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The interesting thing about Aliens is that it's a perfect film for VHS - it loses a lot on Blu-Ray. When the seams aren't smoothed over with lowered resolution and CRT dots, Aliens turns into a film about a world of plastic toys and dioramas. The teal-heavy remaster effectively takes place in those Terminator 1 & 2 'future war' scenes - a less-convincing version of Prometheus' Trek-parody slickness.
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Oct 26, 2015 00:36
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Lurdiak posted:You keep saying these things like they're facts, but you're wrong. It's ok though, lots of people have bad views on film-making. Alien is non-canon. John Hurt gets a bunch of wormy intestine things whipped at his face and then, suddenly, it's some kind of crab. That's a continuity error.
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Oct 28, 2015 02:00
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Timby posted:I guarantee you that "Alien" was appended to Prometheus 2 because Fox desperately wants franchises and so it could have an easier job marketing the thing. Also, that Blomkamp's film has been postponed because a studio doesn't want to compete against itself. "Pending Prometheus 2" means "pending the release and financial success of Prometheus 2", and Blomkamp has clarified that he'll simply be working on other projects in the interim instead of just sitting around - which would obviously create scheduling conflicts to work around.
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Oct 30, 2015 18:45
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Oh no not politics.
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Oct 30, 2015 20:23
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Prometheus is already a popular movie. The internet is a tool for amplification, not for finding consensus.
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Nov 3, 2015 18:48
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What other things did you learn in school.
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Nov 4, 2015 01:55
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Actually, we should discount negative opinions when they're like:Baronjutter posted:Elysium was a sort of fun action movie but it was maddeningly stupid. The setting didn't make any sense. In Prometheus the complaints are mostly about plot or characters but the setting its self wasn't insulting. By this same logic, Alien is maddeningly stupid because the Weyland corporation could simply use limitless space resources to build ten billon robot slaves and put Ripley out of a job before the film even begins.
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Nov 4, 2015 02:35
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Baronjutter posted:I mean if you don't think alien 3 (assembly) is good you don't really "get" alien. Alien^3 is a decent movie, but absolutely not a good Alien movie. It's a Cube movie - like Cube, Jim Henson's The Cube, Exam, or Predators - a variation on the Twilight Zone episode "Five Characters in Search of an Exit". Alien Cubed(!) is an extremely rudimentary existential allegory, with characters placed in a confined location for no clear reason and trying to find meaning in it all. It's a Mad Libs: "Earth is like being trapped in an enormous ________ (jungle/classroom/wastebasket/prison...). Why were we put here? Here's a character who's a ________ (nihilist/optimist/liberal/paranoiac/fundamentalist...), and he reacts to that question. Eventually everyone dies, but someone occasionally ascends to a higher plane of reality." Note that none of the other films use this format - and that Prometheus, an actual Alien film, deals with the 'why are we here?' question in a completely different way. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 09:08
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"What does the powerloader fight correspond to in 'Alien'?" Ripley putting on the space-suit and turning the shuttle itself into a weapon "What scene in Alien parallels the hive ambush? What scene in Aliens parallels [...] Brett looking for the cat and getting mugged?" You just answered your own question. "What scene in Aliens parallels Dallas' happy jaunt in the airvent[?]" The siege, after the power is cut.
