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SuperMechagodzilla posted:In the first however many minutes of Alien, there are no characters onscreen at all. Whose POV is it, then? This is always what fascinated me about Alien, and what grabbed me viscerally when I saw it as a kid. Just the computers of the Nostromo clicking to life, reflected in the empty space helmet, creating a conversation between the machine and the machine, which is really just the same information repeated infinitely between them, before watching the crew be 'born' from their cryogenic pods.
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Jun 30, 2015 18:14
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I think it's also worth noting that virtually every Alien sequel has attempted in some way to recreate the opening, that feeling of omnipresent dread and removal from all 'earthly' safety when we're given a God's eye view of space itself, and then this inscrutable machine floating in space, before any actual element of 'humanity' is revealed. In the first film, however, this is conveyed in terms of the empty space helmet 'talking to the computer,' which I believe is actually a detail explicit in even the earliest drafts of O'Bannon's scripts. This itself connotes the idea that human communication, interaction, commands and consents, have become thoroughly mechanical and artificially reflective. The movie opens by challenging our very conception of what humanity is, before giving birth to these sweaty, lanky, pale crew that largely ends up in the situation it's in by accepting bleakly the inscrutable whim of "Mother." Even when we get to the 'cool,' morbid German expressionist's alien planet, we are already inundated with this imagery of the alien-ness in humanity itself, which is conveyed largely through references to mechanism and industry. Even the superficial personalities of the characters kind of become a mute point, rendering the twist that "Ash is a God drat robot" truly surprising. The reason is because though this was a later addition that O'Bannon thought was dumb, it fits perfectly with this theme of humanity 'lost in space,' reduced to the safeguards of vastly more advanced, vastly more valued industry.
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Jun 30, 2015 19:06
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The thing is that Alien 3 actually does a pretty good job of that. Except it's no longer really about the oppressive industry that was already in remission from deregulation and outsourcing by the time the film was made, but about consumerism divorcing people from spirituality. The cult of the prison planet literally have barcodes on the back of their heads. The opening score isn't some abstract dirge a la The Shining just a year later. It's an ode to God for salvation as the floor literally drops out from the final setting of the previous film. I've always found Fincher's variation on the Scott opening equally as compelling as Cameron's own fantastic "Sleeping Beauty in space" motif.
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Jun 30, 2015 19:16
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I don't know - the whole point of the rotting Space Jockey in the first film is that it's just a reflection of the Nostromo crews own inevitable fate, to be 'reborn' as this 'perfect organism.' Prometheus depicts this perfect organism consuming its creator and, thus, effectively 'joining the side' of its Christian fundamentalist mother. This opens the door for David and Shaw to basically be liberated from the mental slavery of the world and its hegemonic complicity in ecologically devastating capitalism, and to explore the universe, to find more answers to even greater questions about humanity. Say what you will, the ending is fantastic, and carries on the themes of Alien much more effectively then either Aliens or Alien 3. The ending of Prometheus just renders concrete that the xenomorph is just a reflection of ourselves, equally traumatized and abused by its conception, not just an abstract expression of a sadistic, literal hive mind.
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Jun 30, 2015 19:55
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The only Alien-related game I ever played was a Playstation version of that RPG Aliens Vs. Predator: Extinction. Mostly I just played the Alien campaigns 'cause swarming is a super easy battle strategy, it turns out, especially when wherever you are is home turf advantage.
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Jul 2, 2015 04:05
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Funnily enough, a lot of this confusion comes down to the plain and simple fact that in the initial story crafted by O'Bannon and Shusett, there was no robot-espionage subplot. That occurred fairly late in the development stages of the script when the producers were heavily heavily re-working it (to the extent that they notoriously tried to marginalize O'Bannon and Shusett merely to a "story by" credit). O'Bannon himself hated the twist.
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Nov 19, 2016 23:24
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That looks really good.
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Dec 25, 2016 06:23
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A minute is a really long time.
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Dec 28, 2016 16:43
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Yeah, the line has nothing to do with Ripley. It's a tease of Vasquez being Latina. It does, however, give more characterization of how common 'bug-hunting' is used as propaganda to attract the special kind of psychos to be colonial marines ("We Endanger Species" and all).
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Dec 30, 2016 16:46
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willie_dee posted:Why is it? Because "canon," by its very nature, has to ruin everything. The only time the aliens are clearly bioengineered is in Alien: Resurrection - it's there that you notice their design shifting away deliberately from 'robo-skeleton space-penis' to 'space velociraptor.'
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Dec 30, 2016 19:31
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ruddiger posted:So if it's as good as an nes game (in your eyes), shouldn't you still like it considering you still like/play nes games? It's a joke post.
