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Immortan posted:Also, there are overtly modern political & social themes throughout each of Blomkamp's movies that I hope he doesn't bring to the Alien series. Dogg have you even heard of the Alien movies.
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Jun 29, 2015 18:14
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centaurtainment posted:I'm predicting 35% fan service winks to the camera/references to the first two movies, 45% thinly veiled social commentary about governments weaponizing xenomorphs as a metaphor for drone programs or some poo poo, and 20% Sharlto Copley spouting incomprehensible dialogue while walking around in a mech suit like the one from the end of Aliens except it will have guns on it. What you're describing is just Aliens with a different actor.
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Jun 29, 2015 19:05
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Krampus Grewcock posted:I was okay with just about every aspect of the movie, except for the Erich von Däniken inspired parts. Von Daniken took his ideas from HP Lovecraft. They're Lovecraft references.
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Jun 29, 2015 22:43
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The basic problem of a such a thread is that no-one has a concept of what made Alien or Aliens 'good'. So, we get a series of non-coherent two minute hates directed at such varied topics as the plot, the plot, the plot, and the shape of the computer screens. Because when people praise Alien, they're talking about its amazing plot - right?
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Jun 30, 2015 04:48
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Marketing New Brain posted:There's very little debate about what makes Alien good, it is probably the best executed slow burn horror/thriller film in history. Halloween in Space. Right, so Alien 'has atmosphere and tension', while Aliens 'is an exciting action movie'. This is what I'm talking about.
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Jun 30, 2015 08:15
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:SMG if you want to copypaste a whole bunch of Zizek talking about capitalist penis envy or whatever just go ahead and do it, but understand that this is not in the slightest more intelligent, interesting, or coherent a commentary on the movies than the guy who's mad that Prometheus looks like it was shot in 2012 even though it's canonically a prequel to a movie shot in the late 70s. Do you see me writing about 'intelligence'? The issue is way more basic. People cannot articulate what makes Alien 'good'. It's treated as self-evident: "it's so obvious I don't even need to explain it." But if/when an explanation is provided, it doesn't make any sense. It happens in nearly every thread about a popular franchise: "Empire Strikes Back is the best movie ever made." Why? There's never an answer.
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Jun 30, 2015 16:49
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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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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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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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Samovar 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? In Ripley's case, she detaches the shuttle and hits reverse, allowing The Nostromo to fly off without her. The imagery is of her falling, dropping back towards the ringed planet (another aspect of the film that was that was borrowed in Interstellar). Kane's body was launched in the same direction: out the rear airlock, towards the void. It's a small but crucial difference: Ripley doesn't move forward until the alien is killed. But the point of all this is in how the film associates Ripley with Kane - and this is not at all different from how Prometheus links various characters. We're told that Shaw's dad died of Ebola, then shown her boyfriend suffering of a terrible disease, and then there's a 'random' scene of the geologist mutating into a bizarre zomboid. These three characters are facets of one person. The same thing happens in Alien: all the human characters begin as 'part of mother' until they're woken and given a measure of autonomy. It's Ash who maintians the closest connection, and he comes across as an incestuous little weirdo.
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Jul 1, 2015 20:17
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Samovar posted:But surely if that were the case, wouldn't the camera movement be the same with both Ripley and Kane? As it so happens, the the motions is in three different ways (if memory serves) They don't show the planet onscreen, but it's obviously what The Nostromo was traveling away from. So, therefore, that's where Ripley is going before she punches the main engines. (On the other hand, while Interstellar actually shows the shuttle falling into the black hole, you're never shown all three planets in the same shot). You're right that Scott uses a variety of angles, but the action basically takes place along a straight line.
