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Ferrinus posted:Buuut, if we understand that "a xenomorph" is what you get when evolution and reproduction are simply catalyzed towards their logical conclusion, the idea of "can beat a xenomorph" becomes nonsensical. How can you defeat what you're inevitably becoming? Everything about you is just the buggy, pre-alpha version of the creature carved into the Engineer complex's walls. Something cool about this in Aliens is the way that by the time we see the reactor/inner areas of the colony (even with the special edition) with the marines investigating the way it's like not just a mess but has a hive built around it and everything with drones shown as being difficult to make out because how much they're forms are part of the scenery. Since each of those aliens came from a colonist it can be seen as the logical endpoint of Weyland Yutani's goals in general, they're a perfect workforce in Aliens and not just a perfect killing machine like in Alien. So I do like the special edition's little bit at the colony pre-the marines arriving for extra driving home that each of those aliens sprag from a colonist. Very very very distantly, sort of ties into Weyland's low key company mission statement in Prometheus of "make me immortal at absolutely any cost"
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Mar 27, 2023 20:22
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Ferrinus posted:What gets me is that the Prometheus line if anything magnifies the significance of the xenomorph because it unbinds its particular shape and qualities from just happening to be one regular alien that evolved on one planet somewhere and proved pretty hardy! The thing is that within the franchise and among audiences, “a Xenomorph” means a specific quantifiable creature with a specific life cycle, resulting in a reasonably specific creature (some variations notwithstanding). Like when characters are told “xenomorph 1121” (the in-fiction name for the things), they know exactly what that means. “Xenomorph” as a general noun meaning “extraterrestrial that can take an unknown/changeable shape” is accurate, that’s been true since ‘Aliens’. John Carpenter’s The Thing is a “xenomorph”. But “Xenomorph” as a proper noun meaning “an acid-bleeding penis-headed monster that breeds through facehugging, chestbursting, etc” has been part of the cultural zeitgeist for going on 40 years. When Ridley Scott says “David created the Xenomorph”, he’s talking about the proper noun, although it’s easy to interpret the movie as him just creating “a creature”, or recreating the proper-noun Xenomorph. Unless I’m misunderstanding your point, in which case feel free to correct me. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 20:22
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Also, the full David Covenant sketchbook is kind of fun to look at: https://imgur.com/gallery/4yoGf
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Mar 27, 2023 20:24
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Xenomrph posted:The thing is that within the franchise and among audiences, “a Xenomorph” means a specific quantifiable creature with a specific life cycle, resulting in a reasonably specific creature (some variations notwithstanding). Like when characters are told “xenomorph 1121” (the in-fiction name for the things), they know exactly what that means. It's not really an unknown or totally changeable shape, though, right? Like we see a xenomorph with eyes in Resurrection but that's obviously a regression from the ideal. On the other hand, the fact that every instance of what you might call the Xenomorph Classic that appears onscreen is a little bit different (smooth versus ridged craniums, different arrangements of tubing, different arrangements of exoskeletal plating, etc...) doesn't at all need to be read as, like, an out-of-character "well of course the art crew couldn't identically replicate the costume from movie to movie, so we have to forgive them for the collar ridge being a few inches lower in the sequel"; it just scans perfectly fine that each generation is a little bit different, in the same way that no two Giger drawings are literal carbon copies of each other but plainly do come from the same DNA. I brought this up a little earlier, but I'll throw it out again: in AvP2, there's no standard lifecycle. The predalien could turn pregnant humans into the equivalent of fungal fruiting bodies through a direct injection. But that's still obviously a xenomorph, right? It wasn't some sort of gross mistake or watering-down of the concept. What would have watered down the concept is if it could do that to trees, or if it could just scarf down a lot of dog food and then lay eggs which hatched directly into chestbursters with no human intermediary. Darko posted:Also, the full David Covenant sketchbook is kind of fun to look at: https://imgur.com/gallery/4yoGf Oh hell yes.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:30
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Ferrinus posted:It's not really an unknown or totally changeable shape, though, right? Ferrinus posted:I brought this up a little earlier, but I'll throw it out again: in AvP2, there's no standard lifecycle. The predalien could turn pregnant humans into the equivalent of fungal fruiting bodies through a direct injection. But that's still obviously a xenomorph, right? It wasn't some sort of gross mistake or watering-down of the concept. Fans similarly balked at the accelerated facehugging lifecycle in ‘AvP’, because up to that point all 4 movies had been pretty consistent that the time from “facehugging” to “chestbursting” was 24 hours. Incidentally the movie novelization had a handwave for it (the Predators had tinkered with the life cycle to speed it up, so they didn’t have to wait a day to get the party started). And then Covenant dialed it up to 11 by having it require literally mere seconds of facehugging to be sufficient to result in chestbursting very soon after lol. That raised some eyebrows, but ultimately I’m personally not that bothered with it. It’s a little weird in light of all of the other movies, but whatever. Ferrinus posted:Oh hell yes. Go buy this, you’ll love it. Alien Covenant: David’s Drawings https://a.co/d/d131gau It’s got a cool look into David’s descent into “madness” by showing his mental process as he starts our drawing benign stuff like plants and bugs, transitions to animals, then experiments on Engineers, and culminates in what he does to Shaw.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:53
