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Lord Krangdar posted:Really? Huh. I had friends who got kittens very young and they basically had to take on the role of the mother. Like the mother takes the cat to where its meant to pee and poop and licks its butt to stimulate the process, so they had to rub the kitten's butt with a wash-cloth to simulate that experience.
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Sep 6, 2021 18:13
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Lord Krangdar posted:Really? Huh. I had friends who got kittens very young and they basically had to take on the role of the mother. Like the mother takes the cat to where its meant to pee and poop and licks its butt to stimulate the process, so they had to rub the kitten's butt with a wash-cloth to simulate that experience. In fairness, the mother may have done this for them outside and the kittens figured out that the litter box was the closest analogue to whatever patch of dirt she took them to, as compared to the linoleum floor of the bathroom they were in. But, cats aside, there's plenty of animals that aren't raised by their parents. Snakes are born knowing how to be snakes. Not that I disagree with the possibility of the overall feral newborn perspective.
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Sep 6, 2021 19:30
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Ferrinus posted:I definitely think we can reconcile the xenomorph across two or four or even six movies if we really want to (though it's also fruitful to examine the movies in isolation), and it doesn't require ascribing luck powers or an internal perpetual motion engine or anything like that. Well yeah; that’s insanely easy. The trouble comes from the fact that characters in different films serve different narrative functions. The character of Ripley in Alien is written very differently from the character of Ellen Ripley in Aliens. Ellen Ripley is forgiving of the company itself, but vehemently anti-government and turbo-racist against aliens and androids. That doesn’t really track with what we saw in the previous film. We can reconcile the two Ripleys and explain the drastic change in behaviour as a product of her despair over losing her daughter, side-effects of the extended hypersleep, or whatever, but the truth is that they’re just different films. Likewise, the reveal in Alien: The Director’s Cut is not that the ‘xenomorph drone’ has an ‘egg-morph’ ability. The reveal in that film is that, all along, the panther-like creature that we thought was the ‘perfect organism’ is actually just one organ of the alien fungus - a disposable servant of the fungus, gathering victims for it. It’s a huge change to the narrative that doesn’t fit with any of the other films - except Alien: Covenant.
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Sep 6, 2021 21:24
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Xenomrph posted:Speaking as someone who made a concerted effort to do this for years on a dedicated Alien forum, down this path lies madness. That's only if you think of the xenomorph lifecycle as a closed loop such that each generation of xenomorphs has to have all the same parameters as the last except for maybe slightly different cranial ridging. If we understand that there's no such thing as a "true" xenomorph because new aliens are always being amalgamated with foreign DNA, raised in different environments, etc, and especially if we take Prometheus and Covenant into account such that we understand that even the specific black-shelled xenomorph itself is basically a historical accident arising from an extremely variable progenerative xeno-essence, it's real easy.
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Sep 6, 2021 22:20
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Everyone always whines about Alien 3 and how it should be re-conned or done over. Where my alien 2 retcon script where Ripley becomes a violent anti-capitalist terrorist??
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Sep 6, 2021 22:44
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Baronjutter posted:Everyone always whines about Alien 3 and how it should be re-conned or done over. Where my alien 2 retcon script where Ripley becomes a violent anti-capitalist terrorist??
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Sep 6, 2021 23:06
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Ferrinus posted:That's only if you think of the xenomorph lifecycle as a closed loop such that each generation of xenomorphs has to have all the same parameters as the last except for maybe slightly different cranial ridging. 
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Sep 6, 2021 23:54
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It had never occurred to me that the Xenomorph might have an S2 engine. If one were to infiltrate the Geofront...
