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Do you like Alien 3 "Assembly Cut"?
Yes, Alien 3 "Assembly Cut" was tits.
No, Alien and Aliens are the only valid Alien films.
Nah gently caress you Alien 3 sucks in all its forms.
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Xenomrph
Dec 9, 2005

AvP Nerd/Fanboy/Shill



FilthyImp posted:

Be instead like Ash and just marvel at an organism so pure of purpose.
I’ll pass.

In fact I’ll just not engage with it at all, it’s probably better for my mental health and I don’t know why I ever get the insane notion to reply like I do. I am a moron.

FilthyImp posted:

A fun question to throw around is whether SO937 is specifically in case of Xeno encounter or just a generic 'save that poo poo it could be worth $$$' directive.
I personally kind of think it was the latter - the way So937 is worded, it just says to “ensure return of organism for analysis”, it doesn’t say how to do this, or what the organism even is, or provide any warnings or insight. Unless there were addenda that Ripley didn’t see, it just seems very generic.

Ultimately I think you can go either way with it - the Company could have been flying blind with standing order contingencies for anything of Company interest, or they could have had knowledge of capital-A Aliens and 937 was referring to them specifically. I can’t recall which side of the coin any of the expanded universe stuff has gone; I know the old Dark Horse stuff never addressed it, in fact WY is barely even in the old EU.

Ancillary material after Prometheus established that the Company created the Special Orders as general catch-alls to protect potential company interests, but doesn’t clarify if each order was event (or creature) specific or if it was all just boilerplate corporate handbook red tape.

Alien Isolation had Special Order 939, but it’s similarly worded and similarly vague.

https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Special_Order_939

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Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

FilthyImp posted:

Zeno I love you dude but engaging with some folks just ends like Weyland talking to the Engy.

Be instead like Ash and just marvel at an organism so pure of purpose.

A fun question to throw around is whether SO937 is specifically in case of Xeno encounter or just a generic 'save that poo poo it could be worth $$$' directive.

Personally I always took it as the latter. Just a general like if anyone's going to find life not of earth out there it better be Weyland Yutani policy. And like the "special orders" are just orders the androids get that override everything else.

That was a fan theory about Alien 3, but that Bishop brought the egg on board the Sulaco without being aware he did so. But that will always be an unanswerable question because they didn't expect the audience to ask. Like obviously if a QUEEN ALIEN managed to [sneak on board the Sulaco, the Ripley we see in that film wouldn't have even blinked until she personally scoured like every inch of the ship.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

As I've repeatedly noted, Jokey's ship is 'supposed to be' roughly 2000 years old. This is established in Prometheus. You haven't been careful, and have lost track of what you're trying to argue - the danger of the line-by-line 'style' of internet debate.
Line by line is the least worst way to properly respond to a gish gallop, otherwise you'd pick the one thing I didn't address and use that lack of address to "refute" the rest, or "accidentally" misunderstand what response applied to which argument. Because that's the point. And if there was any doubt that you'd do that... just lol at the entire above quote. Alien implies the derelict is ancient through visual storytelling, and it takes extremely wilful misreading to even pretend that that's not what I said. Everything about the setup makes it look ancient, right down to the giant fossilised elephant man pilot (oh, sorry - I mean big pale human in a jumpsuit :rolleyes:). It doesn't look like an old ship freshly landed, it looks like the crash-or-landing site is old. Very, very old.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Otherwise, your assertions are, like, that the alien egg-pods are potentially immortal and that Jokey's spaceship has potentially unlimited speed. Those are appeals to ignorance.
My first assertion is that the alien egg-pods are demonstratively capable of surviving decades, if not centuries, unattended, due to all the egg pods that we're shown having survived for decades or centuries unattended. My second assertion is that FTL is demonstrated to exist within that universe's physical laws.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Since we don't know, Jokey's ship may be extremely slow, having originated from one of the other moons around the planet. It may be utterly incapable of interstellar travel. There's no proof either way.
This is genuinely embarrassing. You made very definite assertions of fact which were trivially proven to be nonsense, which you are now backing up with "yeah but we don't know I'm wrong". gently caress it, let's recap, we've gone from:

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Space is actually pretty big! If Jokey is found only a few months away from Earth, his homeworld’s presumably not terribly far away at all.
to

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Since we don't know, Jokey's ship may be extremely slow, having originated from one of the other moons around the planet. It may be utterly incapable of interstellar travel. There's no proof either way.
and you're the one throwing around appeals to ignorance. I mean this absolutely and 100% genuinely: You absolutely cannot mean what you said. You cannot have, in genuine good faith, have posted the following lines in sequence:

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Those are appeals to ignorance.