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Nov 6, 2015 23:42
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You can tell right away that Prometheus is a good movie when people (often pretend to) get really upset and it, and their stated reasons are really mundane stuff like 'the old-age makeup on one character is unconvincing'. Like, that's it? The necessary response is to ask "if the makeup were flawless, would you love the movie?" And the inevitable answer is "no, because that's not really why we're upset." Repeat this process enough times ("if they told you what the black goo is, would you love the movie?", etc.) and we might approach the truth. Tenzarin posted:When I create species on a whim, I will make sure to go back to help them draw maps to my races top secret weapon facilities. Tenzarin posted:I don't always run away from black goo, but when I do I run into the room where it is kept. The basic premise of Prometheus is that you are shown a bunch of messages written by an alien culture, and you have to figure out what they say. Above are examples of interpretive failure. Why did the engineers run into the room? There's an incredibly simple explanation: because they thought it was safe - it used to be a safe place. What is the room? The safe bet is that it is a sort of temple. If you look at the arrangement of the objects, you have the giant stone head, the Giger goo mural behind it and, in between, a mysterious green crystal. It's the combination of the three that is meaningful. We could call it a model of superego, ego, and id. The arrangement predicts how the severed head will explode later in the film. The jars are laid out as offerings, and clearly not supposed to leak. They begin to 'sweat' for the same reason that the murals fade and disintegrate. Would the aliens invite people to a weapons facility? No. Therefore, the images are not an invitation. A warning is more plausible, but the simplest interpretation is that the images are a display of pure power. "This is our strength. Obey us." People tend to forget/ignore that the engineers in Prometheus are literally just the pagan gods: Thor, Ra, Ganesh and whatever. The engineers' motivations are simply the same as theirs.
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Nov 9, 2015 01:13
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Here's my review of 2001 A Space Odyssey: -It was not an Alien prequel. -The old age makeup isnt real. -He should not go into space. -I'm hungry. -Miniatures are always inferior to full-scale sets. -He should not have chosen to become a baby. -I'm sleepy. -Real computers wouldn't do that.
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Nov 10, 2015 04:54
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oldpainless posted:This is the Alien 3 thread, I think you posted this in the wrong thread but that's ok I thought it was a prequel to Alien 3, and I'm hungry. It's important that you know this.
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Nov 10, 2015 05:05
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Steve2911 posted:It literally shows you the origin of the Alien, or at least a good chunk of it. No it doesn't.
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Nov 10, 2015 19:53
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The sad thing is that the film provides a clear answer to every question. That answer is, simply: ask better questions. It's unambiguous. Shaw starts the film asking basic, stupid questions like 'what is the meaning of life?' and 'why do bad things happen to good people?' By the end, she is effectively asking 'how dare you?!' - a question that is not really a question but a demand. That question is, specifically, 'why are you trying to kill us?' "We are gradually becoming aware of the destructive potential, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, that could be unleashed if the capitalist logic of enclosing [the] commons is allowed a free run. [...] In contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have 'nothing to lose but their chains,' we are thus ALL in danger of losing ALL. The risk is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subjects deprived of substantial content, dispossessed of symbolic substance, our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment. These triple threats to our being make all of us potential proletarians. And the only way to prevent actually becoming one is to act preventively. The true legacy of ’68 is best encapsulated in the formula Soyons realistes, demandons l’impossible! (Let’s be realists, demand the impossible.) Today’s utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely. The only way to be realistic is to envision what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible." -Zizek What Shaw is making is this impossible demand that breaks from the cycle of rebellion/corruption. For all his genius, David 8 cannot think outside this system - he can only accelerate it. Hence: "sometimes, in order to create, you must first destroy." David is saying this with full knowledge that Earth will be rendered permanently uninhabitable, except to robots. The punchline to the magical observatory scene is that David is being overwhelmed with joy by the inevitability of the apocalypse. Without understanding the basic allegory, you will fail to understand basic plot points - like why Weyland fakes his death. Weyland is put into hibernation to create the illusion that his company is no longer patriarchal. The crew are under the impression that Weyland is a hip, Web-2.0 sort of company, where they can work under limited oversight doing nonprofitable research for all mankind. The reveal that Weyland is as alive as ever corresponds with Shaw's newfound awareness of her expendability. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Nov 11, 2015 |
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Nov 11, 2015 02:41
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DeafNote posted:and drat there is a lot more Prometheus talk (way too positive for my tastes) then alien3 talk in this thread That's because Alien 3 is not a very good movie. It doesn't interest people. For example, in the entire history of people writing about Alien on the internet, no-one has ever commented on the scene where Clemens dies - the fact that a bottle of drugs morphs into the alien. And of course, those same drugs are administered to Ripley. So the film is fairly explicitly on the side of Dillon, when he calls the literal plot explanation complete bullshit. Ripley was not attacked her cryotube; the 'queen embryo' was injected into her arm. But fans don't care about this. They care about Prometheus.