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Sep 7, 2021 03:03
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Baronjutter posted:Everyone always whines about Alien 3 and how it should be re-conned or done over. Where my alien 2 retcon script where Ripley becomes a violent anti-capitalist terrorist?? That is Alien 3. Xenomrph posted:Well I mean yeah, that’s the basic stance I’ve adopted over the years (I fall a bit more on the side of “the Alien does weird poo poo we can’t explain, it is inconsistent by nature”); I thought you were proposing we do it “the hard way”. Your current approach is “the hard way”, as it obviously takes a lot more effort to prevent things from being explained than it does to simply explain them. Just look at how many mutually-contradictory arguments had to be deployed just to counter the fact that animals grow by eating food. Ironically, the problem is not being literal-minded enough. Looking at Aliens in the context of Ridley Scott’s unfinished tetralogy (and treating his prequel films as a response to James Cameron), it’s pretty clear that the ‘alien queen’ is a bizarre abberation. It doesn’t fit into David’s (or anyone’s) plans at all. His goal is to make humanity spiritually perfect, so what use does he have for this inefficient, blobby thing? Where the ‘alien queen’ does fit nicely is in the context of AVP 1, where it’s just a big, stupid bug that some space-morons found and chained up for target practice. And here we can note that AVP 1 ends with a UFO in distress, while Aliens’ theatrical cut never actually shows what the crashed UFO looks like. Aliens is functionally its direct sequel. So the easiest way to reconcile things is to divide the films into two distinct series: the Scott trilogy, and the pairing of AVP 1 & Aliens. Ellen Ripley found a Yautja ship! (AV|P:R, for its part, is more of a Predator sequel.) SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 03:44
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The implication in that bonus short film that accompanied Covenant's home release was that David made the alien queen out of Daniels, so I always assumed that it was the "default" xenomorph as understood by fans - black and bony, hive-building, queen-controlled - that turned out to be a flight of aesthetic fancy on David's part as opposed to the product of eons of evolution.
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Sep 7, 2021 03:54
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The xenomorph is like bitcoin. Ripley’s not afraid that it’ll destroy humanity, she’s afraid it’ll thrive and make capitalism more ruthless. Ripley going shithouse with the flamethrower but it’s on a bitmining setup in a third world country.
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Sep 7, 2021 03:59
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Ferrinus: I’m not sure I understand what you mean, could you elaborate on that?
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Sep 7, 2021 04:00
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Ferrinus posted:The implication in that bonus short film that accompanied Covenant's home release was that David made the alien queen out of Daniels, so I always assumed that it was the "default" xenomorph as understood by fans - black and bony, hive-building, queen-controlled - that turned out to be a flight of aesthetic fancy on David's part as opposed to the product of eons of evolution. I like the aesthetic of that particular short, but the exposition is incredibly awkward and comes across as 20th Century Fox trying to explain Covenant away for people who didn't 'get it'. In other words, NON-CANON. I mean, it's possible that Prometheus 3 will be all about David making an 'alien queen' because "whoa these Aliens are so much better than all that weird stuff I was doing in the Ridley Scott films!" But I doubt it.
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Sep 7, 2021 04:09
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Ferrinus posted:The implication in that bonus short film that accompanied Covenant's home release was that David made the alien queen out of Daniels, so I always assumed that it was the "default" xenomorph as understood by fans - black and bony, hive-building, queen-controlled - that turned out to be a flight of aesthetic fancy on David's part as opposed to the product of eons of evolution. You mean out of Shaw, right?
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Sep 7, 2021 04:26
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Xenomrph posted:Ferrinus: Well, if you just dump the black goo on people randomly you mostly get weird fleshy stuff and vaguely xenomorph-esque mutations. As I pointed out before, the "Deacon" appeared after a multigenerational recombination process that was like Holloway -> Shaw - > Engineer, but even it had kind of smoother, spongier skin than the fully Giger-esque tubes-and-bones-everywhere that we're used to. Covenant's similar - after David just dumped tons of goo on the planet, and the goo eliminated all animal life before settling as a kind of fungus, the combination of that fungus and human explorers produced "neomorphs"—space panthers kind of like we'd expect, but pink and fleshy and also they come out of your back. So where's the xenomorph come from, the space panther that's got a glossy black finish and wears its skeleton on the outside and has a second set of piston jaws and such? Well, to weave in someone else's post... Lord Krangdar posted:You mean out of Shaw, right? David made the xenomorph we know out of Shaw. Or, at least, he made the xenomorph eggs we know out of Shaw, and was then delighted to discover what happened once those eggs got brought into contact with some fresh humans. The eggs are kind of big and bulky and easy to avoid— they're nowhere near as insidious or efficient as some near-invisible fungal spores—but they do seem to give rise to a hardier and more dangerous creature once they manage to implant themselves, and, more importantly, they're David's artistic creation rather than a totally random product of him just upending all his materials over his table. That is to say, the egg-facehugger-chestburster-xenomorph progression we all know and love is David's doing. The reason it seems a backwards and inefficient means of propagating life is that... it is. If you just let black goo-spawn evolve naturally you don't get such a clunky and proscribed step-by-step process, but you also don't get such a cool result. So David's in a pickle. Where's he even going to get more eggs? He seemed able to use Shaw to produce four or five eggs, but is he going to have to repeat that exact same process for every new victim? That'll take him forever! If only there was a way to make something that manufactures eggs... hmmm, Daniels is right there... Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 04:45
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Ferrinus posted:
I quite like this idea
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Sep 7, 2021 04:55
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Ferrinus posted:That is to say, the egg-facehugger-chestburster-xenomorph progression we all know and love is David's doing. The reason it seems a backwards and inefficient means of propagating life is that... it is. If you just let black goo-spawn evolve naturally you don't get such a clunky and proscribed step-by-step process, but you also don't get such a cool result. So David's in a pickle. Where's he even going to get more eggs? He seemed able to use Shaw to produce four or five eggs, but is he going to have to repeat that exact same process for every new victim? That'll take him forever! If only there was a way to make something that manufactures eggs... hmmm, Daniels is right there... Interesting. I can see that being where the aborted third-film would have gone. Ridley Scott definitely embraced the convoluted aspect of the alien's reproduction and origins with Prometheus and Covenant, but I'm not sure if he would ever tie in with the Alien Queen concept since it came from someone else's entry in the franchise.
