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SUNKOS posted:This is a very vague recollection for me that I'm not 100% sure is true and might have just been a weird dream I had when young, but I think there were actually some books (that were maybe adapted into graphic novels at a later date?) that dealt with an alien homeworld and a 'Queen of Queens' or something similar? If I'm recalling correctly, I think Xeno will know more if I'm remembering right or just smoked too much crack today. I think the characters intended to go there to capture the queen of queens (related to how the xenomorphs are implied to communicate telepathically?) and there was a lot of reservations regarding what kind of hosed-up nightmare planet could be home to such a species and the possibility of there being even worse creatures present if the xenos evolved to be as they are, what role do they have in the ecosystem? You’re thinking of a few different comics and novels, yeah. The one where they go to the Alien “homeworld” to capture the Queen Mother was ‘Aliens: The Female War. The next story (‘Aliens: Genocide’) features the Alien civil war after two new competing Queen Mothers are born in the wake of the first one being taken away and killed. That takes place on the same planet as The Female War. At one point one of the characters theorizes that it isn’t actually the Alien homeworld and that it could actually just be a planet with a very high concentration of Aliens due to natural fauna giving them a lot of breeding stock; they coin the term “hiveworld” to describe such a place. There’s also the comic “The Theory of Alien Propagation” that mused about the Alien homeworld, what kind of other life might be on it (including ones that might be natural predators to the Alien), and how Aliens might proliferate to other planets despite not having access to their own technology. There’s two comics that feature two different species of extraterrestrials eating facehuggers (“Taste” and “Reapers”) although neither of them feature Space Jockeys. In the comics and novels (“Apocalypse”, “Original Sin”, “The Alien”), there are factions of Jockeys that fear the Aliens and believe that the Aliens are definitely artificially created (although they were not the ones to do it) and are essentially a galactic equalizer to keep other races in check (similar to the “Great Filter” answer to the Fermi Paradox). Edit— mostly beaten. That’s what I get for starting to write a post, sit on it for hours, and not refresh the thread first.
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Oct 29, 2023 19:42
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Aw man I'm 12 years old again  And now to ponder whether to actually revisit those wild stories or just hold on to the bizarre mish-mash of memories 
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Oct 29, 2023 19:51
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Female War is the aforementioned rewrite of Earth War, renaming Newt and co. in the wake of Alien3.
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Oct 29, 2023 21:07
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End of Shoelace posted:Note that Ripley 8 has the brilliant idea to crash the ship into Earth without knowing it's desolate. It's funny because it's flagged early in the film because the military doing their deep space super secret dark project at Jupiter only makes sense if Sol is no longer inhabited.
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Oct 29, 2023 21:34
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Alchenar posted:It's funny because it's flagged early in the film because the military doing their deep space super secret dark project at Jupiter only makes sense if Sol is no longer inhabited. At Pluto, actually, and the reason given in dialogue is because it’s “outside regulated space”.
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Oct 29, 2023 21:48
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SUNKOS posted:One of the best aspects of the Alien films is that Ripley is actually not a crazy person, but rather a very logical and empowered woman who subverts the horror trope of dumb people doing stupid poo poo while the viewer shouts at the screen in frustration. She's rational, sensible and brave enough to do what needs to be done and that is part of what made the films so scary in the first place, is that they presented a protagonist who did follow the right course of action and things still went bad. It's superb writing and acting, and why she will forever be one of the best characters in the horror medium. Ellen Ripley suggests using a nuclear bomb on a colony which may or may not still contain human survivors. This is because she fears one animal is going to wipe out Earth IF it gets onto a space ship. Not because she is 100% sure said animal will get on board, but because it MIGHT. The only ones who agree with her are tweaking marines not paid to think, have so little experience in real combat situations they immediately disobey orders against somewhat competent melee hostiles (having walked into a dead end full of what is effectively tigers sleeping in grass), and who are also extremely stupid. The corrupt company stooge, in comparison, appears the most rational of them all.
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Oct 29, 2023 22:24
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End of Shoelace posted:The only ones who agree with her are tweaking marines not paid to think, have so little experience in real combat situations they immediately disobey orders against somewhat competent melee hostiles (having walked into a dead end full of what is effectively tigers sleeping in grass), and who are also extremely stupid. The only one without combat experience is Gorman by the way. Nor are any of them “tweaking”. Also the only ones who disobey Gorman’s orders are Hicks, Drake, and Vasquez by having live firearms, and their actions arguably allow the rest of the survivors to escape once things go sideways. Gorman struggles to order the Marines to fall back and use the flamethrowers for cover, unaware that of the 4 Marines with flamethrowers (Dietrich, Frost, Apone, and Drake), 2 got taken out of the fight in the first few seconds, and Apone gets grabbed when trying to listen to Gorman’s orders that he can barely hear as Vasquez and Drake are saving everyone else’s lives. At no point in the movie are the Marines “extremely stupid”. Notice that even though they were cracking wise and making fun of Ripley earlier, the moment they step out of the APC at the colony they are strictly business and very disciplined, especially when they descend into the hive where the colonists are cocooned. Even if they’d read Ripley’s briefing, they wouldn’t have been prepared for the ambush (when the Marines first spot the hive resin, Ripley gets asked what it is and she says “I don’t know” - it’s entirely new territory for her). Also for the record Ripley suggests the nuclear strike after she knows all the other colonists are dead or unable to be rescued - they all had personal data transmitters, and Hudson locates all of them down in the hive. Edit— worth pointing out that alleged rational actor Burke’s only stated reason for not nuking everything is because it has “a substantial dollar value”. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Oct 29, 2023 |
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Oct 29, 2023 22:56
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Calling the Xenomorphs just "an animal" doesn't seem to be doing them justice. It wasn't some hysterical human who told Ripley they were the "perfect organism" it was an emotionless robot. Ripley saw first hand how unbelievably intelligent and deadly the thing was. And Aliens seems to prove Ash right since the combination of intelligence and propagation speed means Xenos will spell doom for an entire world in no time. I wanted to say they'd doom an ecosystem, which kinda makes me think... We only see them in human populations in the 4 Alien films and 2 AvP films I've seen. Wouldn't a Xeno "in the wild" spell certain extinction for every animal large enough to be facehugged? That seems like it might be a flaw. Where's Smith to talk about how only human beings are a virus who spread until everything is laid to waste.