Since we don't know, Jokey's ship may be extremely slow, having originated from one of the other moons around the planet. It may be utterly incapable of interstellar travel. There's no proof either way.
You must be making the bad faith nature of your posts obvious on purpose. It takes effort to construct a post that bullshit. Because the alternative, that you actually wrote that post, read it, and thought "Yes, yes, this is a believable opinion and not the textbook definition of hypocrisy" would make even the Prometheus crew think "Man, you're bad at this".

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

However, we do know roughly how fast the Nostromo goes, and there's zero evidence that Jokey's spaceship is faster than the Nostromo. Therefore, the Nostromo has established our top speed in the film.
Do you mean the top speed inarguably stated in the film? Yes. Which is why I then used that speed in my discussion of how far the aliens could have spread since the derelict's construction.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

(Covenant then confirms that, yes, they move at roughly the same speed.)
For the love of god

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

As for the egg-pods in Alien, they are organic and are shown to have 'roots', which imply a need to draw nourishment from soil.
salvage some respect

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

They've lasted an ambiguously long time because they are kept preserved by some kind of technology.
And take

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

This technology produces a lot of light and sound, and necessarily has a power source. Given that they're underground, it isn't likely to be solar power. If it's some kind of automated reactor or geothermal power planet, it clearly hasn't broken down after being left unattended for this ambiguously long time. This all implies that the egg-pods aren't actually enormously old.
oh here, this is worth addressing: The Engineer from Prometheus was in stasis for 2,000 years. So either Prometheus is a dumb film for idiots and you hate it, or sci-fi technology lasting for several millennia is narratively pretty reasonable and you said a dumb, trivially disprovable thing. Pick one.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

(Prometheus, again, implies that the technology is 'only' a few thousand years old. Covenant sez that the egg-pods inside are 'only' a few decades old.)
the L

Splicer fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Mar 26, 2023

Xenomrph
Dec 9, 2005

AvP Nerd/Fanboy/Shill



Splicer, I mistook you for Sigher for some reason and I sincerely apologize for the oversight.

I also had never heard of a gish gallop and just looked it up, very appropriate

Charlatan Eschaton
Feb 23, 2018

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Xenomrph posted:

Splicer, I mistook you for Sigher for some reason and I sincerely apologize for the oversight.
After reading SMG's posts I just assumed it was a depressingly accurate autocorrect

Xenomrph
Dec 9, 2005

AvP Nerd/Fanboy/Shill



Splicer posted:

After reading SMG's posts I just assumed it was a depressingly accurate autocorrect

I think my favorite part is how he tries to connect the dots from “there’s a power source” to “and therefore the eggs aren’t old” :psyduck:

Even if Prometheus put a hard limit on the Derelict’s age (it doesn’t), shame on Prometheus for doing that, that’s another knock against the prequels’ reductive tendencies. ‘Alien’ intended otherwise (and is more interesting for it), that’s the point.

Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Mar 26, 2023

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Xenomrph posted:

It’s not my job to hold your hand and fact-check you when you (willfully?) get it wrong (such as what you just posted), I’ve got better things to do lmao

Alien 1: the egg-pods are shown to be in a cave under the ship.
Alien 2: there are no egg-pods in the Sulaco spaceship. Ripley erroneously claims the egg-pods were inside the Jokey spaceship and brought to the moon by it, but this is only possible if we retcon/ignore Alien 1. As with her claim that one alien can wipe out an entire planet, Ripley's actually just made a mistake here. She wasn't there.
Alien 3: there's one egg in the spaceship. The intentionally-misleading opening scene is also implied to be a dream or hallucination.
Alien 4: written by Joss Whedon.
AVP: the eggs are kept in a temple within an ice cave.
AV|P:R: no egg-pods appear at all.
Prometheus: no egg-pods appear at all.
Covenant: no eggs in the spaceship. Walter transports the baby spiders in little blue capsules.

So you could have just written that you were basing your conclusion on a single line of expository dialogue in Aliens, and/or Alien 4. But even Alien 4 doesn't support your argument, since the eggs were recently created from red goo by a mad scientist.

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Xenomrph posted:

Not really, as Sigher demonstrated.

As mentioned, the implication in 'Alien' was that it was an old galaxy with the potential for ancient spaceships filled with dangerous eggs, or even planets that just have eggs (we don't know where these things come from or if they're bespoke bioweapons or if they're a naturally-occurring lifeform) waiting for unlucky explorers to stumble across them anywhere.

