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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Thinking about seeing the movie. Is it too much to hope that the monsters are lovecraftian in shape/scope or are we talking like guys in rubber suits level of creature? Very much the former.
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Jan 15, 2020 06:42
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Was kinda disappointed in this after reading the hype in this thread. (CineD overhype a movie, never) It felt like underwater Cloverfield which would have been ok if this was 2014 still and those other crap sequels hadn't been made. Eminem's character was done a lot better in Alien Covenant and TJ is basically his Cloverfield character again. The company is evil part wasnt handled very well either imo. They come across as more BP evil than WY evil. "Theyre silencing the survivors!" Ok...and. what's the response? A nuclear explosion happens in the ocean and the worlds just like.."welp they're stonewalling us, oh well" cue credits. Lol. The creature design is weird too . First they start off as little tentacle things then they turn into humanoids...that all come from Cthulu? Every part of this movie is all over the place like they just cribbed a dozen other better movies and called it a day.
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Jan 15, 2020 10:58
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Saw it this afternoon, I thought it was pretty good and really enjoyed it being stealth Lovecraftian horror. I kind of feel like they could have done more with the premise and it might have been held back by its rating, but the environment and setting more than made up for it. All the scenes of climbing through the stations or walking across the ocean floor made me feel the same oppressive claustrophobia I haven’t felt since I first saw The Descent. Also goddamn, TJ Miller is annoying.
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Jan 16, 2020 05:24
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banned from Starbucks posted:The company is evil part wasnt handled very well either imo. They come across as more BP evil than WY evil. "Theyre silencing the survivors!" Ok...and. what's the response? A nuclear explosion happens in the ocean and the worlds just like.."welp they're stonewalling us, oh well" cue credits. Lol. Just to focus on this part - the popular conception of Weyland-Yutani as cartoonishly evil is a strong example of ‘Kirk Drift.’ It’s based on a telephone-game of cumulative misreadings and exaggerations. In Alien 1, the higher-ups in the corporation accidentally program the Mother computer to kill the crew because (as with Skynet) Mother takes their orders more seriously than they themselves do. So a simple order to obtain alien samples for profit is executed with ruthless efficiency where a human would have some ‘commonsense’ self-limitation. In Alien 2, the corporation is presented as totally neutral. The bad stuff happens because greedy, scheming criminal Burke violates company policy, while Ripley works with the company - for the company - to secure their operations and stop Burke. Alien 3 is close to being the exception, because Ripley now thinks Bishop 2 is literally the antichrist. But this isn’t due to the company doing anything atypically egregious for a corporation. Rather, it’s because Ripley is out of her gourd having apocalyptic visions. Tian Corporation‘s half-assed coverup is more evil than anything Weyland-Yutani does in the Alien films. Like, as a direct contrast, W-Y does nothing to disguise the fact that they manufacture bioweapons. It’s all legal and above-the-board.
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Jan 16, 2020 07:49
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gently caress it, I'll take the bait.SuperMechagodzilla posted:
SuperMechagodzilla posted:In Alien 2, the corporation is presented as totally neutral. The bad stuff happens because greedy, scheming criminal Burke violates company policy, while Ripley works with the company - for the company - to secure their operations and stop Burke. SuperMechagodzilla posted:But this isn’t due to the company doing anything atypically egregious for a corporation. Rather, it’s because Ripley is out of her gourd having apocalyptic visions. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Like, as a direct contrast, W-Y does nothing to disguise the fact that they manufacture bioweapons. It’s all legal and above-the-board. Like, I think you might need to re-watch the movies; there's a lot of surface-level text stuff you're using to support your readings that just full on isn't in the movies. Why we're talking about this in the Underwater thread is beyond me, though. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 08:11
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Xenomrph posted:Wrong, Special Order 937 full on says "crew expendable", like it's literally in the order itself. There was no accident there, it's not like this was a HAL9000 situation where the AI had conflicting orders and went nuts. Special Order 937 flat out says "get specimens, and if the crew gets in the way then kill them". I did not say that Mother is like HAL (who accidentally develops a humanlike psychology after being programmed to lie). I wrote that mother is like Skynet (who unexpectedly takes her programming to its logical extreme). You need to be careful to prevent mistakes like this. Read carefully and be mindful of context. Since this is not the Alien thread, I’ll quickly isolate the specific point where you get tripped up. Using only information from the movie Alien (and none of the comics or whatever), answer the following: 1) Who gives Special Order 937? 2) Who is it given to? 3) When is it given? Answer: Mother herself gives the Special Order directly to Ash shortly after the characters wake up. The order is not given by anyone at the company; they are out of communications range at that point. If you answered that ‘the order is given by Weyland-Yutani executives to Mother long before the events of the film’, that is incorrect. That plot is a retcon of the film’s events, from various EU sources. The first line of the order is “Nostromo rerouted to new co-ordinates.” That’s past tense, meaning the ship was already en route to this specific location when the order was written. Also, Mother’s programmers obviously didn’t intentionally authorize her to kill the CEO of the company or blow up the Earth in the pursuit of an alien. But those are unavoidable possible interpretations of her ‘First Priority’. That’s the joke: mother is super-humanly capitalist. Xenomrph posted:Why we're talking about this in the Underwater thread is beyond me, though. We are talking about the motives of the films’ antagonists, and how they relate to those of characters in other films. The Tian Corporation in Underwater, in its banality, is actually presented in a far harsher light than in Alien. Everyone at the start of the film is well aware that bad things are going to happen, but they’ve resigned themselves to it - trudging towards disaster because everyone feels powerless to effect change. The company’s like “eh, we’ll figure something out”. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 17:40
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I did not say that Mother is like HAL (who accidentally develops a humanlike psychology after being programmed to lie). I wrote that mother is like Skynet (who unexpectedly takes her programming to its logical extreme). You need to be careful to prevent mistakes like this. Read carefully and be mindful of context. quote:Since this is not the Alien thread, I’ll quickly isolate the specific point where you get tripped up. Using only information from the movie Alien (and none of the comics or whatever), answer the following: There’s more you can say about Mother’s prior knowledge and intent, but it’s probably best saved for the Alien thread. quote:Everyone at the start of the film is well aware that bad things are going to happen, but they’ve resigned themselves to it - trudging towards disaster because everyone feels powerless to effect change. The company’s like “eh, we’ll figure something out”. If anything the “company is in on it” subplot feels a little half-baked, since it’s relegated to the opening and ending credits and one blink-and-you-miss-it bit in the locker that Norah doesn’t even react to. I mean, unless her lack of reaction is your point? Even then, I’d say the characters aren’t “expecting” danger so much as they might be expecting a lack of response if something bad happened, which is typical of pretty much any corporation nowadays.
