Alien (feat. Predator and David): as Chairman Mao teaches us

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Do you like Alien 3 "Assembly Cut"?
	Yes, Alien 3 "Assembly Cut" was tits.
	No, Alien and Aliens are the only valid Alien films.
	Nah gently caress you Alien 3 sucks in all its forms.

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Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

I finally watched "The Assembly Cut That No Really, Fixes Alien 3" a couple of weeks ago. It doesn't, it's pretty much the same movie with some irrelevant plot details replaced. Same overall movie, same ridiculously bad creature effects that didn't even look good in 1992. This is still a movie that only total alien fanboys really have any interest in.

# ¿ Feb 29, 2016 07:38

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 22:43

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

I would rather watch something made by people with something to say than Avengers 3 at this point.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2016 02:31

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Wrath of Khan and Aliens are two of the best scores ever, even though they are actually many scores in the same movie. It feels kinda dirty to like them but they are indelible parts of my childhood.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 04:19

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

People will eventually realize that I wrote 'satire', and not 'remake'.

Remember, F. Scott Fitzgerald died thinking he would be forgotten.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 21:22

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Google "Alien 3 whippet" for a good laugh at that production test.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 09:48

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

I am not sure why they thought they even needed full-body shots of the alien when they frankly didn't have the technology to make it look right and they managed to not really have to do it in two far superior movies, but then again this one was written by committee by all reports. What we ended up with when they did full shots here just looked bad. The alien is almost never walking around on-screen in our first two movies, true--because it gives away that it's a guy in a suit. To put it mildly, they didn't solve that problem in Alien 3.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 21:22

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

The alien stands to full height near the end of Alien when it's killing Parker and murder-raping Lambert, and even then they don't really move it around.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 21:28

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

As I recall another issue with AVP aliens was that their tail length varied by the needs of the plot.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2016 22:25

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Xenomrph posted:

I don't think you "get" what Alien3 was trying to accomplish. By your reasoning, The Empire Strikes Back is a bad movie because it shits all over the happy ending of Star Wars (or The Force Awakens is bad because it kills Han Solo).

It accomplished sucking.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2016 20:26

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

I'm OK with all the messaging of the movie and I understand and agree with the assessments. It's still a bad movie on a technical and storytelling level. "Life is poo poo, here is some Christ imagery" is not a compelling story (talk about trite) and Alien 3 feels like a smaller, less imaginative film than the previous two.

I like Alien: Resurrection, which is also not a very good movie (and very clearly a calculated response to the poor reception of Alien 3), a lot more.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 22:48

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Alien: Resurrection has more memorable characters held down by an A+ set of character actors, a different kind of story to tell than the first three, a creative take on the Ripley character, and a sense of enhanced scale.

Someone really hit the nail on the head recently when they remarked that the characters in Alien 3 are all indistinguishable bald white guys. They're boring, they're almost impossible to relate with, they live on a boring world, and I don't particularly care about them. When the film's prevailing message is "nihilism is a thing!" it's even more boring. Alien 3 is careful to kill off or de-emphasize any character that has actually been shaded in, as well. Fundamentally, "nothing matters!" is not compelling.

Resurrection, on the other hand, is dragged down by Whedon's trademark flippant teenager dialogue on all of his characters and a really uneven tone. Nothing is treated as consequential or dwelled on, there's just people dying messily. The first two Alien movies work because they're deeply creative and have an emotional grounding. They also have something to say and a unique, interesting way to say it. Essentially, there's soul.

The rest are distinctly lesser films.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 23:23

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Xenomrph posted:

I'm completely unfamiliar with PSX emulation, how does it work? Do you use your PC's CD-ROM drive to read the game disc? How do the game controls work? (keyboard only? Mouse? Dualshock controller + adapter or something?)

I have my game disc handy somewhere, I'd never considered emulation. How does emulation improve it over running it on native console hardware?

Generally you get an .iso file (essentially the disc image), or what amounts to one, and run that on an emulator along with some encoding/decoding file that you have to hunt down yourself because it's getting into not legal territory, even though the emulator would be useless without it.

Generally you're also using a :filez:

copy of the game for simplicity's sake. A 360 controller will do, lovely d-pad and all, and I'm not sure the modern Playstation controllers work on PC yet.

I'm truncating the process here and possibly mixing up some terminology, but that's the basic setup.

PSX-era and after emulation tends to have compatibility issues with computer hardware that it was never designed to run on, so some games look shittier/have more problems than others.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2016 06:33

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Hodgepodge posted:

That's kind of just part of the price of emulating. Not even SNES emulators reliably recreate the experience of the original. We may be using exponentially better hardware, but it's still very different than what the games were built to run on.

