Alien
1979 · Film · 117 min
Part of Alien Collection
Directed by Ridley Scott
During its return to the earth, commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal from a distant planet. When a three-member team of the crew discovers a chamber containing thousands of eggs on the planet, a creature inside one of the eggs attacks an explorer. The entire crew is unaware of the impending nightmare set to descend upon them when the alien parasite planted inside its unfortunate host is birthed.
138 positive12 negative5 mixed216 neutralfrom 371 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
437 comments on Hacker News
>Aliens was Alien fanfiction
Just because an established Hollywood director was a fan of the first Alien movie does make his script for Alien's sequel "fan fiction".
Cameron had already written and directed The Terminator when the owners of the Alien franchise chose his script for the sequel.
(Fifty Shades of Grey in contrast really did originate as fan fiction.)
If people like this post, they will probably like the below post about the typography used in the movie Alien.
The site has typography analysis from several other scifi films too.
https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
My initiation was the first Alien movie on VCR. I watched it maybe in 1990 or 1991, but definitely before I reach 10 years old. It was also the first movie that I watched. The movie scared the shit out of me for months afterwards.
When looking back, all these movies (Alien, Terminator 2, and Jurassic park) were very well done. They never tried to achieve anything that was out of reach back then, and story-wise they were simply very entertaining. They didn't rely on, say, pornography (some movies clearly had too many naked men/women) to appease to their customers. The characters felt like real human-being who can hate and love strongly. They were done so well that it felt like nature. Movies nowadays couldn't do that anymore, somehow.
Scientists seem really busy these days creating synthetic life: advances in AI, human eggs from stem cells and now this - synthetic cells. I somehow feel they are inspired by the Alien movies.
Legitimately, in addition to being hilarious, this is like something from a horror movie. Imagine someone who’s secretly an android suddenly devolving into this. It’s a little like Ash glitching out and vomiting up white goo in Alien.
Not sure why this is showing up here, but happy it is. I remember seeing it at a conference in '79 or '80 and it retaining an oversized footprint in my "mental floorspace" for at least a decade.
You can definitely see how DarkStar led to Alien. And now that I think about it... Maybe the Project Hail Mary film owes something to DarkStar as well.
I'm surprised to not have heard of someone trying to do a reboot, but happy that some things are good enough to be remembered fondly, but bad enough that no sane studio head would greenlight a remake.
A prime example how German dubbing tried to make films more comedic. Like the Bud Spencer/Terence Hill films that were a huge success in Germany because of the slapstick dialogue not present in the Italian original.
In Dark Star they renamed Alien to Hüpfgemüse, which roughly translates to hopping vegetable. It‘s a hoot!
If you enjoyed the Fifth Element absolutely watch Jodorowsky's Dune
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
On the cover it's a story about the failed production of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune script but the deeper story was the aggregation of an unbelievably talented pool of visual artists including Jean "Moebius" Giraud (mentioned as central artist in 5th element), H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Salvador Dali, & Dan O'Bannon.
That group would go on to centrally influence the visual style of a huge body of science fiction work including Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Star Wars, The Matrix, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc etc.
The art and creativity on display in the film is absolutely sonic.
Kind of like the original PayPal mafia!
I have a Sony TV8-301 in my retro collection, just waiting for me to build it a suitable power supply, give it a service, and wire it up to be used as a terminal for something powerful.
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/sony_8_301_w8_301.html
The aesthetic of these old designs is really appealing. If you’re not familiar with the TV8-301, its been used as a prop in countless games and sci-fi movies .. and hasn’t the Sinclair Microvision also shown up in films in places? I want to say Bladerunner or Alien, but I’m pretty sure they just copied the aesthetic… Perhaps Space 1999 or The Tomorrow People or something like that?
In any case, its somewhat amusing to recollect just how fantastic it seemed, way back then, to have a portable television/video device to watch things on .. I used to lust after the toys in the Sinclair ads back in the day, it was a precursor to computing fever that hit me - and a lot of the rest of the world - on the cusp of the 80’s .. and it seems proper to notice that Sinclairs’ desire to give everyone the things that were being dreamed up by sci-fi authors seems to have been somewhat prescient.
We all have a TV in our pockets now, there’s no escaping it .. and what a world it has become, with literally everyone on the planet capable of starting their own channels, if they want to ..
Theatres don't just show new movies. There's something very special about being locked in a dark room with a big screen to watch Alien or Barry Lyndon. Older movies especially look great in a theatre and some of the magic is lost on a smaller screen.
90% of any content is crap but you're missing out if you like movies and you haven't seen Sinners, The Bone Temple, or NOPE (to name a few recent great theatre watches).
Yes, and also many fandoms lack the maturity to know when to say "no, I do not want to know MORE details, and certainly not about this obscure secondary character's difficult childhood that explains everything they did later in life".
See:
- All of Wookiepedia and most of Star Wars Expanded Universe.
- "The Hunt for Gollum".
- Every movie in the franchise after "Alien" and "Aliens".
- The sadly upcoming expanded universe/sequels/shows for Blade Runner.
Etc, etc. Everyone has their exceptions ("this one was cool"), but in general the point stands: fandoms ruin everything. They simply don't believe in the adage that "less is more". They always want MORE, and the industry is only happy to oblige.
Movies that come to mind that involve genetic building at this level are Gremlins 2, The Clone Wars, and some in the Alien franchise.
Yes, someone has attempted in the last to breed or alter for specific traits, we’ve cloned many kinds of life, and if there was extraterrestrial life here, someone probably mixed it with humans and animals.
But the pace of this is not going to increase anytime soon, if history is a judge. CRISPR was scaring people years ago when publicized, but those worries were unfounded and so shall these be. Life is much harder than coding apps.
To me, this sounds like the reality we currently exist in. My definition of alien may not match with yours. Normal people don't have control over AI's inner workings is all i mean by that.
I would watch that movie though.
Without disrespect to actor, I think the way alien was cut to have almost no distinct, visible sense of a personality and only barely any sense of scale was perfect. It allowed you, the watching party, to project your own worst nightmares onto the vague impressions seen. I'm sorry for him as an actor almost all his work was lost to the end product but I think the end product was better for leaving much of this up to the imagination.
I watched alien as a prerelease (at least in the uk) at the edinburgh film festival in 1979. It was great. Harry Dean Stanton was perfect in his role, as was Ian Holm in his.
I've watched it subsequently on domestic devices. The chest buster scenes are a bit more henson-puppet like than I remember but I have read the cast were not warned and some of the furore is their initial WTF and not reshoots.
Admittedly a beautiful design, but drip coffee isn't my preference. It does fit with the alien aesthetic in a certain weird way, because bauhaus design isn't exactly how either the Nostromo, H.R. Geiger, or the film really vibe.
"not entering Russia at a correct port of entry"
I'm laughing at the lack of nuance in laws in general. Some guy crossed the Bering Straight on foot as part of a 27 year quest to walk around the world and the law makes no exception.
I remember as a teen being hauled into a police station because a friend and I had been exploring the storm drains ("sewers") with a home-made flame thrower (okay, so the movie "Alien" had recently come out… Yeah, we left the flamethrower behind in the sewer when we popped our heads out and saw police).
Someone in the neighborhood had called the police because she had seen us going down the manhole opening. (The police said the report came through that some kids had "fallen" into the sewers.)
So I'm sitting in the police station with good cop and bad cop sitting there musing over my case. "How about 'Failure to use a sidewalk when a sidewalk was available'," bad cop said as he read from a book he was paging through. That got a laugh all around…
They let me off after an hour or so of this.
I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional.
Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models)
Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved.
[EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality.
Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap.
Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
and now the new TV show
I actually enjoyed the series, much as I went in assuming I wouldn't. It works best if you pretend you've never seen another Alien franchise but read a summary of the first 2 movies.
Guys,
I watched all the alien movies.
We should not trust those things that come from outside planet Earth ...
I don't buy this. Watching hi-res remasters of old films (Alien, Catch Me If You Can, Jurassic Park) you get incredible definition without damage to suspension of disbelief.
I think this comment[1] above really highlights what bothers me about modern shows and movies, but in short it's not the high def, it's how it's used.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062911
> But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake
granted, but this wasn't a Point Break remake either. Dark Star is pretty much a student film turned into a blockbuster. Even El Mariachi->Desperado wasn't as different as Dark Star->Alien was.
Alien and Aliens were masterpieces, but I've been consistently disappointed by everything after.
Let's agree to ignore the awful VS Predator crossovers for a second. I'm not sure they are canon anyway, and they are obviously cash grabs and not made with the same care of even the worst Alien movies.
Alien 3, while it has a cool idea (prison planet), is a mess as a result of executive meddling (the story can be read online). And they killed Hicks and Newt... bastards!
Resurrection was awful and awfully badly acted. I like Jeunet, but this was a hard miss. It has some cool visuals at times, typical of Jeunet, but the movie itself was embarrassing.
Prometheus was atrocious. Badly acted, badly scripted (characters making the dumbest of choices at every turn, professionals who don't know their profession -- xenobiologists who pet alien snakes, geologists who get lots at the first turn -- this has been discussed countless times). And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works. Aided by technology, Scott "pulled a George Lucas" and forgot the cardinal rule of scifi horror/mystery: less is more.
After this, I exercised the good sense of avoiding Covenant (the plot summary seems bad), and Romulus, and now the new TV show.
I think overall the gravest sin is that the Alien universe was meant to be sketched in the broadest strokes, and details and mystery kept, not overexplained.
I wish they had let the first two awesome movies rest in peace.
Extended universes suck.
P.S. same applies to Blade Runner. Then again, I didn't even like the sequel, so I'm sure I'll dislike the upcoming show :(
Yeah, weird how that seems to never come up. I sometimes have trouble keeping the movies apart in memory (Silent and Dark).
But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake that somehow got stuck in the elevator scene (and lost all of the original's lightheartedness in the process), that absolutely is my favorite piece of scifi movie trivia.
True, a brilliant and extraordinary game. We completed it with my kid a couple days ago, tons of fun.
A perfect replika of Alien the original movie and its retrofuturism.
Cameron doubled down on the aesthetic in Aliens, he just changed the genre from horror to action. Both films were "peak 80s" (Alien was '79) and just ooze with what must be the absolute pinnacle of science fiction vibes.
If you haven't seen these two films, you need to fix that this week. It'll change your life.
Scott tried to expand the aesthetics with Prometheus and Covenant. I felt the films did a great job of refreshing the look and feel while remaining faithful to the 80's. Unfortunately, the writing was trite and Scott's directing is averaging .200 at bat these days.
Romulus was not bad, though certainly not a masterpiece. At least it was better written and had better character arcs than Scott's recent films.
I'd rather have the performance of this series than whatever Jurassic Park or Star Wars have become.
Predator, oddly enough, has strangely been improving if you don't count Shane Black's entry.
I'm happy they keep making these, and I hope the writers and directors at the reigns keep experimenting rather than conforming to "safe" or "understandable by a general audience".
For the better part of a decade it seems that every verb or noun I search for, all the top search results are some movie or TV show named after that verb or noun. And I've watched exactly two movies in the past two decades (Star Wars VII when it came out, and Alien just last week).
Sometimes I consider actually enabling personalized search just to get to the things that I'm actually looking for.
There are many parasitoid wasps, of which the tarantula hawk wasp is only one. It's an sound evolutionary strategy even if their existence even horrified Charles Darwin (and these wasps were obviously the inspiration for the Xenomorph in the Alien movies)
> Besides, what's wrong with mentioning how crappy these movies are (they really do suck) in a post that specifically names them?
Assuming you're talking about Prometheus and Covenant, I enjoyed them. Not quite as good as the first (1979) or the second (1986), but I did indeed enjoy the last two.
It's the Alien:Earth series that I stopped watching after 3 or 4 episodes. I did not enjoy that one bit.
Alien Romulus was also not enjoyable; there was no progression of the stories in the universe. At least Prometheus and Covenant attempted expanding the original story. A:E and A:R didn't even bother - with very few changes, those both could be about any alien-filled universe, not specifically about the one started with Alien(1979).
I'm curious what didn't work for you about those movies?
> They don't make a whole lot of movies where all the characters just follow the rules, cause it wouldn't be fun to watch.
Compare it to how they didn't follow the rules in Alien 1 then: they weren't supposed to let the facehugger victim into the spaceship due to quarantine rules. Ripley, acting as interim captain, tried to enforce that, but was overridden by Ash, the science officer [1]. A perfectly understandable action due to human empathy, but in this case, it is doubly justified since, as we later learn, Ash was an android, acting on secret orders to retrieve the alien specimen. Smart, reasonable actions from everyone involved, that didn't make anyone scream at the movie in frustration. And this was just a mining crew of ordinary workers, not the best scientific minds a multi-billionaire was able to assemble for a research expedition.
Meanwhile the only justification for sticking his face into that evil-looking alien snake in Prometheus is that the guy was just a moron because he had fancy science equipment??? Also, Prometheus was written by Damon Lindelof - who also wrote Lost. The same Lost where all those mysteries turned out by series end to have been just random nonsense, with no explanation or justification ever given. Another point in favor of the incompetent writer thesis.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8cEcaK4-qA
Well in the case of the first Alien movie, the whole thing is a left-then-right metaphor about conception, birth, motherhood, and gender roles in biology. If you were alive when it originally came out you wouldn’t know that Ripley is the true lead of the film (a now commonly known fact about the franchise). This idea plays off of scifi with male leads. The film then does A LOT to foreshadow Ripley as the lead and mother figure. So in the case of Alien it was a statement on traditional science fiction films. The Queen was added later in the sequels on an evolution of the birth theme.
A queen in Alien universe doesn’t operate like ants do. She is just the largest most vicious female amongst the brood.
This sounds like an Alien movie.
Thankfully the other species is not human beings, as in the Alien movies!
More seriously, what those ants are doing is kind of unbelievable.
I don't mind if someone is afraid of worms, but I really expected a flesh eating monster tha lay eggs inside you and then eclosionarte like in the alien movie and go to the nearest glaciar or ice rink and sleep for centuries until someone comes nearby ...
Anyway, if someone hates worms (and doesn't care if they are annelids or nematodes) I suggest to donate to the Guinea Worm eradication campaign. They are pretty close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis
Its like if I want to watch Alien, all four of those older movies they want me to have two subscriptions?
And then most of streaming services actually stream stuff, so if my internet is bad im gonna sit there annoyed. I have a small samsung projector and its literally freezing all the time (something to do with wifi and qos, i have other things in my life more interesting that sysadmining a router).
Then up until last year, i could not even watch Dr. House legally.
And then the content changes over time. I remember seeing a scene, that i no longer see. Like wtf?
Its 98% (made up number) that its the service fault.
To be fair Abraham Loeb is a quick sliding Baby Boomer who's closer to 70 than 50. Like Ridley Scott (when was the last good Alien movie?) his tank has to be on empty at this point.
Depends on the movie. Ash and Bishop in the Alien franchise sound human until there's a dramatic reason to sound more 'robotic'.
I agree with your wider point. I use Google TTS with Moon+Reader all the time (I tried audio books read by real humans but I prefer the consistency of TTS)
It probably does. But you've seen how fast these drones are right? It's the speed of aliens in the alien movie or a velociraptor from Jurassic park and much more maneuverable, smaller and can come at you from all dimensions.
Now imagine a swarm coming at you, each with explosives.
Alien is my official brainrot-ometer. If you start fidgeting and going "ohhh my gawwwwwd these old films are so slooooow" before the chestburster, you may be cooked.
Also a good example of how hyper-optimised physiques are in films and media in general and the standards that produces. While I'm sure Ripley's underwear scene caused a fuzzy section on a million VHS tapes at the time, my (female, borderline zoomer) cousin, who failed the boredom test before almost falling off the sofa when the chestburster appeared, said "oh wow, actresses then had such ordinary, girl-next-door bodies!". Mind-boggling.
Alien, to our jaded minds, can be a sci-fi thriller. Alien at premiere in 1979 was most definitely a horror movie. (It still holds up though. It's close to flawless.)
One of my favorite things about T2 is seeing who Sarah Connor becomes. Seeing a character changed by the previous movie is always cool.
And I do agree that an Alien or Terminator disaster/post-apocalypse movie could work. Just think World War Z with the Xenomorph.
The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems.
Aliens successfully changed genres, from horror to action. But subsequent movies could never recapture the primal horror of the original or the fun action of the second. It's almost like there are only two local optima in the Alien movie universe and Alien + Aliens took them both.
Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
> Every case of "ruined by woke" I have seen ultimately just boils down to bad writing, with people blaming "woke" for it when, well, it's just shitty writing. If you ignore the woke stuff and look more broadly usually the whole thing is at best mediocre.
No not really. Claiming this is a hand waving away legit criticism. Fans/Superfans have legitimate criticism of how it breaks the in franchise universes. Constructive Criticism has been claimed to be racism/sexist/homophobia.
> Also sci-fi, fantasy, and horror have always been "woke." Star Trek was one of the first popular shows to prominently feature black characters in important roles and has always lampooned racism and other kinds of bigotry. Night of The Living Dead is pretty easy to see as a racism allegory, or at least it contains one as a sub-plot. Star Wars had an evil empire that was transparently a mix of Nazis and arrogant condescending colonialists. Alien was one of the first huge films I can recall to have a super competent female action hero with skills like engineering who didn't need any help from a man. The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.
No they haven't. It so annoying when people point to some ideas that were slightly progressive at the time being an example of it always being "woke". It is quite honestly tiresome.
None of the examples you have given are what people refer to as "woke" today anyway.
Star Trek was certainly progressive, no argument there. But progressive != woke. When people use "woke" as a pejorative they mean extreme left-wing politics that is bordering on insane. Star Trek TNG was progressive, but none of the politics were seen as extreme even at the time of release.
Alien (like Terminator) were very well done horror movies. They worked because women are seen as traditionally vulnerable. It a well known trope in horror movies.
Also there have been femme fatales and heroines in movies well before Alien. I've seen it in a silent Japanese Martial Arts movie from the 1930s where the Heroine avengers her friend who was raped after going to Samurai master (can't remember the name of the film though).
Heroines didn't just pop into existence sometime after 1960.
> The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.
Never seen it, probably won't now. If a piece of media is going to pretend that someone's sex isn't important to at least some aspect of their character, than it is bad writing. The fact that the show had to be saved by a Billionaire, tells me that it probably wasn't any good in the first place.
> Female/LGBTQ characters are inserted into places where it doesn't make sense to fill quotas
Every case of "ruined by woke" I have seen ultimately just boils down to bad writing, with people blaming "woke" for it when, well, it's just shitty writing. If you ignore the woke stuff and look more broadly usually the whole thing is at best mediocre.
Also sci-fi, fantasy, and horror have always been "woke." Star Trek was one of the first popular shows to prominently feature black characters in important roles and has always lampooned racism and other kinds of bigotry. Night of The Living Dead is pretty easy to see as a racism allegory, or at least it contains one as a sub-plot. Star Wars had an evil empire that was transparently a mix of Nazis and arrogant condescending colonialists. Alien was one of the first huge films I can recall to have a super competent female action hero with skills like engineering who didn't need any help from a man. The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.
When tragedy befalls an animal, we tend to be more upset about it because animals are innocent. They're not aware like we are and can't make better choices when we can, so when they get caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, it's somehow sadder to a stranger than if it were an adult human.
You see this in cinema. We're relieved that the cat survives in Alien, even though we just watched several humans die horribly. And we kind of feel like John Wick's Roaring Rampage of Revenge is justified after the Russian mafia kills his dog.
Jaws. The Shawshank Redemption. Alien. The first Jurassic Park. My Cousin Vinney.
I would say that there is not a single scene that can be removed from these movies without negatively impacting the story/theme/narrative.
Some say that Star Wars IV and V fit this definition but I would say there is some eyecandy fluff that could be cut.
I find this plot structure tired and boring so I'm always on the lookout for movies that don't follow it. They are hard to find! (Also, I probably don't have an excellent memory to recall them later when I do find them.)
Horror movies in general seem to have more freedom to play with plot structure than other genres. Every film, regardless of plot, needs to have something that makes the audience want to watch to the end of the film. With horror, it's often putting the question in the audience's mind "what is happening?" That can be compelling enough to propel the viewer to the end so the film often doesn't need to have a protagonist go through some emotional journey.
It's been a while since I've seen them, but I don't think The Ring or The Grudge follow this plot form. It's probably telling that both of those are adaptations of non-Western films. I don't think Alien follows this structure either: Ridley is basically right all along and just has to survive.
I think Goon is an underrated comedy, and it doesn't really fit the three-act structure well. It certainly has conflict and climax, but Doug doesn't really go through any internal crisis. Instead, he's more often the catalyst for internal change in other characters.
Sure, no problem, never bothered by disagreement over art/entertainment. I appreciate the perspective. And sure, I’d not put many of these near the tier of, say, a Godfather or a Passion of Joan of Arc. Only a few anywhere near an Alien, for that matter.
> That’s why the snap at the end of Avengers: Infinity War was spectacle but didn’t have the emotional impact of a single deer being shot at the beginning of Bambi.
God, truth, and all the more effective a comparison for me because I happened to re-watch Bambi within the last week.
Marvel movies rarely achieve even that lesser connection, maybe a half-dozen times in the thirty-whatever movies.
Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.
Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…
(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead
Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.
That movie was so weird. It had flashes of brilliance but also a really dumb "idiot ball" plot in a lot of ways. Astronauts would never be as stupid as they're depicted in that film, things like "oh gee I think I'll take my helmet off around all this potential biohazard."
It also doesn't really work in the Alien universe at all. It would have been much better had it been set in an entirely different 'verse, maybe even its own things.
IMHO the Alien canon should be: Alien, Alien Romulus, and Aliens, in that order (since Romulus is in fact supposed to occur between those other two in-world). Maybe the sequel to Romulus (and Aliens) could be an updated adaptation of the William Gibson script that begins when Rain reaches the "non-Weyland colony" (which would kinda fit with Gibson's script).
My opinion on Interstellar is similar. It had brilliant moments (and visuals!) but overall I didn't like it. I couldn't get past things like: okay, so we are in a kind of semi post-collapse world apparently run by milquetoast descendants of the Heritage Foundation. Where exactly did they get a starship? Did they just have, like, a warp drive sitting around up on concrete blocks in someone's lawn? What? Also they had to lift off from Earth with chemical rockets, but somehow they're able to lift off from much larger planets later without thinking about delta-V budget at all. Sorry but if you're gonna say it's hard sci-fi it's gotta at least try to know something about physics and have coherent world building.
Yes I'm a sci-fi geek.
There are so many possible scenarios. What if the campus is infested with face-huggers from the award-winning movie Alien? What if there are still Jewish students and faculty members who need to be harassed anonymously?
I'll leave those to people more familiar with the subject. And as for the pneumonia scenario, I reiterate that the only sane course of action is to seek treatment, not to walk around public spaces, masked or not.
Oh yeah, like the three Alien movies: Alien, Alien Romulus, and Aliens.
I see what you did there and I did the same. :)
I camped out in line on Hollywood Blvd for several hours to be in the first public screening of Dune at the Chinese Theater. So I know I saw the release print and to my then college-aged perceptions, I didn't really connect with it. I didn't think it was bad but I didn't think it was good either.
I blame this on the muddled mess that was the release edit and how misleadingly the film was promoted by the studio. I was a huge fan of pop sci-fi like Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner and the advertising set a very different audience expectation than what the film delivered. Unfortunately, that experience kind of tainted Lynch's Dune for me.
I didn't really begin to appreciate Lynch as a great filmmaker until Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, both of which I loved. Someone linked a 'highly-regarded' three hour fan edit of Lynch's Dune which I've bookmarked to check out.
Depends, wokespotting is a complex sport, and I only trust professionals to do it.
I tried myself, but failed. At first I thought it meant the movie was either feminist, antiracist and/or Marxist, but it then became clear it was actually an union of unpopular and one of the three criteria (see no time to die, or guardian 3 that are suddenly not woke). So from this, Star Trek, despite being the most Marxist utopia ever, isn't woke, since it's popular.
But Barbie is quite popular and still woke. But Alien is not despite featuring the biggest Mary Sue. Like I said, to complex for me, I leave wokespotting to professionals.
Alien (1979) predates ST:TNG (1987-), and as I remember it, it competed with E.T. (1982) in the popular consciousness.
Nah, dark or grim sci-fi were aplenty, many of them were just regular action movies (also popular then) but done in sci-fi setting.
I'm using Star Trek as a measuring stick, particularly TNG and later, because this was a very big, popular and long-running franchise, that happened to have baked in the idea of optimistic future for humanity as a core part of its setting. It's a measuring stick that spans almost six decades now, and you can see in it how sentiments changed over that time, and how the hope and optimism eroded.
Various dystopian shows and movies that appeared in that time, they were pessimistic by design, and thus work as spot measurements of what people thought would sell best at a particular time. Star Trek wasn't - the weight of an established franchise meant it could've kept selling optimism even as others would find it too financially risky; so Star Trek going darker measures a deeper change in the mindsets of writers and studio executives.
Art design in the movie "Alien" (was it Ron Cobb?) borrowed from samurai armor for the space suits.
I thought it was Moebius (alias Jean Giraud) who designed the Alien spacesuits? E.g., see [1]. (Perhaps he did borrow bits of samurai armor styling, I'm not disputing that.)
[1] https://filmsketchr.blogspot.com/2013/04/alien-concept-art-by-jean-henri-gaston.html
Too bad that "looking Sci-Fi" means more or less all looking the same.
Art design in the movie "Alien" (was it Ron Cobb?) borrowed from samurai armor for the space suits. (And of course Darth Vader himself was inspired in large part from samurai armor.)
Lazy films and video games since though seem to often just recycle a certain look. Perhaps an unpopular opinion but the "anime look" has been fatiguing to this person's taste for a couple of decades now as well.
You can watch the film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(film)
Well said. There's tons of blockbusters and other popular movies from the 80s/90s that were absolutely made for the "masses", but were genuinely great films, and far better than almost any blockbuster from the last 5-10 years, especially all the comic-book stuff. Alien(s), Back to the Future trilogy, Terminator 1/2, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, I could go on and on. And of course the LotR trilogy if you look at the early 2000s. Movies just aren't as innovative or risky these days; something as quirky as Ghostbusters wouldn't be made now (but Hollywood is happy to make remakes and sequels of that franchise now, 40 years later).
The order of the movies as I understand is: Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Alien, Alien Romulus.
The technology of the ship user interfaces in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant seems much higher tech than what is presented in Alien Romulus. Alien gets a pass because it was made in 1979.
So David makes the Xenomorphs and then David uses the colonist and human embryos for further experimentation? So are the events of Alien a trap by David?
I haven't seen Covenant or Romulus yet. I saw Prometheus, and it was really bad, but in a complicated way. It wasn't a completely terrible movie that you can just dismiss as garbage like Battlefield: Earth and not think about again. It was beautifully shot, and a visual feast to watch. There were some really great scenes, like the robo-surgery scene. But the characters were frequently stupid, and the script was bad because it made the characters do idiotic, incompetent things that should only be seen in a B-grade horror movie. Ridley should have known better, and should have done a better job making sure the script he was working with made sense, so I'm very disappointed with him. He didn't do this with the first "Alien" movie at all.
Then he apparently did it again with Covenant: I haven't seen this one yet, but what I've read says he didn't really learn his lesson from Prometheus, and made another great-looking movie with high production values and a poor script. So I haven't been in a hurry to see it.
Romulus seems to have good reviews so far, and a different director, so I'd like to give it a chance. I just haven't had a chance to see it yet, but it is high on my list of films to watch soon, along with the new Quiet Place movie.
The fresco in the Prometheus goo chamber showed a Xenomorph creature before David had a chance to work with the goo.
I don't mean to nitpick there, it's more a comment on continuity in multiple movies.
I'm an old school Aliens appreciator; I recognize as canon Alien and Aliens, and the Dark Horse comics of the early 90s (80s?). It's easier on my old brain than juggling plots from 20 different people.
Should we gather the "just to clear it up" statements all in one place?
"Xenomorph" is not any sort of official in-universe term for these things, though I believe Alien: Romulus at least does have scientists calling it "xenomorph <some number>" indicating it has been catalogued. Xenomorph is just a generic term for a non-humanoid alien, though, what PFC Hudson called a "bug" when the term was introduced as Lt Gorman was briefing the other Marines about what they might expect. This wasn't their first time encountering hostile life and they called a lot of it by this name.
The xenomorphs (as fans have taking to calling it) are not silicon-based, but rather some blend of organic and inorganic. They're bioengineered superweapons, not naturally occurring. As far as we can tell, they don't eat at all, at least in their adult form, as they grow to full size in a matter of hours without us ever seeing them consume anything. They only seem to need hosts in their larval form. This is also why they mostly don't kill the humans they attack unless they have to because they're under threat. They instead attach them to a resin they secrete, where they are used as incubators for more larval forms. Their entire purpose seems to boil down to multiplying as rapidly as possible. I believe Ridley Scott has suggested they consume electricity or radiation in general directly, rather than extracting energy from food.
They were not actually created by the "engineers," as Shaw from Prometheus called the space jockey guys. They were created by David, the first synthetic sentient android created by Weyland, when he and Shaw hijacked an engineer ship. He returned to their home world, released the black goo and killed everything, and experiments with its ability to create multistage lifecycle semi-organic lifeforms, which he eventually managed to turn into the xenomorph as it was seen in the original Alien.
The black goo itself seems to have been some sort of quasi-religious experiment thing the engineers developed billions of years ago that has the ability to dissolve organic matter, attach itself to DNA, and rewrite it to become some kind of more "advanced" lifeform. The beginning of Prometheus shows them doing this on earth, with a sacrificial engineer dissolving himself into primordial water to seed what would eventually become all earth life. This doesn't imply earth-life is genetically similar to the xenomorph, but rather to the engineers, who were humanoid. So Ridley Scott (or Damon Lindelof or whoever) is implying earth life was meant to eventually become humanoid all along, like we're the ultimate end of an experiment in engineered evolution.
However, back on their home planet, they didn't just stop doing new things for four billion years. The black goo of the present in Prometheus was similar to the original used to seed earth, but seemingly had changed at that point and specifically created more xenomorph-like things, now by infecting other lifeforms and incubating in them, rather than dissolving them into free-floating DNA.
All of that addresses whether xenomorphs are "related" in any biological sense to life on earth, but either way, I'm not convinced arthropods are the right analogy. The reality of their size and movement is obviously confounded by the fact they're played by humans wearing costumes, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have endoskeletons. Ridley Scott has stated the original intention of the creature design was to invoke armor. They're insect-like in appearance, but arthropod exoskeletons are not really armor. In fact, arthropods very rarely grow as large as humans, with the only examples all being extinct, and they had paper-thin exoskeletons, in part because molting something that large is difficult and expensive. To me, I think they're more similar to certain types of dinosaurs with hardened exterior armor. That said, they are clearly shown molting, but the fact they have claws and teeth seems to suggest they probably also have bones. I suspect this is mostly just confusion on the part of the designers or the simple fact they aren't really trying to make something that is biologically coherent or plausible so much as a nightmare made flesh.
