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Predator is a good pick too. A lot of obvious ones in the sci fi area. Kurt in The Thing, Terminator (a lot of funny options here)
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Jan 6, 2024 16:31
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FastestGunAlive posted:
In Alien you have to keep Ian Holm and have him kind of half putting up with the muppets' poo poo throughout.
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Jan 6, 2024 17:40
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Shanty posted:In Alien you have to keep Ian Holm and have him kind of half putting up with the muppets' poo poo throughout. Nah, they should keep Jones the cat and muppetize everything else.
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Jan 6, 2024 17:54
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Ferrinus posted:And it's increasingly obvious that all these theories are in fact the same theory: since every piece of EU material is basically just an Aliens remake that hits the same canned plot beats (someone stupid and greedy tries to exploit the xenomorph but fails, civilians and marines have to deal with the fallout), meta-EU material just does revisionist history to claim that even Alien was an Aliens remake. A thing to keep in mind is that AliensTM Colonial Marines Technical Manual / AliensTM Technical Manual is titled that way because the publisher of the book technically only had the rights to Aliens TM content. Aliens is a distinct subfranchise of the greater franchise; there are usually very clear differences between Alien media and Aliens media, which could all very well be a a result of a Winnie The Pooh kind of situation. You can have a toy bear named Pooh, but can’t depict him in a red shirt. That kind of thing. Consequently, although the ATM section of the book is set after Alien3, the events of Alien 3 are referenced extremely obliquely - like, to such a degree that someone reading the book as a standalone narrative would have no clue what the gently caress is going on. The characters just relay that Weyland-Yutani middle-managers are checking a place where they might be able to find an alien and then, later, hear rumours that they failed to get an alien from the place but somehow got access to a robot’s memories. The robot is clearly Bishop, but never actually named. They then realize that the original UFO is still on the planetoid, and go casually pick up some eggs. That’s how the book’s slight narrative ends. Events and characters unique to Alien are referred to (i.e. the existence of Mother, the fact that the planet is actually a moon orbiting a gas giant, etc.), so they evidently got some leeway there, but these references are perfunctory and not presented in any significant detail. As an aside: forums poster Xenomrph has gotten the book’s specific description of the Jimspiracy slightly wrong. In ATM, the events of Alien occur very much as Ferrinus and I have described them: the Nostromo was transporting ore on a fairly direct route to Earth, when Mother detects a radio signal and, independently, chooses to reroute the ship towards the source of the signal. What the book alleges is that the entire operation was set up far in advance, by Jim - like, weeks or months in advance - so that everything would fall into place domino-style. Like, the entire mission to collect the ore in the first place was plotted so that the Nostromo would eventually have to pass close to the radio signal to maintain plausible deniability. Perhaps the very mining of the ore was just a ruse to frame Mother. This still doesn’t make any sense, if you interrogate it at all (how was Jim the only one able to detect the signal? Why doesn’t Ripley know where Ash came from?) but it’s nonsense in a very different way from what we’ve seen. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 20:14
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Ferrinus posted:There's probably a case to be made that Weyland-Yutani is not actually that rich or powerful, or at least has massive internal shortfalls that its administrators are desperately trying to paper over, as indicated by its staffing shortfalls and ridiculous moonshot treasure hunts. If they had a properly-funded science division, couldn't Mother have just made a note of the derelict's location, sent that note as a memo to the appropriate department, and let professionals handle this alien artifact crap? It relates to the anti-capitalist themes of the franchise in general, imo. The company cheaps out and commits the bare minimum resources until it's their final chance. First they just send the Nostromo crew, thinking that assigning a droid who knows what to do while Mother oversees things will be enough and it nearly works. Then the second time round they decide to use the USMC to help with the mission and once again it is very nearly successful. I also do not consider Burke to be a lone wolf acting in self interest, he's there for the company and protests when Ripley and Hicks discuss nuking the place. If he was acting in his own interests, he'd have no complaints of the evidence (transmission to go investigate derelict leading to mass death and xeno infestation of an entire colony "with substantial dollar value") implicating him being destroyed. He's there on company orders and has a job to do, he just knows that his rear end is on the line this time. Then we get to Alien 3 and that's it, this is the last chance WY has so they finally commit the proper resources to the mission and send a large vessel manned with scientists and their own private military that's better equipped than the USMC to get the job done right. They cut every corner they could along the way but that does not mean that they're not a very powerful corporation, it's just on-brand with the general anti-capitalist themes of the films. This is just imo, anyways. Covenant also confirmed that WY explicitly knew about the alien before the events of Alien took place as well. We'll never know what happened between Covenant and Alien unfortunately but we do know that David sent a transmission to WY explaining the creature that he had "created" and invited them to come and get it, with a warning that once they do there's no going back. We get confirmation that WY receives the transmission iirc. This makes the detour the Nostromo took in Alien much more logical, along with the last-minute addition of Ash to the crew as well as him seemingly already knowing about the capabilities of the creature, along with the Special Order. Also I'm aware this didn't make the final cut of the movie and was instead released as promotional material, but it being officially released makes it valid imo and I've personally always thought that too many excuses and leaps of logic need to be made to suggest that the company had no idea in Alien (or Aliens). Xenomrph posted:A new Aliens novel just came out, focusing on Bishop. What's the name? What you shared sounds interesting and I'm curious if they touch on my theory  Also WY soldiers vs. USMC hell yeah  I know we share the same sentiment about a movie adaptation of Labyrinth being a really good idea, and if he hadn't already starred in Resurrection then Brad Dourif would have been perfect for the role of Church. Anyways, USMC shooty time has me recalling Aliens: Tribes and the amazing art by Dave Dorman and that would make for a solid movie too, imo. Not very deep but plenty of potential to be very entertaining. I think Blomkamp would have done a good job with the heavy industrial visuals, the freaky body horror and of course the segment with the berserker unit rampaging through the entire ship  Considering the USMC develops such disturbing weapons, makes me wonder what bizarre nightmarish developments the WY military may have made given their complete lack of ethics. Ferrinus posted:it is pretty satisfying to see that piece of poo poo Burke be discovered, get yelled at, and ultimately receive his comeuppance Hey now, we never actually see Burke die  FastestGunAlive posted:
If the entire rest of the case must be muppets and not just the aliens, then I think Beaker would be hilarious as Hudson. I'd be inclined to cast Animal as Vasquez purely for how comical the "Let's rock" clip would be. Disney owns both the Alien and Muppets IPs so why the hell have they not remade Aliens with Muppets yet? It would be incredible  SuperMechagodzilla posted:forums poster Xenomrph Dude you have been told so many times to stop doing this 
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Jan 7, 2024 00:50
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SUNKOS posted:I also do not consider Burke to be a lone wolf acting in self interest, he's there for the company and protests when Ripley and Hicks discuss nuking the place. If he was acting in his own interests, he'd have no complaints of the evidence (transmission to go investigate derelict leading to mass death and xeno infestation of an entire colony "with substantial dollar value") implicating him being destroyed. He's there on company orders and has a job to do, he just knows that his rear end is on the line this time. SUNKOS posted:What's the name? What you shared sounds interesting and I'm curious if they touch on my theory SUNKOS posted:Considering the USMC develops such disturbing weapons, makes me wonder what bizarre nightmarish developments the WY military may have made given their complete lack of ethics. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Jan 7, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 01:21
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SUNKOS posted:It relates to the anti-capitalist themes of the franchise in general, imo. The company cheaps out and commits the bare minimum resources until it's their final chance. First they just send the Nostromo crew, thinking that assigning a droid who knows what to do while Mother oversees things will be enough and it nearly works. Then the second time round they decide to use the USMC to help with the mission and once again it is very nearly successful. I also do not consider Burke to be a lone wolf acting in self interest, he's there for the company and protests when Ripley and Hicks discuss nuking the place. If he was acting in his own interests, he'd have no complaints of the evidence (transmission to go investigate derelict leading to mass death and xeno infestation of an entire colony "with substantial dollar value") implicating him being destroyed. He's there on company orders and has a job to do, he just knows that his rear end is on the line this time. Then we get to Alien 3 and that's it, this is the last chance WY has so they finally commit the proper resources to the mission and send a large vessel manned with scientists and their own private military that's better equipped than the USMC to get the job done right. They cut every corner they could along the way but that does not mean that they're not a very powerful corporation, it's just on-brand with the general anti-capitalist themes of the films. This is just imo, anyways. If we take the bonus Covenant material as canon, it would help contextualize W-Y's general policy of requiring its astronauts to investigate any strange transmission they come across, or at least of combining that policy (which would still make sense in light of totally regular things like distress signals without requiring any ancient aliens silliness) with MU-TH-UR computers that are programmed to seize and bring home alien specimens at any cost. But this makes the company's actions scan with some imprecise understanding that there is a cool alien to be captured "somewhere out there", but not with any kind of institutional knowledge of where exactly David's handiwork is to be found. I say this because sacrificing the Nostromo mobile refinery (and its entire ore payload) and the Hadley's Hope terraforming installation for the sake of bagging the xenomorph doesn't make any sense. There's no way a small craft with some scientists on it somehow costs more than the enormous logistical and infrastuctural investments those things represent. If W-Y knows where the derelict is already thanks to David's helpful broadcasts, nothing would've stopped it from just zooming over there directly, and perhaps setting Hadley's Hope up (since the terraforming facility is presumably profitable in its own right) after they've completely scoured and looted the Engineer derelict. If the point of hiding these xenomorph recovery plots within seemingly normal operations like the Nostromo delivery flight and Hadley's Hope geological survey is to keep the whole thing secret somehow, we need to ask, secret from whom? Who does the secrecy benefit? There's not really a good answer that doesn't involve pathologically paranoid conspiracy plots that end up implicitly or explicitly claiming that the entire universe revolves around gaslighting specific characters. Burke's rear end being on the line is certainly why he doesn't want Hadley's Hope nuked. I don't think we're given reason to believe that the only evidence that he gave the orders to explore the derelict is physically present in the computers of the colony itself. If he shows up back at headquarters with a facehugger to his credit but a depopulated colony to his demerit, that's better for him than if he shows up back at headquarters with a facehugger to his credit but a completely atomized colony to his demerit (especially if it turns out bioweapons really likes the facehugger and will be eager to fly back out to the colony to collect all the xenomorphs still nesting there). Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Jan 7, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 01:36
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Also if you don't nuke the colony and all the aliens then someone can go back for them. Particularly if that someone is Burke and all the marines have had a cryopod accident.
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Jan 7, 2024 01:45
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SUNKOS posted:It relates to the anti-capitalist themes of the franchise in general, imo. The company cheaps out and commits the bare minimum resources until it's their final chance. First they just send the Nostromo crew, thinking that assigning a droid who knows what to do while Mother oversees things will be enough and it nearly works. Then the second time round they decide to use the USMC to help with the mission and once again it is very nearly successful. I also do not consider Burke to be a lone wolf acting in self interest, he's there for the company and protests when Ripley and Hicks discuss nuking the place. Ok, so the question is where the heck you’re actually getting this from, because it’s not from the film - and the AliensTM Technical Manual says that Burke was effectively acting alone. “Jim”, likewise, was operating from within Science Division (which operates more-or-less independently, in competition with other divisions). In the ATM, what limited story there is concerns a bizarre culture of psychopathy where characters within the corporation will readily murder each-other in order to obtain ‘bonuses’. Even in the last pages, where the Weyland-Yutani goons are preparing to gather some unguarded alien eggs, without any known obstacles, some anonymous middle-manager sends and e-mail asking if he should “arrange an accident”. Why? So, as Ferrinus pointed out, Weyland-Yutani is completely dysfunctional beyond the level of a Sears or Twitter. They’re bad at capitalism. In the actual movie, though, Burke is worried about the facility because he’s desperate to ‘come out of this looking like a hero.’ If the facility is destroyed, the probability of him being turbo-hosed into oblivion by both the federal government and his employers increases dramatically.
