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Lord Krangdar posted:Do you ever actually see the human skull inside the alien's dome, in either cut?
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Aug 29, 2021 00:18
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Lord Krangdar posted:Do you ever actually see the human skull inside the alien's dome, in either cut? They painted the carapace pretty dark; that combined with the set lighting made it impossible to see. It’s very visible on the behind-the-scenes shots with different lighting. This is the closest thing to it being visible:  If you zoom in you can see two darker spots that are the eye sockets.
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Aug 29, 2021 00:22
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Neo Rasa posted:Also the meltdown is explicitly caused by the dropship crashing. Nope; the dropship crash worsens the situation, but only because it prevents them from shutting the reactor down remotely: “Why can't we shut it down from here?” “I'm sorry. The crash caused too much damage.” multijoe posted:Duh that's because they've already killed all of the other potential targets before they arrive Give Vasquez a similar two week head-start, and she could take out 2-300 humans. In any case, the point here is to look at what’s going on in the film. What are the characters’ actual goals, and what are they actually doing? For example, it’s typically assumed that the aliens are trying to convert as many humans as possible into drones, but they lose far more of their number than they could possibly gain. It’s more reasonable to conclude that the aliens’ actual goal is the defence of their newly-constructed hive. However, on top of this, the idea that the Queen is ‘in charge’ and directing the drones is a pretty dicey assumption. This fits with the scenes of communication later in the film, but really it could be that there is no sci-fi ‘hive mind’ at all, with the colony structure being an emergent property of the drones’ individual actions. Examining this stuff is crucial, for the same reason that we must ask why the marines don’t bring any kind of N-B-C protective gear - or enough ships to evacuate the colonists.
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Aug 29, 2021 01:30
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Going back to intelligence, I thought the aliens in Resurrection were smarter/craftier because of the cross-contamination between Ripley's clone and the clone queen, similar to how we got the Newborn and Ripley got nascent superpowers
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Aug 29, 2021 01:55
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david_a posted:They painted the carapace pretty dark; that combined with the set lighting made it impossible to see. It’s very visible on the behind-the-scenes shots with different lighting. Thank you!
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Aug 29, 2021 02:14
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:In Aliens, the aliens make no apparent attempt at expanding their territory. They don’t know that this is the only colony, but nonetheless stay concentrated in a single building. (Aside: what are they eating?) Do Aliens care about territory? I don't think so, beyond protecting their nest. I don't think they want to land-grab. It appears that they killed everyone on LV426 except Newt, who is shown as an outlier in that she is a sneaky survivalist type who was already familiar with navigating the vents. Obviously we never see them 'expand' their territory in the films, but it seems that they are very attracted to lifeforms and would probably continuously hunt them down. We don't know if they eat, or need to eat - it seems at the very least that they don't need to eat meat, because the Nostromo Alien gets to be very big in a short time. Maybe those weird vents on its back absorb nutrients from the air? Maybe it can spew acid onto material and break it down into a digestible slurry? They do require living hosts to reproduce though, so I suspect an Earth-Hive to be expansionist in that sense. You seem really fixated on Vasquez loving things up. In the fourth film there are only a handful of aliens and they wipe out basically an entire ship full of armed soldiers with minimal losses - soldiers who are presumably familiar with the Alien because they're keeping a zoo of them. Again, the vast majority of Earth's human population are not supersoldiers like Vasquez - there are old, infirm, children, cowards, obese, etc people who are just going to become new aliens. Aliens can even pop out of animals so presumably billions of livestock and such would provide more numbers. I don't see thousands of aliens storming the beaches of Normandy, but humans would gradually lose ground to them if they didn't wipe out the initial infestations early. It takes 20 years to make a Vasquez - it takes about a day for the Aliens to make a new creature, all of which are dangerous. If we're going by Alien-Movie-Logic then there would almost certainly be some corpo-idiocy that delays or fucks with the military's ability to exterminate the Aliens before it becomes too late. Sweeping massive cities for little eggs and facehuggers seems pretty much impossible. Humans have found it impossible to wipe out rat infestations, so I don't give too much hope to them finding all these rat-sized parasites. Does a random Alien Nobody morph into a Queen? The movies never really say, but probably? Judging by Earth-Bug standards it can happen, and in the movies we never see any Aliens that are more than a few days old really. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Aug 29, 2021 |
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Aug 29, 2021 06:41
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
Vasquez is cool and all, but she kills a couple Aliens and then accidentally kills her best friend in her first encounter with them. In her second encounter she then kills a few more and gets trapped and kills herself. If that's the best we got, then Insert Famous Ash Quote Here. If Vasquez on Earth manages to accidentally blow up some nuclear reactors and vaporize a human city, I don't know if that's really a win. You have a big fixation on kill/death ratio like you're a videogame avatar or something. Outside of the sentry guns, the Aliens don't really lose a lot of numbers wiping out the Marines. We can even argue that the Aliens are smart enough to recognize the sentry guns and avoid them/cut the power after they see them twice. In some Earth-War, do all the Aliens figure this out quick? Do they pass knowledge onto each other with pheremones, like ants? Do they talk? We dunno but judging by the movies they can communicate with each other on some level. I dunno if the Queen is in charge. She seems to have some sort of authority over the lesser Aliens in that she growls at them to back off of Ripley. I suppose it could be both - Aliens will naturally form a Hive, and the Queen is also to be protected. As for the Marines, I have always assumed any sort of disadvantage to their preparation is the fault of Burke in some way. Burke's mission was to cover up his own mistake and somehow get rich. I don't think he had control over the Marine mission but I think he had influence with Gorman that he used to downplay the danger and make it seem like 'just a downed transmitter' until it was too late.