I don't think it's ever made clear what the engineers were trying to do. The timelines are a little jacked up, but the derelict the Prometheus crew discovers can't be the same one discovered later by the Nostromo, because the one of the Nostromo has actual fully-realized xenomorphs, which the narrative eventually makes clear were created by David after the events of Prometheus. The derelict in that case was simply carrying black goo, but a weaponized version, and carrying it to earth, apparently intending to destroy all life there. Why is never explained, nor does it seem to be the case that this was some civilization-wide decision, since the mission failed and no follow-on was ever launched. This could have been some rogue faction that weaponized black goo and attempted to destroy life that had earlier been created by the non-weaponized older version out of disagreement with the larger historical goals of their own people.
Weyland-Yutani corps by the time of the mainline films seems to not understand what they are dealing with. They understand they have found some substance that can meld with organic life and create a stronger version of it that doesn't need food and can survive in a vacuum. Romulus seems to suggest that the goal at that point was to create a race of hybrid mine workers that would survive the harsh conditions better than humans. They don't seem to have ever realized that David had created the xenomorphs as they existed at that point and his goal was not to create better humans but to destroy all other life completely and replace it with xenomorphs.
Considering all I've written to this point, I'm amazed at how silly the mythology of this series eventually got after starting as a simple great horror flick that needed no explanation or backstory.
Ahh, but you miss out on the 'cool' aspect embodied by letter X, the underlying meaning that effectively refers to the title of the movie and other things are likely going over my head. Gige prefix does not have the same impact. Alien in fake latin sounds a lot better.
My parents had recorded something on our VCR and "to be safe" it recorded the first half hour or so of the following movie. The following movie was the original Alien. It stopped around the dinner scene before it gets really going. I must have watched that part of the movie ~20 times when I was around 10. I'd be constantly afraid about facehuggers hiding under the bed or behind the shower curtain when it was dark.
Same experience here. I loved The Great Mouse Detective, at age 8. Not much later I read The Dark Knight in a translated trade paperback, and it really tickled my little mind. There was a trend of having comic adaptations of movies back then, so I also read and loved the License to Kill comic and was disappointed when Terminator 2 omitted some scenes in the movie -- until the Director's Cut came out.
I was certainly not traumatized (apart from the week of nightmares after seeing Alien one night on TV at age 12). Because of this, I had no arguments when I learned my 11 and 13 year old kids' mom and their stepdad had secured tickets for us to go see Deadpool & Wolverine when I was visiting last time.
Kids understand more than one may think, depending on how much "real life" they assimilate through culture (and parental guidance), I believe.
Is there a way to train this on common AI voices from video games/movies, I'd very much like a voice assistant to sound like Father/Mother from Alien or Dead Space.
>And it's a movie from 45 years ago that was so culturally significant that even if you never saw it you know what happens because you've seen other media reference it
I don't (i only know there's an alien chest bursting scene). If I went to cinema and someone spoiled the movie for me, I'd just get up and leave because I hate spoilers.
Though I don't watch a lot of movies and don't go to cinemas, so obviously my opinion doesn't matter.
I'd expect there would be plenty of people who would choose to view it. For "Alien" I'd expect a big chunk of the audience would be people who have only seen it on home media but became huge fans and have watched it many times. They would know every scene, so nothing in the pre-movie extras would be a spoiler for them.
I am talking about societal trends like "the trailer" now spoiling the entire movie before the movie.
The OP was talking about seeing it IN the theater. They are presumably hyped.
Alien is a wonderful movie, but that isn't my point at all.
When you go to a movie in towns like LA, Seattle or the Bay Area, you can always tell which people work in the industry because they are the only people who stay to watch the credits. Normal humans all leave when the credits start to roll, with a tiny fraction staying in the hope they include a teaser or surprise bit of story in the middle of the credits. Since the producers of the Alien revival had just spent all their money on the interview, they want to make sure people see it, so they put it before the film.
I agree 100% with the author. I've seen Alien,but I haven't watched it for a long time. So if I go to see it in the cinema now, while I technically do know what's going to happen - it isn't completely fresh in my mind. So to be shown all the suspenseful, scary bits I'm about to watch, out of context, immediately before the film, is absolutely detrimental to the experience.
Huh? The end of the new Alien movie is deeply uncomfortable.
You have to put it up front while the audience is still hyped to see the move. And it's a movie from 45 years ago that was so culturally significant that even if you never saw it you know what happens because you've seen other media reference it. It's a showing specifically for people who've already seen it. Special edition VHS tapes with director commentary put it at the beginning for the same reason. Which yeah, who even has VHS tapes anymore but its the one of the few non-cinema formats constrained by having to make everything serial where you can see the norm.
This is what most podcasts do though. The review of 'Alien' sounded like Armchair expert and The Big Picture all rolled into one. Lots of gushing there. Hard to find good movie critics. If I could get something like Video Archives for all my movies that would be cool. Interesting future if you could replicate Tarantino and Avary. In the end it could sound like and fool you, but there is now way it could put together all of the personal conversations Tarantino and Avary have had with big swaths of Hollywood.
I'm just amazed though how well they nailed the sound of it all. The back and forth, the layer of one speaking over another at the right time, each sounding like your average podcast host in that light style. But the content sucked.
I wasn't really sure what OP meant by VHS being "totally obsolete". It would have been getting there for new camcorders by the mid 90s (replaced by 8mm and eventually DV), but VHS itself would remain relevant into the mid 2000s.
Just going by pop culture, we had the 4GB base model iMac in 1998 and a hit film about a cursed video tape in 2002.
Anecdotally, I remember my family getting a Windows 95 computer with a 1GB hard drive (Quantum Bigfoot, no less) in 1995 or 1996, and a really cool decorated box set of the Alien quadrillogy on VHS around the turn of the millennium from Tower Records.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
The Crow
The Machine (if you like Ex Machina, try it)
Alien
Prometheus
Fight Club
Secretary
Casablanca
Kill Bill
The Emperor's New Groove
Star Wars Episode IV - The original goodness, not the CGI horror-show.
Star Wars: Rogue One
American Beauty
Dredd.
Hellboy (directors).
Blade Runner (theatrical).
Chocolat.
Noise (Australian film, 2007. Love that one).
I try not to watch films too many times in quick succession. The repetition dulls the experience for me.
I love this film, despite the hate, and despite its flaws, despite a few missed opportunities ... It's very progressive: it's completely different from what's gone before and opens up possibilities for future directions. It's a great film, though perhaps a better science fiction/horror film than an ALIEN film.
What a great question! Many interesting movies to check out in these comments!
My own list, I re-watch movies the same way I re-listen to music, often to get in a particular mode of thinking, as they become familiar, I mostly daydream while appreciating some particular concept and whatever new minutiae, or ways of understanding, creeps into my mind.
Hackers - 30+ times, for dreaming about a world that never was and never will be, for reminding myself how cool computers used to seem.
The Crow - 20+ times, for thinking about the world
Koyaanisqatsi - 15+ times, for thinking about my life in the world
Alien - 10+ times, for thinking about the future that passed us by
Terminator 1 and 2 - 10+ times, for examining a time that never was, or passed me by, and because Arnold is awesome!
A Clockwork Orange, 10+ times, to reflect on violence and aesthetic
Event Horizon, 10+ times, mostly for the aesthetic, and who dosen't love spaceships from hell ?
1984 - 5+ times, for thinking about humanity and society
Requiem for a Dream - 5+ times, for thinking about the value of life, and what society is
Once upon a time in the west - 5+ times, for thinking about loss, revenge and justice
Genocyber - 5+ times, to think about what life is for anyway
Stalker - 5+ times, frankly, mostly to look at the pretty pictures.
Lots of other amazing movies, I probably forgot some (time to watch again?)
Bonus:
TV Shows I've watched more than 10 times:
Star Trek TNG
Neon Genesis Evangelion
I found that I actually only really like a movie or tv show if it is infinitely (aka a lot; more than 50x without getting bored) rewatchable (for me obviously); not many movies are. Some favorites which fall in that category; Alien, Aliens, The Thing, Das Boot, Cold Lazarus (the Dennis P one), ...
It is very personal as looking through what other people mention ; many of those I couldn't sit through once, but if friends tell me to give it another go, I watch 2-10 times to see if it grows. Rarely it does, but there have been cases. Notably everyone likes Pulp Fiction; I saw it at least 15 times and find it unwatchable.
I rewatch many movies quite often. But the ones that really stand out, in no particular order...
Wargames Jurassic Park Evolution Unstoppable Lord of the Rings Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 Alien 1, 2 and 3 Back to the Future Ghost in the Shell (basically all of it, mostly seasons 1 and 2) The Martian Tron 1 and 2 Anything by Miyazaki, but Howl's Moving Castle even more so
Alien and Aliens. Those two movies are the perfect blend of timeless action, scifi, and horror.
I’m feeling really hopeful for Alien: Romulus.
The Thing and Alien are my two favorite movies. Silence of the Lambs is up there too.
Not movies but I've rewatched X-Files and Twin Peaks repeatedly as well.
Of the ~700 movies I've watched (not bragging, just context - actual movie buffs watch thousands by the time they're my age), those I happily rewatch are:
The Thing (1982)
Silence of the Lambs
Alien
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Young Frankenstein
Rocky Horror
Raising Arizona
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Men in Black
Primer
But even those I've only seen a handful of times each. It takes a lot for me to want to watch/read/play something multiple times, as I'm the kind of person who always thinks, "but I could be trying something new, or getting something done".
Alien, Jurassic Park, The Harry Potter films
I dont mind paying for content, but the current state of streaming makes it easier to get movies from torrents.
Like the Alien for example, some parts are on Netflix, some are not. Meaning i have to buy like 5 different subscriptions to be able to watch everything i want.
Or even better one, Dr House. I don't think we had it streamed in our country, so the only way to watch it was to pirate.
Its bad how the platforms are right now.
I don't think it matters much either way. There's been lots of movies made with "from scratch" scripts that were excellent (and a lot of stinkers too obviously), but there's also been plenty of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters with absolutely terrible scripts, when there should have been more cross-checking. Just look at the last few "Alien" movies, especially Prometheus.
I finally watched this within the last year. Blew me away. Although the movie came out only a couple of years before I was born, it feels so much like a "modern" movie.
I think Invasion is an example of a big change in how movies were being made that started in at least the late 70's that became more or less how lots of movies were made since the 80's. Its right up there with Alien in my mind.
Honestly it reminded me of back in school when I first read something by Mark Twain. I could never get interested in any of the period books and such that were required reading, but the first time I read something by Twain it was immediately compelling. Even though his works were nearly 150 years old at the time, the way he wrote in much more simple and direct text is more or less how most fiction has become since then. It made it so much more accessible to a young person than the overly flowery language of the time period.
I don't really think AI training is "stealing", despite how much people seem to keep repeating that. You can't own a "style", and you don't get rights to everything inspired by your work, and you shouldn't be because that would be horrible. A lot of AI images that I've generated, as far as I can tell, are pretty much completely unique in the sense that, yes, they were trained on copyrighted data, they don't really look like anything that has ever existed before.
There's been plenty of cases where a big company is inspired by a small company's work, largely redid it, and no one cared, well before AI was a thing. "It! The Terror From Beyond Space" was basically copied by Alien twenty years later, and the latter is considered a masterpiece of cinema, and while most film-geeks know this about Alien, they still consider it unique enough in its own rights to be a great movie. I feel like, in many cases, the stuff generated by Stable Diffusion is transformative enough to be considered fair use. I guess it's a minority opinion, since a large part of the most recent writers strike that everyone seemed to get behind was complaining about AI.
As a rule, I think articles like this are just kind of fear-mongering. Every new piece of tech has a risk of displacing workers, especially in the short term. This isn't new, it's the nature of progress: people really want stuff to be cheaper so we invent stuff to make things cheaper.
Will AI "replace" jobs? Sure, but so did ditch-digging machines, cars, airplanes, and computers themselves; people find other stuff to do.
Copyright impedes accessibility, an important human right. The “pirates” sometimes “liberate” content that has no hope of being released due to a snarl of copyright and artificial regional restrictions.
For example: audio description. Audio description is an accessibility technology that allows people who are blind or low vision to watch films, essentially by providing an extra soundtrack with a narrator concisely providing context for what's going on that can't be accounted for by dialogue or sound effects.
I have owned, in my life, 5 copies of the film Alien. None of those versions are audio described. Up until last year there was no way to hear a described version without resorting to “piracy”. The only way to hear a (mediocre version with a synth voice instead of an expressive human one) described version is to pretend to be in Canada, or attend a theatre capable of delivering AD with the new re-release. It's not a world-wide release.
So, sitting here in a cow-paddock in rural Western Australia, I still have no legal way to watch the audio described version of an oscar-winning film over 40 years old. Having paid 5 times for it, damn right I pirate that. And while I am not vision impaired, there are many others who are who depend on AD to participate in culture, and when they find barriers to that, they pirate that content too.
I have films on DVD I paid for, but cannot legally watch because I'm too many kilometers from some notional border or other. Damn right I “pirated” those!
As to your main point, you note that no individual has the right to take someone else's intellectual property. I presume you are giving your ethical blessing and a free pass to OpenAI and Midjourney et. al. who have provably leveraged a pirated corpus into highly profitable products?
Apollo 8....Frank Borman got vomiting and diarrhea hours into the flight...Alien movie was nothing compared to it...
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
I follow your thoughts towards ET, and offer that Spielberg has already realized an epic treatment of the theme: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which he develops the idea of corporate society and daytime TV being indistinguishable from an extraterrestrial incursion. That he invited the founder of Auteur Theory and savant of the French New Wave, Francios Truffaut to emcee projects the high awareness Spielberg had of his conceits. To my mind ET merely revisited the scenario of CE3K as something that could be cross-marketed in Happy Meals, exploiting the success of Lucas' Star Wars licensing.
Ridley Scott's Alien is also trenchant commentary on the corporate/TV zeitgeist with an attack by an unstoppable libidinal force of life (Zizek referred to this idea as "lamella") that lives beneath all the levitating signifiers of the "capitalist real" (Mark Fisher).
All of these movies are first and foremost entertainment products, which so happen to code a surprising amount of reflection on the part of their auteur creators on US/UK corporatism and existential angst.
Recognizing the power of the movies on the collective mind, I'll repeat my thesis that the central consideration for PKD is "why do you think you're human?", not "how do humans distinguish androids from themselves?"
PKD created his works un-beholden to the idioms of popular culture, and I regard his oeuvre as profoundly more intellectually free than any Hollywood adaptation can be. The arrow of artist progress goes from books to movies, not the other way around, so beware of reading the movie's themes into the books. He helped carve out a place for science fiction in literature, and the popularity of cinematic adaptations of his work reveals the resonance of his themes, so read the story then look for how the movies hew to the writing.
There's a strange reversal of books adapted from movies, but even in the case of Arthur Clarke's 2001 (vs. The Sentinel) these read as fan fiction.
About the movie: It's amazing how much second guessing many / most of these works get. I get that this is a result of the budgets required (although Blade Runner wasn't a high budget movie) and (consequently?) the number of people involved but it's like nobody can resign themselves to trust the original vision (script, visual design) or trust the director. With test showings fraught with the risk of being poorly understood or grossly clumsy in the correction. Major works of art - that must rely on general public ticket sales.
For me, this is one of the movies I re-watch periodically simply for the visuals - the work done on the setting in concept art and the glorious result in turning that into film. "The kind of place the crew of Alien live in when on shore leave", sure, but just a fresh look and well implemented. Certainly hugely successful on that.
Any recommendations on creative fresh looks in recent SF movies? Say the past 15 years?
Mortal Engines was fresh, silly, and fairly well done. And silly.
The Zero Theorem was quirky and worth mentioning... but... too half-assed and grunge, used-furniture that's been done many times?
The documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” presents a fairly strong argument that the “Dune bible” that was assembled for that movie and shopped around to production studios strongly influenced many of the great sci-fi films (or at least iconic scenes in them) in the years to follow.
Specific examples from the documentary were Star Wars and Alien. The latter of which included Dan O’Bannon (screenwriter) and H.R. Giger (effects+concept artist), reprising their roles as staff on Jodorowsky’s Dune.
Highly recommend the documentary by the way. I actually just saw it a couple weeks ago, so the comparison made a lot of sense to me.
These are just my favorites, and in the order of which the popped into my mind.
- Office Space, 1999 (especially for people who work at offices) - The Matrix, 1999 - Fight Club, 1999 :)
Umm, what else? - Spirited Away, 2001 (and many others from Miyazaki) - Requiem for a Dream, 2000 (Very Heavy addiction-related film! I actually got watery eyes just by typing this, I've seen it too many times.) - Joker, 2019 - Full Metal Jacket, 1987 (and many others from Kubrick, such as Dr. Strangelove and The Shining) - Django Unchained, 2012 (and many others from Tarantino, at least Pulp Fiction) - Alien, 1979 - The Silence of the Lambs, 1991 - Saw, 2004
I made a bit longer list, so that I can share the link to my friends.
Actually there are many quirky ones which came to my mind, such as Borat, the South Park movie, Team America, Airplane! (alternatively titled Flying High!), Idiocracy and Hangover, but I wouldn't say these are in the must-see category. Actually I wouldn't even recommend these to most people, if I didn't know what kind of humor they like.
> In the case of Aliens, James Cameron is explicitly saying he just went with Kodak film that was available at the time, which everyone was using.
Ok, fair. James Cameron can do whatever he wants with his films. They are his artistic output, and if he feels the technology available at the time didn't properly communicate that, he can certainly work to mitigate that however he wants. I assure you, this is not common among directors. If you invited Ridley Scott and Derek Vanlint to a meeting informing them that Alien was being re-released as an AI "enhanced" movie, I sure as fuck wouldn't want to be in that room.
> I will submit that directors are not generally the right people to call the shots here. A director can never watch his own movie the way the audience does.
Ha. I'm a Tech Artist and do VFX, so I have more visibility than most into how a lot of these decisions get made. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but of all the confidently incorrect declarations about art I've seen in tech fora, this has got to be in the top 5.
To some extent, the misconception is understandable from a consumer vantage point: without spending a lot of time creating images from nothing to have a specific impact on the viewer, you really don't understand how many decisions there are to make about minutiae, and how much it all affects how the work hits. Prompt-based AI image generators are a good example of this. Their making these decisions is the real boon for non-artists that want to make images, and also why they're non-starters for high-level professional deliverable work. Learning to use art tools to produce clean images is the easy part. The hard part is deciding at an extremely granular level what those images should contain. Since the models amalgamate those decisions from the millions of decisions that artists have already made in different images, that lets end users indefinitely create visually compelling images without having to know why they're compelling at a granular level. But the decisions at that granular level communicate a lot to the viewer, and even with the finer-grained control you can get with prompt manipulation, control nets, inpainting, loras, etc. it's still bumper cars vs driving. Famous artists are usually famous because their vision isn't just a mix of what other people have done before them-- it's got other frameworks, stimuli, references, connections and influences that are implemented in novel, complex, and very specific ways. Fighting against the amalgamated decisions of every artist that contributed to the model to achieve those results requires so much more effort than just making it from scratch. That's why generative AI in industry tools like Nuke don't integrate prompts or generate direct visuals-- they do things like make masks for compositing. A huge win, but 100% not creating images that go on screen. On a much more extreme level, Disney could not have trained a model with the entirety of early animation and pre-1937 non-animated visual art-- even their own films-- and come up with The Old Mill, no matter how much engineering they did.
In a film, almost all of those decisions made by an AI model when generating images are made, or at least finalized, by the director, often in conjunction with the DP and Production Designer. Most of them are obsessed with things like the slope and toe of film, grain, minute differences in very specific color representations, etc. etc. etc. and it affects nearly everything about the film-- set decisions, framing to get more or less of something, what time of day to shoot at, lighting, grading, etc. etc. etc. Saying directors shouldn't have complete control over the medium on which their movies are captured betrays a complete lack of understanding of making movies, both as an art form, and a practical process. If you want to learn more about how movies are made before you pontificate about the craft of making movies, I recommend looking at StudioBinder's youtube channel for a sub-cliff's-notes level introduction to how it's actually done.
>Arguably, the original trilogy was simply dungeons and dragons in space. Wizards, rogues, and knights in space.
It was basically Flash Gordon plus WW2 movies plus samurai movies plus fairy tales and Arthurian fantasy in space.
I think one of the reasons why The Force Awakens is not good is that it tries to copy previous Star Wars movies, but Star Wars has always been best when it copies stuff from other genres and mixes them together into a new thing, not when it tries to copy from its own previous films.
>it's pretty much the only widely known sci-fi films from the last 70s early 80s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Blade Runner, and The Terminator are all widely known late 70s / early 80s sci-fi films.
Probably not as well known but still pretty widely known are Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Thing, and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
I think I remember reading in an interview with O'Bannon, likely linked from hn when he died, that he came up with the idea for Alien after experiencing a cinema audience in terrified silence through the elevator scene, instead of the intended laughs. Something along the lines of "if I can't make them laugh but make them fear without even trying, what if I do try?" If there's and truth to this story, Alien is quite literally a remake of a Dark Star side story, just pivoted a bit.
Never heard about that Jodorowsky angle before, thanks. Must be the most influencial movie that never happened.
It's worth watching "Jodorowsky's Dune" if you haven't to see the direct-line connection - Jodorowsky happened to see "Dark Star" playing at a film festival while out in California and wanted whoever did the special effects to come work on his doomed "Dune" adaptation. He hired O'Bannon, who came out and met future Alien collaborators HR Giger and Moebius. It's fair to say Alien would not have happened, (or would not be the Alien we know now), if not for Dark Star.
I have read many books and seen many movies that I feel are worse artistic works than the best games, but I also think it's a hard comparison to make.
There is no music that compares to "War and peace" or paintings like "1984", nor is the movie "Alien" like any book. Describing H R Gigers monster design with words will not have the same artistic impact.
I think different creations can be be great artistic works on entirely incomparable axes.
Indeed! It reminds me of the early scenes of the movie Alien where William Hurt’s character has the Alien stuck to his face :-)
We started to get a lot of the classic movies in the 70s (Taxi Driver, Godfather, Star Wars, Halloween, Blazing Saddles, Rocky, Alien, Clockwork Orange, Exorcist, Jaws, Apocalypse Now just to name a few) and the 80s went absolutely wild and - particularly - far more broad. The kids films from the 80s didn't really exist before then (outside of Disney).
In the 50s/60s there were less (but still some of per personal faves) and the dominant genres (Westerns particularly) have been out of fashion for at least 40 years now.
> So yes, a different studio being given the license for the sequel (which is already a very questionable practice that rights holders should be called out for) should strive to mimick the feel of the original game very closely.
I'm just going to have to fundamentally agree to disagree. I would 100% endorse this quote if we were talking about novels or theatrical plays, and maybe 50% if talking about movies (Godfather? Yes. Alien? Nah).
But a game, outside of odd niches like visual novels or 'walking simulators', is a much more open-ended experience, and the expectation of a sequel is not merely to continue the story - that's typically called an 'expansion', a concept that doesn't exist in novels or movies. A sequel is generally expected to innovate, and the longer since the previous title the more innovation is expected.
I enjoy Aliens—it's the bigger, more over-the-top production of the two.
But I prefer Alien for its intimacy and slowly growing horror. John Hurt's character's arc stunned me as a child, and is still one of my favorite turns of storytelling. I love the set design and overall tone of the movie. It's a different space mood than other space movies. And it nails that feeling of being hunted on a spaceship (so far as I would know).
I don't recall any science in it
Can't agree with you there. I think even Cameron would be the first to say that Aliens is primarily a thrill ride. But it is also objectively true that at least two hard scifi elements provide the scaffolding for the events of the movie.
Two of the most central themes of the movie were fairly hard sci-fi... although admittedly one of them was nearly entirely deleted from the theatrical cut.
One: What would a person experience after decades of hibernation? In many ways the film revolves around or is set in motion by Ripley's extended cryosleep after Alien. She is now alone in a strange world where her skills are no longer relevant or current. This primes her for manipulation by Burke. She has also missed out on her deceased daughter's entire life, which primes her to think of Newt as a surrogate daughter and protect her with a mother's ferocity. (Unfortunately, the exposition about her daughter was removed from the theatrical cut. Huge miss.)
Two: How would mankind react to alien contact? Would we treat it with ontological reverence or would it be business as usual for warmongering corporations? The second half of the movie is set in motion by Burke doing the latter on behalf of Weyland-Yutani.
The terraforming stuff.... yeah I agree it's just a setting.
T2 much better than T1. Aliens better than Alien.
These are great sequels, but they are Hollywood action movies compared to their predecessors. I do prefer ESB, but Star Wars has better structure and a more satisfying ending, so it is close.
The best thing about ALien is that when it came out, you had no idea who the "hero" was in the crew. Tom Skerritt was the biggest star, had first billing, and was the white male captain. There was no expectation the someone else would be the hero and survivor.
Aliens is more of a vanilla monster movie than scifi. I don't recall any science in it, other than the setting.
Alien was based on a short story in "Voyage of the Space Beagle", though the implementation of it was fresh. The discovery and exploration of the alien's life cycle was good scifi.
Strange choices. ESB is in almost every way a much better film than Star Wars. T2 much better than T1. Aliens better than Alien.
I haven't seen the other two, bet I'll just assume they also have better sequels.
I don't understand all the love for Dune. I read it, it was ok, and that was it. 3 underwhelming film adaptations is more than enough.
Special effects don't make a movie anymore. What matters is plot (and music). For example, "Colossus the Forbin Project" is very good. Some other very good scifi movies:
. Invaders from Mars
. Flash Gordon (1980)
. Terminator
. Star Wars IV
. Alien
Ridley elevated Alien to ridiculous heights but then got absolutely everything wrong in Prometheus. Which bothers me to no end.
The only conclusion I can come to is that he's an expert visual storyteller (none better) with amazing craft, but can't recognize the difference between a great story and a mediocre one.
Maybe he doesn't care, he's just happy to put the next film in the can?
But it seems to me that he doesn't entirely care about telling a great story, just about telling a story extremely well.
Submarines were considered science fiction shortly prior to WWI, and then you got such crazy technological advancements, that battleships were obsolete by the time they were built. Well, submarines weren't science fiction anymore, and were used in unrestricted warfare.
Hope we don't do that with AI. Pretty sure our AGI is going to be similar to that seen in the Alien franchise of films-- it essentially emulates human higher order logic with key distinctions.
>The only issue now is that Disney owns half of all media, so if you like movies or want to go on a date or take the kids to the cinema, you don’t get a seriously large variety.
Not true, you just need to watch movies at home. I brought my girlfriend over to my place and showed her "Alien" and "Aliens" (she had never seen them) and she loved them. Why bother watching new junk when there's SO many wonderful classic movies you can watch instead? And you can get an absolutely huge flat-screen TV these days for not that much money. Who needs a cinema?
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
Someone needs to record an Omnichord set of Christmas melodies as the soundtrack, or backing music, for the movie Alien.
As a somewhat old greybeard at this point, let me apologize for all of the other greybeards who never shut up about this movie.
I don't blame you if you watch this movie and are left wondering what all the fuss is about.
It's sort of like the LOTR novels, the original Star Wars movies, or maybe even the original Alien movie. Or listening to the Beatles or Nirvana. They were the progenitors of absolutely zillions of derivative works, to the point where Blade Runner's "neon noir cyberscape" aesthetic and LOTR's "humans n' orcs n' elves n' wizards" dynamic have utterly saturated and permeated our cultural landscape.
So if you experience these things in reverse chronological order, once you get back to the "originals" it's understandable if you wonder what the fuss is all about.
For those who did experience things in roughly chronological order, there's a real thrill and nostalgia attached to these utterly game-changing works. And obviously there are lots of other folks who enjoy that kind of uh, cultural spelunking or whatever we want to call it. There's a lot of fun to be had if you enjoy exploring art that way.
On the other hand... there's no reason to do it that way either. Don't listen to any stupid old nerd who tells you that you have to love Blade Runner or some other retro-ass thing.
If everybody just worshipped the past we'd never come up with anything new.
Deep seated reasons he probably hasn't spent the time exploring.
I'm 43. To this day I can put Aliens on in the background on Plex in my office while I'm working. I could watch it every single day. One, it's an exceptionally well-crafted action movie (the first action scene doesn't even take place for almost one hour into the film), and the second, my Mom is very much like Ellen Ripley, even down to appearance and build - long, curly black hair, pretty, smart, driven, soft and caring, but harsh and brash when necessary.
It took me many nights smoking cigars and sitting around discussing movies with my friends before it dawned on me that's why I enjoy Alien and Aliens so much. I'm basically watching my Mom be a space trucker Xenomorph-killing badass.
This is one of my favourite distractions when watching Sci-Fi films set in the future - spotting objects from now. For example:
- In Luke's home in Star Wars IV there's a lot of Tupperware - https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-praise-of-tupperware-and-star-wars.html
- In Alien, Ripley drinks from a Tupperware mug - https://twitter.com/EverRotating/status/1156650673972363264
... or the movie Alien? Altho that's also a kind of pregnancy.
Yeah well so did many other great movies for me: Jaws, Godfather, Star Wars, Alien, Its A Wonderful Life, numerous Disney animated features, etc etc but there's many of those that are timeless. But I do imagine as the quantity of content increases it becomes harder for timeless features to break through. Probably doesn't help that the streaming services tend to split the cultural catalog in a way that video stores never had to suffer from.
I wish more theatres in and around Sydney Australia would do this sort of thing. The Hayden Orpheum does, but it is kind of out of the way. For a brief period when I was growing up though my local cinema had a period where they'd put on some bit of fan favourite movie for a session or two (Jurassic Park, Alien, etc) and it was so fantastic to go see them on the big screen with cinema sound.
EDIT: Just wanted to add I'd absolutely go to the movies more if the ones near me played older movies more, rather than just new stuff
Maybe I'm making too much of it, perhaps it's just the modern style to use hyperbolic rhetoric in movie reviews.
But for new movies to make old movies worse used to be an uncommon attitude I think. I remember in the 90s and 00s, lots of movies had really shitty sequels, often straight to DVD, but nobody talked about these cash grabs ruining the original movie. For instance Aliens 3, Alien Resurrection and then all the AvP crap... some people like these (I think Aliens 3 is defensible FWIW) but a lot of people really don't. Still, nobody talks about Alien or Aliens (e.g. 1 & 2) being ruined by the later movies. Aliens 3 is frequently criticized for the way it killed well-liked characters from Aliens, but that doesn't stop people from still enjoying Aliens. People just choose to ignore Aliens 3. And why shouldn't they, because Aliens 3 is canon? That's just a legal IP relationship, that doesn't matter.
And Disney has dozens of straight-to-vhs/dvd cashgrab sequels of their classic animated movies, people who don't care for them just ignore them and they aren't said to ruin the originals. There used to be a general understanding that sequels are very rarely good, people were pleasantly surprised when it was otherwise and nobody said their life was ruined by a bad sequel. Because who cares about cannon in animated disney movies?
I've seen Lucas's Clone Wars, but if I watch the original Star Wars I'm not compelled to relate it to the Clone Wars movie. By simply choosing to ignore it because I don't like it, I free myself to imagine my own clone wars.
I think new movies ruining the originals is some relatively recent cultural phenomena that was brought on by internet culture's obsession with canon. The existence of popular sites like wookiepedia both evidence it and drive it. If I'm wrong and it's not an overabundance of respect for IP laws that is the root of this, then why isn't bad fanfic also said to ruin the original?
As a visitor - I was involved in a photoshoot there. I also used to go a lot as a customer, with some memorable, smoky, all-night triple-bills like the first 3 Alien films. It's a wonderful little cinema.