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Jul 2, 2015 00:46
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Snowman_McK posted:I vaguely remember that. Doesn't another kid accidentally kill themselves with a gun? Or am I getting my movies mixed up? It almost feels like a troll job. "You want an all out war between aliens and predators? Here you go. Horrifying, isn't it?" You're thinking of Planet Terror. AV|P:R is in the same genre as The Blob remake and (to a lesser extent) Planet Terror, but it's much closer to The Mist. It's a 1950s alien invasion homage, complete with the dude poking a meteor with a stick. The kid's death in AV|P:R is not a 'meta' joke about how the kid never dies in these movies. It's actually an essential bit of characterization: The town sheriff - who knows full well that the kid is dead - lies to the boy's mother and lets her go on believing. This is, of course, is directly related to how the Predator goes around destroying evidence and hiding the bodies. When the nuke finally drops, the sheriff is standing right beside the mother. He brought her right into the bullseye, and she still steadfastly believes that "the government doesn't lie to people!" So it's actually very important to show that the kid is dead. The sheriff has to be a liar for the story to work. It's all about failing to conceal the ugly truth. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Jul 26, 2015 |
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Jul 26, 2015 01:41
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Yes it is. He didn't literally find the bodies, but he knows he found the dad's severed arm. In that situation, you're thinking 'welp, the kid's dead.' The mother doesn't act like she knows about the severed arm part of the story. That's been concealed already. She criticizes the Sheriff for not looking harder. Why isn't he looking harder? Because he knows the kid is dead, and so does the audience. As in every other Alien movie, this is psychological horror. When the predator kills the deputy that saw him destroying evidence, that scene stands in for the Sheriff's inner desire to keep the truth hidden, his resentment towards the deputy, and things of that sort. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Jul 26, 2015 |
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Jul 26, 2015 02:38
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Xenomrph posted:Oh, oh okay. Well, why do you think the mother and sheriff characters are in the film? And don't give me a cynical 'oh they just needed cannon fodder' dismissal. Both characters survive to the end, until the nuke hits, and neither one even really sees an alien. Here's another example. Before the deputy's wife is killed, she has a little exchange with her coworker. It's a perfectly innocent conversation, where he just offers her a place to stay. But Daniel C. Pearl, cinematographer on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, shoots this simple dialogue scene for maximum creepiness:  When the aliens kill them both, a minute later, it's an explosion of this creepy subtext. 
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Jul 26, 2015 04:40
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lizardman posted:Yikes, is it really that much worse than theatrical? I remember going in having heard about the "hosed up" kid and pregnant woman deaths and being a little concerned I'd find it too disturbing, but turned out both scenes seemed to be shot and edited to be as innocuous as possible*, which simultaneously relieved me and perturbed me (the latter in a "well what was even the point of that" way). You have it right. The OMG UNRATED cut is just a director's cut with better editing, alternate effects in some cases, and some really vital scenes added back in. The kid's death is only about two seconds longer. It's like Human Centipede; people get really freaked out by the concept, but the film itself isn't very graphic.
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Jul 27, 2015 20:06
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Baronjutter posted:I sat through Salo because it's an amazingly made movie but I turned off AvP2 because it was just gross and made me feel disturbed/uncomfortable. I've gotten more and more timid in my entertainment tastes these days, I really don't like movies where lots of innocent people and kids get graphically killed for shock value. Hell I find it hard to even kill in video games any more. If there's a way to do a no-death run I'll do it. That's fair enough, but it's not 'just' shock value. The film begins with the cops kicking the town's homeless out of the sewers, trying to cover up a child's murder, etc. the one protagonist is returning from jail, and the other is returning from Afghanistan.... All the imagery is of something repressed that's now resurfacing. This little town is intimately connected to the prison-industrial complex, and to wars overseas, in ways that are hard to visualize. So they're visualized with aliens.
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Jul 27, 2015 23:13
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david_a posted:SMG: I'm curious if you think the absurdly dark color grading of Av|P:R was part of some larger theme or just an incredibly bad stylistic choice. It's neither. It's just a bad transfer by the studio. The same thing happened to Godzilla 2014. The image is perfect if you just turn up the brightness by 3 notches in windows media player. Hate for AV|P:R is slightly understandable because, until Prometheus, it was the most abstract film from either series. As noted, there is absolutely no plot connection between the story of the aliens and the story of the sheriff. Yet, when the nuke hits, the death of the two monsters is intercut with the death of the sheriff and the boy's mother. Contrast this with Aliens, where everything revolves around the literal monsters. "We have to stop these Aliens!" "I was traumatized by the Aliens, so I want to kill the Aliens!" "I'm going to take the Aliens home." "No don't take the Aliens home!" And so-on. AV|P:R and Prometheus basically function like a Garfield Without Garfield comic. Garfield is still 'there', but pushed firmly into the subtext. Meanwhile, fans are like "where's Garfield??? I paid to see an orange cat eat lasagna!"
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Jul 28, 2015 04:02
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People, generally, do not know why they like or dislike things. I do not expect you to be different.