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Aug 29, 2021 06:57
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:In Aliens, the aliens make no apparent attempt at expanding their territory. They don’t know that this is the only colony, but nonetheless stay concentrated in a single building. (Aside: what are they eating?) They probably did, found nothing but lovely terrain, and the Queen ordered them to return and stay where it was warm in the hive. The colony was the only thing on the cold as rear end planet aside from the Engineer ship. Newt does say they mostly come out at night, mostly. Prob when the winds and whatever is raging as the planet is being terraformed are at its lowest. And there were 158 colonists, Newt didn't get facehugged, so there is a max of 157 Aliens in the whole place. Maybe a few more if they have pets/cattle, but we don't see those type of aliens so prob not. So can't take over a world easily with so few. Has anyone done a count of how many aliens are roughly left after all the killing of them?
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Aug 29, 2021 15:09
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Just realized that the Queen in Resurrection is also Ripley.
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Aug 29, 2021 15:53
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I watched Resurrection yesterday its got more weird out of place jokes than I remember. Like the General comically huffing on a faulty breath scanner to open a door. And the alternate cut opens with this shot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwCWzGje8Ds massive spider fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Aug 29, 2021 |
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Aug 29, 2021 16:24
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happyhippy posted:Has anyone done a count of how many aliens are roughly left after all the killing of them? Short answer is I don’t remember any of it. 
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Aug 29, 2021 17:38
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Probably was me asking the same question back then too, as I got some major deja vu when I posted it
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Aug 29, 2021 18:22
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happyhippy posted:Probably was me asking the same question back then too, as I got some major deja vu when I posted it Oh, no, this was on a totally different forum haha
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Aug 29, 2021 19:05
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Vasquez is cool and all, but she kills a couple Aliens and then accidentally kills her best friend in her first encounter with them. This, for me, was one of the biggest bummer moments in the film. I really loved their camaraderie (romance?) and it was over way too soon in a really brutal way. But it also reminds me of something I find frustrating about the movie... why were two SAW gunners hanging out right next to each other? I'm guessing it's just because all their tactics got thrown out the window in a panic when they all began getting picked off. Also, happy Judgment Day. I'm lazy and on mobile but couldn't find a Terminator thread nearby.
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Aug 29, 2021 22:39
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Mr. Grapes! posted:You have a big fixation on kill/death ratio like you're a videogame avatar or something. I’m focussing on “kill/death ratio” to point out the absurdity of the videogame logic. This is part of the overall project of examining audiences’ curious assumptions about this film and others. Like, at the moment, you’re speculating about (1) the aliens being willing and/or able to start an interplanetary war, and that (2) Burke is somehow ‘behind it all’ (albeit in a tentative way, where Burke doesn’t outright manipulate events but instead just subtly influences the marines to send less resources than they need (because...?)). We’ve already gone over how Burke’s plan, such as it is, must have been totally slipshod and developed on-the-fly. It’s borne of desperation as the situation escalates, and large chunks of it make little sense. He wasn’t planning, from the beginning, to sabotage the marines’ ability to fight the aliens. He wasn’t really planning that at any point, because that would be needlessly endangering himself. If Burke had any real influence over the military, then he should have requested a ton of marines and totally routed the aliens. Then he could easily find a way to destroy the evidence of his involvement and/or smuggle an egg out of the derelict at some later point. The military (seemingly) cheaping out on the mission puts Burke at a major disadvantage. So! It’s probably helpful to look at the various factions in play. For starters, against common perceptions, Weyland-Yutani is actually hardly in Aliens at all. They’re effectively providing the neutral background against which the action takes place (which is why Aliens is a less progressive film than its predecessor). There are, implicitly, Weyland-Yutani executives and managers or whatever, but their goal is simply to profit off the “building [of] better worlds” by securing government funding and eventually establishing large-scale mining operations. The point of the atmosphere processor is that it’s presumably cheaper in the long-run than to build a bunch of hermetically-sealed bases. Obviously, the company would prefer if the place doesn’t explode, but they don’t have much more investment in things. When Ripley tells them there’s a stockpile of alien eggs, nobody cares. (As gone over earlier, the alien is worth poo poo compared to the planet’s valuable minerals.) When it comes to the actual mining of the minerals, we have no workers onscreen, and no “Mother” character of any sort. Class tensions have already reached a breaking-point offscreen, and now the film is almost-exclusively devoted to the battle against the monsters, who must be cleared away for Weyland-Yutani to recommence operations. We can look at how Hadley’s Hope stands as a partial regression to the ‘Company Towns’ of the late 1800s/early 1900s - but that’s just riffing on a basic concept that’s not the focus of the film. As Mudede noted of Alien, the emergence of the creatures is a distraction from that far more interesting stuff. (Ripley’s stint as a dock-worker is, likewise, pretty much entirely offscreen.) Far more of the film’s screen-time is devoted to government, e.g. the Colonial Administration and Interstellar Commerce Commission. The crucial detail of the inquest scene is that this particular inquest is exclusively