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Mar 1, 2017 03:55
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Elysium and Chappie were good, you weenies. Better than District 9, even.
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Mar 7, 2017 07:09
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Shageletic posted:The movie hinges on you liking him. Hence the scene when the Robocop bot is about to gun him down being in slow mo, and him screaming at it taking forever to finish. No it doesn't, and the scene you vaguely describe doesn't imply that. You are doing a poor job of criticizing the performances in the movie because you are deliberately ignoring performance: Ninja acts callously, abusively, and manipulatively throughout the film, carried to the tune of his own vainglorious songs about himself. The plot of the film is that this character kidnaps, coerces, and trains a naive man-child into doing dirty work to help save his own skin. This unwittingly leads him into the path of the psychotic Hugh Jackman. There is not, at any point, any injunction upon you to like Ninja or respect his moral character, because Blomkamp treats this as irrelevant.
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Mar 8, 2017 00:01
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Shageletic posted:Then why spend so much of the running time focusing on his near dying (referencing the scene I mentioned above). The movie goes into slow-mo, the score rises, and Ninja spits defiance on an unbeatable opponent, with what I suppose was the uplifiting twist of actually surviving it. The scene you are describing uses cinematography, editing, and score to portray Ninja's struggle as significant and dynamic. This is not the same thing as 'justification.' The filmmakers are not trying to get you to 'like Ninja' in the vague sense of respecting him as a conventional, sympathetic character. They are merely telling a story where one of the characters is, irrevocably, an obnoxious and amoral criminal. The problem you are having is that you are very good at expressing displeasure with Jones/Ninja as a performer, and by extension Blomkamp's decision to build a sci-fi action/black comedy around this persona; but not very good at writing critically. The entertainment value of a film comes from how it's shot, edited, scored, the production design, action choreography, etc. The 'commentary' comes from you writing truthfully and accurately about the subject and how it is presented. There is no consistency in your displeasure, and nothing factual about Ninja's bad acting. You admit that it's "fine" for films to feature unconventional, unsympathetic, or amoral characters, but do not elaborate why this is bad in Chappie, or how the filmmakers would go about 'justifying' the film. By keeping these principles vague, you are let off the hook for failing to demonstrate that you actually noticed that Ninja (for example) abandons his adopted son in a misguided attempt to try to make him 'harder,' which leads to the naive man-child being symbolically raped in a van. The obscenity of what the film is presenting - and Ninja's ironic redemption from his own perspective - is not a failure to make you care or give you reason to engage. The medium is the message. Chappie is a scandalized coming-of-age story, where Ninja assumes the role of a deadbeat, abusive father. The predominating tone of the film is not one of sentimentalism or redemption, but of a constantly escalating black comic farce. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Mar 8, 2017 |
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Mar 8, 2017 22:50
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Shageletic posted:Yeah, going to that beaten horse rhetorical device of criticising the critic, not his opinion, is really helping your argument. I am criticizing your opinion, which involves pointing out that you consistently make vague proclamations about what Chappie (and now Spring Breakers) is, but not actually demonstrating that you paid attention to the movie by offering specific details about its subject and how it's presented formalistically. Your profession of faith that Blomkamp unambiguously identifies through Ninja is another one of these. The subject at hand is Chappie, not Blomkamp. Ninja's "reams of dialogue" and performance is characterization of Ninja, and while you may see his characterization as simplistic, this is not the same thing as it being nonsense. Ninja's characterization and performance can be both aggressively simple and strong. And in order to engage with it, you need to describe it accurately: Ninja is a an ignorant, indigent criminal who lives in an abandoned building surrounded by his artwork which he only exhibits to himself, and listening to his own voice. He is neither portraying a character who is charismatic or intelligible - and, in fact, part of the farce of the movie is that it's Ninja's goal to make Chappie as obnoxious and unintelligible as he is. He cares about others insofar as they are a projection of himself, and he is motivated by materialism and impulsive euphoria. He reacts to Yolandi's death in a manner consistent with his pathological need to be perceived as 'hard,' a 'big dog.' The farce with regards to Ninja comes about through the gulf between what he demonstrates and says, and what actually occurs. Ninja is not the 'big dog' standing triumphantly over the dead dog. The big dog is Hippo, and Yolandi is dead. Ninja says that killing someone is just putting them to sleep, and a favor. But then Chappie reveals that he really can take a 'sleeping' consciousness and give it new life.
