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But scientists who seem to have no comprehension of quarantine or decontamination protocols?

I will say I'm amazed this is the thing we're using most often as an example when the movie has a geologist with cool 3D mapping probes that build a full map of the interior of the structure and he gets lost. I can write off a lot of the things characters did as conceits common to science fiction, but that one has always boggled my mind in how it managed to make it through the editing process without anyone saying "this is really fething stupid yeah?"

 LordofHats wrote:

Which is a huge issue I have with Covenant.

Ridley Scott in general has this bizarre thing where his movies tend to be heavy handed in presenting very simplistic notions in ways that feel completely out of touch with their setting. A lot of his big movies have this problem. Gladiator, Robin Hood, Prometheus, Kingdom of Heaven, and Covenant. He presents these really heavy handed themes, makes a convoluted plot line with lots of coincidence and contrivance, and often times produces a film where the values and pursuits of the characters feel completely out of place with what's actually going on around them.

I have to say I think the extended cut of Kingdom of Heaven is an excellent film, with some nice subtleties layered under the big stuff; I think it's quite well recorded that there was quite a bit of studio intereference in the theatrical cut to make it more "palatable" (& Scott was not happy about those changes).

Robin Hood is really weird, because he couldn't seem to decide whether to do a light-hearted action romp (i.e. resurrecting swashbucklers the way Gladiator brought back swords n sandals epics) or whether to do a more thoughtful dramatic piece about Magna Carta, freedoms and responsiblities, etc. (i.e. sort-of a thematic sequel to Kingdom of Heaven). I actually think either of these would have been good to great films, but trying to do both in one project was an awful, ridiculous mess.

I don't mind Kingdom of Heaven, though I would say it highlights Orlando's main weakness which is that he's not a lead actor. He lacks a sense of gravity to himself and his acting. He always feels like he's still playing that joint second lead of an elf.

I really must see the extended directors cut. We've seen films - like Aliens 3, get torn apart in the editing and cutting phase only to come to new life when the Directors cut appears.

 LordofHats wrote:

But scientists who seem to have no comprehension of quarantine or decontamination protocols?

I will say I'm amazed this is the thing we're using most often as an example when the movie has a geologist with cool 3D mapping probes that build a full map of the interior of the structure and he gets lost. I can write off a lot of the things characters did as conceits common to science fiction, but that one has always boggled my mind in how it managed to make it through the editing process without anyone saying "this is really fething stupid yeah?"

That was one of the things that I was thinking of as part of my "etc, etc."

I think it boils down to; people doing bad / stupid things because they're scared or greedy (ref. Burke in Aliens) works. People doing bad or stupid things because the plot requires them to do what no sane human would doesn't. It puts you in to bad slasher flick tropes (why don't we all split up and wander around alone in the dark?)

I think part of it is the require us to somehow suspend our disbelief to stupid decisions
They think that because we can accept aliens and robots and ancient aliens creating mankind we can accept people doing stupid things.
But we have no frame of reference to those stuff so we can accept it, or we can accept bad/faulty./ fake science for a good story with characters, but we cant accept people doing stupid stuff.
like Jurassic World. I can accept a super dino hybrid. What i cant accept is people being dumb enough to thing going into the cage before confirming where its tracker is think its a good idea.

 Overread wrote:
I don't mind Kingdom of Heaven, though I would say it highlights Orlando's main weakness which is that he's not a lead actor. He lacks a sense of gravity to himself and his acting. He always feels like he's still playing that joint second lead of an elf.

I really must see the extended directors cut. We've seen films - like Aliens 3, get torn apart in the editing and cutting phase only to come to new life when the Directors cut appears.

If you're talking about the director's cut of KoH, then yes! For starters it explains that Bloom's character had actually served as a military engineer in numerous conflicts, which makes all of his preparations for the siege make a lot more sense; this is a smart guy with a bunch of previous experience and some knowledge of strategy, rather than "blacksmith who promised he'd try real hard".

