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Beachcomber posted:Right, which is fine and cool, because it leave the mystery of where it came from in the first place intact. We actually don't know that they created the goo or what they use it for.
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Mar 14, 2023 19:02
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:Alien Megathread: Gonna call bullshit on the spooky space ants being more mysterious than the "GodCum." I like it 
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Mar 14, 2023 19:30
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Beachcomber posted:Right, which is fine and cool, because it leave the mystery of where it came from in the first place intact. This is inconsistent with itself on its face. Everything you say here about the eggs can be transposed onto the mutagen, or vice versa. That is to say, this could go in two directions: 1) The engineers obviously made the eggs, so there's no mystery about them. 2) Who knows where the engineers got the oil? Either way, "mystery" is a fake idea, particularly with regards to the Alien series. We know where the eggs came from: an alien spaceship. We know where the spaceship came from: space. Do you think there's a big cosmic mystery in Independence Day because no one actually gives us the details on the invaders' homeworld and religious traditions?
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Mar 14, 2023 19:59
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Ferrinus posted:1) The engineers obviously made the eggs, so there's no mystery about them.
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Mar 14, 2023 20:33
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Xenomrph posted:Did they? Ferrinus isn't claiming they did, just pointing out that if you're going to make that assumption about the black goo you could do it about the eggs as well.
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Mar 14, 2023 20:36
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Basebf555 posted:Ferrinus isn't claiming they did, just pointing out that if you're going to make that assumption about the black goo you could do it about the eggs as well. That’s fair. 
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Mar 14, 2023 20:39
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But there's apparently comics that say they make the goo.
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Mar 14, 2023 21:47
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I assumed they did make the goo, but it'd be way more interesting if they didn't. The intro to Prometheus presents it like some sacrificial sacrament; if the black god cum isn't even their invention, the religious aspect to it gets way more esoteric. I like it. ...goddamn, do I miss Raised by Wolves.
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Mar 14, 2023 22:01
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Beachcomber posted:But there's apparently comics that say they make the goo. Not to my knowledge, unless it’s the more modern Marvel stuff.
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Mar 14, 2023 22:09
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Xealot posted:I assumed they did make the goo, but it'd be way more interesting if they didn't. The intro to Prometheus presents it like some sacrificial sacrament; if the black god cum isn't even their invention, the religious aspect to it gets way more esoteric. I like it. there's not much to base this on but given how the other Engineers react to learning humanity exists, i tend to read the Engineer at the beginning of Prometheus as some kind of rebel or heretic; what he's doing is presumably taboo or perverse in some way; a god voluntarily dying for the sake of beings who are somewhere on a scale of "slaves" to "microorganisms" compared to themselves and yeah I miss Raised by Wolves too, if the above didn't already make it obvious 
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Mar 14, 2023 23:33
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Xenomrph posted:Not to my knowledge, unless it’s the more modern Marvel stuff. Yeah, while I don't base my views on the comics in any event I'd be shocked if the writers of EU content were allowed to so much as hint at stuff like that. Tuxedo Catfish posted:there's not much to base this on but given how the other Engineers react to learning humanity exists, i tend to read the Engineer at the beginning of Prometheus as some kind of rebel or heretic; what he's doing is presumably taboo or perverse in some way; a god voluntarily dying for the sake of beings who are somewhere on a scale of "slaves" to "microorganisms" compared to themselves I always found the contrast between the engineers in the opening scene and at the end of the movie really interesting. The big, disc-shaped spaceship leaving the dude behind looks very little like the biomechanoid craft we see later in the movie and the sacrifice himself is just in a robe. My takeaway was that the ancient engineers were serving their own higher power. Then in Prometheus we actually meet contemporary engineers and they're all wearing hosed up carapace armor and living in skull facilities, so one possible read is that this is just how their society changed over the last billion years; they've started experimenting on and optimizing what used to be a holy sacrament. But then in Covenant we see that there are actually still un-augmented, robe-wearing engineers who just farm wheat all day and react with religious awe when one of their own spaceships shows up--until that ship starts bombing them. So there's actually an extreme, cultic class division within the engineers themselves, an inner church of diabolical experimenters who hide (well, "hide" is debatable) bioweapons facilities on far-off moons and an outer church of peasants who don't realize that the gods they worship are just men wearing masks. But was it like that all along, or was there some even more bizarre and ancient species that once bestowed the oil (which they... made? found? summoned?) on the engineers and who some clever engineers sneakily replaced? To what extent is either species, or either subdivision within that species, still active, and what do they even think they're doing? I'm not sure if it'd be fun to learn the answer but it's certainly fun to outline the question.
