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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33H2Y8GvYdA
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Mar 29, 2023 04:59
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I’m engaging with AvP classic and it’s great
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Mar 29, 2023 05:31
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On the topic of the UPP, they originated in the William Gibson Alien3 script draft (more about that later) but showed up in the very underrated Nintendo DS game “Aliens: Infestation” (more about that game later), but are also a major player in the Alien RPG, which is where that video gets pretty much all of its content. The Gibson script is interesting in that it barely has Ripley or Newt in it, and features some very wild Alien reproductive methods. For those curious, the script is easy to find online but I also recommend the William Gibson Alien3 audio drama (which features Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles), which also pairs well with the comic book adaptation of the script. I’m having trouble locating the comic book adaptation on Amazon, but it also got a novelization (which I haven’t read). Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson https://a.co/d/6IyzB1U On the topic of the Aliens Infestation DS game, it was meant to be a tie-in for Aliens Colonial Marines, until that game got heavily delayed and its plot got overhauled. The game also has a cameo by the decommissioned combat robots seen in the Alien3 light gun game, which is a cute deep-cut. CelticPredator posted:I’m engaging with AvP classic and it’s great Are you on Discord (and more specifically, the goon co-op discord)? That makes it easier to wrangle you for future goon AvP nights Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Mar 29, 2023 |
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Mar 29, 2023 05:44
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This isn't an unfamiliar concept. Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies, and one of the big scenes involves a sick dinosaur. The character Ellie stops to investigate why the dinosaur is sick, but the question is never answered. ?????? Have you seen Jurassic Park? The character Ellie specifically says the dinosaur is suffering from melia toxicity. Taking the movie at face value, the dinosaur ate a toxic plant. Unless we go into some alternate media, then that is the explanation for why the dino is sick. Ellie is portrayed as a competent botanist and we're given no reason to assume she is lying. I don't need to see Ellie spend years in school to know that she is a botanist. I don't need to see the dino eat the poison plant to know that it ate the poison plant when the botanist examines its turds and finds evidence of poison. In the movie itself, the cloned dinosaurs are not inexplicably dying. I think the only time we see dinos die is when the T-Rex outright eats them. I think your programmers need to fix a few bugs in your system. It's okay to just handwave some stuff you don't remember because everyone gets poo poo wrong but you don't have to go on this crusade against fan-editing when you are doing it yourself. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Mar 29, 2023 |
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Mar 29, 2023 06:34
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Iirc Grant and Sattler are called in because of the mystery illness (and convincing them the venture is sound for that academia buy-in). Sattler's dino-poo poo expedition is meant to dovetail with Grant's anger in the hatching lab: that the beauty and technological feats in the park are hampered by hubris, shoddy research, and compromises made towards marketability that sacrifice legitimacy. It's a neat trick but poo poo behind the curtain gets real wild.
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Mar 29, 2023 06:51
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Mr. Grapes! posted:?????? With internet, you coulda just gone back and checked the scene. In the movie, Dr. Sattler suspects that the triceratops has eaten Indian Lilac, but there's no evidence of the berries in the famous big pile of poo poo. This confirms what Dr. Harding was saying: that the dinosaurs don't feed on the plants. So, Sattler begins thinking aloud: the dinosaurs display symptoms of poisoning every six weeks, but they're not eating the plants... and she trails off. The scene ends, and the mystery is never resolved. There's no point where Sattler actually confirms that the berries are causing the symptoms. When she says it's "melia toxicity", that's her working through a hypothesis. She never gets past that point. The reason the scene remains in the film is that Sattler has already pointed out that the park is loaded with all kinds of toxic plants, that might have all kinds of effects: "how can you know anything about an extinct ecosystem? And, therefore, how could you ever assume that you can control it? You have plants in this building that are poisonous. You picked them because they look good." The sick dinosaur scene proves her right. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Mar 29, 2023 |
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Mar 29, 2023 07:02
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FilthyImp posted:Iirc Grant and Sattler are called in because of the mystery illness (and convincing them the venture is sound for that academia buy-in). Also all the dinosaurs have broken gene sequences filled in with frog DNA, so any study of them is poisoned from the start. Or, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSCmxP5608
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Mar 29, 2023 09:17
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Ferrinus posted:But it's not internally consistent. Splicer-who-just-saw-Prometheus would disagree radically with Splicer-who-just-saw-Covenant.