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Sep 7, 2021 05:36
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Ferrinus posted:So David's in a pickle. Where's he even going to get more eggs? He seemed able to use Shaw to produce four or five eggs, but is he going to have to repeat that exact same process for every new victim? That'll take him forever! If only there was a way to make something that manufactures eggs... hmmm, Daniels is right there... The question of how the eggs are ‘manufactured’ overlooks that they have roots on the bottom. In Covenant, they’re clearly derived from the black fungus. So, if they can be grown and farmed, a ‘queen’ is strictly unnecessary. The Aliens confusion over “what’s laying the eggs?” is more an issue of nomenclature; they’re ovoid, but not actually eggs.
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Sep 7, 2021 05:37
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The question of how the eggs are ‘manufactured’ overlooks that they have roots on the bottom. In Covenant, they’re clearly derived from the black fungus. So, if they can be grown and farmed, a ‘queen’ is strictly unnecessary. Oh yeah, the queen is totally extraneous, since obviously no such creature existed when David made the eggs. He definitely needed Shaw to culture them in the first place, but it's a nod to the "egg morphing" stuff cut out of Alien - if you want a xenomorph, mix A) human flesh with B) the primordial azoth. So, I think the alien "queen" represents David's next artistic flourish. Do you need one? No, but then you don't really need eggs or xenomorphs in the first place. David wants them because they're the pigment of a portrait he's painting of the human race.
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Sep 7, 2021 05:52
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Alien biology has basically been colored in as recursive. If you make an egg, or facehugger, or alien, eventually that will lead to some further horror that can make its own eggs. So all of the eggs being laid in Aliens might just be versions of a thing that was planted in Alien.
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Sep 7, 2021 05:54
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James Cameron’s extremely goofy interpretation of Alien, as implied in his film, is that the hole in the ‘space jockey’ was made by the (first-ever) alien queen. This queen then singlehandedly laid the hundreds of eggs in the ship’s basement - conveniently under some kind of ‘preservation field’ - before mysteriously disappearing. This raises the absolutely wild possibility that the alien queen in Aliens is actually the same creature, having lurked there alone for many, many years. It’s super-dumb, but handily accounts for the queen’s enormous size, natural immobility, and lack of humanoid traits.
