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Baronjutter posted:It's hard to always accurately identify what makes something really good, but it's pretty easy to pick up on what can ruin a movie. For me all a movie needs is a consistent plot and characters that act like humans (if they're human). The plot doesn't need to be groundbreaking, it can be some space truckers finding more than they bargained for investigating a beacon, what ever. As long as everyone acts believably, that the plot moves forward in a way that seems natural, and the writing and plot serve more than to just segue from one special-effects extravaganza set-piece to the next. Characters 'naturally' cause the plot, and plot 'naturally' causes the action and effects scenes. And this list is also a hierarchy: action scenes are at the bottom - plot should serve 'something more.' So everything depends on 'good characters', who are defined as 'natural', 'human', 'believable', 'likeable' and 'interesting'. In theory, you can take a given character and plug them in any movie with any visual style. That's not how movies work. It never has been. Characters are a product of the visuals onscreen. Everything in Alien externalizes the characters' psychologies, since the characters themselves are practically blank slates. The scenes that you dismiss as merely 'cool or gross or scary' are their awe, disgust, and fear. And there are more people involved in a film than the onscreen characters, because the audience has its own perspective. In the first however many minutes of Alien, there are no characters onscreen at all. Whose POV is it, then? There's also your extreme emphasis on what's 'natural'. Humans naturally behave in such and such a way. Events naturally happen in such a way. Define 'natural'.
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Jun 30, 2015 18:03
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Alien is cool because the alien is cool and Ripley has a flamethrower.
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Jun 30, 2015 18:12
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:In the first however many minutes of Alien, there are no characters onscreen at all. Whose POV is it, then? This is always what fascinated me about Alien, and what grabbed me viscerally when I saw it as a kid. Just the computers of the Nostromo clicking to life, reflected in the empty space helmet, creating a conversation between the machine and the machine, which is really just the same information repeated infinitely between them, before watching the crew be 'born' from their cryogenic pods.
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Jun 30, 2015 18:14
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A movie needs all those elements to be good, but if any of those elements are made from stringy or beady poo poo it's going to be a poo poo movie. I'm only talking about what makes a movie bad. A bad plot can make a movie with really cool design or scary monsters lovely. A movie with a perfectly reasonable plot and characters that act in a believable way but garbage design is going to be lovely too. Alien isn't good because it has a good plot or characters, those are simply the minimums needed as a foundation to build a good movie on top of, which Alien does with its absolutely stunning design, with effects that still hold up today, with just the right blend of gore/horror, suspense, and action. But if you don't have that foundation of a serviceable plot or characters, no matter how good your design or effects or cinematography is it's going to be a bad movie for a lot of people. Of course a lot of that is subjective. People don't go into a slasher movie expecting a good plot or believable characters, and a lot of people go into scify just for the design and general concept rather than nit-picking plots or characters and can actually enjoy fun things.
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Jun 30, 2015 18:42
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porfiria posted:Alien is cool because the alien is cool and Ripley has a flamethrower. Also don't forget it has Harry Dean Stanton in it, which is a strong measure of what defines a film as 'good'.
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Jun 30, 2015 18:48
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Baronjutter posted:A movie needs all those elements to be good, but if any of those elements are made from stringy or beady poo poo it's going to be a poo poo movie. I'm only talking about what makes a movie bad. A bad plot can make a movie with really cool design or scary monsters lovely. A movie with a perfectly reasonable plot and characters that act in a believable way but garbage design is going to be lovely too. Alien isn't good because it has a good plot or characters, those are simply the minimums needed as a foundation to build a good movie on top of, which Alien does with its absolutely stunning design, with effects that still hold up today, with just the right blend of gore/horror, suspense, and action. But if you don't have that foundation of a serviceable plot or characters, no matter how good your design or effects or cinematography is it's going to be a bad movie for a lot of people. Of course a lot of that is subjective. People don't go into a slasher movie expecting a good plot or believable characters, and a lot of people go into scify just for the design and general concept rather than nit-picking plots or characters and can actually enjoy fun things. As you said, its subjective and nobody knows what your personal definition of a "serviceable plot" is. Alien doesn't really have all that much of a plot anyway but the point is you speaking in generalities.
