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gohuskies posted:I don't know why anyone would expect that there needs to be a scientifically rational way for the Thing to infect/absorb people. The lone custodian learned too late that the coronal event scrambled her starlink and the ship was actually in an adjacent quadrant, and that the moon was a sentient planet-intelligence that adapts and assimilates continuously.
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Dec 6, 2020 22:53
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:The movie doesn't go out of is way to emphasize this presumably because it's completely unnecessary unless you're a crazy person
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Dec 6, 2020 23:36
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Groovelord Neato posted:The fellas probably considered the possibility the Thing could assimilate another lifeform but keep them as separate entities (which is what the movies insinuates happens with the dog when it goes into the room with one of the guys). Even before that, the split-face Thing and the dog were separate.
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Dec 7, 2020 00:02
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…I don't know what to tell you. If you don't think a monster's ability to near-instantaneously reproduce with each kill it makes isn't crucial information, well, you're entitled to your priorities, but I legit think that's strange.
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Dec 7, 2020 00:08
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FilthyImp posted:We wouldn't be nerds if we didn't know that the alien ship was actually a garbage freighter that was diverted due to a coronal ejection that split a red moon, and that The Thing (re: Protoform Y-32[s]) attached itself to a Ramscoop that gathered elemental materials from the planet chunks. There's a 90s Outer Limits where a Thing like alien turns out to be the cooling system for the actual ship itself. Maybe the Thing here is actually just a medical device to regrow arms and poo poo. On an alien world they have a version of this movie where yeast escapes from an earth ship and just absorbs and takes over their world.
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Dec 7, 2020 00:19
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:…I don't know what to tell you. If you don't think a monster's ability to near-instantaneously reproduce with each kill it makes isn't crucial information, well, you're entitled to your priorities, but I legit think that's strange.
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Dec 7, 2020 00:27
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:At an hour and five minutes, Fuchs just casually drops a line that goes by so quick you might miss that it's the first (and will in fact be the only) line in the entire movie that explicitly references the Thing's contagious nature. The scene with Blair's simulation, saying that a single cell can take over the entire Earth in roughly three years, occurs at around 40 minutes into the movie. Five minutes later, Fuchs tells Macready that the small amount of cellular activity in the dead bodies still poses a threat. Ten minutes after that, Blair yells "if a cell gets out, it could imitate everything on the face of the Earth!!!!!" - basically repeating the point of the simulation for anyone who may have been confused. So, the fact that the Thing is some sort of infectious agent, inside of the infected people, is repeated 3 or 4 times over the span of 25 minutes. gohuskies posted:I don't know why anyone would expect that there needs to be a scientifically rational way for the Thing to infect/absorb people. It is an alien Thing and it does it through alien magic. The human characters (and the viewers of the movie) never really understand how it works because it is an Alien thing that they and we cannot possibly hope to understand, certainly not in the timescale during which the events of the movie take place. That is true to an extent, because the mechanism behind the thing is submicroscopic and therefore effectively invisible. However, we do zoom in up to the cellular level, and that does highlight the absurdity of thinking every single one of Palmer’s 30 trillion cells is superhumanly intelligent and possesses a detailed knowledge of astrophysics. Mistaken Identity posted:Let’s skip over your whole Nietzsche thing, which is at best a semantical resemblance. (Derrida and Kristeva or heck even Marxism are much clearer influences). You are hilariously misconstructing what Barthes intends with the death of the author(ical figure). Derrida was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, and Marx wasn’t limited to a mere anti-authoritarianism. These are rookie mistakes. Specifically, Derrida’s deconstructionism was to great extent based on Nietzsche’s affirmation - where the ethical superman, no longer bound by good and evil, approaches the world as if a child at play. And, again, it’s a huge mistake to read that as a “do whatever u feel like, gas the Jews because nothing matters lol” - because then you would say Trump and the right wing (with their “post-truth”) are exemplary derrideans. In actuality, Derrida’s project of doing away with illusory ‘truths’ has a certain utopian dimension to it - because, again, the goal was to eliminate all these various false excuses for suffering and/or doing harm. The “play” he’s talking about is only possible when based in a concrete freedom from such as poverty. Deconstruction is designed to punch up. “Deconstruction is justice.” -Derrida Your mistake, it bears repeating, is in believing the Author-God actually exists, evidently defined as ‘a person who expresses a belief too strongly’. So, when I post “everybody poops”, or “Black Lives Matter”, or “wearing a mask fights COVID” - that is a dangerous authoritarianism that you must resist at all costs. Like, as if I have an incredible power over you because I refuse to preface the statement “the Holocaust happened” with an “in my opinion...”