devoted to whether Ripley was correct to detonate the Nostromo. (It turns out, on rewatch, that the government has already investigated the deaths of the crew, and put the blame on Ash, who “malfunctioned.”) Ripley’s stance is that detonating the Nostromo was necessary because she was trying to prevent an alien from destroying the entire Earth. She characterizes government as “the wolves” because they disbelieve her warnings about the alien and send her for psychiatric evaluation. But Ripley actually is genuinely wrong! The alien may have existed, but her rationale for blowing up the ship still makes no sense. (If we go back to the actual events of Alien 1, Ripley’s motivation was to kill both Mother and the alien - but Mother is retconned out of Aliens’ backstory, making Ripley - retroactively - nuts.) So government in the film isn’t particularly bad, but nonspecifically lazy and unmotivated despite its power. Ripley concedes that it’s Weyland-Yutani’s responsibility to investigate the derelict site because, evidently, that’s somehow out of the government’s purview? And the ICC are these real hardasses when it comes to quarantine procedures - unless you just don’t declare stuff. “Do you really think you can get a dangerous organism like that past I.C.C. quarantine?” “How can they impound it if they don't know about it?” At every point, Ripley repeats that the government simply isn’t doing enough about the alien menace. Quarantine procedures need to be tighter. Sacrifices need to be made, etc. When it comes to the marines, the government sends the Sulaco with a skeleton crew. Why? The point here is that you might assume government and Weyland-Yutani are aligned in their objectives, but the government actually cheaps out on securing Hadley’s Hope. I’m honestly still not really sure what to make of the massive, near-empty warship being sent in, but appears to be an overall stance of ‘not our problem’: “this might be US territory or whatever, but Hadley’s Hope is a Weyland-Yutani colony and we’ve already given them enough money. Send in the bare minimum.” And, frankly, this is all kinda useless as commentary. Everybody’s just stupid in a way that’s better suited for a comedy. Burke’s stupid, as noted, and Ripley’s stupid. Even the alien Queen is uneducated. The meaty part of story is really over before it even starts: Weyland-Yutani is doing some exploitative bullshit. Burke is a criminal trying to make a few million dollars, and he ends up killing nearly two hundred people. This was a bad thing to have done, and he regrets it. The end. Epilogue: nothing has really improved, but Ripley has a new daughter now.
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Aug 30, 2021 00:05
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Mister Speaker posted:This, for me, was one of the biggest bummer moments in the film. I really loved their camaraderie (romance?) and it was over way too soon in a really brutal way. Drake and Vazquez were covering the platoons retreat to the APC and Drake was the last active marine outside the APC letting loose with the flamer. Normally they operated in separate fire teams. Just unfortunate that an alien got by the flamer and their guns shoot loving explosive rounds. One thing that always semi annoyed me is the video games not going for it with the explosive tipped rounds.
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Aug 30, 2021 00:17
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AvP Classic did, if you shoot Aliens center-mass they blow apart and spray acid everywhere.
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Aug 30, 2021 01:19
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I’m focussing on “kill/death ratio” to point out the absurdity of the videogame logic. This is part of the overall project of examining audiences’ curious assumptions about this film and others. You're taking a deliberately contrarian view of your own opinion, to poke holes in the videogame logic that I'm not championing? Okay, have at that strawman - he won't fight back. 1. Weird. I'm not speculating about an interplanetary war. I'm just going on the evidence seen in the films that Aliens will aggressively attempt to capture/kill any humans they can reach. I presume they would act no different on Earth. Humans might call it a war. To Aliens it's just sex. If we judge by AVPR (I'm not a fan of the AVP movies really, but they made them) then they clearly do not behave themselves on Earth. Within 2 days they seemingly wipe out most of a town and are able to reproduce in unpredictable ways without a Queen. They're not gonna send a letter to the President declaring war. You have a lot to say about curious assumptions when you can completely misread a post so hard. So, to be clear - you disagree? Aliens on Earth would behave themselves? 2. Burke seems to have some sway with the Marines, otherwise why bring him at all? It's never specifically stated but it seems WY has its finger in a lot of pies and has influence with the Marines. I'm not promoting some vast conspiracy theory. Burke sends the colonists to the ship, they get facehugged, they lose contact. Burke is a weasel, and he wants to both avoid consequences for his own fuckup and somehow come out of this ahead. I'm not gonna quote the script, but he pretty much lays it out to Ripley when he claims he made a bad call and that if she helps him out they can get rich. Burke doesn't command the Marine Corps, but I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that he could get some easily manipulated wuss like Gorman assigned to this. It's not like he's commanding vast armies - he just downplays the situation of 'broken transmitter' to the Marines rather than 'hundreds of hostile creatures' and they send the minimal resources. They don't believe aliens exist at all and don't really give a poo poo about this mission and send some crappy new guy out to see what the WY nerd is whining about on LV426. None of it reads like anyone besides Burke + Ripley believe there are actually aliens on that planet. quote:We’ve already gone over how Burke’s plan, such as it is, must have been totally slipshod and developed on-the-fly. It’s borne of desperation as the situation escalates, and large chunks of it make little sense. He wasn’t planning, from the beginning, to sabotage the marines’ ability to fight the aliens. He wasn’t really planning that at any point, because that would be needlessly endangering himself. quote:
quote:For starters, against common perceptions, Weyland-Yutani is actually hardly in Aliens at all. They’re effectively providing the neutral background against which the action takes place (which is why Aliens is a less progressive film than its predecessor). There are, implicitly, Weyland-Yutani executives and managers or whatever, but their goal is simply to profit off the “building [of] better worlds” by securing government funding and eventually establishing large-scale mining operations. I don't know who you are trying to convince, here? I am aware that People Act Stupid (they always do, in every Alien movie). I don't think that is exactly unrealistic, looking at how real governments and corporations handle scandals and disasters. I am aware that Burke is not some Master Mind King of Weyland, you appear to be rehashing some argument you made with someone else about something else entirely? I don't think the Company or the Government takes Ripley's claim about the Alien seriously at all. They aren't avoiding the profit of harvesting alien eggs - they are refusing to believe they exist in the first place, when the more logical explanation to them is that Ripley Is Crazy or The Android Malfunctioned. None of these people feel personal blame for creating the Nostromo situation because it happened before they were born. It's some ancient history, some lost ship, and wow, the pilot is crazy. Sweep it under the rug, the lawsuits and insurance were settled decades ago so who cares? Burke has spent a lot of time with Ripley, and at least partially believes her story. He sees this as his big chance for profit precisely because the WY execs and Gov't Folk don't believe her - it gives him an opportunity to make a move without some honcho stealing his thunder. He's going with the idea that begging forgiveness is better than asking permission, and if he can somehow make it back to civilization with the find of the century then he'll be rich. I believe his ideal plan is that the colonists manage to do all the work and successfully capture an egg without him ever leaving his office, and he gets some profit or promotion out of smuggling it to Wherever. I don't think a captured Alien is going to revolutionize warfare so much that WY needs to devote all its efforts to obtaining one. But would a captured Alien make some people incredibly rich? Of course it would, especially if humans had never seen a live extraterrestrial creature before. Maybe we can make a new industrial adhesive out of its slimy goo? Maybe to satisfy scientific curiosity? Imagine the merchandising? I don't think an Alien is god's gift to bioweapons, but it could give a lot of money and prestige to certain people, and be of great interest to the scientific community in general. That's reason enough to want one. Burke is taking the initiative to do something risky, stupid, and potentially profitable for his own, rather than the Company's benefit. He's also a complete fuckup. His goal is to get Aliens or eggs into some place where he can extract profit from them, be that Earth or Some Other Populated Place. Ripley contends that it could be apocalyptic if such a thing were to happen. Maybe she's exaggerating due to her trauma? Maybe she's right, in that a single Alien could form a Hive that would wipe out millions of people, or billions of people, or just a few dozen people, but she still doesn't think it's worth the risk. In every Alien movie the Aliens do in fact rapidly wipe out most of the humans in their vicinity, so I'll say the point goes to Ripley on this one. You think that makes her insane, or stupid? I think that an Earth Hive could be very dangerous because the government and corporations are incompetent. You disagree? That these authorities would be very proactive and effective in taking the Alien threat very seriously, when all this Inquest Stuff you talk about shows that quarantine is a joke and they think the Alien either doesn't exist or is no threat at all? I think the videogames and all that make a big deal about turning WY into your standard Evil MegaCorps obsessed with the Alien when in the films they are more of a faceless entity which is just ruthless and uncaring, and the LV 426 incidents are just a product of that culture filtering down to rogue agents who act on their own. For the record, I don't think the Nostromo stuff was some vast conspiracy, more Mother + Ash just weighing the value of a few human lives vs their own curiosity and adherence to Special Order, which I think was more of a toggle that got flipped due to receipt of the signal rather than some pointed plan by some evil guy in a suit. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Aug 30, 2021 |
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Aug 30, 2021 03:53
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:We’ve already gone over how Burke’s plan, such as it is, must have been totally slipshod and developed on-the-fly. It’s borne of desperation as the situation escalates, and large chunks of it make little sense. He wasn’t planning, from the beginning, to sabotage the marines’ ability to fight the Taliban. He wasn’t really planning that at any point, because that would be needlessly endangering himself. Aliens is a response to the US experience in Vietnam, but it is interesting how it prefigures the US experience in Afghanistan in certain ways. Burke doesn't make much sense in a Vietnam movie, but he is easy to imagine as a midlevel DynCorp employee in Afghanistan or Iraq. Weyland-Yutani is literally engaged in a Even the massive warship and AI floating above the battlefield for large parts of the movie is analogous to drones and airpower the US wields. The dominance of US airpower was huge when it was fighting in Vietnam, but it hadn't yet developed into a "over the horizon" capability that it is today. Of course, actually using that air power means wiping out the The US propaganda during the withdraw has emphasized children in big way as well. https://twitter.com/DeptofDefense/status/1430285709999583235?s=20 https://twitter.com/DeptofDefense/status/1430293251031019522?s=20
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Aug 30, 2021 04:57
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Atrocious Joe posted:Aliens is a response to the US experience in Vietnam, but it is interesting how it prefigures the US experience in Afghanistan in certain ways. Burke doesn't make much sense in a Vietnam movie, but he is easy to imagine as a midlevel DynCorp employee in Afghanistan or Iraq. Weyland-Yutani is literally engaged in a This is especially true when he builds up the marine's capabilities to Ripley when he's convincing her to come along. Plan or not to get as much rights to the xenomorph to himself as possible, I never took him to be exaggerating in that scene and that he really just assume the marines would roll down, easily blast any aliens, and then he could do whatever easily after.
