Alien (feat. Predator and David): as Chairman Mao teaches us

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Sci-Fi Wi-Fi > Alien (feat. Predator and David): as Chairman Mao teaches us

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Do you like Alien 3 "Assembly Cut"?
	Yes, Alien 3 "Assembly Cut" was tits.
	No, Alien and Aliens are the only valid Alien films.
	Nah gently caress you Alien 3 sucks in all its forms.

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Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Xenomrph posted:

Is this the new Metal Gear Rex?

# ¿ Jun 19, 2022 11:33

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 16:22

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

BiggerBoat posted:

The PS2 The Thing game was loving great except they somehow broke the very central mechanic of how it was supposed to actually work and the main thing that was supposed to be the hook and drive the gameplay.

"Anyone could be a Thing. You can't watch everyone all the time - you'll never know who might turn, or when!"
[NPC who has been in your sightline the entire time and who tested negative for Thinginess just ten seconds prior turns into a Thing the moment you take one step past an invisible line]

# ¿ Jul 15, 2022 23:23

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

sigher posted:

From the Horror Games thread, apparently there's a new Alien/s game rumored to be announced soon, apparently it'll support VR: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23219360/aliens-game-survios-vr-announcement

An "untold Aliens story" about a "battle-hardened veteran who has a vendetta against the Xenomorphs", set... before Aliens? :Brett: riiiiiight.

Still, based on the demos I've seen for Unreal Engine 5, at least it should look amazing.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2022 07:22

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Predator vs the Three Stooges.

Clickclickclickclickclick... "Nyucknyucknyucknyucknyuck."

# ¿ Aug 12, 2022 17:10

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

sigher posted:

lol

Fun fact about Predator, it's vocals in the original film (probably the later films too, but I don't know) are done by voice actor Peter Cullen, best known as the voice of Optimus Prime.

To me, he'll always be KARR from Knight Rider (original and reboot!)

Pretty cool to have played iconic heroes and villains with your voice alone.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2022 23:30

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Wolfsheim posted:

wrong thread! prey was cool though

Shame; thought you were making a comparison about how Community season 1 was like Alien, season 2 Aliens, etc, and Chevy Chase is Mother or something. (I have never seen Community.)

# ¿ Aug 18, 2022 11:59

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

I've never met a single person IRL who likes Alien 3. And I've met a lot of people since that movie came out.

'Like' is probably a term rarely applied to Alien 3. It's a film that some might respect, especially the Assembly Cut, but it's so relentlessly, grindingly unpleasant and nihilistic that there's not a great deal of pleasure to be had from it beyond the interest of it being a great modern director's first movie (on which he had an utterly miserable time).

Obviously in this thread, mind, somebody's bound to chip in saying that it's their top choice for a fun beer 'n' pretzels movie night.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2022 17:02

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

banned from Starbucks posted:

Thats looks really cool except for all the dumb modern tactical poo poo plastered to it.

First things I noticed were the laser and red dot sights that don't belong there.

ChickenHeart posted:

Just got the new Alien RPG module Heart of Darkness. It's really cool and immediately takes its own liberties with the franchise to make a gigeriffic horror story.

Who here likes alien microphages turning space stations into living ships and mutating prisoners into biomechanical superbeings who look like they belong on the cover of Necronomicon?

Somewhere, Eric Red gets a feeling that he's owed royalties but doesn't know why.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2022 23:56

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Timby posted:

Per the chief of FX, yes. On Earth near the end of this century.

Huh, so well before Alien? I'm already less interested, because it likely becomes a prequel that either ends with "and then everyone died so nobody ever learned what happened", or the WY equivalent of the Cigarette Smoking Man has everything sanitised after the inevitable disaster and grumbles "We'll secure one of those pesky xenomorphs for the weapons division next time, I swear!"

# ¿ Jan 30, 2023 00:17

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

It�s my favorite science-fiction show, along with Space: 1999.

Season 1 or season 2? :haw:

(Actually, season 1 of Space: 1999 would fit quite well into the Alien universe in terms of tone. Space is a cold, hostile place, filled with beings and creatures that want to kill you just because, and even in the tiny survival enclave humans have established there's still a good chance that you'll die horribly and pointlessly simply from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. All the while, cosmic forces you have no hope of ever understanding toy with your existence for their own purposes, until suddenly they're done with you and you're abandoned to random fate. Enjoy!)

# ¿ Feb 4, 2023 17:32

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Darko posted:

How does it work? What all has it created? Where does it come from? How do you counter it? Etc.?

Just like Xenos, Engineers were killed by it, too. Any knowledge you have about the goo can be applied moreso to Xenomorphs, with more unknowable things attached to the goo.

