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Owlbear Camus posted:I can't remember if I shared this observation but my favorite bit about that shot is the hand desperately reaching into the frame to retrieve their Important Papers. Awesome choice by that extra. I love watching the whole inquest scene dubbed in Spanish. Instead of "bullshit" that you can "kiss goodbye" she specifically refers to the "papers" and then says something that goes by WAY too fast for me to translate but seems to suggest they can wipe their asses with it in the bathroom. It's hilarious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb2LX01k-fQ&t=374s
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Aug 27, 2019 07:24
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Pochoclo posted:I'm afraid it just says "then all these papers you consider so important won't be any use fixing the damage" which isn't a great localisation but spanish dubs generally erred on the side of blandness back in the day The only thing I can even remotely make out after "papers you consider so important" is the last two syllables sound just like "baño" so I choose to continue living in blissful ignorance 
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Aug 28, 2019 01:54
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Gentle Autist posted:Why do goons bold movie names like some whack rear end marketing department I've wondered how this started myself, but honestly it's a lot more aesthetically pleasing than the standard italics so I'm fine with it.
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Sep 22, 2019 00:03
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I'm not a prude but Starship Troopers really does it push it for me with all the massacred corpses spread everywhere like bugs on a windshield (I'm sure that was intentional but still  )
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Sep 22, 2019 00:12
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Lossy Compression posted:My dad took me to see Alien at its theatrical release in 1979. I was 9 years old. This movie hosed me up so bad that I'm pushing 50 now and still shaking it off. It's probably for the best that you went out to the lobby and had that cool projector booth experience, but if you had somehow managed to make it to the end of the movie the last couple shots of the creature might have helped cure your life-long fear of xenomorphs (I mean... if that's what you'd want...) It used to be this infamously common story that people would talk about how Alien was just outrageously terrifying for them up until the second they got to the end where it became obvious the creature was just some guy in a suit, and while it did kill the suspense, it wasn't a bad thing because it was the very end of the movie anyway and it also gave them esteem-boosting satisfaction of having faced and ultimately conquered their fears. There was an episode of the 90s cartoon Doug in which the title character returns to see a horror movie titled 'The Abnormal' multiple times because he keeps chickening out and bailing in the middle of the movie. At long last he makes it to the end and discovers he can see the zipper on the monster's suit and it hits him how he's been scared of something fake this whole time and it's all  . Yeah, pretty sure it was at least partly inspired by Alien.I also don't think it's a coincidence that when it came to Aliens' final shot of the Queen flailing about in space, it seems like it was consciously trying to show that it was definitely, definitely not just a guy in a suit this time, thank you very much.
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Oct 2, 2019 00:41
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DropsySufferer posted:If Alien had been the only movie released. It would have been hardly remembered just as a great old niche horror movie. What the hell is this? Seriously, are you trolling? Alien had nearly identical box office gross to Aliens and was a pop culture phenomenon that had already made Sigourney Weaver, the xenomorph, and Ridley Scott world-famous and inspired countless imitators and references by the time Aliens was released. You can credit Aliens with broadening the IP's impact even further by popularizing the whole 'space marines' concept, being a breakthrough as a feminist action film, and helping to make James Cameron a Hollywood power player, but it's undeniably the second time lightning struck the franchise, not the first and only. Seriously, please don't make sweeping statements of historical fact if you don't know what you're talking about.
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Oct 21, 2019 03:17
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Like, Alien was already considered a classic film by the time Aliens was released. A classic. In 7 years.
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Oct 21, 2019 03:27
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SilvergunSuperman posted:I've never really thought about quite how insanely quotable Aliens is. They mostly quote Aliens at night. Mostly.
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Oct 27, 2019 12:36
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Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?
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Oct 28, 2019 08:00
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SilvergunSuperman posted:I mean a lot of 80s action movies are pretty drat homoerotic but I think you're right. I definitely saw that in the motel scene, I don't know how you don't take away dude was getting pegged. Sorry if this comes off pedantic but this is a genuine pet peeve of mine: it's not 'homoerotic' when a straight couple does pegging. Anal sex has nothing to do with being gay any more than it does being straight.
