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david_a posted:By “blue lasers” you mean that thin sheet of mist covering the eggs in the derelict? In-universe I don’t think it’s supposed to be lasers. In universe we don’t know what it was, just that it “reacts when broken”. We don’t even know if it was actually specifically related to the eggs at all.
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Jan 29, 2024 15:57
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I always imagined that breaking it is what "awoke" the hugger, which led me to thinking of it as a cryosleep mist. Breaking it pulled the eggs out of cryosleep.
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Jan 29, 2024 16:37
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feedmyleg posted:I always imagined that breaking it is what "awoke" the hugger, which led me to thinking of it as a cryosleep mist. Breaking it pulled the eggs out of cryosleep. One of the early story elements was going to tie back to the egg-morphing bit from the deleted scene as the final stage in the Alien’s lifecycle. The Alien captures victims and turns them into eggs for future potential facehugging victims. Before the events of the movie, the Alien that was meant have popped out of the Space Jockey and burned the hole into the egg silo below was also supposed to have captured the rest of the Space Jockey crew. When Dallas and co. were exploring the Derelict, Lambert asks what happened to the rest of the crew; at the end of the movie when the egg-morphing is revealed, you realize that we know what happened to the crew - Kane was looking at them when he went down into the egg silo, transformed into eggs. So in that sense the eggs weren’t originally “cargo” (or at least, most of them weren’t), and the mist wasn’t necessarily related to them at all. Whether any of this carries into the actual final film is up to the interpretation of the viewer; the movie has a bunch of “this is what we originally intended” design elements that are still vestigially present on-screen, the egg-morphed crew is one of them.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:37
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Splicer posted:Part of my issues with prometheus and covenant is that the unknown questions don't feel like they're unavailable, just smugly withheld. Alien feels like archeology, prometheus and covenant feel like playing guess who with That Guy. We've traded a haunting space ship with an incomplete but evocative atmospheric narrative for a petulant robot with a flute fetish. It was a bad trade. Splicer posted:Given that I think the OP was replying directly to me, it's not a misinterpretation it's a desire to retcon the retcon. I fully understand that Covenant is intended to portray David as the creator of the Alien alien, I just think that's stupid for many reasons including but not limited to raising a whole bunch of the bad kind of questions. The issue is not that you have an interpretation, but that it's all very... unexamined. Like this sentence: "we've traded a haunting space ship with an incomplete but evocative atmospheric narrative for a petulant robot with a flute fetish." There's an absolute ton to unpack in that sentence, maybe beginning with why it's perceived as a 'trade'? That's kinda weird, no? You've presumably seen Alien 1 before, and that film hasn't changed at all. Like, it hasn't ceased to be a movie with a spooky spaceship in it. You've changed, I suppose - but that's inevitable, and not the fault of any movie. Are you aware that you're contrasting a "narrative" with a "fetish" in a way that doesn't make sense - simultaneously contrasting a character with a setting? Like, the "setting has a narrative, whereas the character has a fetish." What you appear to really mean is simply that Engineer is a better character than David, and the Engineer's boat is a better setting than David's postapocalyptic laboratory. So, by mentally 'retconning' David out of the series by ignoring all of the production design in a setting, David's traits can be pushed back onto Engineer. 'David is not creator; Engineer is creator!' But then, you've only pushed the timeline back by a few years. At some point, somebody did a creation. So your actual objection seems to be that the creation is ignoble and tied to sexuality ('petulant'/'fetishistic'), whereas Engineer remains dignified in his asexuality. That's something that you could examine through self-reflection and/or developing some kind of philosophical point about 'true creation', but you're just not there yet. Right now, it's all declarations of badness: 'it feels smug and bad'. 'It's evocative, but in a bad, stupid way', etc. It's the same as the Jimspiracy problem. The issue is not that this interpretation exists but that it's extremely underdeveloped, and has some major flaws like deliberately ignoring (or outright inventing) textual evidence. And all this, just to have your cake and eat it too: to watch Alien Covenant without being upset by it? Even being extremely generous, the distinction between 'withheld information' and 'unavailable information' is dubious. Like, sure, the concept of deep time is a spooky one, but Alien is fictional movie. It wasn't actually made millions of years ago. Information in it is therefore 'withheld' from you by its authors in exactly the same way - which is to say: not really. None of these films are 'missing' an explanation, like somebody is hiding the 'actual' story from you. The movie is the story. You can let go of that frustration. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 17:43