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Jul 28, 2015 04:30
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blackguy32 posted:I kind of want to see it over again and watch it from SMG's perspective. I had never really noticed that on my first and only viewing of the movie and I think it is kind of funny that the movie pretty much takes place in small town America. If you do, it's essential to watch the director's cut, and turn up the brightness a few notches. Otherwise, my advice is to pay attention to the editing, because it's very deliberate. Like, for example, you get a cut from the little girl putting on night-vision goggles to the protagonist staring at the (green) glass of a beer bottle while he gets drunk - implying both that their perceptions are being distorted, and that they're seeing things 'the way they really are'. The aliens emerge at around this same point. (This is likely a reference to Jurassic Park, where the dinosaurs break free at the exact same point that the kid plays around with his night vision goggles - implying that he's entering a 'virtual reality' of CGI monsters).
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Jul 28, 2015 06:28
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Xenomrph posted:I must be the outlier, I'm pretty good at recognizing why I do or don't like things. Well, post your reading. I enjoy a challenge.
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Jul 28, 2015 08:02
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Immortan posted:SMG can you compare your analysis of the Newborn killing the Queen in Resurrection to Cuddles killing the Engineer in Prometheus? It's been a while since I've watched Resurrection in English (because it's much better as a silent), but the 'newborn' thing is basically a nightmarish zombie version of Newt (Ripley coming to terms with the fact that Newt is dead, giving her a tearful goodbye), whereas the 'Trilobite' abortion monster represents Shaw's rage over being unable to have kids (redirected towards the god responsible).
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Jul 28, 2015 11:19
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I just watched a Russian dub; I don't speak Russian.
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Jul 28, 2015 11:40
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah this poo poo is really souring me on him. Sure, make your own fan-service alien 3 but acting like he's going in and correcting some terrible injustice or disaster is just offensive to all the brilliant work that went into the very good movie that is alien 3 (assembly). Like, just make your version but you don't need to constantly tell everyone how awful alien 3 was. That's silly. Like, as if half of what made Alien To The Power Of Three 'good' was its ostensible dearth of 'references'.
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Jul 31, 2015 01:28
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CelticPredator posted:I firmly believe that half of the deleted scenes in the movie would've fixed a lot of character inconsistencies. Or at least most of them. So, Q: Why did he touch the snake? A: Because he wanted to touch the snake. Q: Why doesn't anyone care about the uterus monster? A: Because they don't care. You don't need the expository dialogue to figure this out because the film shows you everything. It shows that the guy is attracted to the snake, and it shows everyone not-caring about the monster. The questions have nothing to do with 'character inconsistencies' and everything to do with backseat driving. They're not even real questions; they are actually hard declarations. "He should not want to touch the snake." "They should care about the monster." But, of course, they don't do what they should - for the same reason people do drugs and have sex out of wedlock.
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Sep 26, 2015 00:50
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Why cookie Rocket posted:I dunno man I love Prometheus (saw it three times in the theater; bought a blu-ray player for it) but the characters definitely act in a....heightened manner. I can roll with it because I understand we're just watching a big metaphor and the characters are tropes, but it's definitely not naturalistic. Prometheus is fairly grounded. It's just that everything is shown from David's point of view. He's scanned all the characters' dreams and knows everything about them, so of course they seem like automatons to him. So this guy claims that he's a biologist and that he wants to find new species for the good of mankind or whatever - but, really, he's motivated by this fantasy of being ravaged by a wild-man. That's why he touches the snake.
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Sep 26, 2015 01:51
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All these characters secretly fantasize about their deaths, and their 'professional' behaviors (with the sophisticated equipment they use) are a way of domesticating those fantasies - of keeping them at a distance. That's to say that the map guy gets lost because he desires it. And, in fact, he only created the mapping technology in the first place because he was trying to avoid realizing his desires. Xenomrph is obliviously ruining characterization.
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Sep 26, 2015 02:27
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Xenomrph posted:Fair enough, I like looking at scenes and considering how they could have been done differently in order to be more effective, and deconstruct it to see what "works" and what doesn't, and why. I find that sort of stuff interesting, but to each their own. Then you have failed.
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Sep 26, 2015 15:46
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Xenomrph posted:Yeah, well that's just, like, your opinion, man. Actually, it isn't. You are not engaged in deconstruction.
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Sep 26, 2015 16:09
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Xenomrph posted:Nope, sorry, there's actually multiple ways of looking at movies a) You don't know what makes a scene effective. b) That's not what deconstruction is.
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Sep 26, 2015 16:45
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My deconstruction of Apocalypse Now is that they should not go into the jungle, and we should re-edit the film so that the jungle doesn't look as bad.