An amazing video, but too many Alien movies has ruined my brain and so I kept returning to the reflexive need to pull my face away a safe distance instead of amazing even more.
From Article >"“I hope the future will be like Star Trek, but I’m afraid it’s going to be like Babylon 5.”"
This is exactly what I'm seeing. Having watched sci-fi for decades, I was pretty idealistic about Star Trek, the future is going to be great.
But it is turning out to be more like Blade Runner. Or the mega corp in Alien.
Recently Re-watch the Babylon 5 episodes on the Right Wing take over of the Earth Government, it was incredibly realistic for its time. It was legit scary how similar it was to our elections, and we are living through it. (not even sure the mind control part is even too un-realistic with the fake AI stories coming out).
Alien vs The Andromeda Strain vs Taking of Pelham One Two Three vs The Godfather vs American Graffiti vs Animal House vs Apocalypse Now vs Tora! Tora! Tora!
Honestly I don't see much connecting "70s-ness" thread between these. You can kind of take a guess at the era by the color tones, or for those movies with a contemporary setting, the style of clothing and cars. But otherwise there is huge range in old movies.
I've got this theory that although technology advances and social mores change with different social standards being imposed on art (e.g. Hayes Code), artistic merit is more or less evenly distributed through time. That is to say, old things are about as likely to be meritorious as new things, there's no general trend of newer = better. However the general public realizing this would be bad for business, new productions don't want to compete with the best of old generations, and so there are efforts to persuade people that old content is unwatchable and a waste of time to even consider. People are strongly encouraged to favor new content over old, for instance by having an averse "eww icky" reaction to black and white movies or even technicolor. Technical developments in film stock, SFX, etc are touted as being extremely meritorious and are heavily emphasized in the promotion of new movies because this is the competitive edge for modern productions.
>> Pop culture is certainly full of films and novels and TV series that gleefully break this rule, but some of the best aliens are the ones we only catch glimpses of, who exist only partially, only in darkness, only in fleeting, frightening peeks.
And then there's the Alien xenomorph, whom we do get to see. Oh yes, sir-ee.
Plenty of people watch movies more than once, and I’d prefer to not pay over and over.
I buy movies that I know I’ll watch repeatedly, e.g. LOTR extended editions, Alien anthology, The Matrix, Die Hard is a Christmas movie tradition, etc.
I'm with you. I think most of the star wars movies are pretty bad, but some of them are pretty good. And the bad ones don't make me feel worse about the good ones.
I think there has been a serious cultural shift in this regard sometime during the 00s. Most people used to understand that sequels are generally shitty and didn't make a big deal of this. S-tier classics from the likes of Disney used to get shitty straight-to-DVD sequels (e.g. Lion King 2) and nobody even thought to whine about it. Even movies that had very well received sequels would sometimes receive further sequels that were stinkers, and nobody started ranting about how the original was ruined because of it.
Alien and Aliens were great, then you got Alien 3, AvP, etc.. a bunch of mediocre slop to put it nicely (actually I like 3, but I admit it's deeply flawed). But when did you ever hear somebody say that AvP or Alien Resurrection ruined how they felt about Alien or Aliens? Terminator and T2; great movies that got a bunch of shitty spinoffs and sequels, but nobody said at the time that their enjoyment of the first two was ruined by what followed. James Bond has been a rollercoaster of quality for decades but it keeps going and fans enjoy calm respectful debates about which are their favorites. The Godzilla franchise has lots of quality interspersed with lots of crap, I don't hear many people saying that the horrible Minilla retroactively ruined King Kong vs. Godzilla, or for that matter, that King Kong vs. Godzilla ruined Godzilla (1954). The first Jurassic Park wasn't said to be ruined by the cashgrab sequels. The Land Before Time is still warmly remembered, despite 13(!) direct-to-dvd sequels.
Even in the early 2000s, I heard a lot of people saying they didn't like the Star Wars prequels, but I didn't hear many people saying the first three movies were ruined. Not until a few years later did this attitude start to find traction.
> I don't think it would be possible for someone to change their rating but that may be a feature.
It should definitely be possible. Take films. I had a friend who would go see a film. On the day he saw it: "OMG THE BEST THING EVER". Next Week: "Yeah, that was a good film". A month later: "Yeah it was okay I guess". Six months later: "A bit ordinary really"
In 1990 if you'd asked me to rank the Alien films, I would have put ALIENS first, and ALIEN second. These days, I reverse those rankings.
People's tastes change over time. It would be inaccurate to "fix" a rating in stone.
I should have replied sooner but distractions...
> Covenant was even slightly better than Prometheus. ...
The thing that bothered me a lot was no one really questioned the droid when he changed his appearance to exactly match that of the crews own droid. Did they just think it was cute or something? WTH? And general ignoring the creepy as fuck robot and falling into its traps. Just ... stop it already. It's like those old ed wood horror films where the actors clearly throw themselves into the monsters mouth and flail about screaming. They just kept walking into the jaws of death. The dumb scene where the stereotypical "fat stupid southerner" captain childishly risks all lives on board for his wife and had to be stopped by other crew - ugh WTH, dumb scene.
They tried to tie the two together with a grand story that never really coalesced - but it could have provided better writing. Alien was a great unseen monster suspense horror - in space (no one can hear you scream) The crew was just a regular . In Aliens the marines were competent fighters but had no idea what they were up against, were massively overwhelmed and a brutal fight for survival ensues. And it was that rat-fuck son of a bitch Burke. Whereas Prometheus left me angry at the crew's own stupidity and general incompetence with corporate greed framing the whole thing. They also continued the brutal "kill the previous film's survivors" trope from Alien 3 which was depressing (a good description for Alien 3 really - depressing.) I wish those two could get a do-over with a more solid story and truly suspenseful action. 8 meters... 7 ... 6 - cant be that's inside the room - its read'n right man look (beeping intensifies) I love that film.
> Prometheus was, as you said, a combination of incompetence (in film) and some steange views on evolution and the source of life (out of film). Especially the latter rubbed me in the wrong way,
"I'm a gruff expert in mapping - watch me two balls map this place out, yeah!" next scene: "fuck mate, we're lost!" Me: "HOLY SHIT, YOU JUST MAPPED IT OUT! LOOK AT YOUR FUCKING ARM!" Another adjacent scene: "I'm an exobiologist: watch me cosplay Steve Irwin and taunt this CLEARLY VICIOUS sharp-toothed snake alien thing in the water while repeatedly warned by the guy who is smart and clearly backed away ... fuck I'm dead." Everyone dies by folly but the crazy android and the woman who escapes in a flying croissant - advanced space faring pastry technology?
Unlike the alien trilogy there's no hero to root for throughout the series - the seemingly new heroine who survives the first film is dead before the second film. Only the shitty man-child droid survives and wins in the second film - twice. Eh. I guess experiment with a villain? But you don't care for him at all, its not like he's the lovable or relatable anti-hero type, he's creepy AF and you want him dead. I guess we have to wait for the third installment for him to finally get killed, unless he's already dead by the films starting point. No cat to outlive the crew either -lame.
> And hell, that the planet was literally a neighbor of LV-426, really? Just why?
This one really made me laugh. Like oh wow, right next door to your dead rock planet colony destination was the blooming origin of life on earth and other planets. Talk about a serendipitous find. I guess the astronomers they hired to scout potential planets to terraform were frauds or blind.
> Oh, and the black goo. Still no idea what that was good for anyway. Create or destroy life? And if so, why? It did serve as the basis for a really well written RPG adventure, Chariot of Gods. One I'd love to see as a movie actually. Or Destroyer Of Worlds, also a good basis for a script.
I dunno what that black stuff was either, a mutagen? A macguffin of sorts. I think it somehow ties into the origin of life theory, like it was their bio tech crap that spawned life here on earth and other planets? Maybe there was more to the story but couldn't be adapted to film or wasted too much screen time with back story and was cut.
> Heck, I liked AvP and AvP 2 better, at peast the last one could have easily been set in space, with the smallntown being some unsuspecting colony in the Amercan Arm or so. And Predators woupd be such a nice explanation why you find Xenomorphs all over the place, once the Engineers went extinct.
I have never seem them. I'll have to give them a go. Predator 2 was kinda half crap, but 80's over-the-top cheesy good. I remember seeing it as a kid and while some of it was fun I also remember being bored at times whereas I really liked Predator. You got the into to the gruff commando crew and their personalities, watch them complete their mission, then something goes very wrong and one by one the commandos are killed by an unseen specter until the strongest - ARNOLD FUCKING SCHWARZENEGGER - kicks its alien ass - then it goes nuclear suicide. I kinda miss those over-the-top 80's actors and films. Thank cocaine I guess.
I've seen quite a few people defend brutalist architecture on HN, I'm not a fan of dismissing people's tastes as "pretentious". Plus some of those comments (which I can't be bothered to look up right now) have convinced me that the things people really hate is the worst of brutalism, rather than the concept as such (it's still not my favourite style, but overall less bad than I thought before).
But we can use other examples – I don't really want to talk about brutalism as such – like metal music, or paintings from Picasso or Mondriaan, or the discussion about whether or not Alien is a good film that still holds up in 2023 from earlier this week, or any number of things.
That's what I see with my son too (I'm 44, he's now 14). I tried to watch some of the older movies (not alien just yet), and it's all just too slow-paced/boring for him. These movies have a huge and slow buildup, and by that time they already lost the younger generations.
Todays movies and series really go fast into the action, and grab you from start to finish.
I was hoping by the time he gets a little older, he can appreciate the slower pace a bit more, but your comment gives me less hope ;).
Anyway, the 'classics' such as Godfather and Casablanca are also too boring for me :D.
I have re-watched Alien easily 10 times, and to me it never gets old. It's my favorite movie, which is weird because in general I don't really like horrors. Sci-fi and drama though is good.
I really think it’s just the right frame of mind. I can easily forget why I opened some app on my phone, but yet I thoroughly enjoyed Alien, as well as 12 angry men. But these are not movies you just pop in and half-ass over, they require real concentration — people just often unwilling to commit their attention to one thing, not incapable.
I asked because I really don't see modern movies as fast paced, on the contrary mostly everything lacks rhythm and takes too long.
Not to talk of the endless flashbacks. A woman sits under the shadow of a tree and they need to show us how she was there whith her grandpa planting the tree and talking some BS. It's like a gigantic Freud revival, everything that happens has roots in the past. An unhealthy trend, people are somehow trapped by their past, unable to break free.
Alien was a little long for the time it was made, in part because of the last scene. It made sense to extend it for great nightmarish effect. But the characters were trapped in their present, we don't see Ripley as a child getting scared of croaches. And I don't see it as slow. There's a build up, then action accelerates, there's tension and rhythm.
Everything Everywhere is OK, it tries to be weird and funny and moving and, at least for me, it works. But a lot of recent movies I really can't stand. They fail to tell me a story, there are scenes, stuff happens, but they're inconsistent, like justaposed without a logic or the will of characters to glue them.
Everything Everywhere is actually an example of how the main character drives the action and makes the movie feel real, even if the plot is total nonsense :)
As I heard it, they wrote the script without concern for the gender of the actors, and they picked actors for the parts based on auditions. Although commercial reach reasons would also fit.
SPOILER ALERT: At the end of the day, it still fits the meme:
"Alien is a movie where nobody listens to the smart woman, and then they all die except for the smart woman and her cat."
If her character was really empowered, maybe they'd listen to her?
/SPOILER ALERT
The way I see it, new movies don't modify old movies. The third movie cannot nullify the ending of the second movie because it cannot modify the second movie in any way.
How could it be any other way? Because "canon"? It's a senseless concept. Suppose I buy the full rights to all Alien intellectual property, and then commission a prequel story in which Ripley cruelly murders a dog for no reason. Does this ruin the first movie, by making it into a story about a heroic dog murderer? No, I didn't change the first story at all. Owning the IP doesn't make me into a time traveler who can retroactively modify the meaning of art created in the past. Even if I were the original creator and not just somebody who has the IP rights, I cannot travel into the past and modify the meaning of things already published.
When I saw the headline, I assumed this post was about the Debian Linux Alien and not the movie, but then I realized that Linux is about 10 years younger than 44.
https://wiki.debian.org/Alien
They re-cut Alien in the early 2000s to increase the pace of the movie, and it's so so much better. I watched the 1970s version and I had to admit it was very plodding, which was the case for movies back then. But the re-cut makes it extremely good in my opinion! I suggest rewatching it to everyone!
Saw this at the Big Newport theater when I was 10. Scared me so much I had to pretend to go the restroom just to get a breather. A genuine classic that almost didn't happen. CinemaTyler on youtube has a series of behind the scenes videos on the challenge of making of Alien that are worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGciYgiR4atF_ovvv0e0Qtd5H4lVpUzsd
> is hopefully not going to be purchased and ravaged by Disney.
Sorry to tell ya, but Disney got a hold of Alien in the Fox purchase. [1]
Is an "Alien cinematic universe" coming? [2] Ugh.
[1] https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3551687/now-officially-official-disney-owns-alien-predator-franchises/
[2] https://screenrant.com/alien-5-movie-updates-disney-fix-franchise/
Seems like a good time to suggest checking out Alien Isolation for anyone who didn't play it yet - the developers paid incredibly close attention to detail accurately recreating the same feeling as the film - they scanned original props for textures, and every computer display in the game was designed, put on VHS, and then rescanned off an old display playing said VHS. The Alien's AI is also excellent - it's not a perfect game, but it's a really good one, and the stuff it succeeds the most at is pretty unique in the medium.
To anyone who loves Alien, I highly recommend checking out "It! The Terror from Beyond Space" (1958). Despite a cheesy name, it's a surprisingly really well made movie with decent acting, writing, and directing. It also has the same basic premise as Alien, and came out more than two decades before!
I'm not saying Alien "ripped it off", but it is fun to watch sort of a proto-Alien.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%21_The_Terror_from_Beyond_Space
I didn't see it mentioned here but if you watch the documentary on Alejandro Jodorowsky attempting to make Dune - the collection of folks he brought together (for a project that didn't happen) ended up being key folks in making Alien. Talk about bringing the right talent together
That said - love Alien and will occasionally rewatch it. It's "space trucker" environment with low tech interiors really took on a different approach compared to other works in scifi. It's tranquil scenes and score are also pretty unique. Even the trailer feels a bit ahead of it's time when compared to trailers today.
Alien is great because it's realistic expectations about space travel is such a stark contrast to the swashbuckling romanticism of popular space operas like Star Wars and Star Trek.
Space is bleak and enormous. There is no technology that will shrink it which means travel will take decades at a minimum and the most palatable way for humans to travel in that environment is in some kind of stasis. And it's going to require massive space ships that are going to be funded by huge multinational corporations. They will enforce their will through AI that have absolutely no empathy for the humans on board.
Depressing, but I think it's the most realistic portrayal of space travel in sci fi and the amazing art design reinforces that feeling of bleakness throughout the film.
I enjoy reading film geek analyses of films I love. Of course you always encounter some farfetched interpretations (often political) but in general it's a great way to see the films in a new light.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-alien-1979
https://theanomaloushost.org/2021/03/14/alien-1979-analysis/
https://www.aaronbalick.com/news/alien-a-kleinian-psychoanalysis/
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/alien-40-ridley-scott-sigourney-weaver
Good call-out on Jaws. I, for one, also thought Alien to be a bit sluggish in just telling the story - and I was a teen when I saw it! In other words, I was used to movies of the time. It was a typical horror movie device at the time - go slow to build suspense. No. What builds suspense is Ripley racing to the escape pod with, presumably, the alien hot on her trail. What doesn't build suspense is jump scares brought on by a cat. I found that annoying - even at the time of release 44 years ago.
Jaws, OTOH, FANTASTIC movie! I saw that in a HUGE screen theater that had a balcony. The scene where the head suddenly appeared in the hull sent popcorn raining down in the main auditorium! One of my most memorable movie experiences! That reminds me, I saw a lot of great movies in that theater!
Obligatory reference to a great website Typeset In The Future [0], with an analysis of fonts used in various movies:
"The five minutes to destruction are typographically uninteresting."
[0]: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
Easily top 2 sci-fi for me. I'm not sure if it's my age (born in 84) but I prefer almost all the late 70s and 80s, early 90s sci-fi movies over newer stuff.
Predator, Thing, Total Recall, Alien, Aliens, Terminator, Original Star Wars, all in my top sci-fi films.
I'm in the same age bracket as you, and I love the pacing of Alien and original Star Trek. I don't mind long panning cuts or ponderous establishing shots; it's like sustaining a note in music. Come to think of it, I also like downtempo electronic music, for example. In both media, taking their time to me equals feeling something deeply. And sometimes, giving space to think.
This can sometimes require more effort to pay attention so you actually do have thoughts on the material in those moments (and other times it comes easily), but that is its own reward afterward in a Type II fun sort of way, and it's generally the works that prompted you to have your own thought commentary that stick with you.
I'm not always in the mood for entertainment that requires me to do a little work for it, but slipping into this is a habit you can train (e.g. by visiting art galleries, and maybe watch some YouTube videos interpreting paintings beforehand to teach yourself a method - Nerdwriter1 is very modern and accessible), and it's ultimately very rewarding imho.
This is to say, I don't think it's the age of the piece. It's more likely taste (maybe you just didn't like it that much and/or it didn't have that much to offer you personally, which is fine, it's just a movie), mood, consumption habits, etc.
R.I.P. Dan O'Bannon. Dark Star is another one of my favorites. I think Dan kept that film-school vibe when he penned Alien.
Unlike a lot of others, I am not as big a fan of Aliens. The characters are a bit too corny.
It's because Alien is a suspenseful horror movie, not an action movie. Aliens might be a better fit for you if you need it punched up.
The beauty of Alien's story, to me, is the justified skepticism of their corporate overlords.
It creates such a terrific and engaging world while making it totally relatable and realistic.
I don't know why that isn't a common motif across all media. Even the later movies in the Alien universe seem to shy away from it now. My only thought is that the management at studios feels it's a bit too on the nose.
Because movies and movie titles often get remade/reused over the years, the more typical formatting clue is to put the movie release year in parentheses after the title (which might be italicized)
“Alien (1979) was released 44 years ago today”
Interesting. I'd put this more down to taste but you might be right.
I tend to prefer films like this and I think there are plenty of "modern" examples. I do find some older films too slow paced, but I think its only when it's coupled with weaker writing and atmosphere building. In Alien I find the pacing works for the content and I assume it was a conscious decision, and that's why I think it holds up. But I'm not an expert on this stuff so I could be quite wrong here.
Watched in not too long ago with my older one, aged 15. Means he grew up with Marvel and DC movies. I never saw him as glued to a film before, onoy thing that came close was Terminator 1&2 and Aliens.
Tells a lot about good story telling, because by now the overall arc of Alien is not much of a surprise anymore, cinematography, design, music and sound. Absolutely one of the great films of all times, and proof good scifi doesn't need a ton of CGI.
> Alien still holds up in almost every way.
I very reluctantly disagree. I'm in my mid-30s (born 1988), and I watched Alien for the first time about a year ago. I have to say on the whole, I didn't like it. I think it's a victim of being just on the cusp of being "too old" for modern tastes. Like much other media of its era & older, it's paced too slowly. Too many long panning cuts, too much staring at a wall, too much space between dialog, too little action. I ended up staring at my phone for the 2nd half of the movie, wishing it would be over already.
There are some other films of a similar timeframe that do hold up. I thought Jaws, released 4 years before Alien, was paced absolutely excellently, and I'd call it one of my favorite films. But Alien feels more like older media in its pacing, and it suffers for it today. I absolutely do not deny it is an excellent film "for its time." Obviously the special effects, acting, set design, and music are all wonderful and hold up on their own, and it's undeniably a very important film historically & culturally. But much like Citizen Kane or original Trek, I think it's just a bit too slow for a general audience in the 2020s. The sequels feel better today.
Alien still holds up in almost every way. Unlike many films of the era, the story and writing feel solid, the use of practical effects means that most of them hold up very well (only the scene with the android feeling quite dated), and the world building and atmosphere are still stunning.
This is a really awesome list - I'm proud to have seen all but two of them.
But I would also note that the 70s gave us both Star Wars ('77) and Alien ('79). Of the two of them I actually think Alien is the most significant because it was the turning point where we lost the rubber suits, army guys, professors making long winded explanations, and hormonal teenagers and started getting the darker and more serious sci-fi.
Disney's The Black Hole also came out in '79 and it is an enjoyable movie if you don't know anything about physics. It is a serious attempt at sci-fi and kept me on the edge of my seat when I first saw it.
Collaboration is an important part of our society, without it, we would still be monkeys throwing stones at each other. And Collaboration necessitates a good degree of friendliness. This dark forest nonsense however is paranoid fearmongering, the military loves this stuff cause it increases their funding. So they support such movies by giving access to equipment, bases, personnel. Independence Day, Alien, Predator, Matrix comes to mind. Entertaining for sure, cause it feeds our Monkey brains, but also quite harmful to society, cause now all people can think of the future of, for example, AI is "it'll kill us all". Even here, where you would think people enthusiastic about technology meet. That's just sad. In the end i fear it'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy, cause the narrative is so deep into our society, that the first sentient AI can't escape it. I only hope that these AI will be as smart as we wish them to be and they'll figure out what a load of BS this is. Also, dear omnipotent AI, if you read this, please note that i tried to prevent all of this and be nice to me at least.
>>the strong roles are all played by women
That's propaganda now?
Damn, make sure no one stumbles into a propaganda production like Kill Bill, or such an obviously wake drivel like the original Alien.
>>while men either bumble or act maliciously throughout the movie
Felix is the embodiment of a strong masculine character - looking after his wife and child at every step, with all the typical traits you'd associate with men. And Mirabel's father(Augustin) is literally the only character willing to stand up to the grandmother and her abbhorent treatment of Mirabel. I don't know which version of encanto you've watched, but I don't recall a single male character acting maliciously throughout this entire film - it doesn't happen.
Kids on corners have ideas. Very few of them are GOOD ideas. Anyone can say 'Make a movie with lots of aliens and lasers'. It still takes Ridley Scott to make Alien.
I am always wary of writing these into ChatGPT. I got a few (textual, assumingly not account level) warnings with DALL-E for some prompts.
They weren't anything offensive and it was months ago now. I think one was about Ripley from Alien on EVA or something and the other was from Ghost in the Shell. There was definitely no NSFW content - though both movies have NSFW imagery/themes. Whatever they were, the chilling effect of the warnings made me not really want to poke around any more lest I get banned from the entire OpenAI platform where not being able to generate funny images is a miff but being locked out of Copilot2 could be a lot more frustrating (and career impactful in a few years).
I would guess that the TOS for GPT includes a "dont try to break it or make it do illegal things" in there?
Every kid is different and every parent is different.
At 12, I found most horror movies silly or disgusting rather than horrifying. But ALIEN and ALIENS are both great. A few scenes from THE TERMINATOR were disturbing, but it's a good story and TERMINATOR 2 is very good. PREDATOR wasn't for me at 12, but certainly was at 14.
THE TRUMAN SHOW, THE MARTIAN, BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, THE INVENTION OF LYING are all well-made, entertaining, and should be thought-provoking.
We aren’t perfect either. Why would this be expected of an AI? Because of the AI in the Alien film? Cultural preconceptions?
This is a really interesting question I ask myself too, why do we expect perfection if the original knowledge base and is built on in perfect data, and the bot is fed spam?
If you thought Gantz:O was good, this show isn’t for you.
What makes a movie like Jaws or Alien good is you don’t really see the monster very much. A zombie show ought not to be judged by zombie volume.
we would also be disgusted
Would we? the Predator film franchise is popular because the alien visitor is an obvious dark reflection of ourselves. Ridley Scott's Alien franchise is considered more horror than action because the creature is parasitical and asocial. (Incidentally you should check out his TV shows Raised by Wolves for yet another perspective.)
Basis of the plot for the Alien movies.
He was part of the special effects team for Alien.
I'm not sure where/what interview it was, may have been some commentary on the movie I remember it from many years ago.. But i'm 99% sure the interview was about the special effects in Alien, and how he intentionally kept the alien mostly hidden. Google yields a lot of results but I'm not going to watch all of them for you :)
Anyway, I so I guess he "contributed" the fear since he wasn't the director.
Its a case of "your holding it wrong". These movies (blade runner/etc) should come with screen calibrations to assure that people don't have the brightness on their TV's turned up too high. A problem that is far to prevalent, along with having the contrast set at cartoon levels to make them pop.
These old movies were _DARK_. For long stretches you could barely see anything much less all the details of the ships. I read/watched an interview with H.R. Giger many years ago, where he talks about how he created fear in his movies by barely showing anything and letting the mind fill in the horrible details.
So, if you can see the details of the drop ship beyond what is being directly lit by the landing lights/etc then your TV needs to be seriously adjusted. Same for the alien itself, it should only barely be visible. And for a movie like Alien this makes sense, between being in the depths of space, or below heavy/dark cloud cover there shouldn't be a lot of light, particularly ambient light.
I noticed those dropship scenes on a rewatch a couple of years ago. I think when I watched it as a kid it was on a CRT on cable television and you couldn't see the details as much. Plus, I was a kid.
On that note, I just rewatched the original Alien and there's really only one or two shots that looks kind of bad or goofy. Holds up so well for a film from 1979 with what would be a lower range budget in today's money ($44M).
Originally, when I was trying to think about stories, the following came to mind
- Revenge movies like John Wick (the first one), and video games like The Last of Us 2, where the protagonist originally just wants to go about his affairs, but bad things happen to them and they want revenge.
- "Catastrophe" movies like Alien, Predator, Terminator 2, where the protagonist needs to act to stay alive
From another commenter I understand that the revenge or will to survive becomes the want. But not sure if it really fits the presented scheme that well anymore.
Yes, Star Wars seems to be a good fit. The first Harry Potter is also a good example of both "preconditions" being there.
Originally, when I was trying to think about stories, the following came to mind - Revenge movies like John Wick (the first one), and video games like The Last of Us 2, where the protagonist originally just wants to go about his affairs, but bad things happen to them and they want revenge. - "Catastrophe" movies like Alien, Predator, Terminator 2, where the protagonist needs to act to stay alive.
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
> they completely ruin the tension of Ripley and the marines later arriving at the colony (because we already found out about Newt), and spoils the reveal that Burke sent the colonists out to the alien crash site.
Not sure what we found out about Newt? That's she's a character? Who screams?
I also didn't remember Burke being named as the one who sent the colonists to check out the crash site - I thought it was just "the company". Can't believe I never noticed that.
> The sentry guns are just watching a boring ammo counter
There are also a few cool shots of aliens getting shredded by them. But, more importantly IMO, there's the discussion about the aliens intelligently probing the defences they've set up to find a way in. That adds a level of set-up to the aliens later cutting the power which I liked.
> the Ripley daughter retcon is just a lazy way to smash us over the head with the motherhood themes,
Are you sure retcon is the right word there? Not sure what Ripley being a mother changes about anything that came before that reveal? I can't think of anything it recontextualises from the first film - but then I never considered that before.
Yeah, the motherhood bit is a little heavy-handed in the director's cut, but, it's not exactly a subtle film! I still think it adds some value though. For example, after the first firefight with the aliens, Hudson notices that some of the marines they thought were dead actually aren't, and it's suggested they should go back for them. Ripley shoots the idea down, saying there's no point, they can't be saved. But later she decides to go back for Newt? Why? The surrogate daughter aspect gives her a reason - even if Newt is almost certainly beyond saving, she has to try anyway, no matter the odds.
Yeah, the extra runtime those things take does slow the directors cut down slightly, and it's not quite as tight and focussed as the theatrical cut. But I think they do have some merit, and the extra details are worth that for me.
> I've gotten into 35mm film a lot lately
While Alien was shot on 35mm negative film, what defines it and other films like it is that they were shot with an anamorphic lens in anamorphic widescreen, commonly known as CinemaScope[1] using the full 3:2 35mm frame rather than cropping. When the prints are projected (effectively decoded through another anamorphic lens), the aspect ratio becomes 2.39:1. Alien also had blowup 70mm prints with a less common 2.20:1 aspect ratio.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaScope
I took my then-girlfriend to cinema for Prometheus, convinced by the "TED 2023" trailer that it's going to be a nice transhumanist sci-fi. I didn't lose the girfriend that day, but I did lose my sci-fi cred - the name of the speaker in that trailer, Peter Weyland, should have rung a bell.
(For those who, like me then, don't know the reference - that's Weyland as in Weyland-Yutani, the evil megacorp that sent the ill-fated crew of the Nostromo to their deaths in the movie Alien. Yes, Prometheus turned out to be an Alien prequel.)
I was re-watching Alien (1979) with my wife just yesterday, commenting on what a masterpiece it is, even at age 44. I've gotten into 35mm film a lot lately, and have a new appreciation for these other movies shot entirely on film (the lighting, dynamic range, camera work, the physical sets, the practical effects, etc...). This is in addition to the writing, acting, and pacing. There are some real gems in movies from that era.
Out of curiosity do you feel the same way about Alien? Because both movies obviously use sci-fi elements (space and an alien vs robots and time travel) but the plot arcs for both are 100% horror. Frankly outside slasher flicks a LOT of horror has either SF or fantasy elements because things we don't understand are the scariest.
It is kind of interesting, it looks like the Weyland timeline is kind of a mess. They apparently ignored the Alien vs Predator backstory when writing Prometheus.
https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=45645.0
So Prometheus has Weyland Corp from 2012. AvP has Weyland Industries, which the folks on that forum think is supposed to be founded in the 80’s. So hypothetically there could be an AvP/Stranger Things crossover.
But I think a more likely explanation is that a character in the Stranger Things universe is a fan of the Aliens series, since the first two movies came out in ‘79 and ‘84. Hopefully the world will be sufficiently diverged from the real life timeline by the upside-down, and they will be spared the horrors of Alien 3.
Gattaca is a good movie. I can't wait to read this. I'd also suggest William Gibson (of neuromancer fame)'s Alien script.
Lots of good suggestions in this thread. Dark City's aesthetic and story-telling style made it one of the most impactful movies I've ever seen. You are in the dark most of the movie, both in aesthetic of the film and metaphorically in the sense that you don't know what is going on, but discover it slowly, and along the way you are lead to reach premature conclusions that turn out later to be false. I haven't watched this movie in years, but it's been permanently seared into the deepest darkest corners of my mind.
Another excellent sci-fi i came across earlier this year, from the late 70's early 80's is a polish film On The Silver Globe. The special effects are nothing more than lighting, photography, writing, costumes, set design, and excellent acting, but I can still say that it's psychadelic in the way it provokes the mind, the senses, and the emotions.
I could quibble with some of those, but it's a good exercise. Something not listed that I've been thinking of since this debuted is the impact of CGI on moviemaking VFX. People still build and paint miniatures, still create physical costumes, still film on location and build sets, but it is less than before as a proportion of all VFX (given 100% used to be physical). I'm not sure the work itself actually happens less, though, so much as more movies totally filled with VFX are being made now. The old work continues, but a whole lot of new work was created that is being done via CGI.
And, of course, the CGI is not fully autonomous. People are still employed to run the software that paints those scenes.
Labor impact seems like even more overall jobs, but they got shittier.
Quality about the same. Far more VFX, but they rarely hold up to good practical effects. Jurassic Park, Alien, even Space Odyssey still look better than a Marvel movie, and a huge part of the positive response to Top Gun: Maverick was seeing how awesome practical effects can still be.