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Oct 29, 2023 23:17
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NikkolasKing posted:Calling the Xenomorphs just "an animal" doesn't seem to be doing them justice. It wasn't some hysterical human who told Ripley they were the "perfect organism" it was an emotionless robot. Ripley saw first hand how unbelievably intelligent and deadly the thing was. And Aliens seems to prove Ash right since the combination of intelligence and propagation speed means Xenos will spell doom for an entire world in no time. Hudson’s line “what do you mean they cut the power, they’re animals!” is meant to highlight that they’re not just animals, they’re thinking and problem solving creatures operating with an intelligence that does not function like a human’s. Also I’m not sure if I’d put as much stock in Ash’s “perfect organism” line, if anything I read it as a flaw in his otherwise emotionless robotic veneer - he idolizes the Alien but I’m not quite sure he himself fully understands it (especially considering that he’s barely had any contact with it). David shows a similar reverence for his “perfect organism” in Covenant, and I think it humanizes him more than he’d probably want to be.
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Oct 29, 2023 23:40
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Ash is not emotionless. His description of the xenomorph as a "perfect organism" isn't made in a vacuum, it's a reflection of his own heavy biases.
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Oct 29, 2023 23:42
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NikkolasKing posted:Calling the Xenomorphs just "an animal" doesn't seem to be doing them justice. It wasn't some hysterical human who told Ripley they were the "perfect organism" it was an emotionless robot. Ripley saw first hand how unbelievably intelligent and deadly the thing was. And Aliens seems to prove Ash right since the combination of intelligence and propagation speed means Xenos will spell doom for an entire world in no time. They don't doom a world without adding in black goo type stuff or ignoring what was shown in Aliens and just using Alien itself with her guessing about it. Aliens sets up the premise that they create nests and bring their victims back to them to impregnate them, all centered around a queen. So on a planet with instant communication, you eventually find out people are disappearing, someone gets word out that there are monsters in a nest, you take out the nest after some initial losses, the end. A few stragglers might create new nests eventually, but it just becomes a new issue that people have to deal with from time to time. Ripley was dealing with her PTSD and wanted to wipe out every single one, but there's nothing that was shown to back up her assessment.
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Oct 29, 2023 23:43
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Xenomrph posted:You're welcome to think I'm bullshitting you, but I'm not. No, I am not wrong, and you're clearly bullshitting me. You're taking "gestures at" to mean, like... "suggests that there might be an origin story out there, somewhere". But as your own later posts show, as soon as the comics even get close to even creating evidence that aliens might have a particular origin, they immediately pull back to qualify it and recuse themselves. My god, it's the biggest planet of xenomorphs ever! It has hierarchies of super-queens! We've found their homeworld! Nonono wait wait ha ha forget I even said that what a crazy idea this might just be a planet they took over, their true homeworld, if there is such a thing, must still be shrouded in the mist of unreleased future movies. The space jockeys themselves don't know! All that "equalizer" stuff is their speculation, because it's simply contractual, corporate mandate that the alien's origins are never explored or revealed in spinoff material. To reiterate: they could never have released Prometheus or Covenant as comics. Those two stories simply reveal and change too much. All the comics can do is scurry around in the wake of those movies and fold them in as best they can. It's like this famous Dick Cheney quote: quote:The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” In this analogy, Ridley Scott has launched an illegal invasion of Iraq while you are a plucky journalist in despair that the massive protests in front of the White House are coming to nothing. SUNKOS posted:I don't think they did? David didn't create anything since we saw the mural in Prometheus that showed the Engineers had a religious reverence for the creature and whatever that green crystal was. We do not know how they came to encounter them, only that they're deeply culturally significant to them as a species and that the black goo is a tool to try and recreate them, maybe, depending on what the plot calls upon the goo to do during whatever scene it's present in. David obviously made the capital-a "Alien". As you say, the black mutagen clearly spontaneously creates all sorts of alien-esque things, which implies a lot about the cosmic essence of life and reproduction, but the stuff in that mural could easily have been like, the pale and fleshy "neomorphs" featured in the second prequel movie. The pod -> facehugger -> black-plated, biomechanical drone came out of David's alchemy. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 00:04