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Nov 8, 2019 10:25
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Most people realize Aliens is a killer title, but I still don't think it gets nearly as much credit as it deserves. Just... Aliens. That is simply a masterstroke of brilliant elegance right there. And it's just so freakin' evocative, too. No one has to ask "so what's the deal with this Alien sequel, what's it about" because you hear the title and you know exactly what the concept is and your mind immediately starts forming images trying to fathom just how much higher the stakes have suddenly been raised. And it's all accomplished without numerals, no subtitles, not even any extra words, just add one single little letter at the end. Like the academy should've invented a special Oscar that year for "Achievement in Film Title Creation" because lord knows Aliens deserves it.
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Jan 2, 2020 21:42
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Owlbear Camus posted:Cameron was young. He had just directed Terminator. Cameron had called a meeting to discuss his "next project." Everyone knew Cameron had written a treatment for Alien 2 that nobody would touch because Alien was not a massive financial success. Alien 2 was not on the table. We expected a professional pitch from Cameron, an outline and a treatment of what he had in mind with a cursory budget; perhaps a couple assistants to run a slide show. Instead Cameron walked in the room without so much as a piece of paper. He went to the chalk board in the room and simply wrote the word ALIEN. Then he added an 'S' to make ALIENS. Dramatically, he drew two vertical lines through the 'S', ALIEN$. He turned around and grinned. We green-lit the project that day for $18 million. I of course love that the Aliens title has its own goddamned origin myth, but I always hated how it claims the original wasn't a big hit, both because that's an outrageous falsehood and also because it isn't even necessary.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:22
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I'd much rather be called "synthetic" than an "artificial person", the former sounds way cooler and also who in the world would want to identify as a fake person? I mean besides Bishop apparently. And Lil Wayne.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:26
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Beet Wagon posted:I mean I guess maybe the intent was to have them be like aphids, some of which do give live birth, but those aphids that do are pretty much constantly farting out a continuous stream of clones from an ovipositor-like structure (vivipositor?) like an assembly line. But like... I dunno they really made it seem very human-analogous which implies there's a huge amount of resources being spent on producing small numbers of offspring. I still can't tell if this post and those preceding it are joking or not. Why are you having such a difficult time understanding that these creatures are unnatural abominations created by a mad scientist? It's not supposed to make sense, that's the whole point.
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Feb 10, 2020 16:13
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Lil Peeler posted:My 26-year-old roommate has trouble watching movies made before 2010. I got her to watch up to the end of the viaduct Chase so I think this is a small victory. Maybe if I can get her to finish this I can get her to watch alien I'd be hard-pressed to describe any difference between movies from the 2000s and movies from the 2010s, and I usually tend to notice such things (this was more evident before everything got remastered, but I've always sworn there was this seismic shift in how movies generally looked pre- and post 1987, for instance). SidneyIsTheKiller fucked around with this message at 10:23 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 10:21
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Splicer posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3947061 LIES! Everyone thinks The Thing is good, that thread included. But Alien is better...
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Nov 8, 2020 15:53
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It's one of the great ironies of the past year that a lot of classic movies have been returning to theaters when people can't/ shouldn't be going. https://www.showtimes.com/movie-times/alien-697/ It appears Alien has just been given a rerelease stateside in 500 theaters. There's of course a goddamn pandemic going on right now so it's out of the question for most of us, but if there's a drive-in nearby, or if you can make it so you're the only person in the theater, or if you happen to have a hazmat suit you can wear you might be able to make it work. Edit: Drive-in, not drive-thru SidneyIsTheKiller fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jan 7, 2021 09:43
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Last weekend Alien was #10 at the box office with $60,000Splicer posted:A whole lot of people trying not make eye contact during the airlock quarantine scene. Lambert: "Will you open the goddamn hatch, we gotta get inside and see Alien." Ripley: "Listen to me, if we break quarantine we could all die."