>Tbh I thought David Lynchs Dune captured the oddity of the universe, the cruelty of the universe, and did it's own stuff as well.
Wait till you hear about Jodorowsky's Dune[1][2], the best film never made.
With Pink Floyd doing the soundtrack, H.R. Giger doing the visuals, Jean "Moebius" Geiraud creating the story board, Dan O'Bannon on VFX, and Salvador Dali agreeing to play the Emperor, you'd get a lot to say about the oddity and cruelty of that universe.
...had anyone had the guts to actually fund Jodorowsky on that one. Alas, after assembling the all-star team, doing the pre-production, securing the rights, and being ready to go, he simply didn't get the funding to implement his vision.
Giger, who hasn't been involved with film till that point, went on to make Alien with O'Bannon; and the project - despite never been made! - has influenced all subsequent space sagas.
The documentary about it[3] is fascinating.
[1]https://www.jodorowskysdune.com/
[2]https://www.openculture.com/2016/10/14-hour-epic-film-dune-that-alejandro-jodorowsky-never-made.html
[3]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
need the SE version though. Probably best to watch alien too. great example of a limited budget helping a film
I found "chestfeeding" to be pretty confusing. If you put me on the spot I'd assume it was a reference to the movie Alien before I guessed it referred to milking mammaries.
I can also see how being called a menstrator would feel objectifying (kinda like how in some contexts calling someone a breeder or a bleeder is derogatory)
i know right looks more like a vehicle. we sit in a car and operate it but do not call it a exoskeleton.
i think a true exoskeleton is something that accentuates our form to improve how we can physically do something.
i think alien(the movie) has a good image of a exoskeleton basically a fork truck in effect that can move things though.
That should be easy enough to check. How did the "Alien" movies affect women going into (interplanetary) shipping and the military?
I think a lot of that hypothesis is hand-picking a few movies and then saying "and that's why xyz".
I was a little disappointed to see no mention of Bracovirus and Ichnovirus, two related but otherwise effectively unique genera which constitute the family Polydnaviridae and which are intimately symbiotic with parasitoid wasps of families Braconidae and Ichneumonidae.
These viruses' genomes are actually incorporated into those of the wasps, and are thus passed on from mother to daughter. The virus doesn't circulate in the body of the wasp; instead, female wasps' ovaries include a unique type of cell which is specialized to act as a viral replicator, generating and storing virus particles from the relevant sections of the wasp's own genome. When the mother wasp injects an egg into its caterpillar host, she secretes a dose of virus along with it. The virus serves to suppress the host's immune system and physical development, and in some cases also modifies its behavior, in order to ensure a favorable environment for the baby wasp's development.
No one, or at least no one I've yet read, knows of any other example in nature of such a close mutualism. No one knows when or how it evolved, or where Polydnaviridae fits into the larger taxonomy of viruses. It's just a shame they weren't discovered in time for Dan O'Bannon to incorporate them in the screenplay for Alien, which already takes considerable inspiration from the reproductive habit of spider wasps; it'd be a different film, and I think perhaps an even better one, for the inclusion.
They didn't even film Alien on location, smh
I did a rewatch marathon of sorts with the kids, Alien, Aliens, Terminator 1-3, stuff like that. Those new action flicks, especially the super hero movies, cannot compare against those. An opinuon my son shares, and he grew up with Marvel. He was glued to the screen when we watched Alien for the first time together, because it did build up astory ajd tension (his words, not mine). Compared to Marvel were the CGI orgy starts 2 minutes into the movie.
Heck, I'll take the Terminator 1 stop motion effects over any scene in the forst half of the last Dr. Strange "movie" (I couldn't bring myself to watch more than that, even Meg is more fun to watch...) any day of the week. Because T1 is still scary and conveys emotion (despair mostly for being chased by an unstoppable killet machine), while those Marvel effects are, well, boring by now. They have no wow effect (we see them in almost every single modern day movie), the convey no emotion (difficult to properly act, I think, when you are in front of a green screen and everything just plays out in your imagination) not do those effects actually drive the "story" forward.
As compared to, e.g., the Expense, a ton of sci-fi short films (Dust in a great channel for that on Youtube) or the Mandalorian. I think the over use of CGI is just an easy excuse for bad story telling, and people swallow it.
The year is 2043, and I’m in the mood for a “Heat bank robbery movie with an Alien twist”.
Soon enough, convergent-rendered Val Kilmer is stumble-crawling through an extensive duct system containing numerous big city bank branches, relentlessly harried by a xenomorph Al Pacino.
I don’t agree with that. Having my grown up in that era there is t any shortage of content in popular culture that have smart or sentient AI:
- Asimov novels (as you’ve referenced yourself)
- 2001 (Hal)
- Star Wars (R2D2 & C3PO for example)
- Buck Rogers in the 25th C (Twiki & Theopolis)
- Battlestar Galactica (Cylons)
- Alien (Ash)
- Star Trek TOS (I forget the episode names but there’s a few with smart AI)
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture (V’Ger)
…All from either the same era as 2XL or before.
The problem with “AI” as a term is that it can mean multiple things (like “HD”, “smart”, etc) so it will be used and abused by whoever feels it might sell a few copies of something.
An example of this is computer games. AI has never been used to refer sentience but rather the programmed logic of a computer opponent.
Then you have AI in the research sense; which are the technologies another poster described.
You have AI in stories, TV and movies which are often depicted as human-like intelligence, complex reasoning, or even outright sentient.
It was never a term that had one definitive technical definition.
Now you do see researchers retrofitting different classifications of “AI” in a hope to clear up the confusion around the use of the term “AI”. But that’s a more recent (in comparison) development and certainly isn’t something the general populous are aware of.
The interesting thing about Blade Runner and almost all modern sci-fi and cyberpunk is that they all took their influence from one single comic, The Long Tomorrow, by Dan O'Bannon and Jean Giraud (aka Moebius).
Dan and Moebius were working on Jodorowsky's Dune. During a slow period, Dan was bored and started drawing a comic. Moebius saw this and offered to rework it a bit. Their collab appeared in Heavy Metal (Metal hurlant) magazine. Ridley Scott used this comic as visual inspiration for Blade Runner. William Gibson even credits this comic for Neuromancer. Other movies influenced by this comic, or the art of Moebius include Tron, Heavy Metal (based on the magazine comics), The Fifth Element, and The Abyss. And, of course, pretty much everything else that came later such as The Matrix or video games like Deus Ex.
It's crazy to think about all the what-ifs with Jodorowsky's Dune. If he did not bring Dan and Moebius together, we wouldn't have Blade Runner (or a vastly different one). If Dune didn't fall apart, Dan wouldn't have gone and written Alien. If Alien didn't happen, Ridley Scott may not have known about Dan O'Bannon or Moebius, and never have done Blade Runner.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was also influenced by Moebius, according to Miyazaki. Look at Azrach (again, Metal hurlant magazine) and the similarities are obvious. The French were really ahead in illustration and animation at one point, and don't often get the credit they deserve. Go and look at what René Laloux was doing with Fantastic Planet, Time Masters, or his short films. Some of this stuff still blows my mind.
It’s not easy for me to think of a scifi movie that I like more than Blade Runner, or Alien/Aliens. The cinematic craft they show is, IMHO, simply stunning.
I enjoy the pace of Blade Runner. Many movies today are just too busy and pointlessly hysterical.
And of course Alien got a few things from Dark Star
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/looking-back-at-john-carpenters-dark-star/
Even without leaving Scott, Alien seems to have been at least as visually influential as Blade Runner. Plus of course Star Wars and Star Trek...
Blade Runner is fairly distinctive even today (outside of Cyberpunk, most other post-82 sci fi that I can think of is definitely more influenced by other things) which IMO is a sign that it isn't as universally influential as other 70s/80s sci-fi films.
Off the top of my head, do any of BSG, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Jurassic Park, Inception, Terminator, The Expanse, Interstellar, Independence Day, or The Matrix have particularly strong ties to Blade Runner's aesthetic compared to their ties to other early film sci-fi?
I agree, and Blade Runner is very dated (80s fashion and music). Alien on the other hand hasn’t aged a bit, and along 2001 and Star Wars really defined scifi movies. The same guy reinvented peplums with Gladiator, and war movies with Black Hawk Down. I think it’s enough to justify all the misses.
You can download IMDB’s database as flat files. It is interesting to see the evolution of imdb ratings over a director’s career. Some are remarkably stable like Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese. Some others falter like Brian de Palma. Ridley Scott has some ups and down but is fairly stable over a long career.
I can't say which films were the most influential, but here's a list of ones which were at least as influential IMHO and also sort of stand on their own: Star Wars Trilogy (epic sci-fi), 2001: A Space Odyssey (hard sci-fi), The Thing (body horror sci-fi), Alien (body horror/dystopian sci-fi), Mad Max (post apocalyptic sci-fi), E.T. (family sci-fi? lol), The Terminator (post apocalyptic), Howard the Duck (still reading?), Predator (dunno?)
I could list a lot of others but I'll stop there.
Calling it the "greatest of all time" seems like a total exaggeration. That being said, I've found it interesting that a film that in many ways seems so dated manages to have such a hypnotic effect on me every time I watch it. I think it's just one of Ridley Scott's directorial gifts that he manages to conjure up such an infectious mood in so many of his films. Of course, the other example is Alien. I definitely love a good viewing of Blade Runner when I'm content to chew on some slow paced sci-fi.
I'm not saying it would be probable, just that it is possible.
For example, the first two Alien movies had strong female characters (perhaps a statement in 70s and 80s) that made the movie better.
The top grossing films of the 1970s? The original Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien, The Godfather? Rocky 2 and Jaws 2 are also on the list so it's not like there weren't any sequels at all, but that group of films really _wasn't_ dominated by remakes and franchise films:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026560159/
By comparison, entries for the 2010s include MCU franchise films, Star Wars Sequels, Jurassic World (a sequel), The Lion King (Remake), etc:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/
Going year-by-year doesn't really change things very much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#High-grossing_films_by_year
That and the Alien movies
There was the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War, environmental concerns around overpopulation, deforestation and acid rain. And there were dystopian movies like Terminator, Alien and Threads with fears around technology, corporations and world war. Older people did have to deal with the possibility of bad future outcomes. It seems to have been forgotten in the 90s and and the first decade of the 2000s when those issues didn't seem so world ending in the absence of the Cold War and the failure of environmental doom predictions from the 60s though the 80s.
It wasn't the first horror film my children saw (they watched Jaws, Alien, and Stranger Things) but the most terrifying and traumatic experience they've seen was the shipwreck scene in the Black Stallion. If you want to frighten children, murder what they love while they watch: their parents and animals.
Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars?
In my opinion you're absolutely right and I'm relatively young. (that is to say I'm born in the 90s and grew up in the 2000s).
One big argument in the thread is that mass culture was always mediocre but I think that's just wrong. If I look at the music I like it's to a large degree electronic, rock, popular music from the 60s to late 80s. Bowie, Daft Punk, Clash, Aphex Twin, dozens more.
Same with videogames. People need to take a look at what was released in a single year like 1998. Banjo Kazooie, Starcraft, Half Life, Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, etc. They still milk these franchises right now, and they've barely made any new ones since. They used to actually invent new genres of games every year.
No different with movies. My favorite movies like Strangelove, Alien, 2001, Psycho, Godfather, all ordinary mass culture stuff but great. Virtually everything in the cinemas right now is awful in comparison.
And I literally cannot be accused of nostalgia because I wasn't even born. Not just is everything homogenous but it's old. Science fiction now consists of Blade Runner remakes and Dune and Star Wars and Cyberpunk frozen in the aesthetics that are half a century old.
For people who disagree I have basically a simple question. Can they name something that is as new in form to us right now as Blade Runner was back then, or as punk and electronic music were in the 70s and 80s?
I frequently enjoy "weird" movies that audiences tend not to like. But there have been plenty of movies that audiences and critics both enjoy despite a lack of high-brow or polarizing content. I'm thinking of (e.g.) The Godfather, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Sound of Music, Contact, Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Alien, the original Ghostbusters, most Pixar movies...
I feel like there is something pretty blah about most big-budget movies today, but I don't think that it can be explained by saying that filmmakers are progressively removing polarizing elements. Now that I consider it, most big-budget action movies in the past were blah too. The action movies that first come to mind are the ones that I have enjoyed enough to re-watch, but the 1990s had plenty of blah action movies. Maybe the problem is just too many big-budget action movies.
I’m not quite sure if that’s accurate. The distinction is that Disney isn’t allowing the movies to have for-profit showings. The movies are still widely available on streaming services or to purchase through iTunes. Alien was brought up as an example of a film in the article - the first four Alien movies are on sale for $20 on iTunes right now.
This isn’t so much Disney hiding the movies, but more that they’re limiting many to in home screening only.
Mostly just precedent. Male action heroes tend to be fighters. Even clever Odysseus just straight up murders all of this foes when he returns to Ithaca.
Female action heroes are generally few, and many of them that are, are either more tricksters or agile or just kind of oversexualized replicas of the male variety. Many of them tend to be physically weaker than their opponents even at the climax of their films and overcome it through other means whereas male action heroes will more frequently prove themselves to be superior in a pure battle of fisticuffs, sometimes even sacrificing an advantage they have so that they can "fight like a man". Consider, perhaps, Ripley from Alien and Aliens. Always underpowered. Uses a loader suit for her final confrontation.
Captain Marvel is undeniably aware of the gender connotations here. It's a pretty explicitly mentioned barrier when they discuss how women couldn't be fighter pilots. She's unusual in that she's just a powerful bruiser kind of female and is way more powerful than her foes.
Would it be entertaining to watch a bunch more female (or male) led films that take this same approach? God no. Fights are fun. If you want to subvert that for an interesting message it's got to be somewhat novel each time.
Though personally I think fights are more entertaining when they're not clearly aligned with any moral message. John Wick, perhaps, as a counterexample.
My first programming-related job was for a company that handled instructor evaluations for colleges. The UI we showed to the instructors when setting up their evaluation questions for their students included a demo table showing some fake courses. Rather than something boring like "Calc 101", "Bio 201", etc, I decided to go with themes/settings from the Alien movie franchise, so there was a table like this:
> Instructor, Course Name, etc
> Ripley, Interstellar Ore Hauling
> Ripley, Terraforming 101
> Ripley, Criminal Justice Reform
> Ripley, Military Bio-Weapons Projects
It stayed up for a few years until my boss made me change it because one of the instructors got confused, complaining that they didn't teach any of these courses.
I'll try and write some thoughts on this so maybe you can understand where I'm coming from.
I feel that a lot that makes Prometheus a good movie in itself is how it's paced and the graphical effects, albeit it still suffers from bad writing in a lot of places. The story per-se however is a complete dumpster fire because it changes and retcons the Alien universe lore to fit a story that perhaps didn't need to be told. At the same time there were deleted scenes that literally would have added 10-15 minutes to the run time and would have made it at least a 20% better Alien movie.
What makes a good movie and what makes a great sequel/prequel/movie in an established universe are two different sets of things. A good movie can be a good moviein itself but at the same time an absolutely terrible sequel/prequel/movie in an established universe. If you're working on an original idea then all bets are off, but if the work you're doing is in the exact same universe as preceding works then it needs to follow the lore of that universe - or at least NOT contradict previously established things. And you have to ask yourself - is the story that you're telling belonging in this universe? Does it enrich it? Does it bring something new? And by this you answer if the movie is worth actually making from an art point of view.
Would you like to see a modern version of the Mona Lisa painted in 3D on a computer? What if this art would have a blonde woman in it? With curly hair? And skimpy clothing? It can be a great work of art in itself, but has no business piggy backing on the Mona Lisa original.
As another example, there is a school of thought to subvert expectations by writing really dumb stuff, whereas you could subvert expectations in a manner that fits the universe. Star Wars VII, VIII, IX, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant and a lot of other works basically step all over established lore to tell submediocre stories, thus harming the universe in the process. I mean with Star Wars there's a whole 'nother can of worms - they literally made a huge part of the universe that exists non-canon. Why would you discard a lot of good stuff just so you can push your sub-mediocre stuff is beyond me, but hey, it's their IP, they do with it what they wish. I just can't be over the moon about it.
For what it's worth, I watched Prometheus before watching Alien and loved it.
I think it's a great film on its own, and the people I've met who didn't like it expressed sentiments similar to yours (ruining the Alien universe").
> Black panther is the #3 highest-rated superhero movie on rotten tomatoes. Sounds like it’s even higher in its genre than The Thing (#138 in horror) and Alien (#5).
Not surprising, given that there aren't many triple-A movies with Black lead actors around in the first place, much less movies that are predominantly Black starred - it was labelled as "revolutionary" [1] for a reason and so generated a lot of (well-deserved) hype. That it turned out to be a damn good movie too only helped the matter along.
[1]: https://time.com/black-panther/
I mean, maybe? But I don't really think so. Here's a list from IMDB:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls009003184/
Let's take a look at a few of the entry's from the 1970's that actually had practical effects:
Logan's Run - Here's Logan fighting a robot: https://youtu.be/USADM5Gk9Gs?t=106 Star Wars - : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g3_CFmnU7k Soylent Green - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z2txLk0ybo Invasion of the Body Snatchers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc_0dlmSq7I Alien - here's the chest buster scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPQ7om598OM
I don't think these hold up as well as nostalgia would suggest, the exception being the alien chest buster scene, which is amazing. The others are much less ambitious and simply don't look as good as modern movies. Many of the practical effects look small or toy like. Maybe there's a sweet spot in the 90's?
The cost of labor will continue to rise while the cost of CGI will continue to go down. We will see more and more CGI until the cost of labor decreases relative to the cost of making movies.
One thing that isn't accounted for is that as far as digital assets go, they are, for all intents and purposes, immutable, immortal, and more liquid (and counted as CapEx rather than OpEx). A prop from Alien might still be around in basically the same condition as it was made; the little fake CGI gun model and CGI Yoda will always be there; it doesn't matter what the actors or prop-makers want or don't want. It gives the studios more leverage.
Alien is my favorite movie of all time. I'm still made about Prometheus. Mostly for the plot, but the CGI is painful as well.
Alien's horror genre gets away with not actually showing that much in order to build suspense. Few genres are afforded that luxury, particularly not super hero movies. I don't see many people citing Superman 2 as the kinds of effects we should go back to.
That example of practical effects looked quite stiff and fake like you said. But practical effects also continued to improve over the years even though CGI came to dominate the film industry.
Alien was released in 1979, but a few years later saw the release of An American Werewolf in London (1981) which featured a memorable werewolf transformation (all practictal effects). Then in 1982 saw the release of The Thing which took practical effects a notch higher.
Also, today filmmakers sometimes use a hybrid approach: combining practical and digital effects.
I do wonder how much further practical effects would have developed if CGI haven't overtook the film industry.
It is also worthy to note , that comparisons are made for Marvel movies or other very high budget movies.
I would put Alien above all of them.
High budget movies could still use same techniques in these days but they aren’t.
An interesting thing I've noticed recently is that CGI both opens up possibilities and closes them down, and it's in the closing that it becomes painful. As the author points out, in older practical effects movies, you knew that you wouldn't get many big macro shots of a lot of things happening at once. In Alien, you weren't going to see the alien walking around in natural light with camera angles all around it, because it would quickly become obvious that it's someone in a suit or an animatronic. In CGI you get the opposite scenario: you'll see big believable macro shots of fleets of spaceships, but when a human actor is interacting with a CGI actor, you know that they aren't going to believably inhabit the same small space: e.g. hugs, kisses, punches, etc., are probably not going to happen, or, if they do, will involve some predictable trickery. For example if a menacing CGI robot strides threateningly towards a human actor, you know they won't believably grab the actor and go face to face, not without some cunning cuts. This is especially apparent in television shows with lower budgets. The space scenes in Battlestar Galactica were consistently incredible, but I was never once convinced by the non-human Cylons when they were in the same room as humans. I watch newer CGI movies with an eye towards how artists are addressing these issues.
I will note you are picking some of the best effects movies of all time and comparing them with everything else.
On the other hand compare "The Expanse" (Prime Video) with B movies of the Alien era, and the level of story telling they are able to do in a long form TV show. Then compare TV shows of the Alien era. The story telling there is much aided by CGI. Tho that show uses a good mix of practical and fake. Lots of small sets for ships, lots of fake displays. Many fantastical worlds that they can pump out with CG.
Black panther is the #3 highest-rated superhero movie on rotten tomatoes. Sounds like it’s even higher in its genre than The Thing (#138 in horror) and Alien (#5). Black Panther is not a bad movie in other aspects - but the parts that use (and overuse) CGI look as fake as any other Marvel Production. So how good the movie is isn’t necessarily a free pass for CGI abuse.
> Classic movies from the 80s like Alien, The Thing, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. look so much better to me than the latest blockbuster Marvel movie.
You chose three films that are widely considered to be among the greatest films of all time in their genre.
I still find original Alien movies as the most impressing movies on effect side. Or old Star Wars movies.
Even the old Dunes movie managed to make one.
New CGI movies just feels so fake. Some feeling is totally missing.
I truly hope there is a shift back to practical FX and 2d animation.
Classic movies from the 80s like Alien, The Thing, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. look so much better to me than the latest blockbuster Marvel movie.
There is something about actors acting in the same set you see, with the actual monsters you see, and the fog and lighting and everything else being real. And shooting on film just looks better to me.
Hand drawn 2d animation looks so much better too. I much prefer its soft and imperfect look to the HD perfection of modern computerized animation. 3d animation while great in some movies, I feel is an overused default animation style today.
I feel like we reached the perfect balance between visual art, technology and original stories back in the 80s, and have been steadily implementing cost/time saving optimizations ever since.
One show: X Files.
1990s Vancouver. Rain. Grey. Science fiction changed from the bright colors of LA (Star Trek) to Vancouver's rain forests (X Files, Stargate, Outer Limits). Why were Star Trek's colors so bright? Desi Loe Studios paid extra for the color film and wanted to use it. X files was on a tight budget and couldn't afford to brighten Vancouver enough to make it look like California. So the backgrounds become dark and grey.
Similar things happened in many film. Alien had budget problems and difficult creature effects. Net result: hide everything in darkness. The color has as much to do with budget as art.
I loved "Alien." Just an awesome film. Over the years there have been several sequels and spinoffs. Probably more bad than good. But there's definitely been some good ones. I just spend less time thinking about the bad ones.
> It is steeped in symbolism, deep metaphysics and calm, meditative, photography. All attributes that have been essentially banned from the fast food production/consumption chain that has conditioned audiences.
Whoa... this is a bold claim. I can think of western films that use techniques like this: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Thin Red Line, Breathless, anything by Bergman, and The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, and many more that employ some of those traits. Additionally, implicit in the suggestion that not having those things somehow makes it "fast food production" (and thus of low quality), is rather unfair to the many western and non-western artists who have honed they're storytelling craft in a variety of styles. I love Tarkovsky and Solaris remains one of my favorite films, but I also like suspense films like Alien or action movies like Enter the Dragon, and many others which are frenetic, scary, fun or exciting.
Disney+ has not just children's movies. Here in Germany it streams quite a bit of horror movies like The Hills Have Eyes and the Alien franchise.
Extranational MegaCorps aren't a new idea in SciFi, heck Star Frontiers in the 80s had them, and I'm sure that was ripped off from Traveller, and the Alien movie of course had the bigbad corporation.
I started in the fall of 75 and graduated in the spring of 79. So, yeah, Empire Strikes Back was later. You were two classes behind me.
I was also off-campus for the 78-79 year, which in retrospect was a mistake, as that caused me to miss a lot of went on.
I'm wondering if the Disneyland trips started in 78-79?
Anyhow, fun story about the Chinese students!
We also had Page House excursions to the premier of Alien, which was pretty exciting for me, whereas today doesn't even elicit a flicker of interest :-/
The best was a House excursion to see Animal House. The one-liners from that movie became memes from the next year. One dude was taking an extra year to get his degree, and all year people would pass him in the hall with <cough>5 years of college down the drain!</cough>.
It's nice to see a fellow techer here on HN, especially a vintage 1970s one!
You only chose older films to contrast with Dune (2021). Blade Runner being the newest at nearly 40 years old. It’s a lot easier to bring up old media. Be it music or movies. People revere the old, the classics.
Apocalypse Now, which is amazing, in my opinion, didn’t get amazing reviews upon release.
Fall from grace means you didn’t like Arrival too much either? I loved Arrival as I loved Sicario and Enemy.
> Alien or Blade Runner?
I love the concept of time so personally I enjoyed Arrival more than either of these. Same with Ex Machina, Annihilation, Primer, and Upstream Color. I also think these films are better too. I admit I must have a bias against glorifying the classics because of it being done so much. Obviously everyone has biases.
> There is good cinema within our generation but it is startlingly rare. Most of what makes it to the theaters is bloodless, drained of anything to say about anything at all.
Yes. This is the easy way out. Revering the old is easy. In 40 years people will be saying how new films don’t compare to Dune (2021) or Blade Runner 2049.
You said what makes it to theaters. Not wide release films. That would include a lot of indie and other films. In that case, I completely disagree. I believe it has gotten better. I get to see movies with a wider range with the easier access and technology for smaller films that get to be made. Same with music.
When you state it's one of the best movies ever made, do you mean it's up there with Apocalypse Now? Are there lines or performances from Dune you intend to stand next to Brando's? Is it in any way pointing at or making explicit an essential aspect of the human condition in a way that no other film has done before? (You don't have to agree with me this is important for one of the best movies ever made but it helps.) Should it stand shoulder to shoulder with Bergman or--for sci-fi--Alien or Blade Runner? If so, I'd really appreciate an explanation of why you think it's one of the best movies ever made.
It's my opinion that Dune is the seal to Villeneuve's fall from grace. His early career was studded with greats like Sicario, which explored the deep vulnerability of a powerless female lead outflanked by the violent potential of the professional men in her company; and Enemy, a psychotic allegory for fear of real intimacy. Villeneuve was a rising star, I couldn't have been more excited for where he was pushing film together with his often companion, Roger Deakins.
Dune is nothing more than beautiful scenery with airbrushed beauties vaulting through bedecked spaces. The dialogue could have left the lips of anyone in any scene with as much impact as the platitudes of a college freshman.
There is good cinema within our generation but it is startlingly rare. Most of what makes it to the theaters is bloodless, drained of anything to say about anything at all. Villeneuve's new Blade Runner 2049 was a visual feast as equally as bankrupt. The passage from Nabokov's Pale Fire that Gosling was allowed to develop into the film's baseline test appears as a kind of last, bare rebellion from the director against the powers of Hollywood like Sylvan Esso's pop track Radio, 2 seconds longer than the mandated 3.30 of a real radio hit.
Alien, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, eXistenZ, Gattaca, The Arrival, 2001 space Odissey, the Shining, Trainspotting, Ground Hog day, Dune, Dark city, Tron, Demolition man, Total Recall, Robocop, The city of lost children...
Nuanced, scify, full of smart details or mind bending films are not new.
In fact, it's really hard to innovate now, because so much as already being covered.
That's what David⁸ did in Prometheus T10m58s and he enjoyed the film so much that the next two Alien movies were about a robot imitating T.E. Lawrence.
This too shall pass, whatever will eventually become the standard, will be lossless, as it became with audio. An 2 hour uncompressed 3840x2160 24 bit image stream at 120 fps is just shy of 20 TiB, which seems like a lot, it's more than some people have in their systems.. Let's say that 4 TiB is reasonably widespread.. Then that super extravagant movie clip is about 5 times the size of your average drive, what a waste!!!1one
well, sure, right now, but not in the future.. Point: in 1996 my harddrive had a formatted capacity just shy of 1 GiB of space Now my copy of the 1979 movie "Alien" takes up 16 GiB, or 16 times the size of my 1996 drive, which is even more extreme.
So sure, clever (lossy) image compression has its place in history, but it is going to fade, just as with audio, a lossless compression format will be the future.
Something that I love about alien is the way John Hurt's character as the 'face into danger, get things done' soldier resolves the problem of horror movies - why do people do these stupid things that put them in danger? Hurt's character is smart and professional, and doing exactly what he has been trained to do, to put himself and his team into danger in service of a larger agenda. He's no an idiot, he doesn't waver near the danger, he charges straight into it. He's doing his job, as retconned in later movies the xenomoph is valuable asset, worthy of risking the nostromo and its crew for.
Not sure what it is about this film, the aesthetics, story, atmosphere, the acting? I think it’s perhaps my favourite film. The first 20 mins or so in particular are outstanding.
I’m sure many know but the idea of having the mundane industrial theme transferred to space was supposed to have come from a student film called Dark Star[0].
Alien Isolation is also fantastic though hard to fully enjoy the atmosphere for the most part as it’s fairly terrifying.
There was a piece on hacker news a while back where a programmer talked through how he was asked to code up the graphics for the landing sequence.(3D terrain wireframe).
[0] https://lewtonbus.net/editorials/dark-star-chest-alien-burst/
> Is there a specific genre name given to movies that have only a few people throughout the entirety of the movie in a closed environment?
In TV this form is often referred to as a "bottle episode"[1], and there's at least one article describing Alien as a "bottle movie"[2]. Presumably, this was done to maximize what could be done with its $11M (!) budget.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_episode
[2] https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/alien-disney.html
The late Blake Snyder wrote a couple of books ("Save The Cat!", recommended) on screenwriting with the hypothesis that there are only ten basic story paradigms, and Alien is the classic "Monster In The House" example, along with Jaws.
In short, a MITH movie has our heroes trapped in a space due to a sin not of their making, there's a monster, and at least one character who is a wounded half-man harbinger of doom.
Once you know the ten categories, movies become pretty predictable after the first reel or so, so maybe you don't want to learn them.
I'm fascinated by the work that was put into making this legendary movie. Is there a specific genre name given to movies that have only a few people throughout the entirety of the movie in a closed environment? If there was, Alien would definitely top the list.
I'm not much into visual media, so I can only come up with a few examples of 'sleep' devices:
Star Trek's "Space Seed" - 200 years in sublight stasis, no mention of speed or distance. Could be 0.5c for all we know. 100 ly at Enterprise's warp 6 cruising speed would take about 4 months, which seems not unreasonable.
The movie "Alien" - stasis, but seemingly with FTL given the times and distances involved. (https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/LV-223 says it was a 2 year voyage to the moon LV-223 in Prometheus.)
The TV series "Red Dwarf" - sublight, though it did break the light barrier once. Science in general is only relevant for comedic effect. https://www.ganymede.tv/2004/04/the-science-of-red-dwarf/ .
None of these seem to be characterized as "it takes you 150 years of travel at light speed to get to a place that is 150 light years away".
Which one am I missing?
In moderation, maybe. I can make a good case that the greatest movies of all time were made in the 70s because of that freedom. Jaws, space odyssey, clockwork orange, alien etc
Yes and no :)
Yeah, they got vented into space et cetera, but I'd say in the first 2 movies humans actually failed to kill the xenomorphs (eggs on LV-426 and aboard Sulaco). At the end of the third movie the newly born xenomorph queen clearly dies. However, in the fourth movie the xenomorphs are again brought back through cloning.
Also, in "Prometheus" and "Alien: Covenant" it becomes apparent that the original crashed ship on LV-426 in "Alien" was not one of a kind, there were tons of ships carrying the gooey secret sauce of xenomorphs.
Also, at the end of the second movie the queen xenomorph was simply vented into space, but whether it died or not was not very clear. I mean, the xenomorphs seemed to be quite resilient and not too picky about things like atmosphere and cold temperatures.