. In truth, the Author-God you are afraid of because of His absolute dominion over meaning does not actually exist, and everybody knows it. Barthes says as much in his essay, very clearly. He’s like ‘obviously we all know the Author-God doesn’t exist, but people keep acting as though He does’. I am not an authority over you. I am just telling you the Holocaust happened. (I can keep writing all kinds of stuff that’s just extremely true - but, hopefully, you get the idea.) Most likely, you’ve made this mistake because you just never considered the political dimension of art. Nothing is actually at stake here because we’re only talking about a stupid John Carpenter movie, right? Meanwhile, John Carpenter fills The Thing with war imagery and personally notes the relevance of his film to the AIDS crisis.... If you want an example of how deconstruction actually works, you can check out Jameson and Zizek’s complementary analyses of Jaws, which go over the many possible interpretations of the film to demonstrate how the shark functions as a master signifier that stands for social antagonism as such: “The vocation of the symbol - the killer shark - lies less in any single message or meaning than in its very capacity to absorb and organize all of these quite distinct anxieties together. As a symbolic vehicle, then, the shark must be understood more in terms of its essentially polysemous function rather than as any particular content attributable to it by this or that spectator.” That’s Jameson saying that you must understand the essential function of the symbolic movie monster in order to perform a proper ideological critique. Because, y’know, that’s the entire point of this - not protecting yourself from having your mistakes pointed out on the Internet. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 02:05
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Listen, you can try to put words in my mouth and gaslight me all you want. I can also assure you that I am terribly impressed by your academic chops. All your condescension and elitism doesn’t change the fact though that you are still missing the point. Let’s boil it down, I said: quote:“Yo dude, maybe take a page out of Barthes and acknowledge that there are other possible interpretations that are valid.” Also, and I missed that at first, but you nonchalantly went from “Barthes is DIRECTLY influenced by Nietzsche” to “Actually, Nietzsche sort of influenced this other author that you brought up that was an influence to Barthes. Still counts.” And speaking of rookie mistakes: The Marxist influence on DotA is not about anti-authoritanism but a critique of an author’s ownership of his text. In conclusion: lol Mistaken Identity fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 09:06
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Blair yells "if a cell gets out, it could imitate everything on the face of the Earth!!!!!" - basically repeating the point of the simulation for anyone who may have been confused. could = will, if would = will, except besides that its a character saying it and characters are faulty and besides that its a character in a movie with a deliberate theme of paranoia where the subject of that paranoia is unknowable and alien and the subject of rampant character speculation we see the paranoia and speculation manifest in different ways from different characters thoughout the movie. the only theory proven correct on screen is the blood test
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Dec 7, 2020 09:42
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
 Goddamn, the film even begins with Also sprach Zarathustra.
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Dec 7, 2020 22:05
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:That is true to an extent, because the mechanism behind the thing is submicroscopic and therefore effectively invisible.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:20
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Mistaken Identity posted:I missed that at first, but you nonchalantly went from “Barthes is DIRECTLY influenced by Nietzsche” to “Actually, Nietzsche sort of influenced this other author that you brought up that was an influence to Barthes. Still counts.” Barthes and Derrida are both influenced by Nietzsche, as evidenced by Barthes’ use of the phrase ‘God is dead’ to express concepts effectively identical to those expressed by Nietzsche. Saying, like, ‘Barthes wasn’t inspired by Nietzsche because he was inspired by Derrida’ implies some sort of incompatibility between Nietzsche and Barthes/Derrida where none actually exists. Otherwise, it’s a pointless non-sequitur. In the very first two paragraphs of his essay, Barthes says that The Author (which he defines as the origin of a text’s meaning) does not exist, and has never existed. He then goes on to say that, despite this fact, most critics in his time feel that The Author is real (i.e. that there is an origin of meaning) because of, basically, capitalist ideology. (See Foucault’s lecture/essay “What Is An Author?”, and how the notion of The Author is tied to notions of intellectual property.) So, to be very clear: Barthes’ target is ideology in general, and capitalist ideology in particular - not the Author-God, which doesn’t actually exist. And, when I write things like “Holocaust denial is false”, that is not promoting, enforcing, or defending the institution of private property, or anything like that. So you made a