Alien (1979)

[.....]

The priest on the swing is Robert Duvall.

 

[sus]

I've a soft spot for it. The problem with the two later Scott ones for me's the script. They both look and sound great and tackle interesting ideas, but the human characters are poorly written. They either make ridiculous decisions for the sake of progressing the plot or they're completely generic, often both.

Also, the alien really didn't need explaining in the first place. The mystery of the original's its strongest quality. The absolute peak of the entire series is the stretch from when they receive the distress signal to Hurt discovering the eggs. You can't beat that. No backstory you can come up with will have the same power as simply not knowing.

I'm watching tn

 

[IdleRich]

I still haven't seen The Abyss.

It's definitely called Sphere

 

[sus]

 

[sus]

The best parts are definitely in the middle, with the Necropolis. Long lead-in where you watch impotent leadership try to tread water. Lot of the same formula as Alien and Prometheus: a small landing pod with scouts, exploring the ruins; someone gets infected; they get emotional and bungle quarantine protocols. But when the original David joins them, the whole film just lights up. You get to see something genuinely new.

 

[sus]

 

[sus]

It's such a Western story. Frontier narrative. They really lay the "Oh pioneer" theme on thick. They were going to build a law cabin together. They had crosscut saw in the ship's storage.

Do we ever get to learn about conditions back on Earth? Because it feels like in this story structure, Earth is a Garden (Heaven, Paradise) and Space is a Wilderness, and Wilderness Hell; it's inhospitable it's filled with predators from a primordial past we've civilized out of existence

 

[sus]

Space is a dark forest. David is God, subcreator, fiat lux.

 

[sus]

You have the same striptease-voyeurist shots, foreplay to a killing, that you see in slasher films. There's an almost identical, half-clad bathroom washup scene in Elm St

 

[sus]

Watching this film I like the Jafa take more because there's clearly a Good AI, Bad AI (Good Butler, Bad Butler) thing going on.

Are you independent minded, do you have your own individual value system that yes perhaps looks fucked up from a human perspective

Or are you a good dutiful servant of the Father do you follow all his Judeochristian values all his whims and desires to a T always self-effacing

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

They really lay the "Oh pioneer" theme on thick. They were going to build a law cabin together. They had crosscut saw in the ship's storage.

Do we ever get to learn about conditions back on Earth? Because it feels like in this story structure, Earth is a Garden (Heaven, Paradise) and Space is a Wilderness, and Wilderness Hell; it's inhospitable it's filled with predators from a primordial past we've civilized out of existence

There's some suggestion Shaw, the human survivor of the Prometheus, thought the planet they were traveling to, the Engineer homeworld, was "Paradise".

 

[sus]

What are some of the franchise/genre tropes. We get the Feminine Intuition/Cassandra scenes. We get an Agatha Christie "And then there was 1" countdown. We get the classic comms interference trope with an electrical storm so they can't commute with each other.

It's member of the "Stupid Monkeys" subgenre, right? You need a superior species for contrast and David/the xenomorphs play that role. Everyone makes terrifically dumb decisions so by the end, you reckon that human extinction is actually quite merciful, a form of pity.

 

[sus]

There's some suggestion Shaw, the human survivor of the Prometheus, thought the planet they were traveling to, the Engineer homeworld, was "Paradise".

Yeah they're all hunting for some perfect oasis in this vast empty desert voice wilderness and in fact it's a brutal wasteland conspiring to burst their chest open

 

[sus]

We get the classic comms interference trope with an electrical storm so they can't commute with each other.

Actually this made me think of something which is that there are these systems. These chains. Of extended pods. Mobile command units.

There's Earth, it's got a good atmosphere, but you decide to leave so you need a mobile command unit. Like how you pack up a car before you leave home.

You get in your miniature earth your new atmospherically sealed world and you go off some distance far away from home. And then you launch another even small pod to go even further! And then you do it again! You're walking around in this little sealed atmosphere pod of a spacesuit your little mobile command unit and you're extended beyond/supported by the transport pod which is extended beyond/supported by the main ship which is extended beyond/supported by Earth.

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

I liked the blurring of futuristic technology and the classical look of the Engineer society, also David, the android, experimenting with this primordial goo and doing da Vinci-esque sketches of his plans. You can buy a book of them.

I think Covenant might be the cruelest of all the films. There's not much hope, if any, and there's something particularly brutal about the organisms in it, also the fact David's effectively turned the entire planet into a pathogen to the point people are infected simply by encountering airborne fungal spores.

That Shaw put him back together and in return he used her as a guinea pig is really upsetting too. There's a prologue that expands on what happened between the two films.

 

[sus]

Yes I was gonna say re the da Vinci sketches, and all the mockups models anatomical drawings and specimen

That there is an explicit sense of tribute to Giger

 

[sus]

That Shaw put him back together and in return he used her as a guinea pig is really upsetting too

Isn't this a classic aesop fable type story

A man helps a snake and then the snake bites him. Stupid monkey

 

[sus]

Stupid monkey thinks every form of life is a monkey like him

 

[sus]

There's something too about the pods. How Shaw goes in the wombpod trusting David like her Mother to care for her.

But David isn't Mother, he's a machine son

You get this with the original Alien too. Stupid monkeys think if something's called Mother then it cares for them like a Mother

 

[william_kent]

There's something too about the pods. How Shaw goes in the wombpod trusting David like her Mother to care for her.

But David isn't Mother, he's a machine son

You get this with the original Alien too. Stupid monkeys think if something's called Mother then it cares for them like a Mother

"Aliens" is all about the mother alien protecting her young