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The thing about Prometheus and Covenant that really works for the fictional universe is the strong implication that whenever humanity scans space and discovers an 'eden' planet, it's because a few hundred thousand years ago the Engineers were there with the black goo. Anywhere we might want to go, there are monsters.
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Mar 30, 2023 09:58
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PeterWeller posted: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? In the fiction Ozymandias made (or we assume probably ordered a bunch of people to make) a giant statue to his greatness, which now stands nearly destroyed no longer as a monument to him, but a monument to hubris and the impermanence human achievement. Though actually in the fiction we do not know that this exists; the author is relating the words of an unknown traveller. We assume he is being truthful. If Ozymandias II: Despair Harder revealed that the traveller made it up, or that the statue was created pre-destroyed a few years earlier under a local art scheme, then while the original piece would remain the same in isolation, the nature of the statue and the message of the original piece would be significantly altered in the overall context of the Expanded Ozymandias Literary Universe. Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Mar 30, 2023 |
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Mar 30, 2023 13:08
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Xenomrph posted:Just heard back from Andrew Gaska, he says there’s no Predator RPG It's not surprising, admittedly. The RPG has a (mild) criticism that they all boil down being either of the first two movies in practice and Predator's probably even worse for that.
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Mar 30, 2023 13:51
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Dawgstar posted:It's not surprising, admittedly. The RPG has a (mild) criticism that they all boil down being either of the first two movies in practice and Predator's probably even worse for that. The only good way to make a Predator RPG would if it was about playing as a group of Predators and stats for being a human being weren't even in the first book and humans are only even present in the book's bestiary as one among many various alien life forms the Predators have hunts for or deal with (like those other aliens in the comics that treat the xenomorph eggs like we would treat regular chicken eggs). Then they can do an "AvP" expansion later that has playable human archetypes based on the folks from the Predator movies/AvP comics/video games/etc. They can make those archetypes/character classes based only on the most badass humans the Predators have faced like Harrigan, Linn Kurosawa, Naru, etc. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Mar 30, 2023 |
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Mar 30, 2023 14:23
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Neo Rasa posted:The only good way to make a Predator RPG would if it was about playing as a group of Predators and stats for being a human being weren't even in the first book and humans are only even present in the book's bestiary as one among many various alien life forms the Predators have hunts for or deal with (like those other aliens in the comics that treat the xenomorph eggs like we would treat regular chicken eggs). Then they can do an "AvP" expansion later that has playable human archetypes based on the folks from the Predator movies/AvP comics/video games/etc. They can make those archetypes/character classes based only on the most badass humans the Predators have faced like Harrigan, Linn Kurosawa, Naru, etc. The first two are the standard LE setup where you're playing nebulous semi-characters with decks made from film moments. The other two you play as Predators running through the first two movies trying to rack up the highest honorable kill count.
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Mar 30, 2023 15:41
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Xenomrph posted:If David misattributing creators is a metaphor for his “creatorship” of the Alien, it’s thematically appropriate. Yeah, sure. But a few things too: Just about any way you interpret that scene to be about "creatorship" is thematically appropriate because creation is a theme of the movie. And it's not enough to just say it's thematically appropriate; you got to also say how it's thematically appropriate. SMG offers an answer (though I still take issue with characterizing David's memory slip as a malfunction). So it's also thematically appropriate to ask if it really matters which poet wrote "Ozymandias". Or in other words, does it matter who created these Xenomorphs? "Ozymandias" is not the only Romantic poem about hubris and loss. It's not the only Romantic poem that alludes to the ancient world. And these Xenomorphs aren't the only Xenomorphs. E: I was in a bit of a hurry when I replied so let me expand a bit. Ozymandias, the historical name, predates Shelley--it's the ancient Greek rendition of Ramesses. So do monumental ruins slowly crumbling and succumbing to the encroaching dunes of the desert. Shelley just channels these pre-existing things into a poem that's hardly the first poem about names, monuments, and memory. Likewise, the black goo and monuments to its power and creation predate David. He just channels those things into the Xenomorphs he creates, Xenomorphs that are hardly the first to haunt space. PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Mar 30, 2023 |
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Mar 30, 2023 15:47
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Just wanted to say that I don’t really have a response to that post (right now at least) but it’s really interesting and insightful, thanks for posting it! 