mistake. The reason for indulging this tangent is that it is relevant to the film; Macready also believes in an Evil God, who is author and origin of a world-takeover conspiracy. Although there actually are people acting against him (Norris and, later, Blair), Macready’s paranoia causes him to misunderstand their motivations and actions. Norris is just some dude who’s scared, but Macready sees him as an all-powerful subhuman responsible for the theft of society. That is actually another example of how deconstruction works: Macready interprets the virus as a sign of degeneracy to be eliminated, while Palmer has a ‘New Age’ interpretation where the aliens are spiritual god-beings delivering ancient wisdom, and so-on. All the various ideological standpoints are all “true” - from a certain point of view, as they say in Star Wars - but all of them fall short of the truth. The virus is really just bringing out the latent (and not-so latent) conflicts in the group, carried over from the world they supposedly isolated from gary oldmans diary posted:could ≠ will If you want to go down that road, then we don’t know whether the blood test works. Macready could be an alien whose blood is very good at playing dead - or one clever enough to create nonintelligent blood for himself. It could be that none of them are aliens, and a tiny alien snuck into Palmer’s sample to frame him. (The part where Palmer appears to transform is a fear-induced hallucination). It could be that the alien disguised itself as a single hair in Macready’s beard. It could be that the alien can transform itself into ice, and the entire continent of Antarctica was a Thing all along. It could be that Norris was a rival Good Thing from a neighbouring starship. It could be that Blair’s ‘chameleon’ metaphor is actually literal, and there’s an invisible lizard hidden in every shot. It could be that The Thing is a movie made by the Thing to make folks think the Thing is a Thing, when it’s not. It could be that only the dog was ever real, and it died, and this is what Dog Heaven looks like. If you’re going to take what you don’t know and fill it in with fanciful speculation, you might as well go all out. What I’m doing, instead, is taking Blair’s fairly-good hypothesis and examining it. He’s probably observed what the cells are doing, but it’s unclear where he got all the complex motivations from. A biologist with a microscope can plausibly observe cells, but he has no real basis for the claim that the infected dog wanted to become human because it perceived humans as superior. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 04:25
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Palpable unintentional irony. I will now engage with you through the traditional medium of Japanese short form poetry: Contrarian thoughts It is lonely at the top Why are they so wrong? I call it SuperMechaGodzilla’s Lament
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Dec 8, 2020 09:02
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:If you’re going to take what you don’t know and fill it in with fanciful speculation, you might as well go all out. having to deal with the only actual reliable evidence being the blood test instead of the mountain of nonsense youve built up compels you to throw a freak tantrum as youve just done gary oldmans diary fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 09:51
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Mistaken Identity posted:I will now engage with you through the traditional medium of Japanese short form poetry:
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Dec 8, 2020 19:53
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The commentary really is gold, for anyone that hasn't heard it. Kurt: "Look at this. Heh heh haha." JC: "The poor guy had to take his shirt off up there in the cold to do it."
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Dec 8, 2020 21:30
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Splicer posted:It's unnecessary to emphasise because it's extremely obvious from context (it's not instant though) Honestly I'm not even trying to argue otherwise; it's certainly something you can deduce or figure out and it may well be obvious (though I'd stop short of "extremely" -- I think it's telling that no one brought that scene up and I had to do it myself). I’m just pointing out that a vital plot point isn't made explicit and that it was a result of a goof rather than being done intentionally (and the idea that it was done purposefully to create ambiguity is sort of at odds with the idea that they didn't make it explicit because it was simply that obvious). SuperMechagodzilla posted:The scene with Blair's simulation, saying that a single cell can take over the entire Earth in roughly three years, occurs at around 40 minutes into the movie. Five minutes later, Fuchs tells Macready that the small amount of cellular activity in the dead bodies still poses a threat. Ten minutes after that, Blair yells "if a cell gets out, it could imitate everything on the face of the Earth!!!!!" - basically repeating the point of the simulation for anyone who may have been confused. This is another one that works in hindsight, but still requires you to know that you must disregard the simulation (or more specifically, that the text of the simulation supersedes the visual component). And hey, if you managed to get that on a single viewing, props to you, but I think for many viewers an established visual like that is narratively powerful enough it's going to take some more to "de-establish" it, as it were. For the most part, The Thing works much better on subsequent viewings because now that you do know all the stuff the scenes assume the movie has already told you, they actually work as intended.