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Mar 8, 2017 23:54
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Shageletic posted:to simply repeating what happened in the movie (the end) without mentioning why that is relevant to the point at hand, how Ninja's characterization (and the movie as a whole, consequentially) was ineptly portrayed and performed. This is not an inept performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG8mCC1ZQ1g In this specific instance, that Ninja is an uncharasmatic leader figure is objectively the point. Remember, the film opens with them being marked by the predatory Hippo character. This scene is vivid explanation of why Ninja is now in this position: He's an infantile fantasist throwing ninja stars at bottles. Ninja himself is really playing two characters. The first is not Ninja, but the uncredited Watkin Tudor Jones, the very real man who is very much just using Ninja as a libidinal, obscene persona.
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Mar 9, 2017 02:56
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Olympic Mathlete posted:The worst bit about Ninja in Chappie is the lol at him struggling to hold up a prop gun and fire it with his noodle arms. The trick is to not get hung-up with what Shag sees as the marker of 'adept' (as opposed to inept) performance, which is that it conveys "the interior mind" of a character. Words have meaning, so we first need to ask, "What the gently caress is an interior mind, as opposed to an exterior mind?" And once we've asked that question, we realize that Ninja's mind, this interior essence of the character, is made exterior by the symbolic order of the film. Ninja's "interior mind" is all over the loving house in which he lives. It's all over his body. It's in the leopard seat covers of his van. It's in the fact that he has this roided-up custom yellow AK-47, whereas Hippo has an actual gold AK-47. The adeptness of Ninja's performance is embodied in how persistently some viewers misidentify him as a 'real person.' "This isn't good acting, it's just Ninja-playing-Ninja." But this is inaccurate. Ninja is already a performance, and a very convincing one.
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Mar 9, 2017 15:33
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The_Doctor posted:No more good boy Alien? I really like that for a minute the production department was so lost and non-communicative that somehow it got okayed through multiple people that they would, like, dress up a dog... like, like The Killer Shrews or something.
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Mar 31, 2017 17:54
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Alien 3 has the dopest slate of fugly British character actors. Yeah, it really irks me when some write off the supporting cast as 'nameless' casualties, because all of them are really compelling, and Fincher's direction is remarkably accomplished for a freshman effort. The fact that I literally don't know who half of them are most of the time is a feature, not a bug.
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May 3, 2017 19:43
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My favorite Fincher joint is still Panic Room.
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May 4, 2017 23:46
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:That's my least favorite of the good ones but it's still very good. One word: K-Stew.
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May 5, 2017 05:54
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I would skip right from the assembly cut of Alien 3 to AVP:R and then onto Prometheus.
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May 15, 2017 04:22
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The 'mystery' in Alien is introduced at the end of the second act, when Ripley is trying to figure out why Ash is acting so weird. Before that, everything which happens is perfunctory monster movie stuff. The difference is that the film is exceedingly well designed and shot, but there is no implicit 'mystery' to anything. They find the aliens on an alien planet, on an alien ship. We are shown that another alien is dead, and then several scenes later we are shown how. These questions of "But what did the space jockeys use them for?" or "Where is their home planet?" are superficial details which, if mined for an independent narrative, can be just as provocative or sensational, so long as they are well-designed and shot.
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May 19, 2017 21:43
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ImpAtom posted:Yes. When something is defined by being mysterious and unknowable ("Alien" if you will) then the more you make it understandable and defined the less interesting it becomes. It actively devalues the themes and execution so that you can go to Alienpedia and make sure to note the exact details of the creature's history. The false equivalency you are drawing is between the superficial plot content of Prometheus/Alien: Covenant, and your belief that the significance of this content is in 'trying to explain' the events of a completely different movie. This is related to your misunderstanding of what "alien" means. Like the film Alien, it has nothing to do with "being mysterious and unknowable." The characters are uncertain about aspects of the derelict craft and its passengers/cargo, but very quickly learn that they are trapped in a brutal, predatory scenario. There is nothing complex or obscurantist about this. The monster wants to kill them. They get it. We get it. What makes it "alien" is, specifically, its foreign nature. Not strictly the unknowable, but this irrational fear of the unnatural outsider whose influence is purely parasitic and corrosive. But, ultimately, what the plot of the film is working towards is that this superficial skeleton martian is actually an abstraction of the real monster, which is Mother/"the god drat company."