 Jadenim wrote:

I have to say I think the extended cut of Kingdom of Heaven is an excellent film, with some nice subtleties layered under the big stuff; I think it's quite well recorded that there was quite a bit of studio intereference in the theatrical cut to make it more "palatable" (& Scott was not happy about those changes).

Oh, I like several of those movies.

I'm not saying this is a "makes the movies bad" thing, but it comes up in Scott's work quite often. Sometimes it works, like Gladiator. Sometimes it produces some bizarre whiplash, like Robin Hood.

One bonus of this big shift toward films direct to home services is that perhaps, with no time limits, we won't see cinema groups cutting films as much. We'll get the "directors cut" first time not the third time with the special DVD 5 years later that "fixes" most of the original films issues.

A streaming service hasn't got to make films fit a specific time frame so that they can maximise bums-on-seats in the cinema per day. I

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


Now I’m not calling either of them bad, or brilliant. Just that Resurrection at least tried to do something different, where Alien3 felt like a shonky remake of Alien.

To be fair, Alien3 is more of a resolution to Alien than a remake, and where Alien is a basically IT! The Terror from Beyond Space and Planet of the Vampires, David Fincher's film has its own identity as Black Narcissus and the labyrinth of an ancient greek monster.

Where the other film's are about surviving the horror, Alien 3 is about how each character bows out. Alien3 deals with faith, guilt, loss and death. Its said that one of the intended endings for Scott's Alien is that Ripley is killed at the end. As Terminator 2 was an opportunity for Sarah to blow up Cyberdyne before its created( an idea from the original Terminator ), Ripley finally accepts her part in the Alien story as the final victim of the doomed crew of the Nostromo.

Its quite brave in that the new cast of characters are those that we feel deserve to die, yet are somewhat elevated above the usual teenage fodder of typical slasher movies. On the one hand they are the scum of humanity, but on the other they can be somewhat comical at times.

...its a shame about the production of the film because its a bit like Dune in that despite it's failings, the cast, crew, director and contributers manage to leave their mark on the film and the result is a flawed film with heart. I was disappointed that Hicks and Newt were killed off in such cruel circumstances, but the funeral scene - which also serves as the birth of the creature - always makes me well up inside. Charles Dutton's prayer for Hicks and Newt is a wonderful performance, and the suffering of the dog is sad. Elliot Goldenthal - like Brian Eno - provides a musical cohesion that the film itself is lacking. David Fincher, like David Lynch, was born to be a film maker and even with his hands tied behind his back, still manages to make contact with us visually and atmospherically.

In someways, the first three Aliens movies can be seen as a classic Odyssey. In Alien the crew of the Nostromo could be returning home from Troy, in ALIENS the soliders are confident in their abilities to win against any task the universe can throw at them despite the grave warnings, while Ripley arrives in a foreign land in Alien 3 and is stripped of all hope and must face her death in Hade's underworld with the damned.

Alien Ressurrection...is one I shall ponder in another post. But at the end of the day I love all four films.

I still don't get why in the Directors Cut of Alien 3 they cut the dog scene for the bull - the dog scene was full of tension and an "ick" feeling and the suffering of the dog; the bull scene was just bland. It lacked any gravity and it also left the missing dog an unresolved matter, whilst a random dead cow wasn't out of sorts for the steadily failing colony of prisoners. Also the alien dog fits it for size; if it really came from the bull you'd have expected twisted horns and a MUCH bigger size to the critter as it clearly had no lack for food.