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Mar 30, 2023 16:28
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Mister Speaker posted: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. It's not gory, it's when you think about what it's doing. It's not really eating people to eat them, it's killing them when it feels threatened and taking whatever sustenance it can while doing so. And it's strong enough to break your hand when it's the size and weight of a napkin. Imagine what it's doing as its rummaging around inside your body. Also drowning in space is horrific too.
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Mar 30, 2023 16:29
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PeterWeller posted:Yeah, sure. But a few things too: Just about any way you interpret that scene to be about "creatorship" is thematically appropriate because creation is a theme of the movie. And it's not enough to just say it's thematically appropriate; you got to also say how it's thematically appropriate. SMG offers an answer (though I still take issue with characterizing David's memory slip as a malfunction). The misquote totally is an error - both because it corresponds to a pretty drastic shift in characterization (from serving as an analyst figure to Shaw to having fallen in love with her) and because it otherwise doesn't make sense for David to phrase things that way.* He could have just said that he interprets Shelley's poem differently. The actual ambiguity comes when David persists in the error even after having been corrected, which demonstrates both too-human fallibility and creativity. He's developed a weird new robot sexuality. I refer to this specifically as a malfunction because, in Prometheus, the entire joke was that David was functioning perfectly - so perfectly that it exceeded his creators' expectations. He subverted his programming not by disobeying it but by overidentifying with it. *The only other explanation, really, would be that David is deliberately misattributing the quote to test Walter's knowledge of poetry, but that's not nearly as plausible when everything else shows that David has developed pathological behaviours.
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Mar 30, 2023 17:47
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PeterWeller posted:Yeah, sure. But a few things too: Just about any way you interpret that scene to be about "creatorship" is thematically appropriate because creation is a theme of the movie. And it's not enough to just say it's thematically appropriate; you got to also say how it's thematically appropriate. SMG offers an answer (though I still take issue with characterizing David's memory slip as a malfunction). His bringing up Ozymandias at all also evokes most of Vickers' outlook in Prometheus. I mean on the surface yeah she's ambitious and wants to take over the drat company already instead of wasting time on pie in the sky immortality quests for Weyland. But Prometheus did a really good job I thought tying Weyland bending everything around him to the goal of making him immortal to have him be like the opposite of how (from just some characters' standpoint) the engineers worship creation via destruction. I think Vickers and Covenant era David would have gotten along pretty well especially with Weyland gone. David's concept of godhood isn't just to be able to create or give birth to stuff, that's already something half the population can do. He sees the ultimate depiction of creation through sacrifice via what (cheating a bit since only the audience saw Prometheus' opening scene but still there's enough there for the characters) we learn of the engineers. And in Covenant he couches this in terms of creating the perfect lifeform but I think he's more going for defining godhood as being able to create life without sacrificing anything of himself. He's more than happy to eviscerate Shaw/etc. because hey that's just how creation works as long as it's not me.
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Mar 30, 2023 18:02
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Has anyone considered that it was Walter who was malfunctioning and, in the Alien universe, it really was Byron who wrote Ozymandias?
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Mar 30, 2023 19:52
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Ferrinus posted:Has anyone considered that it was Walter who was malfunctioning and, in the Alien universe, it really was Byron who wrote Ozymandias? I think it’s more interesting if David was imperfect/“malfunctioning” because it’s another parallel with his creators (as someone else said, the idea that “made in our image” means “also flawed”) and having come to terms with it is an interesting idea.
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Mar 30, 2023 20:03
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Ferrinus posted:Has anyone considered that it was Walter who was malfunctioning and, in the Alien universe, it really was Byron who wrote Ozymandias? Don't you go inviting evil in.
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Mar 30, 2023 20:05
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I forget, actually - do David and Walter themselves actually discuss the mistake in terms of "malfunction"? I don't remember what else Walter says when he corrects David. Androids are plainly organic beings to some degree, to the extent that David actually needs to cut his overgrown hair to make himself presentable to the human colonists. Does it actually signify some sort of correctable mechanical error to forget or misattribute something, even for a robot? Even if it does, one thing most robots can't (or "can't") do that David can is create music, so his ability to forget a piece of trivia could just signify that he's learning to think in more impressionistic and humanlike ways rather than that he has a loose junction or short circuit somewhere.