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Jan 16, 2020 18:09
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Xenomrph posted:Special Order 937 is pre-existing, Mother didn’t write it, it’s a contingency present in her routines whose conditions are met and then she acts on them, using Ash as her surrogate. Dallas explains that the ship met “certain conditions” which is why they were re-routed and woken up - Mother detects a signal, Special Order 937 takes effect, and she follows it (re-routing to the signal with intent to acquire a lifeform, all other priorities rescinded). Nah, this is one where SMG got it right. Note that it shouldn't be surprising that what we're seeing is an internal order from Mother to Ash, because the context of the conversation is Ripley asking Mother why Ash is doing such a poo poo job:  And Mother tells her that it's because he has a special order:  But most directly, it's clear that the order is specifically Mother talking to Ash, because when Ripley enters this command:  This is what she's shown as the text of Special Order 937:   It makes no sense for a pre-written order by the corporation to include past-tense contextualizing information regarding the course of the Nostromo. The order was obviously written after the rerouting had taken place, which means Mother did it and included that line in the order to give her science officer context for what he was being told to do. If it was an order from the corporation to Mother it would say "Reroute the Nostromo to new co-ordinates" or whatever, since she was the one who carried out the rerouting. It wouldn't be written from the perspective of that having already happened. Sir Kodiak fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 19:59
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Alternately, the first line is providing context and the rest is the standing Special Order, pre-written prior to departure, that came into effect after getting re-routed. Keep in mind that the Nostromo was re-routed to the signal, Ash was added to the crew at the last minute prior to departure, and both Ash and Mother mis-characterized the signal as a distress beacon despite knowing it was a warning. The Nostromo’s entire trip there was a pre-planned attempt to make a low-key investigation of a signal that someone at the Company knew was of interest because the signal had been detected and decoded before the Nostromo even left port. Whether it was just a rogue actor at the Company (similar to Burke) or was a widely known corporate decision or something is unknown.
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Jan 16, 2020 21:28
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Xenomrph posted:Alternately, the first line is providing context and the rest is the standing Special Order, pre-written prior to departure, that came into effect after getting re-routed. This is not a comparably plausible alternative. One interpretation is that the highly-literal computer, when given an emergency override command to display an order, simply displayed the order. The other interpretation is that maybe the computer just went ahead and added some stuff to the order without indicating it was doing so, in an act of over-sharing that it displays at no other point in the movie, with nothing in the movie indicating that this has happened. I take it that the Alien EU assumes the text of the special order was pre-written by Weyland-Yutani, and I'm not trying to get into what the canonical answer is, but if that's what going on it's clearly a retcon of what's depicted in the actual movie.
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Jan 16, 2020 22:07
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Your interpretation would make more sense if Ash hadn’t been swapped just prior to departure, Mother hadn’t mischaracterized the message, and the ship hadn’t been re-routed to the signal. You’re presuming Mother is the one who did the re-routing, not the Company at the point of departure. I mean if we want to go the EU route, the movie’s novelization is pretty specific that it was a pre-determined decision independent of Mother and not her being some kind of homicidal rogue actor, so it’s less of a “retcon” and more of “present in the movie from release”. Also you’re saying that the hyper-literal computer that only responds to command overrides is able and willing to take the initiative and fabricate a custom special order on the fly that deliberately includes the phrase “crew expendable” because it is solely programmed to operate in the Company’s hyper-capitalist best interests no matter the cost? I’m not sure you get to have it both ways. 
Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 22:31
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^^^ Thank you Sir Kodiak for the summary. Xenomrph posted:it's not like this was a HAL9000 situation where the AI had conflicting orders and went nuts. Special Order 937 flat out says "get specimens, and if the crew gets in the way then kill them". You’ve mixed up Special Order 237 (which is a confidential message written for Ash) with the clause under Section 8 of the employees’ contracts: “Well, we are obligated under section eight...” “There is a clause in the contract which specifically states any systematized transmission indicating a possible intelligent origin must be investigated... on penalty of total forfeiture of shares.” Mother is programmed to automatically enforce this clause if she intercepts any transmission, which is why she does. Section 8 is obviously not confidential; the crew are all openly discussing it. It is standard procedure to wake the crew and head towards the source of a transmission. Mother, however, has begun to decode the alien transmission and learned that there is a “Life Form” on the moon. So, she drafts Special Order 937 and sends it to Ash. Ash, the specific crewman, is ordered to gather a specimen of that specific “Life Form” at those specific coordinates (preferably the complete organism). Mother is programmed to serve the interests of the corporation, but she is not ordered to murder the crew. That’s not what “expendable” means. Mother is simply programmed to make cost/benefit analyses in the pursuit of profit. Now, we can go over all the little errors one-by-one, but the point is not to quibble over the minutia of the Alien universe; it’s fiction. The point is to get to the source of all the errors. What’s up with your methodology? To put a point on it, the fundamental mistake is is continually depoliticizing the films by dismissing characters as “just nuts”. HAL just goes nuts and kills people. Skynet just goes nuts and kills people. Mother doesn’t go nuts but her bosses are just kill-crazy maniacs high on greed.... All these characters actually have sensible motivations. Skynet was programmed to defend the military-industrial complex against communists, so it kills off the human workers and replaces them with drones - automated factories just aimlessly harvesting resource, to build drones, in order to harvest more resources. It’s not crazy. It was told to defend capitalism against ‘enemies’. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 23:07
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Xenomrph posted:Your interpretation would make more sense if Ash hadn’t been swapped just prior to departure, Mother hadn’t mischaracterized the message, and the ship hadn’t been re-routed to the signal. You’re presuming Mother is the one who did the re-routing, not the Company at the point of departure. Nobody is saying that Mother is a homicidal rogue actor. She's acting on priorities established by the company. The company's configuration of the computer makes gathering a specimen of an alien lifeform a high enough priority that it overrides all other considerations. The logical conclusion of this, as Mother explains to the science officer, is that the crew is rendered expendable. This needs to be made clear to him because, unlike Mother, he has sympathies for the crew. There's nothing "both ways" about saying that the computer literally responds to orders (that it doesn't modify the print-out of an order it's been commanded to show) and that it attempts to literally carry out the company's priorities, which prioritize the gathering of an alien lifeform over other considerations. That's a consistency in Mother's portrayal. In regards to things you're suggesting make this a preplanned mission, not just the logic of the company carrying itself out: Ash joining the crew at the last minute helps sell that they don't know he's a robot. It's just part of the ongoing automation the company is doing. Similarly, Mother and Ash being willing to deceive the crew is just a natural consequence of all other considerations being overriden by the priority of capturing a xeno. It's just the logic of the company playing out. In regards to the timing of when the re-routing happens, we see the navigation system activate at the start of the movie after the ship has already been in space. This is the re-routing:  And, of course, if a destination is set prior to departure, that's known as a "route." Not that we need this sort of parsing of the language, given we see the re-routing happen. Also, as a final note, I gotta say I'm baffled by the idea that something being in the novelization of the movie makes it "present in the movie from release." That's a weird one.
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Jan 16, 2020 23:34
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Sir Kodiak posted:Nobody is saying that Mother is a homicidal rogue actor. SMG was, he was saying she was acting with ruthless efficiency in excess of what the Company or a rational human would want, including killing the crew. This is only the case if she herself wrote Special Order 937, which includes killing the crew. That would make her a homicidal rogue actor. However... quote:She's acting on priorities established by the company. The company's configuration of the computer makes gathering a specimen of an alien lifeform a high enough priority that it overrides all other considerations. The logical conclusion of this, as Mother explains to the science officer, is that the crew is rendered expendable. quote:unlike Mother, [Ash] has sympathies for the crew. quote:Ash joining the crew at the last minute helps sell that they don't know he's a robot. It's just part of the ongoing automation the company is doing. Also more evidence that the Company knew where it was sending the Nostromo and what to expect: Special Order 937 specifies gathering a lifeform - how would Mother know there even was a lifeform to gather? quote:In regards to the timing of when the re-routing happens, we see the navigation system activate at the start of the movie after the ship has already been in space. This is the re-routing: quote:Also, as a final note, I gotta say I'm baffled by the idea that something being in the novelization of the movie makes it "present in the movie from release." That's a weird one. Edit—. SMG, your point about “depoliticizing” is an interesting angle to take, but I ultimately don’t agree with it although I respect your right to hold it. 
Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 00:44
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I cant lie to you about your chances...but you have my sympathies.