Well, the compatibility on PSX-era stuff is such that for a long time, it wasn't playable without a very high-end computer, whereas you can run a SNES game on a toaster.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2016 18:04

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Yeah I don't know if you guys have realized this but it's about equally as difficult to "purely" play any modern game.

Also that article about needing a sweet rig to play SNES games is five years old, roughly two and a half eternities in CPU development.

Meanwhile instead of the mostly unimportant problems listed in the article, in PSX games you regularly get moderate to severe framerate issues or compatibility glitches that make the game completely unplayable. I haven't bothered with this in a long while but it's probably still pretty bad.

quote:

As an example, compare the spinning triforce animation from the opening to Legend of Zelda on the ZSNES and bsnes emulators. On the former, the triforces will complete their rotations far too soon as a result of the CPU running well over 40 percent faster than a real SNES. These are little details, but if you have an eye for accuracy, they can be maddening.

Calling this "maddening" is about all you need to know. It's true that these issues would be enough to make Nintendo itself wait a while to support virtual machine titles, but then we've had VM support since the Wii in 2006.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2016 17:11

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

The turret scene in the director's cut of Aliens is probably the only bad scene, because it reduces tension. Everything else improves the movie.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2016 08:21

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

The android has emotions, the humans of Prometheus are just too hedonistic and estranged from their own humanity to realize it.

I don't think Prometheus is amazing or anything but it's a straightforward story that didn't deserve the worst thread in CD history.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2016 13:27

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Ah, it is bad because if you squint hard enough and draw in plot elements from different movies that weren't even filmed, it wasn't Marxist enough!

How trite.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 08:45

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Hodgepodge posted:

You are correct, this reading of SMG's post is trite.

Cheerleading is trite too.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 09:20

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Tenzarin posted:

Michael Biehn(Hicks), upon learning of Hicks' demise, demanded and received almost as much money for the use of his likeness in one scene as he had been paid for his role in Aliens.

Cameron saved the series and they hosed it up again, just like they would again with Alien Resurrection.

B-b-but... Alien is good?!?

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 23:06

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

For your reading to be supported by the text, you would have to identify even a single point in the film where Ripley acts against the interests of the corporation.

She doesn't.

The closest she comes to this is in arguing the corporation should take a loss on the colony, as it has been irreversibly corrupted by greedy Burke and the aliens. But again, that means she is not against the liberal-capitalist utopia at all. She is merely against the corruption of it from Outside - the threat to her 'way of life'.

Now, we can understand that the 'totalitarian' aliens, that pure Outside, represent a distilled version of our own essence (as per Hegel). But Ripley absolutely does not understand this. She just kills all the drones, launches the queen out an airlock, and then goes back to sleep. She doesn't even have the gumption to execute Burke. Ripley remains unwaveringly humanist, like Joss Whedon. And you are frankly in agreement; the inhuman 'zombie-workers' aren't the real underclass; they're "organic machines," "insectoid drones without any real sense of personhood", etc. Did we already forget the first sentence of this paragraph?

While you are right that the aliens realize the fantasy that sustains the corporation's desire (and the term for a fantasy that becomes real is 'nightmare'), Ripley is herself motivated by a fantasy of perfect fulfillment: of resurrecting her daughter, of a perfect family, of having a prestigious better-paying job.... Earlier in the thread, I noted how she jettisons the exo-suit along with the queen, as if declaring it all beneath her. She overcomes her nightmares in order to start 'dreaming again'.

Newt: Can I dream?
Ripley: Yes, honey. I think we both can.
Zizek: The tragedy of our predicament (when we are within ideology) is that, when we think that we escape it, into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.

And here's where we really get into the point: Ripley's daughter was not taken away by anybody. She simply died of natural causes, in the same way that Shaw's dad in Prometheus simply contracted ebola - for no reason at all. So this is where we return to Prometheus, and its mockery of Big Questions about of "why do bad things happen to good people" and whatever. Aliens provides fake answers instead. What's foreclosed in all of this is the possibility of alliance with the drones.

I did not write 'revolution'. I wrote 'labour uprising'. And it is absolutely in the interests of the corporation to destroy the site and foist blame onto 'one bad apple'. It's the exact same outcome as in the original Robocop, where the bad CEO who controls the entire legal system is fired and replaced with a good CEO who controls the entire legal system. The entire issue of a privatized police force is sidestepped entirely. That's a satire.

