Amph On Earth, Everyone Can Hear You Scream: The Prometheus / Alien Discussion Thread (Romulus, Earth)

A lot of the follow up Starship Troopers stuff went the same way. Completely misses the satire present in the original.

Yeah, looking back, Cameron's movie was pretty seminal, in that he established some really great characters among the marines that other similar movies (of all budgets) have tried to copy, but not really managed to do so with success.

 

Starship Troopers is a really excellent comparison, in that Cameron actually had all of the marine actors read Heinlein's novel before production began. The book is notably authoritarian, which Cameron wanted to convey in his take on the marines and their indoctrination (hence him also harkening back to America's role in the Vietnam War) and put them in a position where the film really isn't idealizing the organization that they are part of. Verhoeven had the same mentality when approaching the Starship Troopers movie - he couldn't even finish reading the novel, himself; he caught on to the fascist elements pretty quickly and decided to use the film to showcase just how awful that ideology is. And like you said, so many of the Aliens and Starship Troopers followups seem to just forget that those films were actually critiquing this subject matter and choose to just play it all straight, which is just super weird to me.

Cameron eventually wound up taking all of this a step farther in Avatar, where he explicitly positioned the military force as the film's antagonists.

 

Starship Troopers for me, apologies for getting off topic, is one of those clever movies that can be watched either way, depending on how you feel. It is a biting satire, and often very funny in how it weaves that satire and cliched tropes into the narrative, but at the same time, it is actually straight up a rather good sci-fi actioner in its own right.

 

New alien game I'm always down for but honestly I should really try Alien Isolation first before the Marines shoot 'em up.

Rewatched Aliens on DisneyPlusStar, it was the theatrical cut which I hadn't seen in awhile. (10 years at least) While I do agree that cutting Hadley's Hope scene does detract from the tension of the arrival, I think it's pretty essential for Newt's character, ditto with the Ripley talking about her daughter and their relationship (I'd say the main three characters in the movie are probably Newt, Ripley and Hicks. Alien Queen is probably the 4th most important). And I kind of miss in the theatrical cut when Hudson drops the reference to the Queen "These things ain't ants, man". I've always wondeed if the Marines talking about Acturians implies that non-human life existed in the universe, and the mention of "Bug Hunts" means they've known about the "bugs" beforehand. Or they've had only fruitless searches for xenomorphs until now.

Still going to rewatch Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection which I've never seen in HD video before so it has that going for it. I think I have a soft spot for Alien Resurrection because it was the first Alien movie I saw in theatres, having only seen the first 3 on VHS for years beforehand.

 

Fire team is probably going to be fun . Theres a prequel novel to it coming out called Aliens - Infiltrator that will probably have some of its characters and story beats followed up on in Fire team. The New Xeno Breed from Infiltrator will probably be in fire team

 

From what I've seen in sourcebooks, wiki, and a short story collection called Bug Hunt the Acturians are another sentient race I assume are like the Greys in UFO culture or the "Skinnies" in the Starship Troopers novel. Just intelligent non-humans we seem to be at peace with. Unfortunatey they have never been used or mentioned in any novel or comic I can find. According to Bug Hunt the term "bugs" is slang in the CM for any animal-like extraterrestrial; so like the Acturians wouldn't be called bugs.

Same. I have a cousin who watched Aliens with me once, she went with her friends to see Ressurection not knowing it was the same series until the opening line "my mommy always said there were no monsters. No real one. But there are."

 

Disregarding any EU material, I always just chalked the "Arcturians" being discussed in Aliens up to being a settlement of androgynous human colonists living in the Arcturus System.

On Resurrection, I do also have quite a soft spot for it. I don't like Whedon's writing much at all, and Jeunet's directing is very at odds with the prior films - but I really dig Jeunet's style in general and find that he brought some of his own really intetesting stylistic tendancies to Resurrection. The movie is gross, kind of repulsive, and weird as hell. If the presentation of a cloned, Alien-DNA infused Ripley lovingly caressing her Alien/human-hybrid abomination of a grandson isn't imagery right at home in this franchise, then I don't know what is.

 

ya'll are making me want to read alien books

I've got enough other tie-in fiction stuff to read lol

 

On the previous page I typed up a list of the best books imo if your interested. You know you want to....like an alien egg opening you can't help but look inside...

(Although I joke in the movies it is seriously a dumb idea to look inside some kind of pod thing that was dormant and suddenly opens in front of you. What were Kane and Oram thinking? Especially Oram who knows David has gone crazy and made monsters that just murdered most of his crew!)

 

I love how it is implied in Aliens that some of the marines had had sex with them, including one at least that was mistakenly identified as female, but was in fact a male (cue marines laughter)

But hey, what does it matter when it's Acturian?