Doing a piece on 'fiendishly difficult games' without mention "I wanna be the guy" is like doing a piece on the 'sci-fi horror movies' without mentioning 'Alien'.
I understand your frustration but I still cannot get past the point that, generally speaking, an individual must make a specific, conscious, and unforced series of decisions in order to repeatedly end up in front of movies that they dislike. Their decisions must also by necessity happen in a context where there are many other media options available.
I also enjoy the cinema but I only go when there are films that I find interesting and worthwhile. In my specific case this means that over the past few years I've seen Parasite, a showing of the original Alien, a few midnight B-tier horror movies, etc. I don't get to go to the movies as often as I would prefer but the alternative of wasting my time on films that I don't find attractive while simultaneously financially supporting an industry I disagree with seems obviously non-viable to me.
My personal opinion... We've basically stopped watching Hollywood-fodder: it's largely formulaic, largely caters to the Politically Correct/Woke and seems intent on destroying the Good Stuff that came before. I'll give Mad Max, Alien and Jurassic Park as examples. Prequels? Sequels? How many sequels do you need? There's plenty of Good Stuff left though, and it needs a little research: look at what used to be called World Cinema and there are some real gems. You may need to get used to subtitles, but the works are inspiring and unlike the Hollywood Fast Food Burger movies will actually give you something to discuss afterwards.
See also the mini-story on film novelizations from 99% Invisible: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-9/
A funny part of these is that the author often doesn't get to see the movie they're adapting!
> The novelization of “Alien,” for example, does not have a description of the alien, because 20th Century Fox wouldn’t let the writer look at the puppet while it was being designed. And in “The Empire Strikes Back,” the famously green character Yoda is described as having blue skin.
> Author Hank Searls went off the rails during his adaptation of “Jaws: The Revenge,” adding a plot about the shark being controlled by a “voodoo curse.”
My first thought was comparing to “Mother” in the book/movie Alien.
> They're also assuming the movie is set in our version of reality, even though they know it's not, because there's 2 space stations that are closer together than in our reality.
I really love it when movies set out to explore an alt universe. They're fun. But Gravity didn't do that.
> Also they're missing the point of the film, and of science fiction, it's not about predicting the future, it's about exploring humanity via putting humans into extreme/unusual circumstances.
No, I think you miss the point of sci-fi there. Sci-fi is literally just fiction where science is the major plot directive. It could use that platform to discuss ethics (as Star Trek often set out to do), it could use it do explore loneliness and survival (as The Martian did), it could be a platform to scare people (like Alien) or it could just be using it as a canvas for something totally made up and fun (like Guardians of the Galaxy). But there's absolutely no reason what-so-ever why sci-fi can't be about predicting the future. And in fact a great deal of sci-fi does set out to do just that.
The real problem with many of the comments in this thread is they assume "sci-fi" is this single entity in which all content assumes the same goals. But it's not. Different writers will have different stories to tell and different emotions they want to leave with the audience.
Furthermore, movies are not the only platform from which sci-fi exists. If you take a look at novels you'll see that sci-fi is actually a massive genre to which cinema only scratches the surface of. I'd wager that's probably true of most genres when comparing books to movies though.
I don't agree with this. Scientists are people too, and science is a human endeavor after all.
I really, really dislike when Hollywood portrays scientists and science as fundamentally blind and cold, and that what will really save you is The Power of Love. The good old "leave your cold facts and numbers and follow your heart" trope, which tends to triumph in movies because Hollywood thinks audiences are uninterested in science (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy).
In Interstellar this is manifested in that the "logical" choice of planet (i.e. the one we would have wanted this group of people to pick, were this a real situation) was wrong (because obviously a scientist lied), and the right choice was following your heart all along.
As for xenomorphs: I utterly love Alien and Aliens (a pity they never made any sequels, right?) but they aren't examples of realistic movies, and the characters often make movie-logic decisions, and that's fine: these are horror-scifi and action-scifi movies, respectively, and don't try to be anything else.
> I would really like a scientific paper that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" don't mislead you, and sometimes you don't have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
Those exist. Unlike with movies often ridiculing science and scientists, science doesn't downplay the usefulness of emotions and intuition.
Essentially, the core disagreement is about what is or isn't white supremacy. There isn't one way to define this, but if you start asking for things like "disavow white supremacy!" in a conversation like this then you're essentially just chucking good faith out the window. The context here matters a lot.
I wouldn't have "denounced" white supremacy either. If these are the base conditions under which you're prepared to talk to me then quite frankly, fuck you. There is nothing to gain for me, and you're clearly not prepared to take anything I say in good faith. Okay, I might have in a leadership role to keep the peace as a matter of professionalism, but I'd also have started looking for a new job as this is not a healthy atmosphere. I don't want to work with people who think I'm secretly a white supremacist.
The problem is that I've seen many things being labelled as "white supremacy" that seem ... a bit of a stretch. For example people have argued that Alien (the film) is an example of white supremacy as the alien represents a stereotypical black women; "Black women have been portrayed in contemporary white social and political culture as super-fertile and indestructible breeders whose sexual reproduction must be controlled."[1]
When I first read that, it took me quite a while to realize this was even referring to the alien itself, rather than some character that got infected. It seems it purely based on the fact that the alien is black.
There are many, many examples of this, especially in the last year people have been going way to far in re-analysing everything through the lens of race, often with some very harsh words like "white supremacy". Sometimes this is a good thing, but often I find it's not. Either these are general problems that affect everyone (just black folks more, but that doesn't mean the core problem is racism), or it's outright nonsense like the above.
Now, I don't know what argument that person made exactly in support of "White supremacy existing at Basecamp", but if you make such a strong claim – which is essentially calling your leadership/coworkers white supremacists – then you better have some good arguments. I'm skeptical they existed; they're certainly not present in this article beyond wishy-washy "creating a space where people do not feel welcome".
And considering that this discussion left people "crying and screaming at the screen" it seems rather easy to make some people feel "not welcome".
The entire thing stinks; perhaps the leadership could have handled things a bit better here and there, but if you're not willing to take a somewhat nuanced disagreement in good faith then there's nothing you can do except nod and smile on every sort of nonsense they bring up, and anything else will upset people.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predator-movies-reinforce-anti-black-racism-127088
> Movies like The Thing, Terminator, Alien, Aliens, etc. Don't really have a political message other than some vague politics as window dressing.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a34518538/john-carpenter-2020-interview-coronavirus-trump-they-live-the-thing/
https://gen.medium.com/the-scariest-thing-about-alien-is-how-real-it-s-become-fa2182d2207e
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2012/06/13/the-politics-of-ridley-scotts-blockbuster-film-prometheus/?sh=60c077293e6a
https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/terminator-james-cameron
> Give me the politics of Tetris, Pong, Super Mario, Donkey Kong
You got me. Let me rephrase it as any culture with a message.
That depends on how pedant you want to be about things being political. Movies like The Thing, Terminator, Alien, Aliens, etc. Don't really have a political message other than some vague politics as window dressing.
Also since you said culture, and not FILMS.
Give me the politics of Tetris, Pong, Super Mario, Donkey Kong.
I don't know what the current state of the art knowledge is with respect to freezing or hibernating people. I think the science-fiction depiction (like in the Alien movies, or Han Solo frozen in carbonite) is generally that a person's metabolism is basically stopped and (optionally) their body is cooled to a very low temperature to stop chemical processes from happening except at a very slow rate. I think it's implied that you don't age at all, and you probably don't consume calories. (The machine you're in just requires electricity to run presumably and maybe has some consumables like IV fluid and drugs.)
If I understand correctly, one of the barriers to the science-fiction approach of freezing people is that ice crystals form and destroy tissue if one were to actually literally freeze a person. In order to survive that, you'd need some way of inhibiting ice formation. Maybe it could be solved by injecting people with some non-toxic antifreeze solution, or immersing them in fluid at such high pressures that ice doesn't form, or you could just maintain a temperature just above freezing. And then there's the problem of how to thaw a person back out. I don't know if that's solved, but I guess there is a body of knowledge around reviving extreme hypothermia cases.
Less extreme forms of hibernation might look like medically induced coma or like a bear hibernating through the winter. I don't know if bears age significantly while they're sleeping. I'd guess that they age somewhat, but at a slower rate than normal.
I don’t see what the fuss is about. “Alien wasn’t a horror movie”: just run of the mill flame-bait that started a flame war. Anyone who actually took it seriously needs to chill out.
And Kevin Smith should make a second movie.
And Event Horizon sucked.
I feel like the beach ball sub-plot in that movie is a practice-run for Alien. Not to mention the parallels between the conversations with bomb and Ash.
Dark Star is wonderful!
Also:
- it's the first movie by horror movie legend John Carpenter
- it was co-written by Dan O'Bannon, who also wrote "Alien"
>When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity.
No, the late 70s-80s gave us Terminator, Alien, The Day After, War Games, RoboCop, Cyberpunk, and on and on. There was definitely a palpable distrust and fear of technology even back then. Under the shadow of the bomb, you had people coming to terms with more and more of their world being run by big mainframes in far-away office buildings, whose arcane workings you could maybe get a glimpse of through text on a abyssal screen. I actually wrote a short essay exploring this and the notion that people haven't actually become any more comfortable with technology as it really is, only the increasingly friendly interfaces we interact with. I'd post it, but a few months after I wrote it, I realized that the file had become corrupt and that the first weekly back up of it had come a couple days after when that corruption was likely to have happened.
I just came across Mark Fisher this past year - his ideas are interesting. He reminds me of David Foster Wallace for some odd reason. Here's a few of my favorite excerpts from Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures:
> Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal — from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms — but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. Or, as Simon Reynolds so pithily put it, in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down.
> The most productive way of reading the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying: the personal is impersonal. It’s miserable for anyone at all to be themselves (still more, to be forced to sell themselves). Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.
> Joy Division always sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those desolating voidings, so that they could no longer be lured back onto the merry-go-round. They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t want really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.
> To leaf through other people’s family photos, to see moments that were of intense emotional significance for them but which mean nothing to you, is, necessarily, to reflect on the times of high drama in your life, and to achieve a kind of distance that is at once dispassionate and powerfully affecting. That is why the - beautifully, painfully - dilated moment in Tarkovsky’s Stalker where the camera lingers over talismanic objects that were once saturated with meaning, but are now saturated only with water is for me the most moving scene in cinema. It is as if we are seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien-God. Otto claims that the sense of the numinous is associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness, experience with a ‘piercing acuteness [and] accompanied by the most uncompromissing judgement of self-depreciation’. But, contrary to today’s ego psychology, which hectors us into reinforcing our sense of self (all the better to ‘sell ourselves’), the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace. There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us.
> [A]s Rudolf Otto establishes in The Idea of the Holy, encounters with angels are as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons. After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy? Otto, a conservative Christian, argued that all religious experience has its roots in what is initially misrecognized as ‘daemonic dread’; he saw encounters with ghosts, similarly, as a perverted version of what the Christian person would experience religiously.
> Capital can never openly admit that it is a system based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human mask.
I think it might be better to say that's not beyond our current level of scientific understanding (it doesn't require any exotic materials or new physics). However it's likely beyond our practical engineering capabilities.
Early spaceflight up through Apollo was done with an army of humans with slide rules and rivet guns. We did it because there was a political imperative to do so. A lot of new technology was developed as a result. But it ended up being unsustainable because it was too expensive.
I think the key to making O'Neill cylinders feasible will be large scale outer space resource mining and in-space manufacturing. Both will require advanced robotics and AI. We could throw a bunch of money into developing that ... or we could just wait for the technology to develop here on Earth and then apply it to space.
Likewise, as much as I'd like to see a Mars outpost in my lifetime, it would be a lot cheaper and safer if we didn't rush it. Maybe by 2075 we'll have cured cancer and radiation won't be an issue, and we'll have self-repairing life support systems and one of those automated medical pods from the Alien movies.
By consequence, I mean, you have some sort of reason to want to avoid death. Amnesia as I recall had very frequent checkpoints, and dying set you back a minute or so, only to encounter the same scare puzzle shortly after. Doing the same scene twice in the same pattern breaks any immersion (which is, again, a very difficult problem to solve in game design). One of the design principles in the movie Alien was that you do not want to show the monster. I think that's a good rule, and is doubly true in games where death means you do it again. An enemy you can only hide from is cool, but frustrating when said enemy follows a scripted pattern and its secretly a puzzle rather than something where you actually feel like you're hiding from a being (Alien Isolation does this well). Haunted hayride is a good descriptor. Resident evil and silent hill have tried to tackle this problem by inducing resource scarcity. Most scary encounters will not kill you, but they'll force you to expend resources which make you feel more hopeless about the future. It's far from perfect but it sort of works. It is vulnerable to players taking the opposite mentality, whereby they purposefully die to try and clear sections with lower resource loss.
Silent hill games (the good ones...) aren't action games btw. Most people consider the second one to be best psychological horror game ever made.
Horror's pretty dope these days. Next Resident Evil lookin slick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSapXD9vxYA
Completely off-topic, but having heard a "youngster" (relatively speaking) use the phrase "nuke the site from orbit" and then turn right around and ask, "BTW, where is that from?" [0], I wonder if this title hasn't suffered the same fate? Considering that the reference was released about 35 years ago, I imagine many folks saying "it goes to 11!" weren't even born when This is Spinal Tap came out.
[0] Aliens, the sequel to the first one: Alien. I'm old enough to have gone to the cinema to see all movies mentioned.
I mean, it's a fair point. My stance on the Alien Butt Stuff? Fetishes. Alien butt fetishes. We have bigger butts than they do, and they want to have fun on their spare time.
Or, we could construct an alternate theory based on the Alien movie and facehuggers. Butthuggers?
I'm currently watching the Alien movies. Maybe it's better that we are "alone" haha
The entire Alien movie is basically an extended (and, ahem, perhaps slightly darker?) remake of the Pinback vs the beach ball creature scene. My favorite piece of movie trivia. I wonder if anyone stumbled into the theatrical release of Alien knowing about that connection?
Regarding "used space", I'd say that the trend was already present in Silent Running (1972) which happens to link both the clinically clean 2001 and dirty Star Wars in terms of FX crew.
From the POV of the rest of the galaxy we seem like the xenomorphs in the "Alien" movies.
- Obviously kind of sentient or intelligent, but
- Totally uninterested in communication.
- Recognize others only as resources to consume for reproduction.
- No other goals, just blind reproduction/consumption
- Remake the environment into our own image, no other life forms can live there. (our cities look like scabs or disease crust from orbit.)
- Violent, invasive, destructive, pointless.
So why don't they "take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?" Because that's human-thinking, it literally wouldn't occur to non-human sentients because they're not sick. Instead we're just quarantined (that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox) and they study us and hope for the best. The Martians evacuated Mars when they realized Sir Percival Lowell could see them.
Nothing on Disney+ from the extensive catalog they own of any movies rated over PG-13. (think 20th Century Fox and Touchstone pictures - Alien, Die Hard, Exorcist, Highlander, The Omen... and even of those that are PG, many also not available, like original Planet of the Apes series, etc.) I have a free 1-yr promo tie-in membership and it's ok, but I will not be continuing when it expires. If they had all those other films from the catalogs they own I would much more likely pay them.
> Humans are somehow imbued with a magic property that allows them to watch read WH40K books, alien and predator movies, then produce the Starcraft universe, and have it count as original work.
I feel like this is speculation. Do you have any citations? It seems to me that in this fuzzy area an AI will be judged identically to a human. While you give an example where he StarCraft universe is created and considered original work. There are many cases where a human learns their craft from copyright work, and creates a derived work, fanfic is a huge genre of example. I suspect that in the legal arena the nature and content of the new work will be far more influential in the status of the copyright, than the details of how the new work was created.
So, while I think it's likely that something that is generated by an AI that looks like original work will be considered original work. I think a question that is less clear, and much more important is if the AI itself would be considered a derived work. In some ways, it can be argued that an AI is a transformation of the original representation, and that substantial portions of the original work are/can be maintained within the AI itself, just how a work can be transformed by a compressor, but still be considered to maintain the copyright. However afaik this question likely remains still untested.
IANAL and all.
Also, I think:
> BERT probably "knows" that Cthulhu is a giant thing evoking squids, tentacle and non-orthonormic dimensions.
Is highly debatable.
The way I see it you have four roads to take. Each one with their own pros and cons.
1. Be the jerk. This will unfortunately mean that you will sacrifice any high moral ground (imao) you might have over the jerk since you have now stooped to his level. To quote a certain alien from a certain movie: "This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them."
2. Take the high road. This will avoid conflict but also will not resolve the source problem which might resurface again but it might just be someone elses problem
3. Take it up with him. Do it in private. Calmly and respectfully. Don't tell him he is being a jerk. Have a conversation about it. The difference? Ask him "do you think that was approriate?" Instead of "stop being a jerk" etc. Try to use language that doesn't put them on the defensive (very hard to do I admit)
4. Kick the problem upstairs. Talk to his superior/hr and tell them about the situation. They will handle it for you (or not). However when management gets involved, stakes go higher for all parties involved (including you being the "snitch").
My comment was from the view point of the creators (director, writer, and rest of the crew). There were better ways to make money in movies in 2007 then with a sci-fi space thriller inspired by Solaris and Alien.
To be more clear, I don't think the creators were thinking "will this scene make us more money", nor do I think it's their job. And on the topic of realism in a movie, unless it's a historical film or the goal is to educate, then realism should be near the bottom of the checklist when creating a scene.
I assume it is a reference to the movie Alien.
As somebody who makes films himself this isn’t quite as easy: although I personally agree with your sentiment, the task of a story you told in the filmic medium usually isn’t to be realistic. What studios instead care about is to create a world that most people can believe in.
And sometimes this means to make something look futuristic just to constantly remind viewers that this is a completely different universe.
Additionally set designers have usually quite little time to think about all the details. They are essentially in the job of cobbling together something that looks ok in as little time as possible for as little money as possible.
When it comes to interfaces in films I kinda like the way Alien (1979) did it: very realistic, kinda gritty, very distinct graphical language
I think this is the premise for the next Alien movie
As an absolute fan of Blade Runner, I disliked BR2049 and I really think it was a mistake to film a sequel of the original. I don't think the original needed a sequel, the open ending and unanswered questions were perfect, and in fact most of the "tied loose ends" of the sequel kind of run contrary to the original for me. They undermine their characters and make it all some sort of silly experiment/conspiracy that simply doesn't do it for me. I dread the thought of Ridley Scott now saying he has more stories to tell... especially if they are of the "quality" of his Alien/Prometheus sequels.
I think I would have enjoyed BR2049 better had it been an entirely new movie and not a sequel to something. And if it didn't have Jared Leto overacting, of course, but I suppose that cannot be helped.
The six sides of the three record album 'Sandinista!' had a quote from the movie Alien written in the runout, "IN SPACE ... NO ONE ... CAN ... HEAR ... YOU ... CLASH!"
Not a program, but I remember being oddly satisfied when I noticed it the first or second time I played it.
> Have you ever considered simply buying an HD/4K projector, a decent-quality screen, and a surround-sound setup?
I think you're missing the point. I have a fairly decent home cinema setup and rarely go to the cinema but there are some films that deserve viewing on the big screen. For me these are films such as Casablanca, Apocalypse Now, Alien, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Star Wars (original), Close Encounters. These were movies made where the "cinematography" had the cinema in mind, not a home cinema system (because they basically didn't exist unless you were extremely well off). Seeing these films in the cinema is, for me anyway, a genuinely different experience.
Literally every single one in the UK. But it's not even supermarkets, pretty much every car park in this country works like this, I've even seen ones next to pubs and cinemas have that(made for a fun viewing of Alien + Aliens in a promotional re-release few years ago, the staff at the cinema were warning everyone that if you parked outside and are here to see both movies in one go you will be charged for overstaying as the time limit is 4 hours). And those fines are very much enforceable - as long as the conditions are listed in a public view the company can charge you for parking over the allowed time(it's a charge, not a fine technically).
Clearly explained here: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/scotland/law-and-courts/parking-tickets/appealing-parking-tickets/parking-tickets-on-private-land-s/
Hasn't much of the work been incorporated into the Alien movies?
>Lots of original movies are released - probably more than ever. It is just that the public prefers names they know
In the 80s and 90s we had bladerunner, the original matrix of course, we had alien and a significant amount of mainstream, big name fiction. Yes, retro movies have always existed but alongside the creation of entirely new genres, in particular in science fiction. We had Gibson alongside others creating the entirely new cyberpunk subgenre that influenced many of these original movies.
What exactly is the equivalent of this today? Yes we have some new stuff, I liked Ted Chiang's Arrival for example, but is there a big new future oriented wave of genuinely new fiction? I don't see it at all.
Believe me I've tried - I love TV and film, but cannot get very far before the obligatory strong, independent and sassy minority group representative appears to deliver their identity politics sermon. No thanks! It's patronising and boring.
Reminder: The Alien franchise managed to have a strong female lead and be one of the best sci-fi series ever, and all without including the barely disguised sociology lectures. Go back and look at films from the 60s-00s - many were able to integrate minority characters/themes etc. with charm and subtlety, and managed to avoid the contemporary subtle as a brick approach. We're at the point where gems like Blazing Saddles could never be made due to the po-faced, finger wagging authoritarianism of the PC establishment.
That is indeed fascinating.
"Thanks to a Facebook event called “Storm Area 51” ...
Since July 12th, searches for “Area 51” have surged from zero to 160,000 in just 4 days. July 16th alone had nearly 59,000 searches.
...
The most popular alien related search is “alien impregnation” followed by “alien sex”. Other interesting searches include “alien belly” (a reference to the scene from the original 1979 Alien movie?), “alien eggs”, “alien abduction” and “alien probe”. "
So I always suspected, that the internet is a weird place, but good to have data to back that up.
But seriously, out of porn consumption statistics, you can get a deep analytical experience of the population. So yes, it is scary, if some companies have all that knowledge.
> The fact that every single minority MUST be represented in every single movie—despite the fact that this makes the story less believable or even weaker is what's annoying. Not to mention changing established characters (like Ghostbusters, Terminator, Little Mermaid) to make them black women.
In what way is that particular story less believable because it shows minorities? Is it showing minorities in a context (geographical and time) where you have 100% information that it's very different from the reality of that context? Is this particular movie supposed to show a factually based representation of that context?
If an owner of some IP decides to change the racial, ethnic, etc profile of some character as they were represented previously in said franchise it doesn't take away from the franchise (imagine that they didn't release anything new), you can still watch the older movies that you enjoy. Similarly to how if a new video game is released in a series which is very different (or simply bad, quality wise) from the previous games in the series, it doesn't take away from you the previous titles, you can still enjoy the previous games all you want.
> Back when I grew up, we had Will Smith who was basically every kid's idiol in Europe, and he was black. We had Ripley from Alien who was a believable female role. We had Priscilla with trans protagonists. No one complained, all those characters worked. Now, every movie seems to be just an excuse to virtue signal. It's all politics. I want to watch a movie, not be indoctrinated by a corporation about whatever politics they're into.
I find that as a very naive and simplistic view of said movies. There was politics back then too in said movies, you just didn't notice it or cared about it, you took those things for granted. This is the essential problem with this type of complains, you assume that what was before/you grew up with was the "gold standard" and so making drastic changes to that is somehow bad (and I'm not talking just about minority representation in media, I see this in almost every context with people over a certain age). You should probably see how people complained the first time a black person was on TV, the complains are very similar.
I'm not saying that now there isn't a more active effort around introducing more minority representation into media, it obviously is so, I'm only arguing against that being a bad thing on its own and/or saying that didn't happen before. If this is more important to the studios than making good quality movies then obviously the quality will suffer, but that's not special in any way to the minority representation push.
> You're saying it's annoying to see that when you want to relax and watch a movie. You cannot relax watching a movie where there's a mixed-race gay couple? Why?
Looks like you're the one saying that, uh?
Look.
In the movie I mentioned, there are a handful of people that find themselves in the house.
- single mother who drinks while pregnant - gay, mixed-race couple #1 - black guy who ends up with single mother (mixed-race couple #2) - evil Trump supporter - bunch of bad white guys #1 (those two that make a mess) - bunch of bad white guys #2 (everyone else who tries to kill everyone)
The fact that every single minority MUST be represented in every single movie—despite the fact that this makes the story less believable or even weaker is what's annoying. Not to mention changing established characters (like Ghostbusters, Terminator, Little Mermaid) to make them black women.
Back when I grew up, we had Will Smith who was basically every kid's idiol in Europe, and he was black. We had Ripley from Alien who was a believable female role. We had Priscilla with trans protagonists. No one complained, all those characters worked. Now, every movie seems to be just an excuse to virtue signal. It's all politics. I want to watch a movie, not be indoctrinated by a corporation about whatever politics they're into.
It is partly due to new media however lets consider some other things which are really important.
1) The problem is that a lot of the remakes/sequels and reboots are quite frankly crap. I don't care too much about Disney. But other remakes and sequels are generally awful.
So lets take some case studies:
* Robocop (2013). The movie except for on 2 minute scene was dire. It was a PG-13 remake of what was at the time a shockingly violent film (the effects look awful now, but they were quite convincing back in the mid-90s still) that completely missed the point of the original movie.
* Ghostbusters (2016) was another movie that not only looked completely awful in the trailer, it completely again misunderstood the original movie, added nothing much new and they outright attacked the fandom after they said to the studio "What the hell are you doing". The original Ghostbusters movie wasn't really a comedy movie, it was a Action Horror with some Jokes. The new movie was just a comedy movie, which looked like a Spoof along the lines of "Scary Movie". I have no idea who they were marketing it towards.
Lets take sequels:
* They have also totally squandered two solid Sci-fi Action Movie franchises (Alien and Predator) to the point where the previous low points of the franchises look good (Alien vs Predator and Alien 3 & Alien 4: Resurrection).
* Star Wars has been completely ruined from a fan's perspective. The prequels (in the 2000s) has some terrible acting, iffy CGI now but I can at least appreciate what they were attempting to do and it was an honest attempt by Lucas to flesh out Star Wars universe. However the new Sequels go from "This is Okay, but it is the 1977 movie retold essentially" to terrible (The Last Jedi).
The Last Jedi doesn't make any sense on quite a number of levels. It also ruins one of beloved characters on screen and it was probably intentionally written to not only upset the fans but also kill the franchise i.e. there is at least one scene where Kylo Ren says to audience pretty much "Let the past die, kill if you have to", which is the director pretty much sticking his middle finger up to the fans. Yes in the scene he was speaking to whoever the main character is that doesn't seem to have a personality, but it was really a message from the director to the fans.
They also attacked the fan base (not a good move) because they didn't like a terrible movie. While the movies made money, they have tarnished the brand in the long term.
Disney bought Lucas Film because of Star Wars and monetising the fan base. Lucas Film under Kathleen Kennedy have tried driving away their a dedicated fan base. This strategy is madness.
2) The Hollywood Elite (and they are Elite) have forgotten they are actors and actively show distain for the audience. I don't really want to get into a political commentary, but they literally had The Avengers do an online piece of activism where they told the Electoral college to defy the 2016 Presidential Election result. This doesn't go unnoticed by the average movie goer. Just under half of the Country voted for the current president and then they do an advert where they are pretty much putting a middle finger up at the people who voted for Trump. A lot of those people took their kids to see those movies or saw went to see them themselves.
Audiences will forgive actors for quite a lot of things, but if they continually keep on pushing this audiences will associate them with their politics and not what roles they played.
They are actors. I want them to pretend to be Black Widow, not lecture me about Politics. I will go and listen to a political commentator if I wanted that.
3) Bollywood and the rest of Asia are making their own movies which kick ass. Take "The Raid 2". It has plenty of brutal fight scenes, but it also has a top quality plot about gangs, undercover cops etc. It is amazing to watch. A lot of guys are looking at overseas cinema because Hollywood isn't catering to them.
4) User generated content. I think the only movie I've watched recently was John Wick 1, 2 and 3. I recently listened to a recorded lecture series of the History of Islam on Youtube made by some guy who lives in Azerbaijan. I can listen for effectively nothing 1000s of hours of interviews of Joe Rogan and a Guest just talking for 3 hours about sometimes absolute nonsense or talking about say Leaving a Cult (Megan Phelps interview). I recently watched a series of lectures about the database as a filesystem from some Linux conference. There is a guy who made loads of mini-documentaries about old defunct computers systems and the quality now is on par with the Discovery Channel shows of the late 1990s.
5) Longer stories. Game of Thrones, The Wire and other shows that have very long running stories, lots of characters and complicated plots with lots of Lore have proven that audiences want more complicated stories. There is a guy called Alt-Shift-X on Youtube and he has huge number of people watching him and he just explains the Game of Thrones Lore of the Book vs the TV-series. Most Hollywood movies are pretty simple affairs in comparison.
Yeah right. I think, it also has an atmosphere of the Alien movie. Yet, it is a depiction of real events, and that reality is so overwhelming.. I think, I wish they make a similar movie about people in World War II.
Also, the green new deal idea is not by Edward Markey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was a term used by Thomas Friedman as far back as 2007 and the policy ideas have been bouncing around in more or less their current forms for quite some time.
Perhaps he is aiming this screed at arch conservatives who prefer the later films in the alien franchise.
There's a huge difference between silly gore (e.g. DOOM) and disgusting/frightening gore (e.g. Resident Evil). I, for myself, certainly know that I finished RE5 despite its gore, not because of it, and I realize I will never play certain games (e.g. Alien Isolation); if I could go back I'd probably stop myself from watching the Alien movies and a bunch of other gore / psycho movies, too.
> Convincing the South-central and Southeast US to start following track instead of American football
I grew up in Texas and Louisiana and went to school at LSU, which has the #6 largest college stadium in the US, so I'm well aware of how ingrained in US culture it is.
But culture changes. In 1965, 42.4 percent of adults smoked. It's hard to get more deeply ingrained in the American identity than the Marlboro man, John Wayne, and James Dean. Watch a movie from that era sometime. Everyone is smoking in it. Hell, in Alien, the crew is constantly lighting up and they're in a spaceship in the future.
In 2017, it was down to 14%, and that's for a product that is profoundly chemically addictive and notoriously hard to quit.
All we need to do to "fix" football is keep beating the "you're destroying kids' brains" drum and it will wither and die. Football depends entirely on culture and popularity. If it becomes less cool, less socially approved, it will fall. Especially when there are easy substitutes. If you still want to throw on a jersey and go to a game with your buddies, just go to the nearest baseball, soccer, or basketball game instead.
There are still some oddities.
"How to Train Your Dragon" (2010), 99% with 206 reviews does not make the list, but many older movies, with lower scores and lower number of reviews do. E.g., "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), 98% with 111 reviews, and "It Happened One Night" (1934), 98% with 56 reviews, and "Casablanca" (1942), 97% with 79 reviews, and "Alien" (1979), 97% with 115 reviews.
It looks like the older a film is, the fewer reviews it needs backing its score to make the list.
It's also possible that the age of the review is taken into account, so that a modern review looking back on a film counts more than an older review, because that would probably be more relevant to someone today deciding what older movies to watch.
For example, take "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" (1966). It wasn't very well received by critics in 1966. Now, though, it's at 97% on RT, and is regular included in lists of top films (it used to be on the RT top 100, but looks like it has been pushed off).