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Mar 29, 2023 09:43
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VIRUS was a pretty fun ripoff of Alien, if only kind of. I also only watched it because one of the lines of dialog from its monster was sampled in an Infected Mushroom song, and I was kinda waiting for it for the whole movie, and then tuned out once I heard it, so YMMV, I guess.
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Mar 29, 2023 09:49
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Xenomrph posted:It reduces it because the Alien can spread farther in 200,000 years with other means than it can in 20 strictly with David, and I like the idea that, like the Jockey, it’s old enough to drink alcohol. We’ve kinda gone over this. Having the potential for more Aliens is a Good Thing. There’s a reason why the franchise walked it back before the movie even came out, and has continued to do so. Having more Aliens doesn’t mean there aren’t potentially other horrors, or lessen their impact. It’s not a zero-sum game. Lets be real, the franchise is doing this not because More Aliens is a Good Thing but because More Aliens means More Money. It's not a an artistic concern, it's a commercial one.
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Mar 29, 2023 10:08
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Neo Rasa posted:I remember generally digging Pandorum and Possession of course rules. Life is good and fun and has aged pretty well. I watched it the first time and was kind of meh on it. Watched it more recently and realized it was much tighter and paid more attention to setting up things than I originally thought and it's pretty good. Also has some nice body horror, not on screen, but when you think of the implications of what it's actually doing to people. Watch it blind.
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Mar 29, 2023 10:17
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Darko posted:Life is good and fun and has aged pretty well. I watched it the first time and was kind of meh on it. Watched it more recently and realized it was much tighter and paid more attention to setting up things than I originally thought and it's pretty good. Also has some nice body horror, not on screen, but when you think of the implications of what it's actually doing to people. Watch it blind. There's some very on screen body horror as well if that's your bag. The way Ryan Reynolds dies is absolutely one of the nastiest kills in all of sci fi horror even though it's so simple.
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Mar 29, 2023 10:44
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Shanty posted:There's some very on screen body horror as well if that's your bag. The way Ryan Reynolds dies is absolutely one of the nastiest kills in all of sci fi horror even though it's so simple. That's mainly what I'm referring to. On screen, not much gore, but if you think about what's happening, it's one of the worst alien related deaths on screen. Blob level stuff. And then what's happening in the final shot, and the implications.
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Mar 29, 2023 11:25
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Neo Rasa posted:I really wish Scott had absolute control over Covenant and got to do a third movie just based on how wild Raised By Wolves got. People really overstate Scott's involvement with that show. He directed the first two episodes and then was hands-off.
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Mar 29, 2023 13:26
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Splicer posted:That's what makes the egg important! Disagree, coming into Prometheus we have actually seen two weird space monsters. What Prometheus does is show us that the two species are related (both created by the goo) and establish that one is way worse than the other: After all, the Engineers have a dope mural of the Xenomorph in their ship, but immediately freak out when they encounter this abomination: 
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Mar 29, 2023 15:17
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Darko posted:That's mainly what I'm referring to. On screen, not much gore, but if you think about what's happening, it's one of the worst alien related deaths on screen. Blob level stuff. And then what's happening in the final shot, and the implications. It was the moments before that final shot that really got to me. Rebecca Ferguson's character screaming hopelessly as she tumbles off into the Void is just, like ... gah.
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Mar 29, 2023 15:22
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Alchenar posted:Lets be real, the franchise is doing this not because More Aliens is a Good Thing but because More Aliens means More Money. It's not a an artistic concern, it's a commercial one. Continuing along those lines, the true threat of the Scott prequels is not that it reduces the range of the “xenomorph” but that it expands it too far - outside the bounds of the franchise, beyond what can be owned. Scott’s setting is populated by cast-off mutants and bastard deviations. Illegitimacy is the rule. It’s a galaxy of alien ripoffs, where even the Capital-X Xenomorph is revealed to have no special status and is, itself, a ripoff of other things. Black goo cannot really be trademarked or copyrighted, and the creatures it can produce are infinite in their variety. Engineers, likewise, are humans and cannot be copyrighted. The capital X is shrinking into nothingness as the capital P expands overwhelmingly. What people fail to appreciate is that this is inclusive. The xenomorphic is redefined to stand for monstrosity as such - the degree to which given film fits into “the universe” now determined by aesthetics and shared political/thematic concerns over licensing agreements or whatever. Calvin from Life is a xenomorph, officially, as ‘the official’ dissolves away.
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Mar 29, 2023 15:55
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Just heard back from Andrew Gaska, he says there’s no Predator RPG
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Mar 29, 2023 16:54
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I thought Calvin being from birth clearly intelligent and problem-solving was a neat riff on the Alien-monster story.
