Splicer posted:

I ran across some earlier drafts and in one of them Milburn is very worried about the hammerpede, but his mistake was trying to treat it like a dangerous snake. That's a much more interesting take to me.

We know a lot more about the head scene than you're letting on. They've just finished scanning the head and discovered that it's in fact a head in a helmet rather than a head with an exoskeleton. They discover the new growth and then go straight to electrics in the brain. From "this is a helmet" to shock therapy in under a minute.

It's also not what they do, it's what they don't do. They electrocuted its brain to provoke a response, presumably in the "new growth". You know what you do before you do an (insane) experiment? You take before samples. We know they didn't because we see the head the entire time. They pop the top vaguely, vaguely wave some tweezers and scrapers at it while continually backing off from actively using them, and then go full frankenstein.

You don't try to "promote new growth" of an unknown life form out in the middle of the room, you put it in containment /first/ and then do it through a barrier. lol at their slow-rear end conveyor belt.

You keep saying "they don't know they're in a horror film", as if their behaviour would make sense in everything that's not a horror film. You and SMG keep saying "kirk drift" to describe accurate (if humorous) descriptions of readily available scenes. This made me realise something: Shaw doesn't act like she's "not in a horror film", she acts like she's in a Kirk Drifted episode of Star Trek. She'd be duct taping dilithium crystals to the deflector dish before Scottie finished debriefing the captain.

Put an extra few minutes in there of sampling, looking at the results, "oh hey these cells are alive!", and /then/ jam a cattle prod into the brain.

You want to see Vickers sabotage things? Have her suggest they try "waking it up" and then position herself by the door.

But "hey look at these lumps HOOK THE BRAINS TO THE MAINS" in less time than it took Ash to get the Nostromo's airlock open? /Wesley/ would call that impulsive.

Splicer posted:

I've been deliberately avoiding this because I'm talking about stupid behaviour not standard stupid movie science, and also we have no idea what voltages are being applied, and also I'm not an expert, but it's my understanding that high voltage is needed to kill people because a lot of voltage is required to get through our skin's resistance. If you go through the skin much lower is needed to cause internal burns and damage. Pacemakers operate on centiamps, the electric chair caps out at 16 amps, and they jam 30 to 50 amps straight into the engineer's brain tissue.

Again absolutely happy to be schooled on this by anyone with real knowledge, "subcutaneous electric shock nerve damage voltage" is not getting me anything.

ruddiger posted:

Companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle literally payrolled death squads in the 80s and 90s to murder labor leaders and union organizers. This is nothing new.

DeimosRising posted:

It’s actually wildly improbable that an alien equivalent of a bacteria/virus would have any way to “infect” us at all. It would be adapted to a completely unrelated biology. It’s only because we are the result of science experiment distantly related to the science experiment that makes the spores that anything happens at all.

Ferrinus posted:

The scientists of Prometheus aren't incompetent buffoons, they just don't know they're in a horror movie. It's plain by the end of the film that corners have been cut since scientific investigation was never the primary purpose of the mission, but, why would you think that 99th percentile rather than 95th percentile (or whatever) geologists would be better prepared to deal with chaos demons? These guys would've lived if they'd just gotten better grades in school? Sounds like ideology to me.

Ferrinus posted:

The first thing they do is confirm that the sample is sterile. Then they discover there are living cells on the surface of the head, then they try to accelerate the growth of the cells. They A) succeed and B) realize the results are dangerous quickly enough to seal and re-sterilize the head before it pops. So what did they do wrong?

Splicer posted:

You know what you do before you do an (insane) experiment? You take before samples.

Ferrinus posted:

The good news is, you don't actually have to do that, because the head is not onscreen in one unbroken shot, and as you yourself point out, the scientists bring scrapers and tweezers up to its sides as they're talking about the growth—and, as you don't point out, we're regularly shown the head in profile, with one of the scientists' implements visibly in motion but with its business end hidden behind the head's other side.

So it's actually totally your supposition that no samples are taken!

Ferrinus posted:

You seem to think several more minutes of runtime should've been added just depicting the scientists taking samples before doing anything. As I write the idea out there, you can probably see the logistical problems with doing that to a movie - what else are you going to steal the minutes from?
...
If they logically should take samples, and there's time within which they can take samples, and nothing's stopping them from taking samples, and we are repeatedly shown the scientists in sample-taking position, we can simply use our apprehension of their words and actions to deduce that they are taking samples.

Splicer posted:

They don't though. You can see they don't. Extremely clearly. You've gone full SMG my friend. Step back from the edge.

Splicer posted:

They don't though. You can see they don't. Extremely clearly. You've gone full SMG my friend. Step back from the edge.

Ferrinus posted:

No, you don't. In fact you plainly see them coming at the head with scrapers and tweezers.

