Alien: Covenant/Alien Series thoughts.

[Adamska]

There's also the matter that they did not seriously read the dossier that Ripley helped work on and they were overly cocky due to thinking it was going to be a routine mission. They genuinely thought that at worst it was a standard "bug hunt", which just meant they had to deal with some hostile organisms, and they never ran into a species like the Xeno prior to that. Even then they clearly thought there were other reasons why the place might have lost contact, like busted comms relays. Colonies going dark was established to be a common problem and usually it's due to nothing serious.

They also had a wet behind the ears overly centralized idiot in command who blatantly stated to all units that the area was secure. I don't think it's highly unreasonable for the Cheyenne to get ambushed; especially since the Alien has on more than one occasion been pretty good at blending into the machinery. They thought they were in a safe zone; their commanding officer was kind of too busy being fucking unconscious at the time, and the sarge is dead. The highest ranking guy still active was Hicks, who was not really an in-charge sort of fellow.

A UACM platoon is essentially two light squads in our reality. I've mentioned this before; that this is for several reasons. Firstly that you can make more units to handle issues on more worlds, since humanity is scattered across the stars, meaning you need to cover all that shit. The second is that it's supposed to show that tech's marched on; two light squads were supposed to have the same firing power of our modern platoon, and thirdly, less men per ship means less supplies you gotta pay for, like food and atmo.

Also yes, having empty spacing is rather useful for things like evacuation of personel. Be it due to retreat from a hostile force or in the event the colony is fucked due to failing equipment. They are called colonial marines after all.

The FTL in universe is cheap. Automation is a big thing as well, to the point that in earlier scripts mining vessels are pretty much automated by the time of Aliens.

Ah, that reminds me; the Sulacco like most Conestoga class cruisers had something akin to MUTHR running its systems; it does have the capacity to handle itself in the event of space combat, to the point the entire unit could be dead and that doesn't affect its space fighting ability. Also it can store up to 2000 personnel per haul, which further reinforces it being a pretty versatile ship.

Oh and one more thing; it's a bit of an old girl by the time of Aliens; it and its sisters was being phased out for the Bougainville Class.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

This is a great way to shoot off your foot, or both of them, considering the gun swings automatically to track targets.

what if you had augment feet that flop down like Don Martin

 

[BrunoMattei]

what if you had augment feet that flop down like Don Martin
View attachment 7132261

 

[MadStan]

Alien Romulus sucked dick.

Unoriginal, recycled to the point they even recycled actors and even their lines. Fucking boring. Fucking pathetic.

The only thing that could make its worse is if Riply returns and goes Tranny on us - and Jesus the Director is so senile and washed up he just night try it.

 

[74164978231]

I mean if you are triggering your 'tism why not do it over an actual head scratcher like wondering why the bastard offspring of a spaceshuttle and a huey is being piloted by a corporal and a private.

Gorman should have been a Captain, Spunkmier/Ferror should have been warrant officers and Hicks a Sergeant.

The plot actively torpedoes the justification by presenting a situation where having a human contingent on the ship, in the loop, would have resolved the situation. Hell, even having one or two people in cryo the ship could activate when encountering unforeseen situation would have helped avoid further loss of life.

A lot of the nonsense could easily be resolved by simply having the Sulaco be a smaller ship. Then it makes sense why only a few dozen people where sent. But if you didnt and say increased crew size then you have a bunch of extras and what not which makes the movie that much harder to shoot.

But that looks less impressive on screen, and the Sulaco was quite impressive.

 

[Hugbox Kommissar]

Alien Romulus sucked dick.

Unoriginal, recycled to the point they even recycled actors and even their lines. Fucking boring. Fucking pathetic.

It really did feel like what you'd get if you fed an AI the scripts from all the previous movies and told it to write an original script based on them.