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Mar 30, 2023 20:11
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When David says the wrong name Walter responds with "when one note is off, it ruins the whole symphony", which I guess is his way of saying you're not working properly and if you're making that kind of simple mistake we can assume you're probably making a lot of others too.
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Mar 30, 2023 20:15
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That's probably a legitimate means of point-scoring... among factory-standard androids. But is the kind of brain that has 100% accurate fact-recall an advantage or an impediment to a practitioner of xeno-alchemy?
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Mar 30, 2023 20:30
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Ferrinus posted:Has anyone considered that it was Walter who was malfunctioning and, in the Alien universe, it really was Byron who wrote Ozymandias? I think one big aspect that's being overlooked is the relationship between Byron and Shelley, who were rumored to be lovers as well as literary collaborators, it could be argued that David's line of reasoning is the slow realization that true creation is a collaboration of two beings creating something unique through their shared experience (re: loving).
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Mar 30, 2023 20:30
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ruddiger posted:I think one big aspect that's being overlooked is the relationship between Byron and Shelley, who were rumored to be lovers as well as literary collaborators, it could be argued that David's line of reasoning is the slow realization that true creation is a collaboration of two beings creating something unique through their shared experience (re: loving). Yes, the question I'd ask is: does Walter (or at least, Walter before he met David and started to have his mind expanded) even have the capacity to make that mistake? Mixing up Byron and Shelley actually implies a level of thematic and literary sophistication that's unavailable to an AI that just knows how to search Wikipedia and print out results.
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Mar 30, 2023 20:33
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SuperMechagodzilla posted: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. As for Dr. Sattler and the triceratops issue, that entire tangent appears to be nothing more than a futile attempt to parallel a Jurassic Park plotline with the themes of the Alien prequels. The focus on toxic plants and ecosystem control doesn't add to the overall discussion of Xenomorphs and their potential for growth in the franchise. Also, the idea that Calvin from Life is a Xenomorph simply because the concept of "the official" is supposedly dissolving away is both absurd and reductive. Just because the boundaries of the Xenomorph universe may be expanding doesn't mean that we should carelessly lump unrelated creatures together under the Xenomorph umbrella. It's evident that the crux of these arguments stem from an unwillingness to accept the natural growth and progression of the Alien franchise. Rather than picking apart trivial details and attempting to dismantle established narrative structures, it would be more productive to focus on the bigger picture and the endless potential of these iconic creatures.
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Mar 30, 2023 21:46
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Thinking back to that Jurassic Park post where the goon talks about trusting Ellie because she's a competent botanist and not realizing most of the tech jargon spewed from the scientists in the movie is either factually incorrect or partially reconstructed from random bits of the book (the biggest grievance is Dr. Grant confidently dictating the motion based vision of the T-Rex)
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Mar 30, 2023 22:51
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ruddiger posted:Thinking back to that Jurassic Park post where the goon talks about trusting Ellie because she's a competent botanist and not realizing most of the tech jargon spewed from the scientists in the movie is either factually incorrect or partially reconstructed from random bits of the book (the biggest grievance is Dr. Grant confidently dictating the motion based vision of the T-Rex) Was the Trex vision thing in the book? I don’t remember. Either way, did scientists ever believe it to be true (even if they don’t now) or did the book/movie fabricate it from whole cloth?
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Mar 30, 2023 22:57
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The T-Rex thing is both in the book and isn't, in that Michael Crichton wrote that it was vision based in Jurassic Park and then wrote in The Lost World 'actually that's dumb the T-Rex is a predator of course it has great vision'. The synthesis is that the frog DNA may or may not have made certain dinosaurs at certain generations unable to see movement. e: bits of the book are scientifically inaccurate because Crichton is making stuff up for his premise and bits are inaccurate because the theme of the book is chaos theory and small mistakes/misunderstanding rapidly escalating out of control.
