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Yeah you're basically right there with that assessment. Resurrection is really bad, but it does have some cool and fittingly horrifying moments. Brad Dourif is great, Ron Perlman's smuggler crew are mostly all interesting characters and moments like the hall of failed Ripley clones and the Newborn's birth and subsequent matricide, and also its death later in the film are downright scary and disquieting in just the right ways. AVP was just fuckin' fun. I remember it getting critically panned and also pooh-pooh'd among franchise diehards on release mostly because of the protagonist lady making an alliance with the predators but on review it's actually a great popcorn action flick that nods enough to the lore and is just irreverent enough to turn your brain off and enjoy. I don't think I ever actually finished AVP:R. A lot of the same friends who hated AVP were raving about how good it was in contrast, because it was so much more gruesome and gritty. But I thought it was contrived and edgy for edginess' sake - seriously, the maternity ward scene was so loving gratuitous even for a Predator movie, I was more disgusted at the gall of putting it in the movie than I was unsettled by it. Also AVP:R is way too dark, like literally it looks like they tried to shoot without proper lighting. It's bad.
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Oct 31, 2023 01:04
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I will admit to Requiem becoming a guilty pleasure, over the last few years. I have to turn the brightness on the TV way up, but I always enjoy watching it 
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Oct 31, 2023 01:22
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Oct 31, 2023 01:28
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Mister Speaker posted:AVP was just fuckin' fun. I remember it getting critically panned and also pooh-pooh'd among franchise diehards on release mostly because of the protagonist lady making an alliance with the predators but on review it's actually a great popcorn action flick that nods enough to the lore and is just irreverent enough to turn your brain off and enjoy. The fanbase back in 2004 (at least on the AvP forum I was on at the time) thought it was fine if underwhelming; making it PG13 was cited as a bad call, and 2 of 3 Predators going out like chumps within 3 minutes of each other wasn’t met with much enthusiasm. Setting it on earth wasn’t met with much enthusiasm either, even if the budgetary restraints basically required it - they even recycled the Alien costumes and animatronics from Resurrection to save money. But the spoiler you’re referring to wasn’t derided in and of itself (it’s lifted wholesale from the original AvP comic series, after all), although the execution was half-baked compared to the comic. I’ll go on the record and say that there are things it does better than Prometheus (both films are essentially adaptations of Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’). Charles Bishop Weyland is a more interesting and fully realized character than Peter Weyland; they both essentially want the same thing - immortality - but they go about it in very different ways. Charles wants immortality through a legacy, and it’s an interesting juxtaposition between his largely altruistic actions in the movie and what his company ends up becoming over the centuries. Peter Weyland just wants to literally live forever and is much more selfish and amoral (and his company reflects this). It’s got a throughline, but it’s much less interesting. I also think the ancillary cast is better fleshed out than the redshirts in Prometheus. For an interesting look at what might have been, check out Peter Briggs’ AvP script from the 90s. It hews much closer to the original AvP comic (although it tosses a group of Colonial Marines into the mix). Briggs is a cool dude, he’s on Twitter and he’s more than happy to answer questions and interact with fans. I haven’t rewatched AvPR in a good while, I don’t remember hating it even if it’s pretty mean spirited and all of the characters only exist to get butchered. But I really like the Predator, there’s a lot of visual storytelling in how he moves and what he looks like that conveys the sense that this isn’t his first rodeo. Also he looks cool, and his gear is cool. Sidebar, the Wolf Predator from AvPR and Scar from AvP were played by Ian Whyte - who went on to play the surviving Engineer in Prometheus. He’s also a cool dude, he recorded an intro for one of my AvP video game let’s plays back in 2008 or so. The fandom didn’t care much for AvPR, but for different (fanboy) reasons - AvP1 hewed much more in favor of the Aliens, which rubbed the Predator fans the wrong way, while AvPR makes the Aliens seem incompetent every time they’re facing Wolf, which pissed off the more numerous (and thus more vocal) Alien fans. A pretty egregious example is when Wolf picks up two Aliens by the neck in the sewer, and they just kind of flail around and forget they have tails for some reason. If the movie got released in 4K and they corrected the brightness so it was like it was in the theatre, I’d buy it.
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Oct 31, 2023 02:04
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Ferrinus posted: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! This is actually another reason that Prometheus is actually the most Lovecraftian movie in the series. You can theorize a lot of complicated and contingent reasons for why the final engineer went berserk when confronted with humans (he's worried that they + black goo will give rise to true xenomorphs, he's been offended on religious grounds by Weyland's request, something like that) but there's a much simpler explanation: just raw, animal revulsion. Remember, the engineers are, to the last man, eight-foot porcelain demigods with negative body fat percentages. To one of them, an earthborne human - small, hairy, sickly, secreting various fluids, whether they want to or not - is probably as much of a disgusting mockery of real humanity as a xenomorph is a mockery of us. It's the same reaction that a well-heeled professor of Miskatonic U might have to someone with the Innsmouth look.
