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the xenomorphs brought in the construction equipment actually
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May 8, 2022 12:21
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Tankbuster posted:A frontier town/outpost in space that just happens to be sitting in spitting distance of the Space Jockey's craft with it's deadly cargo on board. The problem is not that it’s a frontier town in space, but that it only looks like one. Cameron takes the aesthetics of a “small industrial town”, but without the accompanying socio-economic realism. Designer jeans with the holes already in ‘em. A “welcome” sign when there are no neighbouring towns. That sort of thing. Why do frontier towns exist? Why are they built? Like, the basic purpose of the atmosphere processor is to enable large-scale mining across the entire planet. However, there’s only a single colony that houses fewer than 200 people. Only a handful of those people are involved with in the search for minerals and other resources, so this is obviously nothing close to a planetary-scale operation. Planets are big! Like, “bigger than the entire united states” big. And this planet doesn’t even have any oceans blocking access to the dirt. So, okay, maybe Weyland-Yutani’s playing the long game: they already own the planet, so there’s no rush. Why not set the groundwork for eventual resource extraction in the far future? And, well, no; Newt’s parents are wildcatters - which means that they’re heading out to explore the seemingly-worthless land that Weyland-Yutani passed over. The very existence of the wildcatters indicates that Weyland-Yutani owns only a small portion of the planet (because they have a limited budget for making land claims/purchases (from the US government?)). And this means there is competition for land among various entities. Newt’s family represents just one relatively-small business, gambling with big expenses on iffy territory. So, shouldn’t the planet be dotted with little towns as various people rush to get those valuable resources? The only good explanation is that LV-426 is a dud rock, with no real resources to speak of. Hadley’s Hope is consequently a dying colony, the whole atmosphere processor thing is a massive boondoggle, and Newt’s parents are gambling out of desperation. Either that, or space-surveying is so prohibitively difficult/expensive that only a handful of companies can afford it. In that case, Newt’s folks must already be absurdly wealthy to outcompete other groups. (This makes a pretty big difference to the narrative!) But, here, I noticed that Aliens never actually brings up what the Nostromo was hauling. The concept of mining is never actually brought up in the film at all. So, even though it’s a reasonable conclusion, the film nonetheless completely elides the whole motivation for building a colony in the first place. And, while we’re on the topic of this weird stuff, how did Burke order Newt’s fam to do anything? In the ‘special edition’, it’s clarified that Burke ordered a subordinate to ask various independent surveyors to sweep a general area. But that doesn’t really clarify anything, because how does Burke hope to profit off this? It’s even said that Newt’s parents would probably get exclusive rights to the find. So you have to presume a lot of unstated additional steps in Burke’s plan(s) for this to make any sense. It is true, though, that these are mostly problems with the ‘special edition’ - but that’s going back to the issue that, instead of telling us a bunch of very dumb stuff, the theatrical cut doesn’t show much at all. Recall that a good chunk of Alien 1 was devoted to discussion of “the bonus situation”.
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May 9, 2022 01:41
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Do people really think the set design of Aliens sucks? I always thought it looked amazing, but maybe my childlike exuberance has extended into adulthood. I've seen several completely different Lazer Tag places have Aliens quotes piped through the speakers and stuff so I'd say they ripped it off like everything else did.
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May 9, 2022 02:08
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They've put poo poo as small as a prison/lead works facility on a single planet with nothing else. Maybe they just like spreading out.