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Jan 14, 2021 01:45
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One of the blurays has an Easter egg video of all those Nostromo crew dossiers set to the somber opening music. It's legit one of the saddest things I've ever seen and it should play on an endless loop in a museum somewhere.
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Jan 24, 2021 06:05
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PeterCat posted:One criticism of Predator that I never understood was the idea that it was a ripoff of Aliens. Gene Siskel spouts this opinion in his review of the movie. I just don't see it, other than there are military men against an alien. The monsters aren't similar, they way they kill aren't really comparable and there isn't the body horror element present in Predator. It's such a weird complaint. They're using "ripoff" in that loose sense that of course one year after they had a big hit with a "military vs. aliens" action/horror hybrid the same studio was only all too happy to promote another one. The same way nobody would call 'The Thing' a ripoff of 'Alien' nowadays but at the time everybody knew what money the studio was chasing. Probably 'bandwagon jumper' would be a better term for it.
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Jan 24, 2021 06:15
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Young Freud posted:Captain Dallas is also transgender, but his dossier is obscured or otherwise unreadable so we have to go off filmmaker notes to confirm that detail. The idea was that being trans was NBD in the Alien future and fairly commonplace and trans people were indistinguishable from cis people in societal acceptance and sexual function. It also raises the question of why they're going around changing people's sex at birth, with some potentially horrific implications if, say, Lambert's parents simply wanted a girl and decided to have their baby physically customized. For most trans folks their experience is something akin to a birth defect, that you have an innate sense of your gender and can tell when your body doesn't match; the idea that parents would put their children into this type of dysmorphia on purpose for vanity reasons is both appalling and befitting the corporate dystopia the 'Alien' movies present. On the other hand, it could be that they'd found a way to detect when an infant is born trans and the operation is meant as a benefit to the child, which at the very least has good intentions, but the way the profile speaks of potential "trauma" they have to be on the look out for makes me skeptical of that.
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Jan 24, 2021 07:21
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You all are just no fun sometimes, I swear!
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Jan 24, 2021 11:54
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BiggerBoat posted:LOL I don't think you're really sorry. You haven't even taken it down. You idiot. You goddamned moron. Edit: Eh, since it can be hard to tell these days, I really am joking! (I'm a robot, though, a hyperdyne model at that, so...) SidneyIsTheKiller fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Feb 26, 2021 |
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Feb 26, 2021 18:04
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BTW, anyone pick up the recent 'Making of' books by J.W. Rinzler? His book on 'The Empire Strikes Back' was excellent, but I feel like the productions of Alien and Aliens have been pretty well covered already so I'm a little more hesitant with their heavy price tag and all. 
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Feb 26, 2021 20:54
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:BTW, anyone pick up the recent 'Making of' books by J.W. Rinzler? His book on 'The Empire Strikes Back' was excellent, but I feel like the productions of Alien and Aliens have been pretty well covered already so I'm a little more hesitant with their heavy price tag and all. Xenomrph posted:I have them both but haven’t had a chance to really read through them yet, but the reception by the Alien community has been very positive. I just ran through The Making of Alien and while there wasn't much that was 100% new to me, all the little details and added perspective helped make it feel like a fresh read. The bits from Giger's diary are hilarious, and it was nice to get quotes from Bolaji Bodejo (the guy in the xenomorph suit), since he had died pretty young he hadn't had as much public exposure as the rest of the crew. Probably the most surprising thing was that it seems all these years we've still been getting the watered-down version of what happened behind-the-scenes. The best way I can describe it is everything we've heard about Alien is not just true, it's more true. Using live maggots for "pulsing alien brains" wasn't just an idea, they actually brought in buckets of maggots and put them in the drat alien head (Bodejo refused to put it on), and some of them got loose and ended up in Dan O'Bannon's hat which he didn't realize until he put it on and panicked. Ridley Scott not only got a crazy idea to have the alien bite off Ripley's head at the end and start speaking in her voice, he made a serious push at the 11th hour to change the ending to exactly this, even heatedly arguing with producers and Fox executives on a conference call and only relenting when they threatened to fire him. Yapphet Kotto is even crazier than you knew. The competition between artists, producers, writers, actors, et al. was even fiercer than they've said. Some of the preview screenings really were pretty wild to the point where Alan Ladd Jr. snuck out fearing the crowd might try to harm him (apparently this actually happened at some ill-fated previous film). One moment the studio thought the movie would flop and the next instant literally thought it was going to be bigger than Star Wars, and then were deeply disappointed when it "only" grossed $100 million. It was an entertaining read, for sure. I've already got The Making of Aliens coming in the mail.