Also I guess they're done pretending the Xenomorph is an actual organic alien creature. Now it's just whatever form the black goo decides to take, conservation of mass and energy be damned.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

and he's generally better than most in the industry at this kind of stuff, and has certainly improved by the time Avatar rolled around, but it still triggers my 'tism.

the economy of avatar doesn't make sense, in-universe for the price of under 6.5 million coffees you can just buy immortality, when you think about how debt is sort of limited to the lifespan of a human, it would make logical business sense for the entire planet to be forced to get immortality at age 20 and pay it back, or at least have that as an option. also cloning exists, or at least it seems that way based on avatar 2's whole "memory download" thing for the antagonist and that too is very cheap.

like if you don't think we would have at least a billion people already taking immortality juice if it was as cheap as 6.5 million coffees, you're insane.

 

[74164978231]

the economy of avatar doesn't make sense, in-universe for the price of under 6.5 million coffees you can just buy immortality, when you think about how debt is sort of limited to the lifespan of a human, it would make logical business sense for the entire planet to be forced to get immortality at age 20 and pay it back, or at least have that as an option. also cloning exists, or at least it seems that way based on avatar 2's whole "memory download" thing for the antagonist and that too is very cheap.

like if you don't think we would have at least a billion people already taking immortality juice if it was as cheap as 6.5 million coffees, you're insane.

Avatar is one of the dumbest movies ever.

Have the ability to make perfect clones of an alien species so good they can reproduce with the natives but you don't clone or simply produce the immortality giving brain gooo instead you harvest the brain goo like literal 19th century whaling.

 

[regalterry]

Unoriginal, recycled to the point they even recycled actors and even their lines. Fucking boring. Fucking pathetic.

Thing is, it could be nothing else.

What other stories are there to tell about spooky rape bugs from space? I like the Alien/Aliens universe, and think it would benefit massively if it didn't hyperfocus on the xenomorph, but the critter is in the title, and no corporate stooge would ever have the balls to propose a story in the setting that didn't focus on it, or the Engineers, or the retarded black goo.

The Alien RPG has a few interesting ideas, long-lost human colonies, space Cold War turning hot, corporate espionage etc., but even those are constantly hobbled by having to graft one of the aforementioned three onto any story like a malignant tumor.

Even Isolation, largely praised by all, is a rethread of the original movie, only novelty being that you are (a) Ripley and get to experience the horror first-hand.

Avatar is one of the dumbest movies ever.

I didn't even bother watching the second movie since it wasn't just 15 minutes of humanity conducting orbital nuclear bombardments on known smurf settlements and brain trees or whatever the fuck they are.

When one side is spearchucking blue niggers, and the other is a spacefaring civilization, there's literally no justification for a prolonged conflict.

 

[Calandrino]

What other stories are there to tell about spooky rape bugs from space?

Alien vs Avatar would be cathartic.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Alien vs Avatar would be cathartic.

 

[MadStan]

Thing is, it could be nothing else.

What other stories are there to tell about spooky rape bugs from space? I like the Alien/Aliens universe, and think it would benefit massively if it didn't hyperfocus on the xenomorph, but the critter is in the title, and no corporate stooge would ever have the balls to propose a story in the setting that didn't focus on it, or the Engineers, or the retarded black goo.

The Alien RPG has a few interesting ideas, long-lost human colonies, space Cold War turning hot, corporate espionage etc., but even those are constantly hobbled by having to graft one of the aforementioned three onto any story like a malignant tumor.

Even Isolation, largely praised by all, is a rethread of the original movie, only novelty being that you are (a) Ripley and get to experience the horror first-hand.


I didn't even bother watching the second movie since it wasn't just 15 minutes of humanity conducting orbital nuclear bombardments on known smurf settlements and brain trees or whatever the fuck they are.

When one side is spearchucking blue niggers, and the other is a spacefaring civilization, there's literally no justification for a prolonged conflict.

Are you kidding me? There is plenty of room to expand the universe and I’d bother putting pen to paper if it were not for fact Ridley Scott wouldn’t give anyone else the time of day.

Plenty of room indeed.

 

[regalterry]

Plenty of room indeed.

I don't disagree, there's lots of things to explore, as I mentioned in my previous post.

The Alien RPG touches up on lost human colonies being rediscovered, the cold war going hot, sentient Engineer creations trying to reach human-dominated space. Then there's synths and plots surrounding AI et al, but like I said, since Alien is in the title everything in the franchise will always circle back to the xenomorphs, and there's only so many ways you can do the "unprepared humans encounter scary space bug" before it gets stale.