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Mar 15, 2023 00:20
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah, while I don't base my views on the comics in any event I'd be shocked if the writers of EU content were allowed to so much as hint at stuff like that. Based on my conversations with the RPG author he’s allowed to hint at stuff, but there are limits and he knows them well. I’ll have to check the RPG and see if it talks about the goo’s origin. I just know the old Dark Horse stuff prior to the Disney buyout didn’t cover it, in fact Engineers and associated stuff only show up in 2 series, and those comics came out before Covenant did. Those comics also did more interesting things with the Goo in my opinion - Covenant (and subsequently expanded universe stuff like Aliens Fireteam and the RPG) largely “codified” what the goo does into hard and fast predictable rules for gameplay purposes (but the RPG was open-ended enough to let DMs make up their crazy poo poo too). The Prometheus comics show the aftermath of the goo getting unleashed on LV-223, and it radically warps the environment in wild and unpredictable ways, it’s rad. The comic refers to the goo as “the Accelerant”, which I thought was a pretty neat name. If the more recent Marvel comics touch on the goo, I’m not familiar with it since I haven’t read them.
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Mar 15, 2023 00:55
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It's the azoth! For more information, study Ripley's twelve gates and your preferred edition of Promethean: the Created.
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Mar 15, 2023 01:01
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Basebf555 posted:The mystery of the black goo isn't so much about what it will do, the mystery is where it came from, how was it created, and for what purpose? Prometheus and Covenant throw some really tantalizing ideas at you about what the black goo's deal might be, but never enough to prove any one particular theory. The xeno in Alien is similar. We know what it does, it kills. It's the other questions that are interesting. I think the more you try to explain the xenos, the less scary and compelling they become. The whole "what the gently caress IS THIS poo poo??" element of the first film is what made it so scary and the swarming, bug like, hive minded approach in Aliens where they're just space bugs and holy poo poo jesus christ game over, man, made that film work too. I don't need to know their origins and have them bred in a lab or whatever so much as an acid blood cockroach invasion from outer space with two sets of jaws that's utterly horrific and no one understands. But that's just me.
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Mar 15, 2023 02:49
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I have a hot take. I don’t find the unknown that interesting. I don’t need to know but it’s not a huge deal if someone “explains it”. This definitely is probably a me thing but I see it when people say “ah it’s scarier not to see something” I wanna see it though! Don’t need it in broad daylight but gimme something! This opinion comes from watching both Skinamarink and The Outwaters, two movies that don’t explain the threat and keeps the unknown as it’s crutch. I don’t like it!
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Mar 15, 2023 02:55
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BiggerBoat posted:I think the more you try to explain the xenos, the less scary and compelling they become. That’s why I like the comic series Aliens Labyrinth so much - it starts with the premise of a scientist studying Aliens in a controlled environment in order to explain them, and then it turns it on its head and goes “yeah no we know nothing” and has them doing decidedly unsettling and inexplicable stuff, reminiscent of Lambert’s horrific fate in ‘Alien’.
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Mar 15, 2023 02:57
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Iirc, that's the one with the guy who ate the stuff and things became more hosed up from there. But the hive died and he got away.
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Mar 15, 2023 08:05
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I guess my problem with the Engineers is that they're basically just dudes with weird gear. They look pretty much human with some small differences. When I saw the alien vessel in the first Alien film that corpse in the pilot seat looks hosed up! I guess I like the mystery of it, in that it made space seem more weird and hostile in that there are some crazy looking aliens out there who build horrific looking ships and are presumably transporting these awful loving eggs for some inscrutable reason and they got wiped out. But no, they're just buff dudes who would not look out of place in Star Trek or Star Wars.
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Mar 15, 2023 12:43
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I guess my problem with the Engineers is that they're basically just dudes with weird gear. 
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Mar 15, 2023 12:53
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I guess my problem with the Engineers is that they're basically just dudes with weird gear. The Engineers in Prometheus: tall guys in hose 'n' bone-themed spacesuits. Sometimes it's better to leave the answers to your imagination.
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Mar 15, 2023 13:33
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I don’t know if I said it before, but if any of you are a fan of H R Giger’s artwork in any capacity, do yourselves a favor and play the videogame Scorn, it’s one big love letter to his art style and it rules.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:32
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Isn't it not very fun to play?