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Jan 7, 2024 02:00
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Ferrinus posted:I say this because sacrificing the Nostromo mobile refinery (and its entire ore payload) and the Hadley's Hope terraforming installation for the sake of bagging the xenomorph doesn't make any sense. There's no way a small craft with some scientists on it somehow costs more than the enormous logistical and infrastuctural investments those things represent. Who says that sacrificing the Nostromo & Hadley's Hope is intended by WY? The movies make it very clear that the company does not want or approve of those outcomes. I consider them the unintended loss as a result of bean counting. Companies will cheap out to save some bucks and then it will bite them in the rear end, it's a tale as old as time. Ferrinus posted:If the point of hiding these xenomorph recovery plots within seemingly normal operations like the Nostromo delivery flight and Hadley's Hope geological survey is to keep the whole thing secret somehow, we need to ask, secret from who? Who does the secrecy benefit? It's no different from real world corporations. Projects are kept secret during R&D, people sign NDAs, laws are broken, whistleblowers leak things, fines are issued, people are fired/imprisoned and so on and so forth. It's just basic capitalism. They're keeping it secret from competitors and governments, and the secrecy directly benefits the company. Smuggling is also a very real thing that exists in the world, surely you know why it occurs? This all has precedent in reality yet for some reason it appears to be too unbelievable to you in a science fiction movie? Here's another post of yours which I'll use to highlight this: Ferrinus posted:I really want to stress that this is really stupid and only makes the EU look worse. Why, in the first place, does Weyland-Yutani have a bounty/reward structure that encourages its own operatives to trick, sabotage, and backstab each other? Have you ever heard of a company called Microsoft? They operated like this for a long time. They're very successful! SuperMechagodzilla posted:Ok, so the question is where the heck you’re actually getting this from The films. Haven't read the book you're talking about. There's this really cool thing that people can do when watching movies however, and that's interpret what they are shown in specific ways. You've previously detailed some weird conspiracy about sex panthers and hauling porn along with sex cults and so on, and while I think that's a rather bizarre take on this franchise, you're certainly free to interpret the events of the films to conform to this whole "Jimspiracy" thing you invented. I personally have a much more simple take, albeit one that I admit is also cynical, even if said cynicism is born from events that we see in the films. What you quoted is me pretty much just stating the events of the films however (obviously Burke being a lone wolf or not is open to individual interpretation with no definitive answer) so your confusion has me confused! Thus in conclusion this is where I'm at when I share my own interpretation: Xenomrph posted:I can dig it. It’s what the fandom has done for decades. It’s fun to speculate and throw ideas around and see what people think. Alchenar posted:Also if you don't nuke the colony and all the aliens then someone can go back for them. I would love to see some kind of mini-series where Burke's successfully killed everyone in the cryopods and is out there all alone trying to somehow get some specimens onto a dropship and up to the Sulaco without dying. Would a trail of cornbread successfully lure an alien onto a dropship? Inevitable thisisfine.jpg when he finally gets one on board, everything is on fire, the corpses have all been jettisoned in the escape pods and poor Burke is loving sweating at how he'll get out of this week's mess  Edit: Also thanks Xeno for the book names, I'll check them out eventually along with the Colonial Marines one.
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Jan 7, 2024 02:56
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SUNKOS posted:Who says that sacrificing the Nostromo & Hadley's Hope is intended by WY? The movies make it very clear that the company does not want or approve of those outcomes. I consider them the unintended loss as a result of bean counting. Companies will cheap out to save some bucks and then it will bite them in the rear end, it's a tale as old as time. The problem is this: you can bet that, because of the basic strictures of capitalism, the Nostromo and Hadley's Hope are already absolutely cut to the bone. Ripley and Dallas and so on aren't there on the Nostromo because Weyland-Yutani is happy to give them some walking around money, they're there because all that ore just isn't getting home without their, at bare minimum, being there to watch over it. Now, it seems at least plausible that if the Nostromo trundled into port minus its entire crew but plus one xenomorph, that'd represent a net gain for Weyland-Yutani, but Hadley's Hope is a nuclear-powered terraforming facility staffed by like a hundred people. Depopulating Hadley's Hope is just suicidal on the financial level; the over/under on sending some unsuspecting engineers to the derelict and not just flushing the company's entire investment down the toilet is tiny. What you're describing here is extremely not basic capitalism. Under basic capitalism, corporations are tightly-controlled command economies in which massive amounts of variable and constant capital are bent by iron discipline to the singular task of turning X dollars of input into ?= X(1 + r/100) where r is the rate of profit output. Interdepartmental competition is strictly controlled and curtailed because it's literally unprofitable not to; I mentioned Sears because that's a corporation that actually tried to allow its various departments to compete with each other within a miniature market and massively crashed and burned as a result. Obviously, Weyland-Yutani is going to keep its xenomorph-capturing adventures secret from its corporate competitors and perhaps even from its unrelated departments, but that, alone, is not going to stop them from launching dedicated science or exploration vessels to look into areas of interest. You have to really roll up your sleeves and invent an elaborate fantastical scenario in order to make the Jimspiracy make logical sense as compared to what actually, provably happens in Alien based purely on onscreen text and dialogue.