Covenant reduces that scope and scale.

Those two things can coexist (and in fact, they do, in the Alien RPG). There can be crazy horrors in addition to a big nasty space ant being all over the place, it's not a zero-sum game. We can have weird goo-horrors while still having egg-born acid-bleeding chest-bursting Xenomorphs all over the place. We don't need to reduce one to emphasize the other. That's what Covenant does, and that's the problem. Covenant retcons what we saw in 'Alien' to be "the creature is only 20 years old, and is only present where a specific character traveled in those 20 years". That's reductive and lame.

I don't know what Sigher/Splicer is meant to have demonstrated, could you quote the post you mean?

The implication of Alien is extremely NOT that the galaxy is "filled with dangerous eggs", and, concomitantly, you are using the word "retcon" completely wrong. There's no reason whatsoever to expect that this one bug is "all over the place", potentially there to be found on any planet you stumble across. In fact, with every future film in the series, as I'm very fond of pointing out, we receive stronger and stronger implications that the LV-426 derelict is a freak one-off (i.e. there aren't even, like, other spaceships full of bioweapon-eggs manufactured by this one starfaring culture out there) because no one ever finds a "wild" xenomorph ever. It's all cultured or descended or cloned from of that single clutch in the derelict, which itself might well have come from the dead jockey himself, who himself might had a bad burrito.

You're confusing tie-in comics and video games, which have no choice but to sprinkle xenomorphs everywhere because they literally have no other tool in their toolkit, with the films we're talking about. There's no cosmic scope, no expectation of billion-year old eggs (of that exact type and breed, like that specific unique organism, somehow cloned countless times) lurking under your bed at Arcturan sleepaway camp. That's actually an extremely strange conclusion to draw and certainly not one that Alien's themes and visuals lead to.

Xenomrph
Dec 9, 2005

AvP Nerd/Fanboy/Shill



We will have to agree to disagree.

Again, this has all been hashed out ad nauseum multiple times in this thread. I’ve already repeated myself 3 times in this brief discussion alone. I genuinely don’t know why I even responded in the first place and dredged this “debate” back up. I guess I’m an idiot.

Splicer made the point very clear, I don’t need to re-quote him.

We clearly aren’t going to change each other’s minds on this point so I am instead choosing to disengage.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Skipped this earlier:

Splicer posted:

Everything about the setup makes it look ancient, right down to the giant fossilised elephant man pilot (oh, sorry - I mean big pale human in a jumpsuit :rolleyes:). It doesn't look like an old ship freshly landed, it looks like the crash-or-landing site is old. Very, very old.

I've written previously that Jokey does not appear to be 'just' a man in a suit but, rather, some kind of mutant (given that his 'helmet' has what appear to be teeth). And, again, the spaceship is 2000 years old, which is in ancient times. Ancient times span from 3000 BC to 500 AD.

So, you're just stating facts but, like, angrily?

You have made some mistakes, though: nothing can be both fossilized and ancient, as fossils are over 10,000 years old. (Jokey is apparently mummified, but it is not possible to tell whether a mummy is a fossil or not just by looking at it.) There is also no real indication that Jokey's ship had crashed; it's both undamaged and level with the moon's surface. When these sort of mistakes are packed into just two sentences, you can see why it's silly to go through every single line.

Ferrinus posted:

You're confusing tie-in comics and video games, which have no choice but to sprinkle xenomorphs everywhere because they literally have no other tool in their toolkit, with the films we're talking about. There's no cosmic scope, no expectation of billion-year old eggs (of that exact type and breed, like that specific unique organism, somehow cloned countless times) lurking under your bed at Arcturan sleepaway camp. That's actually an extremely strange conclusion to draw and certainly not one that Alien's themes and visuals lead to.

Going back to bears, the three bear species found in North America have existed for around five million years. Of course, those bears evolved over a longer span of time, from other species. Go back 30 million years, and those bears would be unrecognizable. And, of course, that bloodline can be traced back further to the first mammals (something like 100 million years ago), or even the first life on Earth (over 3.5 billion years ago).

So, even something so 'simple' as a bear originated in a primordial ooze and is the product of massive variation over time. Early bears resembled dogs and/or raccoons.

SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Mar 26, 2023

Xenomrph
Dec 9, 2005

AvP Nerd/Fanboy/Shill



Oh yeah I got the Scorn art book in the mail today, this is good poo poo. Highly recommend for Giger/Bekinski fans

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Xenomrph posted:

We will have to agree to disagree.

