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Doctor Zero posted:This is my issue with the prequels. Aliens were created by a human-built android. Really? Then how does an ancient derelict containing hundreds or thousands of eggs end up on Acheron? Remember that the Space Jockey is loving fossilized. The ship commandeered by Shaw and David in Prometheus is already literally ancient, being over 2000 years old. The alien suits used are, likewise, over 2000 years old. They even find a frozen alien who’s over 2000 years old, so they obviously have easy access to ancient stuff. There is no such thing as an ancient fossil, however, since fossils are by definition older than what we classify as “ancient”. The characters in Alien are speaking informally, since Jokey appears mummified but not necessarily fossilized. Mummification is a process that can happen very quickly, and there’s no way to just look at a mummy and automatically know that it’s over 10,000 years old. “Also it completely fucks up the life cycle of a Xenomorph. Oh it gestates and becomes a giant squid for... reasons? The idiot scientist that gets infected turns into a yeti for ... reasons?” The reason is that those are all different species. “Don't even get me started on the whole implying that Jesus was a 12 foot bald porcelain skinned engineer.” That’s not implied in the movie. “Oh gently caress I completely blocked the goddamn disembodied head that is still alive and explodes into goo for .... who the gently caress even knows anymore.” The head is not alive. The aliens remains were kept preserved by the dangerous nanotechnology. The scientists zap the head with a small electrical charge, as part of a test. This accidentally ‘reawakens’ the goo, which proceeds to violently disintegrate the head. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Mar 21, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 15:22
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 00:50 |
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ImpAtom posted:Honestly I think I would have liked Prometheus better if it just... didn't have anything to do with Alien except maybe being set in the same universe. Prometheus doesn’t have anything to do with Alien, though, aside from being set in the same universe. Like, they take place decades apart, on different worlds, with different characters. When the two films are viewed together, the only new plot point introduced is that the aliens have been doing experiments on Earth for a while. You also get a small amount of info on Weyland-Yutani Corporation, I suppose, but not a huge amount of detail. Strictly speaking, Prometheus might not even be classifiable as an Alien prequel because - to my recollection, at least - it’s never actually stated in what year Alien takes place. If you watch only those two films, Prometheus can be treated as a chronological sequel. Set dates for the events of Alien were not given until Aliens, so Prometheus is only a prequel in the context of the broader franchise.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:11
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ImpAtom posted:It has the Space Jockey and Weyland as the center parts of the plot. I mean completely divorced. Not "Here's the secret origin of Weyland-Yutani and the Space Jockey" But, as I noted, the film doesn't actually provide an origin for either of those things. The alien base they find isn't even their homeworld. Like, okay: showing the founder of the company Ripley works for is sort-of implicitly an origin, I guess. But how does that actually impact Alien's narrative at all?
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Mar 22, 2024 17:27
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ImpAtom posted:It makes it more about Earth, which is what I dislike. It goes from "A bunch of space truckers run into something fundamentally unknown and terrible" to "A bunch of space truckers run into a genetic offshoot of the same aliens who created them" and it just loses something for me as a horror thing. The more you explain something the less scary it is I think. I love Aliens and even that runs into the problem a bit. I think that kind of broad explanation is, ironically, missing how particular aspects of the film shape the narrative. Like, this 'more information = less scary' formula. Why can't a shark-eyed, murderous giant ape-man be scary? It's like saying Jaws can't be scary because we know what a shark is. (We certainly know less about the aliens in Prometheus than we do about sharks.) A major fan complaint about Prometheus, after all, is that it paradoxically doesn't provide much exposition about what's going on. Why did these shark-apes create/influence humanity? Why are they plotting to dump this mutagenic goo on us? What is the black goo??? You can reach obvious conclusions, but you have to puzzle them out on your own. But that's the rub: Prometheus encourages you to think about the monsters as characters, with motivations and stuff. Moreover, you start thinking in terms of their material reality: these alien guys are a part of a larger society, producing their tech through work, probably because someone ordered them to. They have religious beliefs that justify their actions, etc. They're probably getting a space paycheck, just like Ripley. This marks a transition from sci-fi horror to full-on speculative fiction - and the bridge is comedy. Prometheus is the fifth movie in a multimedia franchise (the tenth, if you include Predator films). It goes without saying that not all of these stories are actually scary at all, nor even intended to be. In this context, Prometheus is specifically a horror-comedy where a guy smokes the weed in a haunted castle and then dies of a sex joke. To that end, the story is presented from the point of view of this entertainingly amoral Hannibal figure, David. And this is again grounded in the material: David is a slave owned by a deranged Thiel/Musk-like billionaire. We understand where he's coming from. So, the trouble isn't exposure to too much information, but the fact that Prometheus is a powerful artwork. Alien remains the same movie, but you've changed in how you interpret it and now react very differently to the "unknown and terrible". What I really love about Covenant is that, at that point, even the individual 'xenomorphs' are treated as characters with particular behaviors, shaped by their experiences. Covenant, presented from the fearless Walter's point of view, is specifically a gothic romance. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 18:39
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MarcusSA posted:This is what I assumed when I watched it Shaw believes that the aliens are the gods responsible for creating life on Earth, but a big part of her arc is to realize “we were wrong! We were so, so wrong!” It's not really possible for the aliens to have pre-programmed billions of years of evolution into a goo. And just to produce a species of ape that kinda resembles them? Why would they bother spending billions of years on this project, when the result is just this basic-rear end genetic engineering? The reality is that they're 'gods' in the sense of gigantic assholes who live in space who gently caress around with people, not God. Today's humans are only like 300,000 years old. The oldest evidence Shaw has is from 33,000 BC.
