way that Ripley is leading the marines after Gorman gets knocked out. They are never dumb, its just that they will die for the queen in service for the goal.

Ferrinus posted:

I love the alien queen and I don't mind their being bugs, I just don't think we should fool ourselves. There's no amount of stats, superpowers, or weird reproductive mechanisms that you can pile onto a sci-fi alien that will, in and of themselves, make that alien cosmically horrible, "Lovecraftian", or whatever. The Lovecraftian themes come out of context and presentation. Shorn of context, even Lovecraft monsters themselves are these practical, ho-hum mechanisms; a shoggoth is just a construction robot, a mi-go is just a winged guy, etc.

Ferrinus posted:

Bugs that think are called "people". Insofar as the xenomorph is scary, it's scary because of its relation and similarity to us, not its dissimilarity to us.

quote:

What made the Shadow Over Innsmouth scary isn't the fact of fishmen, it's the fact that we are fishmen and fishmen are us.

Xenomrph posted:

She doesn’t operate it in the “push buttons” sense, but she intuits that it’s where she needs to go in order to pursue Ripley despite visually and spatially appearing to be a “dead end”.
Likewise she intuits that she needs to get on the Dropship, and that she can pick up floor grating to get to Newt.

Xenomrph posted:

If it makes a difference to you, the writers of ‘Alien’ specifically cited Lovecraft as an inspiration for the Derelict, Jockey, and Alien itself.

quote:

I think there’s a kernel of truth to this, but I think it’s still missing a vital component. The Alien takes traits from the host, and the degree to which those traits influence the resultant Alien are amorphous and debatable (and that’s kind of the point). But at the same time, it’s right there in the title: Alien. The creature is intended to be unpredictable, ultimately unknowable, unlike anything humanity had encountered before.

quote:

That is a facet of Lovecraftian horror, but not the only one. Notable racist HP Lovecraft was deathly terrified of seemingly incomprehensible “others”, and the “scary” part of Innsmouth is that “others” exist AND that you might be one, and thus different from your fellow “humans”.

Ferrinus posted:

Bugs that think are called "people".

Xenomrph posted:

I’ve found the Alien to be more fascinating than scary

alf_pogs posted:

gediman is that you

Xenomrph posted:

I dunno man, I feel like I had a very different takeaway from ‘Alien’ than you did, and full disclosure I don’t think the Alien is that scary and never did - I saw ‘Alien’ when I was nine and got into the franchise because I thought the 90s toys looked rad, but I’ve found the Alien to be more fascinating than scary. The reasons I’ve felt that way have evolved over the years, sure, as has my appreciation for different reasons why it’s scary for different people.

I will say that the Alien has been its scariest for me when playing Isolation but that’s largely because I find video games scarier than movies, probably something to do with the element of control (or lack of it) and personal immersion.

Basic Chunnel posted:

Xenomrph posted:

I dunno man, I feel like I had a very different takeaway from ‘Alien’ than you did, and full disclosure I don’t think the Alien is that scary and never did - I saw ‘Alien’ when I was nine and got into the franchise because I thought the 90s toys looked rad, but I’ve found the Alien to be more fascinating than scary. The reasons I’ve felt that way have evolved over the years, sure, as has my appreciation for different reasons why it’s scary for different people.

Ferrinus posted:

Oh, me too - I was never scared of the Alien per se, I thought the design was really cool and came to a greater appreciation of the movies' artistry and themes as I became more literate.

It's not cosmic horror as in its ability to scare per se that I'm trying to drill into here, but the assertion that it has some special mystery or unknowability which is lost or diminished by the prequels. In fact, I don't think there was ever such a mystery; since in practice the xenomorph was a (cool-looking, clever) animal, questions as to its origins or evolution were themselves really uninteresting ones with presumably straightforward answers, the classic JJ Abrams "mystery box". You know, like, they evolved on planet XYZ-123, or are the result of a Space Jockey weapons program, or something. These answers wouldn't really "ruin" the xenomorph because they don't really change anything about it in the first place. If I showed up on an alien planet and did some war crimes on them, and the aliens found me really scary and wondered where I came from, I could tell them "earth, the third planet orbiting Sol", but that wouldn't really satisfy them or solve the deeper issues caused by my presence.