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Aug 30, 2021 13:45
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Atrocious Joe posted:The US propaganda during the withdraw has emphasized children in big way as well. Of course it does, hey war sucks rear end but it's inevitable so thank god we're here, kids like you are what this war is all about! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcKzG9LzpTY
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Aug 30, 2021 13:49
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I watched the Alien DC for the first time, and I enjoyed it much more than the theatrical version. That creepy as gently caress space signal, that creepy as gently caress shot of the alien hanging on the chains, and that CREEPY AS gently caress scene with Brett and Dallas turning into eggs were all great additions. Ripley and Parker actually see Brett get abducted before a shower of his blood rains down in this version, too. Also, the 4K remaster of this film owns. It really illustrates just how timeless this movie is. The sets, cinematography, and camera work/direction completely mops the floor with 90% of the poo poo released today. I might just watch the Blade Runner Final Cut today. Maybe Legend DC too. Old school Ridley binge might be turnin on here.
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Aug 30, 2021 20:54
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If you thought the alien transmission in the director’s cut was creepy, check out the one from the original deleted scene (which they should have used instead). https://youtu.be/9UwYJRj2Zao
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Aug 30, 2021 22:23
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MLSM posted:I watched the Alien DC for the first time, and I enjoyed it much more than the theatrical version. That creepy as gently caress space signal, that creepy as gently caress shot of the alien hanging on the chains, and that CREEPY AS gently caress scene with Brett and Dallas turning into eggs were all great additions. Ripley and Parker actually see Brett get abducted before a shower of his blood rains down in this version, too. Also, the 4K remaster of this film owns. It really illustrates just how timeless this movie is. The sets, cinematography, and camera work/direction completely mops the floor with 90% of the poo poo released today. Agreed, I love the director's cut and especially the egg morphing scene.
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Aug 30, 2021 23:44
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Mr. Grapes! posted:1I'm not speculating about an interplanetary war. I'm just going on the evidence seen in the films that Aliens will aggressively attempt to capture/kill any humans they can reach. I presume they would act no different on Earth. [...] The assertion that “they’re not going to behave themselves” is precisely the video-wargame logic I’m talking about, yes. It’s presenting a binary choice between ‘benign’ and ‘apocalyptic’, with the ‘apocalyptic’ choice being backed mainly by references to different films and comicbooks in the franchise - like the Aliens: Earth Hive comic/novel: “Meanwhile, on Earth, Bionational's facility in Lima has been attacked by religious extremists ... The destruction of the facility allows the creatures to escape, and soon outbreaks begin to appear all over the world. ... Billions perish as the carnage spreads across the globe.” Billions dead? That’s pretty bad! What’s being envisioned is effectively a grey goo scenario - except worse, since many are fretting that the creatures could be literally magic and don’t even need to eat. In that way, they will continue growing and spreading beyond the point where resources are totally depleted, exponentially increasing Earth’s mass until it collapses in on itself and forms a white dwarf. The only way to prevent this eventuality is, of course, through immediate brutal elimination of the enemy through unflinching deployment of tactical thermonuclear strikes. And, like, no. Beyond the silliness of the magic assumption (there’s a big difference between ‘not seeing someone eat’ and ‘seeing someone not-eat’), what fans are imagining is a rather-poo poo organism that just immediately renders itself extinct the moment it appears in an environment. As an exercise in speculative biology, this fan interpretation is a big ‘ol failure. In truth, if the aliens were just animals that acted that way, then the more agressive colonies would quickly die out, and the species as a whole would rapidly evolve to be less rapacious. Instead, alien populations would probably just plateau most long after the initial population explosion as a lot of their resources would go into the maintenance of the hive - which they obviously need in order to do stuff like lay and feed the eggs and whatever. They’re tied to a fixed location, which means it’s eventually going to be harder and harder to move resources there. “Ah,” you may be thinking. “But the aliens did not evolve naturally, as they were genetically engineered by David for nefarious purposes! Who’s to say they weren’t purposefully designed to extinguish themselves!” Unfortunately, none of that is in the movie Aliens. (In fact, in Aliens’ superior theatrical cut, the aliens might as well be native to the planet. There are only a couple lines of expository dialogue to the contrary.) And David’s goal is obviously to create a lasting utopia anyways. Things go further out the window when it’s shown that the aliens are reasonably intelligent and have language. The Queen at the end is not driven by hunger or anything, but what appears to be just petty revenge. So are they mindless mechanisms or people? You can’t have it both ways. Also, remember that Aliens is, on the thematic level, about a labour revolt / cult. The leader of the colonists, driven mad in a workplace accident, has amassed these hazardous materials and is using them to drug and convert coworkers and their families to his cause. It’s obviously not great, but such a person does not pose an existential threat to humanity. It’s like watching Captain Phillips or something and getting worried that the drugged-up pirates are going to overtake the world with their advanced khat and motorboat technology. So that’s the issue: there’s all this handwringing over the overwhelming alien menace, when we’re really talking about small colonies of spooky monsters at the margins of human population centres, probably doing less overall harm than heart