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May 19, 2017 22:01
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ImpAtom posted:Incorrect. That's the interesting thing. The creature doesn't just want to kill them. The creature is depicted as strange and bizarre and its actions hard to understand. It kills but it isn't predatory when it kills. It takes Brett and Dallas (and if you go by deleted scenes it takes them to corrupt one into an egg and impregnate the other) and then it attacks Parker and Lambert but at bare minimum while it kills Parker we're left intentionally ambiguous about the horror of what it does to Lambert. All we know is that she's screaming for a long time before she dies. It doesn't just kill her. What you're saying is in essence the mistake the Marines make in Aliens. "They're bugs, they're animals, they're just creatures you kill." And that isn't right. The Alien isn't just an animal who kills to eat or even to reproduce. Whatever happens to poor Lambert is a big ol' example of that. The first two victims of the alien are unambiguously killed. The first one when it comes jettisoning out of his chest, the second when he has his skull caved in by the monster's tongue and is abducted screaming into the rafters of the ship, never to be seen or heard from again. What happens to Dallas in the deleted scene does not occur in the film, and is not only not admissible as evidence as to how mysterious the alien is, but contradicts this point by over-explaining what happens to Dallas. In the film, Dallas is 'disappeared,' probably killed, like most of the characters explicitly are. Brett is not killed "in a profound and intentionally illogical act of body horror." Predatory species use the host bodies of their prey to reproduce all the time. There is nothing profound or illogical about this. Parker is killed, and Lambert screaming for a long time before being disappeared only illustrates that her death/disappearance was extremely painful, emotionally and physically. It does not contradict the alien's predatory motivations. Maybe the alien played with Lambert before killing/disappearing her. Predators play with their prey all the time. (For instance, house cats.) Predator and predatory behavior do not mean that a life form only kills for food, or because it was threatened, or that they only act in necessary (not "needless") ways. Behavior which is predatory is based on a natural inclination to exploit or oppress others. The mistake that the marines in Aliens make is not that they think the aliens are 'just bugs.' The mistake that they make is in believing that their 'superior firepower' and training counts for more than the popular support and environmental acclimation of the indigenous population.
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May 21, 2017 13:00
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I really wanna go to the timeline where Star Beast is a thing. (You know that Roger Corman/New World Pictures would have balked at the title "Alien," not punchy enough.) You have to wonder at, without Hill, the other producers, and Scott's influence, what would have been made of Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusetts' gory tome of a script, and just how much more explicit it would be that all the 'mysterious' aspects of the alien mythos are really just a collage of generic science-fiction. You have to wonder about the film in which the only potential cultural influence it has is that it puts together the plot of Planet of the Vampires and It! The Terror from Beyond Space (and some short stories/horror comics), and then adds the morbid first act twist that "the monster screws one of 'em!"
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May 24, 2017 04:26
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Despera posted:Lovecraftian horror was always overrated. Find monster, run away. It's not so much that it's 'overrated' as it is that "Lovecraftian" and "cosmic horror" are terms that are bandied around without acknowledging the formal qualities of the text, and their cultural influences. It's the same way that post-Alien alien movies are disparagingly contrasted with the 'iconic' status of the original and its apparent mystery. What's occurring is merely an uncritical enthusiasm for superficial content. To put it bluntly: What happens in Lovecraft's fiction is not actually that the reader is faced with something incomprehensible. What happens is that the characters are faced with something incomprehensible to them. The mythos of Lovecraft's work was not this spontaneous product of the 'unknown' - he pulled liberally and deliberately from Western and Judeo-Christian mythology (Titans, half-human degenerates, subterranean beasts, Leviathans and Behemoths, apocrypha of sea monsters, etc.) in order to build around his protagonists a horrific gnosis that violently disturbs their preconceptions about the stability of civilization and the permanence of mankind. These were further - and rather overtly because of the author's (for the time) typical racism - influenced by nativist fear of immigration and miscegenation, poor urban planning and sanitation control, evolutionary biology ('men come from apes'), etc. Lovecraft's horror is not defined by its superficial content - sleeping giants, lost cities, witch covens, all of which are generic features of historical and contemporary folklore and literature, far from incomprehensible. What defined his work was his prose and his preoccupation with characters who were so sutured into their particular ideological context that they were lead pre-deterministically to madness once 'science' and archaeology inevitably proved them wrong. We can adapt the same critical theory to Alien, wherein the superficial content and 'mythos' of canon take the place of actually explaining why the film is compelling. The biology and behavior of the alien are far from incomprehensible. Its reproductive cycle is influenced by terrestrial predatory wasps. Its behavior aboard the Nostromo - while intelligent and systematic - is straightforwardly predatory. In the so-called "Director's Cut," it is further revealed that it can use host bodies to repeat the cycle of reproduction, but this in and of itself is actually rather logical, and only 'incomprehensible' in the sense that it's obviously science-fantasy bullshit which has no specific, systemic explanation. The plot of the director's cut is that we are watching the life cycle of a non-terrestrial organism, and any leaps in imagination are immediately explained by the fact that it's a loving alien. Same thing with the space jokey, the ship, and the egg chamber. How did it get there? What were they for?: They're aliens. They come from space. The story of the film is about how a bunch of 'space truckers' encounter this life-form, and how this encounter, thematically, becomes expressive of their own fatal condition within a political landscape that is still, fundamentally, rooted on Earth. Where did the space jokey come from? He's a space trucker... like them. It was expendable in order to transport and be a host for "the perfect organism." That's the horrific kernel that informed the filmmakers' decision to model the production design of their film, not after the literature and B-movies that actually inspired the script, but after H. R. Giger's Necronomicon and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The alien and its mythos are not scary, as alien fans themselves keep bringing up with respect to the 'expanded universe' that evolved around the creature just as it did around Lovecraft's own rudimentary boogeymen. What's scary is this giant black penis monster with an external human skeleton and 'exhaust ports' emerging from its back. What's scary is how the creature reflects the subjective experience of the characters.