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Darko posted:Aliens sets up the premise that they create nests and bring their victims back to them to impregnate them, all centered around a queen. So on a planet with instant communication, you eventually find out people are disappearing, someone gets word out that there are monsters in a nest, you take out the nest after some initial losses, the end. And wildly enough, the movie where all that happens predates the xenomorph itself. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047573/
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Oct 30, 2023 00:23
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Ferrinus posted:No, I am not wrong, and you're clearly bullshitting me. Lol okay whatever you say, champ. You said the topic of Alien origins never comes up or is even gestured at (your words: “not a single one attempted to explain or even gesture towards the explanation for the xenomorph's existence at all!”), this is false (and I and others provided receipts), and now you’re shifting the goalposts. You were wrong, take the L and move on. Covenant didn’t do anything the comics hadn’t done 15-20 years prior: provide food for thought and nothing conclusive or not open to interpretation. If your argument is some kind of pseudo-“canon” argument that the only thing that matters is the movies, who gives a poo poo? If people want to read and enjoy Aliens cereal boxes and officially licensed wrist watches, who cares how “real” you think it is? If it’s real for them and brings them enjoyment, there’s nothing wrong with that. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 00:49
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Ferrinus posted:David obviously made the capital-a "Alien". As you say, the black mutagen clearly spontaneously creates all sorts of alien-esque things, which implies a lot about the cosmic essence of life and reproduction, but the stuff in that mural could easily have been like, the pale and fleshy "neomorphs" featured in the second prequel movie. The pod -> facehugger -> black-plated, biomechanical drone came out of David's alchemy. My personal theory for the black goo, given the vastly different characteristics it displays in Prometheus & Covenant, is that there are actually many different types. There's an ampule room that appears to contain life-expanding (dunno what word to use here) black goo, a cargo hold that evidently contained black goo to be used as biological warfare and of course as we saw in the beginning of Prometheus, black goo in an entirely different container that is evidently used for religious self-sacrifice. They're engineers after all, I think it only makes sense that the crew stumbling upon the installation have no idea that they could see wildly different results depending on what black goo they encounter? I imagine the same would be the case were roles reversed and an engineer poked around a human medical research lab, maybe they contaminate a work-in-progress vaccine or maybe they accidentally unleash a bio engineered version of the flu that could wipe out civilization if it ever escapes (for anyone curious, the Dutch have it). As for the mural in the ampule room, I think it mostly resembles the Deacon which we see emerge from the engineer at the end of Prometheus after the black goo has had one very wild ride from host to host to host. Let us not forget, that poor little droplet of black goo was totally wasted on vodka before it began its reign of cosmic terror, too  Of course, as SMG likes to frequently remind us, the AvP films unfortunately exist and so technically the alien as we know it existed loooooooong before David was created. If we choose to ignore the AvP movies however (I am totally down for this) the only evidence that I would point to, which could certainly be argued against, is that within David's laboratory in Covenant there are drawings depicting engineer rituals of willing impregnation that clearly depicts the alien we all know and love bursting from the chest of those (presumably "chosen") to host the birth of the creatures, for what purpose we do not know. This could be argued however as I'm not 100% how much of this is actually shown in the film (compared to the art book of David's drawings and the deleted scene turned promo depicting David's communication to Weyland corporation about what he claims to have created and to come and find it - reinforcing the theory of "The company knew" in the original Alien). Would require a rewatch of Covenant to confirm, I think, and I already have quite the movie backlog I've been meaning to get through before I think about rewatching anything! Another thing I'd also note, which I find particularly interesting, is Prometheus seems to imply that the engineers also appear to experiment with themselves to the point of becoming biomechanical creatures. The engineers we see at the start of Prometheus and Covenant are, for lack of a better term, pure. The sole living engineer in Prometheus that is woken from slumber by David however? It has a body that is very clearly biomechanical in appearance and visually similar to the alien as we know it. Very obviously not a suit as the skin gradually morphs into the biomechanical visuals that we see. Slap a giant cock on his head and I reckon he'd pass for an alien: 
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Oct 30, 2023 01:17
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Just got done watching Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead for the first time and now I’m real excited to see what he does for the upcoming Alien movie.