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Jan 17, 2020 01:13
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Xenomrph posted:SMG was, he was saying she was acting with ruthless efficiency in excess of what the Company or a rational human would want, including killing the crew. This is only the case if she herself wrote Special Order 937, which includes killing the crew. That would make her a homicidal rogue actor. Carrying out the company's orders bluntly in a manner a human wouldn't is not going rogue. A human commander wouldn't say "you're expendable," they'd just treat people that way. But the end result is the same. Xenomrph posted:There’s no evidence of this - Ash doesn’t even know the crew, having joined the ship just before departure. All of his interactions we see involve either directly or indirectly procuring the Alien, studying it, or keeping it safe. Ash's final words to the crew are literally "you have my sympathies," in a conversation in which he talks about how he wishes he shared the xenomorph's lack of conscience and remorse. And we shouldn't be surprised to find a robot that is a little too human in a Ridley Scott movie. Xenomrph posted:I don’t see how putting him on the ship has anything to do with “ongoing automation”, which you seem to have inferred out of thin air You don't see the connection between a robot crew member and the automation of ship functions? It's a literal automaton replacing a human crew member. And you can tell this is something the company does because the highest authority on the ship is a computer, that re-routes the ship without the crew being involved. Xenomrph posted:Also more evidence that the Company knew where it was sending the Nostromo and what to expect: Special Order 937 specifies gathering a lifeform - how would Mother know there even was a lifeform to gather? You said this earlier: Xenomrph posted:The Nostromo’s entire trip there was a pre-planned attempt to make a low-key investigation of a signal that someone at the Company knew was of interest because the signal had been detected and decoded before the Nostromo even left port. I'm not sure what in the movie tells us this. But, more importantly, if you're okay with the the company knowing there would be a lifeform based on its analysis of the signal, then whatever the company did that told them there was a lifeform could have been done by Mother instead. Xenomrph posted:Because the book is based on the script, and the author isn’t being influenced by outside “EU” materials or even other movies in the series that might have retconned something (since none exist) so the conclusion that gathering a specimen was a Company directive is either something genuinely present in the script, or at worst a logical conclusion that a person could infer from it. The script is not the movie. The movie is the movie. Sometimes things from the script change when the movie is made. Sometimes things from the script get left out, which also changes the meaning of the movie. All this tells us is that the source of the misunderstanding of the movie represented in the EU may be the novelization. edit: Xenomrph posted:We don’t see any sort of change in course, it’s just displaying its location. The re-routing is that the ship was originally meant to go to Earth, and it doesn’t do that. I checked and you're right about this. The screen is lighting up because they hit their destination. We don't actually see the re-routing, just get told that it was done. Doesn't undo the overall argument, but I appreciate the correction. Sir Kodiak fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 01:17
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Xenomrph posted:Special Order 937 specifies gathering a lifeform - how would Mother know there even was a lifeform to gather? It’s in the transmission, which she has been decoding. The decoding of the transmission is visualized in the famous titles, where strange lines become the word “Alien”. But again, the point is not to correct you on your knowledge of Alien’s plot. The issue is with the fantasies about how a corporation works, why people do crimes, and what a conspiracy looks like. Conspiracies do, of course, exist. Mother and Ash are conspiring to ignore health and safety regulations in order to increase their chances of catching the creature (this is very different from murder, by the way). The company has also been conspiring against the workers by using loyal robots to keep tabs on them. Actual conspiracies are very banal. In conspiracy theories, on the other hand, we fantasize a dark “god of the gaps” who takes the form of whatever shadowy cabal. The point is to come up with a comforting explanation of why things go wrong. In your theory, things go wrong because the company knows everything in advance and plans it all down to the minutest detail. Then they send a single robot, in a tugboat. The robot is very fragile and has been provided no useful weapons or equipment - but he has been given over 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore. The sensible conclusion is that the conspiracy theory is incorrect; obviously the tugboat was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s why there’s only one robot, that’s why they’re terribly ill-prepared to capture the monster, that’s why they’re carrying 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore, etc. Of course, the conspiracy theorist now says “that’s why they want you to think! They’re using a useless tugboat with no weapons to make the crew’s deaths look like an accident!” But, wait, the goal isn’t to kill the crew. That makes no sense. By mother’s own admission, they just don’t care if the workers survive or not, because they’re just assets. Why bring witnesses along just to kill them? Etc. Underwater is a great film because it shuts this nonsense down before it can start. There’s no evil AI computer-god to get confused over, there’s no way to interpret this as some kind of jewish plot. The fish men aren’t valuable, and the company doesn’t pursue them. The mining operation is simply profitable enough to offset the cost of the inevitable disasters. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 02:54