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Sep 7, 2021 06:14
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Your current approach is “the hard way”, as it obviously takes a lot more effort to prevent things from being explained than it does to simply explain them. Just look at how many mutually-contradictory arguments had to be deployed just to counter the fact that animals grow by eating food. Terrestrial animals grow by eating food, but that doesn't mean Aliens (a non-terrestrial, bioengineered organism) have to. We see them literally synthesize mass from thin air in Covenant, as do the Deacon and Trilobite in Prometheus. Ferrinus posted:That is to say, the egg-facehugger-chestburster-xenomorph progression we all know and love is David's doing. The reason it seems a backwards and inefficient means of propagating life is that... it is. If you just let black goo-spawn evolve naturally you don't get such a clunky and proscribed step-by-step process, but you also don't get such a cool result. So David's in a pickle. Where's he even going to get more eggs? He seemed able to use Shaw to produce four or five eggs, but is he going to have to repeat that exact same process for every new victim? That'll take him forever! If only there was a way to make something that manufactures eggs... hmmm, Daniels is right there... The Queen concept served a dual purpose for Cameron - it was meant to "explain" where the eggs in the first movie came from, as well as give Ripley a thematic and physical opponent to face off against at the end of the movie. Granted the egg-morphing concept existed for 'Alien', but Cameron's stated justification for not following it was that while it was in the script and novelization, it wasn't in the movie - and the filmed scene ended up not being seen by the public until after 'Aliens' came out, so audiences largely weren't aware of it anyway. I still think egg-morphing is wild, and I liked how it was the implicit answer to Lambert's question earlier in the movie when they're exploring the Derelict ("What happened to the crew?"), but I also think the Queen is  and am extremely okay with it being part of the Alien lifecycle.SuperMechagodzilla posted:James Cameron’s extremely goofy interpretation of Alien, as implied in his film, is that the hole in the ‘space jockey’ was made by the (first-ever) alien queen. To be clear I’m largely ambivalent on the origin of the Derelict’s eggs (I’ve seen it argued either way), but I do think the Queen we see in the movie was born at the colony. Tangential fun fact: either the Derelict is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, or the egg chamber is a separate underground facility that the Derelict is docked with. I'm partial towards the former, I think it plays better into the theme of Lovecraftian "impossible" geometry. I also like the idea that LV-426 is just some rock that the Derelict crashed on, rather than a dedicated Engineer facility or whatever. The latter works a bit better in light of Prometheus, or at least the EU revelation that LV-223 orbits the same planet LV-426 does (which I think is a super-dumb contrivance but whatever). Having two Engineer facilities on two different moons in close proximity to each other isn't outside the realm of possibility. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 06:23
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Ferrinus posted:The implication in that bonus short film that accompanied Covenant's home release was that David made the alien queen out of Daniels, so I always assumed that it was the "default" xenomorph as understood by fans - black and bony, hive-building, queen-controlled - that turned out to be a flight of aesthetic fancy on David's part as opposed to the product of eons of evolution. I never saw this and couldn't quite find it on Youtube. Do you have a link somewhere? David's rants are interesting in that it seems that the spore-based Aliens we see in Covenant are clearly the most dangerous, at least to humans, since they spread so easily and gestate so quickly, and at the risk of Going There, clearly don't need to eat since it grows from the size of a fist to big enough to knock people over within real-time minutes. But then he goes on about the traditional facehugger routine being some perfect evolution, when really those pale ones seemed even more violent and dangerous than the usual suspects. He is such an egomaniac that he would seemingly enjoy the ones he 'created' better than the ones that seemed to just kind of latch onto the trees as a result of his goo-carpet-bombing raid. David also gets things wrong (the Byron reference) which is fun, because even though he clearly does 'invent' an Alien, is he even the first to do so? Even looking at the new Ridley Scott films, we can see seemingly religious imagery of stylized Alien-like creatures on the walls of the base in Covenant. As far as I see it, the Alien is different everytime because that's an inherent part of its existence. Like, it takes aspects of its living host and will usually be teethy and full of acid, but the particular shape, form, and abilities can vary. Whether this is different 'strains' or due to the mutagenic nature of the Black Slime itself that Prometheus goes with isn't really nailed down. The Black Goo does work towards reconciling the different appearances of the Alien throughout the series, and arguably does it in a way that backs up what we see in Alien 1 - that the Space Jockeys have some use for these creatures, even though they are dangerous. Whether it's weapons, pets, religious veneration, who knows, maybe all three. Some of them are extremely vicious from the moment they smash their way out of the host, while others try to hide, while in Covenant it seems to almost be imprinting on David and mimicking his motions. I found that interesting - like normally when an alien pops out of someone, everyone in the room is already screaming, freaking out, running, trying to kill it. Does that behavior drive the beast into a more fight/flight response? In Alien Covenant it seems to be the only instance where one of them pops out with witnesses that react calmly to it. I wish we had more of David trying to interact with the creatures and not just more chasing and biting that we got. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 07:36
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Xenomrph posted:I think that's a very novel theory, the problem is I personally don't think David created the Aliens in the first (and subsequently the second) movie, which means the Queen reproductive cycle exists independent of him. You mean you personally don't like David creating the aliens. That is in fact what happens in Covenant. Obviously the previous movies work with or without this, but if we want to consider Covenant as part of the same story as Alien and Aliens then that is where the evidence leads us. Mr. Grapes! posted:I never saw this and couldn't quite find it on Youtube. Do you have a link somewhere? The overcomplicated black aliens that David personally concocted do seem to be tougher and deadlier than the fleshy ones once they've actually matured, for what it's worth. Like, just shooting the neomorphs with a gun basically works, whereas the xenomorphs in Covenant seem almost bulletproof and/or so agile that no one can get a clean shot even when one's charging you.