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Jan 7, 2024 03:23
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SUNKOS posted:The films. Haven't read the book you're talking about. There's this really cool thing that people can do when watching movies however, and that's interpret what they are shown in specific ways. You've previously detailed some weird conspiracy about sex panthers and hauling porn along with sex cults and so on, and while I think that's a rather bizarre take on this franchise, you're certainly free to interpret the events of the films to conform to this whole "Jimspiracy" thing you invented. I personally have a much more simple take, albeit one that I admit is also cynical, even if said cynicism is born from events that we see in the films. What you quoted is me pretty much just stating the events of the films however (obviously Burke being a lone wolf or not is open to individual interpretation with no definitive answer) so your confusion has me confused! Here's a couple quotes from the movie. Perhaps you will recognize them: "I just checked the colony log. "Directive dated 6-12-79, signed Burke, Carter J." You sent them out there, and you didn't even warn them." "Okay, look: what if that ship didn't even exist, huh? Did you ever think about that? I didn't know! So now, if I went in and made a major security issue out of it, everybody steps in. Administration steps in, and there are no exclusive rights for anybody. Nobody wins. So I made a decision and it was... wrong. It was a bad call, Ripley. It was a bad call." In the movie, Carter J. Burke got the coordinates for the location of the alien ship directly from Ellen Ripley, who he had been speaking with for some time while preparing her for her hearing. He then personally contacted the Hadley's Hope colony, as Ripley says in the first quote. In the second quote, Burke personally takes full responsibility for the decision to endanger the colony and even helpfully outlines his whole thought process for us. If he had alerted the proper authorities before sending people in, Burke says, then he would have lost the exclusive rights to the alien biotechnology. But, if he had knowingly endangered the colonists, then he could face obvious legal repercussions. Burke's scheme was therefore to claim ignorance: if he didn't actually believe the alien ship was there, then he could hypothetically obtain the exclusive rights while avoiding any legal responsibilities. And that is his scheme. He came up with it himself: "I made a decision and it was wrong." Look at how many times Burke says "I" there. There's no 'we', and no gap in the plot where there had to have been an intermediary or co-conspirator. It's just Burke. There's zero indication of a grander conspiracy in the movie Aliens, and the characters directly state as much. So, the question is, again, where you got the notion from. The conspiracy theory is only presented in different stories, whole other media, ancillary materials. In the not-Aliens movie Alien 3, for example, Ripley states the following: "They won't kill [the alien]. They might kill you just for having seen it. ... When they first heard about this thing, it was 'crew expendable.' The next time, they sent in Marines. They were expendable, too. ... You think they're going to let you interfere with their plans for this thing?" However, in this case, Ripley is getting the events of the previous movies wrong. In Alien, "crew expendable" came from Mother, and then both she and Ash were killed. That was the end of it. The marines in Aliens were then sent to the moon by the US government, over 50 years later, for a rescue mission. As Burke noted above, the government was very much against the potential danger posed by the aliens. If the government were complicit in a grander conspiracy, then Burke probably wouldn't have needed to kill people, or smuggle anything. Why would they even need Burke? They can just kill him for seeing an alien; he can't be trusted. Another indication that Alien 3's Ripley is wrong is that Weyland-Yutani sends in the bigshot science guy Human Bishop, flanked by their own private army. If Weyland-Yutani was behind everything from the start, why didn't they send those guys the first time around instead of just sending Burke? Plus, we can note that Human Bishop proceeds to not kill everybody who saw the alien; Morse is taken alive. So Ripley is ranting about "they", and it's an impassioned speech, but she's factually wrong. It's a conspiracy theory. The next-most prominent source of the conspiracy theory is in the ACMTM. As gone over above, this book is written as a sequel to Alien 3 and the author, evidently, decided to take Ripley's conspiracy theory as fact. He set about retconning the previous films to make everything 'fit together'. So, to this end, the author introduces multiple new characters as agents of the conspiracy. Among them, we have the unnamed character "Jim" - introduced as a shadowy agent behind the events of Alien 1, while Burke is joined by the co-conspirator Michael. Who the gently caress is Michael??? Well, Michael is a high-level figure at Weyland-Yutani who acts as a secret middleman between Burke and the colonial marines, after Burke's personal scheme went haywire and killed over a hundred people. Michael was technically the one responsible for secretly undermining the marines, bribing a colonel to send them in deliberately understaffed for no clear reason (because fewer marines would be easier to bribe???). Michael was later retconned, in some other ancillary material, into being literally the same character as Human Bishop. So it's important to be clear on what media you're writing about, and to keep track of the context. Like, in your above post, you've gotten mixed up between my actual views and various jibes I've made mocking the Jimspiracy theories. But you already know that, don't you. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Jan 7, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 05:28
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Reading this thread is fun. I have a feeling that a lot of people here have never worked for a giant evil megacorporation and it shows. I spent the last half decade working for one. I have seen all sorts of stupid dumbfuckery that leads to a technical loss of profits. The thing is, profits for who? Plenty of people can end up making a lot of money personally by doing things that ultimately hurt the company's bottom line. This has been true since the British East India company. People can get away with this for all the usual reasons - cronyism, corruption, incompetence, etc. It happens all the time. I have watched millions of dollars pissed away because someone didn't bother to listen to the expensive consultant that they hired themselves, because they didn't like seeing their pet project get hosed over. The company had to make that money back by laying off a few employees but none of them were people responsible for this loss. I have seen giant events fail due to 'lack of funding' for something important like 'making sure the tech is tested' but they somehow found the money to hire a full orchestra to soundtrack the poo poo show. I have seen giant deposits in event-planning venues pissed away because the person responsible for producing the building-sized banner put the wrong date on it, and it is easier to just book the entire place out for another week then to make the banner-maker look stupid, regardless of how much it costs. This is normal. This happens every day. I can believe that Weyland Yutani is simultaneously huge, powerful, and influential, while also being ponderously incompetent and internally ridden with ruthless dipshits loving each other over for a percentage. This is the most realistic aspect of Weyland Yutani. The idea that a giant megacorporation functions efficiently and unilaterally towards some ultimate goal is what is loving crazy to me. The richest dude in the world is Elon Musk. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Jan 7, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 12:59
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One of the lore consultants for Fox on the Alien franchise years ago suggested that the Company is structured like “silos”, where the left hand doesn’t necessarily know what the right hand is doing. That’s how you can have things like the Nostromo being sent on a potential wild goose chase (and the fallout of which isn’t even a blip on the radar), or Burke acting unilaterally and getting a whole colony killed, or the last chapter of the tech manual where you have people looking at the events of the first 3 movies after the fact and saying “welp those failed, just another Tuesday, but we will obviously succeed” and giving it another whirl. The Company is big enough to absorb the losses and just shitcan other people or projects and just keep on trucking.
