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Mr. Grapes! posted:Is this screenwriting trickery? Or are the Alien movies trying to tell us that humans through greed/malice/hubris/curiosity will always provide the Alien an opening to gently caress us up? Like, the reason an Earth Hive would get uncontrollable isn't because we lack enough tanks and artillery - it's because some jackass in a labcoat or army uniform is going to neglect to take them seriously or try to take them alive or do some other dangerous thing that leads to the Alien getting an advantage. It's the second one. That's the point! The alien isn't insuperably potent and doesn't constitute an unstoppable bioweapon or world-ending threat. Its strengths are really our weaknesses. It gets the better of us because it's just an idealized form of the social relation we've already trapped ourselves in.
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Sep 5, 2021 08:26
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Ferrinus posted:It's the second one.
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Sep 5, 2021 09:00
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The Alien films are a tactical assessment of humanity's ability to deal with xenomorphs, with a bunch of fruity weird references to 'the psychosexual', which are non-canon and can be ignored
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Sep 5, 2021 09:48
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Hbomberguy posted:The Alien films are a tactical assessment of humanity's ability to deal with xenomorphs, with a bunch of fruity weird references to 'the psychosexual', which are non-canon and can be ignored The scene where David teaches Walter how to play the flute is important because it demonstrates that David wishes to unlock Walter's creative capacities. The line about "blowing" and "fingering" is a pun which injects some welcome humor to the moment. This demonstrates the use of the following literary devices:
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Sep 5, 2021 11:28
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In the movie Aliens, Ripley has a fantasy that she carries a magic demon inside her and that it will consume the Earth if she ever goes home. This is the dream sequence at the start of the film, her recurring dreams afterward, and her weird outburst in front of the inquest. The alien in the dream always stretches at her skin, but never actually emerges. She’s afraid that it will. The story of Aliens is then Ripley gathering the courage to return home by defeating her metaphorical demon. The actually-existing aliens are fairly irrelevant here, except that the killing of them happens to make Ripley feel better. They never posed a threat to Earth. What we’ve seen subsequently, in this thread, are just various increasingly-convoluted attempts to collapse plot and narrative together and ultimately ‘prove’ Ripley’s fantasies true. This is where the hyper-politics kick in, as Ripley’s fantasies (of a perfect family, a cleansed Earth, etc.) are really downright reactionary. “They’re demons!!!” And that is what’s led to a little speculation on my part: I believe that the people pushing the ‘supernatural demon’ narrative are lying. Again. I do not buy that forums poster Xenomorph simultaneously believes the aliens are blessed with supernatural luck-powers by yet another invisible offscreen character, and also that they were frozen on a barren rock for millions of years - then immolated. He hadn’t thought this through at all, because making sense was never the point. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 5, 2021 14:38
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I don't think anyone in CineD needs to be 'lying' to talk utter poo poo.
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Sep 5, 2021 17:18
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I wonder about the ways in which the when and how of your first encounter with a creative work shapes your perspective of it, especially these 70s and 80s sci-fi-action movies that are also working with, like, social realism or power politics. Like, for me, Star Wars was a big part of my effective introduction to concepts of imperialism and struggle against it; tortured and estranged familial relationships, all kinds of little invocations of big, complex topics and themes. I was acting out the stages of the Luke/Vader relationship on the playground far before I could understand it or had any frame of reference--"he's his dad but... they fight? but they still also love each other? Why isn't anyone stopping the empire from hurting the rebels? Can't the teacher see how mean they're being?" etc. now this totally reveals my privilege as well, haha, and is a lower-down example than the employer/employee relationships and vagaries of capitalism that are at issue here, but gets at what I'm talking about--if I had emotionally fixated on that early, naive impression, identified that bewilderment as being a core proper part of what Star Wars is, then maybe i'm not in a place to synthesize a more complex understanding of the world with my appreciation of Star Wars. Instead of coming back and realizing, "Ah, it was about this all along! I understand what was being gestured towards now!" retreating into, "Well this *feels* different from what Star Wars means to me; Star Wars must be its own essentialist thing-unto-itself not meant to speak to real life experience--just a movie."
