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CelticPredator posted:I don't think they want Blomkamp's Alien, even though more people would be down for erasing those movies. The average opinion is the first two are classics, the rest are a garbage fire. Alien is not overly smart. It's a pretty standard thriller with not just one, but two legitimately shocking twists (chestburster scene / robot reveal) that would not have worked nearly as well if not for a better-than-avarage cast, an ensemble of talented and fresh artists working on set and creature design and a director with en eye for visuals. You can tell that a lot of the decisions that in hindsight have been considered super smart came about through coincidences and luck. What makes it great is the novelty of the execution. It could have easily been a bad movie if any of the many moving parts had not lined up as it did. The failure of the prequels is not in choosing "heady themes" over the action/adventure stuff of Aliens. They added in plenty of epic action set pieces to Prometheus, Scott just could not pull em off. Covenant tries to do Alien in the third act, but Scott misses the point of his own movie, and rushes it, without the novel twists and tense slow pace of the original. Heady themes are okay, although I think they're totally unnecessary for the franchise. Make the movie engaging enough and critics will fill in the blanks. The prequels just lack execution. Even Scott does not really hold up his end; Prometheus is a slick CGI Mass Effect looking movie identical to Oblivion and a billion other movies in the last 5 years. It's such an "inception noise" looking movie, for lack of a better term, whereas the original movie had really great weird Giger sets that contrasted with the lived-in practical Nostromo sets. Covenant tries to fix it by slapping on a bunch of flickswitches to the cockpit, a "retro" robot and a bunch of other callbacks. They're so lazy that when choosing the lazy option to backpedal and rip off the original they can't be bothered to go all the way. He should just have made a tight, enjoyable movie. That's where his track record is good. Yet he tries to make something that both "outsmarts" the franchise and is more "epic" than Aliens. poo poo did not work, why they thought adding "is more gory than Alien" to that list for Covenant blows my mind. If the studios wanted Aliens they should have gotten Cameron or someone like him. If they wanted Alien they should have gotten Blomkamp or some other young weirdo who's willing to risk doing something novel. Scott just does not seem like the right choice for this kind of project with where he is in his career. thotsky fucked around with this message at 04:57 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 04:48
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RedSpider posted:I find this shameful. It's quite surreal how people just want an exact copy of Aliens with modern special effects; even going so far as retconning Alien 3 and Resurrection. There was something in a red letter media review about about rogue one, about how limiting and small the Star Wars universe is - it has to have storm troopers, swings, yodas, light savers and a skywalker. How they are stuck to telling the same story. Comparatively the Alien universe is microscopic in terms of the scope of stories they can tell. Even Ridley, the master, has to hit the same story beats for each of his sequels - every story is bracketed by a strange message from a planet, waking up from hypersleep, mess hall dinner conversations, android secrets, face hugging, murder, confrontations ending in air locks and a lone female protagonist barely surviving. At least, that's the impression I got from watching the trailer. All I saw was another generic alien movie, and I wasn't particularly fond of Prometheus and the pseudo intellectual ramblings, so I passed. Probably what a lot of other people did.
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May 28, 2017 04:53
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I didn't really care for Prometheus, and I really liked Covenant. Which kind of feels like what he was going for. I do want to watch Prometheus again now, though.
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May 28, 2017 05:06
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RedSpider posted:Oh yes, grandma Ripley and a frail Hicks fighting aliens in a time-traveling storyline is just what this series needs. Look at me guys, I'm a Blomkamp and Terminator Genisys fan. Wrong. What this series needs is for Blomkamp's alien movie to do a cold open with the scene from 3 where Ripley is falling into the furnace and right as she hits the flames she wakes up from hypersleep and follows the sound of running water to find Hicks in the space shower like Bobby Ewing in Dallas.
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May 28, 2017 05:15
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Man, those engineers really liked big stone faces. The Walter/David dynamic was interesting, but I didn't the movie that much. In particular, I disliked the ending. Even when terrible things happen to a lot of characters, it's satisfying when the few remaining characters make it out alright. Even Aliens 1-3 (I saw Resurrection, but don't remember the ending the slightest) had relatively "happy" endings. The characters made a lot of dumb decisions, both in this and in Prometheus. If you go to an alien planet, wear helmets so you don't get immediately infected by strange organisms. If you meet a clearly psychotic android, don't stick your face into a weird alien egg. If you meet a bad android who looks identical to your good android, make sure you know which is which before putting yourself completely at its mercy. I liked the scenes aboard the drop-ship, when the first little alien emerges from the infected guy. That was sufficiently unsettling. A question: at the end, did David know Walter's security codes? Or did the ship accept David's security codes? Isn't the point of security codes that other people shouldn't know them, or did I mishear something in the ending?