Again, this has all been hashed out ad nauseum multiple times in this thread. I’ve already repeated myself 3 times in this brief discussion alone. I genuinely don’t know why I even responded in the first place and dredged this “debate” back up. I guess I’m an idiot.

Splicer made the point very clear, I don’t need to re-quote him.

We clearly aren’t going to change each other’s minds on this point so I am instead choosing to disengage.

I can't find anywhere that he explains what you mean. Even after we understand that the xenomorph itself is the result of a combination of alien matter with human biology, the eggs and facehugger (face hugger. face! it's actually pretty rare for something to have a face! most life-forms don't. that implies a very specific context) are only shown in one cavern under the derelict. This actually squares pretty well with early concepts for the script in which LV-426 was just the home planet for the long-dead (or at least dormant) xenomorph race, the one where the derelict ship/facility and hieroglyph-covered pyramid were two separate structures.

I'm not really concerned with changing your mind per se, just challenging a falsehood. There's no "retcon" here; the idea of identical facehuggers just sprinkled all across the universe isn't confirmed or even strongly implied by any of the movies (and in fact is implied less and less as the series goes on, because otherwise, why would W-Y be so obsessed with the LV-426 clutch rather than just go out and find other specimens?).

Martman
Nov 20, 2006

I feel like facehuggers could maybe work on things that don't have faces.

Xenomrph
Dec 9, 2005

AvP Nerd/Fanboy/Shill



Ferrinus posted:

I'm not really concerned with changing your mind per se, just challenging a falsehood.

A differing interpretation of a piece of art is not “a falsehood”.

I’ve spelled out very clearly what I believe and why I believe it, and this isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation (but I sure as gently caress hope it’s the last).

If you misunderstood Splicer’s point I’ll let him rehash it, I can’t be bothered.

Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Mar 26, 2023

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Martman posted:

I feel like facehuggers could maybe work on things that don't have faces.

What's it gonna do to a tree, or a fungus, or a coral polyp, or even something as similar to us as a cockroach? There's a ton of dice rolls determining terms of size, biomass, orifices, lifespan, etc that need to come up in the facehugger's favor before it gets to do its job.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Going back to bears, the three bear species found in North America have existed for around five million years. Of course, those bears evolved over a longer span of time, from other species. Go back 30 million years, and those bears would be unrecognizable. And, of course, that bloodline can be traced back further to the first mammals (something like 100 million years ago), or even the first life on Earth (over 3.5 billion years ago).

So, even something so 'simple' as a bear originated in a primordial ooze and is the product of massive variation over time. Early bears resembled dogs and/or raccoons.

Charitably, the xenomorph could be more like a shark than a bear, i.e. something that's barely changed even after millions of years of evolution because it's just lucked into an incredibly efficient and convenient body plan from the jump. The question becomes whether it's thematically appropriate or coherent for these creatures to be static and unchanging rather than protean and constantly evolving.

It seems to me that it would make the most sense that the essence and aesthetic of the creature (acid blood, remorseless parasitism, eyelessness) are effectively cosmic constants while the specific details of any given incarnation are random and contingent.

Xenomrph posted:

A differing interpretation of a piece of art is not “a falsehood”.

I’ve spelled out very clearly what I believe and why I believe it, and this isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation (but I sure as gently caress hope it’s the last).

If you misunderstood Splicer’s point I’ll let him rehash it, I can’t be bothered.

This isn't about "interpretation", you're using the word "retcon", as in "retroactive continuity", as though the Prometheus line of films actually contradicted or went back on some previously-established setting fact. T'ain't so!

Xenomrph
Dec 9, 2005

AvP Nerd/Fanboy/Shill



The core Alien movies only show eggs from one source because the movies follow one character as she goes to the same planet twice. That isn’t “proof” (or even evidence) that there aren’t other eggs elsewhere, that’s the narrow scope of the narrative following a single character’s journey. The implication of ‘Alien’ is there are weird ancient horrors lurking in the depths of space, which can include nightmare eggs. It’s not saying there absolutely are Aliens everywhere, merely that there could be, we don’t know. The imagination can run wild with the possibilities.

Covenant reduces this down to “nope”.

That’s reductive, and lame. It takes a potential interesting interpretation of ‘Alien’ and kneecaps it, to nobody’s benefit.

I cannot make this any clearer.

But here I am repeating myself. Again.

Complaining about my use of the word “retcon” is semantic bullshit and you should knock it off.

Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Mar 26, 2023

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Xenomrph posted:

The core Alien movies only show eggs from one source because the movies follow one character as she goes to the same planet twice. That isn’t “proof” (or even evidence) that there aren’t other eggs elsewhere, that’s the narrow scope of the narrative following a single character’s journey. The implication of ‘Alien’ is there are weird ancient horrors lurking in the depths of space, which can include nightmare eggs. It’s not saying there absolutely are Aliens everywhere, merely that there could be, we don’t know. The imagination can run wild with the possibilities.

Covenant reduces this down to “nope”.

That’s reductive, and lame. It takes a potential interesting interpretation of ‘Alien’ and kneecaps it, to nobody’s benefit.

I cannot make this any clearer.

But here I am repeating myself. Again.

Complaining about my use of the word “retcon” is semantic bullshit and you should knock it off.

Well, first, Covenant doesn't reduce this to "nope", because if you want to treat the cosmos as basically a giant random encounter table then of course at least one result of your d1,000,000,000 roll is going to be "nightmare eggs randomly and bizarrely identical to the ones cultivated by David sometime before 2104". So you've got that going for you.

Second, "which can include nightmare eggs" is like... yes, there are weird ancient horrors lurking in the depths of space, such as the nightmare eggs demonstrated in this movie. But to then expect the very same nightmare eggs a few solar systems over? And then a few solar systems down from that? That's actually really weird. Try thinking about almost any other horror/science fiction franchise like that. You finish watching The Thing and your main takeaway is that there could be a Thing on any planet? Lifeforce implies an entire universe of sexy vampires? You gotta be careful flying to another planet in Dune because for all you know a local shai-hulud could burst out of the ground beneath your spacecraft and eat you? Ah, heck, it turns out the Babadook had a brother?

The notion that this exact egg filled with this exact spider must, must, MUST be found elsewhere, in the wild, is very strange.

Now, as I write in response to SMG above, that specific spider is different from the idea of multifarious hostile acidic biomechanoid parasites, but it's precisely those things which Prometheus does imply are to be found out there, perhaps even seemingly causlessly, since the goo is ultimately just an accelerant.

FilthyImp
Sep 30, 2002

Anime Deviant

Martman posted:

I feel like facehuggers could maybe work on things that don't have faces.
Assblaster just doesn't have the same mouth feel.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Ferrinus posted:

Charitably, the xenomorph could be more like a shark than a bear, i.e. something that's barely changed even after millions of years of evolution because it's just lucked into an incredibly efficient and convenient body plan from the jump. The question becomes whether it's thematically appropriate or coherent for these creatures to be static and unchanging rather than protean and constantly evolving.

Apply some selection pressure, and sharks would begin looking very different rather quickly. Like, gradually take the water away.

Scatter the alien spiders across the universe for billions of years, or whatever is being imagined, and you're gonna see massive deviations across time and space.

If the aliens actually did wipe out entire planets, as noted earlier in the thread, they would immediately render themselves extinct. To survive, the alien spiders would need to establish some kind of equilibrium with whatever they use as hosts and prey. That alone would introduce huge variation as, of course, no two planets would have the same fauna to interact with.

Xenomrph posted:

It’s not saying there absolutely are Aliens everywhere, merely that there could be, we don’t know. The imagination can run wild with the possibilities.

Given what we're shown in the films, there couldn't be alien eggs everywhere. It's a completely unreasonable assumption.

But why not imagine aliens everywhere in spite of the facts? Why not imagine a bear on mars? The problem is that you see your imagination as weak, like it's threatened by the facts. (Isn't that what all that 'headcanon' nonsense is about?)

It's not tough, though. Earlier in the thread, I posted an imaginary scenario where the aliens generate mass from nothing and, consequently, grow to the point that they collapse in on themselves and become a star. Imagination!

SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Mar 26, 2023

well why not
Feb 10, 2009




https://reddit.com/r/NatureIsFuckingLit/comments/1224b7w/this_is_how_a_chameleon_gives_birth_doesnt_take/

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Apply some selection pressure, and sharks would begin looking very different rather quickly. Like, gradually take the water away.

Scatter the alien spiders across the universe for billions of years, or whatever is being imagined, and you're gonna see massive deviations across time and space.

If the aliens actually did wipe out entire planets, as noted earlier in the thread, they would immediately render themselves extinct. To survive, the alien spiders would need to establish some kind of equilibrium with whatever they use as hosts and prey. That alone would introduce huge variation as, of course, no two planets would have the same fauna to interact with.

