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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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Tell us about the Prometheus chapter!

# ¿ May 1, 2016 16:56

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 11:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

TomViolence posted:

Another Alien sequel's going to be bad, no matter what. It'd inevitably just be a retread of the original material or a reboot with slick new CGI visuals. It'll be like how with every Batman or Spiderman film we're made to see the origin story, introduce two villains, beat said villains and get given a sequel hook. Alien would benefit greatly, I think, from being more like an anthology, with a different cast, a different situation and a radically different, self-contained story in each iteration. But that'll never happen, because if superhero movies and star wars have taught us anything, it's that the real money's in pandering to the nostalgia of millenial nerds, even though retreading the same narratives with the same characters can never and will never recapture the original experience asnd can only fall short and disappoint. Doing anything interesting is too big of a risk.

What would the Fury Road of Alien look like.

# ¿ May 4, 2016 04:17

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Xenomrph posted:

Alternately just do what the EU did and casually handwave the Aliens being "extinct", write stories that don't revolve around Ripley, and have a good time.

What I'm saying is either Blomkamp or Cronenberg should adapt Aliens: Labyrinth.

Hahaha I just realized the end of Alien 3 has the same unresolved issue as the end of Alien: the loving space jockey ship is still sitting there on LV-426 with eggs inside. Unless the fusion reactor took it out when it blew.

# ¿ May 6, 2016 03:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Biomute posted:

The Aliens franchise has always been a product of luck and circumstance, I think. The first movie was written by some pretty sketchy dudes and could easily have been atrocious if Ridley Scott had not come across Giger in a good mood and also turned out to be such a great director. Although, we now know that without everything coming together with the script and the casting as it did he's not talented enough to have brought it home on his own shoulders (Prometheus).

I've come to really love Prometheus for all its spiteful refusal to make sense or obey tactical realism, but even among people who hate it all the complaints I've ever heard are about the script. It's a really good-looking movie. The sets are awesome, the camera does interesting poo poo, the landscapes they use for the opening vignette and the flydown to the weapons planet are gorgeous, and it's got a cool ultraclean-tech-meets-ancient-aliens production design, which is most effective and creepy when you get a squealing bloodspattered squid encapsulated in a luxury suite. Ridley did a good job.

I'll forgive it for the Rubik's Cube.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 21:54

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm not here to make friends! I'm ONLY here to do rocks!

# ¿ Jun 12, 2016 23:13

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Ridley Scott is a weird director. Does he have a style? The Coen Brothers have a style, PT Anderson has a style, the Equilibrium guy has an awful but distinctive style. Ridley Scott made some of the most iconic movies in science fiction but I don't know what. Ridley Scott movie looks like. Maybe that's a cool and good thing.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 06:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Excellent thoughts, thank you. I'd read the chameleon director post - but I think what really sticks with me are the atmospheric and light effects SMG points out. I guess when I think of Scott I think of the shots in Alien and Blade Runner that fill the screen with light behind fans or other oscillating sources. Prometheus has a motif of people passing through or emerging from holograms. It's like he's interested in what obscures gaze.

I wonder if he has some kind of industry record for filming Spacesuit Acting.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 10:03

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Celtic it is 5 AM but I promise to click on all those tomorrow!

Okay, veering into the intersection between toychat and cinematography: long before I ever saw and felt let down by Alien Resurrection, I played a lot of Aliens vs Predator 2. That game had a multiplayer map called "Auriga", set on the ship from Resurrection. I remember it being far more golden and oddly lit than the other maps, like a strange collusion of clinical brutalist and misty jungle. It really leapt out of the map lineup.

I remember wondering where it came from, and whether it was 'futuristic' - a map from some kind of phantasmagorial post-movies reality in which human existence and architecture had been permanently altered, made misty and organic like the underbelly of the derelict where Kane found the eggs. Like the people who built it no longer recognized a distinction between the technological and the biohorrific.