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Sep 5, 2021 19:49
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I think that is inevitable with a lot of media you fall in love with as a child. I can even understand those people who argue that the alien design has no sexual elements whatsoever, no sir, because nothing like that was on their minds when they first saw it as a kid. It can take some real effort to rewatch heavily nostalgic stuff through a different lens.
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Sep 5, 2021 20:01
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When looking back at my introduction to the Alien series, I had a similar experience. I first learned about the Alien movies when I was 9 - some friend on the school bus told me about them and the creatures sounded rad as hell, and then I saw the Kenner toys in stores and my suspicions were confirmed: they did in fact look rad as hell. I begged my mom to buy an Alien toy for me, and I picked out the Snake Alien - I specifically picked it because my mom is afraid of snakes. So I begged my mom to rent ‘Alien’ for me and for some reason she did it, and I was instantly hooked. The Alien was rad as hell, and I convinced my parents to buy me all of the Aliens toys and let me see the other movies in the series up to that point (Alien3 was just coming out for rental). I totally immersed myself and it only got worse from there, but the main draw was always the creature - what it looked like, what it could do, stuff like that. The thing is, since I’d gotten the Alien as a toy (and saw a ton of different other Alien toys in stores) before I even saw the first movie, I’d already had the opportunity to familiarize myself with the Alien and what it looked like. I had a little plastic representation of it in my hands that I could touch and manipulate and trigger its action features and have fights with my other toys - the Alien was entirely interesting to me because it Looked Cool. The byproduct of this was that the Alien was never scary for me. Couple that with me being a 9-year-old, and all of the crazy psycho-sexual rape imagery and literally all of the other themes and motifs like evil corporations and class struggles and the Vietnam War and motherhood and everything else all went entirely over my head. They just didn’t even register - the movies were cool because the Aliens were cool, full stop. It took me a loooooooong time to recognize and appreciate the thematic elements at play in the movies, and things like “why” stuff was happening on a filmmaking level or the craftsmanship that went into the filmmaking process like set design, acting, special effects, etc; it took well into adulthood and much longer than it probably should have. A lot of that still lingers in my appreciation of the movies. I still love the design of the Alien, it still Looks Cool. I’m still interested in what it can do and how it looks, and it’ll never be “just a space panther” for me. I still have all the old toys (and a bunch of the new ones), and I still like being able to touch and examine them from every angle. And the Alien creature still isn’t scary for me - it never was. I get why it’s scary for other people, it’s just a facet of the movies that never landed for me (and that’s probably unfortunate). Anyway thanks for listening to my TED Talk. https://youtu.be/E4SSU29Arj0
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Sep 5, 2021 20:30
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Hbomberguy posted:The Alien films are a tactical assessment of humanity's ability to deal with xenomorphs, with a bunch of fruity weird references to 'the psychosexual', which are non-canon and can be ignored  Yeah, yeah, everyone wants to gently caress the alien, that's not really up for debate. The question is how this arises from the ratio of surplus value to variable capital.
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Sep 5, 2021 20:32
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All xenomorphs are literal dickheads.
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Sep 5, 2021 21:01
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Ferrinus posted:
That reminds me of a short SF story I read decades ago, where a lone alien arrives on Earth to warn humanity about the way the wider galaxy works; there are species that are rapists, and species that are rapees, and that's that - and by the way, you're about to have a lot of visitors. The politicians and generals all puff themselves up and go "Well, we'll be fine, it's obvious which we are." Then the alien tells them... nope.