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Oct 31, 2023 05:35
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FastestGunAlive posted:Y’all with the Lame rear end argument that pops up every couple months. That game was broken as hell on launch and I definitely wasn't paying for it after it fell off game pass, but even if you completely ignore the Alien IP elements its still sitting in a unique co-op action game niche with plenty of potential. I'm glad it was successful enough for them to get money for a game two, I hope they learn to programme servers this time.
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Oct 31, 2023 08:48
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Alchenar posted:That game was broken as hell on launch and I definitely wasn't paying for it after it fell off game pass, but even if you completely ignore the Alien IP elements its still sitting in a unique co-op action game niche with plenty of potential. I'm glad it was successful enough for them to get money for a game two, I hope they learn to programme servers this time. They’ve been continuing to patch it. I haven’t played it in a hot minute but I think the latest patch just dropped last week or something?
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Oct 31, 2023 08:53
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Never had any technical issues with it. Definitely an AA game but a labor of love by the devs I felt. I put in decent time, maxed out two classes, but didn’t feel compelled to play long term. Here’s hoping it is a sequel
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Oct 31, 2023 12:56
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For me, Resurrection is WAY better than Alien 3. Three is just such an unbelievable slog to get through.
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Oct 31, 2023 14:28
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End of Shoelace posted:For me, Resurrection is WAY better than Alien 3. Three is just such an unbelievable slog to get through. Have you seen the Assembly Cut version?
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Oct 31, 2023 15:28
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Alien 4 is so loving weird. Remember those mostly unfunny movie parody comics Mad magazine would do? Resurrection feels like someone took one of those and actually turned it into a live action movie. The tone is just so bizarre. The opening scene where a guy kills a bad CGI bug in a kinda gross-out comedic switcheroo so perfectly sets the tone for the movie.
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Oct 31, 2023 18:15
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Baronjutter posted:The opening scene where a guy kills a bad CGI bug in a kinda gross-out comedic switcheroo so perfectly sets the tone for the movie. For what it’s worth, that’s from the “director’s cut”. I preface that in  because Jeunet has said his preferred cut is the theatrical one, the “director’s cut” is purely a marketing buzzword in this instance.If you can tolerate more Whedon, the earlier script draft is kind of neat. It has one or two additional Betty crew members, a whole action setpiece where the characters drive space-jeeps through the Auriga’s greenhouse gardens and get jumped by Aliens velociraptor-style, a few of the deaths are different (Perez gets sucked out a hulk breach like how the Newborn ended up dying in the final cut). I don’t completely disagree with Whedon’s assessment that they filmed his script poorly- his script has issues, but he’s right that Jeunet was a bad match for his script. Jeunet wasn’t fluent in English at the time of filming, and a lot of the “jokes” get played straight or the straight parts get delivered like jokes, and it all ends up falling flat. Couple that with Jeunet’s more “artistic” surrealist flair and pairing it with Whedon’s more straightforward script is not an ideal match. Don’t get me wrong, Jeunet is a better director than Whedon is a writer, and Jeunet pulls off a LOT of great shots (the underwater scene, the failed clones, the ladder scene), but Whedon’s not completely off-base that his script got misinterpreted. This also gives me an excuse to repost the best Alien Resurrection anecdote: https://youtu.be/FF44YvDVP8Y?si=cfyY_JhioLL82YL1
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Oct 31, 2023 23:33
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Xenomrph posted:Have you seen the Assembly Cut version? Yes, it's the one I watched. It is very well shot in parts (like the beach sequence) and stuff like the Bishop animatronic is great! However, if this is considered the BETTER cut of Alien 3, I think I understand why it's not talked about too much anymore. It's really just an alright movie, in the sense that if you eat at a restaurant that is just alright, you don't feel the need for a revisit.