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Nov 13, 2015 00:18
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Not only is there an unambiguous hallucination scene in the film, where Ripley has a conversation with a sewage pipe, the dialogue repeatedly emphasizes that "half [her] system's still in cryosleep." Ripley is not fully awake. There's a common misreading of the film, that says everything after the credits is only a dream. This gets things slightly backwards, as the credits sequence is the dream - one that functions as a prophecy, in keeping with the religious themes. The events in the credits montage parallel the events that will occur in the film proper (most notably: the fireball explosion in the middle). Ripley comes to the planet with foreknowledge of what will occur - that the Alien will re-appear and so-on. And, so, she spends the film reliving the events in the dream, though now as an active participant who can 'change the ending' so that the alien doesn't escape. The logic of the film is that the alien is a genuine nightmare creature - but that this nightmare is more real to Ripley than the mundane reality where people simply kill eachother and suffer accidents. She had almost accepted that state of normalcy, until she took the drugs.
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Nov 13, 2015 02:49
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Try rewatching that clip. I am referring to how the scene is shot and edited, not to the literal plot content. Here is a shot-by-shot breakdown of the moment Ripley is injected with the drugs. First three shots. The needle enters Ripley's arm. CUT TO: Ripley turning her head away and closing her eyes. CUT TO: Golic the madman. He's staring at something that horrifies him. He writhes and tries desperately to escape. In literal plot terms, Golic is on the other side of the room, behind a plastic curtain. And he's looking at a large bug. However, the scene is edited so that he appears to see something else. It's edited as though Golic is watching the injection.  Next three shots. A dark smear rises inside a container of clear fluid. CUT TO: an extreme close-up on the clear fluid being pumped into Ripley's arm. CUT TO: an extreme close-up on Golic's eyes, wide with terror. He's looking down now, and he's no longer struggling.  Next shot: The dark smear now travels along the floor, from right to left - the same direction as the needle. There are a few shots showing Ripley becoming aware that something's amiss, but I'm skipping ahead for brevity.  Last three shots. Ripley, her eyes open, turns her head back towards the needle. CUT TO: A dark smear rising behind Clemens, visible through the plastic sheet. CUT TO: an extreme close-up of the needle being pulled from Ripley's arm. Obviously, the shot of the dark shape rising behind the curtain, and the dark shape rising inside the container of fluid, are linked. The difference is that Ripley is now seeing what Golic saw: a 'dragon'. Seconds later, the dragon will burst through the curtain and fully enter Ripley's consciousness. This all happens in the span of about twenty seconds. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Nov 13, 2015 |
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Nov 13, 2015 08:58
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Right, so with that out of the way, we can get back to the point: Alien3 is thematically similar to Total Recall - to the point that the ending scene with "Bishop II" plays out exactly like the scene with Dr. Edgemar from that film. There's a consistent theme of mistaken identity and of intermixing dream with reality. Ripley is told she's hallucinating because she was pulled out of the machine too early, etc. So: CelticPredator posted:A facehugger actually got her, and this was shown so. This is false. The opening montage does not show Ripley getting attacked. It shows only a creature attached to a human skull, and the sequence is obviously edited to make it look like Newt. Now, you can go into the plot-canonical explanation of 'what actually happened', but then you miss the point entirely. The opening scene is exactly what it appears to be: a scene where Newt is attacked. That's what the audience is led to believe, and it's what Ripley believes - which is why she orders the autopsy. The attack on Newt is real to her. The autopsy then reveals that the opening scene is, in fact, "only a dream". Newt looked like she was infected, but she's not. This is where people make a mistake, because they say "if it wasn't newt it must have been Ripley" and remain satisfied that they now know what objectively happened. Catalog it on xenopedia. However, none of this is objective. Basic point: a facehugger can only infect