To quote Parker, the mysteries of the goo are a big "so what?" It can do whatever the plot requires to act as a catalyst for the next part of the script. Sure, you can argue that it represents eitr, primordial chaos or whatever, but in itself it's nothing but a Macguffin to make things happen. "Someone's been infected by the goo!" "Okay, what crazy mutation is gonna attack us this time?" That's not Alien, that's The Thing.

The goo isn't even the Blob, as someone suggested. It's a spin-the-bottle game with lots of different monsters sitting around it. Maybe this time you'll get lucky and it'll be a Xenomorph, who knows?

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Mar 14, 2023

# ¿ Mar 14, 2023 10:05

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Mr. Grapes! posted:

I guess my problem with the Engineers is that they're basically just dudes with weird gear.

They look pretty much human with some small differences.

When I saw the alien vessel in the first Alien film that corpse in the pilot seat looks hosed up! I guess I like the mystery of it, in that it made space seem more weird and hostile in that there are some crazy looking aliens out there who build horrific looking ships and are presumably transporting these awful loving eggs for some inscrutable reason and they got wiped out.

But no, they're just buff dudes who would not look out of place in Star Trek or Star Wars.

The Space Jockey in Alien: weird as gently caress mummified elephant-looking thing with a head the size of a Spacehopper and an arm longer than a person is tall.

The Engineers in Prometheus: tall guys in hose 'n' bone-themed spacesuits.

Sometimes it's better to leave the answers to your imagination.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 13:33

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

This is just pursuing novelty. I guess that's fine enough, but it means the movies will only work for you once and then it's just wistful nostalgia / online bitching about difference forever. So you spend time in the Alien Megathread reading & writing posts about how you don't want to think about two movies.

Chasing the high results in the paradoxical demand for more canonical Xenomorph^TM content - but also that the familar bugs do things that are entirely shocking and different each time. That gives us dumb superpowers or colour variations, and that kind of nonsense. Whats the story? I dunno, ~~some~~ two garbage ~~comic~~ movies.

I kid. I mean, Prometheus at least looks fantastic.

But it and Covenant are ultimately exactly that kind of nonsense - SHOCKING! and DIFFERENT! variations on the Xenomorph(tm) theme. They would probably have been stronger movies if they had dropped the Alien links entirely and been their own thing, but I doubt Fox would have handed even Scott the money for that. (Cameron, maybe...)

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 17:04

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

No - because, instead of just giving them more special abilities, Alien Covenant presents subtle nuances in the aliens' behavior so that they can be understood as individual characters. One of them imprints on David as its parent, the other doesn't, and that fact is extremely important to the narrative. They're additionally contrasted with the prototypical white-skinned versions, which are more animalistic.

This encourages people to go back to Alien 1 and think about why the alien behaves as its does. It encourages close reading and interpretation.

As you and the other guy say, you'd rather that the movie was remade exactly the same but in a different franchise. Why? The only explanation is that, though you acknowledge that the movie is really good, a new franchise would provide that additional quick hit of novelty and prevent you from thinking too hard about Alien.

Weren't you threadbanned for this kind of passive-aggressive putting words in people's mouths? :haw:

Anyway, nope.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 19:22

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

SUNKOS posted:

Friendly reminder that the Jimspiracy was SMG's strawman concoction and I'm amazed that he is still pushing it. How someone can argue against themselves for so long is bizarre but it's best to tune that word salad out.

Also remember that the alternative to the Jimspiracy is the Dwightspiracy.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2023 15:22

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

I just noticed how perfectly Alien fits the Hollywood three-act template. Omitting the credits, the film is 107 minutes long (in my PAL DVD rip, anyway). Dividing that according to standard screenplay structure, after establishing the characters and setting up the story, Act 1 should end with a turning point at around 27 minutes. Act 2 has another turning point at the halfway mark (53.5 minutes), and transitions to Act 3 at circa 80 minutes with still another turning point, after which everything escalates towards the finale.

27 minutes: after Dallas, Kane and Lambert enter the Derelict, Ripley learns the signal is actually a warning. Uh-oh!
53.5 minutes: Kane has a really bad turn at dinner.
80 minutes: the remaining crew discover Ash is a robot traitor.

The plot points all fall exactly where they should. What's all the more impressive is that the three-act structure wasn't really codified for film, at least in any widespread way, until Syd Field wrote Screenplay in 1979 - which as y'all know is a significant year for this movie.

On a sidenote, I bet if you asked most people when in the film the chestburster sequence takes place, they would place it much earlier than the midpoint.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2023 16:14

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

harry dean stanton owned

Yes, yes he did. There's more than one movie I've watched just because he was in it.