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Sep 5, 2021 21:08
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I first watched Alien in high school in history class at the end of the year when the teacher didn't want to do anything. He had us suggest and vote on movies. I suggested Blazing Saddles which got declined for being R rated, and I can't remember what movie actually got picked. The next day he was like "I couldn't find the movie at home so here's my favorite movie: Alien"
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Sep 5, 2021 22:02
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Roth posted:I first watched Alien in high school in history class at the end of the year when the teacher didn't want to do anything. This happened at my school too but we got loving Mission to Mars.
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Sep 5, 2021 23:45
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banned from Starbucks posted:This happened at my school too but we got loving Mission to Mars. I saw that in theaters and the dude getting torn apart in the tornado freaked me out
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Sep 5, 2021 23:50
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I went on a "light" wiki-hole dive recently because of the new Aliens: Fireteam Elite game, and I came across an interesting tidbit. The reason the Xenomorphs don't need to eat is because their blood is literally battery acid. This is an expanded universe type of explanation but it makes as much sense as a sword with a laser blade that stops after three feet.
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Sep 6, 2021 00:16
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:I went on a "light" wiki-hole dive recently because of the new Aliens: Fireteam Elite game, and I came across an interesting tidbit. 
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Sep 6, 2021 00:22
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I think someone mentioned upthread that in the novelization of the first film, the creature raids the Nostromo's ration supply.
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Sep 6, 2021 00:32
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:The reason the Xenomorphs don't need to eat is because their blood is literally battery acid. That's a nice enough as a metaphor, but it's not at all how batteries work. Saying that "the alien's blood is made of battery acid" is basically just saying "it stores a lot of chemical potential energy in its body, which it can convert into electrical energy (to power its muscles or something)". That doesn't at all address the issue of where the chemicals and/or energy came from in the first place, and instead only raises stranger questions - like why this involves a dang circulatory system. It's like saying they don't need to eat because their lymphatic system is full of gasoline. How did that happen? Remember: everybody poops, and poop comes from food. Regarde Aduck posted:I don't think anyone in CineD needs to be 'lying' to talk utter poo poo. They don't need to, but it's discernible in the recurring pattern. You can already brace yourself for a "maybe the laws of physics work differently in the alien universe???" Pages of quantum woo deployed to 'just enjoy the shooty movie'.
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Sep 6, 2021 01:48
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I've recently watched the entire alien trilogy again so wanted to check out the thread. There's some uh, interesting, discussions going on! In my Alien watch through I think I appreciated the movie more than ever because despite failing to follow quarantine for obvious corporate greed reasons, once the alien was loose on the ship the people seemed to be genuinely doing their best to kill or get rid of it. The Alien felt extremely alien and powerful, it's abilities unknown, it's motivations unknown, everything about it was a total terrifying unknown. I've always loved Aliens but for some reason my love for it dropped a down a few pegs on this recent watch. This extremely mysterious star beast had the mystery lifted and it turns out they're just space termites or something. Crafty and dangerous for sure, but just a hoard of mundane beasts following their natural and mundane life cycle. The maines had more than enough firepower to deal with them, the aliens only became a threat after a series of extremely unlucky events and some bone headed leadership. Alien 3 (assembly cut) I think did a decent enough job of making the alien a true threat again, but had to once again disarm everyone to achieve that. There's always two ways to look at topics like this. Stan Lee made an extremely good point that this is all fiction so "who would win" is entirely up to the author. If someone wanted to write a story about the aliens wiping out earth even with us doing everything right, they'd write that story. If they wanted to write a story about humans easily dealing with the aliens, they'd write that. Both stories could be easily written without contradicting any established lore and could be interesting if well crafted. The other way of looking at fictional universes is to strictly go by what's been shown and attempting to extrapolate from there using only in-universe text. To treat the media not as fiction but as an objective window into some alternative universe totally divorced from the authors. Under that exact lens, yeah, the aliens aren't that huge of a threat without some Gibson Alien 3 script style ramping up of their threat level. But the alien universe is not a real setting, there are no objective or correct answers to what-if situations because the universe can not tell stories without an author to write them. Even the person trying to objectively extrapolate answers from purely "canon" material is still forced to make some assumptions, fill in some blanks, and become an author of their own fan fiction. Neither of these ways of thinking about media is wrong though, it should all just be fun what-if questions not a weird heated hyper-political argument.