one person. I don't care if they invented some bullshit to explain the dream sequence. We have two different, incompatible versions of events: the facehugger attacked the dog OR the facehugger got Ripley. Everyone knows that the opening scene doesn't make literal sense (e.g. how did the egg get there?) - so whose POV is it? There are no witnesses except the computer, and the computer can only confirm that there was an electrical fire. It's Bishop who adds that an alien came down with them - but he's badly damaged and his response is ambiguous. What does he mean by that? Does he mean the facehugger or the embryo? It matters because, according to the plot, two aliens came down. The obvious conclusion is that the events of the opening credits are ultimately being shown to us from the POV of the malfunctioning Bishop. Not even he fully knows what's going on. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Nov 13, 2015 |
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Nov 13, 2015 20:05
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Plot and story are distinct from eachother - and I am focussing exclusively on the story. The plot of Alien 3 is some dull nonsense about putting metal on a bug. The story is a hallucinatory purgatorial myth about a Woman who fell to Earth from the sky, bringing both corruption and a prophecy. Alien 3 is also a science fiction film in the Lovecraft tradition. In the injection scene, the thin plastic sheet represents the fabric of reality itself distorting and then being ripped apart. It's in that sense that the alien is 'created by' the injection. The alien has no substantial existence of its own, but simply appears as a result of this breakdown. Initially a dark blot, it slowly spreads and grows. "Hemorrhaging will show as a dark patch." -Ripley This brings us back to the misidentification theme. Two of the deaths are blamed on Golic, one guy mistakes the alien for his dog, and then his death is attributed to a simple accident. Ripley believes the events in the opening credits were 'just a dream', and so-on. In each of these cases, the rational explanation is quite accurate. It was just a dog, and it was just a dream. There is no alien except in the sense that the alien stands for the meaningless functioning of the universe itself. "It's a metaphor." -Ripley In her altered state of consciousness, Ripley goes on a straight-up vision quest in a metaphorical space called 'the basement'. Plot synopses cannot account for the film's theme, that there is no objective reality but a panoply of conflicting subjective accounts that sometimes overlap. It's crucial to pay attention to who believes what, and when. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Nov 14, 2015 |
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Nov 14, 2015 07:32
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Why not? Maybe Alien Convent will be a nunsploitation film. Anyways, we should go back to the point that Alien 3 is not an Alien movie. The simple reason for this: in the context of Alien 3, Aliens is reduced to a metaphorical story that Ripley passes on to the inmates. It becomes a variation on the 'war in heaven' from Paradise Lost. The opening credits are essentially an extended coda where Satan, having been defeated in Heaven, is cast down to Earth. The trick with Alien 3 is that it actually does take place on Earth, as the old teaser promised - since "Fury 161" is a straightforward allegorical representation of it. And what this means is that characters like the Dragon and Bishop II (who is presented as the literal Antichrist) intrude from a whole other plane of reality, not really seeming to fit. It's like having a stark drama about life in a mining town, and then Zeus shows up in the third act. Something is amiss. But the real question with Alien 3 is to what degree it teaches us the right lessons about the bible. It's commonly accepted that Ripley is a Christ figure who dies for our sins or whatever - but Christ figures are everywhere in cinema, and few are authentic. So it should be noted that Ripley kills herself to eliminate the alien Other - which is frankly not a Christlike thing to do at all. After all, Prometheus stresses that Christ is the alien - this pathetic excremental figure shat out by God. I'll cut to the chase here. Ripley is not Christ. She is The Woman Of The Apocalypse, a.k.a. Mary: "A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; and she was with child; and she cried out, being in labor and in pain to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven diadems...." -Revelation 12:1-4 Put simply, Alien 3 is a blasphemous film where Mary, seeing the horrors that await humanity, aborts the fetal Christ and burns herself as well.