Alien Ressurection I like to view as a fan-service-film. It did some new things for the franchise in terms of things like the hybrid and I think that it also attempted to bring some of the sexual element of the alien design that was Giegers source, into the franchise. Through both Ripley and also the slightly mad scientist (who gets to talk about butterflies before losing his head).
It also took advantage of a lot of CGI and animatronics for its age and let us really get to see the aliens fighting rather than skulking. It was the action fan-service film from a horror series. I tihnk the only thing that makes me go "eh ok that's a stretch" is the whole "we cloned you and the alien from blood" part. Other than that scenes like the clone storage room and such were fantastic and dark scenes. Indeed it showed us more of the dark science side than the previous 3 films. The previous 3 films hinted at this dark side to the science, but we only directly see it through one character in each film, whilst in the 3rd they only appear at the very end and fail to achieve anything.

In the 4th we get to see what kind of experiments and ideas could have been possible (even though its not the original company).

I think it stands the test of time well as part of the original series and whilst its a bit of a stretch in getting Sigorney back into the story, it works. It's got more charm and faithfulness to its roots than the more recent attempts.

I think something that might be sorely lacking in this thread is the Talk about probably the best alien media to have come out in the last several years.
Isolation. Isolation works because even though the alien is known and shown in its full glory, its a direct threat to the audience, in a way.
I think that might be another way to go about it, Video games could be another route to go. and possibly maybe Books.
Could there be chose your own adventure type books, like call of cthulhu solo adventures.

Print media for Aliens has been going since the first film - comics. They are still publishing new comics (Dark Horse too so they are generally good).

 Manchu wrote:
Ouze, it’s mostly implicit to the exposition. But Fifield and Milburn have a conversation around the issue.

Yeah, I wound up re-watching it after this posting and I see where you are getting it from; that exact conversation.

I also caught something else I missed which reinforces that this is an exception to the "older movie has better tech continuity error" that was mentioned - Charlize Theron's character mentioned that Weyland spent more than a trillion dollars on the Prometheus project. So in this specific case, it does make sense that the tech and accommodations in this movie are better than in Alien, which is 30 years afterward.

I hated Prometheus when I first saw it, and I still don't know that I like it - it's got a lot of problems. I do respect that at least Ridley Scott was trying to do something big with it thematically, even though he maybe overextended himself.

I had initially liked it more right after seeing Covenant, but i ALSO re-watched that. While I still definitely like Covenant, which is not a great but not a bad movie, I also see now how some of the things he was trying to explore got abandoned in favor of a more (I'm guessing) commercially viable plot.

Although I still am deeply fascinated with David's arc, overall in-universe making the Xenomorphs an engineered weapon kind of cheapens them a little. That is a very worn trope and I liked it better when they were hideous monsters without explanation, just a little something from the dark corner of the universe where mankind probably shouldn't be wandering.

 Ouze wrote:


Although I still am deeply fascinated with David's arc, overall in-universe making the Xenomorphs an engineered weapon kind of cheapens them a little. That is a very worn trope and I liked it better when they were hideous monsters without explanation, just a little something from the dark corner of the universe where mankind probably shouldn't be wandering.

Word. I think not knowing where the xenomorphs came from and why they are the way they are was a big part of what made them scary in the first place. Taking that away robs them of their mystique. Leaving that out still leaves the door open to thinking they're bio-weapons whilst also letting you speculate they could be something else which is just more fun.

Don’t sweat it overmuch guys, Prometheus and Covenant don’t necessarily explain the origins of the xenomorph. David comes up with something quite similar but notably distinct from the species we saw in the original film. They remain mysterious.

That said, while I would be up for a third movie concluding David’s story, Prometheus and Covenant seem to be their own thing in contrast to Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3, which is the series we are talking about going forward with.

I always liked the weird headspace the old Giger pseudo-mystical artwork gave to the first movie. It made it feel like there was a vast mythos involving the aliens and the jockeys and who knows what, and we were only seeing the tiniest glimpse of its nearest corner. No specifics could ever live up to the promise.