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Jun 30, 2015 18:48
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porfiria posted:Alien is cool because the alien is cool and Ripley has a flamethrower. This is like film school 101 people. Alien = fire is effective, Alien is cool = Cool movie Aliens = fire is effective, Alien is cool = Cool movie Alien 3 theatrical = fire is ineffective = Alien is cool = bad movie Alien 3 assemly = fire is effective = Alien is cool = good movie Alien Resurrection = fire is effective = Alien is not cool = bad movie Prometheus = alien zombie map guy gets flame throwered bludgeoned and run over multiple times = 
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Jun 30, 2015 18:58
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InfiniteZero posted:Also don't forget it has Harry Dean Stanton in it, which is a strong measure of what defines a film as 'good'. I still can't believe he had a cameo in The Avengers but didn't reenact the scene where he screams "AVENGE ME!" like ten times in Red Dawn.
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Jun 30, 2015 18:59
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I think it's also worth noting that virtually every Alien sequel has attempted in some way to recreate the opening, that feeling of omnipresent dread and removal from all 'earthly' safety when we're given a God's eye view of space itself, and then this inscrutable machine floating in space, before any actual element of 'humanity' is revealed. In the first film, however, this is conveyed in terms of the empty space helmet 'talking to the computer,' which I believe is actually a detail explicit in even the earliest drafts of O'Bannon's scripts. This itself connotes the idea that human communication, interaction, commands and consents, have become thoroughly mechanical and artificially reflective. The movie opens by challenging our very conception of what humanity is, before giving birth to these sweaty, lanky, pale crew that largely ends up in the situation it's in by accepting bleakly the inscrutable whim of "Mother." Even when we get to the 'cool,' morbid German expressionist's alien planet, we are already inundated with this imagery of the alien-ness in humanity itself, which is conveyed largely through references to mechanism and industry. Even the superficial personalities of the characters kind of become a mute point, rendering the twist that "Ash is a God drat robot" truly surprising. The reason is because though this was a later addition that O'Bannon thought was dumb, it fits perfectly with this theme of humanity 'lost in space,' reduced to the safeguards of vastly more advanced, vastly more valued industry.
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Jun 30, 2015 19:06
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Yeah, the actual alien is almost secondary to why I love the movie so much. Just that opening scene, the ship its self, the setting is amazing. I don't want more of that alien, I want more of that setting and feeling of hopeless mechanized isolation.
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Jun 30, 2015 19:11
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The thing is that Alien 3 actually does a pretty good job of that. Except it's no longer really about the oppressive industry that was already in remission from deregulation and outsourcing by the time the film was made, but about consumerism divorcing people from spirituality. The cult of the prison planet literally have barcodes on the back of their heads. The opening score isn't some abstract dirge a la The Shining just a year later. It's an ode to God for salvation as the floor literally drops out from the final setting of the previous film. I've always found Fincher's variation on the Scott opening equally as compelling as Cameron's own fantastic "Sleeping Beauty in space" motif.