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Jan 7, 2024 15:39
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I can believe that Weyland Yutani is simultaneously huge, powerful, and influential, while also being ponderously incompetent and internally ridden with ruthless dipshits loving each other over for a percentage. This is the most realistic aspect of Weyland Yutani. The idea that a giant megacorporation functions efficiently and unilaterally towards some ultimate goal is what is loving crazy to me. That's why Burke makes perfect sense. No one's saying his actions constitute a major plot hole in Aliens or something, just that the idea that there's an actual conspiracy supporting Burke (or that Burke himself is in a Palpatine's-behind-it-all! position of power) such that on top of what we're shown and told onscreen, the Sulaco is deliberately understaffed, records of its mission are hushed up, etc. None of that stuff happened; there was just a greedy idiot loving over his peers for a percentage, just as Ripley laments. It's someone at home base knowing where the derelict is (or even what region of space the derelict's signal is detectable and trackable within) before the Nostromo even leaves port that doesn't make any sense. In that case, even if we ignore the explicit test of the movie that the Nostromo was rerouted by Mother mid-flight and that the special order was written post-rerouting, and even if there is a Burke figure operating in the shadows, and even if everything somehow went according to his plan, he wouldn't have been able to succeed on his own terms; the moment he actually brought his specimen forth and explained how he got it he'd get hosed.
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Jan 7, 2024 20:58
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I can believe that Weyland Yutani is simultaneously huge, powerful, and influential, while also being ponderously incompetent and internally ridden with ruthless dipshits loving each other over for a percentage. This is the most realistic aspect of Weyland Yutani. The idea that a giant megacorporation functions efficiently and unilaterally towards some ultimate goal is what is loving crazy to me. Ok, yes, but that is already the plot of all three movies. Mother, Ash and Burke all ‘go crazy’, make terrible mistakes (from the standpoint of the company) and lose Weyland-Yutani hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Alien 3 is set in the remnants of a failed Weyland-Yutani colony, which cost lord knows how much. And, yet, the company keeps trucking along. Nobody really disputes this. The issue comes from the interpretation of those facts, the ultimate “why” behind the events - not only in the movies but in the reality you describe. Why are there Burkes? It’s not just a matter of understanding the plot correctly, because these movies are, themselves, presenting a narrative about those events. Ideological critique is necessary - even (or especially) if the movie is good and we really like it. So: Burke fucks up because he’s a libertarian. He’s trying to enact the logic of the corporation on an individual level, and he fails because, y’know, he lives in a society. Obviously far from being a Randian ubermensch, Burke is terrified, guilty, desperate. He’s ignored laws and regulations, and he’s killed people. He is hosed specifically because he’s acting alone. There’s no massive team of lawyers to defend him, nor any hope of bailout from the government. He doesn’t even have Musk money, insulating him from consequences. So Burke consequently makes increasingly bad decisions, without consulting anyone. (This kinda works both ways, interestingly. I’ve outlined earlier in the thread how Ripley actually pushes Burke to become more desperate by threatening extreme consequences but still letting him wander freely. “I know you killed 200 people, Burke! Everyone will know, eventually, when I tell them! Anyways, I’m going to go have a nap over there, completely undefended.” It deserves examination.) So you can hopefully see a flaw in the ACMTM, with its “Michaelspiracy”: Burke doesn’t have the support of the marines. The basic idea of the Michaelspiracy is that Michael would use the millions of dollars at his disposal (from the Science Division budget, I guess) to bribe all the marines into silence, right? But he doesn’t. Burke in the movie clearly has real no power at all. Even his attempts at authoritativeness, invoking the name of the company, come across as fake and pathetic. (If Burke and Michael can secretly embezzle millions of dollars from the company, for use as bribes, why even bother with the harebrained alien-collection scheme?) So Ferrinus’ point is that Weyland-Yutani succeeds in spite of people like Burke, because it’s not beholden to his ideology. The company, responsibly, works with the authorities to investigate the situation. They generally don’t just casually murder people; they got big off of taxpayer dollars and the everyday exploitation of workers. And the result is that there’s no real criticism, in the film, of Weyland-Yutani itself - or the broader capitalist system. They are presented as the neutral background of a story where Burke and the aliens simply ‘bug out’ and kill people arbitrarily. Fans, I think, instinctively reject that neutral presentation - but what we end up with is not some clear-eyed acceptance of the truth but these conspiracy theories. Beneath the company’s totally normal facade, it must be absolutely teeming with barely-disguised murderous sadists - right? SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 22:21
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I don't like how Aliens took the focus from the company and placed it on one guy. Like "Yeah the company is great, it's just some bad apples making it bad!" ignores the theme of institutional power in the first film.
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Jan 7, 2024 22:47
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Yeah the read of Aliens is: 1. Burke either believes Ripley's story or is willing to take a punt on it being true when nobody else is. 2. Burke sends secret message to the colonists to check out the coordinates Ripley has given. 3. Colony goes silent. Nobody knows why. 4. Burke panics and from this point he's scrambling. He can't explain why he thinks this needs a military response because that would mean explaining what he's done and probably going to prison. This is why the Sulaco is understaffed - it's not a big conspiracy by W-Y to make sure the rescue mission is vulnerable to failure, it's because the level of response that Burke is able to muster is on the 'ugh, fine send someone to keep the Company happy' level using only his own pull.
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Jan 7, 2024 22:54
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Joe Chill posted:I don't like how Aliens took the focus from the company and placed it on one guy. Like "Yeah the company is great, it's just some bad apples making it bad!" ignores the theme of institutional power in the first film. But the Company isn’t great - some of the very first words out of Burke’s mouth are “I’m an okay guy” because he knows the reputation the Company has. For the purposes of the narrative, Burke *is* the Company, personified. He’s not a lone bad apple, he does what he does because he wants to be the first one to do it, knowing full well that if he doesn’t do it first then someone else will swoop in and do it.