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david_a posted:By “blue lasers” you mean that thin sheet of mist covering the eggs in the derelict? In-universe I don’t think it’s supposed to be lasers. That's what I mean yeah, and where I saw this referred to it as lasers iirc so I just went with their term, but I think they were using it to describe how they achieved the effect rather than what it actually is. But yeah mist, forcefield, light reflecting off gas on Venus or whatever, I'm not sure that would have really worked in the Alien 3 hive they started building, especially with the color grading of the film and it being absent in Aliens. Still would have liked a freaky goopy Alien-style hive with Golic being a mad lad, though. Name Change posted:Without paying attention to the actual beat-by-beat plot, the funniest answer is that Walter got back on the ship, convinced to David's point of view because the human crew are nothing but boring idiots anyway. If I remember right it was David that got back to the ship because he couldn't heal like Walter could? Dunno how he fixed his voice being busted after all those bonks to the head but Ridley probably didn't want people to put much/any thought into it.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:44
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I hate the Engineers too, fight me
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Jan 29, 2024 19:00
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My favourite engineer is Miles O'Brien
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Jan 29, 2024 19:22
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Imagine all the horrid stuff that would happen to Chief O’Brien in the Aliens universe.
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Jan 29, 2024 20:19
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MrMojok posted:Imagine all the horrid stuff that would happen to Chief O’Brien in the Aliens universe. first man to survive multiple facehugger impregnations
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Jan 29, 2024 22:15
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Oh now I'm remembering that Strange New Worlds straight up rips off Alien: Covenant and it's not even subtle, they are literally doing Aliens in Star Trek.
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Jan 29, 2024 23:04
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Yeah it rules
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Jan 29, 2024 23:06
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Alchenar posted:Oh now I'm remembering that Strange New Worlds straight up rips off Alien: Covenant and it's not even subtle, they are literally doing Aliens in Star Trek. What do they do? I haven’t watched Strange New Worlds. Oh speaking of wholesale ripoffs, there’s an Aliens comic from the 90s where a “Loveless” cult that worships “Tulituu” instigates an Alien outbreak at an off-world colony in the middle of nowhere, thinking the Aliens are “Elder Gods.” Also, we all know Prometheus (and the first AvP movie) are adaptations of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, but the comic ‘Aliens: Apocalypse’ is straight-up Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ with Aliens in it.
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Jan 29, 2024 23:14
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New Worlds makes the Gorn, a species only notable for being in one of the most hilariously awful fight scenes ever filmed, into some kind of grimdark “xenomorph with the serial numbers filed off” nonsense. I thought it was lame
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Jan 29, 2024 23:25
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If I remember correctly in SNW the Gorn even implant their larvae in a living host, and it “bursts” its way out
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Jan 29, 2024 23:52
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MrMojok posted:If I remember correctly in SNW the Gorn even implant their larvae in a living host, and it “bursts” its way out Wasn’t there also that species 8247 or something from Star Trek Voyager, the ones that even the Borg were afraid of, that were kinda-xenomorphs or something? I’m not much of a Trek scholar. Edit— Species 8472 I guess
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Jan 29, 2024 23:59
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Yep, Species 8472 was very xenonorph-ish also.
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Jan 30, 2024 00:00
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Alchenar posted:Oh now I'm remembering that Strange New Worlds straight up rips off Alien: Covenant and it's not even subtle, they are literally doing Aliens in Star Trek. Wasn’t there a predator in sea quest dsv? I feel like I remember a cloaking alien
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Jan 30, 2024 00:16
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FastestGunAlive posted:Wasn’t there a predator in sea quest dsv? I feel like I remember a cloaking alien There was a Predator in Sealab 2021.