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Oct 30, 2023 01:42
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David gives off the energy of those self described “sigma male” types. Like, Weyland programmed him by in feeding Joe rogan podcasts
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Oct 30, 2023 02:27
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Xenomrph posted:Lol okay whatever you say, champ. You said the topic of Alien origins never comes up or is even gestured at (your words: “not a single one attempted to explain or even gesture towards the explanation for the xenomorph's existence at all!”), this is false (and I and others provided receipts), and now you’re shifting the goalposts. You were wrong, take the L and move on. I simply don't consider characters, subjectively, wondering or theorizing at the explanation to be the comics (or novels, or...) even gesturing at the explanation. They gesture, instead, at the lack of explanation. That's the whole point, it's retracted or disproven each time, because they're not allowed to even begin to tell you anything! Everything that looks like it might move us closer to knowing where the xenomorphs come from is rapidly yanked out from under our feet. The explanation is permanently locked-off to all the second- and third-tier media. For instance, here's how a comic could gesture at (you know, hint at, imply, lend credence to) what Prometheus and Covenant teach us about the xenomorph: a comic could have shown us the fossilized corpses of xenomorph-like creatures, like things that are recognizably "normal" alien fauna from some world somewhere but distorted so that they're fanged and eyeless and so on, nearby broken, now-empty jars in some sort of Space Jockey temple or other facility. That gets the wheels turning, like, hmm, these ancient astronauts must have been doing something, or had something, that can make stuff more xenomorph-like. Maybe "xenomorph" is an adjective. Maybe it's a sliding scale rather than a specific species. We, the readers, have learned something new. But we can't learn anything new from tie-in media. That's not tie-in media's own fault, and it's got plenty of other strengths. It's just an inevitable byproduct of corporate control and monetization strategies. quote:Covenant didn’t do anything the comics hadn’t done 15-20 years prior: provide food for thought and nothing conclusive or not open to interpretation. No, that's definitely wrong, or else Covenant wouldn't draw so much ire and desperate attempts to recontextualize or be like "w-w-well we don't REALLY know that..." if it wasn't obviously putting forward an origin for xenomorphs proper (and even xenomorph queens, in its bonus material!). Now, you can poke holes in it... but you have to work a lot harder to poke holes in it than you have to to poke holes in the queen mother-featuring xenomorph "homeworld", right? Like, that comic, itself, just goes and tells the reader yeah, don't worry, this is actually just some planet, the veil of mystery remains intact. But Covenant? If you're politically invested in the xenomorph's origin being unknown, you have to roll up your sleeves and wrestle Covenant to the ground. quote:If your argument is some kind of pseudo-“canon” argument that the only thing that matters is the movies, who gives a poo poo? If people want to read and enjoy Aliens cereal boxes and officially licensed wrist watches, who cares how “real” you think it is? If it’s real for them and brings them enjoyment, there’s nothing wrong with that. No, that's not my point at all. Actually, it's probably a big limitation of tie-in content that it's trying not to be/not really supposed to be distinct from the movie canon proper. Precisely because the comics and games and so on, at least those with sufficiently high production values, are supposed to fit smoothly in with and broadly be part of the same "universe" as the films, they can't rock the boat too hard. Imagine if all the comics were allowed to be as radical as Prometheus! SUNKOS posted:My personal theory for the black goo, given the vastly different characteristics it displays in Prometheus & Covenant, is that there are actually many different types. There's an ampule room that appears to contain life-expanding (dunno what word to use here) black goo, a cargo hold that evidently contained black goo to be used as biological warfare and of course as we saw in the beginning of Prometheus, black goo in an entirely different container that is evidently used for religious self-sacrifice. They're engineers after all, I think it only makes sense that the crew stumbling upon the installation have no idea that they could see wildly different results depending on what black goo they encounter? I imagine the same would be the case were roles reversed and an engineer poked around a human medical research lab, maybe they contaminate a work-in-progress vaccine or maybe they accidentally unleash a bio engineered version of the flu that could wipe out civilization if it ever escapes (for anyone curious, the Dutch have it). This is technically possible but narratively and thematically really weak. It's also unscientific - you're supposed to avoid the needless multiplication of entities when trying to explain something! Covenant also pushes hard against this when we see the flashback to David's carpet-bombing; the monks mostly disintegrate like that one guy from Prometheus, but a few of them actually do appear to be spontaneously mutating or spawning monsters out of their bodies, and then it's the aftermath of that bombing that gives rise to the backburster fungus and all the fodder for David's experiments and so on. So it really scans much better that there's just this one primordial life-essence, and the reason it's so horrifying is that life itself is.
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Oct 30, 2023 04:52
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Prometheus' thesis statement was "in the quest for knowledge, you sometimes get something worse than no answers- you get answers you don't like" which ties in perfectly with what it reveals of the aliens and jockeys. there is no origin that will satisfy everyone, or even anyone. But that doesn't mean that taking a look is 'against the rules' or 'bad writing', or that you can't tell a story about striving for it anyway. It's a story about flipping on the lights and getting a good look at the rubber costume and strings from the ceiling. It's a story about why the fear of the unknown is used as a crutch, and transforms into a more existentialist/post-modernist discussion about lack of purpose and narrative. I love it, personally. I don't agree at all that it's narratively/thematically weak- the story it actually tells and the theme it explores is quite novel and well put together
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Oct 30, 2023 05:52