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Jan 8, 2024 00:31
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Yeah, I should have said "the company would be great..." You're right about Burke being the company. But what I mean is that by giving the company a face, the movie gives the unintended meaning of a few bad apples. Contrast with Alien where the company is just everywhere, the ship, Mother, Ash...
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Jan 8, 2024 01:26
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Joe Chill posted:Yeah, I should have said "the company would be great..." I agree that the Company would spin Burke’s actions as “a few bad apples”, but between Burke having to lead with “I’m an okay guy” and then after he gets caught he tries to get Ripley onboard that he did what he did because he wanted exclusive rights, it’s clear that Burke is just an example of a broader corporate culture problem that follows from the first movie. The colonists were doomed from the start - if Burke hadn’t done what he did, someone else would have eventually. Including Burke as the personification of the Company gives the audience someone specific to root against, and catharsis when he dies as “the Company” getting its comeuppance in a tangible way.
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Jan 8, 2024 01:37
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Xenomrph posted:It's called 'Aliens: Bishop'. I haven't gotten much further into it since I started reading 'Heart of Darkness' thanks to this thread. I remember there's a relatively faithful film adaption with Tim Roth and John Malkovich, if that suits you, although it's not as bombastic as Apocalypse Now. If you really like the Marlowe framing narrative then I'd recommend Lord Jim (which has a film adaption with Peter O'Toole but I don't remember it as worth recommending) but I feel like it'd be a stronger book if it wasn't restricted to Marlowe's POV. If you like Conrad but not so much the Marlowe narrative then read The Secret Agent (which is his book that I'd recommend the most). I think the best part of his work is his character insight and detailing their inner life, but Conrad tends to over-rely on his narrative voice so his characterization tends to be more telling tather than showing. Marlowe is little more than a device for the author to speak directly in his own voice. That works in heart of Darkness, because it's loosely based on his personal experiences of visiting the Congo. I think Heart of Darkness benefits greatly from being a shorter book, the Marlowe narrative is restrictive of his ability to develop his characters. Lord Jim is at it's best when Marlowe is telling his first-person experiences with Jim but suffers from recounting events that Marlowe only heard about from others. The fleshed-out side characters are the best part of Conrad and they are better developed in Nostromo and The Secret Agent because the narrative isn't restricted to a singular POV. Nostromo I wouldn't recommend reading until you have read a few of his other works and are already sure you like his style. It's a very, um, dense 'magnus opus' novel that flips between the perspective of many characters. It feels very long, exhausting and meandering to read. Sort of like Moby Dick, worth reading at least once but leave it until you're ready to commit to finishing it. Please post your thoughts after reading! It's been a long time since reading but I have fond memories of the books. EDIT: Spelling. Corsec fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 02:13
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Burkes plan makes no sense anyway. He claims he'll get exclusive rights because noone else is "stepping in" on his I Found It Its Totally Mine!! corporate loophole or whatever but if they had successfully gotten any eggs he's already like 3 people removed from it by that point. Burke phones up some WY construction stooge who then farms it out to some colonist, either of which can just go "what message? Burke who? Yeah I just found this egg on my own neat huh?" Or if he goes with his backup plan of kill everyone in their sleep and walk an egg into Bio_Wep HQ and some R&D tech is gonna go yeah cool egg here's 3 million dollars I guess?
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Jan 8, 2024 02:22
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To me at least Burke works largely alone, but he is representative of the kind of weaselly douchebag that the company promotes. They are an evil company not because of all the Alien stuff, that's just another angle for elements within the company to enrich themselves. They are an evil company because they do standard evil company stuff of creating a culture in which their workers are treated as disposable drones, like most regular real life evil megacorps. If anything I think the characterization of Weyland in Prometheus is kind of boring, because we've seen so many evil companies run by Big Business Dude with a god complex and Ridley Scott pulled it off better in Blade Runner. WY to me is scarier as a faceless company that doesn't even know what sort of heinous poo poo its own executives are getting up to and doesn't care as long as it gets profits. Burke I think is a good character because he represents both the ruthless nature of the company and its weaselly incompetence at the same time without actually being a head decision maker. The company is scary because it is probably full of guys like Burke who will murder you to cover their own rear end.
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Jan 8, 2024 02:29
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banned from Starbucks posted:Burkes plan makes no sense anyway. He claims he'll get exclusive rights because noone else is "stepping in" on his I Found It Its Totally Mine!! corporate loophole or whatever but if they had successfully gotten any eggs he's already like 3 people removed from it by that point. Burke phones up some WY construction stooge who then farms it out to some colonist, either of which can just go "what message? Burke who? Yeah I just found this egg on my own neat huh?" I guess we never see Burke's full plan but that doesn't matter. * Even if his plan is an obvious nonstarter, it just makes him more dangerous because he's out of his depth. Like no one really believed Hitler would win the Battle of the Bulge but his wild plan still got tens of thousands of the Allies killed. Sorry to Godwin *Maybe Burke is the right sort of connected weasel that could screw the blue collar Newts family out of whatever profits they may be entitled to due to his mastery of legal mumbo jumbo corpo culture. He may have even expected some of Ripley's story to be bullshit, but to me at least the derelict ship full of advanced tech is arguably worth more than the egg. The ship may have been his real goal. Maybe the egg is his last best option once he realizes the whole place is gonna explode. * Burke could be incredibly desperate and getting the egg is his only real hope of getting out of trouble as a bargaining chip. He's on record in the colony logs for sending them out there and causing the colony's loss. Maybe he can cut a deal for immunity on the space phone while threatening to launch his egg out of the airlock. Maybe the company fucks him over afterwards anyway, because that's funny and fitting. *Maybe Burke can go rogue and sell it on the black market, or to a different giant evil Megacorp. It is surely worth a lot of money even if it never becomes some bio superweapon. Just being the only company to possess some clearly intelligent extraterrestrial life must be huge. Imagine if ET showed up in Googles cage. Merch alone woild be gigantic. As Xenomrph proved there is obviously a market for Alien stuff! * Maybe the company really doesn't give that much of a gently caress and don't want to discourage people taking the initiative to give them a big discovery so Burke just gets a slap on the wrist or someone else takes the fall for the disaster. Real life company dickheads have gotten away with far more innocent deaths than Hadley's Hope. We have many real life examples such as people in British East India company overstepping their bounds and causing a destructive war but getting away with profit and promotion because ultimately company comes out on top. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 02:38
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Xenomrph posted:I agree that the Company would spin Burke’s actions as “a few bad apples”, but between Burke having to lead with “I’m an okay guy” and then after he gets caught he tries to get Ripley onboard that he did what he did because he wanted exclusive rights, it’s clear that Burke is just an example of a broader corporate culture problem that follows from the first movie. The colonists were doomed from the start - if Burke hadn’t done what he did, someone else would have eventually. That's sortof my the point in bold. The movies shift from the theme of being a cog in the machine for corporate/institutional power to problems of how corporations are run. If the corporate culture/rules changed, there wouldn't be a problem anymore?