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May 28, 2017 05:18
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Goffer posted:There was something in a red letter media review about about rogue one, about how limiting and small the Star Wars universe is - it has to have storm troopers, swings, yodas, light savers and a skywalker. How they are stuck to telling the same story. Comparatively the Alien universe is microscopic in terms of the scope of stories they can tell. Even Ridley, the master, has to hit the same story beats for each of his sequels - every story is bracketed by a strange message from a planet, waking up from hypersleep, mess hall dinner conversations, android secrets, face hugging, murder, confrontations ending in air locks and a lone female protagonist barely surviving. I think they said something very similar about the Alien franchise way back as well. Along the lines that basically it's really weird that there is such a thing as an Alien franchise because the original Alien movie is such a simple and effective story and all the sequels actually seem kinda unnecessary, it just so happens that the first sequel it got was very good and very popular. Up until Prometheus all the Alien movies were basically just doing the same thing again, but by a different director and often with a pretty different tone and execution. In their Alien: Covenant review Mike especially tries to drive home the point that this could have been a very interesting sci-fi movie if it weren't for the fact that it had to be an "Alien movie" as well as a sequel to Prometheus (whose direct connection Alien was much less direct and also would have worked as well, maybe even better, if it didn't try to tie into that series at all).
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May 28, 2017 05:40
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wuffles posted:Wrong. What this series needs is for Blomkamp's alien movie to do a cold open with the scene from 3 where Ripley is falling into the furnace and right as she hits the flames she wakes up from hypersleep and follows the sound of running water to find Hicks in the space shower like Bobby Ewing in Dallas. And then have Hicks head explode, mimicking the death he had in Alien 3. Ripley wakes up next to Call and there is no recon bullshit.
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May 28, 2017 05:41
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I mean poo poo why not have Ripley just wake up on the Nostromo and then at breakfast as they're entering colonial territory tell all of them about this hosed up dream she had about how Kane became pregnant with a horrible rape monster and that Ash was an evil robot. Since she slept for a long time it stands to reason that she'd have a pretty long dream, don't you think? Maybe there was something wrong with the hypersleep drugs or whatever and she got injected with some nightmare juice.
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May 28, 2017 05:46
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I want a dramedy set on Earth where Ripley tries to find herself while dealing with PTSD and her unwanted fame as survivor of the first alien encounter. wuffles posted:Wrong. What this series needs is for Blomkamp's alien movie to do a cold open with the scene from 3 where Ripley is falling into the furnace and right as she hits the flames she wakes up from hypersleep and follows the sound of running water to find Hicks in the space shower like Bobby Ewing in Dallas. haha
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May 28, 2017 05:48
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DorianGravy posted:
The captain being a dipshit was the point
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May 28, 2017 05:48
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Biomute posted:He should just have made a tight, enjoyable movie. That's where his track record is good. Yet he tries to make something that both "outsmarts" the franchise and is more "epic" than Aliens. poo poo did not work, why they thought adding "is more gory than Alien" to that list for Covenant blows my mind. If the studios wanted Aliens they should have gotten Cameron or someone like him. If they wanted Alien they should have gotten Blomkamp or some other young weirdo who's willing to risk doing something novel. Scott just does not seem like the right choice for this kind of project with where he is in his career. I think it's extremely wrongheaded to assume a movie's financial success or failure can be mapped to its quality or indeed anything about the movie itself, and there are some very obvious examples of this in Ridley Scott's filmography
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May 28, 2017 06:09
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DeimosRising posted:I think it's extremely wrongheaded to assume a movie's financial success or failure can be mapped to its quality or indeed anything about the movie itself, and there are some very obvious examples of this in Ridley Scott's filmography Alien: Covenant wasn't that great though. There's interesting premises in it and a core (or traces) of a pretty cool sci-fi movie, it's just that it goes wrong with a bunch of the other stuff which feels really out of place. Also, on a different but unrelated note, the designated main character, Daniels, had almost nothing going on. Why even have her as the main character? Oh, yeah, they gotta have a female action hero shooting guns, closing doors and dealing with aliens, because of Ripley and because this movie wanted to be alot more like Alien and Aliens than Prometheus (also Ripley had alot more going on with her character than just being an action hero in Aliens, and Shaw in Prometheus was a pretty different main character from Ripley in most respects). If she was supposed to be the main character of the movie maybe she should have received a bit more attention and characterization? For much of the movie I kind of forgot about her entirely until the dumb alien on a ship sequence in the end, more attention and characterization was given to David, Walter, the captain (however simplistic that was), Danny McBride and the lady who gets blown up on the dropship. Her place in the movie was just really weird and out of place, just like the last 20-minutes with the alien.