The casting in Alien is so good. There are no "movie stars"; they're all great character actors with years of stage and screen experience, the one exception being Weaver who at that point was a practically unknown up-and-comer. (I didn't know until this week that she was considered for the female lead in The Black Hole, which was made contemporaneously - her career would have turned out very differently if Disney's head of casting hadn't taken a dislike to her first name and rejected her out of hand. There's a parallel universe where Susan Weaver makes extra bucks at sci-fi conventions signing autographs next to the Vincent prop.)

I made an online poll asking people to guess how far into the movie the chestburster scene took place: almost two-thirds thought it was way earlier than the actual halfway mark.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2023 11:54

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Name Change posted:

An ancient civilization expressing itself in three-panel cartoons was definitely the wrong choice here.

Still, better than loss.xno.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2023 01:17

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Alchenar posted:

1) Aliens is the reference point for space travel speeds in this Universe. It take roughly a week to get from Earth to LV-426.

Well, 17 days.

17 days?!?

I always thought of the egg chamber as something underneath the ship itself, partly because the Foster novelisation (which I read long before seeing the film) describes a long descent, and also because Kane calls it a cave. There's also that one matte shot which shows it to be gigantic - the Derelict may be big, but unlike the Nostromo which is a hulking block, its shape doesn't suggest having that kind of interior space. Maybe it's that whole Lovecraftian dimensions thing.

But in hindsight, the shaft that Kane goes down to reach it changes things. It's too small for the Jockey to have used as access, even though it's right next to the chair. So what is it? It's Jockey aesthetics all the way down, so it's clearly integral to the ship. Weirdly-positioned and OSHA-noncompliant ventilation shaft? Drain? (For all we know, the Jockey was on the can and the giant 'cannon' is the phone he/she/it was reading.) It doesn't seem to have any kind of cover or hatch at either end, so it's like express facehugger access to the pilot.

Unless it only became the egg chamber after the Jockey got chestburstered...

# ¿ Mar 26, 2023 11:35

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Alchenar posted:

In the movie the guy referring to the cave as some sort of cave has no idea what he is looking at.

He also calls the things that look like eggs eggs. There's gonna be a contrarian debate on whether they're actually eggs now, based on retcons from a prequel that came out decades later? JFC.

We might as well start asking who the other two Nostromo crew are that we can clearly see on screen walking away from Parker and Brett but who are never named or interact with anyone else aboard.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2023 15:16

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

The best thing about The X Files is that in its universe, everything is true. So you have murderous government conspiracies covering up an impending alien invasion, and you also have genies granting three wishes.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2023 10:00

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

One occasion where an evil android would actually have been in the right.

"Holy poo poo. The preserved head of an intelligent extraterrestrial. Possibly the most remarkable scientific discovery of all time. Now, what should we do with it?"
"It has to go back, all sorts of tests have to be made..."
[Bzzt crackle] "Yo, ah gawt Ol' Sparky all hooked up and ready ter probulate! Hyuk!"

Edit: rewatched the scene, and it's under 30 seconds between removing the helmet and Shaw's "How about we zap its brain to trick it into coming to life?" The doctor should have gone "Yeah okay, Lara Croft, how about you wait over there and dust some clay pots?"

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Apr 5, 2023

# ¿ Apr 5, 2023 08:43

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

If we're making Star Trek comparisons, the Prometheus crew are the Pakleds.

# ¿ Apr 5, 2023 12:20

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Ferrinus posted:

Is Shaw touching/pinching/scraping the flesh? You can't actually know. How close or far her hand appears to the skull is an artifact, among other things, of the lens in use, so there's simply no flawless spatial apprehension you can claim to be using here. You certainly don't have an uninterrupted camera feed of her tweezers (nor of the Scottish scientist's), which means this actually comes down to a matter of inference and judgment. Would scientists who are carefully waving sample-taking implements around an object of interest eventually use those implements to take a sample?

If you watch the video, she's clearly not touching it, just hovering the tweezers above it (as she was in the closeup where you can see them, and a subsequent medium shot where she's holding clean, open tweezers). A film doesn't have to be shown in 3D to provide a sense of where objects are in relation to each other.

Incidentally, the gap between the dialogue of "there's something weird on its skin" and "let's run electricity through the head! :haw:

" is nine seconds. SCIENCE! :science:

# ¿ Apr 6, 2023 12:30

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 16:22

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Ferrinus posted:

No, it's not. Shaw's entire motion keeps part of her hand and the business end of the tweezers behind the head. This means that she is, right there and then, collecting physical samples from the head using her tweezers. That's why she has tweezers and her fellow doctor has a scraper.

I was going to note that you can see her tweezers in another shot like five seconds later and they're open and clean, but drat, son, these walls of angry contrarian text are making you seem like SMG's third clone, and that's not an Alien Resurrection reference. So peace out.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2023 23:38

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Sci-Fi Wi-Fi > Alien (feat. Predator and David): as Chairman Mao teaches us

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