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Jan 8, 2024 02:43
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Burke’s plan was to some how use the xenos to help him make sleeveless vest jackets cool again
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Jan 8, 2024 02:52
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FastestGunAlive posted:Burke’s plan was to some how use the xenos to help him make sleeveless vest jackets cool again Plan worked as far as the finance sector is concerned
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Jan 8, 2024 03:00
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I've always wanted a vest like that for a Burke Halloween costume but could never find one.
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Jan 8, 2024 03:06
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banned from Starbucks posted:Burkes plan makes no sense anyway. He claims he'll get exclusive rights because noone else is "stepping in" on his I Found It Its Totally Mine!! corporate loophole or whatever but if they had successfully gotten any eggs he's already like 3 people removed from it by that point. Burke phones up some WY construction stooge who then farms it out to some colonist, either of which can just go "what message? Burke who? Yeah I just found this egg on my own neat huh?" Yeah Burke’s plan is kind of poo poo, he sort of has no leverage even if he pulls it off, and there’s a dozen ways it can go wrong in the interim (as the movie shows us). The USCM checking on the colony largely runs counter to his interests, but he can’t control the fact that there’s a USCM response (although he controls the fact that Gorman is put in charge). In an ideal world he’d likely aim for just a WY response sort of like we see in Alien3, but even then the chances of him being cut out of the loop are high. poo poo, “what if there was a WY response” is largely the corporate subplot of Aliens: Colonial Marines. Spoiler: it doesn’t go great. Speaking of Burke and “what if”, Marvel is literally doing a “What If….?” spin-off series for the Alien franchise and the first story is about Burke. It’s even written by Paul Reiser and his son! Corsec posted:Please post your thoughts after reading! It's been a long time since reading but I have fond memories of the books.  )banned from Starbucks posted:I've always wanted a vest like that for a Burke Halloween costume but could never find one. NECA did a Burke action figure a while back, it’s pretty hilarious . https://youtu.be/rNo74hUrRiU?si=d1vYrE28eKmanAuW Paul Reiser even made a tweet about it when it came out. https://x.com/paulreiser/status/880437760892579844 https://x.com/paulreiser/status/880463762041573376 Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 03:46
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Xenomrph posted:One of the lore consultants for Fox on the Alien franchise years ago suggested that the Company is structured like “silos” on trucking. Silos are a very real problem for real-world megacorps. I run into this every week, one group doesn't care at all about another group's objectives, even if we're going to have a very positive impact on their bonuses if our project succeeds. Mr. Grapes! posted:The ship may have been his real goal. Maybe the egg is his last best option once he realizes the whole place is gonna explode. That's an excellent point. A whole alien starship is an incredibly valuable find and would set Burke up for life. His goals for the year get an entry for "participated in an expedition that secured an intact alien starship for study", and if he can mark it completed his career is made.
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Jan 8, 2024 03:57
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Joe Chill posted:That's sortof my the point in bold. The movies shift from the theme of being a cog in the machine for corporate/institutional power to problems of how corporations are run. If the corporate culture/rules changed, there wouldn't be a problem anymore? Cameron’s fear of being ideologically critical runs both ways. See: Aliens constantly being professed as a “Vietnam allegory” while its military cast of characters seem like they came straight out of weebalos with everyone’s favorite tough big brother Apone replacing the cruelly dehumanizing drill instructors and the little rascals Hudson and Vasquez replacing the hardcore racists and war criminals from other cinematic depictions of Vietnam.
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Jan 8, 2024 03:59
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Corsec posted:I remember there's a relatively faithful film adaption with Tim Roth and John Malkovich, if that suits you, although it's not as bombastic as Apocalypse Now. If you really like the Marlowe framing narrative then I'd recommend Lord Jim (which has a film adaption with Peter O'Toole but I don't remember it as worth recommending) but I feel like it'd be a stronger book if it wasn't restricted to Marlowe's POV. If you like Conrad but not so much the Marlowe narrative then read The Secret Agent (which is his book that I'd recommend the most). Nostromo and Moby-Dick happen to be two of my favorite books, and in both cases it’s primarily because the author does such a fantastic job immersing the reader in the world of the story. Its not just the plot, rather it’s the way the plot, the characters, and the setting fit together to make the story come alive and feel like a real time and place that we get to witness in close-up detail. drat I need to reread Nostromo now. Oh but wrt Burke and the Company: the way I understand his character, he is a) acting alone but also b) absolutely a product of Company culture. Ellis in Die Hard and Morton in RoboCop are on the same wavelength.
