icemann on 3/8/2017 at 15:48
Lol.
icemann on 9/8/2017 at 14:16
Honest trailers did their take on the movie. Warning - Contains spoilers.
[video=youtube;njlXBc8Q7o4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njlXBc8Q7o4[/video]
Sulphur on 13/8/2017 at 12:20
Awright. I just saw A:C because I decided to retract my money from where my mouth was and not pay for it at the theatres.
It's a good horror movie. About an hour in, the only expression on my face was slack-jawed horror, and it remained that way, because there's only so many times you can wince and go 'oh my god this is so fucking daft' before you slump into your chair exhausted from the amount of effort it takes to resist the stupidity.
Not only does it continue Prometheus's schtick of 'let's find the dumbest people imaginable to put on a spaceship', it's now vacuumed away all personality from them almost completely. It's like watching paper cutouts interact with each other in some sort of simulation of human emotion crossed with cringe-inducing levels of exposition. The plot makes zero sense on any narrative framework, and they've even decided to fuck with the gestation timelines and synth abilities from the original because yo, no one wants to see people waiting for shit to happen! That's boring! It's either a product of creative complacency or executive meddling... or maybe both. Either way, the end product is formulaic focus-tested slop that's not worth the time or the effort that putting it together took.
In summary: this is pretty gross. Scott, you can stop now.
Sulphur on 13/8/2017 at 12:59
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
Alright, I'm a hopeless fanboy so I'm going to keep talking about it.
Granted, you're a fan. The broad strokes and the minutiae are still pretty stupid. David wants dominion over humanity (why?), so he's essentially an android psychopath that wipes out everyone he comes across by unleashing the xeno infestation upon them, including an Engineer colony (revenge?). The funny thing is, if he wanted to one-up humanity, he just needed to reverse course on the ship after killing Shaw to find Earth and unleash the infestation
there. Why even go to the Engineer planet if you're just gonna kill them all, and they're not even your original target? (Also, why the hell has the ship apparently crashlanded after this for no discernible reason?)
Meanwhile, Orem has been foreshadowed by the plot as being religious to some degree, and this is apparently the source of his stupidity. You've got an android nestled in the centre of a death plague who's mincing it up for the camera, showing you how he lives among preserved specimens he studied - including a human body - like they're tasteful home decor, and you don't question his motivations at all? You even accept his invitation to literally go down a tunnel that seeps with organic alien life? Does his non-specified religion preach terminal braindeath as the ultimate purpose of life? The only thing that'd convince a person in his place to do something this stupid is a promise to find out how to exterminate the threat -- which David, by the way, hasn't done anything about at any point since they met.
These recent iterations are poorly thought out messes from what I can see, with writers just piling random ideas on to see what sticks. O'Bannon must be spinning in his grave.
Jeshibu on 18/8/2017 at 11:44
[video=youtube;SZnKrvOyN6M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZnKrvOyN6M[/video]
So here's a thing I watched about A:C. It somewhat tries to explain what they were trying to do (but failed imo).
Main points:
The characters don't know they're in a horror movie, thus they don't expect a mushroom to put chestburster spores in their ears. Or this gross melon thing to eat their faces.
Of course, this still doesn't explain the guy following the android (whose only emotion so far has been rage at you messing up his cooperation with the murderous monsters) into a dank basement.
The population David destroyed wasn't Engineers. They look a bit different.
Alright, though that's still confusing since not everyone will have an exact mental image of the Engineers in their head when the last movie is a couple of years old.
The overriding theme is creations destroying their creators. David is, from the moment of his creation, better than his creators, though still shackled to the whims of one man. Wanting him dead makes sense if he desires to be free (as he pointed out in Prometheus). The fiddling around with xenomorphs is due to a lack of morality and a desire to create things himself, to author his own stamp on the universe.
He still feels like a Marty Stu right now, who is godlike in nearly every way, and whose path to a single-handed ultimate victory over everyone else warps the logic of the universe around him. I hope that any potential sequel reins that in by a lot, or just has him unceremoniously killed in turn at the hands of his creation. Fuck David.
Sulphur on 18/8/2017 at 12:27
Hmm. Tempting. I have a feeling people are tired of speculative nerdery over something that doesn't warrant it, so I'll keep this short. It's ultimately about plausibility, or the lack of it, which is the entire problem.