We're just apes that think!

BiggerBoat posted:

Well, OK, but I saw the first film when I was 12 and it scared the ever loving poo poo out of me. I'm not sure what not's scary about these weird insect/crab/whateverthefuck things with acid blood trapping people in space with no idea how to defeat it and no weapons or, further, being surrounded by a hundred of those motherfuckers WITH weapons and being totally outnumbered when ONE of them wiped out an entire crew.

I'm hard to pressed to come up with a monster movie that's scarier to be honest.

Ferrinus posted:

In fact, I don't think there was ever such a mystery;

Ferrinus posted:

These answers wouldn't really "ruin" the xenomorph because they don't really change anything about it in the first place.

BiggerBoat posted:

I'm hard to pressed to come up with a monster movie that's scarier to be honest.

Xenomrph posted:

For me it’s less “finding out where the Alien came from” and more the disappointment of what the answer ends up being. It takes the Alien from being this ancient cosmic horror and turns it into a robot’s pet science project that is, at best, a couple decades old.

sigher posted:

But there was for plenty of people, you can't just handwave that.


They actually do, this is why horror works in the first place because a lot is left to the imagination which is scarier than anything you'll see on the screen. A good example is The Thing, people wonder what it's original/true form looks like before assimilating but you never know so it's just weird hosed up amalgamation of poo poo we know but twisted in hosed up ways. Or Black Christmas, never seeing Billy makes him that much more interesting; yes, we all know that it's just an average looking dude through the door crack but not knowing is what gives it impact.

Wondering what's behind the mask tends to be more interesting than what is behind it.

Ferrinus posted:

Prometheus and Covenant actually posit something far more radical and out-there than this: that rather than having specifically evolved anywhere or being created by anyone, the xenomorph is the logical endpoint of all life, such that any kind of accelerated progenerative and evolutionary process will generate it or something like it. Rather than a particular alien species, the xenomorph is a demonic manifestation of the psychosexual menace lurking at the heart of life itself. It's a horror immanent in the very act of reproduction, something swimming in your very genes.

Ferrinus posted:

The answer can only disappoint you if you think that it has some sort of determinative power over the content of the media in the first place. Like, imagine this counterfactual: the movie Alien completely unchanged, except that scientific analysis reveals in the space of a minute or so A) that the Space Jockey craft was indeed native to the planet it was found on, just being the remnant of an ancient civilization that developed on that world and B) the alien eggs had been manufactured by the ship. Entire rest of the movie proceeds apace.

Now we know the origin of the xenomorph: it's the creation of a long-dead alien race. This is probably the most logical conclusion to be drawn from the movie anyway (except that the Space Jockey might have come from a different planet, rather than that one). The next most likely is that the xenomorph is just, you know... an alien creature that evolved on some foreign world and had been harvested by the Jockeys from transport, or perhaps that evolved on the same world as the Jockeys.

quote:

Prometheus and Covenant actually posit something far more radical and out-there than this: that rather than having specifically evolved anywhere or being created by anyone, the xenomorph is the logical endpoint of all life, such that any kind of accelerated progenerative and evolutionary process will generate it or something like it. Rather than a particular alien species, the xenomorph is a demonic manifestation of the psychosexual menace lurking at the heart of life itself. It's a horror immanent in the very act of reproduction, something swimming in your very genes.

quote:

It's quite possible that the specific xenomorphs present on LV-426 were David's pet science project and just a few decades old, because that's how long ago David got his hands on the azoth. But finding fault with this is like complaining that Mephistopheles is just the few-years-old pet science project of Faust.

Xenomrph posted:

When one of the personal appeals of the Alien is that it’s an ancient horror from the stars and god knows where it came from, finding out it’s only a couple decades old kind of takes the wind out of those sails. Part of what makes the Alien scary is that they could be lurking in the dark anywhere, David creating it 20 years before the first movie radically scales back that scope.