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Mar 29, 2023 17:12
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Xenomrph posted:On the topic of the UPP, they originated in the William Gibson Alien3 script draft (more about that later) but showed up in the very underrated Nintendo DS game “Aliens: Infestation” (more about that game later), but are also a major player in the Alien RPG, which is where that video gets pretty much all of its content. Yeah I first read about the UPP from the gibson script, which I didn't think was very good but I did enjoy the world building it added. I've always wanted more content that just explored the world of alien, even if no aliens were present. I've always been so curious about what the human galaxy looks like. Is Earth a giant blade runner mega city dystopia and all the colonies are fairly rural and undeveloped resource colonies, or are there other human planets with billions of people? What's civilian life like? We've seen frontier colonists, we've seen space truckers, but not much else. None of this stuff is remotely important for the themes and topics explored in alien movies, it's just the stupid poo poo I'm interested in. When I first heard about the UPP being some "socialist" power I briefly got excited that maybe we had finally seen that there's actually some good guys in this universe, maybe a little hope. But of course they're very much marxist-leninist rooted authoritarians with brutal internal security and poverty due to over-investment in the military. 
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Mar 29, 2023 17:27
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Disagree, coming into Prometheus we have actually seen two weird space monsters. What Prometheus does is show us that the two species are related (both created by the goo) and establish that one is way worse than the other: After all, the Engineers have a dope mural of the Xenomorph in their ship, but immediately freak out when they encounter this abomination: Audiences were freaked out by that abomination too, albeit not in the intended way  Xenomrph posted:The Gibson script is interesting in that it barely has Ripley or Newt in it, and features some very wild Alien reproductive methods. For those curious, the script is easy to find online but I also recommend the William Gibson Alien3 audio drama (which features Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles), which also pairs well with the comic book adaptation of the script. I’m having trouble locating the comic book adaptation on Amazon, but it also got a novelization (which I haven’t read). Was anything similar to this ever made for the wooden planet script? Something collecting the script, concept art/storyboard, behind-the-scenes photography and so on? There's various things scattered around online but it would be nice to see all that material collected, possibly with additional commentary.
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Mar 29, 2023 17:40
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SUNKOS posted:Was anything similar to this ever made for the wooden planet script? Something collecting the script, concept art/storyboard, behind-the-scenes photography and so on? There's various things scattered around online but it would be nice to see all that material collected, possibly with additional commentary. Vincent Ward has a section on his website: http://vincentwardfilms.com/project/concepts/alien-3/unrequited-visio/ His site is always super slow so beware. He commissioned a graphic novel of the script that’s on there but I don’t know if it’s complete (phone posting between meetings)
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Mar 29, 2023 18:13
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Baronjutter posted:I've always wanted more content that just explored the world of alien, even if no aliens were present. I've always been so curious about what the human galaxy looks like. Is Earth a giant blade runner mega city dystopia and all the colonies are fairly rural and undeveloped resource colonies, or are there other human planets with billions of people? What's civilian life like? We've seen frontier colonists, we've seen space truckers, but not much else. None of this stuff is remotely important for the themes and topics explored in alien movies, it's just the stupid poo poo I'm interested in. The Leading Edge RPG is neat because it’s campaign driven and really isn’t capital-A Aliens centric at all. Sure they’re in it, but the campaigns are often about what the Colonial Marines are doing when they’re *not* dealing with Aliens. Border disputes, corporate entanglements, colonist uprisings, other indigenous extraterrestrials, shore leave, stuff like that. It’s also got rules for playing as corporate mercenaries, which is neat. SUNKOS posted:Audiences were freaked out by that abomination too, albeit not in the intended way Not yet, but this website has a pretty exhaustive deep-dive about the script, including concept art and the like: https://alienseries.wordpress.com/tag/wooden-planet/ I also remember liking the David Twohy ‘Alien3’ script (it’s been a while since I read it) - he recycled parts of it wholesale in Chronicles of Riddick when Riddick goes to the underground prison.  Alien3’s production was a clusterfuck.
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Mar 29, 2023 18:14
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Splicer posted:Yes, that's how acquiring knowledge works. Not when the second thing you learn doesn't at all contradict the first. It's like, upon reading your second issue of Spider-Man, getting really mad because this one being about Doctor Octopus must mean your beloved Green Goblin is dead forever.