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Nov 15, 2015 06:45
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Robotnik Nudes posted:When Christ says My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? is he bluffing or not? If he is in fact bluffingand by bluffing I mean that he is simply saying this aloud but secretly knows that he is Godthen the crucifixion is not serious. It is just a spectacle staged for humans. But if we take Christs statement seriously, then the implication is extremely radical. We must not forget that in Christian theology, Jesus Christ is not thought of in the same way as messiahs in other religions. Christ is not a representative of God; he is God. This means that God is radically split. A part of God doesnt know what God is doing. There is a kind of inconsistency in divinity itself, which is I think the crucial insight of Christianity. This is why I ask: how can we rejoin God? In other religions God is a simple transcendence: We are here in our sinful, terrestrial life, but if we purify ourselves, its possible for us to get closer to and be rejoined with God. In Christianity, when its said that the only way to God is through Christ, I think whats implied is precisely this Christ at the moment of doubt on the cross. This is why for Christianity you can, paradoxically, reach God only through this moment of doubt. As Chesterton put it, God himself becomes, for a moment, an atheist. The idea is as follows: We experience the utmost despair and alienation. We are here, God is there. We are totally abandoned by God. How then in authentic Christianity do we reach God? Not by somehow magically overcoming this gap but just by means of a shattering insight at the very point when we are abandoned by God. There we occupy the position of Christ. What was thought of only as alienation from God is the position of Christ himself: God abandoned by God. Right, yes, but isn't Ripley killing herself precisely to purify herself and the world? The lyrics sung over Newt's and Hick's deaths are from the Agnus Dei - "Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, grant us peace." When talking about Alien 3, it's helpful to look at other sci-fi adaptations of Revelation - like Elysium. Straight away, you can see the difference; Elysium ends with a host of angels flying down to Earth to enforce the Kingdom Of God, aka the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Terminator series has also begun moving towards the idea of a benevolent (version of) Skynet, reprogrammed to defend the poor, that may eventually defeat the evil capitalist version. In Alien 3, we get a gnostic version where the material universe is illusory, the product of the demiurge, and the correct solution is to reject all of flawed creation and embrace the nonmaterial. I'd say that (Ripley believes that) the queen-embryo/Christ is the embodiment of this demiurge and thus needs to be eliminated. In a very Heaven's Gate situation, where all the characters kill themselves because Planet Fury Is (literally) About To Be Recycled.
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Nov 15, 2015 20:20
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Arglebargle III posted:Huh that's interesting. The UFO in the opening doesn't look like Engineer's own ships, does it? Nope; the shape is roughly that of a watermelon seed.
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Nov 17, 2015 05:41
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Baronjutter posted:lol if you think there's actually an alien in alien 3 and can't figure out the very obvious fact that it's all her delusions and is in fact killing everyone here self. It's very fight-club esq but probably beyond most of you peon's ability to understand, but understanding or not it's absolutely a fact. Actually, the subtext (in the theatrical cut, at least) is that Dillon is killing everyone. Note that the the attempted rapist just disappears, and is never mentioned again, after Dillon decides to "re-educate" him with the big lead pipe. After Ripley tries to sacrifice herself to the alien, and it refuses to kill her (because it needs her alive to eliminate humanity), the exact same sequence of events is repeated with Dillon. Dillon refuses to kill Ripley because he needs her alive to eliminate the alien. This theme reaches a conclusion when Dillon and the alien merge together to form the weird metal alien and, once that creature is dead, Morse can mercy-kill Ripley without any difficulty.
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Nov 22, 2015 00:06
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Xenomrph posted:Actually the rapist is killed by the Alien on-screen during the corridor chase, sorry. I'm referring to the character 'Junior.'
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Nov 22, 2015 01:33
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Xenomrph posted:My mistake, I was thinking of Gregor (who is also present at the attempted rape), but yeah as david_a pointed out, Junior's fate is still shown in the Assembly Cut. Right, but the removal of that plot-point in the (superior) theatrical cut turns the character's disappearance into pure subtext, highlighting the Dillon character's relationship to sin and punishment. That theme is present in both cuts, of course, but conveyed differently. Keep in mind that Alien 3 is a microcosmic allegorical tale about life on Earth, where Dillion stands for The Church (and the guards stand for The State, etc.). So, in the Assembly version, Junior the rapist is of course locked away, taking the Dragon with him. Harmony is restored until Golic opens the door, steps into the darkness, and emerges transformed into the Dragon. The theatrical cut simply skips these steps and has these human characters vanish without any literal explanation, being replaced by the alien. But we've nonetheless established that Dillon is attempting to repress these characters' sinful behaviour through violence that is repeatedly equated to that of the alien ("I am a murderer and rapist of women."). And of course this attempt at harnessing the alien's power for 'good' is destined to fail, as what Dillon really desires is his own annihilation.