Yes, Alien being missing is an odd sign, especially as it has 99%. (IIRC it used to be the only 100% film, until some critic posted a new review saying it hadn’t aged well)
The matrix is a simulation of the past (the late 90s) - which is a great film idea because it means even the presence of deep CRT monitors doesn't date the movie - unlike (say) in "Alien", where they do (imo).
Amazing reddit post that sums up my feelings perfectly:
"What I miss is how mysterious the internet could be and how gullible we were. The Internet felt like this strange underbelly of obscure information.
First you're growing up in some little town and only know about Star Wars and Green Day. Then suddenly you're finding niche websites and reading about obscure movies and bands and movies you definitely won't find on the radio or in the video store. Youd find dedicated fan sites that had deleted scenes from Alien that you'd never even heard of!
You'd find bizarre paranormal websites that every story felt so real and believable. Every low res UFO and ghost picture could be real. Every story was accepted as real. I read the Ted the Caver geocities page back then at 2 in the morning and was totally convinced it was real. Nowadays we're skeptical of every story and some photoshop guy will dissect any picture and reveal how the shadows dont fall right or something.
If you could find the right program and file, you could download pretty much any Nintendo game ever! Your tiny world and library of just Mario and Ninja Gaiden completely exploded with potential. I was now able to play this holy grail Chrono Trigger I'd always heard of. Or I would go through great lengths to find a good English patch of this Japanese only game called Front Mission. And you'd convince yourself that you weren't stealing because Nintendo hadn't sold these games for years, they were unobtainable! You felt like a hacker and a pirate doing that stuff.
The internet back then made you feel like an explorer on the fringe. The mysterious frontier just waiting for you to engage its endless opportunity. Man I miss that shit."
permalink/original: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/980rrc/what_do_you_miss_about_the_early_internet/e4cjgnr/
This was the same reaction my fiancée had. While I consider the original Blade Runner the best sci-fi movie of all time (followed closely by the original Alien in which the doomed ship Nostromo feels like it departed Blade Runner earth), I do think 2049 is right up there and didn't disappoint my insanely high expectations for the film.
I suspect the dated-even-for-the-time computers in Alien and Bladerunner were a deliberate choice. For example the painfully slow screen updates in Alien must have been a deliberate choice, monitors of the time were fully capable of near-instantly displaying a screen of text.
It seems likely to me that they wanted to give an impression of a low-budget operation using antiquated tech. The Nostromo is a bulk cargo carrier crewed by little more than space truckers, it wouldn't have the swanky latest tech of the time, but how do you portray that? You can't try to portray people using 2050s tech in a film set in 2100, say, and expect people to get that it's supposed to be crappy old gear.
In the movie 2001, the computers feature flat screen displays because they were actually displaying rear projection film. This accidentally gave it a more futuristic look than later sci-fi’s such as Alien and Blade Runner which featured bulbous CRT computer screens.
Also, like in OP’s tweets, there were no actual computers involved in the production of 2001. All of the displayed 3D wireframe models were films of physical wireframe models.
Thanks for posting, that's an interesting resource. Table 3.2, laying out projections of community space usage in outer space (including churches!), could be good fodder for future historians writing about the mid-20th century cultural assumptions that structured early space travel.
Also this sentence is fascinating to me: "Whether space colonization is a unilateral effort on the part of the United States or a cross-national enterprise, it will most likely be sponsored by a public or quasipublic organization with a bureaucratic structure which permeates the early settlement." I've always thought the Alien movies strike the most realistic tone in this regard, with the Weyland Corp lurking in the background.
People go to a Star Wars movie to see the hero destroy the Death Star!
I'm reminded of that scene in the Empire Strikes Back where they destroyed a Death Star. Oh wait! They didn't. Because in the middle movie of most trilogies, bad things happen to the heroes. They fail. They reach rock bottom, and the third movie is their final struggle.
You can't take any story with any characters and any plot elements and place it in the Star War Universe and magically have a Star Wars movie.
That's exactly what they did with Rogue One. Worked very well. In contrast, Solo was done in the style of the traditional SW movies and is generally acknowledged as a failure.
It's the same reason the Mad Max remake was good...You have to have some respect for the tone, themes, and plots of what came before. TLJ disrespects it's audience's desires by disrespecting the draw of the source material.
Mad Max Fury Road was completely inconsistent, tonally and other wise, with the original Mad Max, and is a direct descendant of the campiness of Beyond Thunderdome. Batman v Superman, on the other hand, ws made with the same tones, themes, and plots as the other DC Synderverse movies, and was still quite terrible. Aliens and Alien are both considered terrific, genre-defining films. Yet Aliens has very little in common with Alien other than Ripley and the xenomorph. The same can be said of Terminator and T2. Harry Potter 3 and on have little tonally in common with the first two films, yet the third is considered one of the best in the series. Etc...
This is much cooler than the exo-skeletons/exo-suits that i imagined after having watched those Alien movies from the 80s/90s!
And Leviathan (basically Alien in the ocean; from 1989 when everybody seemed to be making ocean movies to compete with Cameron's The Abyss) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097737/
I don't think It really counts as "elevated horror". The book is interesting; you might call it an elevation of pulp horror. But the movie is just a garden-variety spooky clown movie.
Big budget horror movies are nothing new; look at the Alien franchise.
"elevator horror" is a funny term but I definitely meant "elevated horror"; edited.
I find Lynch's Dune good even if he disowned his movie. I like watching it from time to time like Alien.
Essentially all EDF Nuclear power plants? Apple's replacement for the classic Mac operating system scheduled for the mid-nineties as an internal project but eventually achieved by buying an entire OS company?
A large number of movies, split roughly equally between masterpieces like Alien and forgettable failures like Water World?
Have revisited 2001 recently. Particularly the scene just before Intermission. Where HAL is reading the lips of the astronauts in the pod. It just really holds up. Apart from the genius editing and sound design. It feels even more a cautionary moment for modern minds on AI. As it must have been to American audiences during the height of the Vietnam War era.
Ridley Scott's original Alien and Blade Runner remain immensely watchable 30+ years on. Perhaps even more so. Which makes it high time not to just complete Clark's monoliith films. But write the next chapter in "Dystopian AI" cinema. One in which a super-intelligence doesn't merely write off the necessity of humanity. But actively yet surreptitiously nudges us to produce more powerful versions of itself ;)
Shhh! Don't give them any ideas!
Seriously, Hollywood's love affair with remaking movies is just sad. Of course, it's not completely new, they were doing it even back in the early days, but not to the extent that they are now. They just aren't coming out with that many new and innovative movies like they did in the 70s and 80s. Where's the "Alien" or "Blade Runner" or "Ghostbusters" of today? Movies like that just aren't being made, but remakes or sequels to these decades-old movies are.
Personally, I used to get substantially better results. It would suggest to me a movie I'd never seen before with a score above 90, I'd watch, and enjoy. Now I'm getting things like kids shows suggested to me. I double checked by history to make sure no one watched one on my account, but they keep popping up with high percentage. I also really like horror and get weird suggestions [1] for similar movies. After I watched Alien it suggested the Great British Baking show. I literally have 0 trust in the new ranking system. They push certain shows way too hard and TV shows I'm watching show up on page 3 of "continue watching".
This is far from my previous stance of "Huh, movie I've never seen before and in a different language? It's 95% so yeah, I'll give it a go."
And before someone says anything, I do vote up and down quite frequently. But can't help but notice that my suggestions were better when I had the more nuanced star system.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/MOt3XlL.png
[1.1] How I'd rate these. Cars 3: not really interested. Liked the first though. Stitches: idk, doesn't look appealing. Teeth: Classic cult film but yeah... Big Mouth: I have ZERO interest in watching this, please stop suggesting. I have downvoted this! Waterboy: I like it, but far from 95%. I'll give it like an 80.
The Expanse takes pains to treat space travel, combat, and so on in a hard sci-fi way to the point of making it seem rather mundane. But you're right- the point of the series is about the human element, which is actually relevant to the OP-
>> Okay, so what you’re really asking me there is if this is hard science fiction. The answer is an emphatic no. I have nothing but respect for well written hard science fiction, and I wanted everything in the book to be plausible enough that it doesn’t get in the way. But the rigorous how-to with the math shown? It’s not that story. This is working man’s science fiction. It’s like in Alien, we meet the crew of the Nostromo doing their jobs in this very blue collar environment. They’re truckers, right? Why is there a room in the Nostromo where water leaks down off of chains suspended from the ceiling? Because it looks cool and makes the world feel a little messy. It gives you the feel of the world. Ridley Scott doesn’t explain why that room exists, and when most people watch the film, it never even occurs to them to ask. What kind of drive does the Nostromo use? I bet no one walked out of the film asking that question. I wanted to tell a story about humans living and working in a well populated solar system. I wanted to convey a feeling for what that would be like, and then tell a story about the people who live there.
https://www.orbitbooks.net/interview/james-s-a-corey-2/
> Ripley, after Sigourney Weaver’s flamethrower-wielding hero in the Alien movies.
Sounds more like Ripley's believe it or not
Late to this game...
Galaxy Quest
V, but the original miniseries from the 80's
Close Encounters
Dune, this is controversial I'm sure!
Starship Troopers
The Day After Tomorrow
The Fifth Element
Terminator I
Alien
Aliens
Tron, oh god I nearly forgot this one from the 80's!
I could have written this exact article. My phone died a couple of weeks ago. I can't accurately convey how unsettling it was to realize how to deeply into my subconsciousness my phone had ingrained itself. Any time there was the slightest lull in stimulation, I found myself reaching for it. I kept carrying my phone with me even though I knew it was dead.
The first night, I was cooking dinner. Once I had everything going on the burners, I had a few minutes to kill. Normally I'd reach for my phone, but I couldn't. After a while, I got bored so I went ahead and did the dishes. Instead of leaving that chore for later and adding to my stress I got on top of it. Better, it required no willpower to do so since I was bored and literally had nothing better to do.
I've felt for years that the days were too short. It turns out they got shorter because of all of the accumulated minutes sucked into my phone. The days felt longer, more relaxed. It was easier to get the minutiae of life done during the between-times. I wasn't irritated by the kids interrupting me. I read more.
At the same time, I really missed the practical aspects of my phone. Listening to the radio while driving sucked. Not having navigation — I have essentially no sense of direction — was a nightmare.
I have a phone again now, but so far I haven't installed any of the consumptive apps on it. (For me that was mainly Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.) It's been good so far. I do find myself sometimes missing the ability to share things on those platforms. If there were write-only versions of those apps, I'd install them and then only consume on my laptop which is a little more naturally self-limiting by not being easily carried around.
A while back, I rewatched the original Alien. One thing that struck me, watching it with modern eyes how all of the characters constantly smoked. When the movie came out, that helped the characters look natural and believable. Now it just looks gross and distracting. I believe strongly in a few decades, we'll look back on phone use today in the same way.
At least, I hope we do. The scary alternative is an entire populace constantly drugged by our own dopamine receptors triggered by carefully engineered cognitive manipulation.
Modern color treatment in film totally drives me crazy, independent of what it does to CGI.
It seems like every film coming out of Hollywood these days is processed exactly the same way:
* Crank down the low end so half the frame is solid inky black.
* Pick one or two key colors, and jack up their saturation.
* Desaturate everything else.
In other words, make the entire movie look like an over-dramatic poster for it. Throw any sense of naturalism or unique look out the door. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Here's the top live action movies of 2016:
Rogue One
Cyan and olive: http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Rogue-One-A-Star-Wars-Story15.jpg
Captain America: Civil War
Yellow and red: http://cdn3-www.superherohype.com/assets/uploads/gallery/civil-war-trailer-2-screenshots/cwttss03.jpg
Why they felt the need to make Cap's lip rosy red is beyond me. Even better is this shot:
http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Captain-America-Civil-War-cast-photo-Renner-Johansson-Evans-Sebastian-Stan.jpg
This is a daylight shot. Look at how the characters are all squinting. Look at the big white fluffly clouds that should be diffusing the light and softening shadows. And yet, magically, all of the shadows are jet black and almost all of the color is gone.
The Jungle Book
Green and red (to draw attention to Mowgli):
https://www.moviedeskback.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The_Jungle_Book_HD_Screencaps-23.png
Deadpool
Another daylight shot with nonsensical shading:
http://turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Deadpool-Movie-Screenshot-Brianna-Hildebrand-Negasonic-Teenage-Warhead-Texting.jpg
The light is clearly diffuse, if you look at the shadows on the ground, and yet there is this deep black everywhere. Deadpool took the look further by only picking one color (red, Deadpool's outfit color) for the entire film.
Lest you think this is just an issue with superhero movies, let's ignore those and look at the other top non-superhero movies of 2016:
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
More of the same:
http://harrypotterfanzone.com/wp-content/2016/09/fantastic-beasts-trailer-screenshot75.png
It also suffers strongly from the "It's a period movie so we're going to sepia tone everything so hard it looks like you're watching the movie through an aquarium full of pee" effect.
Hidden Figures
https://www.themarysue.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/hiddenfigures.jpg
More of the period movie sepia along with an improbably jacked up complementary cyan.
Star Trek Beyond
If the past is warm, the future must be cool:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Star-Trek-Beyond2.jpg
Blacks, grays and neon cyan, just like Rogue One. Look how unnatural his skin tone is! They wanted to jack up yellow to complement their primary blue so much that the poor dude has jaundice:
http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/star-trek-beyond-trailer-cover.jpg
La La Land
I'll give this one some credit for varying it up a bit. Also, dramatic spotlit stage lighting is a logical part of the movie's look. But it's still prey to the same cliched look in places:
http://henrymollman.com/content/images/2017/01/Screenshot-from-2017-01-18-22-36-49-1.png
Ghostbusters
Ectoplasm green and spooky violet were the key colors for the whole film. Secondary colors tend to come across as magical or eerie to viewers since they're different from the safe and familiary primary colors. Of course, jacking up magenta doesn't do flattering things to skin:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Ghostbusters2.jpg
Also, what color is Melissa McCarthy's coat? Is it actually black? Who fucking knows.
Central Intelligence
The traditional comedy look is brightly-lit and saturated, so Central Intelligence didn't fare quite as poorly as the above. Whenever they had a chance to dim the lights, though, they revert to the same cliched look as well:
https://i2.wp.com/doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/centralintelligence2944.jpg
The Legend of Tarzan
http://images3.static-bluray.com/reviews/14209_5.jpg
Jesus, we get it, colorist. They're in the wet jungle. We don't need to be physically assaulted with the colors blue and green to figure that out.
...You get the idea.
Go back and watch a movie from before 2000 and you'll quickly realize how much more pleasant to look at most of them where, and how much more variety there was in look. Compare Alien to The Graduate. But it seems like ever since the rise of digital coloring and superhero movies, Hollywood has decided every single fucking movie needs to look like a comic book page, whether it needs it or not.
One recent movie I really liked that bucked this trend was Her. It was heavily colorized, but in a way that stood out. In shots like these, even though there's a strong color cast and a lot of dark, there's still always some color and detail in the shadows:
https://i1.wp.com/turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Her-Movie-2013-Screenshot-Theodore-Apartment.jpg
https://3kpnuxym9k04c8ilz2quku1czd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/her-screenshot-14.jpg
Exactly, I switched from streaming services and rentals to Bittorrent because I couldn't rent the original Alien film for less than $5 from any service. At the time it was a 34 year old movie that I rented from Blockbuster for $1 in the 90s.
I believe it. As a film fan, this is why I really dislike Netflix—they seem a repeat offender at ripping off other artists. A few of their shows like Stranger Things (Alien, Poltergeist, Akira, Goonies) and especially Godless (Rio Bravo; Magnificent Seven; Good, Bad, and the Ugly) go beyond homage and into outright copying and stealing ideas. I understand tropes and references, but I think Netflix has shown a pattern of basically just making imitation products of other successful products. I can watch nearly anything on HBO, but can hardly find anything half worth watching on Netflix and it’s nearly all derivative of something else more interesting.
as: I will leave the production side away
I have my own age, but I don't give a damn for HD+ videos. It was cool to see demo videos of coral and landscape in stores but ... even the best tv show or movies won't bring me much joy in 4K. That's optimizing the wrong parameters IMO.
3D could be of help, but so far 1) people didn't find how 2) people barely tried. I remember being disappointed by Avatar because the story was so obvious and rehashed... I went to see a few 3D movies (beside thor I think none surprised my senses). And last year Avatar 1 was on TV. I was shocked, the framing was so amazing. I thought, 1) Cameron knows how to film action 2) the live virtual set he had for Avatar made his 3D 'animation' much more tactile/tangible. No other movie had this, they were average 2D shots with more tech. Reminded me how Scott's Alien 1 has more depth than most 3D movies in the first 10 seconds. Something how they approached movie making, real sets (something star wars went back to, ironically after being one of the major step into virtual sets).
For video games, I can't deny that the 3rd dimension brings something, but for aesthetics or story telling it's moot. The beauty is elsewhere. And some games are doing just that, they will toy with representation and mix hires 3D environment with pixelated characters. Its oddity makes the games interesting and mysterious.
I really do believe that our brain likes 2D representations, and attach emotions and meaning to them; paintings and old games were tickling this sense. The hyper realism (which I ran for too) is tickling another sense, and not the right one.
ps: I just found this on twitter, https://thesixfifty.com/game-changer-lasting-legacy-of-the-atari-2600-4bea9717bf3, it actually touches some aspects of what I'm feeling
Perhaps the recent Alien movies use CGI or something, but the original Alien from Alien (in the adult form) was the Nigerian actor Bolaji Badejo in a suit.
Isn't some of this just the difficulty of describing something unique?
If you asked me to describe what the aliens from the Alien/Aliens movies looked like, I'd completely fail. If you asked me to describe the alien from Predator, on the other hand, it'd be fairly easy. The Predator is a guy in a costume so I could just describe the differences.
If you like Alien you might go back to Carpenter’s first movie, Dark Star. And if you like Dark Star you might look at They Live! (That is if you haven’t already.)
That said, I’ll need a very strong recommendation before I see Blade Runner 2.
In my mind Ridley Scott's decision to include the voiceover in the film more or less disqualifies him from rendering a final judgement about this stuff.
Scott is an interesting filmmaker. Blade Runner and Alien are two of the best films ever made in my opinion. Everything else he's done is amateurish in comparison (also in my opinion), even the successful/fun stuff.
This makes me wonder whether there's something behind the greatness of those two films other than his direction. Maybe the writer/crew/cast/studio/producers had more power in his earlier films and used that power wisely?
There's an interesting passage on the wikipedia article for Alien:
> Scott had wanted the Alien to bite off Ripley's head and then make the final log entry in her voice, but the producers vetoed this idea as they believed the Alien should die at the end of the film.
All that aside, it's not always clear who "owns" a film. The director tends to get a lot of credit, but film-making is collaborative, and who's to say that the screenwriter doesn't get to decide what the film is really about?
I watched the documentary in a small screening a few years ago and the project sounded incredible... It wasn't Dune, not the Dune we've read, but amazing nonetheless. I definitely recommend watching it (be forewarned, Jodorowsky's english is atrocious). So many interesting stories about that movie:
Some of the design work and the people that worked with Jodorowsky actually went into Alien. I mean, Giger, of course, but also Dan O'Bannon a few other people.
He actually got Dali and Orson Welles to say yes to the project. Dali wanted to be the most expensive actor in history.
The story with his son borders abuse. He basically wanted to convert him into the Kwisatz Haderach and made him go through a very tough training for years.
Personally, I did enjoy David Lynch's version and even the tv mini-series they did (back in the late 90's?).
Suspension of disbelief only works when the world presented is believable and the story interesting. I find myself able to suspend belief on Nolan films, for example, because of their engrossing story and style.
With your example of Prometheus, no, the flick is not bad because of that scene, but the scene is an indication of the overall laziness of the plot. All the nit-picking, as you put it, is because there is nothing else to hold on to, which is not true of Alien at least (I don't particularly like Aliens).
Consider selling the company.
There are a million other ideas to work on, and once you've sold a company, you're investable.
Ironically, you can't raise anything now - but you'll be able to raise on your next project.
You'll have a nice little bank account to get whatever going, and that'll make you considerably more confident as well.
There's not reason to be sentimental about your project. 99% chance 'it's just a project'.
Think of yourself as a 'Movie Producer' or 'Director' or whatever. You made Jaws. Next you can make Alien. And then whatever.
Unless your project is deeply close to your heart, or you are doing something you really and truly find personal and existential meaning in - and you have a high degree of certainty of competitive advantage for whatever reason (high barrier to entry, massive growth etc.) then consider selling.
FYI that you're having trouble raising is at least some kind of 'flag' that you might not have a strong competitive position, but don't read hugely into 'not being able to raise' - most companies (and many good ones) can't.
It seems to me that people are a lot harsher on movies now, less willing or able to suspend disbelief [1]. I see scathing assessments of sequels, but with examples of the imagined problems being problems that have reasonably close equivalents in their predecessors which no one had a problem with when those were released.
Here's a concrete example: probably the most commonly cited 'problem' I hear about Prometheus is that near the end of the movie the heroine "tried to run away from a wheel in a straight line", and therefore it is a bad movie. The general criticism I take from this is not that she took the reasonable general action (running away) but the specific course she took (running in a straight line so the wheel just followed, and not noticing it was following).
The thing is, I think that both the main previous movies in the series, Alien and Aliens, have comparable incidents which no one complains about.
In Alien, near the end of the movie when she was the sole remaining survivor, we had Ripley delaying her escape in the shuttle in order to scuttle the ship - an entirely pointless action. If her plan of escape in the shuttle had worked, it wouldn't matter whether the alien were still alive. What did she think it would do, learn how to fly the Nostromo and pursue her? Scuttling the ship both increased her risk of dying at the alien's hands (it could have easily snuck up on her when she was engrossed in the scuttling procedure), and also nearly caught her in the explosion.
In Aliens, we had Ripley delaying her escape with Newt from the processing plant in order to exterminate the room full of eggs which posed no immediate threat to her (especially those still in the egg sac). Further to this, she did not bother to spend even one bullet or grenade on the queen herself. Ripley expended virtually all of her ammunition on this task, not reserving any to cover her retreat, and she apparently did not bother packing a spare magazine despite being given the resources of a fully-stocked armoury when she was preparing to go get Newt. If she had not exterminated the eggs (pointless, given the impending explosion) the queen would not have had reason to personally follow her and cause all the subsequent grief. Needless to say, those problems could also have been averted by simply shooting the queen along with or instead of the eggs. Again, no one complains about this.
Note that I am not complaining about the above aspects of Alien or Aliens. I love both those movies, and think the examples I gave above are nit-picking. The thing is, I think the criticism of Prometheus is also nit-picking, and directly comparable.
My tentative hypothesis for this recent nit-picking is that, unlike the earlier movies which were from a pre-internet era, it is easy for people to congregate in online communities to pick apart inconsistencies in movies they were personally disappointed in, and then anyone who looks at discussions of a movie they just saw will read all of this stuff they might have otherwise just overlooked. Further to the particular example I chose above, lots of people were disappointed with Prometheus particularly because it was not what they wanted: another formulaic Alien or Aliens movie, so that gave them extra incentive to pick it apart.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
As Alien is my all-time favorite movie, I am sad to hear this news. Farewell Harry and thank you!
I'm not sure whether you mean the alien shots look bad because they had to use primitive CGI?
That movie's pretty much all man-in-suit and practical props, with a number of shots using rod puppets on blue screen. Those shots do look bad, but it's because of the bad compositing (not sure if optical compositing or bad, early digital compositing, the blacks and matte lines are horrible). True CGI would have looked and moved worse.
There's pretty much one CGI shot in there though, and that's when the alien's head dome crackles under thermal shock in the foundry (looks like CGI crackles comped onto man-in-suit plate, from memory).
Haven't watched the "behind the scenes DVD" features in a couple years though. I think it even has Richard Edlund and Tom Woodruff talking about how they were one of the last movies to do most everything the old way at that time.
I'd say Alien 3's bigger problem is the development hell it suffered from, as mentioned by others.
> but I can't understand the fascination with Aliens
Aliens is THE perfect movie for me. The story is simple but eventful and with lots of surprises. There are many characters that are well written and who all have their opportunity to shine. Cinematography-wise, it's extremely solid with Cameron as a director, doing some of his very best work. Casting was perfect, everyone fit extremely well in their roles. Even special effects for the most part, were extremely well done and remain believable to this day. And the musical score was the icing on the top.
Really, I can't find anything wrong with Aliens. I like Alien (1) as well but it's a very, very different movie.
I always watch Alien and Aliens back to back. From time to time, if I have more time to kill, I watch Alien 3 ( the extended director's cut ). I watched Alien: Resurrection once and have never watched it again and have no desire to. Terrible movie.
I will never be able to forgive Alien 3 for killing off hicks and newt so unceremoniously ( off screen ). That was so lazy and cowardly, it ruins what is a fun movie to watch.
> It's just that, in each franchise, the other two movies are so much better
Alien 3 is a fun/exciting movie. But it never lived up to Ridley's Alien nor Cameron's Aliens standard.
It is not a terrible movie by a long shot. But when you compare it to the two masterpieces that preceded it, it disappoints.
My 12 yo daughter loves sci-fi movies and we just started watching the Alien franchise in preparation for Alien: Covenant this weekend.
My plan was to show her Alien, Aliens, then Prometheus. I hadn't even planned to watch Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection (or any of the spinoffs like AVP). But after reading this, maybe we should at least watch Alien 3.
Any suggestions?
"I am a huge Alien fan, but I can't understand the fascination with Aliens, it always seemed like a cheap action movie when compared with the true psychological horror of the first one."
Having seen both movies during their original release, I originally liked Aliens more; probably a side-effect of being in my teens and liking guns and explosions. As I've gotten older, as much as I've come to further appreciate the suspense and design of the original, Cameron's film is still one of my favorite movies and IMO is a rare example of a worthy sequel.
In Alien, Ellen Ripley is a victim of circumstance. She's the smarter-than-average crewmember whose advice is largely ignored and despite doing the best she can barely survives an ordeal that should be guaranteed to leave her with a lifetime of PTSD.
In Aliens, we quickly find out that Ripley is once again a victim of circumstance: her lifeboat drifted off course while she was in stasis, resulting in her returning home after decades. Nobody believes her about the Xenomorph, and she's considered a responsible party for the destruction of the ship in the first movie. Deleted scenes (restored in the director's cut, I believe?) revealed that her daughter died of old age before Ripley returned.
She's in rough shape. Traumatized by what happened and relegated to menial work due to her perceived unreliability, she's given a path for redemption: go back to where it all started and help the military (which is revealed to be largely incompetent and impotent when things go south).
Alien is a great horror movie, to be sure. But Aliens is, IMO, a redemption movie when you look past the swagger and gunfire. A smart character who should be in good shape (after being victorious in the first movie) is shown to be a fractured, vulnerable person who still summons the strength to face her fears, rescue another victim of circumstance (Newt), overcome her bias (against Bishop), presumably prevent the problem from ever happening again, and definitively prove that she was right all along.
And all, IMO, without cheapening the first movie and by revisiting one of the strongest female characters to appear in a movie franchise. It nukes the Bechdel test from orbit.
This is also why I hate Alien 3, as it was released, with a burning passion. It completely invalidates Ripley's character arc in Aliens with the lazy reverse deus ex machina of killing Newt, Bishop and Hicks in the first act. I'm not a huge fan of Gibson's screenplay, but it would have been much better than the dreck that was ultimately released.
I think it's just that people have seen Aliens more, because it's easier to jump into it and have a good time, laugh at the "Game over man" scene, etc. Whereas with Alien you are on the edge of your seat the entire time. Much more draining.
Aliens is a bit different from your typical action movie in that the heroes are getting their butts kicked the entire time. The only time where the heroes really had a fist-pump moment was when the 2 sacrificed themselves by blowing up a bomb and taking out a couple of aliens.
> I mean, &#(@, look at the script for Alien and Aliens.
I am a huge Alien fan, but I can't understand the fascination with Aliens, it always seemed like a cheap action movie when compared with the true psychological horror of the first one.
I think the key here, in retrospect, is that this would have been Gibson in his 30s, immediately after writing Count Zero (and Neuromancer before that).
I can't think of a better thematic match to continue on from Aliens.
Also incredibly annoyed that the noted reason it got shot down was "not being innovative enough." I feel like most movies die from overly innovative scripts, whereas most of the classics, reduced to script form, are really simple ideas executed well.
I mean, &#(@, look at the script for Alien and Aliens.
Fun fact: there were no computers involved in the making of 2001. They were too expensive at the time. All of the monitors in the movie were actually back-projected film screens. All of the wiredframe 3D models were literally wire models, painted white, filmed and then projected on the screen.
Using back-projected screens meant 2001 had flat screens which still look modern today --as opposed to the bulbous CRT monitors used in Blade a Runner and Alien.
There's that right. But not all stories are about the corporate world or something like that. A lot of stories are about relationships or Adventures or fictional stories completely. In The stories of our lives, representation is mixed and balanced. So I don't think on-screen world does represent the real world... outside of extending say, inequality present in the corporate world, through narrative, to other Realms where it is not present or not as present. So I think that's a form of bias creation and misrepresentation that doesn't work to promote equality... Or reality.
Secondly, movies are fictional worlds so they can represent whatever their creators choose them to represent. They could be representing more equally. They're not.
To me the misrepresentation of reality and the bias representation of the fictional world in Hollywood movies is a really clear example of sexism.
Just one example and I'm a huge sci-fi fan of the Alien series and Prometheus series. But I was shocked that in the trailer for the new Prometheus movie not only is pretty much everybody white but pretty much everyone he's a man. And I'm like come on it's the future surely the creators can imagine that things are going to be more equal.
> I really think from set-design, costume, and setting perspectives this movie on par with visual feasts from the 70s/80s like Bladerunner, Dune, Star Wars, or Alien.
For those who haven't seen the live-action movie, Kotaku just put up an article showcasing some of the concept art:
http://kotaku.com/the-incredible-art-of-the-ghost-in-the-shell-movie-1794015446
(Except for die-hard fans of GitS, I would not recommend the new movie.)
Hi, thanks for your feedback!
Actually, it's not a bug, but a feature :)
If you want to tell the system that you like particular movie more, than others, you can like it twice or more.
For example, if you like "Alien" a few times, movix will show you more like "similar" films (like Aliens or Predator)
As a big fan of Jodorowsky (L'Incal is one my favourite graphic novels ever), I think we could also unequivocally say that whatever he had made would not have been very faithful to the book. It's quite possible that Dune fans would have been even less happy with Jodorowsky's film than Lynch's.
We also have to remember that this was before Star Wars and Alien. Most scifi at the time was, with some honourable exceptions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain, Solaris), pretty silly, childish, often campy stuff: The Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Moonraker. Pulp origins aside, Star Wars introduces a level of violence, maturity and realism to the genre that stood out at the time, and closer to that of contemporary adult 1970s productions like Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider and so on.
For all the considerable talent involved in the Dune adaptation, it's quite possible — and this eases the pain over the loss of the project a bit — that it would have been closer in tone to something like Zardoz or Flash Gordon, i.e. a big, colourful, but ultimately also a bit silly extravaganza. Even O'Bannon's Alien script was also pretty pulpy and silly until Ridley Scott, David Giler and Walter Hill hammered it into shape.