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Jun 30, 2015 19:16
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Also the whole colony was a massive state of the art industrial centre at one point but has become redundant to the needs of space-capital so it is abandoned to a dwindling penal cult. Despite living in an extremely advanced inter-stellar civilization, if you don't have a sufficient economic reason to exist you are abandoned, left to rot. Humans hold no intrinsic value in this future, their only value is in operating and maintaining the technology to create profit for the corporations. They still get supplied but they have to rely on candles for loving illumination, not out of some luddite spiritual purity but because society has deemed them unworthy of even getting replacement bulbs or the most basic parts to keep the power on. In Alien the crew were disposable corporate employees and contractors, the hopelessness came from the fact that the alien was worth far more than the crew. In Aliens the hopelessness came from the Marine's and corporate's arrogance and lack of planning and that Burke needed to keep everything on the down-low so he could personally take all the glory and profit rather than going in later with a larger and better equipped operation. In Alien 3 we've reached new levels of isolation and hopelessness as the planet is an abandoned squat filled with rejects and cast-offs of society. Not only is this a prison-planet, it's an abandoned prison planet. In Alien we see the lot of typical human every-mans, reduced to agentless ants crawling around inside a beeping and booping machine-hive serving the queen: "mother" and how its worker-ants are expendable and worthless. In Aliens we see the soldier-caste at work. So pumped up on military hype and technological invincibility but once again, ultimately expendable. In Alien 3 we see the lowest of the low, people who aren't even part of society anymore. A garbage dump for people and technology, the place expendable or defective people and infrastructure end up. In a way Prometheus tried to give us a look at the desperate ruling caste of this society, which could have been interesting, but pee pee doo doo bad movie. Also alien 3 had some amazing backgrounds. gently caress I love a good matte painting.    
Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 19:41
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I don't know - the whole point of the rotting Space Jockey in the first film is that it's just a reflection of the Nostromo crews own inevitable fate, to be 'reborn' as this 'perfect organism.' Prometheus depicts this perfect organism consuming its creator and, thus, effectively 'joining the side' of its Christian fundamentalist mother. This opens the door for David and Shaw to basically be liberated from the mental slavery of the world and its hegemonic complicity in ecologically devastating capitalism, and to explore the universe, to find more answers to even greater questions about humanity. Say what you will, the ending is fantastic, and carries on the themes of Alien much more effectively then either Aliens or Alien 3. The ending of Prometheus just renders concrete that the xenomorph is just a reflection of ourselves, equally traumatized and abused by its conception, not just an abstract expression of a sadistic, literal hive mind.
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Jun 30, 2015 19:55
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Alien: Isolation captures the feeling of isolation and terror pretty well. I wouldn't suggest playing on anything other than he easiest setting, unless you want the game to last forever because the Alien is constantly mauling you to death because it knows exactly where you are at all times. The experience the game is attempting to convey is solid. CAPT. Rainbowbeard fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 19:59
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That game owns. It's flawed but ambitious, and when it works it's easily the best game based on the franchise that will ever happen. There are some really interesting tricks to how the Alien works in it even if it doesn't always pan out. The best is how it will often "dramatically" kill someone if you lure it to an area with other humans. Like you'll be hiding safely and a mauled body will slam down right in front of you as the Alien walks by. Also I mentioned earlier but they really did do an incredible job at duplicating that notion in Alien of the game's humans being expendable compared to the importance of corporate profits. You get a great look at that not just through the design and bleakness of the game's locations but also in the cold way the game's synthetics behave and in the files you find in these bulky seventies style terminals. They did something really brilliant both in setting and as a game design thing, which is sort of how the entire game was made. Basically the synthetics you encounter are from a different company, and their gimmick is that they don't try to make them physically human so that there's no trust issue. In the game's space station with all the power out though it makes them creepy. They have slightly glowy eyes like in some scenes in Blade Runner, talk in a low static drawl, and are always calm, plus they look like and are made of hardened future plastic or whatever. So like they'll be strangling you but very slowly and calmly talking to you about how you don't have access for the area you're in or whatever. It's a brilliant way to work a what would be generically forced horror tropes into the game in a way that serves both the game and the story at the same time. Also in a nod to the subtle pharaonic imagery Scott uses at points in both Blade Runner and in Alien, the droids are stored in these vertical sarcophagus things for recharging. That said, I found the default difficulty to be fine. It's only super challenging in the medical area where the Alien is straight up after YOU and you haven't found a lot of items/distraction things to play around with yet in the game. Also the Alien finds you more easily when you're crouching/moving slowly. I think they were trying to have it have a sense of "smell" portrayed in game form maybe? The logic for how your movement/noise/light effects stuff in the game in general is really cool. More importantly for Alien fans though there's a DLC where you can be on a 1:1 of the Nostromo and walk all around it trying to flush the Alien out of the airlock. It's structured like the deleted scene in Alien where Parker tries to flush it out first but fails (they only filmed Parker's VO and Ripley/Lambert monitoring though, it's on the special edition DVDs as an extra) before Dallas goes in. So you can play as Ripley, Dallas or Parker and they even got everyone back to do voice over work. And to their credit while the main game has a motion sensor, stun prod, and a flame thrower, they duplicated how those same things look and work in Alien itself instead of recycling those models. 
Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 20:12
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I have to pick that up at some point. I held off because I didn't have a PS4 and it didn't look quite worth it at the full $60 price. Now that I have a PS4 and the game is cheaper I have no excuse.
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Jun 30, 2015 20:20
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I could only play Alien: Isolation by cheating and making myself invisible from the alien. Instakills still killed me though. Alien 3 is remarkable for being a movie because they started filming before even having "a" script even though they had 4 different ones written. Just be happy we didn't get a wooden planet that looked like the deathstar flying through space filled with a bunch of monks that claimed the alien was a dragon. http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Alien_III_(Vincent_Ward) Tenzarin fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 20:29
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Tenzarin posted:I could only play Alien: Isolation by cheating and making myself invisible from the alien. Instakills still killed me though. I was really happy that all of that was coalesced into Dillon and Golic, with Dillon's spirituality and Golic's psychosis and seeing it as a dragon. There's that brief but great shot in the assembly cut of Golic venturing towards the darkness to free the Alien that's real low angle and super bright on just one side like an early baroque painting, I love it. The assembly cut is definitely the best thing that could have possibly been made given the circumstances of the movie's production. It sucks that Fincher wasn't given more control and freedom with it but that he pulled out something so good is great. I know the assembly cut isn't his cut technically (to paraphrase him the only way to really get his cut would be to let him film it again from scratch) but he gave it his approval at least compared to the original. Here's Empire's really thorough tale of the wooden planet version, more importantly a lot of the concept art from the DVD/blu-ray is here too: http://www.empireonline.com/features/alien-3-tale-of-the-wooden-planet/ It's crazy, but still better than the William Gibson script, aliens exploding out of people because it's a virus, Ripley is literally Snow White in a forest planet with horse aliens, etc. versions. It's also interesting since you can see some of the more iconic things in the final movie like the Alien approaching Ripley and then not killing her, were a thing even at this stage of production. It does make me wish Vincent Ward could have directed like a Space Hulk or Warhammer 40K movie or something though. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 20:34
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Basebf555 posted:I have to pick that up at some point. I held off because I didn't have a PS4 and it didn't look quite worth it at the full $60 price. Now that I have a PS4 and the game is cheaper I have no excuse. It's a pretty good game, but after a while, some of its shortcomings become really annoying. Like sometimes the Alien just will not go the gently caress away from an area that you have to be in for a mission objective, and really your only recourse is to wait since all your other alternatives usually result in the Alien coming back in about 30 seconds and much more inquisitive this time. As for the Blomkamp Alien film, it just feels cheap to me. I don't think Ripley and Hicks story is a story that needs to be retread. Especially Hicks, who is a pretty boring character overall. But maybe Blomkamp will just kill them off within the first 30 minutes of the movie.
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Jun 30, 2015 20:52
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blackguy32 posted:As for the Blomkamp Alien film, it just feels cheap to me. I don't think Ripley and Hicks story is a story that needs to be retread. Especially Hicks, who is a pretty boring character overall. But maybe Blomkamp will just kill them off within the first 30 minutes of the movie. If he kills them off like ten minutes in it will be the greatest movie ever made.