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Sep 7, 2021 14:27
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Ferrinus posted:You mean you personally don't like David creating the aliens. That is in fact what happens in Covenant. Obviously the previous movies work with or without this, but if we want to consider Covenant as part of the same story as Alien and Aliens then that is where the evidence leads us. David is not in ‘Alien’; we don’t see him create or place the eggs inside the Derelict. That leaves us with two fan-theories: 1. David is the source of the ones in ‘Alien’; the ship merely looks old, but actually isn’t. 2. The ship in ‘Alien’ actually is very old and predates David; he did create creatures in Covenant, but he did not create the creatures in ‘Alien’ I subscribe to the second one. Side question, do you like the idea that David created the aliens?
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Sep 7, 2021 15:17
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Xenomrph posted:
I'm not Ferrinus, but I hated it to begin with and later came around to thinking it's fine.
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Sep 7, 2021 16:15
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Ferrinus posted:You mean you personally don't like David creating the aliens. That is in fact what happens in Covenant. Obviously the previous movies work with or without this, but if we want to consider Covenant as part of the same story as Alien and Aliens then that is where the evidence leads us. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that all David did was recreate an existing formula, something that is inherent in the black goo itself. So David created a xenomorph, but the question of whether he created the xenomorph eggs from LV-426 is still very unclear. For one, the xenomorph is shown on the mural in Prometheus, and we see in both Prometheus and Covenant that the black goo reacts with other genetic material and then mutates it to create xenomorph-type creatures(in the case of Prometheus it's a facehugger but the point is the same). Secondly, David is explicitly shown to have developed a huge ego, an inflated view of himself and his role as a creator/god. He wants to think that he created a brand new life form, but has he really? Everything we've seen about the black goo suggests it's a reagent and that David has simply followed a recipe that's already present within the goo. Just because he acts like a proud father, like he accomplished some great feat, doesn't make it true. In fact, the movie goes out of it's way to show him making a demonstrably false statement not long before that. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 16:30
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I didn't view the story in Covenant as David creating the first aliens at the time or now as we talk about it. That's a rather outlandish take even within just the Covenant movie and/or Prometheus, as he didn't make the canopic jars full of parasitoid goo, or the (resulting?) spores. David views the aliens as fellow travelers, living beings created and engineered for a purpose that they've outlived, and who don't share the qualities of their creators but are none the less arguably their greatest achievements--the creation of new life. So he is helping them along. He shares the view of Ash that they are essentially perfect, but like Ash he is not a reliable judge of character, so to speak. Just as with David, why the aliens/black goo were created is largely irrelevant--maybe they were intended as a mere bioweapon, maybe as a form of forced evolution, maybe both and more--because they're life and they're doing their own thing.
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Sep 7, 2021 16:35
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Basebf555 posted:There's plenty of evidence to suggest that all David did was recreate an existing formula, something that is inherent in the black goo itself. So David created a xenomorph, but the question of whether he created the xenomorph eggs from LV-426 is still very unclear. 1. Apparently Fox wasn’t thrilled with the notion of David being the source of all Xenomorphs in the galaxy, and almost immediately started walking it back. The novelization of the movie outright says he followed a preexisting template (to be fair the author took the initiative on this and it isn’t described this way in the script, but Fox supported the author’s decision), and Fox instructed other writers to either be very ambiguous on the topic or avoid it entirely, under the hopes that they could convince Ridley to walk it back in a potential future movie. We don’t know how Disney feels about the topic (yet). 2. People shouldn’t conflate David not creating the Aliens with him *lying* about creating the Aliens - he likely very much believes he is the very first one to ever do it, but as you said that doesn’t make it true. The movie alludes to this when he misattributes the author of the Ozymandias poem - he is not lying or being deceitful, he completely believes his answer even though he’s actually wrong. Multiple discovery is very much a thing, and would also play into the gothic mad scientist motif present in Covenant - David thinks he has created something unique, what better way to bring his ego crashing down than for him to learn that he didn’t. I like the theory that the Black Goo is somehow derived from the pre-existing xenomorph, and David essentially created a recursive loop.