I'd argue that audiences are already desensitized to them, there's no mystery to them anymore, they're not some eldritch abomination from the dark depths of space, they're just a somewhat nasty version of space bugs.

I think the book "Alien: Into Charybdis" did a great job showcasing how trivial it would be for trained and prepared humans to deal with a xenomorph infestation, and it felt appropriate for where the franchise currently is. They're now just animals to be hunted and either exterminated or researched.

That being said, tossing aside Ridley's gay take on the Engineers and turning them into something properly eldritch and truly alien would be cool. I also like the Perfected as a concept, if not the overall execution, and the Engineer obsession with the Destroying Angel and their attempts to (re)create it is also pretty cool.

Basically, what I'm arguing is that while there's a lot of directions to take the franchise, Hollywood will never do it.

 

[74164978231]

Rewatched Covenant, dont know why but man jesus christ was that movie fucking dumb. I think because I rewatched Prometheus, which is actually good up until they enter the Engineer facility then it becomes dumb.

Why cant we just get an Alien movie that has competent people who know what theyre getting into and using tech/brains to handle the aliens? Why do we always get the same fucking slasher slop remade every fucking time?

 

[Overly Serious]

Why cant we just get an Alien movie that has competent people who know what theyre getting into and using tech/brains to handle the aliens? Why do we always get the same fucking slasher slop remade every fucking time?

It's difficult to write smart and competent characters in Aliens without either diminishing the Xenomorph as a threat or moving the focus to Xenomorph-adjacent threats.

I say that with a massive caveat in that I think people in the first Alien movie were competent. At least within reason. Much of their trouble comes from Ash misdirecting them which turns out to be intentional. And whilst yes, not letting them back on the ship is solely something Ripley tried to do, Dallas violating protocol wasn't stupidity, it was compassion. And very understandably so. "He could die in 24 hours!" Dallas tells Ripley. Switch perspectives away from audience knowledge and Ripley is the corporate-drone jobsworth letting a man die rather than go against company policy. Outside of this we see Dallas as a competent person. His plan to flush it out of the airlock may well have worked except who made those motion sensors that failed and got him killed? Yes, Ash.

Incompetence became a meme because of the second one and primarily because of Gorman. In Alien three, the prisoners killed the Xenomorph with no weapons and no advanced tech, just teamwork and planning and guts. Hell, it was the xenomorph that was incompetent in that one - there are cattle on the planet. If it were smart it could have gone back outside and got a few stray bullocks and then there'd be three or four of it to take on the prisoners.

Though Prometheus and Covenant both took the incompetence from Aliens and dialled it up to 11. I guess as you've just watched both those movies, incompetence does seem to be the default. I guess I'm just saying it didn't start out that way.

All this said though, the Alien doesn't create tech or use it beyond showing a savage cunning about it like figuring out how to cut the power. They're clever but they've never picked up a gun or sent a false message to misdirect people or piloted a dropship back up. So making them a valid threat against an organised and smart group of people who do use tech well, is a challenge for writers.

The Alien RPG, of which I'm a fan, goes to quite some lengths to pull off ongoing threat from the xenomorphs but even there, if the players are smart and get hold of pulse rifles (don't know why they're called that), it's not that hard to kill a xenomorph.

 

[Adamska]

Rewatched Covenant, dont know why but man jesus christ was that movie fucking dumb. I think because I rewatched Prometheus, which is actually good up until they enter the Engineer facility then it becomes dumb.

Why cant we just get an Alien movie that has competent people who know what theyre getting into and using tech/brains to handle the aliens? Why do we always get the same fucking slasher slop remade every fucking time?

Because that's what hack and hasbeen Ridley Scott, who has been given way too much credit over the years for this franchise, thinks we only care about and want shitty slasher slop after people were mixed on his dumb "Alien is the demiurge" movie take. It also doesn't help that he lost his touch 20 years ago and refuses to acknowledge it.

Well that and characters are only about as smart as the writers commissioned to make them, and Hollyweird hires the dumbest fucking people on earth. They prefer to have the characters buckle down to the plot rather than have the plot react to their actions and beliefs. Rather than say have the biologist be cautious of an alien life form and change the animal's response due to said caution; he gets right up to it in interest, ignoring his tendency to be cautious and panick at something as simple as disease. Why? Because they need him to die to the snake thing.