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quote:I simply don't consider characters, subjectively, wondering or theorizing at the explanation to be the comics (or novels, or...) even gesturing at the explanation. quote:That's the whole point, it's retracted or disproven each time, because they're not allowed to even begin to tell you anything! Everything that looks like it might move us closer to knowing where the xenomorphs come from is rapidly yanked out from under our feet. The explanation is permanently locked-off to all the second- and third-tier media. quote:For instance, here's how a comic could gesture at (you know, hint at, imply, lend credence to) what Prometheus and Covenant teach us about the xenomorph: a comic could have shown us the fossilized corpses of xenomorph-like creatures, like things that are recognizably "normal" alien fauna from some world somewhere but distorted so that they're fanged and eyeless and so on, nearby broken, now-empty jars in some sort of Space Jockey temple or other facility. That gets the wheels turning, like, hmm, these ancient astronauts must have been doing something, or had something, that can make stuff more xenomorph-like. Maybe "xenomorph" is an adjective. Maybe it's a sliding scale rather than a specific species. We, the readers, have learned something new. Once again, you're speaking from ignorance. quote:If you're politically invested in the xenomorph's origin being unknown, you have to roll up your sleeves and wrestle Covenant to the ground. quote:No, that's not my point at all. Actually, it's probably a big limitation of tie-in content that it's trying not to be/not really supposed to be distinct from the movie canon proper. Precisely because the comics and games and so on, at least those with sufficiently high production values, are supposed to fit smoothly in with and broadly be part of the same "universe" as the films, they can't rock the boat too hard. Imagine if all the comics were allowed to be as radical as Prometheus! Realtalk if you want Weird poo poo outside the box Aliens expanded universe material, I can give recommendations (the Fire and Stone Aliens/Predator/AvP/Prometheus crossover, its sequel Life and Death, and Labyrinth are good starting points). I get the argument you're trying to make, it's just misguided. Mazerunner posted:Prometheus' thesis statement was "in the quest for knowledge, you sometimes get something worse than no answers- you get answers you don't like" That's an interesting meta-reading of the movie and its purpose, although it doesn't make me enjoy it more as an "Alien" prequel. I still like the movie as a novel sci-fi-horror story, even if I think "sabotaging an earlier movie to make a meta statement about answering questions" is a not-great way to go about making a movie (and by your interpretation, Ridley Scott did it twice lmao). I think Prometheus and Covenant are at their weakest when they're directly tying themselves to 'Alien'. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 06:01
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I'll just say that I fundamentally do not think of Prometheus/Covenant (though I haven't seen Cov) as sabotaging the earlier movies and leave it at that
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Oct 30, 2023 06:17
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Xenomrph posted:Cool. Shifting the goalposts, got it. No, dude. Tie-in media doesn't explain, or even gesture at the explanation (the explanation, as in, the actual answer) for, the xenomorph. Characters in a story doing or trying to do something isn't the same as the story doing something. In fact, in many stories, characters take an action precisely because the greater narrative is very much militating against that action. For instance, four-color superhero stories frequently contain criminals, but are carefully constructed so that crime doesn't pay. (And why were they so constructed? Why, the demands of the Comics Code Authority!) In an Aliens tie-in comic, some guy might speculate or even claim to know the origins of the xenomorph, but he is inevitably contradicted by the rest of the plot. Speculation ends up waxing metaphorical or religious (perhaps they are destroying angels, perhaps they are a cosmic balancing mechanism, perhaps they...) because the mystery is the point. Being inexplicable is part of the appeal for a certain cadre of fans, just like being ancient or being eternally unchanging. So in fact tie-in media only raises the question of getting The Answer in order to emphatically, definitively, and repeatedly remind us that we aren't allowed to know it. But why? Well... quote:And the reason isn't because they *couldn't*, it's because they chose not to. ...all of them? Every single one? There's a lot of different writers and artists that have worked on a lot of Aliens products, and some of those products, as some must in any sufficiently prolific body of work, suck rear end and make terrible athematic decisions. Yet none of them reveal the origin of the xenomorph, or even offer evidence in the direction of a particular origin for the xenomorph. Why? It's become a matter of faith among some that you're just, you're just not supposed to do that, it's objectively wrong to explain a monster. But even cursory reflection reveals that this is stupid. Monsters get explained all the time. Plenty of great pieces of science-fiction or fantasy horror tell you why the bad thing that's happening is happening. From the other direction, you can't just unilaterally improve any horror story by taking away information (imagine if Alien just began at the chestbursting scene; that'd be even more mysterious, but would it therefore be better?). So I think it's much more plausible that we're looking at editorial directive, not a particular creative decision that, somehow, every single Aliens writer who's ever existed (besides Ridley Scott himself) has taken in lockstep. quote:There are a lot of comics and other media that do this, introduce new ideas like what you're proposing. The comic series "Fire and Stone" took the black goo in way, way wilder directions than Covenant ended up doing, for example. Hah, nice try, buddy. This might've gotten me if I didn't already know what happens in "Fire and Stone", which is a goofy story about a guy getting superpowers from being exposed to a mutagen. It's much less weird than Covenant, which reveals the xenomorph to be, basically, one man's portrait of his lifelong obsession. However, it is much wilder than the entire heretofore existing Aliens expanded universe. Why? Because Prometheus gave the writers and artists of the tie-in universe two new toys to play with: 1. the shark-eyed, albino Engineers and 2. an unpredictable and fast-acting alien mutagen. So okay, we splash a predator with the mutagen. Now it's an Engineer/Predator hybrid! We inject an android with the mutagen. Now it's a xenomorph/android hybrid! Wheee! And this is all good fun, I approve. But you must notice how they're just recombining stuff that the movies broke ground on, right? The difference is that they have a wider color palette now. On top of the classic human, android, alien, and predator they've now got black goo and white muscleman. Then Covenant adds neomorphs and xeno-fungus and backbursters and such, which means even more video game enemies to collect loot from. quote:Not really, no more than was necessary for the expanded universe. Arrant revisionism! This very thread features you, not to mention plenty of other posters, complaining about how, ugh, Covenant tries to explain the xenomorph's origin, and that's why it's so bad, fortunately we can do an exegesis on the films' canonical timeline and some background props to determine that in fact David just happened to create something very much like etc etc etc. Now, we don't need to dive into the whole debate again, even though it'd be pretty funny to since I think we've both been on different sides of it before (like literally, you complaining that the film explains the alien, but me saying well, it might, but technically it might not, so you needn't be upset). But you surely agree that Prometheus and Covenant in combination at least swerve much dangerously closer to explaining the xenomorph to anything else, right? Like, have you ever run into anyone complaining that The Female War has revealed too much about the xenomorph and therefore removed the mystery or cheapened the monster somehow? I strongly doubt it, because TFW is much more careful to color inside the lines. You'd never end your post suggesting that The Female War is "sabotaging" earlier Aliens material to make a meta-statement or weakening itself by tying itself to Aliens, would you?