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Dec 8, 2020 21:40
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Another fun excerpt from The Thing commentary! JC: "Now John Wash, a friend of mine from USC, who designed the graphics from 'Escape From New York,' also designed these graphics trying to explain the life cycle. The Thing takes over one normal cell, as you can see… we still didn't get it quite right, but it doesn't matter. "Strangely, at the time, Kurt, when we previewed the movie, someone in the cards said that this kind of technology doesn't exist, it wouldn't exist, this kind of animation graphics in computers." Kurt "Oh really? Huh." JC: "It's strange now, you can see how crude it looks." Kurt: "Yeah, it's crude. It looks like an old game of… what was that?" JC: "Pong." Kurt: "Yeah, Pong! Haha. Asteroids." JC: "I loved Asteroids." Kurt: "Yeah, Asteroids is good." JC: "Asteroids is my favorite." Kurt: "Didn't we have one up there?" JC: "We had it on the set. Everybody played it."
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Dec 8, 2020 22:01
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:Honestly I'm not even trying to argue otherwise; it's certainly something you can deduce or figure out and it may well be obvious (though I'd stop short of "extremely" -- I think it's telling that no one brought that scene up and I had to do it myself). I’m just pointing out that a vital plot point isn't made explicit and that it was a result of a goof rather than being done intentionally (and the idea that it was done purposefully to create ambiguity is sort of at odds with the idea that they didn't make it explicit because it was simply that obvious). There's a bunch of stuff in the Thing that's ambiguous. But you keep brining up stuff that is extremely not ambiguous. I was typing up a big post, then thought, hey, maybe I should rewatch the thing to make sure I'm not misremembering how obvious the "the Thing can split" thing is. And it turns out I was: It's way, way more obvious. And explicit. I haven't even hit Blair's simulation and here's what's happened: The dog show up. We know it's a the Thing. They find a the Thing in the Norwegian camp. That's two the Things. The dog starts assimilating the other dogs. Blair said it was eating the dogs "to finish imitating the dogs (plural)". Blair then asks Clark how long he was alone with the dog, clearly worried that he had been imitated. So at this point if you haven't worked out that the Thing can split off additional Things I don't know what to tell you. They've done everything but turn to the camera and say "Hi, you, the viewer there. There can be multiple the Things." Then the next scene goes to do that. To spoon feed you something that you should already know. To tell you "Hi, look, just in case you're, you know, not that bright, here's the central premise of the film. Again. Just in case you missed it earlier." And flubs it. Not because the scene is necessary. I would argue that including the scene detracts from the film. It's an extremely overwrought infodump of stuff we already know. But because it cuts off early, the scene is arguably misleading. e: oh poo poo I hit submit before I was finished It's misleading because it makes you doubt conclusions you have already reached. There film has set it up so there's multiple things etc... but this simulation only shows it eating and consuming cells, not splitting. So if you haven't realised there's multiple things before that scene, if you think the film needed to be more explicit, then I don't understand you. If after that scene you're confused about whether the thing can split or not... yeah. I get that. Splicer fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Dec 9, 2020 |
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Dec 9, 2020 00:08
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Wait, why didn’t Clark get assimilated when he was alone with the dog thing?
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Dec 9, 2020 00:23
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gary oldmans diary posted:thats what you have been doing this whole thread. its your primary mode. your first resort. you build theories on top of other theories multiple levels deep including levels consisting of characters thoughts with the bottom layer being as shaky as any and assert that its true Well, no. I’m actually beginning from your assertions. Many people believe there is an evil alien who’s trying to kill everyone and take over the world. And, to that, I say “ok sure”. There are plenty of movies about evil aliens. It’s not unheard of. But, then, I’m taking an extra step: I am examining your theory. So, I’m going over the film, and it turns out that one of the aliens spends a whole week sitting around in a hut smoking weed. There’s no evidence that he does anything else. So, it seems like the alien just wants to get really fuckin high - and that contradicts the assertion that he wants to kill everyone and take over the world. Once you note that Palmer the alien loves weed and not killing, all the assumptions about evil aliens get tossed out the window. Like, OK, maybe he’s working for Blair and somehow toking up is part of Blair’s plan to build the hovercraft. How the gently caress does he actually help Blair build the hovercraft? If the aliens are characters, then they must have characterization. “They’re just inscrutable” don’t cut it. So we just keep raising more questions, like why doesn’t the alien do anything to defend himself while everyone around him is armed and plotting to kill him? We need an alternate theory, and mine happens to explain what’s happening without any of these issues. Palmer Snoke’s weed because there is no alien intelligence at work. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Dec 9, 2020 |
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Dec 9, 2020 04:47
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, no. I’m actually beginning from your assertions. SuperMechagodzilla posted:But, then, I’m taking an extra step: I am examining your theory.