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Jun 30, 2015 21:10
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Neo Rasa posted:It's crazy, but still better than the William Gibson script, aliens exploding out of people because it's a virus, I wish I was living in an alternate universe where the William Gibson version was produced instead of Prometheus being made. Either way alien was just reduced to a virus.
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Jun 30, 2015 21:14
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What do we actually know about the new Alien 3 other than it being more "familiar" vs the actual wonderful Alien 3? So far all I've read is Blumpkin assuring everyone it will be a familiar normal rehash of the things the fans like/want and not at all like that terrible weird movie that was Alien 3 that he's excited about erasing.
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Jun 30, 2015 21:16
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Basebf555 posted:I have to pick that up at some point. I held off because I didn't have a PS4 and it didn't look quite worth it at the full $60 price. Now that I have a PS4 and the game is cheaper I have no excuse. It's actually better than most of the sequel films. It's dedication to maintaining the aesthetic and sound design of the first film is impressive.  There's also DLC that lets you play as the crew of the Nostromo proper, but you can't get an option to control Harry Dean Stanton, so I have to continue to wait for Paris, Texas: The Videogame.
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Jun 30, 2015 21:21
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Baronjutter posted:What do we actually know about the new Alien 3 other than it being more "familiar" vs the actual wonderful Alien 3? So far all I've read is Blumpkin assuring everyone it will be a familiar normal rehash of the things the fans like/want and not at all like that terrible weird movie that was Alien 3 that he's excited about erasing. I don't think he's said anything about the plot other than vague stuff about it happening between Aliens and Alien3, somehow without erasing the events of 3 and 4 (???). AFAIK all the plot stuff is mainly assumed based on the concept art that's out there, but who knows if that's even going to be in the film. Is there even a script yet?
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Jun 30, 2015 21:21
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Neo Rasa posted:If he kills them off like ten minutes in it will be the greatest movie ever made. He should unceremoniously kill Ripley off in the first five minutes instead.
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Jun 30, 2015 21:22
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Baronjutter posted:What do we actually know about the new Alien 3 other than it being more "familiar" vs the actual wonderful Alien 3? So far all I've read is Blumpkin assuring everyone it will be a familiar normal rehash of the things the fans like/want and not at all like that terrible weird movie that was Alien 3 that he's excited about erasing. I think it is going to align with Prometheus a little bit and apparently the title is supposed to be pretty bold. But I think that really is all we know. I am just curious as to where they are going to take Ripley and Hicks since I thought the particular plot strand from Aliens was over. Maybe Blomkamp will troll everyone by killing off Ripley and Hicks and have the film star Lance Hendrikson for the rest of the runtime. It will be Lance Hendrikson playing as himself and not Bishop.
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Jun 30, 2015 21:22
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Neo Rasa posted:In the theatrical version it's not confirmed one way or the other, Bishop just says it but no one buys it. In the assembly cut he is definitely human and he has an extra bit where you can see blood and his messed up ear. After holding his head in pain he slams his bloody hand on the fence holding them back and screams "I'M NOT A DROID" In a great mix of both pain, desperation and almost surprise. Lance Henrisken. Theatrical cut didn't have the other parts where he acts like a human either - it made him look like an android that had been lying to justify the choice Ripley makes. I do remember reading the novelization at the time, and in that he was unambiguously human, closer to what the assembly cut did.