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Oct 30, 2023 06:46
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Good lord this thread sucks
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Oct 30, 2023 07:26
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Edit— not worth it Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 07:57
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Xenomrph posted:That sure is an interpretation someone can have. The thread is getting a bit heated, but l think this is worth addressing. It's been discussed many times how the marines have not put on any kind of protective gear against chemical hazards, not even after seeing large holes in metal and agreeing it corresponds to Ellen's aliens. After resting and discussing, they then take their bare sleeves and non-masked mugs into a huge alien structure (like, what else is a logical source for a gigantic alien structure of melted and reset metal OTHER than the acid aliens?). Ellen, the woman frozen for 50 years, has to point out to the marine tactical commander(!) that they are currently inside of a power plant, and that hitting it with bullets will make it unstable. The marines are ordered to take off all bullets WITHOUT explaining why, and told to proceed. They're not told to, like, regroup at command to explain the situation and distribute non-bullet weapons to everyone. What's the rush? The marines absolutely are tweaking by the point when their group gets massacred by an ambush of tigers (not in reference to an actual ambush, which doesn't happen, but the way a group of tigers is referred to!) and their prospects are grim. The civilian has to calm down upset marines and take control (lol). And yes, the small corporate stooge out for himself being the most reasonable against the use of nuclear weapons is crazy. Yet, Ellen's proposition to drop a nuke on the savannah is so loving insane that Burke ends up being the moralist via cowardice and extreme greed. End of Shoelace fucked around with this message at 13:02 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 12:00
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I think at this point all of you all need to shut the gently caress up and let this thread drop down a couple pages on the forum Because this is some real embarrassing and cringeworthy poo poo
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Oct 30, 2023 13:39
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Ferrinus posted:David obviously made the capital-a "Alien". As you say, the black mutagen clearly spontaneously creates all sorts of alien-esque things, which implies a lot about the cosmic essence of life and reproduction, but the stuff in that mural could easily have been like, the pale and fleshy "neomorphs" featured in the second prequel movie. The pod -> facehugger -> black-plated, biomechanical drone came out of David's alchemy. David's close-to Xenomorphs are visibly and functionally different than the Xenomorphs in Alien 1-3. In Alien 4, we know they are being screwed with due to having Ripley genes, in AvP1/2, the Predators might have screwed with them because they specifically were set up for an immediate hunt with young Predators. David's don't look right (which is fine, as Alien 1-3's look different too, but its the combination of different aspects that's the thing), way more aggressive and dumb, the facehuggers just have to basically touch you to create a chestburster and don't have to go through the tube deposit process, they're also noticeably weaker and can be taken off way easier (possibly because even their legs are different than the others), the chestburster comes out way faster, other stuff. Just from what we see on screen, we have to assume that David's fuckery ended up finally creating something really close to the Xenomorph, but isn't quite there yet. We also know from Prometheus that something really close to the Xenomorph had existed before or is known of. So assumptions are that he either ends up getting there and creating the Xenomorph for real (something a little further hinted at with the Covenant cut script scene where he talks about creating a queen), which Ridley's intentions seemed to be, or he just copied blueprints and didn't get it quite right (which Covenant goes over where they talk about androids not being able to truly create). David is basically just the Christopher Columbus of the Alien universe is what I'm saying. He goes to a New World, killing all the natives and stealing their stuff and then acts like he discovered everything himself.
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Oct 30, 2023 14:12
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End of Shoelace posted:The thread is getting a bit heated, but l think this is worth addressing. I’m not going to break this all down, I’ll just say that this is an awful lot of Monday Morning Quarterbacking and “tactical realism” about events that wouldn’t have changed very much even if they’d done what you suggested.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:30
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Darko posted:David's close-to Xenomorphs are visibly and functionally different than the Xenomorphs in Alien 1-3. In Alien 4, we know they are being screwed with due to having Ripley genes, in AvP1/2, the Predators might have screwed with them because they specifically were set up for an immediate hunt with young Predators. The xenomorphs in each movie have been visibly and functionally different from the xenomorphs in every other movie; there's not like one specific biomechanical gribble that all the ones in the first three movies have but the ones in the sixth and seventh lack. I don't really know what you're talking about with regards to "way more aggressive and dumb" or "noticeably weaker", either; the xenomorphs in Covenant can run through gunfire like it's rainfall and otherwise perform distinctly superpowered feats in start contrast to the noticeably weaker and easier to take down neomorphs that precede them. Now, I do agree that the exact breed we see in Covenant isn't the one we see in Alien or Aliens; just as you say, the most straightforward reading of the movie + tie-in material is that David turns Daniels in the first-ever xenomorph queen (presumably because alchemically manufacturing the eggs one by one is slow and tedious), and his queen's first batch of eggs produces slower-incubating and slower-maturing chestbursters that lack cute little hands, etc. But that's still the obvious throughline: that the particular creatures we're familiar with are an incestuous, recursive combination of the primordial azoth and human (and I include David here) perversity. Otherwise you "naturally" get all sorts of creatures that broadly do a lot of penetration and infestation and eruption, and that have too few eyes but too many teeth, but aren't the specific thing we expect space marines to be shooting at. I think you shouldn't be taking the humans in the movies at their word that androids aren't "truly" able to create, incidentally. Are humans truly able to create? Is David any less of a person just because his biology is different? On the other hand, if he isn't a person and is just a jumped-up tool, then doesn't that simply displace the responsibility one step up the chain and mean that humans ultimately created the xenomorph? To respond to your points in backwards order, I think it's wrongheaded to specifically explain specific properties of the creatures in Resurrection or in AvP1/2 as having been "screwed with", as if the creatures in every other movie haven't also de facto been "screwed with" because they were born out of earth animals like humans and dogs. There is no actual pure, mainline, true, pure, etc. xenomorph! They're copies of copies of copies all the way down, constantly distorting and recombining and mutating in basically the same way that VHS tapes degrade or large language models become increasingly deranged due to training on their own input. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 17:21
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Never seen anything as cruel as trying to trick someone into reading fire and stone.