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Sep 7, 2021 16:55
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David rides a ship that is much older than David to the planet in Covenant in the first place, and he comes there from a planet that's actually covered with other ships. Engineer ships and architecture in general seem to maintain a warm and clammy internal atmosphere that's perfectly conducive to stuff looking worn, corroded, or overgrown if it's left alone for a few decades, which is about the time lag between the movies. Also, we're consistently shown that things get more xenomorph-y the more they're combined with, specifically, human beings; otherwise you get a variety of thematically-related but aesthetically distinct mutant monsters. This means that if David's ruled out (and he's not; all the timings and his technological access fit neatly), the best explanation for the LV-426 ship taking Covenant into account is that the Space Jockey or someone else onboard was running experiments just like David's on a crop of human test subjects so as to get basically the same results. I actually didn't think this at first; it was definitely true that the xenomorph or something like it was implicit in the black mutagen and the Engineers already knew about it, just as Baseb555 says, so David might have just discovered rather than invented the specific phenotype. But the more I've thought and written about it the more I've realized that what we're shown onscreen actually does fit with what Ridley Scott's said in interviews: that the specific queen->egg->facehugger->drone lifecycle and the creatures it produces are David's invention.
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Sep 7, 2021 16:56
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I still have to disagree, much of that is still based on fan theories and explanations not present in the movies themselves. ‘Alien’ presents an old ship that the audience is meant to understand to be old, which predates David. Therefore he couldn’t have created its contents, so Aliens exist independent of him. The xenomorph phenotype being humanoid because of deliberate human-based engineering is an interesting thematic through line, but the movies don’t really bare it out. The ones in ‘Aliens’ are distinct from the one in ‘Alien’ - the head shape is different (and not just the ridges), the hands and feet are less humanoid, and the forearms have big protrusions. The one in Alien3 is not born from a human at all, but retains the bio-mechanoid stylings. The ones in Alien Resurrection *are* born from humans, but end up looking *less* human, featuring digitigrade legs. A more likely explanation is that the Alien takes traits from the host, and Aliens born from humans share a rough humanoid shape. Both James Cameron and Ridley Scott have said as much in interviews (and both actually used Jones the cat as examples of a host that would produce a different Alien), and Alien3 made it part of the literal text. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 17:01
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The ship being old doesn't actually matter because Prometheus ends, and Covenant begins, with David flying off on and repurposing old Engineer ships. Of course the ship is old - David didn't build the ship. He just cultured the eggs.
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Sep 7, 2021 17:05
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Ferrinus posted:This means that if David's ruled out (and he's not; all the timings and his technological access fit neatly), the best explanation for the LV-426 ship taking Covenant into account is that the Space Jockey or someone else onboard was running experiments just like David's on a crop of human test subjects so as to get basically the same results. I'm not ruling the David scenario out, only saying that the actual evidence presented in the movie leans more towards that other scenario. I mean, it's not exactly a stretch that Engineers would be running human experiments on one of their ships is it? It's like, their whole thing, they gently caress around with genetics for unspecified and mysterious goals, that's what Engineers do. It's a discussion where I really do think death of the author is appropriate because Ridley Scott is notorious for just saying things and you can never quite pin down how seriously he's thought about it or whether or not he's considered how it fits in with what he's actually presented in the films he makes. Like, I'm not sure that he even really remembers Alien all that well compared to fans who have watched it countless times over the years, and who knows how long it's been since he's actually sat down and watched it.
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Sep 7, 2021 17:12
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Ferrinus posted:The ship being old doesn't actually matter because Prometheus ends, and Covenant begins, with David flying off on and repurposing old Engineer ships. Of course the ship is old - David didn't build the ship. He just cultured the eggs. The intended conclusion the audience is meant to draw when watching ‘Alien’ is that the ship and its contents are old. Did David make the eggs in the Derelict? Maybe, but ‘Alien’ provides evidence to the contrary, it’s very much up in the air and open to interpretation. Edit— there is a very well worn adage in the fan community: “Ridley Scott says a lot of things.” Ridley said his sequel to Prometheus was going to feature Shaw and David going on a fantastical adventure to the Engineer homeworld so Shaw could try and get her answers, no Aliens involved whatsoever, and we saw how that played out. The involvement of the Alien in Covenant was a studio mandate, one that Ridley Scott wasn’t thrilled with and famously said, and I quote, “They want Aliens? I’ll give them loving Aliens.” Well, the studio doesn’t like the idea of David inventing all Aliens in the galaxy, so we’ll see if he capitulates to another studio mandate. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 17:13
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Basebf555 posted:I'm not ruling the David scenario out, only saying that the actual evidence presented in the movie leans more towards that other scenario. I mean, it's not exactly a stretch that Engineers would be running human experiments on one of their ships is it? It's like, their whole thing, they gently caress around with genetics for unspecified and mysterious goals, that's what Engineers do. Yeah but loving around with us, specifically, seems to be something they're extremely not willing to do, probably because they're afraid of the xenomorphs resulting. Conceivably the dude on LV-426 was some kind of heretic, but there's an easier explanation, which is that the ancient chaos mutagen did not somehow produce two identical results thousands of years apart. Xenomrph posted:The thing is we don’t see him on an engineer ship at the end of Covenant, or heading to LV426. No, but we do David him smuggling his existing mutagen-work onto a ship that's also stocked with countless human test subjects who are going to be at his mercy, talking about turning someone into his "queen", etc. Someone watching Alien alone might assume the eggs are as old as the the ship they're on, but someone watching Alien in the context of Covenant knows that doesn't have to be, and indeed isn't, the case. This "intended conclusion" stuff is meaningless; something's either in the films or it isn't.