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May 24, 2017 17:58
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Alien Megathread: We still can't talk about intersex SMFH
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May 25, 2017 02:20
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Alien Megathread: Your Nostalgia is a Locked Room, and Only Neill Blomkamp Has the Key
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May 25, 2017 02:59
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Hodgepodge posted:^^^ The famous quote about how "with strange aeons even death may die" is a wry twist on Christianity. Exactly. The cognitive dissonance provoked between Alien and Prometheus/Covenant is not because the former is this iconic example of Lovecraftian horror, whereas the latter are 'unnecessary' exposition. Alien is not concerned with spiritual matters or the archaic past, which is the essence of Lovecraft's fiction. It's only when we get to Alien 3 that we start getting poo poo, like, colonies of murderer/rapist-monks and dudes worshipping the xenomorph as an avenging angel and poo poo. Hell, even AVP expanded upon these themes. The speculation upon the alien as a Lovecraftian archetype is the inevitable consequence of the 'expanded universe' of canon, whereas the first movie is a slasher movie in space, and is actually less occultist than, say, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (in which astrology is used as foreshadowing) or Halloween and Friday the 13th (with their eponymous holidays and full moons and such). Prometheus is full of meaty, unalloyed, Lovecraftian poo poo. And fans don't dig it.
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May 25, 2017 04:25
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ruddiger posted:Prometheus takes place on a(n originally pagan) holiday too. Ding ding ding. wyoming posted:If only the black goo had whistled "Tekeli Li!" The funny thing is that Galaxy of Terror is a more Lovecraftian movie than Alien. Amarcarts posted:I can enjoy both, and I'm not necessarily sure it's that particular difference that makes the new movies not as good. Sometimes I wonder if it has to do with the director's age and level of success. When Scott was younger he had to collaborate with actors on a more equal playing field, so you got more artistic synergy in the performances. Nowadays the deck is too stacked in his favor so the actors' creative output is suppressed. All of it is very subtle and maybe nobody notices it at the time but I think any sort of artist would tell you that this sort of thing ultimately affects the finished work. But we're returning then, again, to the problem where instead of straightforwardly describing the work, its formal qualities, and its themes, we instead speculate about the impurity of the experience. Like, of course Ridley Scott getting older has something to do with Prometheus feeling less resonant than Alien - but that's just one drop of water in the stream of time, my friend. It also has to do with the intense, 'primal experience' of witnessing Alien, and how every time we remember this and then re-watch it harboring this nostalgia, we compound upon the ideological fantasy that the reason it's good is because of some 'invisible' jouissance, as opposed to Alien being good is a matter of appraising its formal qualities, and you enjoying the film to whatever extent is dependent upon your unique emotional state and memories. So, yes, Scott is a different person, now - but so are you, and Prometheus is a completely different movie. It is obviously formalistically and thematically distinct from Alien, it was never going to nor supposed to recreate this primal experience. Like, with Alien the dialog mix was poo poo and everybody mumbled, so you didn't know what the gently caress was going on half the time, which was formalistically appropriate for a sci-fi slasher movie about space truckers. Scott has already made that movie, though, and he did a drat fine job. Now he's making a space epic, about less swarthy characters in a less straightforward context, the formalistic motivations are completely different. We have to deal with it. There are plenty of less experienced, younger filmmakers making movies sharing formalistic and thematic DNA with Alien. Would we ever dare to claim that they are all better than Prometheus, because they are made by younger filmmakers with less pull? No, of course not, that would be silly. If anything, we would just move onto the next excuse: 'Ah, this is just a "retread" of Alien!' This primal experience of Alien can not be recreated. There is no going back. We have to judge films on their formal merits, and this involves paying close attention to the observable text. This will lead us to a more eluminated understanding of not only films going forward, but Alien itself. For instance: the most overt literary reference in the film is not to H.P. Lovecraft, but to Joseph Conrad.