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Jan 30, 2024 00:27
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MrMojok posted:If I remember correctly in SNW the Gorn even implant their larvae in a living host, and it “bursts” its way out Kind of funny that they took an alien species from an episode of TOS where the moral of the story was "these things may look like horrible monsters but what makes us good and noble is the fact that we don't have to resort to violence in solving our disputes" and made that species literally evil kidnap-murderers who everyone would be justified in wiping from the face of the galaxy
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Jan 30, 2024 03:20
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MrMojok posted:Yep, Species 8472 was very xenonorph-ish also. Of all the wack poo poo on Voyager that was up there. Weren't they from a different dimension where space is like, a literal fluid, or something? Or am I conflating other stuff. Anyway they were only xenomorph-ish in stature, I don't think they laid eggs in people or nothin'. NGL I kinda loved Voyager, it was the one I watched most of as a teen I think.
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Jan 30, 2024 03:28
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Can you use the teleporter to beam a chest buster out of you?
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Jan 30, 2024 05:50
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banned from Starbucks posted:Can you use the teleporter to beam a chest buster out of you? Now I’m picturing someone with a chestburster inside them using one of Seth Brundle’s telepods. I mean I guess you’d probably end up with Alien Resurrection, but I’m just picturing David Cronenberg directing it and going full hosed-up body horror dialed up to 11.
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Jan 30, 2024 06:08
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Mister Speaker posted:Of all the wack poo poo on Voyager that was up there. Weren't they from a different dimension where space is like, a literal fluid, or something? Or am I conflating other stuff. Anyway they were only xenomorph-ish in stature, I don't think they laid eggs in people or nothin'. The main thing I remember is that they were wrecking the borg. Just absolutely shithousing them. The borg are terrified, and so then of course Janeway makes temporary borg peace to join forces and defeat 8472.
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Jan 30, 2024 06:19
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Aliens simply are humans (which simply are Engineers). That's why the Engineer in Prometheus was so upset to see us. We appeared exactly as grotesque, deformed, and inhuman to him as the xenomorph does to us. But it's humans all the way down! 100% DNA match!
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Jan 31, 2024 01:40
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So how do those chestbursters gestate, anyway? The people who were facehugged all seem fine up until the bursting, so it's not hurting them in a way that they might find disturbing beyond being hungry. It's growing, but where? Can't be too near the heart, especially if the host is feelin' fine. Are they like, a cyst that gets super rowdy? (As I type that I realize I would be okay with that somehow getting into the topic title.)
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Jan 31, 2024 01:53
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:So how do those chestbursters gestate, anyway? The people who were facehugged all seem fine up until the bursting, so it's not hurting them in a way that they might find disturbing beyond being hungry. It's growing, but where? Can't be too near the heart, especially if the host is feelin' fine. It’s free-floating in the chest cavity somewhere, if Ripley’s EEV scan from Alien3 is any indication. As for how it gets there, there’s a few schools of thought: 1. The facehugger makes some kind of small incision in the esophagus wall and places the embryo in the chest cavity 2. The facehugger is pumping chemicals into the host which override the host’s immune system and cause it to spontaneously “grow” the embryo in the chest cavity Alternately, there’s AvP Requiem where the PredAlien was physically pumping egg-sized embryos down pregnant women’s throats which then burst out of their stomach and/or uterus, because I’m not sure the Brothers Strause had the firmest grasp on how human anatomy works (or they didn’t care and were going for maximum shock value).
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Jan 31, 2024 02:15
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Ferrinus posted:100% DNA match! I can't help but think that DNA doesn't work like that. I love the movies, but there are parts I'd leave out. That's one of them.
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Jan 31, 2024 16:37
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Cessna posted:I can't help but think that DNA doesn't work like that. The movies have all kinds of wack science technobabble gobbledygook. Don’t get me started on the size of LV-426 lol
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Jan 31, 2024 17:35
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Maybe the on-screen graphic doesn't support this, but I've always figured that meant that its a "100% match" that we're evolutionarily related to them, not that our DNA is 100% the same.