disease. Likewise, with Burke, we have these sort of “commonsense” assertions that, like, Burke has a lot of sway. But if we get into the specifics of what that actually means, it doesn’t quite resemble your version of events. Burke’s official role in the operation is to act as a representative of the corporation. So, officially, Burke needs to be pushing for as much stuff as possible. For example, Burke makes a deal with the ICC on behalf of the company to secure Ripley as a consultant. The Weyland-Yutani execs want Ripley there, because they actually do believe the alien story now, and they’re worried about their colony. As soon as the transmitter goes down, everybody’s like “oh poo poo”. In that context, how is Burke going to downplay the situation and push for fewer and shittier marines without looking like something’s weird? The character Burke does downplay the risks to is Ripley, for obvious reasons, and the organization he does have some degree of sway over is the ICC. But the stuff about nobody believing the aliens exist, and the marines being stabbed in the back by Weyland-Yutani’s corporate culture, is bunk. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 01:58
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The assertion that “they’re not going to behave themselves” is precisely the video-wargame logic I’m talking about, yes. It’s presenting a binary choice between ‘benign’ and ‘apocalyptic’, with the ‘apocalyptic’ choice being backed mainly by references to different films and comicbooks in the franchise - like the Aliens: Earth Hive comic/novel: Okay, I can assure you I've never read the books and comics and all that. I've played a few of the videogames, but they tend to fall into standard You're A Space Marine In A Spooky Corridor type of thing rather than any apocalypse scenario. quote:
I dunno about magic. At least in the films it seems that they don't need to eat, or that they don't need to eat things we recognize as food. In Alien they assume the thing is the size of a rat when they go hunting for it, but within a few hours it is like 2 meters high. I'm not sure how much time passes but it seems like they wouldn't want to go to bed with that thing running around. So, maybe it's just eating junk, and it is able to use acid to turn it into some edible slurry, or maybe it can absorb nutrients from the air, or I don't really know, but I think the safest assumption is that it doesn't need to eat like we do. The eggs are arguably 'alive' and are able to exist for a seemingly long time either with no nutrients or just absorbing them from the ground/air. I know you love hyperbole but I assume the Aliens mass has an upper limit, and that is the available hosts? Or maybe they will virulently spread eggs to cover every available surface, because who knows what they do? If we factor in Prometheus then it can be arguable that is almost what they are designed for. quote:The only way to prevent this eventuality is, of course, through immediate brutal elimination of the enemy through unflinching deployment of tactical thermonuclear strikes. Okay, what does it eat? It either doesn't need to eat, doesn't need to eat much, or can easily eat stuff we don't normally think of as food. They grow really large really quickly, even without access to a food supply that would conceivably give them such mass. What do they eat in Alien Resurrection beyond their own hosts, if any? I don't know. It's weird you seem fixated on the Alien creature from space (that is maybe bioengineered?) to have a different biology than Earth-life. My theory is that food isn't really an issue for them and they hunt for other reasons (fun? instinct? reproduction?). While your theory is that they'd starve because.... quote:In truth, if the aliens were just animals that acted that way, then the more agressive colonies would quickly die out, and the species as a whole would rapidly evolve to be less rapacious. Instead, alien populations would probably just plateau most long after the initial population explosion as a lot of their resources would go into the maintenance of the hive - which they obviously need in order to do stuff like lay and feed the eggs and whatever. They’re tied to a fixed location, which means it’s eventually going to be harder and harder to move resources there. Even ignoring Prometheus, the original Alien can easily back up the idea that they were bio-engineered. They appear to be transporting these eggs. The ship doesn't appear to be all slimed up like it would be if the Queen was hiding out in there. I prefer the interpretation of 'Who knows?', but it's weird for you go to down this evolutionary route that this rapacious monster needs to somehow fit into an Earth biological niche. Who the hell knows where they came from? Not from LV426. If they ARE from LV426, then it appears that they wiped out all the life on the planet and turned it into a barren rock, or someone else 'nuked it from orbit' to destroy them all? Hmm...... I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but this sort of thing has happened on Earth. New animal species have been introduced to biomes they did not traditionally inhabit. They will often breed and consume so rapidly that they will gently caress up the ecosystem, including their own survival. So, the Aliens land on Earth, wipe everyone out, and then gently caress their own reproductive chances. So, what? They didn't think ahead? It doesn't make it any better for humans that the Aliens can breed themselves into a corner. The same thing happened on LV426. They didn't manage their food/breeding supply, they rapidly killed everyone on the colony except Newt and then if there wasn't a ship full of Marines arriving they'd just sit there and rot. quote:Things go further out the window when it’s shown that the aliens are reasonably intelligent and have language. The Queen at the end is not driven by hunger or anything, but what appears to be just petty revenge. So are they mindless mechanisms or people? You can’t have it both ways. You can absolutely have it both ways? Ripley is an intelligent person, but she is doing something incredibly stupid in going back for Newt. You might even say she is acting on instinct, even though she knows it's a very bad idea. She basically admits this to Bishop. Ripley essentially gets a ton of people killed in Alien 3/4 because she goes back for Newt. quote:
I mean, thematically, Aliens is a Vietnam movie too, and Domino Theory was based on the very idea that if we don't fight them over there then we'll have to fight them somewhere else, and eventually AT HOME!!!!!!!!! I don't know how much of a history buff you are, but small worker revolts have grown into revolutionary movements that brought down empires before, so Real Life Earth Governments have very much taken the view that little worker rebellions are dangerous things. quote:
Yes, it always happens in hermetic spaces. Ripley asserts that if the Alien were allowed to have unlimited space to breed and hunt, it would be far more dangerous than when it is limited by supply of hosts. Would LV426 have been an even more dangerous place if it had 1000 colonists? I'd argue that it would. I think that without major weaponry/training the colony is still gonna get wiped out, and now we have 1000 Aliens instead of 100. You disagree, but you always seem to talk in circles around it. You'd be perfect in the role of some company/gov't exec in an Alien movie. 'Sure, they kill just about everyone they've ever encountered, but it'd probably be fine if there were lots more of them." quote:
Yes, Burke is officially a WY rep. Burke is also shown to be shifty and disloyal. So he can do things as a company rep that benefit himself under the guise of checking all the boxes he's supposed to be checking. The film is unclear about how high up he is or what his specific role is. quote:
Obviously this is all offscreen, for everyone. Neither you nor I have any real knowledge of what goes on in between Ripley's meeting and meeting Gorman for coffee. We know that Burke encouraged colonists to find the Alien (he very specifically does NOT mention the Alien to the colonists, as evidenced in the Colony scene where those guys complain about getting vague instructions). Burke is clearly not working within strict company regulations here, or if he is, then the Company is the kind of Blockbuster Movie Mustache Twirling Umbrella Corp Evil that we both seem to discount. When Burke loses contact with the colony he knows he has hosed Up, so it stands to reason he would downplay the fuckup and go with the transmitter story, rather than Everyone Got Eaten By Aliens Because I Didn't Warn Them About Aliens. quote:The character Burke does downplay the risks to is Ripley, for obvious reasons, and the organization he does have some degree of sway over is the ICC. But the stuff about nobody believing the aliens exist, and the marines being stabbed in the back by Weyland-Yutani’s corporate culture, is bunk. Bunk is a strong word for something that happens 'offscreen' regardless of interpretation. I guess we don't know, really. They seem very dismissive of Ripley. I think WY doesn't really believe in the Alien, because if they did they might want to send more than Burke. My interpretation is that Burke is kind of doing this as a side-project while trying to involve as few people as possible. To that end he tells whatever story to each listener that he thinks will give him advantage: To Company: I'll check out the downed transmitter and ensure WY assets are protected. To Ripley: We're going in to kill these things. These Marines are invincible. To Marines: There's a crazy woman who insists there's a monster, but it's probably just a broken radio tower. We need to check it out, but don't go overboard. Like, if all these people honestly believed Ripley's story about Aliens then you think they might show more interest in it. The WY Gov't guys blow her off. The Marines clearly do not care about her alien briefing, and even Gorman just blows it off like "sure, review her report later guys". You think if this is the military going into its first fight against clearly dangerous creatures they would show a bit more interest. None of them think they are going to encounter a dangerous Alien until they actually arrive and see how hosed the situation is. They straight out poo poo on Ripley's story multiple times. Maybe I watched a different film, but it seems the Marines believed they were there to babysit some dumb colonists and fix a radio and maybe get laid. You, SuperMechaGodzilla, watched the Sulaco scenes and came to the conclusion that ' "The government and company authorities totally believe the Alien story, and have thus sent 12 soldiers led by a spineless newbie, an unhinged popsicle woman, and a nerd in a vest". Now, these are the same authorities you assert would be able to stop the Alien threat on Earth, because of course they believe in it, and when they do, they send proper assets to dispose of it. "Sir, we've got upwards of a hundred vicious murdermonsters hiding in miles of subway tunnels. I'm gonna need 12 guys and a butterbar with zero experience, ASAP!" But really, all this is kind of pointless because you disagree with some basic assertions that I think are backed up by the films. Mainly that: - Aliens are dangerous, and want to breed-kill as many lifeforms as they can get their hands on. - If Aliens were able to set up a Hive or two on Earth, it could soon become a very big problem. - The government and WY's uncaring nature/incompetence would make this a more dangerous situation. Really, I think it'd make a cool movie/show more than doing yet another rehash of the first two films, which I suspect we're gonna be getting for decades. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 04:00
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Leaving circular arguments behind for a moment: Does anyone who is well-versed in the EU content have an answer for: How did the eggs show up in Alien 3? It always bugged me a bit. I've seen the movies and I've played a few of the games, so I'm unaware of the contents of this or that comic or novelization. As far as I can tell: A: Bishop is evil and he did it on his own, or under orders from some rear end in a top hat who wants an Alien. B: The Queen had a few still inside her, and popped em out. But, the eggs appear to be in the 'crew' area of the ship while she was just hanging out in the hangar in between the explosion and her airlock trip. C: They just kind of formed out of spores, maybe given off from the Queen? Alien Covenant at least seems to support this idea, but that's obviously way after Alien 3 came out. It just seems like weird oversight on the filmmakers, but hardly an oversight, since it is literally the opening scene of the film. Like, just filming a facehugger without the eggs would have seemed more plausible, in that one could have crawled on with the Queen or that she laid her egg in the back of the dropship and it wandered over to Ripley and crew during their space journey.