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May 25, 2017 16:26
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Covenant is so, so loving good. The great thing about it is that, whereas Prometheus functioned as a spiritual, 'better than' remake of Alien vs. Predator, this movie functions as a 'better than,' condensed remake of Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien: Resurrection.
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May 26, 2017 03:49
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ruddiger posted:Then Vishnu rapes them. Hot.
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May 26, 2017 04:47
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Lord Krangdar posted:How so? It helps that Alien 3 already begins as a 'condensed' version of Aliens - which is to say, it begins with the protagonist of the first film waking up to discover that her family is dead. In Covenant, this narrative is streamlined so that Newt's biological mother and Newt's adoptive mother are the same person. The explorers arrive on a planet that, explicitly, has already been colonized. There is wheat growing, someone had to plant it. They don't know that, retroactively, wheat is actually an alien organism, and that it only appears on Earth because the space jockeys cultivated it first. Much like in Aliens, the objective of the colony is that it represents the hope for 'new earths,' to 'build better worlds.' Covenant streamlines the events of Aliens so that what happens to the marines and what happens to the colonists occurs simultaneously. Progressing further, and despite the crediting of the performers as 'neomorphs,' it is revealed that the xenomorphs themselves are 'clones' or the genetically engineered offspring of the originals/neomorphs. David himself assumes the role of the post-Weyland-Yutani military operation which clones Ripley and the alien queen. Again, the narrative is streamlined: Rather than concocting an entirely new organization and military-industrial order, Covenant simply says that Weyland's son (David) made aliens from researching other aliens. The climax of the film cycles back to Aliens, explicitly referencing both it and Alien with Daniels plan to just isolate the xenomorph and shoot it out of the airlock. The twist that Covenant adds is that, now, the synthetic is actually aligned with the xenomorph against the humans. David/Walter/Bishop now embraces the "perfect organism," as opposed to human beings, who are consumed by "duty" rather than "love." Unoriginal Name posted:So the boring and completely unnecessary fight with the Alien on the Covenant, that's the masterful remake of the iconic Queen vrs Ripley fight? Really? The scene that even people who like the film, are saying should be cut? Lol, the climax of Aliens was already 'unnecessary.' Ripley already saved her adoptive daughter from the feminine monstrous, and on the Sulaco she does it again, this time in a giant robot suit. This is the problem one encounters when, instead of straightforwardly discussing the formal elements of the film, you instead beat around the bush and talk about anecdotal feelings. Covenant has the same climax as Aliens, but the conclusion is more interesting and horrific: Bishop betrayed Ripley after all. All that "not bad for a ... h-u-u-u-man" poo poo was just a put-on.
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May 26, 2017 07:18
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:Yeah, that's actually a good question, David kept doing these experiments... how the gently caress exactly? That lab looked extremely low-tech for a genetic engineering lab, and the way black goo creatures breed would seem to preclude low-tech artificial selection. Joke answer: David is an artist, man, not a scientist. Serious answer: David is an artist, man, and a stand-in for H. R. Giger against the pedantic, biological realism of Alien fans. He's also archetypically harkening back to Dr. Morbius from Forbidden Planet. alf_pogs posted:the cave did have automatic mood lighting so presumably the primitive cave decor was an artful choice David learned enough about space jockey technology that he could use mood-lighting in a far-flung attempt to seduce Walter. This is why this movie is dope as gently caress, and why I feel really bad for cats who get hung up upon 'necessity.'
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May 26, 2017 07:29
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MrMojok posted:Nah, the ending of Aliens owned. Powerloader scene was completely necessary. I didn't say the scene wasn't well-done, I'm saying 'necessity' has nothing to do with it. The powerloader fight does not occur because it's necessary - it occurs in order to escalate the conflict between Ripley and her 'personal demons,' after it has already technically been resolved in a previous scene. 'Necessity' is one of these things like 'Lovecraftian' and 'Ridley Scott is too old and has too much creative security.' Cats have convinced themselves that James Cameron's war-movie sequel to a space slasher is a non-gratuitous film. Doflamingo posted:It's one of the coolest fight scenes ever made. The last fight in Covenant, on the other hand, was completely unnecessary. I was way ready for the movie to be over by that point. Again, you are merely describing your feelings, and beating around the bush. Why is the powerloader fight necessary, versus the apparently unnecessary qualities of the climactic battle in Covenant? What is your justification, based on the formal elements of the respective films, as to why James Cameron successfully repeats and escalates dramatic conflict after a brief period of false security, whereas with Covenant, you believe it's gratuitous?