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Sep 6, 2021 02:24
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With Aliens the Vietnam allegory is pretty heavy-handed. While the Marines would mop the floor with the aliens in a fight on the Marine's terms, there's basically no reason to think the Marines could ever compel the aliens to fight on their terms.
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Sep 6, 2021 03:41
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Baronjutter posted:There's always two ways to look at topics like this. Stan Lee made an extremely good point that this is all fiction so "who would win" is entirely up to the author. If someone wanted to write a story about the aliens wiping out earth even with us doing everything right, they'd write that story. If they wanted to write a story about humans easily dealing with the aliens, they'd write that. Both stories could be easily written without contradicting any established lore and could be interesting if well crafted. This is wrong because it's bad logic: the claim is that the events in film narratives are dramatic, therefore there are diegetic 'laws of dramaturgy' that govern the events in films. This false because it ignores that the events in a given film's plot are not limited to what happens onscreen. The backstory of Alien is that the characters have been asleep for ten months, for example. Half the film is about contract negotiations, and then we end with Ripley either drifting through space for additional years, or 'getting picked up by the network'. Aliens, as we've thoroughly established, takes place over the course of several months. Ripley spends three weeks asleep, then the film ends with Ripley falling asleep for an additional three weeks. Six weeks of sleep. The second mistake is in all this talk of "winning". Ok, so Ripley kills the alien queen. Has she 'won'? What was the contest? "Luck" and "winning" are the sort of things that are entirely relative. If I have a free chicken dinner, that's lucky for me and unlucky for the chicken. Whether it's lucky for the restaurant is ambiguous. The point of Stan Lee's statement is that the ideas in a film are what matter. If we change the ending of Alien so that the alien survives in the shuttle instead of Ripley, this doesn't make capitalism suddenly good. The characters still stand for the same ideas. Baronjutter posted:The other way of looking at fictional universes is to strictly go by what's been shown and attempting to extrapolate from there using only in-universe text. To treat the media not as fiction but as an objective window into some alternative universe totally divorced from the authors. This is also wrong, because Aliens - for example - is obviously not an "objective" depiction of events. There's a dream sequence! Reading the film text properly entails recognizing that we see things largely - but not entirely - from the perspective of the Ripley character. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Sep 6, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 04:14
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Baronjutter posted:Neither of these ways of thinking about media is wrong though, it should all just be fun what-if questions not a weird heated hyper-political argument. Nah you’re entirely on-point.
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Sep 6, 2021 04:20
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The third option is film literacy.
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Sep 6, 2021 04:21
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Baronjutter posted:In my Alien watch through I think I appreciated the movie more than ever because despite failing to follow quarantine for obvious corporate greed reasons, once the alien was loose on the ship the people seemed to be genuinely doing their best to kill or get rid of it. The Alien felt extremely alien and powerful, it's abilities unknown, it's motivations unknown, everything about it was a total terrifying unknown. I've always loved Aliens but for some reason my love for it dropped a down a few pegs on this recent watch. This extremely mysterious star beast had the mystery lifted and it turns out they're just space termites or something. Crafty and dangerous for sure, but just a hoard of mundane beasts following their natural and mundane life cycle. Normally I'd agree with you. But all the discussion here about how Ripley reacts to the aliens compared to their actual capabilities has made me rethink that a little. If the first film has the alien represent the unknown, or something that should not exist, in the second film it represents Ripley's PTSD and survivor's guilt. So there is still that psychological, nightmarish layer there in a different way.