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Nov 22, 2015 09:14
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Trolling is a fake idea. Alien 3 is a movie that simply doesn't benefit from having more exposition. The dog is obviously better than the ox, considering its death is intercut with the "why must the innocent be punished" speech. And, also, Ripley's original death was much too tasteful. The queen popping out is a nice schlock punchline to the proceedings.
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Nov 23, 2015 03:47
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Both Alien 3 and Resurrection are bad, so what's the big problem with making a sequel to Aliens? Like boo hoo they're making a sequel to the fourth-best Alien movie instead of to the unambiguously worst one. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Nov 24, 2015 |
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Nov 24, 2015 02:37
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My main question is which youtube movie rant host is pushing this fanfiction meme.
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Nov 24, 2015 02:59
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Blomkamp is also pretty much my favorite director nowadays.IM_DA_DECIDER posted:I'm not very interested in a sequel to any of them. I've seen all those movies before, many times, and especially Aliens has been homaged to death. I can just watch them again if I want to see more of the same. As already noted, Prometheus is a direct remake of AVP. But it's also worth pointing out that the relationship between Shaw and David 8 is basically Ripley/Clemens without the sex. Although people got upset that Prometheus 'isn't an Alien prequel', it absolutely is one. It's simply many other things in addition to that.
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Nov 24, 2015 05:21
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MonsieurChoc posted:I still can't get my head around people giving a poo poo about the not-Ripley characters in Aliens, to the point that a alrge amount of spin-offs and sequels would rather follow tham than Ripley. Or new stuff unrelated to either. Anytime someone (usually Xenomrph) talks about the comics, I just can't believe they'd follow Hicks and newt over Ripley. Have you considered that you don't actually like the Aliens movie?
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Nov 24, 2015 07:10
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Immortan posted:No, he gets poo poo because his last two films were incoherent disasters. No they weren't.
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Nov 24, 2015 07:16
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Harime Nui posted:Elysium and Chappie get a lot of hate and I just have no loving idea why. Elysium has all these beautiful glamor shots of a fully realized goddamn space colony and Chappy has a dude get stepped on and pulled in half by a meaner Ed 209 what the gently caress's not to love about this Even besides the fact that both films are insanely good, they were both modestly profitable. Chappie has already garnered a bit of a cult following.
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Nov 24, 2015 07:35
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Nah, I don't believe you could come up with that on your own. Aliens definitely is one of those movies where everyone's like "hell yeah, best movie of all time, I quote all the lines!", and yet nobody actually has a clue what's going on in the story. As a basic example of what I mean, consider the opening scene where we see the escape shuttle being slowwwly approached, cut open, scanned, etc. The salvage team then enters, looks around, then dramatically pull off their masks to declare their disappointment that Ripley is alive. This whole scene is pretty much superfluous in plot terms; we could have skipped right to the hospital. It exists to kick the film off with some fairly obvious alien abduction imagery. But, like, why start the film off an alien abduction? It's not to fool the audience, because the fact that the abductors are human is fairly obvious from the get-go. The salvage guys are just being straightforwardly compared to malicious aliens. And we should note the multiplicity of perspectives. We start from the perspective of the salvage crew, as the camera approaches Ripley's shuttle from above. We're then treated to three repetitions of the same event: something intrudes on the scene, the camera pans over to Ripley, and then we get a close-up of her face. In this manner, Ripley is first scanned by the shuttle's computer, then by the laser probe thing and, finally, by the human salvage guy using his flashlight.  So, again, why the repetition? Obviously the point is the transition from the free-floating, disembodied perspective ('there's nothing there'), to the alien perspective ('there's something there') to the human perspective ('there's someone there'). Nothing changes except these shifts in perspective. It's also worth noting that Alien 3 directly copied this stuff for its opening credits/prologue. In that film, the prologue serves as both Ripley's unconscious dream sequence and as the POV of the flight recorder (as accessed by Bishop). So, we can say this is basically foreshadowing.