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Mar 29, 2023 18:38
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SUNKOS posted:If you consider David an unreliable narrator, it raises the question and possibility that the planet may have already been like that before David and Shaw (or what was left of her) arrived. I know it's a hobby horse of mine, so I apologize for Kramering into this thread, but that's not what an unreliable narrator is. An unreliable narrator is not one who lies to the audience about the sequence of events depicted in the story. An unreliable narrator is one whose ethical and moral judgments about the events depicted in the story are undermined by the story or its "implied author". The classic example of the unreliable narrator is Humbert Humbert from Lolita. He doesn't lie about getting custody of Lo and taking her on a road trip where they have sex. He just characterizes that as a romantic and later hectic adventure instead of a kidnapping and rape. Conversely, the classic example of a reliable narrator is Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby who narrates scenes he has no part in, most notably the argument in the garage, but readers don't question his assessment of that scene because he's the novel's obvious moral center. Also, to be a narrator, one has to have an narratee, one to whom they are narrating. The prologue version of that scene released separately from the film has David narrating it, but the film presents that scene more as David reminiscing while he recites "Ozymandias" to Walter. I would suggest that the narrator for that moment is the same disembodied perspective from which the rest of the film is narrated, which is the reliable perspective against which any character's narration should be measured. A great and thread appropriate example of unreliable narration is the film version of Starship Troopers. The film never lies to you about events. Mormon colonists settled in bug space and the bugs massacred them. Later an asteroid hit Rio and all out war against the bugs began. These are all determinate facts of the text. But what becomes clear as you realize you're watching a propaganda film is that what the movie characterizes as bug aggression and human retaliation is actually a pretext for human aggression. Alchenar posted:I actually saw this in a youtube comment when checking out the scene the other day: the 'engineers' David kills don't actually look quite like the Engineer in Prometheus - they're smaller and have slightly different cranial structure. I think it's very clear that the people David murders en masse are not the Engineers encountered in Prometheus. SUNKOS posted:Audiences were freaked out by that abomination too, albeit not in the intended way I think audiences were freaked out about old Weyland exactly as they were supposed to be. He's supposed to look unnatural and loving wrong. He's also supposed to look like an actor in old person makeup so you think he may get his wish from the Engineers, have his youth restored, and the makeup removed to reveal handsome Guy Pearce beneath.
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Mar 29, 2023 19:13
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PeterWeller posted:I know it's a hobby horse of mine, so I apologize for Kramering into this thread, but that's not what an unreliable narrator is. Also, the “unreliable narrator” claim is wrong because it gets the plot of Covenant wrong. What actually happens is that David bombs the humans-who-aren’t-engineers, pushing a presumably-horrified Shaw to wrest control of the ship and smash it into the ground while singing Country Road - presumably in the hopes of killing David. David, however, obviously survives and takes Shaw captive - which leads into the events of the film.
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Mar 29, 2023 20:12
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PeterWeller posted:I think audiences were freaked out about old Weyland exactly as they were supposed to be. He's supposed to look unnatural and loving wrong. He's also supposed to look like an actor in old person makeup so you think he may get his wish from the Engineers, have his youth restored, and the makeup removed to reveal handsome Guy Pearce beneath. Subverting audience expectations was a nice little side effect but they actually did want young Guy Pearce in some scenes which is why they hired him and not an older actor. He was supposed to have been inside the crypod thing talking to David and he would've appeared as his younger self during those scenes, but they were cut.
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Mar 29, 2023 20:18
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Basebf555 posted:Subverting audience expectations was a nice little side effect but they actually did want young Guy Pearce in some scenes which is why they hired him and not an older actor. He was supposed to have been inside the crypod thing talking to David and he would've appeared as his younger self during those scenes, but they were cut. I think those scenes would've just further reinforced the idea that Pearce is going to slough off the old man makeup at some point in the movie. And I'm sure at some level they just got Guy Pearce because he's, well he's Guy loving Pearce and he owns.
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Mar 29, 2023 20:53
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All narrators are unreliable
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Mar 29, 2023 21:09
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Also, the “unreliable narrator” claim is wrong because it gets the plot of Covenant wrong. The ship was musical, controlled by a little flute, Shaw crashed trying to get it to 'take her home' I mean, also doubles as the siren's call that got the Covenant there. I need to rewatch Covenant, David as a space wizard in a space gothic is so drat good.