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May 28, 2017 06:23
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Re: David's security codes: They said thay Mother was shut down from damage from entering the atmosphere and would need to be rebooted. I assumed that David somehow just used this opportunity to create a user account for himself with admin privileges.
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May 28, 2017 06:26
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That's a large leap though.
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May 28, 2017 06:28
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I want a dramedy set on Earth where Ripley tries to find herself while dealing with PTSD and her unwanted fame as survivor of the first alien encounter. Rob Zombie's Alien II Unrated Edition
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May 28, 2017 06:32
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I mean, mother being offline is something that we're told that is presented as a vulnerability since, we, the audience know that David and Walter have switched. Physical access to a system is root access, so it would be pretty straightforward for a super intelligent android whose job was to run a ship by himself while humans were in cryosleep, so give himself admin privileges. Like sure, it's a valid argument that the average movie goer might think that, but as a computer person, I wasn't surprised at all when he used his own credentials to access the ship after the ship's AI was rebooted. Because I thought that "mother being offline" was a plot points because it's what allowed David to take over the ship. Like, why else would it be an important thing to mention? Like, yeah, it's so Mother can't tell them where the Alien is, but that's the misdirection reason, since the whole last sequence is basically to try to make us doubt the David/Walter switch. Edit: Like, the whole ending sequence, the xenomorph is the destruction, both for the audience and the characters. David's real plan is to take over the ship. The fact that mother is offline and he takes direct control of systems illustrates his success at that. Snak fucked around with this message at 06:45 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 06:39
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Randarkman posted:Her place in the movie was just really weird and out of place, just like the last 20-minutes with the alien. Was that final sequence added in reshoots or something? You could remove that entire sequence and not change the movie at all. It's a little strange when it feels like a movie's climax is not an important part of the movie. Plus, the cuts at the beginning and end of that sequence (Daniels waking up in bed; Daniels lying down in the cryopod) are pretty abrupt. There didn't seem to be much tension during the climax, either, since they had the alien pretty well contained the entire time. For example, what was preventing them from just leaving the alien trapped in a small room and figuring out what to do with it later? DorianGravy fucked around with this message at 06:49 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 06:45
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double post.
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May 28, 2017 06:49
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I actually was thinking earier that I liked how Daniels and Tennessee survive together rather than there being a 'final girl'. It's been said in this thread that they're basically the same character, but I like the contrast between the end sequence of Alien, where Ripley blows the xenomorph out the airlock, and the end of Covenant where Daniels and Tennessee work together to blow the Alien out the airlock. It's saying something different. The strength of family and cooperation. Of course they thought it was 3v1, when actually it was 2v2 and so they lost. Edit: ^ because the whole 'climax' is a distraction. The actual tension doesn't come from the xenomorph, but from wondering when and how David is going to gently caress them over. Snak fucked around with this message at 06:56 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 06:54
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Snak posted:I actually was thinking earier that I liked how Daniels and Tennessee survive together rather than there being a 'final girl'. It's been said in this thread that they're basically the same character, but I like the contrast between the end sequence of Alien, where Ripley blows the xenomorph out the airlock, and the end of Covenant where Daniels and Tennessee work together to blow the Alien out the airlock. That still doesn't make it good or make it feel less out of place. You could also have all these same themes of family and cooperation or whatever you said you get out of it (I got nothing out of it though) by just having the fight against alien when they're trying to leave the planet, you have David there as well wondering if he's Walter or David. And it lasts something like 5 minutes. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 07:20 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 07:17
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Randarkman posted:Alien: Covenant wasn't that great though. There's interesting premises in it and a core (or traces) of a pretty cool sci-fi movie, it's just that it goes wrong with a bunch of the other stuff which feels really out of place. I dunno I didn't see it yet but whether it is or isn't doesn't have a lot to do with whether people go see it.