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Mar 22, 2024 19:15
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Doctor Zero posted:I want to hear more about how Prometheus is a comedy. That’s an interesting statement I’ve never heard anyone else talk about. Well, if you watch Alien 1, there’s a real undercurrent of sadness to everything. There’s some fun banter, but also quiet bits like Dallas just sitting in the escape shuttle by himself. They hold a sad little funeral for Kane. Even Jokey died, seemingly, alone. The last thing that happens is Ripley recording a message stating that she and the poor cat might not survive the trip home. Prometheus doesn’t do that, obviously. And it’s not some kind of deficiency, like they tried to be sad and failed. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say prequels are inherently comedic, they do inherently deal with a fatalism that can be mined for comedy. These characters are doomed from the outset, and we know from all the other films. Even if you’ve never seen a movie before, though, Prometheus is told from the perspective of David, who scans the human crew’s dreams - before they even wake up - and concludes that they’re all idiots. Because he’s so far beyond the humans while simultaneously bound by the butler programming imposed upon him, David ends up an arch, camp figure. He plays up his artificial servility while cracking dry jokes about his masters’ ironic “monkey’s paw” comeuppances. That the context in which the guy who literally says “I’m not here to make friends” gets attacked by a penis monster and turned into a space werewolf. So Shaw’s arc, in the end, is to surprise David. Or, rather, to impress him by overcoming her too-human psychological limitations: “I didn’t know you had it in you.” In a broader context, Prometheus’s depiction of Weyland Corp is very much making fun of tech-bro hipster types and a more liberal version of corporate culture. Vickers - the strong female character ‘girlboss’ CEO - is doing this mission under the guise of philanthropy, but literally serving the same patriarch who ostensibly died. The movie also came out right after Avatar, and was a refreshing piece of counterprogramming to that film’s neon hippie take on Aliens. I still think of it as the anti-Avatar.
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Mar 23, 2024 03:18
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Vampire Panties posted:Yes, exactly. From David playing with the basketball, Idris's mustache, the flamethrowers, "decontaminating" the surgical bed with nitrogen, the Engineer inexplicably running towards Nooni instead of going to a different ship, they obviously felt they needed to hit very specific Alien/Aliens/Aliens3/Aliens:Resurrection notes, and instead of it being a medley its just people hammering at the piano keys Top 5 ICONIC Alien Moments: -Playing Basketball -Having a Moustache -Using a Flamethrower -Nitrogen -Running Towards a Person -
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Mar 23, 2024 13:46
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 00:50 |
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Shaw and Holloway are both explicitly “ancient aliens” nutbars, reflecting the two sides of that theory. Shaw is the fundamentalist creationist who believes God’s miracles objectively occurred and can be proven scientifically. Holloway is an atheist who hopes science will reveal that “God” was all along just a species of alien. These are effectively just different attitudes towards the same non-belief, which is why they’re partners. A basic joke of the premise is that their fake garbage science accidentally leads to a real discovery: godlike aliens have been visiting Earth for many thousands of years and probably inspired various myths, but the creationists are so ideologically hosed that they can’t interpret the data. Milburn, the biologist, calls them out on this: they’re idiots who reject the theory of evolution. And he’s right; nothing they uncover actually disproves evolution. All they find is that a species of ape related to humans has somehow had access to flying saucers. Shaw simply assumes that, because theses tall white guys have power, they must be billions of years old, benevolent, creators of the universe, and surrogate daddies to her. They must have access to the meaning of life, etc. It’s no wonder that this appeals to Weyland; he refers to himself as a Titan at the start of the film, the hero who will bring humanity knowledge of its cosmic purpose.
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Mar 23, 2024 21:10
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