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Oct 30, 2023 17:37
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MrMojok posted:I think at this point all of you all need to shut the gently caress up and let this thread drop down a couple pages on the forum I'm not sure what there is to be upset about. We're writing about is how people interpret media, and specifically Alien franchise media. Forums poster Xenomorph's position is (or, at least, appears) to be that the Scott prequel films are 'bad' because they close off potential future/alternate plotlines hinted at in what we could term the Aliens Expanded Multiverse of comics and videogames and such. Ferrinus (and others) have pointed out various reasons why that is not a good approach to interpreting media. In this specific case, Xenomorph protests that the feature film Alien Covenant contradicts the 1988 short story Aliens: Theory of Alien Propagation (in which a scientist outlines the theoretical origins of the predators from the film Aliens). Consequently, the film also contradicts the 2014 "technical guide" Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report - which, released after Prometheus, effectively (re-)canonized the short story via a reference. The short story was itself a tie in to the 1988 comic Aliens: Outbreak - an Aliens sequel featuring either Hicks and Newt or Wilks and Billie, depending on the version. Aliens: Theory of Alien Propagation may or may not originate from an 'alternate timeline' to that of the films, but Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report served as an attempt to restore that continuity. Xenomorph has insisted that he doesn't actually care about canon, but has also made it clear that he doesn't care about a singular strict canon while caring a great deal about an overall loose assemblage of franchise media analogous to the website Xenopedia. Under this approach, any given piece of franchise media is at least partly canon, since linkages between pieces of media are treated as 'real' and contradictions are downplayed or ignored. The result is like an enormous mental collage that supersedes any individual piece of media. Individual scenes in a film may or may not count as real, and are potentially ignored. Long story short, Xenomorph seeks to assimilate and incorporate as much Alien media as possible into a mostly-coherent blob of plot, and rejects the Scott prequel films for doing too much harm to the blob. Whole sections of the blob are cut off, if the predators from Aliens are only a few dozen years old. (Same issue with Blomkamp's proposed alt-universe Aliens sequel, as it happens - or my observation that there is objectively no evil conspiracy in the movie Alien.) This harm to the blob is exacerbated by Xenopedia's policy that (parts of) theatrical films are almost always 'more canon' than (parts of) books. Against this view, people are pointing out that discontinuities and contradictions are not to be ignored because they are often vital aspects of a given text. Ferrinus is currently pointing out that whatever continuity is observed in the blob is not strictly 'natural' but often a product of various institutional pressures. As an example of this, Ruddiger notes how the comics were (sloppily) edited by Dark Horse Comics after the release of Alien 3, to match the film. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 17:44
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ruddiger posted:Never seen anything as cruel as trying to trick someone into reading fire and stone. Fire and Stone, unless I'm reading this wrong, has a predator get splashed or otherwise infected by black good (or a derivative of same) and turn into this:  Which is just so, so stupid. Why would it turn a predator into an engineer? How is this on-theme?
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Oct 30, 2023 17:46
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ruddiger posted:Never seen anything as cruel as trying to trick someone into reading fire and stone. I am a monster. Fire and Stone has writing problems (largely because you had 4 creative teams doing their own thing without editorial oversight to help things mesh together) but its handling of the Black Goo is not among them. It had the potential to be an interesting storytelling experiment whereby you’re seeing 4 self-contained stories that are linked by a common thread (that way a Predator fan who doesn’t care about Aliens, for example, could theoretically read an independent story without requiring foreknowledge of something they don’t care about) but the execution ends up being less than ideal due to a lack of coordination. Contrast this with the sequel “Life and Death” which has the opposite problem - the whole thing was written by one guy, so it’s coherent, but each of the 4 “chapters” are contingent on each other; none of them make sense without the other three, forcing the choosy reader to engage with stuff they might not care about in order for any of it to make sense. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 18:14
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Ferrinus posted:The xenomorphs in each movie have been visibly and functionally different from the xenomorphs in every other movie; there's not like one specific biomechanical gribble that all the ones in the first three movies have but the ones in the sixth and seventh lack. I don't really know what you're talking about with regards to "way more aggressive and dumb" or "noticeably weaker", either; the xenomorphs in Covenant can run through gunfire like it's rainfall and otherwise perform distinctly superpowered feats in start contrast to the noticeably weaker and easier to take down neomorphs that precede them. - I stated that the xenomorphs looking different on their own isn't the kicker, but that, combined with everything else tells you that those xenos are in fact different than what we know as xenos. People spent hours and hours designing and modeling the ones in Covenant and for them to not make them biomechanical and change the teeth and put barbs on the tail and stuff is a definitive design decision. Combine that with the other things listed, and you basically conclude they aren't the same, but really close. - These are also more animalistic and immediately attack straightforward as compared to that shown before. Xenos charge and attack like morons when protecting the hive in some way, otherwise they are generally shown as more deliberate and sneaky (the whole chase in Alien 3 was using Ripley as bait). The xenos in Covenant are acting like they are in aggro mode constantly, very similar to the other similar creatures David created via the spores. It just shows a different line in David's creation in general. - Sorry for not being clear, I was referring to the Facehuggers being weaker. It is much easier to remove them; even though acid is generally plot dependent, their acid does very little, they're again, faster and more aggressive (going along with the David line of things) and there are also design differences (they have different joints in the fingers of the hands they are). I'm taking David at his actions. All he does is take what he saw on the engineer mural and keep experimenting with it until he kind of makes what is on the mural. Will he make a perfected version? Possibly. He's almost there as-is. But since there is no third movie, it's up to the viewer to decide if he does and if it leads to the events in Alien. I only say "screwed with" as there are actual plot reasons as to differences in those movies, and I feel there are definitive ones here. If we are all different results of the black goo, then any mix is "valid." The Alien/Aliens/Alien 3 xenos all came from the derelict eggs and whatever happened there. 4 did as well, although they got more spliced with human and now they can get pregnant. The AvP/AvP2 came from whatever the Predators had on the temple. The Covenant things come from David's experiments. All different versions of the same life cycle, with variations. In that universe, everything ends up xeno at the end in some way.