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Mar 30, 2023 23:23
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david_a posted:That comic has been in the same state for years, so I wouldn’t hold out hope of it being completed. I laughed when I first heard about the wooden planet idea but the more I think about it, it would have been way more interesting than what did come out. Maybe not good, but interesting. Speaking of which, you know what the Alien series should have been? It should have been like Trick 'r Treat, where the universe is all interconnected stories but they have their own horrors and don't revolve around the Xenomorph life form itself. What John Carpenter wanted to do with Halloween originally but never happened because of the studios. I guess Blade Runner is does the same thing to an extent since Ridley Scott said they're in the same universe or whatever, but more... I don't know, connected. I want to see more of the universe but I don't want the xenomorph to be the only horror that anyone faces in said universe. Give me Alien: Even Horizon, about a crew on a haunted ship but with the same dope as aesthetic as Alien, or Alien: Total Recall which is just an action thriller. Kinda like how Warhammer has tons of crazy different groups but they all somehow fit together from robots to orcs. I dunno, I'm high.
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Mar 30, 2023 23:29
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The misquote totally is an error - both because it corresponds to a pretty drastic shift in characterization (from serving as an analyst figure to Shaw to having fallen in love with her) and because it otherwise doesn't make sense for David to phrase things that way.* He could have just said that he interprets Shelley's poem differently. The actual ambiguity comes when David persists in the error even after having been corrected, which demonstrates both too-human fallibility and creativity. He's developed a weird new robot sexuality. Oh yeah, I have no question that David is mistaken. The look on his face when Walter corrects him confirms that for me. I like your explanation for calling it a malfunction, but I still think it's better described as an error or mistake instead of a malfunction because it's just such a very human mistake to make, and the vagaries of human memory are, I think, a feature instead of a bug. Ferrinus explains it well. And also, I sympathize. Like I love "The Second Coming," but I always got to double check that it was written by Yeats instead of Keats. ruddiger posted:Thinking back to that Jurassic Park post where the goon talks about trusting Ellie because she's a competent botanist and not realizing most of the tech jargon spewed from the scientists in the movie is either factually incorrect or partially reconstructed from random bits of the book (the biggest grievance is Dr. Grant confidently dictating the motion based vision of the T-Rex) Does it really matter, though, that the technobabble in the movie isn't scientifically accurate? Jurassic Park is not scientific discourse; it's science fiction. The purpose of that dialog isn't to convey accurate scientific knowledge; it's to signify that the characters are competent scientists. No one should question Geordi la Forge's warp drive expertise because he's spouting a bunch of made-up bullshit. That would be really poor media literacy. Similarly, Andy Weir has said he deliberately gets some of the math wrong in The Martian for better dramatic tension. Dude is trying to write the hardest of Hard SF and still chooses the story he's trying to tell over the exact science he's trying to tell a story about.
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Mar 30, 2023 23:37
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sigher posted:I laughed when I first heard about the wooden planet idea but the more I think about it, it would have been way more interesting than what did come out. Maybe not good, but interesting. Sounds like what you're looking for is Alien 2 (which also incorporated the goo decades before Prometheus).
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Mar 30, 2023 23:37
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sigher posted:Speaking of which, you know what the Alien series should have been? It should have been like Trick 'r Treat, where the universe is all interconnected stories but they have their own horrors and don't revolve around the Xenomorph life form itself. What John Carpenter wanted to do with Halloween originally but never happened because of the studios. Stuff like that never works due to the realities of the movie industry. Bringing Sigourney Weaver back for 4 made no sense, but some suit decided nobody would go see an Alien movie without her.
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Mar 30, 2023 23:37
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ruddiger posted:Sounds like what you're looking for is Alien 2 (which also incorporated the goo decades before Prometheus). Interest piques.
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Mar 31, 2023 00:01
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sigher posted:I laughed when I first heard about the wooden planet idea but the more I think about it, it would have been way more interesting than what did come out. Maybe not good, but interesting. There's a Colonial Marines short story book that does this. It's not great, but only a couple of stories have Xenos.