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Sir Kodiak posted:Carrying out the company's orders bluntly in a manner a human wouldn't is not going rogue. A human commander wouldn't say "you're expendable," they'd just treat people that way. But the end result is the same. Sir Kodiak posted:Ash's final words to the crew are literally "you have my sympathies," in a conversation in which he talks about how he wishes he shared the xenomorph's lack of conscience and remorse. And we shouldn't be surprised to find a robot that is a little too human in a Ridley Scott movie. Sir Kodiak posted:You don't see the connection between a robot crew member and the automation of ship functions? It's a literal automaton replacing a human crew member. Sir Kodiak posted:And you can tell this is something the company does because the highest authority on the ship is a computer, that re-routes the ship without the crew being involved. Additionally, this presupposes Mother re-routed the ship, and that the course change wasn't made at departure by the Company. Sir Kodiak posted:the source of the misunderstanding of the movie represented in the EU may be the novelization. The Company in the movies isn't "cartoonishly evil", it's amoral to a degree that's meant to make the audience say "the Alien isn't the bad guy, the Company and the kind of culture and employees it breeds are". Like Ripley says, you don't see the Aliens loving each other over for a goddamn percentage. It's not actively trying to murder anyone, but it sure doesn't care if it tramples over some lives if it thinks it can get away with it. As I said before, at the time 'Alien' and 'Aliens' were made (and you could make a similar case with Robocop, although that's arguably more complex), the portrayal of such an amoral corporation is meant to shock and disgust the audience. The unfortunate joke is that in today's corporate culture, "the evil corporation" isn't just a well-worn trope, it's a literal facet of modern society in real life. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is the Nostromo incident in real life - "crew expendable" wasn't literally written in big green letters where the rig's crew could read it, but BP's pursuit of the Almighty Dollar was more valuable to them than human lives. The American healthcare industry and pharmaceutical corporations make Weyland Yutani's casual disregard for human life look like amateur hour. That's what takes the wind out of Tian Corporation's sails - seeing them do a "coverup" and having it just thrown on the screen at the last minute of the movie isn't going to shock anyone, nor is it giving a particularly scathing commentary on anything we don't already see every day in real life, so it just feels like "why bother?" SuperMechagodzilla posted:the fish men aren’t valuable, and the company doesn’t pursue them. The mining operation is simply profitable enough to offset the cost of the inevitable disasters. Okay, so if Tian doesn't care about the fish men, why cover anything up? When the disaster hits, the crew surmises it's an earthquake and that alone almost destabilizes the reactor, which would vaporize the mining rig. And that's the obvious way any bystander would read it - an earthquake damaged the rig, and then it exploded. What is there to cover up? On that topic, maybe I missed it during the end credits but does it specify that there are only the two survivors of the disaster? Like, when we first see the captain he indicates that he personally launched other people out in life pods, but he opted to stay behind.
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Jan 17, 2020 03:38
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Xenomrph posted:I dunno man, when SMG's point is "Mother is willing to get people killed, something the Company wouldn't approve of", which hinges on the Company not approving of Special Order 937. I wrote nothing of the sort. Like, nothing about “approval” at all. I’ve warned you to be careful. The point of Alien is that, where a human person might say “uh, this is a bit silly”, or feel bad about it, Mother indefatigably pursues the alien up to her death by nuclear explosion. This is the basic point of making Mother an operating system rather than a human character. She is the ‘embodiment’ of the corporation’s logic - its policies, practices, internal rules and regulations, etc. And this is where we’re getting back to the problem of depoliticization: if you are a worker, you are already expendable to your employers. That’s why things like labour laws exist. We’re talking of progressive struggle. You don’t need to fantasize a crappy murder conspiracy. Movies like Alien and Underwater are about actual things experienced by people in reality. Lose sight of that, and you get stuff like this: quote:This is what feels like a mixed message - Norah notices the plans to drill in the precise spot where the fish men are, but no attention is given to that point. So were Tian after the fish men or not? No, they are not drilling for fishmen. That’s ridiculous - like saying that the companies producing carbon emissions are trying to obtain Australian wildfires and dead koala bears. There is zero ambiguity here. They are not drilling for fishmen. The innovation of Underwater is that the creatures are presented as a byproduct of the corporation’s functioning. In this way, the film’s politics align with those of District 9 - in which the magical ‘xenomorphs’ are more accurately understood as simply homeless people with guns. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 05:51
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I wrote nothing of the sort. Like, nothing about “approval” at all. I’ve warned you to be careful. SuperMechagodzilla posted:In Alien 1, the higher-ups in the corporation accidentally program the Mother computer to kill the crew because (as with Skynet) Mother takes their orders more seriously than they themselves do. So a simple order to obtain alien samples for profit is executed with ruthless efficiency where a human would have some ‘commonsense’ self-limitation. Also, knock off the condescending "be careful" nonsense, thanks. quote:No, they are not drilling for fishmen. That’s ridiculous - like saying that the companies producing carbon emissions are trying to obtain Australian wildfires and dead koala bears. There is zero ambiguity here. They are not drilling for fishmen. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. Serves me right for taking the bait I guess. 
Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 06:07
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Saw it tonight, and frankly it was a pretty good film. Didn't start out great, but got better as it went along. 2 questions though, cause I got confused about a point. 1: Why did the captain suddenly ascend? I know they were fighting with the merman thingie on that platform, but suddenly he rockets up but he's not blasting out air bubbles or anything, just flying upwards. Did I miss something? 2: What the hell caused that bigaas explosion when he decided to detonate himself? I saw him hit the button but I don't recall any sort of tech talk earlier in the film about these suits being fusion powered or whatever. Not trying to be nitpicky, and I did enjoy the movie, I just have the feeling I might have missed a thing or two while eating popcorn.