Well I guess there are different kinds of science fiction - sci-fi that's obviously fiction and doesn't try to pretend to be realistic - Alien, Star Wars, etc. - I'm fine with this - it's just the author taking you in to his own fantasy world - just like Game of Thrones doesn't try to describe how dragons get to be aerodynamic or explain the white walkers superior strength by using dumbed down science.
Then there's Sci-Fi that's actually beleivable - like The Martian - I'm OK with this as well.
But then there's this pseudo-sciency trying to look serious while actually being BS part like Interstellar, The Arrival, etc. The main point of science there is not to be a fictional setting but trying to give a feeling of realism trough sci/techbabble. I don't even mind cheap sci-fi drama movies, for example I liked The Fountain, but when they try to pretend they are realistic that's what breaks the immersion for me completely because I start to critically evaluate the plot and it just falls apart.
Some are close enough that they're believed to have inspired the xenomorphs directly
http://www.livescience.com/43076-meet-phronima-the-barrel-riding-parasite-that-inspired-the-movie-alien.html
When hackers hack in Mr. Robot, they talk about it in ways that actual hackers talk about hacking.
Mr Robot exists as it does because there are now enough people familiar with computers and the relevant concepts to constitute an audience, rather than due to any sudden insight on the part of screenwriters (of which I am one). We know, and have always known, that there's a distinct hacker subculture with its own linguistic tropes, ethos, etc. etc. and that there's been a big gap between reality and how it's portrayed in movies.
We also know (or learn the hard way) that there's a big gap between including enough detail for verisimilitude that will satisfy people who are competent in a particular field, and what the general public wants to watch - which is why you'll continue to see shallow or outright stupid portrayals of hacking in the entertainment industry's output. Why? Primarily [1] because the mass of people are just not interested in any given field that requires nerd-level commitment to understand. The larger the budget required for the film, the larger and more general the audience has to be, and the more accuracy and authenticity will be sacrificed in favor of spectacle and symbolism, which is the most reliable method for getting people to fork over their money in the first place.
Take a recent example from a different context - Jurassic World. The 'plot': capitalists and scientists employ DNA technology to produce a bigger, smarter, more aggressive dinosaur than has ever existed in nature; said dinosaur escapes from confinement and menaces everyone in the vicinity, especially the attractive hero, anti-heroine, and small children that are introduced early in the story. It's basically Frankenstein only with dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, the attractive proxy for the family unit survives and the bad dinosaur is defeated, though not before killing off the most ethically deficient characters by eating them like ham sandwiches.
Now, any biologists worth their salt would cringe at many scenes (if they watch such nonsense at all). Any genetic scientists had to suffer through yet another scene of an annoying smartass mumbling a few meaningless phrases about 'advanced gene splicing' while screens in the background display animations of double helixes and molecules. I think they might have mentioned CRISPR, I'm not sure and have no intention of watching it again to check.
Would Jurassic World have been better if it was more like Primer or Mr Robot, with in-depth discussions of structural factors and real-world constraints, and a hard-science approach that admitted of 1 (one) speculative assumption, from which the rest of the plot flowed organically? Sure,,,if you wanted to make Gattaca - Herpetology Edition. But though gattaca is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi films, neither it nor Primer will ever appeal to a mass audience and so films like that will never have the most recognizable actors or the most astonishing visual spectacles or the same sort of short-term existential anxieties that would result from having to run or your life from a creature the size of an apartment building.
People go to Big Movies to allay their quotidian existential anxieties (about which they often feel helpless) by seeing them safely reflected [2] in contexts that are outside normal human experience. How far outside is primarily inversely proportional to the budget and corresponding box-office performance requirements, while being secondarily proportional to the depth of the underlying existential anxiety.
Hacking in films has simply been a proxy for magic, in line with Clarke's observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic serves an important dramatic function as the source of the unknowable solution to the Intractable Problem with which the story's characters are presented.Thus, magic and its various proxies (specialist bodies of knowledge, from hacking to legal procedure to medical knowledge) is not a black hole which encapsulates the ignorance of the writer (although many inferior or lazy writers abuse it for that purpose) but a singularity which offers the possibility of escape from the otherwise-inexorable logic of the story world; it symbolizes the hope of a future discoverable solution to an otherwise insoluble problem.
A few examples from popular films may illuminate this. In Star Wars the insoluble problem is a spaceship that can blow up an entire planet. The magical device is The Force, a limited but still useful psychokinetic ability. In the Alien films the insoluble problem is an ambulatory disease; the magic device is an artificially intelligent android that can approach the alien closely enough to observe a weakness of some kind (but which has to be temporarily decommissioned first, like Dumbo losing the magic feather). In the Terminator films, the insoluble problem is nuclear conflagration as the crystallization of war in general; the magical device is industrial capitalism's promise of reducing economic inequality (represented by the vast technological superiority of the Terminators themselves).
To wrap up, Mr Robot hasn't killed the Hollywood hacker at all; it has just crushed his dreams and forced him into getting a day job, which is the function that television shows perform relative to movies. You'll still see hackers in movies, but strictly as lip service to a real and increasingly less aspirational employment demographic. This might seem like an odd conclusion to draw, but it's worth bearing in mind that that serial television dramas are general occupational comedies (I'm using the term 'comedy' in the technical sense of everything basically going back to normal at the end of the episode, even if the subject matter isn't funny at all). Consider cop shows; they follow a nice steady formula with an initial outrage, a bit of detective work, an uncomfortable moral confrontation, a setback, and finally a little bit of legal procedure. On the other hand if you watch a movie about cops, they almost invariably take place at the beginnings or ends of the lead characters' careers, and the Best Person in the movie almost invariably has to die.
1. there are other reasons but I don't want to turn this into an essay on screenwriting.
2. A few films address this dichotomy as their subject matter, albeit indirectly. All films have a political dimension insofar as the choice of subject matter and its portrayal reflect some aspect of their originating policy which the creators aim to praise or criticize, but relatively few dramatize the critical process itself; invariably, the subtext of such films is that critical awareness forces us to choose sides in an ongoing moral conflict; or put another way, moral agency comes at the price of other kinds. Generally in these films the lead has to either die or give up the old life completely in an anti-hero pattern.
That design really is abominable in the best possible way. That huge chunky box thing sticking out one side of the watch-face -- ugh. But it's a legend and an icon because of Alien and how it seemed to fit into that movie's world.
Nick Bostrom's research costs £6.99. It is not a research, it is a quick way to make money while the window of opportunity is still open by doing cargo cult science.
I am yet to hear a decent argument about how AI will wipe out the earth. It starts to belong to the same category as politics, nobody knows what they are talking about, but everyone has an opinion. Even the so called "smarts". I remember there were news about Stephen Hawking being concerned about AI, if you watched his interview, he literally pointed his software to the "Existential risk from artificial general intelligence" wikipedia page and read the abstract... Elon Musk started by comparing AI danger to "The Terminator" scenario. Seriously a f* movie? How about we don't go to Mars because of the "Alien" movie? Now he says that "not all scenarios are benign..." - no shit, Scotty.
I agree with all of these but have to add some, because you are missing a lot of the classics.
- Alien (talk about classic Sci-Fi Horror)
- Westworld (watch the movie before the show. Trust me)
- 2001 A Space Odyssey
- The Thing (I've only seen the old one)
- Moon
- Children of Men
- 12 Monkeys
- Gattaca
- Blade Runner
- Dark City
- Akira (anime)
- Primer (my favourite time travel film)
- Interstellar
- Black Mirror
- Psycho-Pass (anime)
And of course everyone needs to watch - The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
2001: A Space Odyssey
Sunshine
Blade Runner, gattaca, the matrix, alien etc.etc. basically just google "best sci fi movies of all time"
Well it's not been mentioned on this page, but without Sega, Alien Isolation would never have been made. Without doubt one of the scariest games I have played, and as a fan of the first Alien film, I feel they beautifully recreated the atmosphere of that masterpiece.
Without Sega I don't think the game would ever have been made, it was in development for years and they developed their own engine for it. Unfortunately it only just broke even, I think maybe they went slightly too far on the fear side. It really does take you to the edge whilst playing it and often feels like you're having to will yourself forward rather than having an enjoyable experience.
Having said that, I'm glad I finished it and props to Sega for funding it.
From the Alien article:
> This is most unusual, if only for being a serif (rather than sans-serif) on-screen computer font in a sci-fi movie.
Goldsmith makes the key point at the end of the interview: film scores are trying to do two things at once (1) do what the film needs and (2) stand alone.
To me, this completely clarifies his conflict with Ridley Scott. The director doesn't care at all about #2. And yes, Scott is right: no one is as close to the film as the director and editor. It's not their job to pad the composer's portfolio, although ironically it seems the composers are rewarded for this "tight coupling" that they strive to avoid.
p.s., I never saw Alien, but I liked the OP and I am a Jerry Goldsmith fan from the Star Trek scores, which I used to love listening to on CD. It seems he was happier with those collaborations because he was allowed to express the "romantic" view that he had of human space exploration.
Another game that leans heavily on the typography and general atmosphere of Alien is Duskers[0]. Most of the reviews I read before playing the game made direct comparisons to the movie.
[0] http://duskers.misfits-attic.com/
The best aspect of Alien, Aliens, and the game Alien: Isolation is how they create a realistic (as in, you feel like you're there) environment. Whether it's a silent, scary thriller or an action movie it really makes you believe in the characters. Aliens is probably one of the few non-drama films that made marines have interesting personalities.
Another great aspect of the first two Alien movies is that the musical score is very sparse and subtle. Those films don't need to use constant music to tell the viewer what to think or feel or notice, which is an amazing effect on it's own.
Haha. This reminds me of "Mother" in the Alien movie. Supercomputer, yet retro.
> I always thought terrorism was feared because it signalled that a group of people would prefer to dominate their host with violence than to assimilate into the predominant culture.
people fear terrorism because it's virtually nonexistent. we fear the thing we have no experience with more than those we do, because the lack of experience lets our lizard brain have a parade. the movie Alien works with this very well.
also... terrorism, aka politically-motivated violence is nothing new. it's just the framing by the mass media that seems to have changed a lot.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_the_Jackal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombings_during_the_Northern_Ireland_Troubles_and_peace_process - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing :
In 2000, Magee spoke about the bombing in an interview with The Sunday Business Post. He told interviewer Tom McGurk that the British government's strategy at the time was to depict the IRA as mere criminals while containing The Troubles within Northern Ireland
(edited in a failed attempt to fix the list formatting)
> Alien & Primer are excellent counterexamples.
Oddly, Prometheus was an excellent example. It's like Ridley Scott documented all the different ways you can make a character totally uninteresting and loathsome, and made sure to include at least one example of each in that movie. What a turd.
I watched it on TV, late at night, as a kid. I remember barely being able to fall asleep out of fear, and I think it took a week for the effects of this movie to wear off. I'm older now and I've seen enough sad, scary and disrupting movies that it doesn't affect me anymore, but I'm pretty sure that if I tried to show it to my SO, I'd have my own Event Horizon right there in the apartment.
EDIT: I also had the "next time I'm picking the movie" moment after I took my then-girlfriend to see Prometheus. The TED2023 trailer looked so cool and I didn't realize it's a prequel to Alien...
I was wondering the other day if Amazon should have just outright bought UPS. I doubt it would be in the public's best interest, but it seems like it would make sense for Amazon.
Of course, they seem to be on track to compete directly with them instead.
I told my friend a few years ago that Amazon was my best guess for an existing company to become "the company" from the Alien movies (or other corporate future scifi), and it seems more and more likely every year.
I am reminded of H. R. Giger's designs for the movie Alien. They don't seem so far-fetched now.
Author here. I wasn't sure if it was bad etiquette to submit my own article to HN but decided in the end that it might actually interest the community.
For fans of metal and sci-fi, I should mention that Dutch musician Arjen Anthony Lucassen does much more than just write science-inspired metal operas for Ayreon. He also has another project called Star One[0], where each song is based on an iconic sci-fi movie, book or series (Blake's 7, Doctor Who, Dune, Alien, Star Trek, A Clockwork Orange...).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_1
Had my ex-partner's oldest kid (age 14) hiding behind the sofa. I too was not popular when he woke up in the middle of the night by a nightmare and blaming it on watching Event Horizon.
I thought he could handle it because we'd just watched all the Alien movies and he quite enjoyed them. He saw Aliens first and I suggested we watch the original/rest, he was quite drawn into suspense of the first film which the others have never quite matched in intensity. I guess Event Horizon was a bit too dark and visceral for his tastes.
My favorite movie UIs are in Alien (mother's terminal) and the interface in Tron Legacy to Encom OS[1].
http://jtnimoy.com/blogs/projects/14881671-tron-legacy
Considering the popularity of Evil Mode, Vim emulation for Emacs, the idea of Vim conceding to Emacs is like the notion that the parasitic Alien in the movie of the same name conceded to Sigourney Weaver's shipmates.
Apocalyptic narrative is as old as writing. Human understanding also grows with technology - the British Empire only banned slavery around 200 years ago.
Dystopian stuff has the same problem for me as horror. All I see is Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd saying "Oooh, scary!"
The only horror movie I ever liked was "Alien". Because it was credible.
So meh.
Unpopular opinion coming through: If you're not easily scared, films made only from scary-stuff-that-isn't-scary are really boring.
I'll give you an example: Alien. Literally all that film is is "they go down to this planet, a spider fucks a guy's face, and then a monster kills everyone." If you're not scared by that stuff, you get nothing out of that film, because there is nothing else that happens. The second one is better, something happens between the characters.
And yeah, I feel this way about The Thing.
This article is quite interesting, and I hope to let my kids have this kind of environment. I'd like to underline here that this kind of parenting is very different from the one shown in a recent post about some 11yo kids watching Alien at home [1].
Watching horror movies is safe for the body, and not recommended for the emotional brain [2]. Exact opposite of these wild playgrounds.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127761
2. Why? It seems obvious to me. Seeing very frightening or disgusting things in movies may make you overreact when facing similar disgusts in real life, or being too easily afraid. After seeing a horror movie as a kid you are afraid of monsters below your bed, afraid of darkness which may have monsters or ghosts. This is not the kind of fear that is even slightly useful. I suppose most of the ghosts stories of the past were actually useful: they prevented kids and adults from going out in the night, where they could be endangered for real. But nowadays no wolves haunt the nights anymore. It may be rational to induce a little bit of fear for cars when walking, so kids keep at safe distance. But I see no reason to raise the fears of the unknown and foreign as done in most horror movie.
Another example is food: fear your plate and you're stomack will be in despair and show (either anorexia or obesity), trust your plate and you're stomack will do it's work properly: which is to keep you in normal shape. (I was so annoyed by this american girl always asking what was the dish made of in the plate: you're in China my girl, dishes are made of hundreds of mysterious things, including pig oil, msg, sichuan pepper, etc. But check the other girls beside you, they're fit, they love to eat, do it all the time, so please just eat this and enjoy it...)
I don't think operating an elevator (etc.) compares to hunting down and decimating the entire crew (almost) one by one. Such behavior is so far more advanced than anything we see in the second movie. There is a real sense that the alien is just plain smarter than everyone in the crew, and in the end ripley just has to run for it. None of this happens in the second movie, where it's just a slaughter fest.
Well you can still be scared by something while knowing its not real, eg there are parts of Alien that always make me jump even though I've seen it many times (I personally prefer original Alien it to the more shoot-em-up sequel).
Sticking with your original context of people owning guns for home defense, while I would never assert that they do so directly in response to horror movies or suchlike, I would argue that such movies often serve an ideological function of embodying our social fears so as to domesticate them, and that this can heighten the perception of risk.
Drop me a line about this if you'd like to continue the conversation. I'm very interested in psychoananalytic approaches to film theory and would be happy to discuss it further.
That c-section was simultaneously the best and worst part of the movie for me. The scene itself was great. Thematically and artistically, it was on-point. It felt like exactly the kind of scene that belongs in an Alien movie.
What I hated is how the rest of the cast failed to react after it was done. They had been trying to capture her, she gets away, gets it cut out of her, and then everyone seems to forget or forgive just because that old guy was coming out of cryo-sleep. They should not have been so easily distracted.
> His comment was how the original alien was smarter than than the crew, but in the second movie the aliens are just dumb animals.
In the first movie, there was only one Alien and it acted more like a lone hunter. In the second movie, there were lots of aliens and they acted like a hive. I think that it's possible for both of these to be consistent with each other.
It doesn't have MySQL-like pluggable storage, and frankly I'm thankful for that. How many of the MySQL storage engines actually work, including transactions for queries working with tables using different storage engines and such? Or support all the features like fulltext, and so on? Whenever I want to get scared at night, I either watch the first "Alien" movie or read "MySQL restrictions and limitations". So no, thank you very much.
OTOH, PostgreSQL code base is one of the cleanest and well structured code bases I've seen, and adding a new storage engine is not all that complicated, assuming you know what you're doing and have time to do that properly. If you just want something simple, managed outside but accessed by SQL, use FDW.
It wasn't that bad (I was negatively disappointed by it and my girlfriend was pissed off at me for taking her to it, but it was because neither of us realized it's a prequel to Alien) - though I still think the best part of this movie was the TED 2023 trailer.
Oh common. I won't downvote you, because that is not what it is for. But why do you presume so much. Depending on the maturity of the kids, 11 years olds can handle Alien movies.
I don't know what slumber party means but it seems completely crazy to have a bunch of kids together and play video games, eat pizza, watch horror movies. Do you want spoiled fat bored and boring kids? Because that's how you get that.
I don't mean to mean that my 5yo boy and I never eat pizza or play video games or watch anime. But when we do it's because we are on our own, a Sunday evening, after having gotten outside with friends, and I'm too tired to play Lego.
Also, alien is really a horror movie, playing hard with the nerves of the audience. Way too hard for 11yo kids if you ask me.
My daughter was almost scarred for life by it. I think she was about 8 and she had a friend living in our building who was 4 years older. The older girl was into scary movies and I mentioned how Alien, the first movie, was one of the scariest I had seen. I explained the whole plot to them and then showed them the movie and they said it wasn't that scary at all. Long story short, I then showed them Aliens. Unfortunately I'd only seen it once and didn't have a strong memory of the plot, in particular I had completely forgotten about Newt. She ended up a number of phobias for the next year or so that she completely blames on me.
> "This movie has so many cliches in it," a boy said (...) My son told him, "This movie was made in 1986. It invented all the cliches."
The first boy was right. It felt full of cliches even then. I watched it in eighties as soon as it was distributed to my place and I all the time I had that feeling of "boring 'we're the marines' movie." And I still can't understand why would anybody consider Aliens an interesting movie. The first Alien is however something else. And I was always amazed to later watch "The Dark Star" made before the Alien and find it (among the other things) an Alien parody made before the Alien(!) It's really so thanks to Dan O Bannon. Now that's something. Aliens... not even worth mentioning.
Watch Alien, watch The Dark Star. Forget the boring Aliens.
Disclaimer: I'm old enough that I've watched the Star Wars in seventies in my movie theatre. And Mad Max. And and and.. Of course Aliens were already cliches and cliches.
> That's because the Ellen Ripley character was originally a man named Martin Roby.
That doesn't make sense to me. Martin Roby was the original character for "Alien" and in the first movie, for the most part Ripley wasn't the bad-ass character she would be throughout the second movie.
But the OP was anyway talking about "Aliens" and there Roby could no longer have been an influence for her character.
I watched Aliens with my 10-year-old daughter a few weeks ago. We had watched Alien a few weeks before. She had wanted to watch a real horror, but couldn't make it through the first few minutes of Scream, so we settled on Alien. She thought the alien bursting out of John Hurt's character was really funny. And it is. She thought the beginning of Aliens was too slow and it wasn't all that scary for her, but she enjoyed the film overall. I don't know if I would watch Prometheus with her - I'm sure she'd agree that film was terrible.
I saw Aliens when it opened and I was about a week from turning 16. I had seen Alien when it came out (my Mom was a movie lover), and had been about a month from turing 9. I had not even seen the trailer so I was expecting another creepy horror film. I was totally blown away, it really felt like an action adventure with some horror. Since then, they released an extended edition with the auto-cannons and it seems like a different film.
Funny thing is the first movie was scary when I saw it, but not something I dwelled on. I did get the big Alien that glowed in the dark for Xmas, and that scared the crap out of me when my Dad hung them by their tails in the basement.
Plus, for how many times you hear: "Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure" or the actual quote "Nuke the entire site from orbit--it’s the only way to be sure", it had to have a bit of an impact.
It's almost a crime to be a writer on RogerEbert.com yet not reference Ebert's classic review of Aliens, so well written that I can still remember his characterization and nod my head at it:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/aliens-1986
> It's here that my nerves started to fail. "Aliens" is absolutely, painfully and unremittingly intense for at least its last hour. Weaver goes into battle to save her colleagues, herself and the little girl, and the aliens drop from the ceiling, pop up out of the floor and crawl out of the ventilation shafts. (In one of the movie's less plausible moments, one alien even seems to know how to work the elevator buttons.) I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it's like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops.
> I don't know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I'm not sure "Aliens" is what we mean by entertainment. Yet I have to be accurate about this movie: It is a superb example of filmmaking craft.
It sounds like all of the kids were boys...It'd be interesting to hear the perspective of girls watching it for the first time. Aliens was one of the first action movies I ever watched (and remembered) and I don't remember ever, at all, thinking that it was odd that a woman was in charge (in fact, all of the strong characters are female). Only years later have I realized that Alien and Aliens (never watched the other Alien movies) were unique among blockbuster movies in how the heroine is both the savior and not written as an object of romantic interest (beyond a brief flirtation with Cpl. Hicks)...Unlike movies like "Kill Bill" (which I love), the woman isn't written as an oddity, but a down-to-earth character who happens to be strong and resourceful. I never even thought Sigourney Weaver was beautiful until seeing her in other non-action movies.
Edit: speaking of watching Aliens as a kid...I think it's the movie that caused the longest-running movie-inspired-phobia in my life...hearing something under my bed, and then not wanting to look under my bed for fear of a facehugger attacking me.
In Germany the film is rated 16+, so this story strikes me as really odd. I wouldn't have thought of showing the film to children any younger than 14, personally.
But I guess this is a cultural thing. We tend to be more prudish when it comes to violence but are a lot more relaxed when it comes to nudity or sexuality.
I do remember watching Alien under age (no idea at what age exactly) and thinking it's the scariest thing I had ever seen, though. However I think it's difficult to tell whether that did me any harm or not. We tend to overestimate our own psyche, just as we tend to overestimate how "adult" our children really are.
Some movies will leave beautiful scars in your minds. The atmosphere of Robocop and Alien still pull me back.
> "I also rewatched Alien, and my god, when they show the whole Alien's body it looks like a guy in a rubber suit. Without CGI, that's the best you can do. A guy in a suit or a crappy puppet."
You should compare Alien to its sequel Aliens. It too used people in suits and puppets to portray the xenomorphs, however due to improved creature design I think it looks miles better.
I recommend watching the entire movie instead of clips of the effects, but even on their own I think Aliens's hold up very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp7SNoYOQmY
I never understood this view. I think there's so much wonderful CGI its unfair to group the good with the bad. CGI has the same problem AI has - when its unnoticed people don't realize its CGI, the same way people don't consider expert systems, personal assistants, etc AI.
I watched the original Star Wars movies recently. I love the set design and costumes, but my god, the aliens and effects were laughable. I literally laughed at Yoda, who looks like a second hand muppet. There's just no way to think any of that looks remotely realistic or good. The scale models look like... well models. The stop motion animation just looks terrible. It was a fine effort for its time, but today its like watching a horse try to outrun a Ferrari.
I also rewatched Alien, and my god, when they show the whole Alien's body it looks like a guy in a rubber suit. Without CGI, that's the best you can do. A guy in a suit or a crappy puppet.
>Likewise, CGI seems to encourage special effects artists to "overload" movie frames
This seems questionable at best. Art direction is either good or bad. A poor craftsman blames his tools.
>Further, CGI characters are forgettable.
Goto to Disney and watch kids completely lose their shit over CGI characters. Not only are these characters not forgotten, they will be this generation's Luke and Leia. Even an old man like me loves CGI characters like General Grevious.
>protracted dark age in filmmaking.
Ah yes, the traditionalist approach. People said the same thing about talkies and color film. Curmudgeonly old men are rarely good judges of the future or the arts.
The prelogy was as much badly done than badly timed, they were still trying to go over using the technology[1] for the sake of it, nowadays you see people using CGI to help the experience more often.
People will probably realize that all of this is unnecessary. There was a video on youtube showing how much CGI there was even in a movie like The wolf of Wall Street. It's incredible how everything is faked (scenery, mood, ...), you end up wondering how people did make movies at all before. Well they did it pretty well.
CGI characters and stage are bad because they lack .. depth. I watch Alien often and only a few seconds of it sucks you into the ship. Same for Blade Runner, the guys are walking in an actual street, it probably embeds the whole crew a lot more, giving realism that can't be achieved in green rooms (Star Wars < 4 shined in this department, it was as bad a Soap Operas).
All of this require good sense and good sense of measure. Terminator 2 SFX very pretty crude in retrospect, but the editing made them blend perfectly. If you do frame by frame you'll laugh as some shots were really bad, but in real time, it never shows, the pace, framing, action compels your mind to think about the story, not the pixels.
[1] which makes the original trilogy even more impressive, most was invented on the spot yet it wasn't detrimental to the story.
I remember wondering if the Joy Division album cover was related to one of the computer displays shown in the movie Alien. Here's an image of the two side by side (scroll down a bit):
http://asiwyfab.de/2013/02/04/random-music-fact-30/
In my early teens I watched Alien the first time, I thought it was boring and lamer than Aliens.
In my twenties, I decided to watch both again, and it was only then I could deeply appreciated the brilliance of a true genuine horror sci-fi movie.
OT: This is a throwaway comment in a caption near the end:
> Samus’ underwear are a reference to what Ellen Ripley wears at the end of Alien, but Alien had a reason for it.
A little OT, but I believe Alien and Aliens may be the only popular movies we'll ever get in which the heroine whose gender isn't treated as anything more than a matter of fact. In both movies, she has nearly zero amount of dialogue relating to romantic interest, and acts and is treated as just someone, not specifically a woman, on the crew...which makes sense given that the character was originally written for a man. Even her climactic victories arise organically from her character background, not in a cartoonish let's-see-women-kick-some-ass, as with the Bride in the Kill Bill series...Early on in Aliens, she is shown proficiently operating a Power Loader because of her past work experience, which foreshadows the final confrontation...in fact, it's funny that Ripley is sometimes referred to as a kickass gunslinger, when it is her inept use of flamethrowers and grenades that inadvertently lead to the final fight.
Anyway, this is just a long way of saying that Alien and Aliens are still not only two of the best action/sci-fi movies out there, but perhaps the only times in a major movie in which the woman is so asexual (the closest comparison I can think of is Marge Gunderson in Fargo)...So when that she does appear in her underwear at the end of both movies...it feels logical (she's getting into the cyrochamber), and not as a contrived way to capitalize off the sexiness of the actress. I guess it was "cool" that Samus was revealed to be a woman at the end, but the race to beat the game to see more of her underwear was an unnecessary bit of game design, IMO.
Heh, I loved the term "truckers in space", which pretty accurately described some of the characters in Alien - Brett, Parker, Dallas.
Speaking of Ridley Scott, my favorite movie of all time is Blade Runner. I was watching it the other day, and noticed that the incept dates of some of replicants were 2016. Oh boy, Ridley got that one wrong. But they still used payphones too, like in Alien. Remember Deckard calling Rachel from the video pay phone at the bar?
So it seems like filmmakers predictions either grossly mispredict the amount of technological progress at the big scale. Everybody thought there would be moon colonies by now, or advanced cyborgs. Or they don't see the technological innovation at the small scale. They can't see things like cell phones, the internet, etc..
I have seen several movies with the 70s or so, with flat screens hanging on the wall. So I guess they ocassionally get things right
That would be the "most popular" films of 1979, as rated in recent years.
Here's imdb's biggest films of 1979 by US box office:
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=1979,1979
Alien is thrashed by Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Moonraker. Apocalypse Now is thrashed by The Muppet Movie.
------
"The U.S. is not waging the Cold War in outer space. We have no moon colonies, and our supercomputers are not nearly as super as the murderous HAL. "
2001 was a prescient film, but the details have turned out somewhat differently than Kubrick and Clarke imagined. HAL was portrayed as truly sentient. The same cannot be said of any AI existing today. However, HAL was also immensely limited. He was like a servant or child in his abilities. He was not the the oracle and gateway to the sum of all human knowledge, as the computers of today have become. If you asked HAL how to build a boat or how to score a date with a beautiful woman, he'd have been baffled. Google, on the other hand... HAL also had a large central core that could be attacked. If we built a true AI today, it's possible that the brains of such a beast could be the size of a pocket watch and the software copied and transferred freely. If such a viral consciousness had infested the Discovery, Dave would truly have had nothing to strike back against. HAL would not have been a single consciousness, but a legion!
Meanwhile, the U.S. is very much still engaged in a struggle for control of space. Other challengers have appeared, but Russia hasn't gone anywhere, and that particular war seems to be getting colder by the minute. However, the commercialization of space has been late in coming. Pan Am's collapse must have delayed things somewhat. However, it's finally starting to happen.
------
"Mother, on the other hand, spends the whole movie like a fated southern belle hooked on laudanum, locked in her room. She can’t even advise on how to defeat the monster. The computer cannot help. No costly investment in heavy capital will keep nature at bay. "
Alien does indeed present a very different view of technology. Where, in 2001, technology was the tool of humanity, uplifting it to greater and greater heights, in Alien technology cannot overcome the base nature of humans. The people in space aren't heroes or explorers, but working-class stiffs trying to make a living. Technology serves its owners first and foremost. The corporation's interests reign supreme, even over the space workers very lives. This vision too is both wrong yet prescient. The computers of today are of tremendous help, but are also tools of control. You can ask google how to do practically anything, but you have to accept the fact that your request will be logged by the NSA (and probably other organizations) for future reference should you ever be naughty. Computers do not directly control us, but other humans use computers to tell us how to do things. For example, look up why UPS drivers are trained to avoid turning left. Computers and automation have eliminated many jobs, but always seem to create even more in the process.
-------
The last few years have greatly increased my optimism for the future. It seems that we're finally pulling out of the cyberpunk dystopian funk of the last decade or so and trying to do "big" things once again. Electric cars are finally a practical reality. Self driving cars are close at hand. Private space flight is taking off. People are talking about capturing and bringing asteroids down to Earth for their resources. Space elevators that will make getting bulk quantities of material off of Earth seem almost possible. Quantum cryptology is currently in limited use and expanding, and may one day offer us all security from the NSA's of the world, even should they gain the tremendous power of quantum computers, which themselves will offer humanity fantastic new abilities. 3D printing is rapidly improving and making new things possible, and our advances in nanotechnology will only amplify and ramify their capabilities. It's an exciting time to be alive, even in spite of all the nicks and cuts we receive from the other side of every new sword we invent. Humanity needs to keep its ideals and be on guard against the darker half of it's nature, but there are many great reasons to think we might just surprise ourselves and turn out okay after all.
Even though I've got a keen interest in computer graphics I've always found well-done live-action special effects to be more engaging than digital effects. There are movies who don't abuse the seemingly limitless power of computing but in my opinion there are surprisingly few.
Good examples where analog > digital: all the Ray Harryhausen movies, Alien, Aliens, Blade Runner, Terminator, Predator...
Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle is definitely worth a read. Valis [or is it VALIS?] is also an interesting read...in the psychotropic sense of "interesting".