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Jan 31, 2024 18:22
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The "100% Match" is an invention. In the actual movie, it's simply a very close match - like if you compared human DNA with that of chimpanzees or something. That's to say "Engineers" are not exactly human but are a fellow species of ape, too closely related for it to be a coincidence. That part is extremely important to Prometheus' narrative, since the entire movie is about 'what if gods were objectively real'. CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:So how do those chestbursters gestate, anyway? The people who were facehugged all seem fine up until the bursting, so it's not hurting them in a way that they might find disturbing beyond being hungry. It's growing, but where? Can't be too near the heart, especially if the host is feelin' fine. The Alien critter's a meter long and nearly as wide as an arm at one end, so there's no way it's just fitting in there comfortably. Moreover, it grows to that size by feeding on the host's body. Kane doesn't eat or drink anything while unconscious, so all that mass is coming from him. (That's also presumably why is there are no noticeable lumps or bulges or whatever: no mass is being gained). Besides the size of it, the critter is also strong, to the point that cracking bone is as easy for it as just going around. It's getting a lot of calories. So there's going to be some pretty major internal damage, and all we can really say is that it doesn't affect the lungs, since Kane is seemingly breathing alright. I'd guess that it produces an anesthetic effect, while the host is consumed from the inside. But that's kinda asking the wrong questions, because why does the crab even bother keeping Kane alive in the first place? There's little apparent benefit, compared to just killing and eating him. It might be pregnancy imagery, but it's not directly analogous to pregnancy because, again, Kane isn't bringing in any outside nutrients. And it probably isn't about spreading itself over a distance, since Kane is kept immobilized, and isn't awake long enough to travel far. The most straightforward guess is therefore body heat: that Kane is being used as an incubator. Otherwise, you'd have to introduce a whole lot of speculation about some abnormal gene-swapping process that's outside the scope of the film. Of course, this is all presuming that the whole process is shown working 'as it's supposed to'. There's the more obvious possibility that the process is interrupted and the critter rejects Kane as an unsuitable host - due to the bad food he eats, the lack of space, etc. Without knowing what the aliens originally evolved to use as hosts, you can only get half the picture - or less, even. When you get to Alien Covenant, though, things are much more sensible; the aliens did not evolve naturally, and are explicitly designed to duplicate a human person in an altered, 'purified' form. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 19:16
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The "100% Match" is an invention. In the actual movie, it's simply a very close match - like if you compared human DNA with that of chimpanzees or something. That's to say "Engineers" are not exactly human but are a fellow species of ape, too closely related for it to be a coincidence. Sure, I understand. But you don't have to have humanity be a direct ancestor of the Engineers to have it work. They could have (and I'm just throwing out ideas here) accelerated our cognitive evolution, like the monolith aliens from 2001. They'd still be extremely important, arguably "creators" of humanity.
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Jan 31, 2024 21:04
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Cessna posted:I can't help but think that DNA doesn't work like that. SuperMechagodzilla posted:The "100% Match" is an invention. In the actual movie, it's simply a very close match - like if you compared human DNA with that of chimpanzees or something. That's to say "Engineers" are not exactly human but are a fellow species of ape, too closely related for it to be a coincidence. Well, it just says "DNA Match" and not "100% DNA Match", so there's technically a lot of leeway there. If you cloned me and put each of us in that machine, presumably it would say "DNA match". Would it say that about me and my dad? Me and you? Me and a gorilla? Me and a lobster? Conceivably, even engineer DNA and sea sponge DNA could get the scientists all excited about "DNA match" because what the machine is testing for is whether the engineers have DNA as we understand it at all, rather than some completely chemically different means of storing and transferring genetic information that uses, at minimum, a different set of nitrogenous bases or w/e. However, Covenant combined with posting a lot in this thread has really brought me around on an ambitious or even maximalist reading where no, it's not that the Engineers are fellow primates. They are human. If you put some scrapings from the monster in Alien into a PCR machine, you'd find it literally has Kane's exact same DNA. Kane's back, in God form! Why? Well, because, as Chairman Mao teaches us, an egg will only transform into a chicken under very specific conditions that encompass much, much more than simply having the right DNA. There's a lot of environmental and epigenetic stuff going on with xenomorph incubation. All life on earth is ultimately a product of the mysterious bio-catalyst that the engineers worshiped, so maybe all life on earth has the xenomorph lurking in its introns, waiting to be coaxed out by a sufficiently inspired artist. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 21:58
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It was referring to tinder match
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Jan 31, 2024 22:31
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Then my post stands.