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Sep 6, 2021 04:43
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
Okay, this will probably be my last reply. You seem more interested in derails than speaking about the topic. Maybe you'll surprise me and make a post where you just respond to things I say, instead of spinning out wild stories to make relatively simple claims sound ridiculous. Probably not. I'll spare the rest of the forum this nonsense. Do you really think there is a difference biologically between a Marine and Dallas? I know you're trying to do Your Thing, but it's pretty tired and boring. In the movie the Alien is capable of turning a human into an egg-like thing without a Queen. The fact that it's not a Marine, but instead a ship captain, is worthy of arguing about? Like if it happened to a Marine, you'd be cool with all the eggomorphing? If the alien barfed some embryos into a Marine instead of a pregnant lady it'd be better? If the fungal spores got into a Marine's ear instead of some random colonist guy it would now be more true? I get it. Aliens is arguably the best one. When I was younger I used to be all weird about it and declare only the first two films as 'valid' but now I don't really care. There is something to like in all of the films, for me at least, even if they aren't as good as the originals. I am happy for them to make more entries in the future, ridiculous as that may be, because the other ones still remain and aren't going anywhere. I've said before that I am speculating about the TV show, and the Alien in general, not the Alien as it appears in one singular film. I think the franchise as a whole shows us that the Aliens can appear in very different looking forms. I think this is a strength of the franchise, in that showing the Aliens to be a virulent strain of life that mutates and adapts and comes out twisted and different every time can lead to a more interesting series than doing retreads of Aliens over and over. In conclusion, Aliens shows the complete Alien lifecycle, and gives us definitive answers on how they eat, grow, and breed. All other Alien films in which the Alien very obviously behaves differently are invalid. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Sep 6, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 05:14
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I think the franchise as a whole shows us that the Aliens can appear in very different looking forms. The franchise does not show that, because “the franchise” is just a legal fiction. What you are actually saying is that you like seeing how different filmmakers employ Giger-ish imagery. And that’s valid, because each one has a fairly unique take! But you are then attributing those variations to Disney-Fox and trying to explain them in terms of canon. You like the franchise because Disney-Fox is showing us THE alien, and THE alien is capable of anything and everything. Each new film reveals more and more zany abilities that THE alien ‘always had.’ And that’s false. There’s actually no particular reason to believe that the creatures in Aliens are capable of doing the same stuff as the creature in Alien: The Director’s Cut. Or vice-versa. There are pretty big differences in not only appearance but behaviour.
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Sep 6, 2021 06:34
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SMG is right and that's why it's difficult to reconcile the qualities of the Ridley Scott 'the alien is a bioweapon' Alien with Cameron's 'it's a hive creature' Aliens. Incidentally I think the 'it's a bioweapon' version provides the neatest answer to 'how does it eat?' - it doesn't. The egg is like a seed and is produced through means unknown (maybe even factory line manufactured) with all of the biofuel the Alien needs for its lifetime already there. Incubating in a host is like planting a seed in soil and it activates the process of 'unlocking' that fuel energy. The Alien doesn't eat because it is designed to go on a murder rampage and then die.
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Sep 6, 2021 11:35
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Alchenar posted:SMG is right and that's why it's difficult to reconcile the qualities of the Ridley Scott 'the alien is a bioweapon' Alien with Cameron's 'it's a hive creature' Aliens. Trying to understand and explain stuff is human nature, finding a creature that says “gently caress your ‘science’” is at best humbling because it shows how little we know and understand about the universe (if one subscribes to Neil Degrasse Tyson’s belief that given enough time and study, humankind can eventually understand and explain anything), and at worst it’s existentially scary because it demonstrates that maybe there are limitations to our own minds because there are things that we, as humans, cannot “explain” given the limitations of our “humanity” (be they biological, psychological, some combination of both). In short, sometimes Aliens do Weird poo poo. https://youtu.be/ItkvuJJ5VFE
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Sep 6, 2021 13:20
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Alchenar posted:SMG is right and that's why it's difficult to reconcile the qualities of the Ridley Scott 'the alien is a bioweapon' Alien with Cameron's 'it's a hive creature' Aliens. *Or can't, depending. Which raises the question: what are the 'true' versions of each film? Always theatrical (no egg-morphing, no sentry guns, dog-burster, never reach Earth)? Director's/Extended (egg-morphing, sentry guns, ox-burster, ruined Paris)? Or does the viewer get to play Choose Your Own Adventure with eight possible routes through the series?