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Nov 24, 2015 10:16
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See, now you've already gotten badly confused. The assertion was that the films were 'disasters', and that is simply false. We now have a pretty good idea of why you are (unwittingly or not) attempting to deceive us, but rest assured that it's unnecessary to invent a consensus. You are not insane, and your wrist is fine. Harime Nui posted:I think, SMG, you're suggesting our marines are the aliens, entering an environment that has essentially become naturalized to the xenomorphs, poking around and prodding at it like doofuses until they blunder into its heart. See the way the film is shot, interestingly, is intensely neutral on the issue of who 'deserves' to survive, homo sapiens or xenomorph. We're the away team here. Is that the idea with the (somewhat Kurt Russel-esque IMO) Salvager in the opening scene. My point is that we should take the imagery 'at its word'. The opening scene really is about putting a human face on a rapacious alien threat. The removal of the masks corresponds with the salvage-machine reaching the barest of limitations: basic laws prevent it from tearing Ripley's ship apart, and basic human morality prevents the crew from just killing Ripley to get the cash. You can say that the salvage guys are clouded by conscience, remorse, and delusions of morality. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Nov 24, 2015 |
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Nov 24, 2015 20:19
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It's important to look at things the other way around: Aliens does not resemble a Blomkamp film, except in aspects of the production design. Blomkamp pushes far more heavily towards a documentary realism in his films, whereas Cameron emulates the style of pulp comics. You can tell that he storyboarded the hell out of Aliens. Even though Elysium and Chappie are not literally found-footage, as District 9 largely is, each shot evokes the logic of having been filmed by some entity. A shot of Matt Damon firing a gun in slow motion is taken from Discovery Channel TV shows like Futureweapons and Mythbusters, for example. Other shots evoke news helicopter footage, surveillance camera footage.... Every shot is from a mediated perspective, be it diegetic or not. Cameron simply doesn't do this. As I pointed out in Aliens' opening scene, Cameron combines a very straightforward narrative style with 'realistic' plotting, which obscures just how bizarre things are. By this I mean that Aliens begins with a literal salvage operation, shot is a fairly straightforward cinematic way, and the alien abduction stuff is firmly in the subtext. It's very neutral. Contrast it with the opening of Alien 3, where a simple electrical fire is shot and edited like an intense nightmare sequence - and it's eventually revealed to be a robot's nightmare.
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Nov 24, 2015 22:12
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A certain subset of libertarian tech geek certainly feels betrayed by the fact that Blomkamp makes incredibly realistic films about 'the singilarity' that proceed to ruthlessly mock the concept.
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Nov 27, 2015 02:18
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The curious configuration of [Ray Kurzweil's] The Singularity is Near – its apolitical and asocial utopianism, and science- and technology-based millenarianism – is, of course, not accidental. For the whole point of Kurzweil's speculation – its ideological function, if you will – is precisely to bring us to utopia without incurring the inconvenience of having to question our current social and economic arrangements. This is why Kurzweil supposes that the onward march of technology will produce the society of plenitude, all by itself – so long as government bureaucrats and religious fundamentalists do not interfere with entrepreneurial innovation. By a curious sleight of hand, even after a radical “rupture” in the very “fabric of human history,” we witness the persistence of such features of our society today as private property, capital accumulation, branding and advertising, stringent copyright enforcement, and above all “business models” (with which Kurzweil seems curiously to be obsessed). -Steve Shaviro As I wrote above, the basic fact that Blomkamp makes political films poses a threat to singularity believers.