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Oct 31, 2023 23:45
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End of Shoelace posted:For me, Resurrection is WAY better than Alien 3. Three is just such an unbelievable slog to get through. Yeah I'm in this boat despite being a huge Fincher fan (though I like some of Jeunet's other films too). I really enjoy Resurrection much more
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Oct 31, 2023 23:49
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End of Shoelace posted:Yes, it's the one I watched. It is very well shot in parts (like the beach sequence) and stuff like the Bishop animatronic is great! I’d say Alien3 is worth watching at least twice (once Theatrical, once Assembly) just to see the differences and how heavily it was overhauled. I can’t think of another movie that was so drastically changed other than Zack Snyder’s Justice League. The Assembly Cut is definitely the better cut, although the theatrical cut has elements I prefer (the Alien coming from a dog, Ripley being recovered from the EEV, the Queen popping out of Ripley at the end). Alien3 just had one hell of a rocky development, with a ton of studio interference, alternate scripts (which are worth checking out just to see how different things could have been), conflicting ideas, it was a huge mess. For a long time 20th Century Fox tried to whitewash how badly they derailed the production of that movie, but with the additional supplemental on the excellent Alien Anthology blu-ray set they actually owned up to it pretty well. I still think there’s a lot to like in the movie - Charles Dance and Charles Dutton are great, I love the Alien design and how Tom Woodruff Jr portrayed it, there’s a lot of gorgeous shots, it’s got a lot of directorial stuff that would become David Fincher staples in things like Se7en, Fight Club, and Panic Room. It’s not my favorite Alien movie, but I still feel it has a lot of artistic merit.
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Oct 31, 2023 23:56
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Alien 3 fundamentally understands what making a solid filler episode in the Alien franchise should be—a horror-based Alien do-over that takes place in a new place with a new gang of folks and mixes up the events and action just enough to keep it fresh. At the end of the day, Alien 3's biggest problem is that it's not that interesting. The prison isn't a very interesting space, the prisoners aren't very interesting characters, and the world isn't expanded significantly in any interesting ways. We've seen what it's doing before in the first movie, and it's more of a remix than an expansion. Despite me not loving a lot of the action-oriented nature of Aliens, it's stuffed to the brim with new intriguing details about how the world, technology, people, military, politics, etc. etc. work. And it's all so well-thought through! Deep complex worldbuilding isn't essential to making a great sci-fi movie by any means, but for a sequel it's one of the better ways of making a movie not feel like more of the same. Alien 3 has hints, bits and pieces. But it more or less takes place within the confines of what came before. I think one of the bigger failures is that it doesn't significantly engage with what the prison industrial complex has become in the future, and how that connects to Building Better Worlds, colonization efforts, corporate power and control intersecting with government interests, etc. If there was a lot more of that stuff in between the existing story beats, I think it would be much better loved.
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Nov 1, 2023 00:15
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 This is how long it is after Ripley activates the self destruct until the ship explodes. I timed it because I was bored.
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Nov 1, 2023 00:17
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Mister Speaker posted:Good lord this thread sucks Wrong! It's frequently interesting and entertaining
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Nov 6, 2023 07:53
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I know it's been three decades, but good Lord, killing off Newt and Hicks at the start of Alien 3 was such a bad call
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Nov 7, 2023 22:15
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Carter Burke has a SA account?
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Nov 8, 2023 02:45
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Aliens vs. Predator is one of those concepts you're probably not supposed to think too much about, especially not the title. Surely they're both aliens, and come to think of it they're both predators, too. Perhaps a more explanatory title is necessary, like Big Dribbly Black Thing That Likes Eating Lance Henriksen and Has a Head That Makes You Wonder About What Sort of Relationship H. R. Giger Had With His Father vs. Big Clicky Invisible Thing with a Crab for a Face That Always Seems to End Up Getting Beaten Up By Big Stupid Lads Wearing Dirty Pants.
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Nov 12, 2023 14:55
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Not sure what the go is on posting pure Predator stuff here But I gotta say, I'm that guy who thinks that Shane Black's "The Predator" is way better than the recent "Prey" film I honestly found a lot of The Predator quite funny and the approach of approaching the tone of 80s and 90s action movies worked for me. Yeah there was some weird behind the scenes stuff with Shane Black hiring a creep and he either shouldn't have done it or at least gave the cast informed consent. Also the stuff with the autism savant superpower son. Look I'm not neurotypical myself and I found it entertaining af. If people found that representation poor or careless that's valid but I must found it to be a really fun entertaining Predator movie Prey on the other hand felt like one of those fake what-if fan trailers being expanded to full length. Like what if Predator fought a Comanche tribe. OK. There's the movie. It did nothing for me and I don't need a reverent approach to the predator, I'd rather have an entertaining script Also I hope the Predator didn't gently caress Shame Black's career completely cause the Nice Guys is still one of the best movies of the last decade. Think he's doing another project with Downey Jr tho
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Nov 12, 2023 21:55
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They’re both extremely pro tier Edit my bad I thought it was Predator 1 being discussed with Prey not the Predator. I redact my statement FastestGunAlive fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Nov 12, 2023 |
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Nov 12, 2023 22:00
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:Also I hope the Predator didn't gently caress Shame Black's career completely cause the Nice Guys is still one of the best movies of the last decade. I loved Prey and the Predator was alright. But I’ve never seen The Nice Guys and you have now convinced me to check it out. Sounds funny, and funny Shane Black reminds me of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang which I love.