Broadly, I'm willing to grant the somewhat fantastical assumption that some aspect of the monster from Alien is just so adaptive and efficient OR such a pure expression of grisly, primordial truths that it does survive millions of years of radically-different-across-different-planets selection pressures, like that we might legitimately find a xenomorph on a desert planet and then a xenomorph on a jungle planet on the other side of the galaxy and thereby learn something about the nature of life in general.

This is sort of implicit in both Prometheus and Covenant because you can sort of see everything exposed to the black goo kind of struggle towards the xenomorph-shape, getting close to that shape in proportion to how much the specific mutant in question roots itself in human flesh and reproduction. Worms become acid-blooded constrictors that shove themselves down throats, fungi spawn "neomorphs" (which I'm fairly sure weren't David's purposeful creations except insofar as he dumped a shitload of the catalyst on an inhabited planet and watched what happened), the "deacon" gets like 80% of the way there after being formed out of a complicated alchemical process incorporating Holloway, Shaw, and the last Engineer, etc. The Engineers even represent xenomorph-like figures in some of their sculpture!

Now, the trivial explanation for this is that the black goo is just xenomorph-juice and you have to be careful because if you use too much of it, especially on its own products, you'll get xenomorphs. However, I think it makes more sense to understand it as a general accelerant and recombinant, something that just takes life and starts jamming the "reroll stats" button ten thousand times per second. Unfortunately, when you do that, you start getting these eyeless, toxic demons. They're the teleological endpoint of reproductive life, generally.

This is to say that I'm actually very sympathetic to the Xenomrph/Splicer/whatever position. I just don't get why, like, specifically that one egg and that one spider are so important. "These hosed up eggs are one example of how hostile life itself is" is actually more true to Alien than "Watch out! These eggs could be anywhere!"

Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Mar 26, 2023

Mister Speaker
May 8, 2007

WE WILL CONTROL
ALL THAT YOU SEE
AND HEAR
If I may ask a question about the events of Prometheus since Ferrinus' reply reminded me and I'm at work right now unable to throw on the film:

Of the two scientists who encounter the Hammerpede, which one is it that we see back at the cargo ramp of the Prometheus, imbued with superhuman strength and agility? One of them gets the Hammerpede in his suit and down his throat, and the other is just splashed with its acid blood (which melts his helmet to his face), no? I thought it was the latter guy who comes back to the ship, which seems strange to me that the acid that melted his helmet zombified him such - I realize there aren't really any established 'rules' for this but the scene where they get murked by the Hammerpede suggrsts to me that the thing going down the guy's throat is a little more nefarious ans intentional than the defense mechanism of the acid blood. Have I been mixing up these two characters the whole time, or is there an explanation for why acid guy gained super monkey dexterity and ate someone's face? Do we ever see the other guy again?

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world
The hammerpede crawls down Milburn's (the biologist's) throat and we never see him again. Fifeld's (the geologist's) helmet is melted onto his face by the creature's acid blood, and he staggers backwards before spinning and falling face-first into the black goo that had covered the floor of the chamber. It's Fifeld who shows up later with a hosed-up, swollen face and attacks the crew in a rage.

Mister Speaker
May 8, 2007

WE WILL CONTROL
ALL THAT YOU SEE
AND HEAR
Ah ok. So it's meant to be the black goo he falls into that transforms him, presumably. It's been a long time but I think that could have been visually shown a little more, because from what I remember it happens very unceremoniously and the camera seems more intent on capturing the horrific Hammerpede down Milburn's throat before it cuts away.

FilthyImp
Sep 30, 2002

Anime Deviant
The audience doesn't know yet. I think in the interim David does his Goo-spiked drink trick and then they get attacked.

Mister Speaker
May 8, 2007

WE WILL CONTROL
ALL THAT YOU SEE
AND HEAR
Right, but even still I'm saying I didn't really make the connection that he even had been goo'd even after the fact, because from what I remember the end of that shot focuses entirely on Milburn taking that big thick Hammerpede in his mouth. I just rewatched the scene and we do see Fifeld go down in the goo, stand up and make a pained noise as his helmet appears to melt to his face. Then we cut to Milburn swallowing the Hammerpede and appearing paralyzed.

I get it now, but all I'm saying is that for me, the scene treatment of Fifeld's predicament could have been exposited(?) more thoroughly, as it stands to me it looks like he's just suffering from some really bad melted plastic burns while it appears something much more insidious is happening to Milburn. Even stranger that Milburn simply disappears after this scene, with how the camera lingered on him.