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Sep 7, 2021 17:18
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Ferrinus posted:No, but we do David him smuggling his existing mutagen-work onto a ship that's also stocked with countless human test subjects who are going to be at his mercy, talking about turning someone into his "queen", etc. Someone watching Alien alone might assume the eggs are as old as the the ship they're on, but someone watching Alien in the context of Covenant knows that doesn't have to be, and indeed isn't, the case. This "intended conclusion" stuff is meaningless; something's either in the films or it isn't. The intended conclusion for ‘Alien’ is in the film - Dallas says the ship is old, that’s storytelling shorthand telling the audience the conclusion they’re meant to draw in case they’re slow on the uptake. If we’re talking about things that are in the films, why are we talking about David making the eggs in ‘Alien’, something we don’t see in the films? I’m not saying your interpretation is wrong, merely that it isn’t the only valid one out there. Also you didn’t answer my question, do you like the idea that David created the Alien?
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Sep 7, 2021 17:23
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah but loving around with us, specifically, seems to be something they're extremely not willing to do, probably because they're afraid of the xenomorphs resulting. Conceivably the dude on LV-426 was some kind of heretic, but there's an easier explanation, which is that the ancient chaos mutagen did not somehow produce two identical results thousands of years apart. Not sure where you get that from, what indicates that the Engineers fear experimenting with humans or fear the xenomorph? If anything, they seem to revere the xenomorph or maybe even worship it. The black goo isn't a random chaos mutagen, it's clearly shown to be designed to take whatever genetic material it comes into contact with and change it into something to produce a xeno-esque outcome.
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Sep 7, 2021 17:24
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Xenomrph posted:The bolded part is a supposition. If one concludes the eggs are old because the ship is old, then David couldn’t have created them. One can draw that conclusion based on ‘Alien’, and it is perfectly valid. Okay but... "the eggs are old because the ship is old" is not actually a sound conclusion. At a point in Alien, Kane is also on the ship. Is Kane old because the ship is old? Is the Nostromo old because space is old? These things are intuitive but not true because we have countervailing information elsewhere. We actually do learn that David concocted eggs and facehuggers out of, like, mutagen and fungus and human biomatter, before the events of the mainline Alien films. The alternative - that things exist in these exact same forms but for almost totally unrelated reasons - is more poorly supported and less convincing than the default explanation. Basebf555 posted:Not sure where you get that from, what indicates that the Engineers fear experimenting with humans or fear the xenomorph? If anything, they seem to revere the xenomorph or maybe even worship it. The first part's supposition on the basis that the facility in Prometheus was clearly destroyed by some disaster years ago and the one remaining Engineer reacted with disgust or fury or something upon actually meeting humans. I could well believe the Engineers held the monster implict in the goo in some kind of religious regard, but I don't think they wanted one. It's not random, but a propensity to turn things into eyeless monsters isn't the same thing as a propensity to produce a particular and really abstruse lifecycle. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 17:33
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Xenomrph posted:My approach is essentially the one Ferrinus stated, with a twist - the Alien is a continuous organism, with things that can't be explained by contemporary human understandings of science. This is where you again run into the problem of art. What Ferrinus and I are talking about is curation: we can and do choose to create a series (of films) by placing Aliens after Alien. But we can just as arbitrarily place Aliens after AVP, Alien after Outland, etc. And the act of excluding films from the curation is just as important as the inclusion. My proposed double-feature of AVP & Aliens consciously excludes Alien. Everyone does this all of the time, without even thinking about it. We all group artworks into 'genres' or 'movements' or whatever, making and tracing associations. Ferrinus and I are simply being conscious of this. The issue for you is that each curated series created in this manner has a different narrative. For example: Outland, when paired with Alien, says that the creature is 'purely' a hallucination, the side-effect of a futuristic amphetamine: "Oh, God! I hate spiders! Kill it! Get it off! Get it off my leg! Somebody