I really like Resurrection, but mostly because I love the crew of The Betty. Can you imagine being able to take those actors as they were, and those characters, and running a Netflix type series with them? I would have loved that. Yeah, Jeunet is a style of his own, but I like his other stuff like Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. Really weird imagery, but cool.

I wonder what Giger made of it? If he saw it I think he would have approved.

 

Well, they originally neglected to credit Giger for his original designs in the film, which prompted this very angry letter from him:

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/s...20th-century-fox-alien-resurrection-snub.html

In the letter, he does describe the film as "Excellent."

 

Yah that's what I'm kinda going with, wiki and EU sources aside. Although you'd figure when Cameron wrote the line it was implied that the Arcturians were another space alien life form (ditto the Bug Hunt line which implies they've been on this type of mission before as how bored Hicks is when he asks about it. I'm going with they've been on Bug Hunts but never found anybody). But basically a core tenet of the series seems to be this is the first time humans have encountered extraterrestrial life and it's a monstrous creature that only wants to kill and mutate them. The idea kinda loses some of it's potency if humans are just off having dalliances with little green alien Arcturians on shore leave.

 

Aye, the whole nature of of Blue's 'connection' with Marcus is something I find incredibly compelling; it's a great science-fiction concept in general, and enhanced by the particular way it is used in this universe.

I'm not sure exactly how far into the book you are, so I'm going to spoiler tag this and you might not want to actually open this tag until you're done reading the book, but...

Spoiler

Alex White's idea of the plagiarus praepotens is actually something they almost weren't able to include in the book. The way the licensing rights worked at the time, Prometheus (and with it, the black goo/pathogen) was technically not included in Titan's Alien publishing deal; at the time Alex was writing the novel, however, Alien: Covenant released, and the minute the pathogen appeared in a film that had "Alien" in the title Titan gained the ability to feature the pathogen in its books and White was allowed to proceed with using these elements in the novel.

I actually think that whole thing is a pretty fascinating idea, in the way it builds upon what we already know about the Alien lifeform itself. In Alien 3 we learn that the embryo that grows within a host actually takes traits from the host's own biology; The Cold Forge expands upon that by showing us that the Facehugger isn't directly depositing an embryo into the host, but rather, that it is actually depositing the pathogen (in the form of plagiarus praepotens) into the host which then bonds with the host DNA in order to form the embryo, like a sort of internalized version of what we see playing out externally to hosts in the prequel films when they come in contact with a more unfocused version of the pathogen. In hindsight, this even makes the botched cloning attempts in Alien: Resurrection make a bit more sense, in that it gives further context as to why Ripley and the Queen Chestburster's DNA was so hard to separate (and why the Queen DNA even existed in her blood sample, to begin with).

I'm almost done with Into Charybdis, just a handful of chapters left... and I'll just say, it builds on concepts introduced in The Cold Forge in some pretty significant ways.

 

Watching Alien 3: Assembly Cut!

So much symbolism:

The Giant Cross after the crash.

The Alien comes out of an ox rather than a dog, which is important:

“Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.” (Proverbs 14:4)

Jesus the Savior is born in a clean manger, “Mary gave birth to her firstborn, a Son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.” (Luke 2:7)

Alien 3 takes place at Christmas time, which commerates Jesus birth and being laid in a manger.

Prometheus takes place at Christmas time. Thus the beginning and the end (if you ignore Alien: Resurrection) both happens at Christmas.

Is Ripley Jesus? She dies at the end of Alien 3 in the shapw of the cross and Alien Ressurection is her risen.

 

I finished Into Charybdis last night and absolutely loved it. Nobody writing expanded universe stuff quite gets these movies the way Alex White does. A wonderful marriage of the sensibilities of James Cameron's Aliens and Ridley Scott's prequels.

Resurrection does function akin to the "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" Easter narrative in that regard, however, which furthers Ripley's Alien 3 role as a sort of Christ figure. Interestingly enough, the only actual 'religious' character in Resurrection seems to be Call the Auton; the concept of the Autons as second generation Androids (and the idea that they had an uprising/rebellion of sorts) is one of Resurrection's ideas that I would very much like to see expanded upon.

Taken in the grander context of creation, as brought on by the prequels, it brings to light a very interesting lineage. Engineers create humans, humans create androids, androids create both Aliens and Autons, and (as far as we know) eradicate the Engineers - and every time humans attempt to further create, to expand upon the work of our creators or of our creations, it always seems to blow back up in our face. Humans have become these middling pawns in a universe so much larger that seems to no longer offer any place for us beyond incubation for the horrors that stem from this chain of events.