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May 28, 2017 07:23
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DeimosRising posted:I dunno I didn't see it yet but whether it is or isn't doesn't have a lot to do with whether people go see it. True enough. Word of mouth when a movie turns out to be good or at least well liked can help a movie though. I would guess this not doing too well is mostly due to alot of people either not really caring for Prometheus, or being very disappointed with it (as alot of people were), and maybe a general lack of interest in another Alien/Prometheus movie. The movie's got problems though. The most obvious ones being how it attempts to tie in with the Alien franchise and how this serves to bring down what at times is a pretty neat and clever sci-fi movie, and it's a drat shame really. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 07:28 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 07:26
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I mean, I guess it didn't bother me at all. One thing that I liked about this movie was that it felt very economical. Nothing was drawn out or belabored. Each sequence just leads straight into the next. There's a disaster -> there's a planet -> people get infectioned -> o gently caress monsters -> there's david -> o gently caress he's bad -> kill him and leave -> monster came with us -> kill it and leave -> whoops still hosed -> credits And every scene looks dope except for some sketchy cgi near the beginning. Fassbender is the best. I hope the next movie finds a way to still be about Michael Fassbender.
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May 28, 2017 07:26
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DorianGravy posted:Was that final sequence added in reshoots or something? You could remove that entire sequence and not change the movie at all. It's a little strange when it feels like a movie's climax is not an important part of the movie. Plus, the cuts at the beginning and end of that sequence (Daniels waking up in bed; Daniels lying down in the cryopod) are pretty abrupt. Not only was it not, there was an additional action scene that was cut. Originally before they reach the cargo platform they filmed Daniels/etc. in a running retreat from the remaining Neomorph, and that's the point where the Xenomorph notices them (from all the racket) and gives chase. While fighting them both Daniels is able to blow away the Neomorph but the other one is too agile and so the crane scene/etc. happens.
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May 28, 2017 07:27
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Every person I know who's seen it, from nerd with Strong Nerd Opinions to people who barely know alien have ranged from "eh... it was pretty bad" to "eh... it was ok". No one had a strong opinion, no one was super angry at it like after Prometheus and no one really liked it. The word on the street is that it's really gross but just not tense or fun or interesting, it's not entertaining, skip it.
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May 28, 2017 07:30
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RedSpider posted:I find this shameful. It's quite surreal how people just want an exact copy of Aliens with modern special effects; even going so far as retconning Alien 3 and Resurrection. How is this, in any way, shameful or surreal? Everyone loves Aliens the most, it was the pinnacle of the franchise, and the potential for seeing it in the modern era of effects is a nice thing to entertain.
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May 28, 2017 07:48
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Update: my husband hated it.
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May 28, 2017 07:48
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MisterBibs posted:How is this, in any way, shameful or surreal? Everyone loves Aliens the most, it was the pinnacle of the franchise, and the potential for seeing it in the modern era of effects is a nice thing to entertain. Because gently caress fans sometimes. However, I'd be down for an original film by Blomkamp, with his own characters and story. I can see the germ of a really neat idea, especially with those concept art pics of the controlled Aliens. But I just don't know if I want to see Old Ripley doing the same old poo poo except not dying and falling in love. I'd like to see one drat Alien movie that doesn't have a single reference to the other films, and is just it's own, awesome thing.
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May 28, 2017 07:52
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Snak posted:Fassbender is the best. I hope the next movie finds a way to still be about Michael Fassbender. Just think of what they could do with David's god-complex on Origae-6 for the next one. He has 2,000 colonists to play with on a creepy planet. MisterBibs posted:How is this, in any way, shameful or surreal? Everyone loves Aliens the most, it was the pinnacle of the franchise, and the potential for seeing it in the modern era of effects is a nice thing to entertain. Each Alien film has gone out of its way to be different than the last one. It is one of the best parts about the franchise. gently caress following the play-it-safe Force Awakens route. I was glad to see Ridley mocking the shoot-em-up action concepts that were proposed on that Empire podcast. Also, this: CelticPredator posted:Because gently caress fans sometimes.