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Mar 15, 2023 14:55
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Azubah posted:Isn't it not very fun to play? If you have Gamepass it's worth putting a few hours into just for the art and weirdness though.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:59
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Scorn plays fine, but if you don't like or are at least okay with puzzles getting Object A from Point C to Z, you will not enjoy it despite its magnificent art direction and messed up story. It's a survival horror game. It's on Game Pass.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:05
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BiggerBoat posted:I think the more you try to explain the xenos, the less scary and compelling they become. The whole "what the gently caress IS THIS poo poo??" element of the first film is what made it so scary and the swarming, bug like, hive minded approach in Aliens where they're just space bugs and holy poo poo jesus christ game over, man, made that film work too. This is just pursuing novelty. I guess that's fine enough, but it means the movies will only work for you once and then it's just wistful nostalgia / online bitching about difference forever. So you spend time in the Alien Megathread reading & writing posts about how you don't want to think about two movies. Chasing the high results in the paradoxical demand for more canonical XenomorphTM content - but also that the familar bugs do things that are entirely shocking and different each time. That gives us dumb superpowers or colour variations, and that kind of nonsense. Whats the story? I dunno, some garbage comic.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:48
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Martman posted:Yeah it's not a very good game. It's a kinda cool walking simulator, some puzzles are sorta interesting, then halfway through it starts emphasizing some really bad combat way more than it should. The combat is bad but you’re also meant to actively avoid combat, the game just does a bad job of communicating that. It’s a pretty short game overall, I still definitely recommend checking it out for the art style because it “gets” Giger’s art better than anything I’ve ever seen, it’s amazing. Even Prometheus and Covenant miss the mark compared to Scorn. It’s like an interactive art exhibit and I loved it.
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Mar 15, 2023 16:22
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is just pursuing novelty. I guess that's fine enough, but it means the movies will only work for you once and then it's just wistful nostalgia / online bitching about difference forever. So you spend time in the Alien Megathread reading & writing posts about how you don't want to think about two movies. But it and Covenant are ultimately exactly that kind of nonsense - SHOCKING! and DIFFERENT! variations on the Xenomorph(tm) theme. They would probably have been stronger movies if they had dropped the Alien links entirely and been their own thing, but I doubt Fox would have handed even Scott the money for that. (Cameron, maybe...)
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Mar 15, 2023 17:04
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What if you could have one unproduced Alien project appear, fully finished, as the creator(s) intended? What do you choose? (It's the canceled Operation: Aliens cartoon for me. Do it, Fox Kids - put chestbursters in a Saturday Morning cartoon).
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Mar 15, 2023 17:20
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Payndz posted:I kid. I mean, Prometheus at least looks fantastic. I’ve argued for this for a decade, Prometheus is a cool movie with interesting and thought-provoking ideas saddled with Alien baggage that simultaneously undermines ‘Alien’ while dragging itself down. If they’d totally divorced it from the Alien “franchise” and just let Scott off the chain to do something new, I think we’d have ended up with a much more interesting and unique movie. Failson posted:What if you could have one unproduced Alien project appear, fully finished, as the creator(s) intended? Operation Aliens is tempting, but I’d have to go with either Obsidian’s “Alien: Crucible” RPG videogame that got canned in favor of Aliens: Colonial Marines, or Neil Blomkamp’s Alien5. https://youtu.be/ms4_HcYA7VU Edit— speaking of Operation Aliens, here’s a short documentary about it: https://youtu.be/C5ZlHHP0BXA Incidentally I’ve got the board game that was going to tie into it. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 17:25
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Payndz posted:I kid. I mean, Prometheus at least looks fantastic. Not quite. Prometheus and Covenant create a greater context within which the xenomorph(tm) itself is but one variation. It's not just an alien on a space station, an alien in a jungle, an alien in a desert...
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Mar 15, 2023 17:38
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Payndz posted:I kid. I mean, Prometheus at least looks fantastic. No - because, instead of just giving them more special abilities, Alien Covenant presents subtle nuances in the aliens' behavior so that they can be understood as individual characters. One of them imprints on David as its parent, the other doesn't, and that fact is extremely important to the narrative. They're additionally contrasted with the prototypical white-skinned versions, which are more animalistic. This encourages people to go back to Alien 1 and think about why the alien behaves as its does. It encourages close reading and interpretation. As you and the other guy say, you'd rather that the movie was remade exactly the same but in a different franchise. Why? The only explanation is that, though you acknowledge that the movie is really good, a new franchise would provide that additional quick hit of novelty and prevent you from thinking too hard about Alien.