The same thing happens, less satirically, in Iron Man 1.

I guess if you entirely ignore Burke and the context of why Ripley is going there versus the context of why Ripley is sent there, as well as any number of other textual plot details that stand directly and obviously in the way of your fanfic.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2016 20:49

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

quote:

You might as well just go into each and every thread about a Hollywood movie that takes place in the US and drone on about how it's a tacit endorsement of American imperialism, liberalism and the military-industrial complex because the characters don't try to subvert government and corporate interests, even if it's loving When Harry Met Sally.

Funny you should mention.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2016 21:30

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Toady posted:

Sigourney Weaver was skeptical of Cameron's sequel and didn't understand why Ripley would have a personal hatred for the aliens.The maternal angle gave her an arc to work with, but she always maintained her desire for Ripley to have sex with an alien. She didn't even want to wear underwear in Alien; she imagined the creature would be transfixed by her as she took off her clothes.

Yeah the Alien movies as written and directed by Sigourney Weaver would be pretty wild, to put it mildly.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 06:41

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Unfortunately, that's not at all what happens in the film. Ripley is absolutely clear that her intentions are to punish Burke for his betrayal of humanity.

Ripley says absolutely nothing about using evidence to bring down Weyland-Yutani, because there is no evidence against Weyland-Yutani. Because the Weyland-Yutani has done absolutely nothing illegal in this film.

We should be very clear: Weyland-Yutani haven't even done anything immoral in this film. They have done nothing but begin construction for a mining operation on some obscure, barren rock.

If you're talking justice, you need to talk emancipatory justice. And that would entail helping to free all the workers from exploitation - especially in the colonies where everything is functioning smoothly. Ripley says absolutely nothing about these 'peaceful' colonies, because she doesn't care about the exploitation going on in the 'peaceful' colonies. She only cares about her war with the greedy aliens, and their collaborator Burke.

Actually, colonizing the planet when you have existing evidence that it contains dangerous lifeforms and not evacuating it when you get further confirmation, is grounds for all sorts of legal proceedings even by our crude twenty-first century laws. Weyland Yutani is not at any time in any movie established as a company that acts within a morally or legally acceptable framework, and without even touching that you're really trying to get blood from a stone with your willful refusal to read actual movie text. Not implication, not subtext, just straightforward text. There's really nothing further to discuss because none of your theories have basis in text.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 09:08

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Shanty posted:

Wait, WY doesn't know anything about the wreck/aliens before they start colonizing the planet, do they?

They would in fact have to know on at least a bureaucratic basis, because someone ordered the lifeform extracted (ALL CREW EXPENDABLE) in the first film.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 09:55

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Sir Kodiak posted:

It's odd you keep bringing this up considering it's not even in the movie. Ridley and co also realized it was bad and removed it.

When we have people bringing up script items that never appear in the movies and unfilmed sequences from other movies entirely, a deleted reel from Alien seems like a low bar to cross.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 22:05

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Pee pee doo doo, Alien 3 is a bad movie

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 22:20

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

MrMojok posted:

The fact that everyone from Cameron on down repeatedly mentioned the Vietnam influence on the film means it's completely verboten in Cinema Discusso.

Instead, here it must be "read" in terms of some kind of class war, and/or themes of capitalism vs socialism. I think this is in the main rules sticky for CineD.

In defense of talking about movies, a movie can be about more than one thing.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2016 03:44

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

oldpainless posted:

I'll be honest, I'm not sure who Zizek is or why he is brought up as someone who is an expert on movies.

A socialist philosopher whose face was melted by the sheer energy of the truths he speaks to power.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2016 18:11

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Xenomrph posted:

Alien Resurrection has a lot of individual components that are really cool, even if the complete package has some issues and a lack of a coherent vision tying it all together. It's got the most memorable, quotable characters since 'Aliens', the practical effects are really impressive (the Newborn puppet, the failed Ripley clones), making Ripley part-Alien is a novel way to explore her character further, and the underwater/ladder sequence is a really well done action setpiece.

She is illegal because all the autons rebelled, if I recall.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2016 18:58

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Eh, at that point, anybody in Hollywood who didn't know what they were getting by signing Brando, especially Coppola, was firmly in denial.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2016 23:26

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

I don't really get why Blomkamp's Alien is supposed to be bad and get the sense that this thread is just an echo chamber for weak arguments as to why nihilism is not actually a retarded philosophy for babies.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2016 03:17

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Xenomrph posted:

James Cameron also slammed AvP when it came out, and then praised it after he actually sat down and watched it.
The bottom line is that James Cameron says a lot of things.
Also for the record, T3 is a cool but flawed movie with some great action and effects and a mega-ballsy ending, and Genisys gets way more flak than it deserves and genuinely has a lot going for it, and does really interesting things with the Kyle, John, Sarah, and Terminator characters, as well as the time travel mechanics.