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Jan 17, 2020 10:03
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Xenomrph posted:Yes, you did: That’s not what ‘condescending’ means. I am not treating you as stupid. This bad paraphrase: "Mother is willing to get people killed, something the Company wouldn't approve of" Is the opposite of what I actually wrote: “In Alien 1, the higher-ups in the corporation accidentally program the Mother computer to kill the crew because (as with Skynet) Mother takes their orders more seriously than they themselves do.” Why are these sentences opposite? Because a pre-programmed ‘willingness’ to treat workers as expendable resources is not the same as being ordered to kill six specific people (and yourself). Those are different things. The one thing is the cause of the other, different thing. Here’s a rephrasing to help demonstrate: -Mother is ordered to treat the workers as resources. -Mother takes this order extremely seriously. -As a result, Mother kills a bunch of people. Because you missed or ignored the “because”, you lost track of cause and effect. Because of that, you read my post to mean Mother was not really ordered to do anything and just ‘went nuts’. That’s a misreading. Because of such repeated misreadings, I urged you to be careful. I attribute your skipping over words, and glossing cover grammatical nuances, to carelessness - not stupidity. But it is affecting your literacy. Another example: quote:Again, what was there to "cover up"? The characters spell out a ready-made natural explanation for the disaster that removes all culpability from the corporation. In a fairly straightforward metaphor for climate change, the Tian corporation is covering up the existence of the creatures because they don’t want people to do anything about the extremely high risk of creature-related ecocatastrophe. The creatures are a deadly byproduct of the drilling operation - not only endangering the workers, but certainly threatening to have a devastating impact on the ocean ecosystem. But the corporation wants to keep drilling. They are not trying to catch the creatures.
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Jan 17, 2020 16:16
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Saw it tonight, and frankly it was a pretty good film. Didn't start out great, but got better as it went along. I thought one of the fish men grabbed him and was dragging him up. As for the explosion, I think his suit was failing because of the rapid pressure decrease from ascending too fast. I don’t know if it would have caused an explosion like that but that’s how I rationalized it.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:06
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Good point on the first one. I didn't see that happen but honestly I could have missed it while grabbing popcorn. Second one, I'm still confused about, because the first guy imploding was messy and weird, but not exactly a giant explosion like his was Yea, I'll fully admit to it being nitpicky but other than those moments I really liked what the movie turned out to be. Wasn't a fan of the first part but it got pretty great pretty quick.
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Jan 17, 2020 23:19
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Good point on the first one. I didn't see that happen but honestly I could have missed it while grabbing popcorn. I think that might be the difference - the first one was an implosion because the suit’s integrity was compromised, and the captain’s suit was an explosion because it was rapidly going from a high-pressure environment to a lower-pressure one. Maybe? Like that makes sense in my head I guess.
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Jan 17, 2020 23:32
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Xenomrph posted:I think that might be the difference - the first one was an implosion because the suit’s integrity was compromised, and the captain’s suit was an explosion because it was rapidly going from a high-pressure environment to a lower-pressure one. Maybe? Like that makes sense in my head I guess. I think ascending too quickly would make your blood boil, not your suit implode/explode.
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Jan 18, 2020 18:21
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smoobles posted:I think ascending too quickly would make your blood boil, not your suit implode/explode. Yes, but there was also a warning from the suit saying that pressure was increasing too quickly and its integrity was dropping fast.
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Jan 18, 2020 18:53
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On its face, Underwater is a very typical disaster movie about hope. At the beginning of the movie, KStew has given into despair and has become depressed and directionless after her fiancee's death. By the end of the movie, her crewmates' struggles and sacrifices have rekindled her spirit and she has the hope to defeat the personification of Death at the bottom of the sea. BUT, the very end of the movie calls that all into question. The newspaper clippings state that the Tian Corporation is just going rebuild, implying that the whole affair will just repeat itself. KStew's rekindled hope, then, just continues a cycle as the movie ends essentially as it starts, with newspaper clippings describing a disaster and then efforts to rebuild. Is the movie trying to argue that the inspiration to rebuild after a disaster only provokes further disasters? That would give the movie an effective punchline, but is that enough to make the rest of the movie less trite?
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Jan 18, 2020 19:11
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My understanding is that the suits are pressurized and couldn't adjust quickly enough to the drop in external pressure, like a balloon exploding as it expands when rising to the surface. I was also surprised just how spectacular the explosion was, but that's why it looked different than when that other guy's faceplate failed. Maybe the batteries also breached when it tore itself apart or something.Xenomrph posted:While this is a salient point, I stand by Ash not caring about the crew. Given his (hilarious) smile after saying it, I interpret "you have my sympathies" less as "I am genuinely in sorrow over the predicament you're in" and more of "good loving luck, you're gonna need it." SMG handled the corporate side of this discussion well, so I'll just say, this is a real failure to read what I would have thought as the most famous line in the movie. Ash admires the creatures being unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality because he feels those things but they conflict with what the corporation compels him to do. For him there's a tragedy in what David will later play as farce: being made just a little too human. We should not be surprised to see this in a Ridley Scott movie. Xenomrph posted:By that logic, why not replace the whole crew and automate the whole thing? Auto companies didn't lay off every worker simultaneously and replace them all with robots on the same day. Yet it's still accurate to say they're increasingly automating their factories. pospysyl posted:BUT, the very end of the movie calls that all into question. The newspaper clippings state that the Tian Corporation is just going rebuild, implying that the whole affair will just repeat itself. KStew's rekindled hope, then, just continues a cycle as the movie ends essentially as it starts, with newspaper clippings describing a disaster and then efforts to rebuild. Is the movie trying to argue that the inspiration to rebuild after a disaster only provokes further disasters? That would give the movie an effective punchline, but is that enough to make the rest of the movie less trite? I take the point as being that, as monstrous as the Lovecraftian creature is, it's still a symptom and not a cause. The true enemy is still at work on the surface. The fight isn't over. It's a horror movie. Compare it to the final shot being the killer's eyes suddenly snapping open.