The nearest comparison I can think of is the line from Ghostbusters where Vinz Clortho just starts summing up what he considers the highlights of Gozer’s travels. We have no scale or specifics on what the Voldronaii are or why they had to be rectified, what a torb is when not large and moving, who the Meletrex Supplicants were, etc., but man does it really get my imagination working. The lamest thing ever is whatever comic book illustrated torbs and sloars as, essentially, dinosaurs.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:


Although I still am deeply fascinated with David's arc, overall in-universe making the Xenomorphs an engineered weapon kind of cheapens them a little. That is a very worn trope and I liked it better when they were hideous monsters without explanation, just a little something from the dark corner of the universe where mankind probably shouldn't be wandering.

Word. I think not knowing where the xenomorphs came from and why they are the way they are was a big part of what made them scary in the first place. Taking that away robs them of their mystique. Leaving that out still leaves the door open to thinking they're bio-weapons whilst also letting you speculate they could be something else which is just more fun.

See, I see that as an eventual problem of giving fans want they want, fans will inevitably come up with theories and and such to explain this stuff. and then they want explanation. Then it never holds a candle to what they want.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 creeping-deth87 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:


Although I still am deeply fascinated with David's arc, overall in-universe making the Xenomorphs an engineered weapon kind of cheapens them a little. That is a very worn trope and I liked it better when they were hideous monsters without explanation, just a little something from the dark corner of the universe where mankind probably shouldn't be wandering.

Word. I think not knowing where the xenomorphs came from and why they are the way they are was a big part of what made them scary in the first place. Taking that away robs them of their mystique. Leaving that out still leaves the door open to thinking they're bio-weapons whilst also letting you speculate they could be something else which is just more fun.

See, I see that as an eventual problem of giving fans want they want, fans will inevitably come up with theories and and such to explain this stuff. and then they want explanation. Then it never holds a candle to what they want.

To be fair, and while I agree in large part with the sentiment that the mystery adds a lot of the flavor, the explanations the studios end up going with are so stupid and off the mark that it's pretty much not what anybody wanted, or simply didn't know what they wanted to make themselves. Looking at the Prometheus, they wanted it to function as a prequel without actually directly being a prequel movie and instead be able to stand all on its own, and while it does that, they way they structured the story in order to accomplish those goals makes it a really stupid (if functional) prequel. Had they left the Xenomorphs out of it entirely and just let it go on its own, or had they committed to really making it a direct prequel, I think it would have been better received. Even keeping that premise of being a not-prequel, there were better ways of handling that origin story. There were a lot of ways to make that work, and they went out of their way to choose a silly one

Sir Ridley wanted to make a movie meditating on the themes of Frankenstein. To get the financing, he had to agree that Fox could market it as an Alien movie. The same thing happened with Covenant but hit even harder there (where the final act feels like someone else directed it).

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I think part of it is the require us to somehow suspend our disbelief to stupid decisions
They think that because we can accept aliens and robots and ancient aliens creating mankind we can accept people doing stupid things.
But we have no frame of reference to those stuff so we can accept it, or we can accept bad/faulty./ fake science for a good story with characters, but we cant accept people doing stupid stuff.
like Jurassic World. I can accept a super dino hybrid. What i cant accept is people being dumb enough to thing going into the cage before confirming where its tracker is think its a good idea.

The muscle men aliens were pissed to have created a race of stupid, effeminate gaks that can't do anything right. That's probably why he killed all those people and tried killing humanity. Humanity wasn't 'special' (except in the short buses way on a galactic scale) just some rejects expected to get weeded on earth for stronger, more adaptable and smarter species.

 Ouze wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
Ouze, it’s mostly implicit to the exposition. But Fifield and Milburn have a conversation around the issue.

Yeah, I wound up re-watching it after this posting and I see where you are getting it from; that exact conversation.

I also caught something else I missed which reinforces that this is an exception to the "older movie has better tech continuity error" that was mentioned - Charlize Theron's character mentioned that Weyland spent more than a trillion dollars on the Prometheus project. So in this specific case, it does make sense that the tech and accommodations in this movie are better than in Alien, which is 30 years afterward.