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May 28, 2017 08:09
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If they ever said Daniels' last name (which is Branson) in the movie, I didn't notice, because I was absolutely positive it was going to be a Dark Knight Rises sort of deal at the end where its revealed she's a Ripley. So, here's something I've been thinking about. If we are to assume that the differences in the Xenomorphs between Covenant and Alien are due to David continuing his experiments, why would he ever shift the life cycle from "normal alien but small" to "wiggly chestburster"? That seems like a strange route to go. And doesn't the Xenomorph prototype grow like way faster than the Alien xenomorph? It couldn't have been more than one or two hours from chestburst to full grown adult.
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May 28, 2017 08:11
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Ridley doesn't care about that.
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May 28, 2017 08:12
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He probably just forgot.RedSpider posted:Each Alien film has gone out of its way to be different than the last one. It is one of the best parts about the franchise. gently caress following the play-it-safe Force Awakens route. I was glad to see Ridley mocking the shoot-em-up action concepts that were proposed on that Empire podcast. That essentially describes 1/4 or 1/5 of this movie though. Especially the last 20 minutes, which was just a straight up by-the-numbers Alien remake (but in 20 minutes so it was even more stupid). It's almost as if someone mandated that this movie be more like Alien and less like Prometheus, so they killed off the main character from Prometheus, killed all the engineers, explained straight up what the black goo was and then stuffed the whole classic alien and the rest of its life cycle into the last part of the movie. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 08:18 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 08:14
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I mean, he thinks the aliens in 3 and 4 are all digital. ADI did some solid work in those films.
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May 28, 2017 08:15
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The alien in 3 is a mix of costume and animatronics in close up shots and composited puppet when running around if I remember correctly. Ridley Scott thinks it's CGI?
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May 28, 2017 08:19
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he also lumps it up with the other films as a "shoot 'em up." The Empire interview was interesting but said a few things that made me raise my brow.
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May 28, 2017 08:23
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Everyone mistakes the composited puppet in Alien 3 as terrible CGI. It looked fake as gently caress.
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May 28, 2017 08:28
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Well, I guess that's just most people's first instinct. CGI could look really terrible back then (and still can today), though compositing could be pretty bad as well (one of the few good things about the Star Wars special editions is how they cleaned up the Rancor in Jabba's palace, there was some really bad black matte lines from compositing in that scene in the original). If you want a truly terrible example of how awful early CGI could look I would point you in the direction of the movie the Last Starfighter. The composited puppet in Alien 3 is beautiful compared to that crap.
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May 28, 2017 08:43
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What kind of crack head thinks CGI was that advanced in 1992???Low Desert Punk posted:If they ever said Daniels' last name (which is Branson) in the movie I thought Daniels was her last name?
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May 28, 2017 08:49
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Numberwang posted:I thought Daniels was her last name? She's Matthew McConaughey's other daughter. Numberwang posted:What kind of crack head thinks CGI was that advanced in 1992??? Jurassic Park came out in 1993. MisterBibs posted:I doubt it was mandated; I saw it as more of a dire need to get through the remnants of the Prometheus Stuff as swiftly as possible in order to get to the Alien Stuff. Yeah. Maybe Ridley Scott felt bad about Prometheus maybe. Anyway it's what brings the movie down really. Though I will say I kind of like what they did with Shaw and the engineers being dead (even though it felt like the reason it got written in in the first place was just to tie up loose ends from Prometheus). Randarkman fucked around with this message at 08:56 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 08:52
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Randarkman posted:It's almost as if someone mandated that this movie be more like Alien and less like Prometheus, so they killed off the main character from Prometheus, killed all the engineers, explained straight up what the black goo was and then stuffed the whole classic alien and the rest of its life cycle into the last part of the movie. I doubt it was mandated; I saw it as more of a dire need to get through the remnants of the Prometheus Stuff as swiftly as possible in order to get to the Alien Stuff. RedSpider posted:Each Alien film has gone out of its way to be different than the last one. It is one of the best parts about the franchise. We're talking about a franchise that got it right in the second film, though.
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May 28, 2017 08:53
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