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Mar 15, 2023 17:56
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That’s a pretty gross oversimplification/willful misunderstanding of what I said lol “The only explanation” lmao Nobody said “exactly the same”, in fact I advocated it be very different because it wouldn’t be tied to a pre-existing “franchise”. The connections it has don’t add anything to ‘Alien’, and hold the prequels back from fully spreading their wings. The Space Jockey didn’t “need” to be explained, nor did we need the origin of the Xenomorph, and doing so actively undermines ‘Alien’ (again, as I’ve said for a decade). The prequels’ best and most interesting ideas have nothing to do with Alien. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 18:19
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If you aren't interested in playing the game, there is an Art of Scorn book you will probably enjoy.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:34
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Dienes posted:If you aren't interested in playing the game, there is an Art of Scorn book you will probably enjoy. I actually just slapped down an order on that today, but it looks like it doesn’t ship until 4/22. Speaking of art books, these are excellent too: The Art of Alien: Isolation https://a.co/d/2RsrTiA HR Giger. 40th Ed. https://a.co/d/4AqLHht Alien Covenant: David’s Drawings https://a.co/d/91AxCkH
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Mar 15, 2023 18:38
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In the Pre-Prometheus Aliens, the Xenomorphs were just a scary thing that was waiting for us out in space. The Space Jockey was an unknown thing waiting for us out in space. Their relationship was unexplained, maybe the Jockey was just some schmuck who stumbled on the eggs like the humans did and was taking samples home for study. There's no way to know. The galaxy is a big place and you don't know what you will find in it's dark corners. Post-Prometheus, everything is connected. Not just the Engineers and the Xenomorphs to each other, but also the Engineers and Xenomorphs to humanity. There is some kind of grand narrative playing out and humanity is a part of it. That is a smaller and less mysterious universe. Hell, pre-Prometheus there were movies in the Alien universe that didn't have a single Xenomorph in them, united purely by the theme that there are scary aliens out there. At this point I'm expecting some Predator EU story to establish that they were connected to the Engineers too, and through them to humanity, so it's all linked and all one big story.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:45
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Gripweed posted:In the Pre-Prometheus Aliens, the Xenomorphs were just a scary thing that was waiting for us out in space. The Space Jockey was an unknown thing waiting for us out in space. Their relationship was unexplained, maybe the Jockey was just some schmuck who stumbled on the eggs like the humans did and was taking samples home for study. There's no way to know. The galaxy is a big place and you don't know what you will find in it's dark corners. Something I was going to post before reading this, it would have been pretty easy to have the engineers in Prometheus just not have gear/etc. that's related to the Space Jockey at all. Like have the black goo and the engineers just be their own separate other bizarro poo poo out there waiting for us that has an undefined connection to the alien and Space Jockey as you say in Alien instead of a 1:1 this goo is the programming stuff designed to create the alien and the other ways the two flicks connect to the Alien movies.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:49
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The space jockey and xenomorph have always been connected to humanity, both implicitly (they find a guy in a space suit who suffers the exact same fate their guy in a space suit did; the alien attack is representative of and comorbid with various political problems already afflicting the crew) and explicitly (the alien incubates in, comes out of, and functionally replaces one of the human characters). If the crew of the Nostromo were confronted by a glowing polyhedron that caused internal hemorrhages in anyone standing between 3.2 and 4.9 meters of it, that might actually go some way towards depicting a totally foreign and incomprehensible menace from the farthest reaches of space, but also no one would care because it'd be boring. What Prometheus and Covenant pick up on is that, in fact, the xenomorph has always been all too familiar.
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Mar 15, 2023 19:11
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:No - because, instead of just giving them more special abilities, Alien Covenant presents subtle nuances in the aliens' behavior so that they can be understood as individual characters. One of them imprints on David as its parent, the other doesn't, and that fact is extremely important to the narrative. They're additionally contrasted with the prototypical white-skinned versions, which are more animalistic.  Anyway, nope.
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Mar 15, 2023 19:22
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Ferrinus posted:The space jockey and xenomorph have always been connected to humanity, both implicitly (they find a guy in a space suit who suffers the exact same fate their guy in a space suit did; the alien attack is representative of and comorbid with various political problems already afflicting the crew) and explicitly (the alien incubates in, comes out of, and functionally replaces one of the human characters). Oh poo poo, when you think about it they’re also connected by being in the same movie! I obviously meant in-universe lore connections, not thematic connections. You knew that, c’mon.
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Mar 15, 2023 19:24
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Ferrinus posted:What Prometheus and Covenant pick up on is that, in fact, the xenomorph has always been all too familiar. As mentioned, making the Space Jockey into a literal giant human who also created humans devalues the mystery and isolation of space. It’s not a weird and scary void where who knows what you might find and what bizarre and inscrutable life forms are out there, with humanity being a small and helpless blip in an uncaring and potentially hostile galaxy, now we’re literally made by god in His image, we are special. The ideas of a hateful god doing weird science on his creations as we try to find our creators (and with the through line of our creations, also in our image, coming to resent us while becoming creators themselves, and create monsters) is a genuinely interesting idea, it just doesn’t need to be in an Alien movie to work (and actively harms ‘Alien’). As mentioned, it makes the setting smaller and less interesting.
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Mar 15, 2023 19:33
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