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Love how Prometheus chat almost always centers around the Milburn/Fifield thing. It's basically the best grossout horror in the alien franchise since Alien/Aliens and then pretty soon the movie returns to people doing William Shatner dialogue (I say this lovingly).

Mister Speaker
May 8, 2007

WE WILL CONTROL
ALL THAT YOU SEE
AND HEAR
Shaw's caesarian section probably had me wincing the most out of everything in that film.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Alien 1: the egg-pods are shown to be in a cave under the ship.
Even the final script calls it a cargo hold my dude. Perhaps you should lie down, take a break.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Skipped this earlier:

I've written previously that Jokey does not appear to be 'just' a man in a suit but, rather, some kind of mutant (given that his 'helmet' has what appear to be teeth). And, again, the spaceship is 2000 years old, which is in ancient times. Ancient times span from 3000 BC to 500 AD.

So, you're just stating facts but, like, angrily?

You have made some mistakes, though: nothing can be both fossilized and ancient, as fossils are over 10,000 years old. (Jokey is apparently mummified, but it is not possible to tell whether a mummy is a fossil or not just by looking at it.) There is also no real indication that Jokey's ship had crashed; it's both undamaged and level with the moon's surface. When these sort of mistakes are packed into just two sentences, you can see why it's silly to go through every single line.
If the only thing you can think to argue about is a full "fneh fneh I think you mean mummified fneh" maybe an acknowledgement that everything you've said to to this point was "untrue or inaccurate", and that it was "trivially easy for me to demonstrate that?" is in order?

Also it's not level with the surface? It's at a noticeable angle.*

Have you even watched this film?

*E: it's also irrelevant, "crash" does not necessarily imply akimbo, an emergency or automatic landing are both fine, and I even said "crash-or-landing site" in my post so zeroing in on the word "crash" reeks of bad faith.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:49 on Mar 26, 2023

Icon Of Sin
Dec 26, 2008



Mister Speaker posted:

Shaw's caesarian section probably had me wincing the most out of everything in that film.

“C-section Cthulhu” wouldn’t be a bad username, but you’re right. That scene is gnarly, but still not as dark (literally or figuratively) as the maternity ward scene in AvP2.

That scene/idea was wasted in that movie :(

Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

Pull up thread.

Two points:

1) Aliens is the reference point for space travel speeds in this Universe. It take roughly a week to get from Earth to LV-426. The touchstone for us is that travelling around the universe is like getting on a boat in the 1700's. It'll take a few weeks depending on how far you want to go, there are a few places nobody's bothered to go yet, and there's a reasonable chance something might go wrong on the way.

2) In Alien the eggs are have a 'blue mist stasis field'. I have always interpreted this to mean that on some level the ship is still functional and turned on.

Darko
Dec 23, 2004

My favorite part of Prometheus is when they wake up the Engineer and he's kind of inquisitive for a minute, realizes humans are garbage since they immediately start yelling at/over each other and begging for immortality, and decides, yeah, I'm going through with the original plan of killing all of these assholes.

FastestGunAlive
Apr 7, 2010

Dancing palm tree.
He decided to kill them because he sees their gains are not acceptable and their physique isn’t competition ready.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Mister Speaker posted:

Shaw's caesarian section probably had me wincing the most out of everything in that film.
I've never encountered a movie villain as terrifying as the nail in A Quiet Place.

Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!

Alchenar posted:

1) Aliens is the reference point for space travel speeds in this Universe. It take roughly a week to get from Earth to LV-426.
Well, 17 days.

17 days?!?

I always thought of the egg chamber as something underneath the ship itself, partly because the Foster novelisation (which I read long before seeing the film) describes a long descent, and also because Kane calls it a cave. There's also that one matte shot which shows it to be gigantic - the Derelict may be big, but unlike the Nostromo which is a hulking block, its shape doesn't suggest having that kind of interior space. Maybe it's that whole Lovecraftian dimensions thing.

But in hindsight, the shaft that Kane goes down to reach it changes things. It's too small for the Jockey to have used as access, even though it's right next to the chair. So what is it? It's Jockey aesthetics all the way down, so it's clearly integral to the ship. Weirdly-positioned and OSHA-noncompliant ventilation shaft? Drain? (For all we know, the Jockey was on the can and the giant 'cannon' is the phone he/she/it was reading.) It doesn't seem to have any kind of cover or hatch at either end, so it's like express facehugger access to the pilot.

Unless it only became the egg chamber after the Jockey got chestburstered...

Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

Payndz posted:

Well, 17 days.

17 days?!?