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Jun 30, 2015 21:28
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Tenzarin posted:I wish I was living in an alternate universe where the William Gibson version was produced instead of Prometheus being made. Either way alien was just reduced to a virus. Yeah but the mythological and spiritual context in Prometheus made it more than just a virus. The opening scene is the Norse creation myth and Greek mythology simultaneously. Ymir the first frost giant/living thing bleeds ether into a river from which life springs) while also being evocative of a titan (huge ash covered dude) and of Prometheus' guts getting spilled out but that violent process being intertwined with the creation and prosperity of humanity. The script was like an episode of Genocyber. blackguy32 posted:I think it is going to align with Prometheus a little bit and apparently the title is supposed to be pretty bold. But I think that really is all we know. I am just curious as to where they are going to take Ripley and Hicks since I thought the particular plot strand from Aliens was over. The ultimate would be if it's Lance Henriksen AS Bishop and the connection to Prometheus is him and David sharing screen time/information in some way. The ultimate and most meta expression of the series' trademark theme of corporations/capitalism making humans expendable. In this fan wank what if movie Ripley/Hicks are killed off in five minutes and the main characters are two androids. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 21:34
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exquisite tea posted:I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a movie to have at least some kind of logical narrative connection to previous entries in the series, which have up to this point maintained a consistent and connected narrative. A movie that promotes itself partly on the world that has been created for it should at least attempt to dwell within that same world, or else what's the point really? I don't care that much either way because nothing about the new Alien project particularly excites me. I do think you illustrate the inherent problem of when a franchise tortuously returns to the same characters because they've totally run out of ideas. You see the same thing going on with Terminator and, to a certain extent, the new Jurassic Park. If they were writing a sequel where the Alien befriends a little girl and saves the space colony from the evil corporate goons I'd be right there with you, at that point it isn't really an Alien movie and I kinda wonder why you made it one, but dispensing with an event that happened offscreen and had no visible lasting effect on the characters or world in one of the least watched and remembered installments of the story is just completely inoffensive; if Hicks or Newt or Burke being dead gets in the way of writing a good story just fuckin bring em back, nobody was doing anything all that great with their deaths. If you want to rewind and see where things would go if LV420 didn't get blown up, or Ripley never got alien impregnated, and you make it clear that's what you're doing, there's no harm to that so long as the movie makes clear you shouldn't be taking the events of all those other movies as understood. Which, really, a sequel decades after the last one shouldn't rest on the shoulders of prior art too much anyway. Baronjutter posted:It's hard to always accurately identify what makes something really good, but it's pretty easy to pick up on what can ruin a movie. For me all a movie needs is a consistent plot and characters that act like humans (if they're human). The plot doesn't need to be groundbreaking, it can be some space truckers finding more than they bargained for investigating a beacon, what ever. As long as everyone acts believably, that the plot moves forward in a way that seems natural, and the writing and plot serve more than to just segue from one special-effects extravaganza set-piece to the next. You should really read At The Mountains of Madness, first because it's excellent and second because Prometheus is Scott doing to At The Mountains of Madness what Blade Runner was to Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep. It's not random, it's a compressed sketch of the same plot with radically flattened characters (which is really saying something, in a Lovecraft short story) and reading the source material will help you get at least what they're trying to do. Scott's a lot more about the visuals and sound and fury than tightly written character studies, which I don't know is a huge deal in science fiction opera, but I'm not sure what is gained either from replacing a vast and uncaring cosmos that humans are just a random blip in with a crazy-evil anthropocentric universe that actively revolves around the principles of creating and destroying humanity, or a bunch of explorers completely out of their element with the Scooby Doo Crew. I'm fairly positive nobody would talk about his movies if they had the kinds of effects teams that accidentally make the monster glow green though.
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Jun 30, 2015 22:35
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Mountains of Madness is good and the parallels are obvious now that you point them out. Maybe I sperged out too hard and need to give the movie a 2nd try and not compare it to the other 3.