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May 9, 2022 03:59
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I always took the 'Welcome' sign just as a joke, like of course no one is coming there. I assumed mining, if it was the point, would get expanded once the atmosphere processing is 'complete' and it would be more attractive for people to actually go there, and they could maybe set up farming or something. As it is, it is in the rear end end of space and the planet is a largely unlivable piece of poo poo, and it is implied that WY is doing this on all sorts of planets and putting eggs in lots of baskets. Maybe successfully terraforming the planet gives them ownership of it, in a similar way to how in the early US you could claim land for yourself by making it into something productive. Gobble up as many planets as you can by planting some WY crap on them and focus on making the good ones profitable later. The atmo processor is automated but I imagine the harsh weather makes maintenance of the colony and the processor something of a task. If we go by the idea that there are 158 colonists and assume about a third to a quarter of them are children, then you've got to have quite a bit of support staff just to keep that running. You'd have admin guys, IT people, maintenance folk, teachers, medical staff, security, transport, janitorial, food prep, engineers, mental health, a bartender, etc. Because they are so far from any assistance they probably need a lot of seemingly superflous types like sanitation engineers just in case the pipes all break down. I don't think it's wildly out of place for most of the staff just to be support for the highly trained tech folks that need to babysit the atmo processor, which is seemingly the whole point of the colony. I don't see why the planet would need to be dotted with tiny little towns that all require their own support staff when the movie pretty much states that they are terraforming and it takes decades, and terraforming basically just involves making sure the Big Machine does its job. I figured Burke would get the rights because he had the exact coordinates, and as an official corporate stooge for an awful company like W-Y he would have some paperworky way of screwing the lower level workers out of controlling all the profits. This is pretty much how corporations work, nowadays. If I work for DeBeers and find a big diamond in a hole after they give me the location I don't get to keep it. I assumed the wildcatters in general are out just gambling on finding something because it is better than just sitting in the prefab Lazer Tag dorms and there probably is some sort of profit available to them if they find anything of value, but some WY exec is absolutely going to get the lion's share of it. They don't get to keep the Space Jockey ship - they'd probably get a finder's fee and then the bigshots step in and take over. I think no one mentions what is exactly being hauled by the Nostromo because they don't really give a poo poo - they are just the haulers, they don't really have any investment in the cargo. I thought it was carrying an entire ore refinery of some sort. I don't think the precise element of unobtainium really matters, it's just that mining was happening somewhere and Ripley's crew were just one part of a logistical chain.
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May 9, 2022 04:47
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I thought it was carrying an entire ore refinery of some sort.
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May 9, 2022 04:58
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banned from Starbucks posted:They've put poo poo as small as a prison/lead works facility on a single planet with nothing else. Maybe they just like spreading out. Well hold on, bucko!!! Fionira "Fury" 161 is explicitly the remnants of a failed colony - repurposed as a prison because they can find no better use for it, yet still on its last legs. After a mere two-dozen deaths, they shut the leadworks down completely instead of sending any more inmate-slaves. This is the fate of a space colony. Execs converting the place into a halfassed for-profit prison as a sort of pathetic fire-sale last move. Maybe now that it's shut down, they can strip the copper wiring out of the walls. After Aliens, things here are suddenly crystal clear: the company's been losing money on this. Fury's closer to Earth than Hadley's Hope, and without any gap in time to 'explain away' how things are now apocalyptic. This was always in the background, is Fincher's point. It's dispelling the fantasy of the omnipotent corporation. In this case, the exact 'why' behind why the colony failed isn't so important; its clearly just for economic reasons. A catastrophic drop in the price of lead, or maybe just some 'colony bubble' on the verge of collapse. ("We're getting into a lot of terraforming now", sez Burke. By 'now', doesn't he mean 'twenty years ago'???) quote:I don't see why the planet would need to be dotted with tiny little towns that all require their own support staff when the movie pretty much states that they are terraforming and it takes decades, and terraforming basically just involves making sure the Big Machine does its job. Because the plan can't be 'just' terraforming, because that's a means to an end. (In Alien 3, the planet boasts vast amounts of natural methane, which fuels the leadworks.) If the 'special edition' is taken into account, then you would expect a lot of different entities nabbing parcels of land all over the entire planet. The fact that there aren't is weird. Again, were talking one frontier town for an entire planet. The place is less populated than Antarctica. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:54 on May 9, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 05:42
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Why was LV-427 chosen to be processed by WY? Was that choice made by random? I thought it was intentional to try and find the derelict ship but I guess it was colonized before they found Ripley and the Blackbox of the Nostromo. Also, is Hadley's Hope a mining town? I thought the point of the atmosphere processor was to eventually make the make the planet hospitable to colonize it, not sure to what avail, though that could be to strip it for resources as well but I don't remember them saying they are mining the planet.