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Jan 8, 2024 04:32
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Xenomrph posted:But the Company isn’t great - some of the very first words out of Burke’s mouth are “I’m an okay guy” because he knows the reputation the Company has. In Alien, the Weyland-Yutani corporation is represented in Mother AND Ash AND the laborers AND the Nostromo itself, and then the interaction of those various internal forces produce the ultimate incarnation of the company: the xenomorph itself. A company isn't just management; it also consists of constant capital and labor and so on. The terrible things that happen in Alien are the result of all of these individual components of Weyland-Yutani basically doing their job; Mother following her programmed directives to seek wealth, Ash following mother's directives and overruling labor as necessary, etc. In Aliens, Weyland-Yutani is represented not only by Burke, but by Ripley (a former warrant officer and now a lovely dockworker or something), and Bishop (another Weyland-Yutani android), and the Hadley's Hope installation, and indeed the living creatures still in that installation (Newt and the xenomorphs both). But everything is the fault of Burke, who, within the plot, is breaking the rules and getting himself in trouble. So viewers are led to compartmentalize, to decide as you do that the foibles of middle management are the same thing as the capitalist firm as such. It's Dilbert logic, griping about how stupid and unethical the pointy-haired boss is. If only there were a better corporate culture! Then W-Y would have a better reputation!
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Jan 8, 2024 05:29
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I don't think Aliens is making the point that WY is a good company messed up by bad apples. Burke seems well aware it has a lovely reputation. The workers complain about it. Ripley clearly doesn't like them. The whole 'Building Better Worlds' slogan is definitely meant to humorously contrast with the crappy colony on an inhospitable rock. WY sucks,and sucks extra because it has elements like Burke. Like, in Jurassic Park:. Nedry is a villain, but the lovely cost cutting by the evil Ingen Corp provides even more opportunities for immoral fuckwits to cause chaos.
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Jan 8, 2024 10:05
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Burke wouldn’t be in a position to gently caress others over for a percentage, nor would he have the motive or even the idea to, if it weren’t for the corporate cultural ecosystem in which he exists.
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Jan 8, 2024 15:32
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Like, in Jurassic Park:. Nedry is a villain, but the lovely cost cutting by the evil Ingen Corp provides even more opportunities for immoral fuckwits to cause chaos. As someone who was obsessed with JP as a kid (and is still an unapologetic fanboy as an adult) it took me an alarmingly long time to put that together and recognize that “spared no expense” was a profoundly incorrect catchphrase regarding the original park.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:34
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Ferrinus posted:And it's increasingly obvious that all these theories are in fact the same theory: since every piece of EU material is basically just an Aliens remake that hits the same canned plot beats (someone stupid and greedy tries to exploit the xenomorph but fails, civilians and marines have to deal with the fallout), meta-EU material just does revisionist history to claim that even Alien was an Aliens remake.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:43
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Halloween Jack posted:Come on, you know that's not fair. Dark Horse came up with a somewhat different premise for a comic book miniseries and then reused that premise for like a half-dozen other miniseries. While this is somewhat true, there’s also a lot that are very different. poo poo, WY never even gets mentioned in the Dark Horse comics except for one, maybe two times, and even then it’s just a name-drop. There’s a lot of “mad scientist tries to harness Aliens, it goes poorly” stories, but even those have a good degree of variation among them. I mean, “someone tries to exploit the Alien, it goes poorly” is the overarching plot of the first 4 movies - the one that strays furthest from it is Alien3, where the main action of the plot can’t be traced back to someone trying to exploit the Alien. It becomes a plot point, but much later in the movie and it doesn’t really affect how anything plays out because Ripley pre-empts it. I don’t know what the Marvel comics have been doing, I haven’t read any of those yet.
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Jan 8, 2024 18:05
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Apollodorus posted:Burke wouldn’t be in a position to gently caress others over for a percentage, nor would he have the motive or even the idea to, if it weren’t for the corporate cultural ecosystem in which he exists. The trouble is that he’s not in such a position. One source of the various conspiracy theories is the assumption that Burke must have a singular plan. So, from there, everything that goes wrong in a way that potentially benefits Burke is assumed to be part of the plan. Hence, the conspiracy theory that Burke somehow hand-picked Gorman for his incompetence(???). (That silly claim comes directly from the ACMTM, as it happens.) As usual, none of that stuff is actually in the movie. In actuality, Burke is just constantly doing dumb poo poo with no overall plan. It should first be acknowledged that there are a lot of contrivances that must first exist in the plot as a pretext for Burke’s actions. This includes the warning beacon from the previous film being shut off, but I’m referring specifically to the bizarre “security situation where Administration steps in.” Apparently, if you find something hazardous-but-valuable in space, you have to go through a bunch of red tape in order to maybe maintain partial rights to the find. And that can kinda makes sense; if you find a nuclear bomb, the government’s not just going to let you keep it. (The aliens aren’t actually nuclear-bomb dangerous, of course, but you could make a case for their potential harm to the environment as an invasive species. Also, the chemicals in their blood. In any case, it’s probably good practice to check crashed spaceships for various hazards just in case.) However, inexplicably, the red tape and quarantine procedures magically disappear if the hazardous material is discovered accidentally?????? That only makes sense if Burke was plotting with the colonists to smuggle the stuff out of there illegally - but Burke explicitly did not do that, instead telling the colonists barely anything. And Burke is explicitly concerned with obtaining rights to the find, meaning that he is respecting the rule of law there (unless he’s talking euphemistically). It’s possible that Burke was planning to send the colonists first and then get them onboard to do very illegal activities - but that’s extremely dicey because he has no leverage. Even if all the colonists are onboard (which they might be, since nobody appears to have followed any safety procedures), Burke is only useful to them as a convenient middleman between them and some people who actually have money. There’s nothing stopping the colonists from going to a rival company! And, also, Burke doesn’t appear to have actually gotten anyone with money onboard with his scheme yet (hence the need to invent Michael, I guess). So, in summary, the best possible interpretation of Burke’s initial plan is that he’s just going to improvise a post-hoc criminal conspiracy involving potentially hundreds of people, and hope that they agree to gift him some millions of dollars for being the ‘ideas man’. And then it gets dumber from there, after people start dying.
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Jan 8, 2024 18:25
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