Splicer posted:

Coming at and /backing away/. Watch the scene. Watch the instruments. It almost seems deliberate how often we see them approach taking a sample and then backing off at the last second. Like it would genuinely have been less effort for them to show them taking samples in that scene, even without extending the runtime. Even when they insert the stimline Shaw is still holding the immaculately clean tweezers in the camera's sightline.

...is it deliberate?

ruddiger posted:

Just like you don't see Vickers choosing the class dropouts. Where were the pleas about the edge for that one?

Ferrinus posted:

You see a character coming at it and backing away from one side... while, behind the head, such that the business end of the implement is obscured (I have written these exact words before but I get the sense you're just skimming my posts), the other character is also working on the head. By the time we see them again, their implement's going to be clean again because they can have scraped whatever

Splicer posted:

While there are multiple cameras cuts, the dialogue makes it clear this is a continuous scene from the opening of the helmet until at least 1:40. There simply isn't time between cuts during that conversation for them to pull, deposit, clean, return. It's wishful thinking. And, again, watch the instruments. They're not just not taking samples, they're pointedly not taking samples. They're playing I'm not touching you with the head. It would have been less effort to show one of them pulling away a scraping.

Ferrinus posted:

Here is a sample being taken. In this shot, Shaw is concentrating on the head in front of her while slowly sweeping the scraper from stage left to stage right.

MacheteZombie posted:

It's a cool scene and worth being in the movie

Mister Speaker posted:

I thought I'd seen everything ITT when it came to disingenuous arguments and leaps of logic, but people are going to awfully funny lengths to defend a giant alien head exploding in what is clearly meant to be nothing more than a shocking scene.

Splicer posted:

Ferrinus posted:

what did they perform the DNA test on, Splicer?

Splicer posted:

Shaw has a tweezers, not a scraper. Ford 8s moving the scraper back and forth in full view in front of the camera but it never touches the head. Shaw has the tweezers behind the head, waving them back and forth but never tweezing or even getting close to the head. We then spend a second or two rapidly cutting between a few angles while what appears to be a continuous conversion occurs over the top without giving Shaw time to move any of her telekinetically acquired samples anywhere.

If you're implying this is supposed to be a montage of a considerably longer scene then wow, that's done lovely directing and editing! Because watching it sure looks like it takes like a minute real time to get sparking!

Splicer posted:

A biologist who can understand threat signals would probably have lived longer yes. I'm not sure how much being a better archaeologist would have helped Shaw, but even in non-horror-film settings shooting electricity into one-of-a-kind biological artefacts until they explode is generally frowned upon these days.

Halloween Jack posted:

they should know that this planet with breathable atmosphere and wheat fields is full of spores that will cause a monster to grow inside you until you explode?

Ferrinus posted:

I don't think this is a montage, no. I assume the experiment took as long to do as the scene took to watch.

That said, if Shaw's got tweezers, that means she's tweezed onto something and is slowly pulling it away from the surface of the head, in the same way as you might try to remove a piece of sticky tape from some paper without snapping the tape. Or, she might be scraping the flesh with her tweezers, gouging a narrow furrow in the flesh so as to ball up a little boulder of alien biomatter at the tip of her tool by the end of the motion.

Ferrinus posted:

This was flatly wrong in multiple ways: they didn't shoot electricity into it until it exploded,

Ferrinus posted:

and it wasn't one-of-a-kind.

Ferrinus posted:

But, as soon as this was pointed out, instead of changing your position at all you started looking for smaller and fiddlier details to prove, prove that the scientists were really dumb (which is weird, since even "the scientists are really dumb" doesn't ultimately satisfy you because there's no Big Other reassuring you extradiegetically that the scientists were dumb), until you're finally stuck with "they didn't take any samples" even though they plainly did.

Ferrinus posted:

Doesn't this bother you? Wouldn't you prefer to operate in a mode of honest inquiry rather than increasingly-desperate motivated reasoning?

Ferrinus posted:

The first thing they do is confirm that the sample is sterile. Then they discover there are living cells on the surface of the head,

ruddiger posted:

So we're back to "the science is bad" by noted scientist Splicer.

At least no one's hanging their hat on the "human heads totally explode via electricity" talking point anymore (give it a couple months and it'll be parroted again, no doubt).

ruddiger posted:

So we're back to "the science is bad" by noted scientist Splicer.

At least no one's hanging their hat on the "human heads totally explode via electricity" talking point anymore (give it a couple months and it'll be parroted again, no doubt).

Splicer posted:

I've been deliberately avoiding this because I'm talking about stupid behaviour not standard stupid movie science, and also we have no idea what voltages are being applied, and also I'm not an expert, but it's my understanding that high voltage is needed to kill people because a lot of voltage is required to get through our skin's resistance. If you go through the skin much lower is needed to cause internal burns and damage. Pacemakers operate on centiamps, the electric chair caps out at 16 amps, and they jam 30 to 50 amps straight into the engineer's brain tissue.