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May 9, 2022 05:49
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sigher posted:Why was LV-427 chosen to be processed by WY? Was that choice made by random? I thought it was intentional to try and find the derelict ship but I guess it was colonized before they found Ripley and the Blackbox of the Nostromo. They didn’t know the Derelict was there because the beacon was deactivated and it was on the other side of a mountain range from the colony/atmosphere processor. And yeah Hadley’s hope was basically a mining town (for narrative purposes at least). Wildcatter prospectors we’re venturing out from the colony in the hopes of striking it rich.
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May 9, 2022 07:19
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Why set up a colony and start converting the atmosphere before you even know there's anything there worth mining? Isn't it a giant lava rock anyway? Wherever the Nostromo is coming back from in Alien is twice as far out from Earth as lv426 you'd think they would have hit it up before going out that far if there was any mining potential.
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May 9, 2022 07:44
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:A “welcome” sign when there are no neighbouring towns. Well, one reason.
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May 9, 2022 07:48
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banned from Starbucks posted:Why set up a colony and start converting the atmosphere before you even know there's anything there worth mining? Isn't it a giant lava rock anyway? Wherever the Nostromo is coming back from in Alien is twice as far out from Earth as lv426 you'd think they would have hit it up before going out that far if there was any mining potential. What will really bake your noodle is that “canonically” LV426 and LV223 (the planet from ‘Prometheus’) orbit the same gas giant, and are close enough to each other to transit between the two moons if necessary. No, seriously. This wasn’t from a comic book or whatever, it got introduced in the ‘Prometheus’ blu ray and got subsequently added to the ‘Alien’ franchise “story Bible” at Fox. It’s one of those retcons that has potential for neat ideas behind it* but gets dragged down by being half-baked and not really well thought out. Like, the star chart the Prometheus crew follows doesn’t seem specific on which planet to land on, it just gives them a star system at best. So when they got in the star system they’d have presumably picked up the Derelict’s signal and said “hey that’s an intelligent signal, that must be where we’re supposed to go” and headed there. But they don’t. Like I said, it’s a dumb retcon. *in the spin-off novels and comics that came out after ‘Prometheus’, it’s revealed that Hadley’s Hope had a small cargo lifter that could make short voyages and when the colony gets overrun, some of the colonists take the lifter and hop over to nearby LV223. What they don’t realize is that some Aliens got onboard the lifter, and in the 90-odd years between Prometheus and ‘Aliens’, the Black Goo had caused rampant mutations all over the planet. It doesn’t go great for the colonists. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 08:08 on May 9, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 08:04
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Xenomrph posted:What will really bake your noodle is that “canonically” LV426 and LV223 (the planet from ‘Prometheus’) orbit the same gas giant, and are close enough to each other to transit between the two moons if necessary.
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May 9, 2022 08:10
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I agree, and it’s one of the major reasons I’m not a fan of the idea that David “invented” the Alien as Ridley Scott claims. It makes things too small, and in my opinion, boring.
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May 9, 2022 08:30
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 Why would the 38th infantry put up this sign. Clearly anyone on Bataan would know they were on it.
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May 9, 2022 11:18
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FastestGunAlive posted:
 Do you seriously expect me to believe those distances and directions are even slightly practical. That's not even how signposts work!
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May 9, 2022 12:26
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FastestGunAlive posted:
The joke on that sign is the smug "Courtesy Of" phrasing. The joke is not the sign itself, since it presumably marks an actual border (i.e. the area that the military is boasting about having secured). Likewise, the joke is on the Hadley's Hope sign is the smug "Have a Nice Day" graffiti. The sign itself is not a joke; it marks the 'city limits' of the colony - which raises its own set of questions.