It was pretty weird and I'm sure if I looked it up it'd disappoint me. Game owned though.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 10:09

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I just rewatched it and it owns. The two big weaknesses are the characters (the movie doesn't know how to sketch them out vividly like Alien does, so their eventual deaths are pretty bleh) and the escalation of the threat. Alien gets more and more tense as it goes, and holy poo poo does the camera milk those sets for all they're worth. Event Horizon is straight up goofy in a really nineties way, from the walls of blood to the credits music, and it doesn't so much build tension as geyser schlock.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 20:55

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

On the other hand Supernova is uniformly awful.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 21:00

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Groovelord Neato posted:

this is why it always bums me out. i'll watch it and not hate it but they could've done so much more with that concept.

Maybe the sequel is better? I don't know, haven't seen Deepwater Horizom yet

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 23:55

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The Spaihts script is also much closer to the post-Aliens 'how do we make an alien movie' formula. You've got the facehuggers, the evil corporate interests, the new alien variant (it's soft and squishy iirc), they're searching for a specific technology (the engineers' terraforming) rather than big-picture Answers, and it climaxes with fights between mercenaries and the aliens. That's about all I remember.

The only thing Lindelof's script added that I really detest is making it a Christmas movie.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2016 00:48

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Spielberg did that WW2 comedy that nobody likes. Also AI.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2016 15:34

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

What would Predators be if it were made as that franchises' Aliens ��a genre shift that picks up the fiction of the first movie, but uses it to attack different themes? Predator is hypermasculine in its anxiety, with a vagina-faced phantasm picking off the bodybuilders one by one. Where do you go with Predator that echoes the rape -> motherhood or slasher->Vietnam shift between Alien and Aliens?

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 06:53

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

They need to slather KY jelly all over everything to make it look right.

I actually had a dream that I was in Alien Covenant last night, and I remember complaining (as we were all massacred in a phantasmagoria of ruptured flesh, oozing fluids, and violations of the body) that the script had dropped all of the interesting ideas from Prometheus.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2016 21:48

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I hope this movie answers some of the Prometheus questions like 'why did they create us and then decide to kill us' but the answers are all horrible and maddening. And the gods are all dead or hideously transformed. And everyone's foolish hopes are entirely undone, for the indifferent perfection of the cosmos is exceeded only by its hostility.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2016 23:54

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I also hope there will be a dozen creatures of incomprehensible life cycle and purpose, defying all attempts at taxonomy or analysis, each one capable of new and obscene metamorphoses and appetites. Nothing should make any sense, all should be inchoate. The Engineer paradise transmuted into something pregnant with abomination: their marmoreal bodies disfigured by malignancy, wombs for the new and nameless life. The human explorers will be damned at the instant of contact, for all the choices they might make will only quicken the shrieking chaos.

Also excited to see more cool set design

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Dec 26, 2016

# ¿ Dec 26, 2016 00:03

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I really like the Engineers in Prometheus, the choreographers and actors (animators?) really nailed their body language. Even when he's fighting off the trilobite the last Engineer looks arrogant and imperious and faintly outraged that he has to deal with this poo poo.

The trilobite is also loving horrible.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2016 00:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

CelticPredator posted:

There's some spoilers for Covenant out there, no idea if their real, links also gone...but it sounds super dope to be honest. I'm more excited about it. It's definitely a sequel to Prometheus but with more Alien.

David's role sounds perfect.

Tell me everything, I'm really curious and spoilers will only make it better!

# ¿ Jan 1, 2017 02:14

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

CelticPredator posted:

Like this is the kind of thing I want in my Alien movies. I'm more stoked after those spoilers

Yeah, same. It'll be a bummer if (covenant spoilers) we don't learn much more about the Engineers, though. I think Prometheus will be a stronger movie in retrospect if Covenant deepens the confusion and mystery around their motives re: creating humanity and then deciding to gently caress us up with goo. Give me more of those arrogant marble hitlers! I don't care that much about having the original alien 'explained', but I am interested in Ridley Scott's question of why anyone would make such a terrible thing.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2017 05:26

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Mother's deciphered the signal. It's not a distress call. It's a warning for refugees to stay away

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 18:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Kane gets hit in the face by a huge rear end cane toad