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Dec 9, 2020 05:29
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:So, I’m going over the film, and it turns out that one of the aliens spends a whole week sitting around in a hut smoking weed. the movie clearly takes place over 4 months
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Dec 9, 2020 05:39
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Splicer posted:So here's the Thing (how many times has this been done in this thead) This post is a breath of fresh air, and believe it or not I think we agree on the the most important bits. This whole time I've been mostly fighting the notion that the exposition was "intentionally ambiguous" which is why I've constantly been trying to point out how "the movie expects you to already know this" seemingy to no avail. It's frustrating because it's just as you said: it's not ambiguous. The movie simply gave me the wrong impression. The only part we differ is I don't think the early scenes are quite the turbo slam-dunk multimedia lazer show that says "~*~This Thing Splits Off And Forms a New Separate Thing With Every Assimilation~*~." If you come in to the movie confident in your knowledge that this movie is about "an organism that imitates other life forms" (and this is all the vast majority of the plot synopses for this movie ever give you) and the idea of a mutant contagion is the furthest thing from your mind, the events of the first act won't necessarily disabuse you of that notion. There's two Things? So the Norwegians found two Things and managed to kill one of them. The dog-Thing starts assimilating the other dogs: we see it trying to pull them into its own mass to be absorbed, so that checks out. Blair says "imitating these dogs?" That's the way he talks, he means "imitating each of these dogs." (**More about this scene later) Sounds silly, I'm sure, but nothing really screamed "contagious reproduction" to me so it was pretty easy at that point to rationalize everything I'd been seeing. I'll note, though, that this was the point where I did get an odd inkling that maybe something else was going on. It was probably the knowledge that the movie implied the dog-Thing absorbed a human already, and so with seemingly everyone at the dog-Thing's post-autopsy there should presumably be someone missing. I can't remember if I'd managed to put my finger on it like that on first watch, but I do remember getting a feeling that something wasn't quite adding up. Splicer posted:Then the next scene goes to do that. To spoon feed you something that you should already know. To tell you "Hi, look, just in case you're, you know, not that bright, here's the central premise of the film. Again. Just in case you missed it earlier." YES!! HOLY poo poo YES!! And in my case it was actually even worse, because it reinforced by misconception, and did it in one of the most definitive ways possible. And then it kept doing it. Just about every expository scene hammered home the same point of "this is an organism that imitates other life forms," to the exclusion of nearly anything else, and so each time felt like more reinforcement. Splicer posted:It's misleading because it makes you doubt conclusions you have already reached. For me this realization was delayed much later, and it was a much harder crash because of it. It was after the Bennings-Thing incident and all the Thing carcasses were destroyed, and all the characters just kept on going about how some of them were Things. And I could tell they weren't just paranoid or suspicious, they pretty much knew it was the case, and by extension I was supposed to know it, too. It was disorienting as gently caress, and I had a hard time simply watching the movie because I kept looking out for the movie to give me some confirmation either way, but at that point the movie was mostly done giving exposition and it wasn't until seeing Palmer-Thing infect Windows-Thing with my own eyes that I felt like my feet were on solid ground again, but for the most part I simply didn't feel sure about anything I'd just witnessed. It may as well have just shuffled all its scenes in random order. It was one of the most baffling moments in all my moviegoing life. Splicer posted:So if you haven't realised there's multiple things before that scene, if you think the film needed to be more explicit, then I don't understand you. With the allowance that I did notice there were two separate Things and that I mostly just wasn't compelled to come up with a reason why or think about how the Things reproduce at that moment, I am totally fine being the dork who didn't figure that out from those early scenes. It's infinitely preferrable to trying to carefully explain all this over and over only to be told I'm a philistine and how dare I besmirch the good name of The Thing which could not possibly have flaws. Splicer posted:If after that scene you're confused about whether the thing can split or not... yeah. I get that. This is also true, so WOO-HOO! Goddamn this is loving cathartic!! SidneyIsTheKiller fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Dec 9, 2020 |
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Dec 9, 2020 08:31
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I still don’t know how a movie literally called THE THING is misleading. “It doesn’t act like a virus!” No poo poo. It’s the thing. It’s not a virus, not a bacteria. Not even a thing. It’s The Thing. It’s like an idea. Once that idea spreads, is it now considered ideas? No, it’s still the idea. The thing spreads, but it’s still The Thing.