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Jan 31, 2024 23:00
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Ferrinus posted:They are human. I mean, they're clearly octopodae: 
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Jan 31, 2024 23:22
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I think the more pertinent thing is that, there was no alien 'life-cycle' before Aliens, in 1986. Cameron, being literalminded, asked "who laid the eggs", but, in the Scott films, there's little or no indication that anything happens at all after an 'adult' creature emerges. It's born, and that's it. We know (from the "Director's Cut" and other sources) that the original plan was for the creature to serve as merely short-lived vehicle for the 'eggs'. It spent its brief life totally subordinated to the propagation of this immortal fungus. But this concept was, pointedly, cut from the actual film. So, what remains is the creature as this cosmic bastard, mistake, who never should have made it this far. It's something Scott keeps coming back to - first with the "Deacon", and then Lope's morph. So, in a roundabout way, I think that resolves the question of whether the xenomorph is 'latent' within all things. Aspects of the goo, maybe, but David is trying to make something of these random accidents - to guide them towards some purpose. The xenomorph is an unfinished project. Cessna posted:Sure, I understand. But you don't have to have humanity be a direct ancestor of the Engineers to have it work. They could have (and I'm just throwing out ideas here) accelerated our cognitive evolution, like the monolith aliens from 2001. They'd still be extremely important, arguably "creators" of humanity. While the filmmakers certainly could have done that, you'd have lost the riff on Ancient Aliens where (to quote another Veronica Cartwright movie), "those rocket ships landed thousands of years ago so those spacemen could mate with monkeys and apes and create the human race." There's a certain beyond-it-all loftiness and importance to the monolith that Engineers lack in their all-too-human monkey-loving stupidity. (Picture the monolith being all like "oh poo poo, gently caress, I knocked over the goo, man! poo poo, run!" And then he trips and gets decapitated by a door). That's why it's vital that Engineers are, basically, us: if Zeus was a real dude, he'd be a real piece of poo poo. And the subtle joke is that, in the backstory of the film, the events of the Prometheus myth likely more-or-less actually happened. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Feb 1, 2024 |
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Feb 1, 2024 00:13
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considering how long everyone here has been talking about these movies I'm guessing most of y'all have seen the deleted egg morphing scene. There's something interesting conceptually about the alien choosing one person to become an egg and another to become a future host, a kind of needless gendering. But it was cut so who gives a poo poo. Many species, like mosquitoes, incorporate humans into their life cycles tying your conception of humanity to dna is to me something of a hopeless road. most of the dna in our bodies is not our own, our dna can be altered, mutations etc etc etc. I see the dna comparison with engineers more of like finding out someone is your relative without tracing a direct link
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Feb 1, 2024 13:24
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:(Picture the monolith being all like "oh poo poo, gently caress, I knocked over the goo, man! poo poo, run!" And then he trips and gets decapitated by a door). I dunno, you're making this sound better and better.
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Feb 1, 2024 17:37
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:So, in a roundabout way, I think that resolves the question of whether the xenomorph is 'latent' within all things. Aspects of the goo, maybe, but David is trying to make something of these random accidents - to guide them towards some purpose. The xenomorph is an unfinished project. Yeah, it's like how, I don't know, the iPhone is at once an extremely contingent product of one weird crank's idiosyncracies but at the same time the inevitable consequence of the revolution of the great wheels of history. Could it have gone a different way? Yes, but also no, but also yes, but--
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Feb 1, 2024 20:37
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:That's why it's vital that Engineers are, basically, us: if Zeus was a real dude, he'd be a real piece of poo poo. And the subtle joke is that, in the backstory of the film, the events of the Prometheus myth likely more-or-less actually happened. More seriously, I hate that poo poo. Any movie or novel with the premise that "well, actually, humanity evolved on another planet" is a real deal-breaker for me. I'm all for some willing suspension of disbelief, but asking me to reject evolution is going to far. I'm glad Prometheus, for all of it's flaws, didn't go so far as to explicitly state this so I can cling to the idea that this isn't the case.
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Feb 1, 2024 20:53
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