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Sep 6, 2021 13:22
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Payndz posted:*Or can't, depending. Which raises the question: what are the 'true' versions of each film? Always theatrical (no egg-morphing, no sentry guns, dog-burster, never reach Earth)? Director's/Extended (egg-morphing, sentry guns, ox-burster, ruined Paris)? Or does the viewer get to play Choose Your Own Adventure with eight possible routes through the series? I’m of the opinion that viewers should decide for themselves, which gets especially interesting when you’ve got mutually-exclusive versions of the movie like Alien3. Some EU stuff like the RPG and the Weyland-Yutani Report have lampshaded it by saying “there are rumors that the Alien came out of a dog or an ox, we don’t know which are true.”
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Sep 6, 2021 13:41
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Alchenar posted:Incidentally I think the 'it's a bioweapon' version provides the neatest answer to 'how does it eat?' - it doesn't. The egg is like a seed and is produced through means unknown (maybe even factory line manufactured) with all of the biofuel the Alien needs for its lifetime already there. Incubating in a host is like planting a seed in soil and it activates the process of 'unlocking' that fuel energy. The Alien doesn't eat because it is designed to go on a murder rampage and then die. Well, what you’re asserting there is that the “face-hugger” implants a tiny but absurdly powerful battery. Like, Star Trek “thousands of thermonuclear bombs” powerful. That’s certainly one solution to the ‘problem’ of how the creature eats, but we already have a better idea of how the creature eats: it has two mouths, which it uses to bite stuff. As noted earlier, “does it eat” isn’t an actual question. “The alien doesn’t eat” is just a fan-theory based on the IMDb trivia that the alien isn’t shown explicitly feeding until Alien 3. But Jones the cat isn’t shown explicitly making GBS threads in a litter-box either. Does Jones the cat eat? Does Ash have a power source? Does the Nostromo need fuel? Yes, of course they do. It’s simply implicit. Here’s a line from Ash: “It's adapted well to our atmosphere, considering its nutritional needs.” Ash is talking about how the alien breathes here, but the basic concept of Alien 1 is that the creature has “nutritional needs” and fulfills them by altering its biology. It needs to breathe, so it adapts itself to the ship’s oxygen/nitrogen mix. It needs to eat, so it adapts itself to stomach whatever’s remotely edible. “How can we drive it?” This is the entire point of the scene. The characters are trying to figure out if they can suffocate the alien, starve it, etc. Ash says it will be difficult because the creature is so adaptable. To be clear, it is not at all expected for films to be precise physics simulations, because they simply aren’t. You can handwave the eating process because it’s all offscreen and not very important to the narrative. Yeah, maybe it eats rocks. But when you start talking specifically about physics, speculating about physics, that’s a whole other ball game. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Sep 6, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 13:59
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I mostly agree with you, with the quibble that I think you have confused adaptation with needs there. Ash isn't implying that the creature adapts its needs to the environment, I think the more likely interpretation of what he is saying is that its nutritional needs are fixed and it's ability to function with those needs only partially fulfilled is what is exceptional. It's not changing what it breathes or can eat, it's a suped-up version of what happens to a person's lung capacity when they spend a year living on a mountaintop.
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Sep 6, 2021 14:16
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Alchenar posted:It's not changing what it breathes or can eat, it's a suped-up version of what happens to a person's lung capacity when they spend a year living on a mountaintop. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. When we’re talking about adaptation, we can say that it adapts itself to breathe different chemicals (like a fish adapting to breathe air instead of water), and/or that it adapts itself to simply function on less oxygen. Either way, it amounts to the same thing. The difference is only relevant if you were striving to calculate its peak efficiency or something.