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Dec 9, 2020 08:46
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ruddiger posted:I still don’t know how a movie literally called THE THING is misleading. Exactly! And why should we believe anything Blair says about the Thing like it's a fact? Blair is some second rate scientist who's been shipped off to a nowhere post in Antarctica. We're supposed to believe that he's an expert on an alien Thing in a matter of hours? Why would anyone think his simulation or his dialogue about the Thing is accurate? When he says that the Thing was trying to imitate the dogs, he's just a guy like all the other guys in the crew. We shouldn't take him as an infallible narrator about how the Thing works - just accept that the Thing is magic and works however it works!
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Dec 9, 2020 08:53
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By that logic, why should we trust any character in any movie ever? We (the audience) should trust Blair because when he’s giving infodumps to the other characters, he’s doing it for the sake of the audience’s understanding. It’s like in T2 when Arnold tells John Connor that the T-1000 is “liquid metal”. Is it literally liquid metal? No, but it frames it in a way the audience understands.
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Dec 9, 2020 08:58
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Xenomrph posted:It’s like in T2 when Arnold tells John Connor that the T-1000 is “liquid metal”. Is it literally liquid metal? No Have I ever mentioned how I love that it wasn't "Nanomachine-laced"? It's just a block of thinking metal and it wants to ruin your day. Also love how they didn't give us T-1000 vision that was sleek and more advanced than the T-800 and blue or someshit.
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Dec 9, 2020 09:26
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:Blair says "imitating these dogs?" That's the way he talks, he means "imitating each of these dogs." (**More about this scene later) Following up on the above, the whole "imitating these dogs" (plural) bit came up earlier, and I got some interesting insight from the deleted scenes and script: SidneyIsTheKiller posted:I feel vindicated here because in this scene as originally shot (it's in the deleted scenes) Blair does make it more explicit that the Thing would become "three dogs," and moreover, that the dog-Thing is still alive (the others jump at this - in the script, this scene is immediately followed by them torching both of the Thing 'bodies'). This scene was specifically edited down so that Blair does not reveal these things. Adding to this, I do believe this scene as originally written and performed by Wilford Brimley, the line "imitating these dogs" was indeed meant to be literal. But after being edited, the same line became shorthand speak. SidneyIsTheKiller posted:I know "deleted scenes don't count blah blah" but it's an intention that informs the following scenes in a way that makes sense: at this point everyone is at ease except Blair because he is withholding this information, either because at this point it's just a troubling theory of his or because he doesn't want to tip off to any potential Things that he knows what's up. This continues to makes more sense to me than having him reveal it right then at his autopsy report: if they know that the Thing is reproducing through assimilation right then it makes them all seem a little dense if they're not worried about who might have gotten Thinged right then rather than having it drawn out.
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Dec 9, 2020 10:38
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gohuskies posted:Exactly! And why should we believe anything Blair says about the Thing like it's a fact? Blair is some second rate scientist who's been shipped off to a nowhere post in Antarctica. We're supposed to believe that he's an expert on an alien Thing in a matter of hours? Why would anyone think his simulation or his dialogue about the Thing is accurate? When he says that the Thing was trying to imitate the dogs, he's just a guy like all the other guys in the crew. We shouldn't take him as an infallible narrator about how the Thing works - just accept that the Thing is magic and works however it works! You may well be right! It's possible all these characters have it wrong about the Thing. The thing is (sorry), these characters are all we have to form a narrative around, and if we don't have a good idea of their own understanding of their situation, the story isn't going to make any sense.
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Dec 9, 2020 10:41
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:these characters are all we have to form a narrative around adding to that the characters disagree with one another throughout most of the movie
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Dec 9, 2020 11:14
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i forgot about this topic and came in to shitpost about the Thing and there's some big dumbass arguments going on here what the gently caress
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Dec 9, 2020 13:45
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FilthyImp posted:Well yeah that's because it's a mimetic poly-alloy. Not to derail the thread, but how is it a block of thinking metal without being nanomachines? Or is the answer “doesn’t matter, rule of cool”?