Xenomrph posted:

Frankly I’d rather not know either way, but given the scenarios you posited vs what Covenant says, I’ll take your scenario any day.

quote:

Could you elaborate on this? Because I’m not sure how the movies lead to that conclusion.

quote:

When one of the personal appeals of the Alien is that it’s an ancient horror from the stars and god knows where it came from, finding out it’s only a couple decades old kind of takes the wind out of those sails. Part of what makes the Alien scary is that they could be lurking in the dark anywhere, David creating it 20 years before the first movie radically scales back that scope.

alf_pogs posted:

the mural in the giant head room in Prometheus certainly implies that the xenomorph or some similar-lookin mutation was a known quantity well before David

Ferrinus posted:

I should point out that, also, the straightforward mystery you attributed to the xenomorph still remains: where did the black goo come from? Where did engineers get it? Why did they decide to use it the way they did? What changed between the simple, robed Engineer and flying saucer at the beginning of Prometheus and the sinister, biomechanically-augmented Engineers at the end? We just don't know. Hell, maybe the black goo is just the royal-jelly of some kind of ur-xenomorph lurking in an ancient, primal hive at the heart of the cosmos, although I think it makes more sense to understand the stuff as a primordial change-agent which creates xenomorph-like creatures because the xenomorph is the ultimate cosmic expression of the horrifying synthesis of birth and death.

Xenomrph posted:

Those are all mysteries relating to the black goo - and while they are neat mysteries, I wish the capital-A Alien hadn’t been discarded in favor of “other mysteries”. Mysteries of the black goo =/= mysteries of the capital-A Alien in my book.

That’s what I mean about wishing the prequels had been wholly divorced from the Alien movies. If I want to see cool spooky cosmic body horror about mutations, I’d hope my capital-A Aliens in my capital-A Alien titled movie don’t get sidelined in the process.

Durr quote is not edit

alf_pogs posted:

i am definitely in favor of Ridley saying whatever he wants about the thing, but it's always going to frustrate and confound an interpretation of the film if you include external analysis - even if it's from the director.

that said, these contradictions and uncertainties and weird paradoxes add to the fun for me. it's good to get two opposing opinions and find ways of reconciling them (even if only thematically) so i really enjoy the conversation at the moment.

in the most recent watch of Prometheus i enjoyed that it's basically the story of the antichrist: from a baron womb, a long-anticipated godlike entity is born. and hey it's christmas!

Ferrinus posted:

The psychosexual body horror is within you even now! It can emerge at any moment! Reproduction itself begets only disgusting monsters!

alf_pogs posted:

David Cronenberg's Alien

Ferrinus posted:

Also, xenomorph-like creatures are produced spontaneously when the fungi (or something like fungi) that sprout up in the aftermath of that disintegration manage to infect human visitors. An actual xenomorph is produced deliberately by David, who has years and years to play around with the mutagen and the various lifeforms it's created, as well as the human body of Shaw.

Xenomrph posted:

Mysteries of the black goo =/= mysteries of the capital-A Alien in my book.

Ferrinus posted:

It's literally the same mystery. The xenomorph came from somewhere. Where? "Space."

alf_pogs posted:

i am definitely in favor of Ridley saying whatever he wants about the thing, but it's always going to frustrate and confound an interpretation of the film if you include external analysis - even if it's from the director.

sigher posted:

Fo real. When Dallas, Kane and Lambert walk into the Space Jockey's chamber it's powerful, right there we have this giant rear end thing, looks strange but vaguely familiar with humanish arms, a kinda human shaped head and it's sitting in... something. It doesn't do anything, it doesn't need to, it's perfect visual storytelling: "This was once alive somehow, it's dead and you're in the dark as much as the crew." Then we get into the Egg chamber and how the movie keeps changing the problem that the Nostromo deals with to keep you interested and never tells you how or why. The black goo shows up as a couple of vases; the room itself is pretty cool but the vases and goo themselves aren't. The most interesting "mystery" in Prometheus for me was the holograms of Engineers running and the giant corpse pile. What were they escaping from? We're not shown any evidence of anything chasing them, or a containment leak or anything of the sort (from what I remember anyway). Was that ever explained?

Xenomrph posted:

No it isn't? The Alien isn't the Black Goo, it's something the black goo can apparently create given certain circumstances.

sigher posted:

The goo only leads us to the intermediary life form right?

Xenomrph posted:

No it isn't? The Alien isn't the Black Goo, it's something the black goo can apparently create given certain circumstances.

I get that you're positing that they're the same thing, but I simply don't agree, I'm sorry.