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Nov 12, 2023 22:10
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:Not sure what the go is on posting pure Predator stuff here Don't see why not.
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Nov 13, 2023 00:07
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Something I didn't think about until now is that this is the second time Fede Alvarez is heading up an entry in a franchise previous helmed by David Fincher The last time he did it didn't inspire enthusiasm in me
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Nov 17, 2023 12:40
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:Something I didn't think about until now is that this is the second time Fede Alvarez is heading up an entry in a franchise previous helmed by David Fincher Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is awesome
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Nov 18, 2023 02:35
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Xenomrph posted:Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is awesome Is that the ~2013 one? I loved it too. The hypodermic needle stabbing nearly made me leave the theatre and the literal blood rain at the end was loving awesome.
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Nov 18, 2023 03:11
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Xenomrph posted:Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is awesome I like it as well as the first Don't Breathe, but I'm not convinced he can do anything outside of a very specific framework that I don't think fits for Alien. His sequel to the Dragon Tattoo is just a baffling misfire on every level
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Nov 18, 2023 03:21
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Girl In the Spiders Web is definitely not great, but I recently rewatched it because I enjoyed the heck out of the sniper sequence at the end
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Nov 18, 2023 04:10
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:I like it as well as the first Don't Breathe, but I'm not convinced he can do anything outside of a very specific framework that I don't think fits for Alien. See I haven’t seen that so I can’t comment, but if he can do a small-scale tightly-knit Alien movie in a similar scope to Evil Dead then I think he’ll knock it out of the park. I’d still pay good money to get a copy of the comic “Aliens: Labyrinth” into Neill Blomkamp’s hands, I think he’d absolutely kill it. It is extremely in his wheelhouse, and it’s easily my favorite Aliens comic ever written.
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Nov 18, 2023 09:06
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I would like to see a predator movie set in Afghanistan during the American occupation. Protagonists could be regular Afghans or Taliban. Lots of good connections and parallels to be drawn between predators and American soldiers and drone strike stuff.
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Nov 19, 2023 09:19
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Xenomrph posted:For what it’s worth, that’s from the “director’s cut”. I preface that in It's pretty much is with all the "director's cut" of the Alien movies. Alien is one of the few times when Ridley Scott was happy with the theatrical cut and Fincher didn't want to touch Alien 3 after it was finished.
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Nov 19, 2023 12:32
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lonelylikezoidberg posted:I would like to see a predator movie set in Afghanistan during the American occupation. Protagonists could be regular Afghans or Taliban. It would be a little on the nose but yeah a sequence where a US secret special sauce team with insectile NODs is stalking Taliban fighters at night while in turn being invisibly stalked by a Predator watching them on mask thermals would be tight as hell. Really the formula is hard to gently caress up. I'd watch Napoleonic predator, I'd watch Bronze Age Predator, I'd watch Crusaders and Muslims teaming up to fight a harrying invisible creature they argue whether it's djinn or devil, I'd watch cowboys and plains Indians fighting a Predator, I'd watch Warring States China Predator thing... Just make the anthology show.
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Nov 19, 2023 17:13
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If anyone has a PlayStation and is subscribed to PS +, one of the free games of the month is Aliens: Fireteam, where you play online as a marine shooting up aliens and exploring engineer ruins
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Nov 19, 2023 19:11
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Steve Yun posted:If anyone has a PlayStation and is subscribed to PS +, one of the free games of the month is Aliens: Fireteam, where you play online as a marine shooting up aliens and exploring engineer ruins It's a solidly fun single A title in the vein of Left 4 Dead, would recommend.
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Nov 19, 2023 19:26
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Owlbear Camus posted:It would be a little on the nose but yeah a sequence where a US secret special sauce team with insectile NODs is stalking Taliban fighters at night while in turn being invisibly stalked by a Predator watching them on mask thermals would be tight as hell. This guy gets it
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Nov 19, 2023 19:34
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I was watching Prometheus the other day and totally forgot Mandolrian stole the flute bit.
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Nov 19, 2023 19:45
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How could you forget the kickass flute
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Nov 19, 2023 19:49
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Alhazred posted:It's pretty much is with all the "director's cut" of the Alien movies. Alien is one of the few times when Ridley Scott was happy with the theatrical cut and Fincher didn't want to touch Alien 3 after it was finished. Yeah but Alien3 isn’t marketed as a director’s cut, and the director’s cut of Aliens absolutely is Cameron’s preferred version.
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Nov 19, 2023 21:06
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