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Dec 9, 2020 16:38
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gary oldmans diary posted:no actually youre not. that your fanfiction is detached from reality is not a personal theory or assertion of mine. its simply something immediately evident as everything you post has layers of supposition that you seem oblivious to If anything I’ve written is untrue or inaccurate, it should be extremely easy for you to demonstrate it. Instead, you keep insisting that the film is incomprehensible. Here’s an example of how the passage of time is conveyed in the film. Macready says “there’s a storm hitting us in 6 hours, and we're gonna find out who's who” Then, shortly afterwards, Macready says “the storm's been hitting us hard now for 48 hours. We still have nothing to go on.” Those phrases, together, mean that Macready was overconfident about how his alien-hunting would go down. He expected a big conflict with aliens, but roughly 54 hours have passed with nothing happening at all. (6+48=54) Your response is that we can’t ever know that 54 hours have passed, because we should be paralyzed with uncertainty. What if Macready can’t tell time? What if he’s lying for no reason? Etc. It’s the kind of thinking that renders you nonfunctional in any situation. Imagine trying to cross the street that way. There are many points in the film where Macready does gently caress up, obviously. “[Garry was] the only one who could've gotten to that blood.” Actually, it turns out that Garry lends his keys to people all the time. But there’s no indication that Macready’s a liar or bad at telling time. So there are two full days in the movie where the supposedly omnipotent, murderous aliens dont do anything at all. If the aliens are characters, that is characterization for them.
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Dec 9, 2020 16:45
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Johnny Truant posted:i forgot about this topic and came in to shitpost about the Thing and there's some big dumbass arguments going on here what the gently caress SMG is The Thing and he's taken over this thread after he was found frozen outside of CD. Now the entire thread is a CD thread and threatens to take infect and take over GBS.
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Dec 9, 2020 16:57
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Xenomrph posted:Not to derail the thread, but how is it a block of thinking metal without being nanomachines? For me, whenever it's nanomachinetalk, it's discrete components "swarming" and working as a whole. Just a bunch of little robobugs essentially. Eventually you see that it's some kind of mechanism if you get small enough. The T-1000 was always more mysterious in a magic future tech way. The 800 is obviously mechanical -- pistons, chips, forged metal. The 1000 was just a pool of metal goop. No gears, no floating brain-case or CPU. It makes it seem like Skynet just programmed the material on an atomic/molecular level. It's vaguely analogous to how we went from poo poo like your VCR working by pressing levers and turning cogs and using all kinds of awesome mechanical tricks to just pressing a button on an iPad and videos playing. It's also an extension of the anxieties from Terminator -- like shjt, you thought foreign industrial technology was scary, here's digital-computer tech that is infinitely more threatening.
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Dec 9, 2020 17:01
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GATOS Y VATOS posted:SMG is The Thing and he's taken over this thread after he was found frozen outside of CD. Now the entire thread is a CD thread and threatens to take infect and take over GBS. Nothing for it, but posting about The Thing.
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Dec 9, 2020 17:02
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FilthyImp posted:I guess it's a small distinction.
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Dec 9, 2020 17:30
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GATOS Y VATOS posted:SMG is The Thing and he's taken over this thread after he was found frozen outside of CD. Now the entire thread is a CD thread and threatens to take infect and take over GBS. That's apt because I do not actually exist, and what we're seeing is a sudden explosion of a 'CD' mindset that was already latent. I'm like "Macready seems kind of a dumbass. Look at him fuckin it up" and the response is pure pretension like "what is reality? Is it possible to ever 'know' anything?" He shot Clark in the head because he's a bad leader. "Uh, well, what is 'truth' really?"
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Dec 9, 2020 17:39
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Xenomrph posted:I can get that analogy, but I guess the idea of the T-1000 being a liquid-like glob of nanomachines with a decentralized CPU never bothered me. A programmed material at the molecular level is still nanomachines in my head. I dunno, it's just how I've always viewed it; it doesn't make the T-1000 any less threatening or "alien" when compared to the T-800, a swarm of nanomachines is still pretty fundamentally different from the idea of human biology or a human consciousness. e: to expand FilthyImp's analogy, "liquid metal" is someone saying "we made glass that detects the presence of living flesh" and "nanomachines" is someone saying "what if a dial but, like, small?" e2: or mobile phones vs a really stretchy phone cable, like, so stretchy. Miles! Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Dec 9, 2020 |
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Dec 9, 2020 17:44
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