please help me! Spider! Please help me! Get it off! Oh, get it off! Oh, God, it's getting inside! Get it out! Somebody please help me! Somebody help me get it out of my suit!" -Tarlow, a drugged-up astronaut from the beginning of Outland, hallucinates an alien spider before breaching his own suit and killing himself. This is pretty clearly Peter Hyams' interpretation of Alien. He wanted to highlight the surreal, hallucinatory aspects of the Alien story while placing greater emphasis on the anticapitalism. The 'alien' is just a symptom of the rampant drug use, which is the symptom of greater things. David Fincher provides a similar interpretation of Alien in his film, when the creature is presented as a diegetic metaphor/vision/hallucination. So, what Cameron was doing - albeit with a very large budget - was presenting his own interpretation of the movie Alien. As with the characters in the movie Prometheus, Cameron was presented with a 'crime scene' and tasked with making sense of the evidence. And, seeing the hundreds of ovoid objects, he concluded that they must be eggs, and that they must have been laid by a gigantic offscreen chicken. Ripley: Kane, who went into that ship, said he saw thousands of eggs there.[...] Ripley: So who's laying these eggs? Bishop: I'm not sure. It must be something we haven't seen yet. Now the issue is that this is a very weak interpretation. The objects in Alien are very clearly stored beneath some kind of a force-field or whatever, and Cameron's interpretation depends on us forgetting or ignoring that.* "The pit is completely enclosed. ... There's a layer of mist that reacts when broken." The reaction Kane hears is specifically a high-pitch electronic whine that increases in intensity as he steps into it. This whine is followed by a bunch of radio interference when Kane fully enters the pit. The static then, crucially, fades away despite Kane no longer doing anything. What the sound design is telling us is that something invisible inside the pit was released when Kane broke the seal. The radio interference codes it as some kind of radiation, but whatever. So the 'eggs' were deliberately stored. But, as we've also gone over earlier, the 'bioweapon' explanation for why they're stored makes very little sense at all. The objects are fairly useless for the purpose of killing lots of people, but clearly very useful as a means of turning people into powerful demonic cyborg things. In Outland, the drug use is encouraged by management to increase workplace productivity. It also fits nicely with the hallucinatory themes of Alien: Covenant. To be clear, this agreement is not a result of any 'canon' or whatever, but simply a result of multiple artists independently reading Alien and concluding that a 'space-drug' interpretation of Alien is the strongest interpretation. And this is ultimately why your "David didn't create the alien" is a weak interpretation of both Alien: Covenant and the series of films you've grouped together with it. The film shows David very clearly engineering this thing from a space-fungus. There's no evidence of pre-existing designs for him to duplicate, there's no indication of how he could duplicate those designs, it's not in his character to just rip off another design, and the claim that he came up with an identical design on his own through a sort of 'convergent evolution' is pretty ludicrous. *It also depends on us not remembering that the queen is totally bloated and immobile, with no way of arranging the eggs in the fairly regular patterns as they appear in Alien. Also, there is obviously no indication in Alien of any of the 'hive' stuff: resin, etc. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 18:30
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Ferrinus posted:Okay but... "the eggs are old because the ship is old" is not actually a sound conclusion. At a point in Alien, Kane is also on the ship. Is Kane old because the ship is old? Is the Nostromo old because space is old? These things are intuitive but not true because we have countervailing information elsewhere. The eggs, the presumed cargo/egg morphed crew/byproduct of an Alien queen that popped out of the pilot, of a ship with a “fossilized” pilot who made a distress beacon before he died and was “fossilized”, being as old as the pilot and ship is a very sound conclusion to draw - and is the conclusion audiences drew for decades until Covenant came out. Is it true, in light of Covenant? We don’t know. Is it a valid conclusion to draw? Absolutely. Ferrinus posted:We actually do learn that David concocted eggs and facehuggers out of, like, mutagen and fungus and human biomatter, before the events of the mainline Alien films. The alternative - that things exist in these exact same forms but for almost totally unrelated reasons - is more poorly supported and less convincing than the default explanation. I guess we’ll see what a future movie does with the topic. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 18:44
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