Again absolutely happy to be schooled on this by anyone with real knowledge, "subcutaneous electric shock nerve damage voltage" is not getting me anything.

Xenomrph posted:

Sticking an electric needle in the decapitated head to “make it think it’s still alive” is a little wack, considering such a technique has never worked in the history of medical science (heads generally need more than an electric current to live - and to loop back around to the X-files wasn’t the plot of the second movie about a guy doing head transplants or something?), but hey, maybe there have been advancements in science in the whatever years between now and Prometheus. The movie doesn’t really seem to indicate that, but who knows I guess.
But even if tricking it into thinking it’s alive worked, what then? It’s got no lungs or vocal chords so it can’t talk, so was the plan to do a Bad Lip Reading as it mouths words in whatever mystery space language it happens to speak?

Xenomrph posted:

Sticking an electric needle in the decapitated head to “make it think it’s still alive” is a little wack, considering such a technique has never worked in the history of medical science (heads generally need more than an electric current to live - and to loop back around to the X-files wasn’t the plot of the second movie about a guy doing head transplants or something?), but hey, maybe there have been advancements in science in the whatever years between now and Prometheus. The movie doesn’t really seem to indicate that, but who knows I guess.
But even if tricking it into thinking it’s alive worked, what then? It’s got no lungs or vocal chords so it can’t talk, so was the plan to do a Bad Lip Reading as it mouths words in whatever mystery space language it happens to speak?

Schwarzwald posted:

"What is that on its head?"
"It looks like new cells, in a state of—"
"—change."
"Changing into what?"

They have no expectations of bringing the engineer back to life, they want to encourage (and observe) the growth of whatever seems to be growing on it's flesh.

They succeed.

Splicer posted:

She isn't though. If you look at the scene with your eyes she's not doing that.

quote:

Yes they did. They did indeed shoot electricity into a head until it exploded. Your attempted rebuttal of "well technically it was the goo and/or decontamination box that exploded it" implies that you think that everything else in this scene was otherwise a good idea. Which is baffling.

quote:

This is possibly true, but not information they had at the time. This was the only one they'd opened and they had no reason to assume the others were equally well preserved, or exhibited the "new cell growth" they were so excited by. I'll go halves with you on this one.

quote:

None of this paragraph is true. Look, I'll give you an analogy. I empty a few rounds into a populated house, hit a gas line, and take out the neighbours.

"You shot a house until it exploded!"
"Well, technically the gas line exploded it"
"You also shot two passersby!"
"They obviously shot each other. You can tell by the guns they were carrying."
"They weren't carrying any guns"
"They obviously must have, otherwise they could not have shot each other. Therefore the guns were destroyed in the freak, blameless gas explosion"
"We have footage of you shooting them"
"Can we please stop arguing about who shot who, you're obviously just mad I disproved your bizarre "shot a house until it exploded" claim."

quote:

Don't try to pull a "why is this so important to you?" when you've spent multiple pages holding up a sheet of white paper and trying to say it's black.

quote:

Incidentally, the scene I linked ends with Shaw telling Ford to take a sample. That's where they got the one to test. Because they didn't have any from pre-explosion. Would you care to admit you're wrong so you can move on to operating in a mode of honest inquiry rather than increasingly-desperate motivated reasoning?

Yes?

quote:

Excellent. So, moving on to the second thing they did wrong:

What on earth do you think "sterile" means???

feedmyleg posted:

Y'all are acting as if the colonists in Covenant aren't just a bunch of space Mormon emigrants blindly traveling out on the Oregon Trail hoping they don't get smallpox.

Should they have kept their helmets on and checked the atmosphere? Yeah, if they were a highly-trained corporate strike-team. But in actuality they're a bunch of undertrained rubes that The Company is sending out into the unknown.

e: They heard Country Roads playing over their radio, so they "know" humans are down there. It makes sense they'd assume there are no atmosphere issues. There's wheat down there, for god's sake.

Ferrinus posted:

Yes, she is. Do you have some sort of filmic x-ray vision such that you can see through and behind the prop between the camera and Shaw, and confirm that her tweezers aren't touching it? She sure does seem to be making a careful sweeping motion over it, and her team sure does do a DNA test on the alien biomatter later.

Ferrinus posted:

The screen says "no contagion present", which is why it's safe for them to breathe the same air the head's sitting in.

Mister Speaker posted:

I thought I'd seen everything ITT when it came to disingenuous arguments and leaps of logic, but people are going to awfully funny lengths to defend a giant alien head exploding in what is clearly meant to be nothing more than a shocking scene.

Blood Boils posted:

The logic leaping is coming from the haters, friend. Fwiw I don't think y'all are disingenuous, just genuinely mistaken.

Mister Speaker posted:

Alien, Aliens, Alien Isolation - Cool AND Good
Alien3 - Good but not Cool
Prometheus - Cool but not Good
Alien Resurrection, Alien Covenant - neither Cool nor Good