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Xenomrph posted:No I mean, within the narrative of ‘Aliens’, when Gorman says “a xenomorph may be involved”, he’s not referring to the proper-noun Aliens, it’s meant to be a catch-all generic military term for “extraterrestrial with an unknown shape”. The cultural zeitgeist just latched onto it as a species name, and the franchise essentially adopted it as one within the fiction as well because it’s convenient shorthand. ‘The Predator’ did the same thing when one of the characters says “we call them Predators” even though it kind of makes no sense within the fiction (and then immediately lampshades it when a character says “yeah but why do you call them that?”) It’s because it’s what audiences call them and they immediately know what you’re talking about when you say it. Oh I mean "the" xenomorph here, whose shape clearly is changeable but within certain important aesthetic parameters. Like there are obvious reasons that the fleshy white things in Covenant are at least legible precursors while E.T. is not. quote:Oh you’d better believe fans (and some general audience members) balked at it as being “unnatural” and not in-line with what an Alien “should” do, and had to reconcile it with what they expected. There’s easy handwaves for it (a popular one is that the PredAlien was a Queen and that’s one way Queens can reproduce to jump-start a hive in a pinch), but it was still something that raised a few eyebrows when the movie came out. That doesn't surprise me about some fans' reaction to Requiem, but, I ask you, was that YOUR reaction? Even if we assume Prometheus and its sequel never came out, and if we take Requiem as "canon" (such that so is AvP, and so are predators, and so are thousands-year old rites with facehugger pods in ancient ziggurats...), the surprise reproductive capabilities of the predalien to me feel like less of an actual change to anything and more like someone pointing out to me something that was obviously true in retrospect. Why wouldn't we expect some kind of adaptive radiation here? If these monsters are scattered across space, and take on properties of their hosts, and might already have several different means of propagating themselves (drone matures into a queen and starts laying eggs, drone just melts a human down into a fungal facehugger pod...) then why not weirder variants of alien that inject people with hypodermic tongues or constantly flake off mutagenic spores or forcibly integrate people as new walls of a single gigantic, living hive? This kind of unpredictable flexibility would actually give Ripley's ravings in Aliens a little more credence. A single drone, even one with the ability to slowly turn a person into a second drone, isn't going to be that dangerous even if let loose on a densely-populated planet. But the more these monsters are at least potentially capable of Thing-like exponential infection...
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Mar 27, 2023 21:10
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Ferrinus posted:That doesn't surprise me about some fans' reaction to Requiem, but, I ask you, was that YOUR reaction? I’d say the true hard-line threshold for how an Alien “should” look and act likely varies from viewer to viewer, but I’d say there’s also some degree of consistent consensus on what a baseline proper-noun Xenomorph is, and when things deviate from that people will try to come up with explanations if that makes them more comfortable.
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Mar 27, 2023 21:29
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CelticPredator posted:Every alien movie is good I've enjoyed every alien movie but they range from great to bad
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Mar 27, 2023 21:37
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Xenomrph posted:It raised my eyebrows at first, but I ultimately settled on a handwave “explanation” (it’s another form of reproduction used in certain circumstances, like egg-morphing) and I was fine with it. It’s just a thing they can do, and that’s fine. I guess the point I want to make here is that the two of us at pretty close points along the same gradient here, where I'm just farther along the "oh, cool, that's something I didn't realize about them" progression than you are. There's a classic beat in arguments about religion wherein a nonbeliever tells a monotheist "we are both atheists; I just disbelieve one more god than you do".
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Mar 27, 2023 21:49
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Slashrat posted:Only thing Resurrection did right imo was the concept of the underwater scene imo. The effects of it don't really hold up today even, but just the idea of having to contend with xenomorphs while underwater is terrifying. I was talking about the practicals honestly. All the creature effects are top notch
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Mar 27, 2023 21:58
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A xenomorph is something James Cameron came up with on the potty
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Mar 27, 2023 21:59
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CelticPredator posted:I was talking about the practicals honestly. All the creature effects are top notch Extremely good set dressing too. The pit-like cell Ripley is in is reused as a corridor several times, I think they only had like two corridors for the whole movie
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Mar 27, 2023 22:48
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You're talking about Jeunet. You know you're gonna get excellent production design from Jeunet at the very least.