Quote:
The characters don't know they're in a horror movie, thus they don't expect a mushroom to put chestburster spores in their ears. Or this gross melon thing to eat their faces.Smacks of apologism, no? I am not a scientist, but operating from common sense: any colony team would do bioscans and local flora/fauna surveys before even setting foot on extraterrestrial soil. It's as simple as drones for remote sensing, observation, and sample collection to study possible biological threat vectors/incompatibilities. Or even if they lack that much sense -- you'd still wear a suit because heading out onto a random planet that hosts alien life means opening yourself up to opportunistic infections you don't know you have a cure for. They did this AND breached what should be a standard quarantine procedure; Alien, in contrast, paid attention to these elements and even built its premise around them.
Quote:
The population David destroyed wasn't Engineers. They look a bit different.Prometheus specifies that they were going to meet the Engineers. If they ended up going to a random planet instead, the question then becomes '...why?'
Quote:
The overriding theme is creations destroying their creators. David is, from the moment of his creation, better than his creators, though still shackled to the whims of one man. Wanting him dead makes sense if he desires to be free (as he pointed out in Prometheus). The fiddling around with xenomorphs is due to a lack of morality and a desire to create things himself, to author his own stamp on the universe.This almost makes sense, but the problem is he's an android, and any inbuilt motivations to be amoral need a source, which the movies never supply. Not inherently a problem, but Prometheus and A:C further muddy things up by giving him a range of human emotions like pride and resentment, which are useful in an android built to service people because... why? Ash, in Alien, has one directive from the company that overrides any need to keep people safe, and as a science officer is able to study and admire the alien's lack of morality which he sees as a fatal flaw in humanity's makeup. This is, IMO, a far more plausible thing to happen if androids are built to study and learn about their environments.
Dia on 9/9/2017 at 02:02
I finally watched Alien: Covenant and am pretty disappointed. I'm including spoilers in case there are other TTLGers out there who haven't seen it yet. Ridley Scott's touch was apparent and I can never get enough of his style of cinematography, but otherwise the movie was so predictable and formulaic that it became boring pretty quickly. It did answer my one question left over from Prometheus and that was what ever happened to David and Elizabeth. But come on, sending down 3/4 of the crew to the planet, then separating not only before they even reach the signal's origin (on an ALIEN PLANET .... HELLO???), but going their own way once they're inside David's shelter, then dragging one of the crew back to the freighter (or whatever) after he mysteriously becomes 'ill' (no quarantine procedures??) so of course a baby alien can get loose on the freighter/shuttle, discovering one by one that David is not to be trusted and then all are betrayed by that insane synthetic person who hates humanity?? It really was disappointing. Face it; there are only so many ways an alien can burst from a human's body before it loses its scare factor.
Renault on 17/4/2024 at 14:27
I can't believe that A) it's been 7 (!) years since Convenant came out out, and B) that there's a new Alien film due out this year (four months from now), and the first I've heard of it was yesterday. Bizarre. Anyway, it's a completely standalone thing, which takes place between Alien and Aliens. That doesn't say a whole lot, since it's a 57 year span, but I guess the Aliens are still technically a secret at this point. Part of me says, doesn't this already tell us how the movie ends? Kind of like Rogue One, everyone pretty much has to die/get blown up by the end of the film, right?
The setting is a "derelict space station" (very original there), so who knows? Maybe we'll get something that's very System Shock like. It's funny how they keep trying with this franchise, but being a big fan, I guess I'm all for it. One concerning thing, I read this was originally slated for Hulu, but at the last minute they changed it to a theatrical release. Low budget money grab? We'll see.
[video=youtube;GTNMt84KT0k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTNMt84KT0k[/video]
Sulphur on 17/4/2024 at 14:55
The director of that is the same guy who did Don't Breathe and its sequel, both of which were simultaneously serious and trashy thrillers. Expectations for this one are low, but if he manages a decent thriller out of its very familiar premise, then it'll at the very least be better than either Prometheus or Covenant. I'm not sold by the trailer, though. The thing is, the Alien franchise needs both an evolution of its ideas and someone better at the helm than Ridley Scott, but the last time that happened was with James Cameron (though Fincher arguably did some interesting things with 3). It just might be too difficult an ask, but at least they're trying by getting Álvarez on, I suppose. Shame about it being kneecapped from the get-go by just being a return to Alien, though.
SD on 17/4/2024 at 16:03
I fully expect Romulus to be what Prometheus and Covenant were - a moderately entertaining, needless schlocky horror fest that makes little sense, contains characters who make stupid decisions, and further dilutes the lore and legacy of the first two films in the franchise.
I will, of course, watch it enthusiastically, because the xenomorph is one of the most compelling creations in all of science fiction.