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Mar 15, 2021 00:20
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BiggerBoat posted:Wait...you were never able to finish it but want a sequel? Alien Isolation sold like 2 million copies, it's just that making videogames with that level of graphics costs a gagillion dollars.
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Mar 17, 2021 20:05
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My favorite Yaphet Kotto anecdote was that he would psyche himself up to play Parker so much that Ridley Scott had to have someone inform him via walkie talkie what entrance he was at so he could avoid having Kotto come up and tell him how Parker wasn't going to die and he was going to kick the alien's rear end for the upteenth time. He was also in the running to play Captain Picard, which would've been interesting.
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Mar 17, 2021 21:28
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:It was an entertaining read, for sure. I've already got The Making of Aliens coming in the mail. Just finished The Making of Aliens. It doesn't have as many crazy stories as the previous but well worth it for fans. Probably the highlight is Hill & Giler's hilariously irreverent initial story treatment (though it should be noted they actually came up with much of the concept before Cameron came in). 
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Mar 17, 2021 22:59
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Pennywise the Frown posted:Dental patient lol. My other favorite part of the book is that it goes out of its way to inform us in one of the drafts that not only does Ripley call the Queen alien a bitch in that famous line, she also calls her "whore" and "slut" as well! 
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Mar 19, 2021 16:51
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Torquemada posted:It’s definitely this, with additional commentary from SMG about how the whole movie is an analogy for the struggle of the proletariat against the predatory rapaciousness of the corporate future. SMG think Aliens is too pro-capitalist and doesn't think Ripley does enough to try to communicate with the aliens so they can team up to fight the company.
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Apr 1, 2021 22:07
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BiggerBoat posted:Wow. How loving original. The aliens are communists.
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Apr 2, 2021 01:27
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Xenomrph posted:You don’t see them loving each other over for a goddamn percentage. My issue with how the aliens escape in Resurrection is that it kind of undermines this. I'd have liked it better if the one xeno willingly offered himself to be gutted.
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Apr 2, 2021 01:40
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zenguitarman posted:On this thread's recommendation I bought The Making Of Aliens book and it's really great and revealed a lot of things I didn't know/realize about the movie, even from watching the DVD extras and the Alien Theory YouTube. Absolutely check out the author's book for Alien while you're at it. The bits from HR Giger's diary are worth it on their own. Edit: VVVVVV Exactly hahaha SidneyIsTheKiller fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Apr 23, 2021 |
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Apr 23, 2021 16:57
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Pennywise the Frown posted:So... and here me out.... I am drunk and decided to watch a movie. I turned on this indie film called "The Terminator." I call BULLSHIT. How do you know it was good if it just started, HMMM?
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Jun 23, 2021 03:32
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BiggerBoat posted:Uhhhh....did you see how we dealt with the pandemic? Well we didn't treat that like a big deal either, so...
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Jul 3, 2021 04:18
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Xenomrph posted:The ‘Aliens’ novelization is narrated by William Hope (the actor who played Gorman) if you want to listen to ‘Aliens’ while you think about ‘Aliens’. Does it still cut out all the swearing? "Get away from her, you!" Sure told her, Ripley, right on!