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Sep 26, 2015 17:02
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Well I mean, for example, the scene where the soldiers go surfing in the warzone. It would be more effective if they had a reason to be surfing, like it is part of their mission objectives. Maybe they are trying to reach the enemy base covertly, and they can't use outboard motors: "why not use surfboards!" It's still a bit silly, but i think this would fix a lot of the character inconsistencies. Either that or they could explain that this part of Vietnam is very safe, so surfing is okay.
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Sep 26, 2015 17:27
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Xenomrph posted:I really wish you'd recognize that there's more ways of looking at/enjoying movies than your own, because you write a lot about them and sometimes you even write interesting and insightful things about them and it's disheartening when you're so dismissive. "Dismissive" implies that I've rejected your 'way of looking' without first evaluating it. The reality is that I've read what you've written, carefully, and found it to be bad.
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Sep 26, 2015 20:19
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The purpose of editing is not to add or remove scenes, but to construct scenes. By cutting out the jokes and characterization from the psychological comedy sequence, in your proposed fan-edit, you now have a scene that no longer has a reason to exist. And, consequently, the characters have no reason to exist. That makes you a bad editor.
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Sep 27, 2015 00:41
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You've confused criticism with pretending to be angry.
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Sep 27, 2015 02:18
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The definitive document on Prometheus (so far) is actually the essay Negative Storytelling and the Posthuman - which, effectively, condenses and summarizes everything I've written about Prometheus since the film came out (and throws in several new points). The weird part is that I didn't write it.
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Sep 28, 2015 04:52
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lizardman posted:I admit there's this small part of me that's kind of rooting for the project just because I get this impression as if this Alien movie is Blomkamp's dream project that his career so far has basically been an audition for. Nobody got upset when AVP was remade - and, therefore, retconned out of existence. (Or that Predator 2's 'non canon' because it takes place in a comic-book dystopia.) In the same sense that Prometheus incorporates unused concepts from the 70s, the likely and ideal outcome for Alienses would be to incorporate elements from the various rejected Alien 3 drafts, and actually set it on Earth or something. The weird fear that Blomkamp "won't take Alien seriously" doesn't make sense when most of the films in the series are comedies and/or campy action-adventure deals. Even Alien is a little bit goofy. Fincher's nihilistic, and humorless slog is an anomaly.
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Oct 1, 2015 01:44
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Xenomrph posted:AvP hasn't been remade (and therefore, hasn't been retconned out of anything). AVP was remade as Prometheus. The two films have the exact same plot.
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Oct 1, 2015 08:56
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AvP is not bad, but also the worst of all the films.
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Oct 1, 2015 23:20
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The key to Prometheus is in how the opening scene is interpreted. Shaw, of course, believes that the statue-man's disintegration is the literal story an Ancient Alien landing on a primordial Earth and 'seeding' it with life. This interpretation has become generally accepted as 'canon'. (Although Scott himself has noted that this specific scene doesn't necessarily take place on Earth, it's still considered analogous to what 'actually did' happen here.) The trick is that Shaw has totally misinterpreted the imagery; the alien man did not emerge from the UFO to sacrifice himself. He is sacrificing himself to the UFO. That's to say that the guy in the opening scene has no idea what his own God wants from him, and he himself is acting on faith. We can even assume that this whole scene is taking place on their own homeworld.
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Oct 15, 2015 04:37
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Baronjutter posted:They hosed up by putting the aliens in the predator universe rather than the comics/games which put the predators in the aliens universe. AvP 1 doesn't take place in either 'universe'. It takes place in a microcosmic videogame constructed by the 'Predators', based around their religious ideology. The trouble with the film is that it's actually much too 'highbrow', having to establish this pyramid as a model for the Predator cosmology while, simultaneously, deconstructing that same model - pointing out the flaws in the game. Nobody fully exposits the rules of the game, but the basic idea is that if you kill the 6 Aliens (and however many 'face-huggers') you win. If you fail, the entire site is destroyed. So the lesson the predator teens are being taught is about maintaining a ying-yang balance of opposites, lest the world be overwhelmed by greed and corruption or whatever. What this means is that the entire film is spent cheating. Things start to go wrong because the humans steal the guns and are not willing sacrifices, while the creatures they turn into rebel against the logic of the game to free the queen. Then the hero Predator throws away his personal nuke and helps kill the queen - both acts being implicitly against the rules. That's why you have the film ending with the 'Predalien': the guy was supposed to have committed space-seppuku, and none of his superiors had expected him to break the rules. So basically, they only win by destroying their own civilization.
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Oct 17, 2015 02:01
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