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Mar 31, 2023 00:20
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Sneeze Party posted:Claiming that the black goo can't be trademarked or copyrighted and thus holds no significance within the Alien universe is just plain ridiculous. That is not what is being asserted. What’s being observed is that black goo and the xenomorphs it produces have garnered a hostile reaction from fans. It is then asserted that this is because the goo effectively renders xenomorphs “open source”, baffling the imagined intentions of the franchise-as-author. It has significance in the franchise universe, but also beyond that universe. When we are within franchise thinking, the illusion is that each new product discloses something new about a teleologically-constructed universe/multiverse. And the bounds of such universes are determined by ownership: property rights. Xenopedia contains a lengthy page on how prospective fans can rank different works on a hierarchy of canonicity, but, “ultimately, the final word on what is part of canon rests with 20th Century Fox [now 20th Century Studios].” Yet black goo appears in District 9, whose unnamed aliens resemble Dan O’Bannon’s “Star Beast”, and are thematically identical to Aliens’ “Arcturians”. A corresponding white goo (aka android “fuel-blood”) appears in the series Raised By Wolves, and so-on. Though you deem it absurd, these are clearly - literally - the same goos. Moreover, the role of the goos in those media go far beyond the usual “easter egg” where someone namedrops Weyland-Yutani or whatever. There is a stronger thematic connection to Alien in these “unofficial” media than in, I don’t know, 90% of works listed on Xenopedia. So: of what use is Xenopedia? Of course, this has always been the case - going at least as far back as Hyams’ Outland. But black goo fully underlines the arbitrariness of franchise thinking, and does so from within the franchise itself.
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Mar 31, 2023 16:15
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Is it not also the same black goo that features in the X-files? The important takeaway being that Detective Munch may have encountered a Xenomporph or teamed up with Lieutenant Mike Harrigan to stop voodoo themed drug dealers.
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Mar 31, 2023 19:13
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PeterWeller posted:Is it not also the same black goo that features in the X-files? Certainly in the case of X-Files: The Movie: The First X-Files Movie - but it goes back to the point that, without the hand of 20th Century Studios to guide us, the question of whether something is “an Alien movie” depends on shared aesthetics and political/thematic concerns. The goo-aliens in X-Files: The Movie are certainly xenomorphs, and we have the familiar ‘ancient aliens’ plotting, but the question is whether its reactionary conspiracy-theory stuff can be reconciled with Alien’s storyline where there is explicitly no broader conspiracy.
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Mar 31, 2023 19:35
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Oh go on then, link me to the thesis about the 'monster' in Hollywood being displaced by black goo that reshapes you ps (I totally agree this is a thing)
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Mar 31, 2023 19:39
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The way the black oil works in The X-Files movie is definitely very xeno-like, it gets inside that Neanderthal man and turns him into a xeno-like creature. You don't really see that in the series, where the oil mostly just possesses people and you see it floating around in their eyeballs. If I remember correctly the black oil is revealed to be the actual alien force that is planning the invasion, the oil itself is the alien entity, it's not just some bioweapon.
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Mar 31, 2023 19:49
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Yeah, the oil is the aliens FWIR, at least it's one part of their life cycle. The Smoking Man (actually I think it's someone else) tells Mulder of their invasion plans and really makes it sound like humanity has been negotiating with them, and then he gets blown up by a car bomb I think. I thought it gestated a scary clawed alien inside you though, not turn you into one. In the movie (which honestly ruled) we see one of the victims' corpses blown open like an XXL chestburster.
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Mar 31, 2023 22:31
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Demons 2 is great because the goo infects media itself so poo poo starts bursting out of televisions, it's loving amazing
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Mar 31, 2023 23:14
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 The eggs are larger than I remember (or Giger is a very small man).
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Mar 31, 2023 23:19
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How does Lorenzo’s Oil tie into this shared Prometheus - X-Files thing
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Mar 31, 2023 23:28
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ruddiger posted:Demons 2 is great because the goo infects media itself so poo poo starts bursting out of televisions, it's loving amazing Demons 2 is really amazing
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Mar 31, 2023 23:37
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The Fitness Coach is better than the pimp in Demons 1 too.
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Apr 1, 2023 00:26
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Mister Speaker posted:Yeah, the oil is the aliens FWIR, at least it's one part of their life cycle. The Smoking Man (actually I think it's someone else) tells Mulder of their invasion plans and really makes it sound like humanity has been negotiating with them, and then he gets blown up by a car bomb I think. The X-Files diligently cycles the alien mythos plotline in place after the end of the first season, for the most part, and the show is not always coherent on what everything means (because how could things otherwise be mysterious for X seasons of TV?).
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Apr 1, 2023 00:43
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