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May 9, 2022 14:05
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Splicer posted:This kind of thing just makes the universe feel so small. That the only canon planet they've found black goo derived monsters on is right next door to the planet with the black goo does have implications, but the implications are all very boring. It makes sense that warship moon that went horribly badly would have a crashed ship on the planet it orbits or a nearby moon depending on how you want to connect it. Prometheus is wide open enough because anything before "it went very badly for them right when they tried to goo earth and a bunch of them died" can be anything and makes the "crashed ship on the other moon" thematically make sense. Maybe the Prometheus Engineers set up shop next door after grabbing the goo from the crashed LV426 ship; who knows. Engineer Planet X from Covenant is a long ways away and unconnected as well and it has goo creatures because of fuckery as well. There could be any number of different goo creatures on any number of planets. People are goo creatures too, technically. Darko fucked around with this message at 14:57 on May 9, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 14:55
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the xenomorphs put the sign there
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May 9, 2022 15:05
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Darko posted:It makes sense that warship moon that went horribly badly would have a crashed ship on the planet it orbits or a nearby moon depending on how you want to connect it. Prometheus is wide open enough because anything before "it went very badly for them right when they tried to goo earth and a bunch of them died" can be anything and makes the "crashed ship on the other moon" thematically make sense. Maybe the Prometheus Engineers set up shop next door after grabbing the goo from the crashed LV426 ship; who knows. Darko posted:Engineer Planet X from Covenant is a long ways away and unconnected as well and it has goo creatures because of fuckery as well. There could be any number of different goo creatures on any number of planets. People are goo creatures too, technically. Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:17 on May 9, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 15:59
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Xenomrph posted:*in the spin-off novels and comics that came out after ‘Prometheus’, it’s revealed that Hadley’s Hope had a small cargo lifter that could make short voyages and when the colony gets overrun, some of the colonists take the lifter and hop over to nearby LV223. What they don’t realize is that some Aliens got onboard the lifter, and in the 90-odd years between Prometheus and ‘Aliens’, the Black Goo had caused rampant mutations all over the planet. It doesn’t go great for the colonists. Is this comic any good?
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May 9, 2022 16:56
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Baronjutter posted:Is this comic any good? It’s pretty neat, it’s a 16-part thing where each “arc” has a different theme that kind of loosely interweaves with the others (Aliens, Predator, AvP, and Prometheus), with different characters and sometimes different timeframes. It doesn’t do a perfect job of knitting itself together across all of its parts because the writers were kind of doing their own thing without communicating with each other, so each arc is somewhat self contained when they should be more interwoven, but it still has its moments. A standout moment is when a Predator gets hosed up by Black Goo, it’s pretty nuts. I’ve been meaning to re-read it. I think the series would have been better if it was four self-contained but still related arcs where you could read any one arc and get a complete story without needing the others, and the comic attempts that, but doesn’t quite pull it off. How the Black Goo “works” gets contradicted by Alien Covenant (for the worse IMO), but that movie hadn’t come out yet. Covenant has the goo create consistent, predictable Alien-like creatures, the comic has it create really wild unpredictable mutations that are a lot more interesting. There’s a sequel 4-arc comic series but it’s all written by one author (Dan Abnett I think?) and while it has 4 arcs focusing on 4 things (Aliens, Predator, AvP, Prometheus), it’s more like 4 chapters in one big story meant to be read in a certain order and none of the arcs are standalone or make any sense without reading the others. Splicer posted:I'm going to ask you to, yourself, think about why the first film's aliens and the fifth film's origin point for those aliens being far apart would have immediate and obviously spookier implications than them being very far apart.
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May 9, 2022 17:16
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Xenomrph posted:I’m of the opinion that Prometheus is not the “origin point” for capital-A Aliens, let alone the ones from ‘Alien’. B) Oh I absolutely agree, Capital A Aliens being directly from LV223 is less interesting than there being black goo on various planets doing who knows what, but again if they're both on moons orbiting the same planet then occams razor. Which is why that's a dumb idea and they're obviously very far away from each other.
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May 9, 2022 17:20
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Splicer posted:A) Whoops, I made an amusing mistake, now corrected In my post that I quoted, I gave one of many possibilities: quote:Maybe the Prometheus Engineers set up shop next door after grabbing the goo from the crashed LV426 ship; who knows. In other words, LV426's ship could just as likely still be the starting point and the Prometheus crew of Engineers doing their war thing grabbed goo instead of face huggers from that ship like the humans did, which led to them coming to the same doom as the humans in a different way. There's a ridiculous amount of ways to tie them together without Prometheus being a direct prequel to Alien as far as the Space Jockey ship. Especially since the original script had that as being a direct origin to the point they were on LV 426 and a ship with an implanted Engineer crashes on it, and it got purposefully changed not to be by the time of shooting.