I hated Prometheus when I first saw it, and I still don't know that I like it - it's got a lot of problems. I do respect that at least Ridley Scott was trying to do something big with it thematically, even though he maybe overextended himself.

I had initially liked it more right after seeing Covenant, but i ALSO re-watched that. While I still definitely like Covenant, which is not a great but not a bad movie, I also see now how some of the things he was trying to explore got abandoned in favor of a more (I'm guessing) commercially viable plot.

Although I still am deeply fascinated with David's arc, overall in-universe making the Xenomorphs an engineered weapon kind of cheapens them a little. That is a very worn trope and I liked it better when they were hideous monsters without explanation, just a little something from the dark corner of the universe where mankind probably shouldn't be wandering.

I think this is why they’re such disappointing films; there is real potential for something great in them. David is a fascinating character, with a great arc and a wonderful performance by Michael Fassbender. If they were just dumb, stupid films we wouldn’t care and they’d have just been dismissed and forgotten.

On the tech thing, I picked up a wonderful piece of head-canon recently; Loading Ready Run are doing a streamed Alien RPG (currently on hiatus due to “the Event”) and were using the idea that the FTL technology in the universe isn’t able to cancel out entropy. So if you travel 150 light years, even if it only takes you 6-months, you still accumulate 150-years of entropy, so the ships have to be built out of this big, solid, simple tech in order to work; delicate high-tech stuff generally wouldn’t survive. I don’t know if it come from the RPG source book, or if they made it up, but I love this idea.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

The nearest comparison I can think of is the line from Ghostbusters where Vinz Clortho just starts summing up what he considers the highlights of Gozer’s travels. We have no scale or specifics on what the Voldronaii are or why they had to be rectified, what a torb is when not large and moving, who the Meletrex Supplicants were, etc., but man does it really get my imagination working. The lamest thing ever is whatever comic book illustrated torbs and sloars as, essentially, dinosaurs.

Yup. The Noodle Incident can be a great hook to ignite fan speculation provided you limit its use so the audience doesn't feel like all the cool stuff has happened off screen

 Overread wrote:
I still don't get why in the Directors Cut of Alien 3 they cut the dog scene for the bull - the dog scene was full of tension and an "ick" feeling and the suffering of the dog; the bull scene was just bland. It lacked any gravity and it also left the missing dog an unresolved matter, whilst a random dead cow wasn't out of sorts for the steadily failing colony of prisoners. Also the alien dog fits it for size; if it really came from the bull you'd have expected twisted horns and a MUCH bigger size to the critter as it clearly had no lack for food.

Not sure, but the dog scene is indeed better.

 Jadenim wrote:
and were using the idea that the FTL technology in the universe isn’t able to cancel out entropy. So if you travel 150 light years, even if it only takes you 6-months, you still accumulate 150-years of entropy

Wait. I'm probably getting something wrong, but is that like treating parsecs as a measure of time?

I don’t think so; parsecs are a real unit that Lucas misunderstood/misused. Entropy is a real concept that must always increase (second law of thermodynamics?)

Of course we won’t know whether the concept is nonsense until we can travel faster than light, but I find it a neat, plausible explanation for why a film set several hundred years in the future has self-aware androids and 1970’s computer screens(!)

I'm just struggling to figure out how six months of travel = 150 years of entropy. Unless the entropic effect isn't subject to time dilation. But then that's speeds slower or equal to lightspeed. Is FTL in this case actually FTL, or some kind of hyperspace handwave like most settings...?

According to the technical manual it’s a tachyonic view of the universe, much like Saxton’s take on Star Wars hyperdrive. There is a reverse time dilation effect, where the farther from light speed a ship is in the ftl direction, the “slower” time passes. So, a trip that seems to take a short amount of time from a ‘normal’ frame of reference takes a hundred years subjective time.