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Sep 6, 2021 15:04
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It's entirely possible that the alien on the Nostromo was able to grow to full size because Ash himself snuck down into the lower decks and made sure to leave some food stores unlocked or something.
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Sep 6, 2021 16:26
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:As noted earlier, “does it eat” isn’t an actual question. “The alien doesn’t eat” is just a fan-theory based on the IMDb trivia that the alien isn’t shown explicitly feeding until Alien 3. But Jones the cat isn’t shown explicitly making GBS threads in a litter-box either. Does Jones the cat eat? Does Ash have a power source? Does the Nostromo need fuel? Yes, of course they do. It’s simply implicit. A cat has to be taught how to use a litter-box, though. Kittens are kept with their mothers and siblings for, ideally, around 14 weeks for proper development of skills. The alien in the first film is born alone, with no others of its species to teach it how to function. Throughout the entire film its basically a feral infant. With that in mind, its behavior is less like a predatory animal seeking food and more like a confused and lonely animal lashing out. For much of the film it doesn't even seem that motivated to hurt the human characters, or Jones. Like at the end when it curls up in the escape pod, Ripley understandably freaks out but the alien is not necessarily even interested in her at that point.
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Sep 6, 2021 16:44
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Xenomrph posted:I don’t see it as particularly difficult to reconcile the Alien across different movies - it’s a weird extraterrestrial creature we aren’t meant to fully “understand”, and that’s kind of the point. This is just restating the fact that we can't reconcile the xenomorph across different movies as an intentional positive. This is a fair framing, but our understanding of the creature getting less consistent the more movies we include does mean we're not reconciling the presentations, even if that's a good thing from a storytelling perspective. Lord Krangdar posted:A cat has to be taught how to use a litter-box, though. Nah. My two cats were brought in from under some bushes at 4-5 weeks after they lost their mother, having never been indoors, and when given a room with a litter box in it figured out immediately that it was the most convenient place to go.
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Sep 6, 2021 17:13
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I definitely think we can reconcile the xenomorph across two or four or even six movies if we really want to (though it's also fruitful to examine the movies in isolation), and it doesn't require ascribing luck powers or an internal perpetual motion engine or anything like that.
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Sep 6, 2021 17:35
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Ferrinus posted:It's entirely possible that the alien on the Nostromo was able to grow to full size because Ash himself snuck down into the lower decks and made sure to leave some food stores unlocked or something. For what it’s worth the expanded universe is fairly inconsistent on the topic of Alien growth. The PC game AvP2’s Alien campaign literally has you play a level as a chestburster where your objective is “find food to grow”. A few of the early comics have chestbursters feeding on the corpses of their hosts. On the other hand there are a lot of instances where Aliens grow to full size without an apparent food source, and the Colonial Marines Technical Manual has a whole chapter devoted to a team of WY scientists coming to the conclusion that a lot of Alien biology (including growth rate) doesn’t make sense given our current understanding of science (and as a byproduct this makes the Alien more appealing for acquisition). And then we’ve got Alien Covenant where we see them and the Neomorphs literally synthesizing mass out of thin air.  I’m of the belief that they can eat to grow and perhaps it assists the process on some level, but they don’t need to. Ferrinus posted:I definitely think we can reconcile the xenomorph across two or four or even six movies if we really want to (though it's also fruitful to examine the movies in isolation), and it doesn't require ascribing luck powers or an internal perpetual motion engine or anything like that. 
Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Sep 6, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 17:43
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Sir Kodiak posted:Nah. My two cats were brought in from under some bushes at 4-5 weeks after they lost their mother, having never been indoors, and when given a room with a litter box in it figured out immediately that it was the most convenient place to go. Really? Huh. I had friends who got kittens very young and they basically had to take on the role of the mother. Like the mother takes the cat to where its meant to pee and poop and licks its butt to stimulate the process, so they had to rub the kitten's butt with a wash-cloth to simulate that experience.
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Sep 6, 2021 18:11
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