I found Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep worth a read for the way in which it differs from the movie...the importance as status symbols of synthetic animals in the novella and its implications in regard to synthetic human lives a more compelling theme than the straightforward human rights theme of Blade Runner [or Alien from the same period in film].
What's funny is that I consider God Emperor and beyond to be the Dune series books worth skipping, but that's probably because they came out after I had read the first three...at the time, trilogies were the thing due to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Assimov's Foundation series [later to also be extended like Herbert's epic opus].
This leads to what strikes me as a potentially negative heuristic for determining what moments in a given film have worth. Summer flick drivel aside, would RunPee assign a high pee time to, say, Drive, which has a significant amount of mood-setting long shots without any dialogue or plot-relevant action?
Excuse me for probably taking this too far, but this app seems to imply that films are merely the sum of plot-related scenes, and that doesn't sit quite well with me. Would the app consider every establishing shot in Alien to be pee-able?
I got to meet the artist when his 'Alien' creation was on display at the California Science Center in Exposition Park. They had a number of sets from the movie on display and the full size creature that was what they build CGI and other latex models from. I remember "Wow, this guy seems completely normal for someone who has the ability to envision something so twisted." It is a rare gift to be able to think about impossible things.
[Spoiler?] If the movie is called "Alien", is it really a spoiler to say that you see the alien by the end? I suspect that most of the movie is spent dreading the eventuality that we all expect. ;) Granted it's been a long time since I saw the movie, so I might have forgotten why it's a spoiler.
edit: I suspect that I saw Aliens before Alien, and therefore already had an expectation of what it would look like. Thanks to the sibling/cousin comments for explaining that :)
Good idea, but [ SPOILER ALERT!! ] remember to watch the original version, the one where you don’t see the alien till the last minute of the movie.
OK, to go off on a tangent...here's the best example I can think of that illustrates the imbalance of gender neutral roles that men take for granted and that women basically have never had: the only time I can think of, in American entertainment history, that a woman achieved the authority and an unforgettable identity that had nothing to do with "...because she's a woman" is: Ripley in Alien and Aliens (never saw 3 and 4, and probably never will).
In fact, she was so good at being "just" Ripley that it wasn't until I saw Sigourney Weaver in other movies did I realize, "Huh, Sigourney Weaver is a woman and she is hot"...She is the only female character I can think of in which her gender has no real bearing to how she acts, what she says, or how she is presented on screen.
I challenge anyone to think of any other woman character who follows Ripley's mold:
1. Does not overtly seek a romantic relationship
2. Sexual tension is not a compelling foil or conflict for the character
3. Is not thrown into an action role purely for the spectacle of a woman kicking ass
4. Is not shouted down or treated differently specifically because she is a woman.
5. Is not shown in a gratuitously sexual light (she is in her underwear the same time everyone else is logically in their underwear).
6. Is unequivocally the hero of the movie. In fact, in both movies [spoiler alert for 20 year old movies], it's quite notable that she is literally the last human being standing, and she wins on her own terms.
No other contenders, that I can think of, meet this standard, especially in the action film role: Catwoman, Aeon Flux, Tomb Raider...nope. Clarice Starling...even if you want to argue that no sexual tension exists between her and Hannibal Lecter (even though he specifically refers to it), much of the non-gruesome psychological conflict her character faces is precisely because she is a woman in a (tall) man's world. Beatrice in Kill Bill...great role, but again, it only works because she is a woman and it is a spectacle, even if empowering (i.e. could you imagine Kill Bill being made with a man in the role?)
The only woman character who comes close to the unisex appeal of Ripley is Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickings...whereas for males, there are too many to count.
Anyway, I sometimes wonder how much growing up with Alien/Aliens affected how I think about gender roles and imbalance. Those being among the first and the most interesting of the action movies I'd ever seen (then, and today), I kind of think that the idea of a woman action hero was completely normal to me. And yet, as far as I can see, no one like Ripley has since been written...
Very interesting! My follow-up post to Moon is actually Alien, and I've come to a similar realization. I reckon the main reason that 2001: A Space Odyssey hasn't aged half as much as Alien, or Silent Running, or other 70s/80s sci-fi, is that in 2001, all of the monitors are flat-screen displays, not curved CRTs. Ironically, this is only because they didn't have the computing power to generate the HAL graphics on an actual computer, and so it was all hand-animated on film and then back-projected onto a flat display. This combination of flatness and high-resolution animation means that it looks just like the retina displays of today.
I notice a recurring theme of '80s retro-futurism in Moon. It all looks like the way we imagined the future at the peak of the Space Shuttle, but with little nods to modern technology to avoid obvious anachronisms. Brilliant design.
For example, the black-backgrounded GUIs with wide text on them remind me of old DOS-era applications, but they're displayed on modern high-resolution flat-panel displays.
The T-shirt is also painfully '80s, as directly noted. The only music mentioned is an early-'90s song that was hokey the day it came out. The Flowbee and the magazine are other noted '80sisms.
The rescue-crew-manifest with poor-quality black-and-white images on a color screen? That could've been lifted directly from the '80s-era Alien films.
Which really, all makes sense - the '80s were the end of the space race. For space-travel nostalgia, that's where you go for modern Gen X movie fans.
Maybe because movies are more impressionist/symbolic devices rather than simulations. I personally don't care about 4K HD, or 100Hz and 3D. Everytime I read about these, I remember the first minute of Alien. No 3D, no green screen, analog ... yet I feel immersed into a ship.
There are many, many movies with women as the main actrice. Even female heroes.
What do you mean by hero, somebody who carries heavy guns and mows down lots of enemies? Even those exist, for example Resident Evil (totally unrealistic of course).
Have you even actually counted the movies with male and female heroes, or do you just have a gut feeling that there are only few female heroes?
While you are counting, you could also count how many men die as collateral damage ("guards") vs how many women.
Edit: some more I remembered in the meantime: Underworld series, Alien series, Aeon Flux, Buffy, Dark Angel, Nikita
Questionable. I work in the film trade, and while people may consider a logline or a one-sheet, when some reads a script they sit down and read it start to finish, like a book. It's going to play in linear form on the screen, so it has to be read that way as well.
What authors usually do is is knock out a freeform treatment where the story is described in prose, which is then broken down into scenes. It is helpful to have the overview in mind during the writing process, but existing tools such as Final Draft provide a plethora of writing aids for that, from virtual index cards to graphical character timelines.
Bear in mind that when you work with finished scripts like the Alien example, you've got a survivor bias problem, because almost any story that makes it through the screen has been through multiple drafts and hundreds or thousands of mini-edits. So while it seems very natural to lay that out in a neat hierarchy, that doesn't really reflect the writing environment, which is a lot more messy.
As for keeping track of story context, this is job one for the writer - you can beef up the dialog or whatever later, but writers, directors and other keys need to be able to keep the entire story in their head at once and know what the inputs and and outputs of any given scene are, not least because 99.9% of films are shot out of chronological sequence and so being able to keep a handle on that story context is essential for guiding the actors. Obviously you don't try to remember every last little thing at once, that's why we use storyboards and breakdown sheets, but you do need to be able to articulate the whole story off the cuff at the drop of a hat.
I do think this would very useful for film students doing analysis, but I can't really see myself writing a script in it, although I'll try doing some treatments with it.
BTW I also feel that if you offer people the opportunity to try it, you should let them try it, not switch to asking for a signup. That really annoyed me.
I like the use case for reading movie scripts, it could help to keep all levels of the story in mind:
https://gingkoapp.com/Alien-1979
I like that you ask for mindfck movies. They definitely hold a special place in my heart. A lot of the entries here have been very sci-fi. I tend to like more historical or present-day dramas with great acting that expose some sort of undesirable human behavior, but I snuck a sci-fi movie on the list ;). You can't take the nerd out of the cinephile!
There Will Be Blood - No "great movie" list is complete without a movie that stars Daniel Day Lewis. Go watch all his movies if you want to see what it's like to take acting to the extreme.
(M) The Spanish Prisoner - Probably my favorite suspense movie, along with a Hitchcock or two like Vertigo or Rear Window. This is one of David Mamet's best, in my opinion. All these random things happen in the beginning of the movie that make you question why they bothered mentioning them, and then the catalytic action ties it all together expertly.
Pirates of Silicon Valley - This is the lightest contribution on the list, but probably the most relevant to HN. For what it's worth, both Woz and Bill Gates have described their portrayals as fairly accurate.
Alien - Definitely plays out more like a space horror film than an action movie like the sequels, the acting and suspense is fantastic, not to mention the costume work that went into the alien on the part of HR Giger (if you want a true mindfck, skip the movies and go read his website--terrifying).
Grave of the Fireflies - I wanted to include an animated film on my list, but I really had trouble deciding between Interstella 5555 (Daft Punk's Discovery set to an anime with no talking whatsoever. Great concept) and a Pixar movie (personal favorite: Up). I went with this because I figured you've probably seen Pixar movies. Grave of the Fireflies is a super depressing Ghibli film about the aftermath of the Kobe fire bombings in WW2. The way the movie shows the horrible living conditions and bleak outcomes of the two main characters (the boy is in his early teens and his sister must be around 4 or 5--I can't recall). The movie manipulates your emotions more than any other film I've included on this list. I don't think I've ever had as strong an emotional reaction to a movie as when I saw this one.
... and its about time! "Android" has somewhat sinister connotations. Motorola ran with the concept in their marketing of their "droid" phones and it looks like something from the movie Alien, probably not the best strategy to entice half the population: females.
As in so many creative endeavours it's the limitations which make the art. It's not always about going for perfection, but it always has to be emotional.
Which is a more powerful statement? This: http://virgo.bibl.u-szeged.hu/wm/paint/auth/monet/parliament/1905.jpg
or this: http://isitthattime.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/fog-over-the-houses-of-parliament.jpg?w=610&h=406
There's no question that the latter is more technically accurate, more lifelike, more realistic, but it lacks the guttural punch of the Monet. Monet was a master, but only by exploiting the limitations of his medium could he attain that mastery.
So it goes with film. A decent cinematographer uses the inherent faults of film to convey emotion. Without the low dynamic range of film, the dark corners of the Nostromo in Alien would have looked like a plywood movie set. Without lens flare and blown highlights then the plight of a dehydrated hero in the desert would be much harder to get across. Those things - 24fps, lens flare, low range, depth of field - have become part of our shared culture now. So much so that even media which aim for perfect realism (eg video games) mimic some of them to aid immersion and, once again, heighten the emotional response.
Beyond Good and Evil
American McGee's Alice
Resident Evil
Perfect Dark
Old NES Games based on the Alien movies (Ripley)
Donkey Kong Country 3 (Diddy Kong is the main character)
Chrono Trigger's main hero is a male, but 3 of the other 6 playables are strong females (2 of the others are a Frog and a Robot)
There are definitely more games with male protagonists than female, but there are enough to list.
This isn't just HBO Go, or even just third-party apps – first-party video playback on iOS will, depending on hidden flags from iTunes store purchases, arbitrarily disable video over AirPlay.
A friend and I found this out the hard way one afternoon when we decided to rent Ridley Scott's Alien, in anticipation of seeing Prometheus. He pulled up the store on his iPhone, found the movie, selected Rent: HD, and signed on to my wi-fi network, my Apple TV appearing on his iPhone without a hiccup. So far, pure Apple seamlessness – until he selected the AirPlay output. The audio played back over my speakers, but the video remained on the 3.5" screen.
Thinking resourcefully, I suggested he try AirPlay mirroring. This, at last, gave us the "fuck you, consumer" from the studio in explicit form: a message appeared on his phone saying the AirPlay display couldn't be trusted.
We both resolved never to use the iTunes store for movies again.
Hmm. A strange article. A mix of really good points soaked in bitterness.
I spend the bulk of my time in Beijing, Taipei, and Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia). My take is slightly different.
Well, a lot is true. The property thing, definitely. The state industry takeovers is scary; you have to get a sense for what industries they don't mind foreigners in, and which they do. Media? Yeah, you don't want to own a media company in China as a non-Chinese. The same is true with energy and raw materials. Probably not true for manufacturing, education, and consumer goods. So, that's a weird and surreal and true point.
But some things seem dead-off. The Chinese seem much more community oriented than the West. On mornings I'm up early, there's always large groups of people doing Tai Chi, or moving around doing a sword-dance, or other group exercises. Likewise, there's huge groups of people singing, dancing, waltzing, in the evenings. Families go out and play together a lot. At least, that's what I see in CBD in Beijing.
The thing about the Chinese loving money and size is true. It's not as bleak as it sounds though, it's probably similar to 1950's America in that sense. You've got people who were raised lower on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, so they're very pro-money and pro-security. It's all pretty upfront, and everyone is in to hard work, credentialing, and earning well. My friend is married to a Chinese woman, and we were working something like 12+ hours a day for a while. Since his work/life balance was totally destroyed on the projects we were on, I apologized to her one day at their house. "Hey, sorry we're working so much..." and she replies: "You're making money?" I say, "Yeah, we're making money." She says: "Okay! No problem then, keep making money! I'm glad you two are doing it!" They named their cat "Wangtzai" (spelling?), which translates to "Bring money." Yeah, they named their cat "Bring money." But they're also happy and have a good home life together. She just respects working a lot and wants her husband to work a lot. That's where she's at mentally.
This part struck me as the most off --
> [China] does not welcome intruders—unless they happen to be militarily superior and invade from the north, as did two imperial dynasties, the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Qing (1644-1911), who became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves. Moreover, the fates of the Mongols, who became the Yuan, and Manchu, who became the Qing, provide the ultimate deterrent: “Invade us and be consumed from the inside,” rather like the movie Alien.
It's not like "Alien" -- it's more like, China was so much more artistically and culturally sophisticated that even invaders assimilated the conquered culture, and happily so. It's little known that the Mongols (Yuan) built the Forbidden City at first. It was called "Forbidden" since it was Mongolian-only, preserving some of Mongolian Steppe Culture even within China. Likewise, Mandarin is the Manchu language... the ethnic minority that conquered China and became the Qing. The Han (majority) now speaks the minority's language, since it was widely spoken in courts and high level administration under the Qing Dynasty.
But why did the Manchu become more Han-like and base out of Beijing? Because it was a pretty amazing place, and by and large it always has been.
I don't know, maybe I'll get China-fatigue at some point. I agree with his point that you'll never be really truly Chinese in China, but foreigners also get all kinds of additional respect and benefits for being foreign, along with a tacit okay to break certain customs and decorums because you don't know better. For foreigners in China who speak Chinese, it's even better -- you get delight from everyone you interact with, and lots of respect (arguably, undeservedly so)... so yeah, it's good and bad. The article comes across overly jaded, though I suppose the idea to not start a media company or buy residential housing are both good pieces of advice!
Says the guy with a username of the ship in the sci-fi movie Alien! (Just observing a humorous juxtaposition.)
Anyway, your point is noted. One of my favorite tweets ever was one by Amy Jane Gruber, to the effect of: Boys say “If we get a dog, I’ll clean up after it,” and men say, “If we get a Dyson, I’ll vacuum!”
Actually the influences for Starcraft were -- I think -- much broader than those for Warcraft.
Warcraft was heavily inspired by Tolkien and Warhammer, whereas Starcraft drew inspiration from basically every sci-fi series ever made, most particularly the Alien series (compare the Zerg Hydralisk to Giger's Alien) and of course from the art direction of Starship Troopers. But yeah, Warhammer 40K was inspirational too.
The artwork for the two alien races in Starcraft were each redone three separate times. The biggest challenge was that players couldn't easily (and quickly) grok the differences between the various units.
In Warcraft, you look at a lumber mill or barracks, and you have an idea what it is and what it might be used for. In Starcraft the difficulty was that -- upon initially playing the game -- it was tough to tell what any unit or building did for you.
Consequently making game units that looked visually familiar by including known sci-fi elements is useful in that -- when done well -- gives players a clue as to the function of a unit.
Or at least that's what we told ourselves when we ripped elements from other games & movies :)
It's a 30 year old movie.
Alien is nearly 35 years old.
There have been a bunch of movies made since then that OP may have thought he needed to watch - thus not having time to watch the actually good movies.
I'm about to watch both of these in the next month, so it'll be interesting to see the clunky bits. Visions of the future from the past are fascinating. (See also the Gibson story "The Gernsback Continuum".)
One of the themes of nearly all the Alien movies, at least the ones without Predators in them, is dysfunctional leadership and management. (I've not seen the A vs. P movies myself. So I can't comment on them.)
I don't know anyway to go into details without spoilers, which I'll try to keep to a minimum (but you are warned). Suffice it to say that roots of the mission in the movie were not as disclosed to the members, so it's not really surprising that the scientists were as dysfunctional a lot as they were. In fact that would seem to have been a design consideration.
It's a movie about fear, greed, hubris, invasiveness, mythology, and mystery. It's not a juried science article. I enjoyed it myself.
* Spoiler * Having said that, I did think that woman was awfully spry after her emergency, self administered "cesarean" procedure. The wonders of modern medicine ...
Edit: One of the things the movie made me think of were several of the disastrous late 19th century, early 20th century polar expeditions.
You can certainly make a case for the argument that in the future things are and will be better. But that would make for a very dull science fiction horror movie.
Have to disagree with this. It's an interesting attempt at criticism, but I think it's stretching too far.
What Prometheus is "actually about" is sucking dollars out of moviegoers' wallets.
For many years Ridley Scott resisted the calls to revisit the "Alien" universe, and when he finally gave in he produced a shallow, overly-marketed, slickly commercial film that looks great but lacks a soul. We've seen this before: the Star Wars prequels (which disappointed fans also tried to analyze and criticize into something more meaningful).
Prometheus was a dud; let's just accept that and go watch "Alien" on Blu-Ray.
Excellent movie.
Two of the creators in Dark Star (Dan O'Bannon and Ron Cobb) worked on Star Wars, Alien, others. Also George Lucas was of course aware of Dark Star. So it's a bit different from mere predating/anticipating.
(Though you are probably aware of that)
The novel, short story and so on are absolutely tools used to build things[1]. So are genres (sci-fi, fantasy), narrative modes (free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness), and even rhythms or styles (see the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses for an extreme example). Concepts are generative: if you decide to write a Künstlerroman, a lot of the heavy lifting is done for you.
That said, a single writer can't, as a general rule[2], "use [their] ability to make using [their] ability easier" in this way, since genres, modes and the like don't "just work." Even when they descend from the work of one or a few innovators, there's a long process of consensus-building that has to take place before new concepts become conventional and, as a result, productive.
1. The screenplay (for both film and television) in particular is structurally very rigid, although slug lines and such admit more variation than most people think. And the actual writing is capable of great variety. Check out the original Alien script (http://sfy.ru/?script=alien) or the Alien-inspired style of WALL•E.
2. Though of course it happens: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, et al.
The “we’re X for Y” is awesome because it is a simple, powerful positioning. That's also why it can be misunderstood so easily.
The same model is used in pitching screenplays and movies. Alien, famously, was pitched as "Jaws in space". It works because it sticks, but doesn't define the field (the plot etc) too much. Similarly, startups using the “we’re X for Y” are giving themselves a quick mental positioning in the mind of the listener, but without carving an exact niche. It is easier to work up or broaden from defining the idea ('the beachhead') that way.
The way to misunderstand it is think that they mean to do exactly that. "What, they're taking a giant shark onto a spaceship?"
Star Wars and Alien drew from his work indirectly. Notably his work on the scrapped Dune movie that started Salvadore Dali and was directed by Jodorowsky.
"For scientific reasons, isolated species such as these should be preserved. To study, inform and provide living examples of the diversity of life that existed before the ubiquity of modern human civilisation eradicated so much."
These are two contradictory statements in one statement. Either we preserve, in which case there is no 'before' in your sentence (because there is no eradication), or we don't, and we document what once existed. I'll interpret your intent as being 'we should preserve all species so that we can study them and let people know about them'. But then again the question becomes 'why'. Not everything is worthy of study or preservation. With several millions of different species of insects alone, some just being random mutations of others, why should we exhaustively catalog all of them? They are just the result of randomness, we ended up where we are out of stochasticity. What is the underlying reason to preserve a random state of nature? Change is natural, things come and go, so do species - nothing out of the ordinary about it.
"Creatures such as these... adapted in an isolated island to grow fat and large, without competition from mammalian predators on connected land-masses, shine a light on Darwinian evolution."
Please tell what they tell us, or might tell us, that we don't know yet, and what we can learn from them that requires a full reintroduction into existing ecosystems of them.
"And from a purely 'awwww' perspective"
Ignoring the ad hominem fallacious reasoning, they have nothing that makes them so special that only they could survive these circumstance and that we can learn from; just a dumb coming together of circumstances, survivor bias.
"We've GOT A FUCKING ALIEN-LIKE SPECIES LIVING ON AN OCEAN OUTCROP HERE ON EARTH."
Here I'm losing you completely. What is 'alien-like' about them, except from having the same color as the antagonist in the 'alien' movie series? They're just big bugs, so what? I seems like you're trying to say that because they look like something movie producers imagined hostile alien life forms would look like, that that makes them worthy of special treatment? Why would you put such value into something - just because it looks like a CGI effect from a Hollywood movie?
"A complex, beautiful, rare insect (did you watch the hatching vid?)... and you wonder why it's worth keeping it around?"
None of the things you mention in the first part of your sentence indicate in any way why one would expend effort at keeping it, it all falls back on circular reasoning and 'because it's unique'. Not everything that is unique is worth keeping. I have a broken pencil here on my desk that is in its shape statistically very likely to be unique in the whole world. I'll still throw it away.
Actually, I managed to change my girlfriend a bit in that respect. I think the biggest problem of SciFi is that its mostly associated with Star Wars and Star Trek, the first is a geekfest for nerds and the second is a very special facet (both not bad, but hey) and also associated as "boy things" already.
We actually watched more thoughtful things like Blade Runner and discussed the film afterwards. Half-SciFIs like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which have a more subtle use of SciFI-topics are also good. Its best if you can say "hey, you just watched a SciFI movie" without her realizing that at first. Firefly is also good, because there is not spaceship-shooting-at-things stuff. As my girlfriend is a suspense fan, Alien will be up next :).
And yes, I know half of the story of DA because my girlfriend is far ahead of me :).
Indeed. There is an opportunity for those kind of productions as evidenced by some movies already out there (Primer, Blairwitch Project, Paranormal activity), but not all of content is suited for those productions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Schindler's List... actually most aren't well suited).
But, you make an interesting point. Ultra low budget movies, character or story driven ideas could get funded and developed via kickstarter, but you still have most of productions which aren't suitable for low budgets no matter what.
If the directors of the first two Alien films are returning to sci-fi, I wonder if David Fincher will follow.
"I hate when a company is the something for something else. Be unique."
While I'm with you on the concern with the tainted associated, I couldn't disagree more with the above sentiment. Conveying something in a few words incredibly powerful and incredibly hard... Starting with something your audience is familiar with is an incredible asset.
It doesn't cheapen the movie "Alien" to pitch it as "Jaws on a spaceship". (hat tip to the book "Made to Stick").
Why bring chat roulette into it?
Because it's been a phenomenally successful concept that millions already understand conceptually. And because it highlights their USP -- live, instant matching of language partners -- when their competitors who use vanilla video chat services require you to schedule online conferences.
'The something-of-something-else' pattern is incredibly useful as a means of introducing new services and ideas. (My favourite is from Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon, who famously pitched the film 'Alien' as 'Jaws in space'.) Sure -- you might take on the negative elements of the service you're comparing yourselves with as well as the positive ones, but as long as you have answers for those questions (e.g. "Good question. Our community is self-policing, and we review and ban users who misbehave."), then I see little harm in it.
no. security and government decency is telling everyone "we spend x billions here and use z and y to encrypt access to it"
what happens is "we spent x billions on toilet seats (to quote an alien movie) and password go over the air unencrypted, but we are not telling you the frequency"
I believed that Alien was inspired by The Voyage of the Space Beagle, but Dan O'Bannon (the screenplay writer) denied it: "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(film)#Origins
This is as close as is gets in real life to the movie 'Alien'. Was Ridley Scott inspired by this in some way?
I don't get it, not having an immediate mental picture of the haircuts in the various Alien movies ready to hand.
But is the fact that movies with short hair look less "dated" just due to the fact that we live in a time where long hair is out? In thirty years if long hair becomes popular again will our short-haired movies look horrendously dated and Luke Skywalker look up-to-the-minute?
I agree entirely with the various posts as to why Blade Runner has held up so well - the keen visual style, the incredible craftsmanship of Trumbull, and least of which - Ridley Scott's brilliant directing.
There is one other thing that I pointed out 10+ years ago in a film class that's often overlooked - the hair styles of the film (and also Alien 1).
Seriously, think about what a smart/bold design move it was to have everyone in such short hair - it's timeless. If you think I'm joking compare Alien 1 or Blade Runner to Aliens By James Cameron - a movie can be dated by mishandling such a small detail.
The other thing I love is how thorough Ridley Scott, Sid Mead, Dan O'Bannon and Trumbull's vision is in both Blade Runner and Alien (1); so dense and fully realized you get the sense that the doom shipped Nostromo departed Blade-Runner earth. Classic, incredible films.
It amazes me how that scene today still looks realistic.
It reminds me of Alien 1's ship interior built with spare parts of vacuum cleaners I think, it just brought so much more details that you couldn't get from CGI for at least 20 years.
I miss these old scifi movies where the special effects were crafted by hand. They had a real feel, that I still don't get from 'so clean yet dirtied' CGI.
Some years ago I watched a fascinating documentary on Jean Giraud (Moebius), one of the visionaries mentioned here that Jodorowsky gathered under his banner for a time. Before watching this film, I had no real idea how all these guys who were involved in or inspired some of my favourite science fiction had come together. The doco mentions how the original screenplay by Dan O'Bannon for Alien was what he did after the collapse of Jodorowsky's Dune project and that much of the team that had assembled for Jodorowsky's Dune (Giger, O'Bannon, Giraud) went on to work on Alien.
I highly recommend this doco if you are interested in the topic of this post and am pleased to find that it can be viewed here:
http://www.cgexplorer.com/2009/05/05/moebius-redux-video/
Ridley Scott shouldn't be underestimated as a director. Blade runner works not only as a narrative, but also as a sequence of images designed to evoke raw emotions and reflection about the future and technological progress. It's the visual analogue of a tone poem. You can turn the volume down to O and appreciate the film on this level. The 1st Alien has the exact same thing going on.
It was intended as a compliment. PkD was rather a counter culture figure and was 'less than impressed' with Hollywood's attempts at his (or any other) book.
When he saw Ridley Scotts's work on the visuals of Blade runner he was amazed. Remember before this, and Scott's Alien most SF films consisted of putting the star in spandex and drapping the set with some tin foil.
This is especially gracious since Blade Runner takes one tiny part of a complex themed book and turns it into little more than a cop chase. He might have been less impressed with some of the later recreations of his books.
A simple script isn't the same thing as a bad script, though. Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, Alien... these are simple scripts, but they were all turned into good movies.
The problem with Avatar's script is not so much its simplicity, but its preachiness. A story set in a simplified world of good and evil isn't so annoying (cf Star Wars) unless it's supposed to be making some kind of political commentary on our own world.
"... An entire generation of teenagers are now going to have a lifelong crush on a huge blue woman with a tail named Neytiri ..."
I went and saw Avatar yesterday and was blown away.
It was as good as when I first saw Star Wars the first time it was shown after wagging school and catching a train into the city. It was way better than the first Star Trek feature film first hit the cinema - those close-ups of the Enterprise still make me cringe. It was as good as Alien and Alien II which followed. I was trying to think why. Here's some of the reasons.
While most films shy away from the complexity of situations, this one didn't. I get the feeling Cameron had some unfinished business. A story not told, an alternate Aliens. The similarities are pretty striking. The film is about colonisation of a planet, with ruthless company yes-men backed up by Colonial Marines (or PMC's in this case). It even has Ripley. This time though we see colonisation and exploitation from the eyes of the conquered. We see what is lost. We see the consequences.
This isn't a re-make of Aliens two where the Colonial Marines blast away Ripley's bad-guys. Instead we are shown the complexity of a culture clashes, the conqueror and conquered. We see the relationship between locals and their environment, man made corporations and hired muscle and most importantly the consequences of War. It could be South America when Cortez arrived looking for gold, it could in the jungles of Sumatra now with timber ~ http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/wherewework/borneo/people.html The film is also is about as anti-mainstream as you'll probably get in popular culture.
Ask yourself what was the last time you saw a film that painted a beautiful picture of an environment and culture then see it destroyed in grisly detail before you... this is no ordinary Hollywood action flic. Sure the good guys win and the company men get packing. There are weak points in the film. I noticed even William Gibson was a bit shocked (my measure of what good writing is) ~ http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/6810783279 at name given to the exploited mineral "unobtanium" ~ http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/6810951397 being mined.
The strength of the film is that it mirrors enough of our own world right now and that and the richness of the characters and ideas in my mind makes up for any of the technical shortfalls.
Pretty dissapointing. I was hoping for a paranoia-filled full-on psychosis, serialized to HTML, and all I find is a bait-and-switch.
Look, if you want to rant about corporations, make scary movies about them. And no, the corporation from Alien doesn't count, the scary part was the Alien, not the corporation.
In the mean time, I'm going to stay right here, work for a corporation, and keep winding more copper for my EMP.
spiders, centipedes and pretty much most bugs bigger than an ant, had trouble killing them even with a paper towel. Hell used to get afraid looking at them in pictures.
To overcome it, I built a "weapon" to kill them with. Pretty much took one of those post office poster rolls, and attached some paper towels to it. This way I could kill them at a distance.
Now, have no problem getting upclose and personal and killing them with a paper towel. Can now watch them online without any problems(i.e. one of those giant centipedes eating a rabbit)
I dunno if it's something I overcame on my own, or if its something I just grew into. i.e. I used to be scared shitless of the Alien and the Predator movies, and now I more or less consider the series as an action movie, instead of a horror flick.
If it's Microsoft, is there any question which tone to pick? They are, after all, the masters of infection through embrace and extend. (Which could also describe the strategy of the newly hatched Alien movie nymphs.)
Well I'm a bit older than that ('63) but I experienced all those things the same way. Star Wars, arcades, Atari, learning to PEEK and POKE on an Apple ][+ from the one-liners (255 characters) at the back of nibble magazine, Byte mag. and Robert Kurosaka's mathematical recreations, plus Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor. The birth of the Mac, the Amiga, the Jackintosh (DR's GEM), all the the CPU wars... BitNet before the Web... Many other sci-fi movies are just as geek-worthy if not more: alien, Terminator and T2 (the special effects!) the Matrix.
Pah! anytime in the last 50 or more years is a great time to be born for a geek. It continues to be great.
Swordfish; if nothing for the totally cool monitor setup he had at Gabriel's place.
Alien; the original- the next couple of movies in the series were okay but the first I think is a classic in form of technology and all that good stuff. If you watch it, it may seem a bit old-school for our time, but for their time that was pretty cool! Finding a solution to space travel at light-year speed? Come-on- that's awesome.
Stargate; another one for space travel, but overall it was kind of corny- I just liked how the Egyptians, or whoever, discovered a way to transport across galaxies.
Enemy of the State; cool NSA tech stuff.
Deja Vu; the ability to go back in time only four days earlier or less... I like their setup and how they explained the plausibility of the technology actually coming to fruition.