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Mar 27, 2023 22:54
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Basebf555 posted:You're talking about Jeunet. You know you're gonna get excellent production design from Jeunet at the very least. You’re also going to get quality Ron Perlman (not that he ever does bad work though) and Dominique Pińon as well. True story, Ron Perlman, who is fluent in French from having worked on City of Lost Children with Jeunet, had to run interference for Jeunet to keep the studio execs from trying to railroad him by exploiting his difficulties with English. This is still the best Resurrection anecdote though: https://youtu.be/FF44YvDVP8Y Over time I’ve come to recognize the movie’s flaws, but I can’t bring myself to hate it. It was the first Alien movie I was old enough to see in theatres, and for me that was a Big Deal. It’s got a bunch of great character performances, cool practical effects, some neat setpieces, and the best basketball shot in all of cinema. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 22:58
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I've gotten some entertainment out of every alien related movie, even the bad goofy ones. But Requiem was just... not enjoyable in any way. It had a sort of sadistic cruelty to it, it lingered and wallowed in the shocking cruelty to really gross degrees. I enjoy gross comedy-gore slasher movies, I even enjoy well made horrific movies like Salo. But Requiem?? It was just such a hateful movie, but didn't have anything else going for it.
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Mar 27, 2023 23:00
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The over the top borderline nihilism of Requiem was mostly a response to the fan reaction to the first AvP, which was PG-13 and considered too sanitized to be a good Alien/Predator movie.
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Mar 27, 2023 23:04
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Ferrinus posted:forcibly integrate people as new walls of a single gigantic, living hive? I'm surprised that this hasn't happened yet, to be honest. Equally surprised a Cronenberg (be it David or Brandon) hasn't been brought on to direct their own take on the IP. quote:This kind of unpredictable flexibility would actually give Ripley's ravings in Aliens a little more credence. A single drone, even one with the ability to slowly turn a person into a second drone, isn't going to be that dangerous even if let loose on a densely-populated planet. If recent events have taught us anything, it's that such a situation would not even be acknowledged until it was far too late 
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Mar 27, 2023 23:06
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Baronjutter posted:I've gotten some entertainment out of every alien related movie, even the bad goofy ones. But Requiem was just... not enjoyable in any way. It had a sort of sadistic cruelty to it, it lingered and wallowed in the shocking cruelty to really gross degrees. I enjoy gross comedy-gore slasher movies, I even enjoy well made horrific movies like Salo. But Requiem?? It was just such a hateful movie, but didn't have anything else going for it. "it came out after SAW" explains it well enough
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Mar 27, 2023 23:25
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Is it ever explained in the films what the resin that the hive is constructed of, actually is? In one of the comics it seems to be shown that they need organic material for it (so the drones of a fledgling queen sacrifice one of themselves). Bees make wax on their own, I learned.
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Mar 27, 2023 23:27
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It's plaque
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Mar 27, 2023 23:31
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Mister Speaker posted:Is it ever explained in the films what the resin that the hive is constructed of, actually is? In one of the comics it seems to be shown that they need organic material for it (so the drones of a fledgling queen sacrifice one of themselves). Bees make wax on their own, I learned. In the films? No. Even in the expanded universe it isn’t exactly consistent or well-defined. In the Leading Edge RPG they spray the stuff out of their dorsal tubes (the RPG came out before Alien3, which features an Alien with no dorsal tubes  ). As you mentioned in one of the comics they’re shown making it out of dead Aliens and/or fashioning it from Alien drool. I think in the AvP Extinction RTS game it gets propagated by “hive nodes” and grows like the Zerg Creep in StarCraft.
Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 23:32
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Xenomrph posted:The thing is that within the franchise and among audiences, “a Xenomorph” means a specific quantifiable creature with a specific life cycle, resulting in a reasonably specific creature (some variations notwithstanding). Like when characters are told “xenomorph 1121” (the in-fiction name for the things), they know exactly what that means. Right, and these and other notions you’ve expressed can all be traced back to James Cameron’s Aliens and its related merchandising. Everything you’ve expressed is an effort to map Aliens back onto other films. Even Scott’s “Director’s Cut”, where there is explicitly no big alien pooping eggs out of its cloaca because the aliens reproduce via fungal spores, is made subordinate: “Xenomorphs are capable of egg-morphing if a Xenomorph Queen is not around...”. We have to be perpetually assured that J.C.’s Aliens are still valid at all times and just lurking offscreen. This insistence on a continual repetition of the specific events of Aliens is, frankly, a fetishism of Aliens. And again, this is because you haven’t been trained by marketing to fixate on, say, how ‘the deacon’ reproduces. Does a big deacon poop out deacon eggs? Does a big ‘neomorph’ poop out neomorph eggs? You’ve certainly never considered this.
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Mar 28, 2023 00:32
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Mar 28, 2023 00:40
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If anything I've written is untrue or inaccurate, it should be trivially easy for you to demonstrate it.