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Aug 31, 2021 07:12
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Quoting myself from the last time the egg question came up:Payndz posted:you just have to shrug and go with Giler and Hill's notorious phrase: "some bullshit happens".
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Aug 31, 2021 08:50
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Leaving circular arguments behind for a moment: The closest I can think of is the animated Blu-ray menus for ‘Alien3’, which include schematics of the dropship and briefly show the egg inside the landing strut. https://youtu.be/_gcInDTisMg When asked about where the egg came from, apparently the producers of the movie literally said, and I quote: “The audience isn’t supposed to ask that.” My guess is that the Queen laid it enroute from the planet to the Sulaco. How it got to the underside of one of the mess hall tables as we see it in Alien3 I’d another matter entirely. It’s a debate that has raged in the fan community for literal decades.
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Aug 31, 2021 09:49
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Egg morphing is my favorite alien idea. It’s so cool. My issue with it in the DC is it messes up the pacing. I wish it took place a bit before but idk. It’s a cool scene tho.
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Aug 31, 2021 10:37
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Mr. Grapes! posted:or maybe it can absorb nutrients from the air, or I don't really know, [...] My interpretation is that Burke is kind of doing this as a side-project while trying to involve as few people as possible. To that end he tells whatever story to each listener that he thinks will give him advantage I like to avoid the point-by-point rebuttal style because the forest tends to get lost in the trees. In this case, we’re jumping from speculation that the aliens are breatharians(!) to stuff like an imagined scene where Burke puts together the whole military operation as a “side project” by somehow being the only source of information for all involved parties. I can point out that Burke obviously wouldn’t be the military’s source for intel (and am now pointing it out, I suppose) - but that’s probably not going to make a dent, when your overall point is a defence of the movie’s politics. The “maybe these animals eat air?” stuff is a means to that end. Like, you’ve pretty much directly stated that the Vietnam War was ‘worth it’ as a means of preventing the possible Soviet takeover of the Earth, and that it could have been won if the American armed forces were simply more competent and cared harder. It’s according to this logic that the aliens possibly never eat or poop. We just can’t risk that possibility! We gotta nuke them! Note: everybody poops. An isolated community supporting over 150 people is certainly going to have supplies to feed those 150 people for an extended period of time.
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Aug 31, 2021 13:08
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CelticPredator posted:Egg morphing is my favorite alien idea. It’s so cool. My issue with it in the DC is it messes up the pacing. I wish it took place a bit before but idk. It’s a cool scene tho. I didn’t feel that it messed up the pacing. You could still hear the sirens and auto-destruct countdown during the whole scene.
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Aug 31, 2021 17:10
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MLSM posted:I didn’t feel that it messed up the pacing. You could still hear the sirens and auto-destruct countdown during the whole scene. Interestingly in the 4K cut it's gone and they even made the final escape very slightly shorter - Most all of the shots are the same but some slightly different takes are used where Ripley is moving/navigating stuff faster form shot to shot. Fortunately it does keep the other director's cut additions like Ripley being more present/active in the first act and Ripley/Parker arriving as Brett is being pulled away and the blood coming down. I agree, I don't think it hurt the pacing at all. I can see on paper why like "yeah she stops running for a minute" sounds like it would but it really didn't at all to me, such a great scene. One of my favorite parts of Dead Space was them sort of ripping off the visual of it for the dudes that were mutated to sabotage the atmosphere stuff on the station and how in pain they sound when you kill them so the air is working again. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 17:21
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Not directly Alien related but holy gently caress the look of this thing https://twitter.com/LiberatedLabor/status/1431073519870234625
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Aug 31, 2021 18:04
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Neo Rasa posted:Interestingly in the 4K cut it's gone I watched the DC in 4K and it’s still there.  I forgot to mention the alien smashes the box with the cat inside (in the DC) instead of just looking at it.
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Aug 31, 2021 19:19
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MLSM posted:I watched the DC in 4K and it’s still there. Feel like I'm crazy or my Plex account may have hilariously mislabeled something  I believe youEDIT Plex was having a real one all this time and calling the theatrical cut the 4K cut on my server lmao Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 20:43
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Neo Rasa posted:Not directly Alien related but holy gently caress the look of this thing 
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Aug 31, 2021 23:10
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The many Aliens spinoff books, ranked by their twists on the mythology I haven't read any of these but you jerks might enjoy the list.
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Sep 1, 2021 01:28
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Apparently there's some post-Covenant AvP comics where an android gets injected with the black goo and morphs into basically a superhero that alternately commands and beats up multiple aliens and predators.
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Sep 1, 2021 01:32
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Ferrinus posted:Apparently there's some post-Covenant AvP comics where an android gets injected with the black goo and morphs into basically a superhero that alternately commands and beats up multiple aliens and predators. You’re thinking of the Fire & Stone comics that came out after Prometheus, he’s not quite an android and is a bit closer to a Blade Runner style biological replicant. I don’t remember him commanding any Predators, but there is a Predator that gets all black goo’d and gets real hosed up, it’s pretty wild.
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Sep 1, 2021 01:48
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