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Mar 29, 2023 21:26
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david_a posted:Vincent Ward has a section on his website: http://vincentwardfilms.com/project/concepts/alien-3/unrequited-visio/ Thanks for this, I see there's a section for the graphic novel that appears to be a work-in-progress. Enjoyable to see more of the story and what could have been. Something that is new to me is the section "The Shaft" showing a character sympathetic to Ripley finding a book that reveals the xenomorphs had overrun Earth so long ago that it was mostly forgotten by the time these events took place. Very bold direction to go and I can see why there was so much initial excitement for his script before changes at the studio. Probably would have pissed a lot of people off after the initial marketing hinted at aliens on Earth, though. Xenomrph posted:Not yet, but this website has a pretty exhaustive deep-dive about the script, including concept art and the like: Thanks, and I don't think I've even heard of the Twohy script but now I'm curious about that too PeterWeller posted:The prologue version of that scene released separately from the film has David narrating it, but the film presents that scene more as David reminiscing while he recites "Ozymandias" to Walter. What I find interesting is that while reminiscing and reciting, it is revealed that David is malfunctioning and what he says is wrong. Who wrote Ozymandias? David recites part of it, but it's poignant that Walter finishes.
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Mar 29, 2023 22:18
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I don't know if I'd call it "malfunctioning." His memory is imperfect, demonstrating that he is as flawed as his creator. But he's made in his creator's image, so is it a malfunction to share his creator's flaws? E: Or maybe a better question it raises, at least in that it's more relevant to the recent discussion in this thread, is: does it really matter who wrote "Ozymandias"? PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Mar 29, 2023 |
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Mar 29, 2023 22:35
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Whether one chooses to engage with the text or not is entirely up to them v v
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Mar 29, 2023 22:51
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PeterWeller posted:E: Or maybe a better question it raises, at least in that it's more relevant to the recent discussion in this thread, is: does it really matter who wrote "Ozymandias"?
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Mar 29, 2023 23:00
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SUNKOS posted:Thanks for this, I see there's a section for the graphic novel that appears to be a work-in-progress. Enjoyable to see more of the story and what could have been. Something that is new to me is the section "The Shaft" showing a character sympathetic to Ripley finding a book that reveals the xenomorphs had overrun Earth so long ago that it was mostly forgotten by the time these events took place. Very bold direction to go and I can see why there was so much initial excitement for his script before changes at the studio. Probably would have pissed a lot of people off after the initial marketing hinted at aliens on Earth, though. That comic has been in the same state for years, so I wouldn’t hold out hope of it being completed. I re-read the script overview on Strange Shapes again and that script has some… issues. Maybe a couple more passes would have smoothed it out, but it felt like Too Much. I think the setting of a decaying gothic wooden structure in space is pretty striking but yeah, maybe that set director was correct when he asked WTF this has to do with the alien series. File off the Alien franchise ties and it probably could have been a pretty cool standalone sci-fi movie.
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Mar 29, 2023 23:05
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david_a posted:File off the Alien franchise ties and it probably could have been a pretty cool standalone sci-fi movie.
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Mar 29, 2023 23:09
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PeterWeller posted:Or maybe a better question it raises, at least in that it's more relevant to the recent discussion in this thread, is: does it really matter who wrote "Ozymandias"? It’s important because David was the authentically Promethean figure in Prometheus, and still sees himself as a such a figure - but poets Byron and Shelly had substantially different interpretations of the Prometheus myth. David, now malfunctioning, conflates the two. So, in an echo of recent discussion, David’s confusion of two distinct works leads to a wholly unusual new work founded in misinterpretation - in this case, purposefully making destruction itself into his monument.
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Mar 30, 2023 01:07
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Just heard back from Andrew Gaska re: future Alien RPG expansions, he said space truckers, androids, and corporations for sure.
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Mar 30, 2023 04:56
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Xenomrph posted:I think Terry Gilliam directing a sci-fi movie about a wooden planet could be extremely in his wheelhouse. If there's any director who could make an Alien film I'd only ever watch once, it's Terry Gilliam. His two best films are already on that list, Brazil and Tideland, and Tideland may be the better film. I will, in the same breath, both call Tideland a truly great piece of cinema and advise that you do not, under any circumstances, watch it.
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Mar 30, 2023 08:04
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Just watched Life due to some discussion ITT. It was OK, the creature was interesting enough, but I kind of expected it to be more horrific. The grossest/scariest thing in the movie is when it completely consumes the lab rat; I was kind of expecting it to do the same thing to the humans, but it just... Ate its fill of their insides or got bored? The twist ending was really good, though.
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Mar 30, 2023 09:41
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