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Mar 28, 2023 01:00
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E:
MrMojok fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 01:03
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Xenomrph posted:There actually is a campaign centered around the attempted assassination of my character. MrMojok posted:
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Mar 28, 2023 01:05
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Oh believe me, I saw it the first time you posted it. 
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Mar 28, 2023 01:21
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Mar 28, 2023 01:22
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Xenomrph posted:In the films? No. Even in the expanded universe it isn’t exactly consistent or well-defined. In the Leading Edge RPG they spray the stuff out of their dorsal tubes (the RPG came out before Alien3, which features an Alien with no dorsal tubes Isn't there mention of it being secretion somewhere? SuperMechagodzilla posted:If anything I've written is untrue or inaccurate, it should be trivially easy for you to demonstrate it. He's done that multiple times which you avoided addressing and continued with your Jordan Peterson schtick. He's not going to waste more time.
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Mar 28, 2023 01:27
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Xenomrph posted:Oh believe me, I saw it the first time you posted it. 
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Mar 28, 2023 01:29
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SUNKOS posted:Isn't there mention of it being secretion somewhere? “Yeah, but secreted from what?”
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Mar 28, 2023 01:30
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Xenomrph posted:“Yeah, but secreted from what?” Don’t touch nothin’.
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Mar 28, 2023 01:34
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SUNKOS posted:He's done that multiple times which you avoided addressing Could you present one example? The point of all this is to show how franchise thinking is deleterious to actually reading the films. It's effectively believing that there's a talking/rapping dog in the movie Titanic because one is shown in the movie Titanic: The Legend Goes On.... In the case of Alien/Aliens, it's a historical phenomenon, happening at nearly the same time that understanding of First Blood was terribly impacted by the release of First Blood: Part 2 and its fantasy of Vietnam War. Like, as if that looney tunes poo poo is what reduced John Rambo to an incoherent, blubbering mess in the previous film. For fans who complain about Alien3 and Prometheus/Covenant's rejection of Aliens, you can see the bad trajectory that that the Alien films could have taken in the largely-forgotten Rambo sequels. Last Blood, or the one that is now known primarily as a photoshopped image that doesn't actually appear in the film.
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Mar 28, 2023 01:59
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Icon Of Sin posted:Don’t touch nothin’. I was going to follow up with the next line in the script… but that line isn’t in the script, looks like it may have been ad-libbed. The script does have the line “they ripped apart the colony for building materials”, though, which is not in the final film.
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Mar 28, 2023 02:05
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Aliens is the most popular movie in the franchise, particularly among fans of the franchise, so it's not surprising that there's people who would like it to be the Aliens franchise and not the black goo franchise or inhumane AI franchise, even if they have no objection to the existence of black goo itself or enjoy Michael Fassbender as David. The specific limitation introduced by the later Ridley Scott films isn't whether you can run into weird monsters throughout the galaxy, but whether it makes sense to fill the galaxy and thousands of years of history with Aliens spin-offs because Alien: Covenant suggests that Aliens is a special case rather than a representative example.
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Mar 28, 2023 02:38
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My xenomorph lifecycle head-canon is anything that happens in Alien, Aliens and Alien 3. Everything else is a weird fever dream 
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Mar 28, 2023 03:20
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Space Jam posted:My xenomorph lifecycle head-canon is anything that happens in Alien, Aliens and Alien 3. Everything else is a weird fever dream I'm even more exclusionary, I don't consider those films either!
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Mar 28, 2023 03:26
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Schwarzwald posted:I'm even more exclusionary, I don't consider those films either! The xenomorph lifecycle is *vaguely gesticulates at outer space*
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Mar 28, 2023 03:31
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As Lovecraft intended.
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Mar 28, 2023 04:29
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Sir Kodiak posted:Aliens is the most popular movie in the franchise, particularly among fans of the franchise, so it's not surprising that there's people who would like it to be the Aliens franchise and not the black goo franchise or inhumane AI franchise, even if they have no objection to the existence of black goo itself or enjoy Michael Fassbender as David. The specific limitation introduced by the later Ridley Scott films isn't whether you can run into weird monsters throughout the galaxy, but whether it makes sense to fill the galaxy and thousands of years of history with Aliens spin-offs because Alien: Covenant suggests that Aliens is a special case rather than a representative example. Well, right; there's nothing wrong with liking Aliens. It's a perfectly okay film with a lot of good stuff in it. The trouble is the subsequent mushing plot points from Aliens together with plot points of hundreds of other things until they're indistinguishable. Literally everything becomes Aliens, in this sort of meta-narrative where the film itself colonizes everything it touches. Reading the egg article on Xenopedia right now, and they're like oh yeah; the And, like, no. It isn't. The pods in Alien aren't called ovomorphs, and they don't bounce.
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Mar 28, 2023 06:19
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