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May 26, 2017 15:11
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ImpAtom posted:"Necessary" is a word you apparently have no actual definition for because you're struggling to retroactively justify a conclusion you came to, as with almost every single argument you've made in this thread, because it's clear you're arguing from intentionally contrarian viewpoints instead of anything you actually believe. Yeah, you're right, that certainly is clear, just like it's clear that the fake-out at the climax of Aliens is motivated, whereas the fake-out at the climax of Covenant is unnecessary. Oh, wait... superh posted:Alien: Covenant's sequence has meaning for Daniels, too. She's got to smash the Alien with the truck - the last vestige of a connection she held to her dead husband. This is only the second time that this setting/machine appears in the film, and it is dramatically motivated. To further expand on what superh has written, the relationship between Daniels and Walter/David is at play here, too. In contrast to the duty-bound Walter comforting Daniels in her hour of need, Walter/David now watches perversely from a control room as his beloved child, the Xenomorph, similarly duty-bound, attempts to kill Daniels. I have not made any contrarian point. I have written straightforwardly that Covenant is a remake of Aliens, but in which the optimistic ending is betrayed. The Ripley figure is now a supporting character in David/Walter's story. I am only rejecting the non-reading that the climax of Aliens is good because it's dramatically motivated, but that the climax of Covenant is bad because it's unnecessary, with no actual explanation of how formal choices in narrative or aesthetics become apparently 'necessary.' When challenged, Aliens fans merely misdirect the issue into defending Aliens, which was never being criticized. The challenge is the reading of Covenant, or, as it were, the non-reading.
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May 26, 2017 19:50
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ImpAtom posted:It's extra hilarious how you are so desperate to be angry at fans you ignored the point I didn't say anything about Alien:Covenant at all. You're the one who attempted to misdirect the issue by going "Well, people didn't have a problem with it in ALIENS which totally did the same thing!!" What you have quoted is not a criticism of Aliens. It is a criticism of non-reading, of the arbitrary declaration that the climax of Covenant is unnecessary, when I am specifically rejecting this vague construction, and am instead demanding more specific reading. Like, Covenant is criticized, and I write that this is a silly lens to criticize a movie from because it undermines the reading of films fans like. Then you insist that you aren't talking about Covenant at all (which I have also already written, thus confirming it), and continue to try to defend Aliens. I have not yet begun to criticize Aliens. I am criticizing flimsy reading rooted in nostalgia. I am criticizing the demonstration of fans to not read films simply because they are "ready for them to be over" and what-not. I have been writing that there is a difference between describing one's emotions and demonstrating that one is actually interested in discussing the formal elements at play in a film. For instance, if we must return to Aliens, we can tackle this flimsy reading you do where the powerloader scene is essential because it signifies that ImpAtom posted:Ripley embracing her new life (recall that the powerloader is something she knows how to use because of her new job and is one of the few things on the ship that is not a military weapon) and personally using the empowerment of her new life in order to personally overcome the physical representation of her trauma in in order to protect her new daughter. The scene in the hive does not satisfy that requirement at all. It is not gratuitous, it is the end of Ripley's character arc, where she fully embraces her new life and uses it to empower herself... But you have already misinterpreted not only formal elements of the film, but basic plot details. Ripley does not learn how to use the powerloader as part of her 'new life.' She already knows how to use the powerloader. If anything, it represents her old life, and in a previous scene she uses it as an opportunity for good will, to demonstrate to the marines that she's not just some "fifth wheel" or victim that they're superficially ferrying to-and-from the scene of her trauma. In a very straightforward way, the powerloader is used in the film to signify a piecemeal solidarity between Ripley and the marines. Moving forward from this, you make this arbitrary distinction between Ripley using guns to annihilate an indigenous population, and Ripley using the powerloader. But the powerloader is not this apolitical machine. It is owned by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, who are funding this entirely military enterprise to begin with. To the extent that the 'Chekov's gun moment' occurs, that punchy scene in which Ripley runs away and then emerges from the dark in this embiggened suit of armor, this does not contradict the militaristic context of the story at all. Ripley is using an artifact from her old life, owned and manufactured within the military industrial complex of her contemporary society, to annihilate an indigenous radical. This is not a fundamental contradiction of the non-issue that 'guns solve everything,' or whatever. The powerloader is not 'apolitical' whereas the guns are 'bad things' which signify the wrong way to go about indiscriminate killing of the voracious Other. It is an escalation of militaristic themes that pervade the entire narrative. The fake-out occurs for dramatically and thematically