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May 9, 2022 20:08
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Every Alien film takes place on the same planet: Tatooine
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May 10, 2022 01:32
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BiggestBatman posted:Every Alien film takes place on the same planet: Tatooine Listen buddy, theres planet tunisia, planet vancouver, and planet southern california. If you can think of another place to find aliens, you go there
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May 10, 2022 02:37
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I've seen Star Wars, Italy is also a planet. The Emperor's from there.
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May 10, 2022 03:37
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Xenomrph posted:It’s pretty neat, it’s a 16-part thing where each “arc” has a different theme that kind of loosely interweaves with the others (Aliens, Predator, AvP, and Prometheus), with different characters and sometimes different timeframes. It doesn’t do a perfect job of knitting itself together across all of its parts because the writers were kind of doing their own thing without communicating with each other, so each arc is somewhat self contained when they should be more interwoven, but it still has its moments. A standout moment is when a Predator gets hosed up by Black Goo, it’s pretty nuts. I’ve been meaning to re-read it. I think the series would have been better if it was four self-contained but still related arcs where you could read any one arc and get a complete story without needing the others, and the comic attempts that, but doesn’t quite pull it off. What would one search for to find this 16 part thing?
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May 10, 2022 03:42
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Baronjutter posted:What would one search for to find this 16 part thing? Fire and Stone
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May 10, 2022 03:55
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Xenomrph, is the black goo from Alien: Labyrinth the same as the black goo from Prometheus?
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May 10, 2022 04:09
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SMERSH Mouth posted:Xenomrph, is the black goo from Alien: Labyrinth the same as the black goo from Prometheus? Labyrinth is awesome by the way, and I would pay good money to see Neill Blomkamp adapt it straight. Baronjutter posted:What would one search for to find this 16 part thing? This is the complete collection, but it's well out of print (especially since Dark Horse lost the license when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox). Your best bet might be ebay, or trying to get the 4 arcs individually. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 04:53 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 04:48
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some of the alien and predator comics really own
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May 10, 2022 04:56
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Xenomrph posted:Labyrinth is awesome by the way, and I would pay good money to see Neill Blomkamp adapt it straight. Thank God they got the Evil Dead/Don’t Breathe guy instead.
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May 10, 2022 04:56
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MLSM posted:Thank God they got the Evil Dead/Don’t Breathe guy instead. Well I mean, he can do whatever he wants as long as he doesn't gently caress up an adaptation of 'Aliens Labyrinth'.
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May 10, 2022 05:28
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I’m excited he’s doing a stand alone thing. I was gonna be a bit sad if someone wanted to play “Erase the Scott movies” game but I’m down for just an Alien movie
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May 10, 2022 06:03
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And in case someone @s me no if they did “erase” the movies it wouldn’t do Jack, I just think it’s 98% a lazy thing to do. However there’s been a few cases where it worked. But I’m still not into it. Use your weird continuity and have fun with it! Be more like Chucky
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May 10, 2022 06:04
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they should make everything canon imo
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May 10, 2022 06:24
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16-bit Butt-Head posted:they should make everything canon imo Everything is canon if you want it to be. SMERSH Mouth posted:Xenomrph, is the black goo from Alien: Labyrinth the same as the black goo from Prometheus? I mis-spoke, I just asked the author of the Alien RPG if the black mold made it into the RPG, and he said: “It is related to the black goo and the neomorph pods. I beleive I wrote about the pools for the core book” So there you go. 
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May 10, 2022 07:38
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16-bit Butt-Head posted:they should make everything canon imo Agreed
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May 10, 2022 07:55
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| # ? Jun 4, 2024 02:50 |
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The AVP movies are on sale on Amazon in a two-disc set for like four bucks, and it was too good to pass up. I’m hoping the Requiem disk is contrast-corrected so that I don’t have to manually change my TV settings to see the movie, but even if it’s the Cinema Darko version, this was still worth it.
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May 10, 2022 11:45
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