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Jan 18, 2020 19:19
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pospysyl posted:KStew's rekindled hope, then, just continues a cycle as the movie ends essentially as it starts, with newspaper clippings describing a disaster and then efforts to rebuild. Is the movie trying to argue that the inspiration to rebuild after a disaster only provokes further disasters? That would give the movie an effective punchline, but is that enough to make the rest of the movie less trite? The 'tragedy' of the film is that Norah dies right as she finally gets the right idea, of giving herself completely to protecting the workers and fighting the company. But this is why Norah is ultimately shown impossibly alive after her death: outside the unending downward spiral of disaster and reconstruction, it is this spirit that persists - even despite the coverup. So while the corporation announces plans to drill again, Norah has opened up a new opportunity for us to put a halt to those plans. It's important that the creatures aren't an immediate threat to her. She's not really concerned about them, outside of protecting the two coworkers, and just dispassionately blows up the facility.
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Jan 18, 2020 20:20
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Sir Kodiak posted:Auto companies didn't lay off every worker simultaneously and replace them all with robots on the same day. Yet it's still accurate to say they're increasingly automating their factories. Auto companies also didn't roll out humanoid laborers meant to integrate with the crew, and ultimately deceive them as they were being replaced one by one until there were no humans left. No, the guy who normally did the welding was told "we're replacing you with an articulated robot arm that can do your job six times as fast as you can", and then they installed the robot arm. Like, think about what you're trying to suggest - the Company, in its efforts to cut costs, are going to invest millions in R&D to create lifelike humanoid robots that can integrate with humans in order to replace them one by one. In doing so, they're going to make sure that these humanoid robots can pass for human in every regard to the point that they can effortlessly deceive the people they work alongside, which means they're nominally consuming the same resources a human would. In doing so, they're going to gradually replace each member of a ship's crew one by one, unbeknownst to the still-human members of the crew, until there's one human left who doesn't realize all his friends are robots or something. Like it's a really funny and sadistic idea I guess (and could make for the plot of its own movie, like a robotic "invasion of the body snatchers"), but it's the opposite of practical in a corporate setting.  To clarify, there are reasons to have humanoid robots, and reasons to make them seem convincingly lifelike, but the people working with them know what's going on right from the start (i.e., Bishop in 'Aliens'). Even if Ash being an android was beneficial to the crew, the crew would have known ahead of time - heaven forbid something malfunction with him, or he stumble off a ladder and crack his head open, and the rest of the crew is totally caught off guard and can't help him because they had no idea he was a robot and didn't prepare for that. No, Ash's presence wasn't some kind of corporate automation initiative, he was there as an act of deception. What you're suggesting is something you'd expect from a bizarre corporate apologist looking for the "good" justification for obviously bad behavior. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Jan 18, 2020 |
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Jan 18, 2020 22:00
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Xenomrph posted:No, Ash's presence wasn't some kind of corporate automation initiative, he was there as an act of deception. What you're suggesting is something you'd expect from a bizarre corporate apologist looking for the "good" justification for obviously bad behavior. Alien was made in the 1970s and, from that standpoint, predicts that human workers in the future will be cheaper than robots. There is only one robot because robots are expensive. (Along these same lines, although Ripley speculates that the company wants the alien to sell as a weapon, the more likely explanation is that it's a potentially-cheaper worker than either a human or a robot - inexpensive to produce, built-in spacesuit, etc. Its usefulness as a weapon is dubious). Here we should point out that Ash is not a robotic arm on an assembly line. He is obviously designed to resemble a human in a way that is entirely superfluous to (and, in all likelihood, hampers) his role as Science Officer. This is because Ash's primary task is to help management spy on the workers. You are not wrong on that point. But the mistake, as before, is that you speculate that this spying is evidence of a far-reaching satanic conspiracy, instead of a mundane union-busting tactic. (All Ash's 900+ "Special Orders" are implicitly to prevent the workers from uniting against Mother and the company). And again: this mistake is the result of depoliticization. The conspiracy theory depends on ignoring the role of labour, costs, resources, the company's profit motive, etc. The executives just 'go nuts' and lie out of malice. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Jan 18, 2020 |
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Jan 18, 2020 22:59
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Right. Obviously, it works for the plot to have Ash be in charge of science and medical because that's who deals with the alien in the actual movie, but people with specialized technical knowledge that has marketable use other than on a pretty lousy job like long-haul naval work (e.g., science and medicine) are the hardest and most expensive to staff. So it makes sense that to deploy your expensive robots there first. That companies would replace people with robots where a loyal specialist is needed should, again, not be surprising to find in a movie made by the director of Blade Runner.