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 18:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Kane grows a little pouch that the chestburster rides around in. Ash calls it Joey.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 19:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Last night I dreamt I was part of a flotilla in an expedition to search the cavernous frozen interior of a weird comet. Our lights illuminated the blue-white depths of ice veined with cyanide and other strange substances. As the comet fell towards the star, the ice began to sublimate, releasing the black goo imprisoned within. A cloud of tenuous vaporized mutagen filled the cometary interior, coating our machinery and suits. Madness and paranoia ensued. Soon our shipboard pets and pests became infected. It began with a cat who gave birth to a litter of squirming polyps that entered the eyes. Worse followed. Pulsating intestinal serpents and soft whirling flesh-anemones drifted in the failed gravity of charnel ships. We sealed the comet shut from within and prayed nothing would escape. Our commander tried to self-destruct his ship and we had to go aboard and abort lest he crack the comet open. He was already beyond any help except the incinerator. Welp cya

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 17:10

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

As a kid I was sick at home eating some kind of soup and I watched the Voyager episode where an invisible force chases Janeway and her crew of lower-decks fuckups through an asteroid field. Then a worm crawls around under one of the fuckups' skin. Now whenever I think of that soup I think of worms crawling beneath human skin. Thanks, Voyager.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2017 20:53

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The Lost World book was my first Crichton as a kid and I liked how run-down and nasty it got. The villains are pathetic people who die in stupid ways, the heroes' equipment and preparations are inadequate, the old Ingen facilities are a great setting with all the wrecked hubris, and the dinosaur ecosystem is pathological and hosed.

I liked the first half of Sphere a lot too but the squid scared the poo poo out of me.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 19:42

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Kingtheninja posted:

Did you have to stop reading after that part?

No I read the whole thing (and had childhood nightmares for months!) I wish I'd stopped, though, the back half of that book is pretty weak.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 21:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

If Fay Wray can love King Kong, why can't Ray Ray love Lucy? :biotruths:

# ¿ Feb 16, 2017 18:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah, it's remarkable (see we're remarking on it, you can tell) how immediately he distinguishes his new android from David. Can't wait to see them onscreen together.

I just love the blue-collar space trucking stuff. I could watch people mumble and flip switches on a Ridley Scott spaceship all day.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2017 07:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm afraid Ridley will die before he can make all these movies (knock on wood) but he seems to work really fast so hey, let's hope!

# ¿ Mar 2, 2017 05:11

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Things with a million tiny waving legs are revolting, so I hope that's in the movie.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2017 18:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

As a contrast, Alien Resurrection is loaded with Alien 3 references, functioning (to the extent that it does) as a surreal companion piece.

I want to hear more about this!

# ¿ Mar 5, 2017 23:00

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Alienwarehouse posted:

I hope a living Engineer makes a cameo in this.

Me too, I'd like to see more done with a pretty good character design. I hope the story doesn't just shove Prometheus' questions under the rug. Rather, I hope they're made even more horrific and weird and traumatic!

Unfortunately I suspect it's just going to be aliens killing people and people trying to survive.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2017 05:18

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Somebody spoil what happens to Shaw and whether we get any closure to her arc - does she finally lose faith, stop looking for answers? Do we get any reaction from her about events between Prometheus and Covenant?

# ¿ May 13, 2017 05:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I know ��I'm just curious whether we get any more.

# ¿ May 13, 2017 05:43

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Julio Cruz posted:

I instinctively dislike any film which has a character fight themselves/their twin/their clone/etc etc

But Citadel was the best Mass Effect? :confused:

e: new page steal like I'm the Blade Runner trailer

# ¿ May 14, 2017 23:38

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Have you guys all been over this DVD feature?? The ~fan~ in me likes the added detail on the goo and the suggestion of the Queen, but it feels a bit like the sort of connective tissue Scott has no interest in.

I wish we'd seen more of the horrific hosed up ecology on Paradise, I'm way more interested in that then more xenomorphs. Even more curious about exactly what happened between Prometheus and Covenant now.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2017 22:50

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Star beast should be the 'laser sword' of this franchise

# ¿ Sep 11, 2017 04:22

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It was canceled just in time to avoid the horrifically misogynistic mass rape plot they had coming up

# ¿ Sep 14, 2017 07:33

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 11:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

happyhippy posted:

Do you think would a squad of marines (ala Aliens) totally own the Engineer homeworld too?

Lol they would do exactly as well as they did in Aliens. They're walking allegory for military hubris.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2018 17:42

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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