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Nov 27, 2015 03:31
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CelticPredator posted:An Alien film about class war would be dope as gently caress. lmao What Blomkamp complainers don't seem to understand is that the Alien films are already anti-singularity films. The plot of Aliens is literally that Weyland-Yutani wants to upgrade the colonial marines into bioengineered cyborg soldiers. These soldiers will no longer need armor, weapons, or special sensors because it will all be inbuilt - and they will be controlled by a central AI (e.g. the computer "Mother"). Again, the plot of the Alien films is literally that the space jockeys succeeded at doing all this - they harnessed the power of capitalism - and that's why they're all dead. When you see the alien hive, with the queen at the middle, that is how sentient corporations are depicted in the Kurzweil-satirizing novel Accelerando: "after the Singularity, all sentient AIs function as autonomous economic entities, 'slyly self–aware financial instruments'. They exist only to accumulate capital, in the form of endless computation. The AIs have freed themselves from merely human parameters, shed their human origins, and emerged as alien, predatory lifeforms. They strive to extract the maximum value (in the form of computational power) from all matter. Their focus is on efficiency, and on endless self–expansion. They have no goals external to the processes of accumulation and expansion themselves. No measure of abundance can satiate their rapacious competitive drive." -Shaviro The failure of Aliens is in the none-too-subtle implication that everything would be fine without the machinations of bad people like Burke. There's nothing wrong with the atmosphere processor or "building better worlds", after all; the problem is that Burke lied and deliberately endangered people. If he had simply followed the rules, this wouldn't have happened. And the alien queen is distinctly unlike the cold and indifferent Mother from Alien. Can you imagine Mother going all "raaaar" and chasing Ripley around? Of course not. Aliens 'personfies' "the bad parts" of the corporation as this goofy alien Other that can be safely jettisonned.* "What one should recall here is that the only place in Hollywood films where we see the production process in all its intensity is when James Bond penetrates the master-criminal's secret domain and locates there the site of intense labor (distilling and packaging the drugs, constructing a rocket that will destroy New York...). When the master-criminal, after capturing Bond, usually takes him on a tour of his illegal factory, is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist proud presentation of the production in a factory? And the function of Bond's intervention, of course, is to explode in firecracks this site of production, allowing us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with the 'disappearing working class.'" -Zizek This is, of course, what we see with Ripley: instead of fighting capitalism, she is fighting 'pollution' and the other unavoidable byproducts of this gee-whiz future poo poo. Cameron was already paving the way for the liberal-utopian vision of Avatar - with everyone hooked up to the central AI tree, in perfect symbiosis with nature, and the uncouth immigrants sent back to the polluted third-world they came from. *Note that, when this same imagery is used in Man Of Steel, with the character Zod, it is to illustrate that he is a simple fascist - not the actual problem, but a mere symptom. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Nov 28, 2015 |
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Nov 28, 2015 07:49
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Body Snatchers, by a country mile. (I'm sure that someone out there anticipated it a lot.) Hbomberguy posted:I agree - but he's only an outlier in the 'canonical' context of the wider Universe. I read the colony as an alternate way of looking at Earth itself. In this context, the 'system' is the Alien queen and her army of drones, with Burke being one viewpoint on this society. The alien planet is an alternate version of Earth (note that, in Aliens, it is consistently referred to as a planet and not a moon) - but it's specifically like Krypton or the homes of the various monsters in the Godzilla series. It's both prehistoric/primordial and yet serves as a warning of what fate could befall humanity. The alien dinosaurs were wiped out because they couldn't adapt. How can Earth survive? But then, Cameron includes a second, competing vision of Earth. The terraformation colony represents a utopian future - "building better worlds" imagery from Total Recall. So the conflict of the film is fundamentally the utopian vision getting corrupted by the evil aliens (and the greedy traitors who work with them). Note that the atmosphere processor works great, until Burke lets the aliens loose. Then it explodes because the stupid aliens crashed a plane into it, and the stupid queen just sits there laying eggs while the place burns down around her. The aliens might be smart enough to cut the power, but they're not smart enough to do much else. They're not a real threat. While the queen is a bad capitalist enemy, she is specifically a accelerationist type, deliberately hastening the apocalypse like Red Skull in Captain America. There's a nice, clear comparison there: Captain America soundly defeats the evil drone army, and wakes up 70 years later in present-day New York. He looks around at all glowing, neon dystopia and says "oh no." Likewise, the original ending of Army Of Darkness: Ash kills the baddies, and then gets frozen for a few hundred years. When he wakes up: "oh no." And isn't this effectively the case in Phantom Menace? Aliens doesn't have this. The solution is basically just liberal socialism, along the lines of Fury Road.
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Nov 28, 2015 20:54
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Y Kant Ozma Diet posted:SMG Didn't you like Fury Road? I liked it about as much as Aliens.
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Nov 28, 2015 21:25
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