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Jan 19, 2020 20:00
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The Order includes at least one major grammatical error (INSURE RETURN OF ORGANISM) so I'd hesitate to use the tenses to argue mother added it her/itself. Alien takes great pains to tell you that Ash was assigned to the Nostromo right before it left and ISN'T THAT SUSPICIOUS? The Nostromo was sent out there to get hit by this ping, and Ash was assigned to the ship to make sure they found/acquired/etc the xenomorph. If that meant the crew dies, eh, whatever life is cheap. But since this is the Underwater thread, I'll leave it there. It's amazing to me that the two leads from twilight have turned into actual good performers. Kinda awesome really.
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Jan 19, 2020 21:21
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Per a recent interview, Underwater's director confirmed that in the last act the big honking monster is meant to be Cthulhu.
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Jan 19, 2020 23:08
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Xenomrph posted:Per a recent interview, Underwater's director confirmed that in the last act the big honking monster is meant to be Cthulhu. Yessss 
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Jan 20, 2020 01:04
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I watched this and, overall, it was... fine? Kristen Stewart does a good job as an action hero but is weighed down by some clunky writing/editing and T.J. Miller, who seems to be from an entirely different movie than all the other characters. (God, I hated his Alice in Wonderland gimmick.) It's clear that there's been some aggressive revisions done to whatever this movie was in 2017, so I guess I should be happy that it is still broadly serviceable.
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Jan 20, 2020 03:27
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Spite posted:But since this is the Underwater thread, I'll leave it there. This is important to the Underwater thread because the film is, for all intents and purposes, a direct sequel to Alien. But, more importantly, we’re getting into basic questions of, like, why are corporations bad? What makes a corporation bad? If the assertion is that corporations are bad because they’re selling weapons, flagrantly breaking the law, killing people, etc.... well, ‘you’re not wrong’ as Norah says in the film - but that is also far from being true. The vast majority of companies don’t do such things, and companies are bad regardless of whether such things occur. The worst excesses are entirely legal and enacted without malice by boring good people, because systemic problems exist and persist regardless of anyone’s intentionality. This is where it might be helpful to move from Ash to Bishop. Bishop is, by all accounts, a good and honest person - but he exists for the same reason Ash does: to prevent the workers from uniting against their employer. He simply does so by fostering a spirit of friendship between workers and the company, instead of Ash’s bad optics. Almost 60 years after Alien 1, Bishop is part of Weyland-Yutani’s efforts to rebrand itself as a progressive, ethical corporation. He literally provides a human face for the company, speaks in the language of political correctness, etc. But the fact that Bishop is a nice and honest person makes his service more deceitful than Ash’s, not less, because the exploitation of the workers remains the same. This corporate progressivism papers over the fundamental antagonism that is class struggle. Although the company still has a “Bioweapons Division”, Bishop would certainly - and without lying - tell you that those weapons are being developed for humanitarian purposes, to protect the colonies against such terrible threats as the xenomorph. This is why I emphasize that the alien is not the enemy, but actually Ripley’s unnatural ally. This is where Underwater extrapolates from Alien out to the level of ecolosystem. Its message, with its image of humanoid creatures parasitically attached to a collosal leviathan (resembling Junji Ito’s The Thing That Drifted Ashore), is this: “What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.” -Zizek, my bolding As a contrast to, say, James Cameron’s The Abyss, Underwater is interesting because that it doesn’t romanticize the water at all. The film emphasizes its opacity, its choking thickness - air pollution, antithetical to human life. In Lovecraft tradition, the creatures are mutants - altered by evolution, over the course of eons, to barely-survive in this hideous place. The image of the creatures is of course, to Norah, a vision of humanity’s future as well as a reflection of her present struggle.
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Jan 20, 2020 06:19
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Sir Kodiak posted:My understanding is that the suits are pressurized and couldn't adjust quickly enough to the drop in external pressure, like a balloon exploding as it expands when rising to the surface. I was also surprised just how spectacular the explosion was, but that's why it looked different than when that other guy's faceplate failed. Maybe the batteries also breached when it tore itself apart or something. It looked like he was fidgeting with something on the suit which could've been what caused the explosion. Could've been something for the suit's power source or considering they're miners, some sort of detonation charge for if they have to go out an manually plant one. Xenomrph posted:Per a recent interview, Underwater's director confirmed that in the last act the big honking monster is meant to be Cthulhu. Looked like a mix of Cthulhu and Diablo . Still, was a very nice design.
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Jan 24, 2020 00:21
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Just got back. It wasn't great, but I liked the outline of it, kind of The Abyss crossed with Gravity. It probably could have done with a second pass for lameness (stop putting voice overs in your script, please, please), but having just wrung dry The Expanse I've been thirsty for more of this kind of aesthetic, with the bulky suits and the airlocks and the whatnot. My main observation is that it felt like it was missing its first act. We never get to see anything functioning properly or the station operating normally for a minute to orient us before everything goes wrong; we probably should have followed the research assistant down for her first day or something. It's a big ingredient--all the Alien movies had it except Resurrection, which sucked the hardest, The Abyss, The Thing, even fuckin Avatar, we need to see the thing that's going to be getting knocked down before it does. Also I've already forgotten whatever it was TJ Miller did so I wasn't really scandalized by his presence beyond all his dialogue being stupid. Inspector Hound fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Jan 25, 2020 |
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Jan 25, 2020 05:34
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