 Vermis wrote:
I'm just struggling to figure out how six months of travel = 150 years of entropy. Unless the entropic effect isn't subject to time dilation. But then that's speeds slower or equal to lightspeed. Is FTL in this case actually FTL, or some kind of hyperspace handwave like most settings...?

Ah, I think I see what’s got you, it’s not the six months, it’s the 150 light years = 150 years of entropy. I.e. you can’t break the second law of thermodynamics by skipping time in FTL. I think. Maybe.

 Jadenim wrote:
I don’t think so; parsecs are a real unit that Lucas misunderstood/misused. Entropy is a real concept that must always increase (second law of thermodynamics?)

Of course we won’t know whether the concept is nonsense until we can travel faster than light, but I find it a neat, plausible explanation for why a film set several hundred years in the future has self-aware androids and 1970’s computer screens(!)

I mean, the concept is nonsense because it involves travelling faster than the speed of light.

But as far as handwavium goes it serves its purpose. Most people are somewhat aware of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, though often misinterpret it and apply it to situations where it does not apply (such as climate change deniers claiming renewable energy isn't renewable, ignoring that the second law applies to isolated systems and the earth is not an isolated system as it has an external source of energy in the form of the Sun) and if you asked them what entropy is then you won't get any answer. And most people have a somewhat passing familiarity with Special Relativity.

So you have two somewhat commonly known physical laws and mash them together to get something which sounds plausible to the viewer. Which at the end of the day is good enough for a film like Alien where most people really don't care about the details of the FTL travel.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Jadenim wrote:

 Vermis wrote:
I'm just struggling to figure out how six months of travel = 150 years of entropy. Unless the entropic effect isn't subject to time dilation. But then that's speeds slower or equal to lightspeed. Is FTL in this case actually FTL, or some kind of hyperspace handwave like most settings...?

Ah, I think I see what’s got you, it’s not the six months, it’s the 150 light years = 150 years of entropy. I.e. you can’t break the second law of thermodynamics by skipping time in FTL. I think. Maybe.

Well, the issue with this is that when you are dealing with time dilation you are also dealing with length contraction, so the distance actually travelled by the ship will be less than 150 light years.

 Lance845 wrote:
Without promethius the space jockeys tech and civilization still lays undiscovered. There is a huge story there with large lumbering biotech elephantine men.

The jockeys themselves are alien enough and potentially terrifying. Its not a bug monster hunting you. Its a hyper intelligent race thats happy to put you on a disection table and see what makes you tick.

Imo, there is a way to "rescue" Prometheus/Covenant. . . We don't exactly know where/when on the timeline they start off, only that they are "before" the first Alien film. . . . So, to "fix" the mistakes of those 2 movies, you start off where Covenant ends: David, a lunatic robot has made off with Engineer tech on a colony ship. . . . Have the engineers show back up with their own bioweapon again, on the planet where David has landed, but this time, you have Xenomorph vs. David's pets, and by the end of it the horror of what they've wrought leads to a ship escaping, with a crash landing on a barren/uninhabitable planet right before the credits. Based on various opening scenes in Prometheus, the "bio-weapon" is a bit like Kali - in that it is both creator and destruction, depending on use. David's theft and corruption of this stuff is a grave threat to Engineers, but as they have previously been set up as "evil", they need to enact an over the top solution to the problem.

Of course, part of the terrible nature of the xenomorphs is that they cannot be controlled. . . One of the major elements of Resurrection (or was it 3?) was that they had them in prison cells and were trying to learn how to control these ultimate predators. I also think one of the enduring "facts" prior to Prometheus, is that ALL xenomorphs look the "same" wherever they've been encountered. . . And frankly, having the Engineers work their space-magic to create an over the top version of their creation virus specifically to counter a bastardized version of their creation virus ought to lead to the "one xenomorph" appearance, and I think it would make far more sense than the idiocy we see in Alien v. Predator.