motivated reasons, but not out of any apparent 'necessity.' It is included in the film in order to further amp up the audience and suture them into Ripley's apolitical power fantasy and fairy tale. This is the problem with non-reading: I have not said that Aliens is a bad film, or that its ending is 'unnecessary.' I have said that defining the qualities of films by 'necessity' is arbitrary and vague, and detracts from critical reading. Everything about Aliens is flamboyant, gratuitous, and unnecessary, but that doesn't mean it's a bad film. It is, indeed, a very well made, reactionary power fantasy and fairy tale. It begins with a 'sleeping beauty' who then ascends into a suit of armor to destroy a diabolical dragon, which is simultaneously an evil witch/queen. Ripley's empowerment, while guiding structure of the film, is built around precisely this constant escalation, the compounding repetition of imagery. The climax of the film, with Ripley is the suit of armor, standing toe-to-toe with the dragon, is an escalation of the image of her diving deep into the dragon's lair. All I have written is that detractors of the climax of Alien: Covenant are not reading the film in the same way that they have not read Aliens. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The movie even properly "ends" with the reconciliation of "Walter" and Daniels. Right. The perverse thing is that now Walter is defined by love, rather than duty, and this is horrific. Gatts posted:Do we assume David took Walters upgraded body due to the lack of hand? Not that it matters I guess but it'd be fitting. Kind of. Through deliberate montage, right before Walter is about to bash David's head in, the implication is that this violent, psychosexual relationship has fused them into a single figure. David did not take Walter's body, or alter his own. Walter killed David, but then realizes that he was right. Love is more important than duty. He feels authentic remorse in the same way that David is remorseful that, from his point-of-view, Shaw's death was a fatalistic predetermination so that the 'perfect organism' can be born. There is an overt queer-ness to this imagery. David successfully seduces Walter, and through this 'unholy union,' the product is a child (much like the aliens) which fundamentally contradicts binary assumptions of gender and trappings of heterosexual reproduction. Walter/David, literally upchucks embryos, it's awesome. As long as we're talking about non-reading, Covenant deals directly in one of those aspects of Alien that everyone acknowledges, but that no one reads: Which is that the phobia that the xenomorphs stand-in for is not at all cosmic or incomprehensible, but straightforwardly the fear of queer-ness, of gender non-conformity, of intersexuality, of technology leading to the end of heteropatriarchal supremacy through 'natural' sexual reproduction. For all that folks go on and on about how Ripley herself is a 'gender-bending' figure, a postfeminist icon, the reality is that this ascending warrior-princess actually stands in for a comforting, reactionary fantasy in the face of deteriorating sexual norms. Covenant finally and violently rejects this. There is no going back. God is now a bisexual wizard who can reproduce without heterosexual reproduction. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 16:42 on May 27, 2017 |
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May 27, 2017 14:53
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SUNKOS posted:WY and the USCMC are two different companies, though. You might as well claim that forklift trucks are military vehicles as well. This is confirmation of the ideological fantasy at work in Aliens. The overarching threat of the military-industrial complex is obfuscated through Ripley's empowerment in fighting her personal demons. What goes unresolved is that there is no 'apolitical' distinction between the private enterprise and imperial-military establishment, further illuminated by the fact that Ripley is not operating a banal forklift. She is wearing a suit of armor. She is not moving a crate. She is fighting a dragon.
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May 27, 2017 16:57
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Snak posted:One of the things that I really liked about Covenant was how David was this Dracula-like figure. How he comes out of the night, drives away the wolves, and leads the weary travelers to his big spooky castle a great hall and giant table and poo poo. LesterGroans posted:Yeah, I loved the second act the most because of this. David as a creepy Dracula/Dr. Frankenstein figure is perfect, like you said, bringing them off the moors and into his old castle. It has this gothic vibe, which is unique to the series except for maybe Alien 3. Is Industrial Gothic a thing? It's the most overt example of the film subverting the 'fairy tale' imagery of Aliens (sleeping beauty and the good Christian knight are the same person) by making David into a wizard. Like, when we finally see him again, he emerges out of nowhere from the dark in a cloak and casts a torch that immediately sends the evil spirits scattering into the night. Then he brings them back to the lonely ruins where he's been studying the black arts and has magic lamps and poo poo. As Groans notes, this brings it thematically more in line with Alien 3. But even that film couldn't resist the quasi-messianic, optimistic ending. Here we actually see the protagonist 'go to heaven,' with ripe souls all hanging in wait for him, the beautiful, angelic choir he always wanted. Call me anemic, will you dad. I'll show ya. It's also Forbidden Planet, obvi, but where the robot and the master are the same figure.
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May 27, 2017 23:27
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