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Jun 30, 2015 23:08
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I also recommend, if you want a super sleezy b-movie version of Alien, to check out Galaxy of Terror by Roger Corman. Prometheus is almost a remake of it. Also notable because James Cameron did a lot of work on the effects, so it stands out for the time. Here's the extremely NSFW trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJO07ylhTu4
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Jun 30, 2015 23:21
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K. Waste posted:This is always what fascinated me about Alien, and what grabbed me viscerally when I saw it as a kid. Just the computers of the Nostromo clicking to life, reflected in the empty space helmet, creating a conversation between the machine and the machine, which is really just the same information repeated infinitely between them, before watching the crew be 'born' from their cryogenic pods. Alien's opening titles are perfectly timed so that the words 'I' and 'ALIEN' appear just as the backlit planet enters and leaves the frame. In the time that the screen is blotted out by this dark shape, the words transition from what look like a set of abstract measurements to a series of illegible glyphs. This shot then fades to a shot of 'The Nostromo' slowly pulling up to the camera with a readout of its technical specifications overlaid. What you soon learn is that the titles were not some abstract sequence, but a representation of what Mother 'saw' that led them off course - a visualization of the radio signal that appears, to Ripley, as a series of ones and zeroes. (Christopher Nolan directly copied this image of a 'black hole' - surrounded by a glowing ring and orbited by three planetoids - for Interstellar). But the point of all this is we're constantly encouraged to adopt this nonhuman perspective. The crew aren't (just) being reborn. They're being summoned to do what Mother cannot do on her own. What makes Alien good is that every little nuance matters. When Ripley escapes in the shuttle, the shuttle is launched backwards - following the same trajectory as John Hurt's corpse. She sends the alien hurtling in the same direction. When she rouses the alien, she's using the same gag with the steam vents as Parker used on her earlier. She's sitting in Dallas' seat, and so-on. Ripley becomes a sort of amalgam of traits from the other characters. In a not-dissimilar way, Parker's and Lambert's deaths are intercut to create an abstract and achronological collage of imagery. When Lambert is killed, it's actually Parker's body that's being impaled, and so-on. There's little 'naturalistic' about this presentation. It has the hosed continuity of a Bay film.
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Jun 30, 2015 23:47
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:If you didn't crack up at MOMMY.DAT I don't know what to say man Like I said, there were some bits that were enjoyable but it was overall a complete waste of a concept. Chappie himself = great. Everything else in that film = whatever.
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Jul 1, 2015 09:42
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88h88 posted:Like I said, there were some bits that were enjoyable but it was overall a complete waste of a concept. Chappie himself = great. Everything else in that film = whatever. Hugh Jackman playing a mil-tech nerd was a highlight
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Jul 1, 2015 09:48
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Snowman_McK posted:Hugh Jackman playing a mil-tech nerd was a highlight His character arc was just odd though. He wanted the Dev dude gone so he took out a military robot and tried to shoot everyone to death? I know it's a film and interesting stuff needed to happen but I was sat there like "tell Sigourney he's stolen poo poo..." There was just a whole load of stuff in that film that made no sense outside of 'because it's a film' which is weird because the main point of the film about AI and sentience was put across somewhat seriously and was interesting. It just seemed like the film couldn't decide what it wanted to be.
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Jul 1, 2015 14:19
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Chappie was "ok", I wish they went with the alternate ending instead. And also they could of had more combat for Chappie and less "We gotta do the HEIST, MAN".
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Jul 1, 2015 16:50
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88h88 posted:His character arc was just odd though. He wanted the Dev dude gone so he took out a military robot and tried to shoot everyone to death? I know it's a film and interesting stuff needed to happen but I was sat there like "tell Sigourney he's stolen poo poo..." The character is a capital-F Fascist whose goal is to end crime by genociding the poor.
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Jul 1, 2015 17:29
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88h88 posted:His character arc was just odd though. He wanted the Dev dude gone so he took out a military robot and tried to shoot everyone to death? I know it's a film and interesting stuff needed to happen but I was sat there like "tell Sigourney he's stolen poo poo..." Agreed, an entitled feeling white dude deciding to do a mass shooting is pretty out there stuff.
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Jul 1, 2015 17:30
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Tenzarin posted:Chappie was "ok", I wish they went with the alternate ending instead. And also they could of had more combat for Chappie and less "We gotta do the HEIST, MAN". What was the alternate ending?
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Jul 1, 2015 17:56
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
I agree with you that the wee nuances are the things which make the 'Alien' films work, but how do you mean they 'go backwards'? Surely, they just... go away from?
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Jul 1, 2015 18:32
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