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Oct 30, 2023 18:22
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92Q7Rv5jT80 David be like this to this thread
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Oct 30, 2023 18:53
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Darko posted:- I stated that the xenomorphs looking different on their own isn't the kicker, but that, combined with everything else tells you that those xenos are in fact different than what we know as xenos. People spent hours and hours designing and modeling the ones in Covenant and for them to not make them biomechanical and change the teeth and put barbs on the tail and stuff is a definitive design decision. Combine that with the other things listed, and you basically conclude they aren't the same, but really close. I think you're right that the differences between the Covenant xenomorph and the Alien xenomorph point to the creatures we see being a (much closer) transitional stage. I don't really agree that they're notably more aggressive (the second one certainly did some horror movie slasher poo poo, and a lot of xenomorph behavior in the earlier movies comes down to being some combination of juvenile, outnumbered, or straight-up asleep), but the fact that there is, for instance, a visible gradient in the amount of tubing and ribbing from Covenant-Alien-Aliens definitely points to a deliberate progression either in David's efforts or in the developmental tendencies of the lifeform itself. And it's certainly true that the level of uniformity in movies 1-4 is traceable back to the fact that all those aliens are being hatched from the same single clutch of eggs, such that the trends we're seeing aren't really on the level of "most tigers have stripes" so much as "most McCoys are redheads". Where I don't agree with you is the idea that David is simply drawing from a photograph, so to speak. The camera certainly lingers on that one mural in Prometheus, but I don't think we see David doing so, or hear him talk about it, or watching him studying rubbings taken from it in Covenant, or something like that. David is performing a creative act, just like when he collaborates with Walter to play the movie's theme song on a flute. It's possible that, oh, he's just gotten lucky, he's just copying, this just happens automatically, but that's just cope from a particular stratum of the fanbase; it's much cleaner, and more narratively on-point, to take the movie at its word that, yes, it really is part of a line of Alien prequels and, yes, the titular creatures are much more intimately connected to us than we thought. To put it another way: quote:I only say "screwed with" as there are actual plot reasons as to differences in those movies, and I feel there are definitive ones here. If we are all different results of the black goo, then any mix is "valid." The Alien/Aliens/Alien 3 xenos all came from the derelict eggs and whatever happened there. 4 did as well, although they got more spliced with human and now they can get pregnant. The AvP/AvP2 came from whatever the Predators had on the temple. The Covenant things come from David's experiments. All different versions of the same life cycle, with variations. In that universe, everything ends up xeno at the end in some way. It's xenomorphs all the way down, including us. Humans, too, are disgusting mutants spawned from the primordial mutagen, and maybe the reason the mainline movie creatures were so scary to the engineers is that they'd represent xenomorphs spawned from xenomorphs. Xenomorphs squared!
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Oct 30, 2023 19:02
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Oct 30, 2023 23:27
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It stunk
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Oct 30, 2023 23:45
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Y’all with the Lame rear end argument that pops up every couple months. Alien Fire Team Elite devs have been hinting that they’re working on a sequel 🤞🏽
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Oct 31, 2023 00:25
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| # ? Jun 5, 2024 09:56 |
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To assist in changing the subject—despite loving this world, I've never seen Resurrection, AVP, or AVP:R. Resurrection looks to embody that 90s-maximalist "City of Lost Children" crank-up-the-weird vibe that I just find incredibly obnoxious and exhausts me. That being said, it looks weird enough that I do want to eventually watch it, but whenever the thought comes about I just decide to watch one of the Alien/Aliens ripoffs I've never seen instead. AVP just seems like a dumb action movie with that particularly unpalatable ugly vapid 2000s cynicism that I associate with, say, I Robot or the Doom movie, and seems like the sort of movie that has a lot of nu-metal on the soundtrack. Which is unacceptable. AVP:R seems so universally hated that even though it sounds like it's got the right recipe on paper, I haven't bothered to take a peek. Am I wrong about any of these assumptions?
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Oct 31, 2023 00:26
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