Raised by Wolves (which owes a lot to Alien and Blade Runner, and the first two episodes of which were directed by Ridley Scott himself) is currently doing a lot of fascinating things with the idea of androids and human religion that should appeal immensely to fans of this franchise.

 

Haven't gotten Into Charybdis, have to budget for the marvel Alien Epic collection 1 in April. It reprints a few comics that were only in UK Alien magazine and the mini comics that came with the old kenner toys. But to quote Wayne's World "she will be mine. Oh yes, she will be mine" lol

While I put Cold Forge on my best of list I have to say my only negatives are

Spoiler: Cold Forge spoilers

Dorian going crazy. Not a bad idea but was too over the top for me. Killing a tech who does nothing to defend himself by bitting his neck then smashing him off a consol. I get it he's crazy . Also I could not sympathise with Blue and was disapointed that she survived. Its awful how she's confined to a bed and doesn't have long to live but she reminded me of people I know irl that have terrible attitudes, are rude to everybody, and get mad that no one likes them. Maybe if she acted like a decent person she'd get some respect. On second thought its a lot like kylo ren where he acts like a spoiled child but we are supposed to sympathise with him and hope ben solo comes back. SPOILER]

All that aside the writing and story overall is still really good and it's an easy read for someone new to Aliens EU

 

Spoiler

One of the things that I actually really love about the presentation of Blue in The Cold Forge is that she isn't really a "hero." She has her motivations and her desires and you sympathize with her plight to an extent, but you also kind of just don't like her at the same time. I dig that the book wasn't afraid to make you dislike, well... almost everyone, really. You're more so rooting against Dorian than you are for Blue in a lot of ways.

I also really love the nature of her rather unique bond with Marcus, and the way the book uses that to explore the rather repulsive treatment of androids by their supposed 'superiors' and emphasize just how skewed and terrible humanity's perspective can be on what is seen as 'lesser' beings like this. White actually spoke a bit about this on Twitter in a very interesting thread:



This grasp on what's fundamentally wrong with the way that humans treat androids (something that the prequels also explore) makes me think that White would actually tell a rather interesting story set a bit farther in the timeline featuring the Autons.

 

@Kato Sai
Did you like Alien 3 Assembly Cut better than the theatrical? Imo it is mostly better. Didn't like that for some reason added a shot of the alien before it killed Clemens and by the time you get to the last time the inmates have group prayer it slows the pace down considerably. But aside from that I love all the additions like Jr sacrificing himself to lock up the alien and Golic letting it out later. And like others have said it makes more sense if the queen doesnt burst out of Ripley as that would mean even if the Company was honest about saving her they didnt have the time. I used to have complete set of Alien3 cards and they had some of these parts that got cut.

Back when theatrical was only option I just assumed any prisoner I didn't see after the fireball got killed during it.

@bstnsx704
I find myself rooting for the alien most of the time lol. The Earth Hive trilogy is one of the few where I was hoping more than 1 or 2 humans survived.

 

I loved the Assembly Cut! It was so much better. Alien 3 is now in my too three Xenomorph film favorites!

The pacing did slow, but the symbolism added back in took away nihilistic feel, I could see it as Biblical allegory and messianic sacrifice.

 

Cross-posting this here, the Avatar thread, and the Terminator thread. It seems to have been just announced, and instantly caught my eye as a must-order.

 

Rewatched Aliens and Alien.

I rewatched Aliens (Theatrical Edition) twice. I normally watch the Special Edition with 17 more minutes.

I want to say the pacing of Theatrical Ed is better. It gets you to LV-423 faster and dispenses with uncessary scenes IMHO of Hutson talking about his theory of how there is a Queen.

The only scene from Special Ed I like are the auto guns in corridor wiping out Xenomorphs, this explains later why Ripley runs into far less in the Hive at the climax.

I prefer not seeing the colonists living normal lives prior to the Marines arriving, it makes it more mysterious and creepy.

Ripley’s daughter’s death is important, but not vital for the film IMHO.

Aliens is my favorite of the Xenosaga. The suspense building, acting, cinematography, action, and more is sublime.

Alien is so different from Aliens, it has psychological terror more prevalent and the locations, LV-423 and Nostromo themsleves feel like threats aiding the Xenomorph and its stages. Its a masterpiece of science fiction and horror.

 

The drone-gun sentry material in Aliens gets my nomination as the greatest deleted scene(s) in film history. Expunging it from the theatrical cut is simply mind-boggling; it ratchets up the siege facets of the film, and is a masterclass in capturing dread without showing nearly anything. (Michael Biehn is characteristically great here, as he was in the entire film. No action star has juggled stoicism and fear so capably.)