Basing a movie in strictly fan service is bad, unless the filmmaker can make up the missing elements with, you know, quality filmmaking. 'Aliens' didn't become a pop culture icon because of fan service.
Fan service combined with actual filmmaking gets you The Force Awakens or Jurassic World. A movie trying to coast on fan service alone gets you AvPR, or the goofy callbacks in the Star Wars prequels.

I would like Genisys a lot more if I hadn't seen the entire plot in commercials (causing the movie to flop), but I still wouldn't like their casting for the leads.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2016 03:19

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

I've noticed that you consistently deploy these toychat & images of merchandise as a way to keep others at a distance, effectively punishing them for "taking you seriously as a person."

Like you are not posting such as the 'Operation Aliens Board Game" because people will find it really interesting, but specifically because they won't find it interesting. It almost looks like communication, but the actual message is "leave me alone, don't talk to me. " Like the ideal state would be for everyone to stop communication altogether and just post mutually unread links to Amazon webstores.

It's an abuse of that poor happy-face emoticon.

He's doing that to annoy you, and it's working.

Often you really deserve each other, the moment someone can't make sense of your argument or identifies that you are willfully ignoring text, out comes the petulant, imperious trolling and Zizekposting. This is tiresome even when you are right, and it certainly doesn't help that thanks to your unwillingness to talk any direction but down and a small group of cheerleaders, every thread is an inevitable countdown until it becomes about you and your posting.

No one's so dense that they need it pointed out that a coloring book with a throbbing penis-monster on the cover isn't an attempt at levity at the expense of this.

And for that matter, people complain about CD outside of CD because we have a group of posters obsessed with making it a Philosophy 101 class and actively discourage any other kind of posting. Pretty much every other entertainment-focused forum manages to get to some choice meat on the subject matter without all this other bullshit.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 01:50

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

ruddiger posted:

Pretty sure there was a poster earlier who was asking about similar themes of humanity and questions of self-identity through Ridley's movies and they completely blanked on Blade Runner, so questions like that are a step up actually.

Also, as far as intricate set design, Hannibal utilized every inch of Venice (the scene at the opera, holy poo poo), American Gangster was a period piece which Ridley went into pain staking detail to get that 70s Harlem look right, Body of Lies is supposed to take place in the middle east, but Morrocco and the US are pretty unnoticeable stand-ins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYwv7-YkhKs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgOO8Z-FoKY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJz6eFgwgkA

Hannibal was a book that screamed "I'm only writing this for the movie deal/to retain control of the characters," but the movie brought the book locations to life. It was literally just as I had visualized it in the book, much in the same way that Peter Jackson nailed Rivendell.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 00:21

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

This pretty well explains Michael Bay technique:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2THVvshvq0Q

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 00:29

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Xenomrph posted:

Alec Gillis, one of the founders of Amalgamated Dynamics (the special effects people who did 'Alien3', 'Alien Resurrection', the two AvP movies, and will be doing the effects for Shane Black's 'The Predator') recently started posting production stuff on his Instagram about the aborted Ripley clones from 'Alien Resurrection', including videos of the props, concept artwork, etc.
I think it's pretty cool because it's not really something someone thinks a lot about when talking about the production of that movie, but it's still a facet that they obviously put some thought into - showing the progression of the Ripley clones, the expression of human and Alien physical traits, etc. They're all weird and gross, and you only get to see them for a couple seconds in the finished film, and the behind-the-scenes stuff on the Anthology bluray doesn't really talk about their design or anything like that.

Clone 1

Clone 2

Clone 3

Clone 4

Clone 5

Clone 6

And a vintage production photo of Clone 7

Some concept art:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BKmUriBhmX0/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/p/BKo0SkBBOBS/?hl=en

And speaking of other little-seen props, here's the post-crash Hicks corpse from 'Alien3'

The Ripley clones felt like they were from some other, better movie. Also I enjoyed Alienbabby and felt bad for him/her/it.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2016 05:14

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

blackguy32 posted:

The theatrical cut of Alien 3 is pretty bad considering that there are people that simply just disappear with no mention of them ever again.

Also, this is what you get when you can't let go of how Alien 3 began.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mquByeLRYNM

From 1:00-onward you could just play Yakety Sax.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2016 00:49