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Jul 19, 2021 21:33
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The Last Call posted:Even better, we have pictures of the original design with the skull showing: Just to be clear, the image above isn't an alternate form, that is indeed the final costume just without the translucent dome installed. It's never really visible in the film, but the skull is there. (Sorry if you already knew this, but it's a common misconception).  The previous post mentioning a transparent alien that you would be able to see a vague hint of a human form within is most likely referring to this prototype (Edit: Er, reading that post again maybe this wasn't what he was referring to after all, but hey)   Decades later somebody found what was left of that suit in storage and it was put up for auction. 
SidneyIsTheKiller fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Aug 10, 2021 |
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Aug 10, 2021 20:01
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Not that I don't appreciate the effort, but I'm surprised the sequels all continued with the translucent dome when the effect is almost never visible on-screen and even when it is my eyes tend to register it as a sheen across the surface rather than something we're seeing beneath the skin. I believe the first film is the only one to articulate the skull's eyes and nose, but they honestly could've saved themselves the trouble completely and gone straight for an opaque smooth dome head. Exception, of course, for the Aliens variant which ditched the dome completely to expose those gnarly ridges underneath.
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Aug 10, 2021 23:47
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I don't recall (hurr) anything particularly memorable about the design in Total Recall. Seemed to take place in like a big gray airport on Mars? I'm sure that's exactly what they were going for and all, but it surprises me to hear it described as influential.
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Aug 13, 2021 02:41
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Parkingtigers posted:The real crimes are in the opening act though. It's still impossible to get over the fact they killed off Hicks and Newt in the opening 6 minutes. For Ripley, the last time she woke up she was locked in a room with Newt and two facehuggers on LV-426. For her, that was yesterday. Today she wakes up and they're all dead. The next day (and I'm being generous in assuming it was actually the next day) she's all "eh, I'm over it" and decides to gently caress Charles Dance. That's a *wild* three days of character un-development for Ripley. Now Charles Dance is a great actor, but he's playing a very emotionally restrained dude here and it's just so baffling that she's horny for him (or anyone) at that point. I take issue with a lot of this. Ripley showing a more resigned and mature attitude toward tragedy after all she's been through is in fact quite the opposite of "character un-development" and it would have been a much greater disservice to Aliens had she been a weeping wreck. (It's not without precedent, either - Alien implied Dallas was her lover and she handled his death very stoically). We should probably remember that Ripley barely knew Hicks and Newt and I doubt she seriously thought they'd all become a family. Rather they were a revelation that she could still connect with people and their experience a way to exorcise her regret over the life she'd lost in her long hypersleep. Their deaths are deeply saddening and tragic but it's because of her experience in Aliens that she knows she need not feel guilty for it. If we're really going to take the whole "Ripley is too good for Charles Dance" bit as seriously as a lot of folks seem to, I think it betrays a gross and frankly sexist attitude. Ripley can sleep with whoever the gently caress she pleases, thanks. She probably hasn't gotten laid in 57 years and I don't think it's odd at all she might be feeling lonely and seeking some form of intimacy after all she's been through. Dance's character has that stoic, cool-headed vibe Ripley seems to be attracted to and he's far and away her best option in her present surroundings. So she's settling in this instance, who cares? I can respect and appreciate that the ubiquitous threat of rape in the movie is upsetting and perhaps not dealt with in the best of taste, but I object to the idea that it's inappropriate or simply exploitative. I think there's value in reminding the audience that Alien is only a slightly exaggerated microcosm of reality and that women live in a world run by men that takes for granted that men are lustful and violent so it's your fault if you're victimized, and that's all a bullshit excuse because unlike the xenomorph we see that men can choose not to be rapist penis-monsters, and too often they simply don't. If I'm coming down too hard on you my apologies. I don't even like Alien3! I think it's dull and depressing. But I've seen a lot of folks treat that like some kind of objective or even moral failing and the narrow-mindedness honestly offends me a little.
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Aug 30, 2021 23:12
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