The Nostromo is a big container ship, the Sulaco is a frigate. Just assume you were to get on one of those ships right now crossing the Atlantic/Pacific to go somewhere. That's the frame of reference for how mature/accessible space travel is in the Alien universe.

Darko
Dec 23, 2004

I always thought the egg chamber was the Jockeys fridge and that he had a bad reaction after eating one of his eggs wrong. He got greedy and swallowed whole instead of chewing. It's like delicacies we eat that are poisonous and have to be prepared right.

Just that when the live food comes into contact with tiny (in comparison) people, it's no different than how horrific the animal kingdom is to other tiny in comparison animals. Our smaller animal life has to deal with much worse stuff than Xenomorphs, for example.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Darko posted:

I always thought the egg chamber was the Jockeys fridge and that he had a bad reaction after eating one of his eggs wrong. He got greedy and swallowed whole instead of chewing. It's like delicacies we eat that are poisonous and have to be prepared right.

Just that when the live food comes into contact with tiny (in comparison) people, it's no different than how horrific the animal kingdom is to other tiny in comparison animals. Our smaller animal life has to deal with much worse stuff than Xenomorphs, for example.
I'm not into the fridge thing, but yeah the Xenomorph life cycle reads to me like a parasitic life form introduced to unsuitable hosts rather than an apex predator. In the proper host it could very well crawl back out the way it came or be passed naturally rather than getting lost and bursting through the sternum. See tapeworms: human tapeworms are very bad for humans but they pretty much chill in your guts leaching nutrients and shedding eggs. Pig tapeworms are very bad for pigs but they pretty much chill in their guts leaching nutrients and shedding eggs. Put a pig tapeworm in a human and it gets confused by the body plan and starts borrowing into your muscles and brain. On their home planet getting facehuggered could be the equivalent of a cold; wake up with a sore throat, feel lovely for 24 hours, throw up an alien, and hopefully kill it before it starts breeding in the walls.

It could even by symbiotic; a large enough life form with skin apertures puts up with bad zits every so often, and in exchange it gets a bunch of space remoras making eggs out of the stuff it doesn't want hanging around.

Introduce the same life form onto a colony of humans (or onto an elephant man ship) and they end up producing malformed young who breed out of control until they collapse the local ecosystem and the hive along with it.

What I'm saying is that Aliens is an educational parable about the role invasive species play in habitat destruction.

e: just in case anyone, naming no names, is reading this in incredibly bad faith; this is my pet thinking-too-hard fanwank not an actual attempt to declare the True and Correct interpretation of the Alien franchise.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Mar 26, 2023

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Xenomrph
Dec 9, 2005

AvP Nerd/Fanboy/Shill



Ferrinus posted:


This is to say that I'm actually very sympathetic to the Xenomrph/Splicer/whatever position. I just don't get why, like, specifically that one egg and that one spider are so important. "These hosed up eggs are one example of how hostile life itself is" is actually more true to Alien than "Watch out! These eggs could be anywhere!"

We’ve been over this before (repeatedly, naturally) but it’s because the xenomorph is cool and good, and I like seeing it and want to see more of it. “Hey, look, we know you love your old dog very much, but we’re going to take your dog away… but look at these other different dogs! You like dogs, right??”

Nah bro, I want the potential to see my old dog anywhere, any time - restricting it so I can only see my dog if I go to specific places ain’t gonna cut it.

Payndz posted:

But in hindsight, the shaft that Kane goes down to reach it changes things. It's too small for the Jockey to have used as access, even though it's right next to the chair. So what is it? It's Jockey aesthetics all the way down, so it's clearly integral to the ship. Weirdly-positioned and OSHA-noncompliant ventilation shaft? Drain? (For all we know, the Jockey was on the can and the giant 'cannon' is the phone he/she/it was reading.) It doesn't seem to have any kind of cover or hatch at either end, so it's like express facehugger access to the pilot.

Unless it only became the egg chamber after the Jockey got chestburstered...
The edges of the hole Kane descends through are ragged and acid-burned, it seemingly isn’t a natural hatchway or something like that (assuming the Jockey could even get out of the chair and wasn’t fused to it).

Considering the original “egg morphing” concept and the idea that the eggs Kane finds were the crew, a likely implied series of events was that an Alien popped out of the Jockey, made the hole itself, and put eggs down in the hold.

Funnily enough, when you explore the interior of the Derelict in AvP Classic, the hole is covered over by metal plating placed there after the fact (obviously for OSHA compliance, don’t want someone tripping into the hole and breaking a leg and suing the Company after all :v: ).
I don’t remember how Colonial Marines handles the hole.

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