Also doing something new is hard sometimes, and sometimes requires a genre shift. I unironically think the Gibson script for Alien 3, where they treat it more as a tense political thriller as two sides try to use it for biowarfare purposes before degrading into body horror was the better take.

 

[Ghostse]

Given that Alien and Predators are cannonically in the same universe you have infinite stories you can tell. You could have xeno threats that aren't just the usual cast, and that was one of the things I really liked about Predators even if it wasn't utilized anywhere near to its potential.

There was some Zombie comic I read that while it wasn't very good but the premise it had was good, which was after the first few weeks Zombies weren't even a serious threat, they were more of an environmental hazard, and the only thing really holding back a full zed sweep was the number of people who died in the initial infection. The only threat of zombies for any survivor outpost was that human raiders would show up and blow up a path through your defenses, or retards wouldn't report new infected.

And I feel that's the only thing you can really do with Xenomorphs. For unarmed/underarmed and poorly trained colonists, even just a Xenomoph is a huge threat, but anyone ready for one or appropriately armed, its not going to be too hard to deal with.
Which to @Overly Serious point, the crew in Alien made some bad decisions, but no absolutely retarded ones (except for maybe not putting Kane directly back on the future X ray once the faceraper dropped off).

Gorman made a typical rookie officer mistake of wanting to complete the mission without giving his team the means to do so. And in the end, he was right - the smart gun fire damaged the reactor's coolant lines. He should have pulled back his platoon and gotten more flamer or other weapons that could have been used.

 

[Adamska]

Gorman made a typical rookie officer mistake of wanting to complete the mission without giving his team the means to do so. And in the end, he was right - the smart gun fire damaged the reactor's coolant lines. He should have pulled back his platoon and gotten more flamer or other weapons that could have been used.

Also in Gorman's defense, the comms were disrupted by the hive structure, so Apone before getting grabbed couldn't hear his stuttered attempts to demand a fallback via flamer unit coverage in pairs. He actually did try to do his job, but was way out of his depth, and once the Sarge was down, the marines didn't have a central figure to rally to until Ripley took charge.

Gorman coming off as incompetent is a bit off I think. The the real word I'd use is inexperienced and out of his depth; mainly because he showed his mettle and what he could've been with more seasoning when he tried to save Vasquez, and willingly stayed with her to ensure a longer delay and so she wouldn't die alone. He also was willing to sacrifice himself to deny the enemy assets and to save the remaining survivors.

 

[Ghostse]

Also in Gorman's defense, the comms were disrupted by the hive structure, so Apone before getting grabbed couldn't hear his stuttered attempts to demand a fallback via flamer unit coverage in pairs. He actually did try to do his job, but was way out of his depth, and once the Sarge was down, the marines didn't have a central figure to rally to until Ripley took charge.

I mean more specifically he should have pulled back his squad before enemy contact: either only send in his flamer-equipped troops or had everyone retreat to get weapons that could be used.

And of course he couldn't do that because "The Space Marines fucked up the entire alien hive with short, controlled bursts from their infinite stock of futureweapons, the end" wouldn't make for a particularly gripping movie. But while in the end serving the plot, none of his decisions were illogical.
He wanted to follow orders and get to the colonists as quickly as possible, he had no way to know they were already dead or just how fucked up things were about it get. if it hadn't been a whole hive of xenomorphs, a half-dozen marines with incinerators should have been more than enough to deal with some lifeform no matter how dangerous. And his only real failing - being unable to clearly communicate his plan to his NCO once things had gone to shit - is completely understandable given the character/backstory.

 

[Overly Serious]

Given that Alien and Predators are cannonically in the same universe [...]

*lunges for the can before @Ghostse can let the worms loose!*

But seriously the canonicity of the Aliens vs. Predator movies has always been a grey area. If they're canon then you actually had a Xenomorph outbreak in Colorado. Not that the public would know about it because the film was so dark the army covered it up. And presumably there'd be records of the Antarctic expedition from AvP as well.

But... sure, what the Hell. it would open up the franchise for more plot points, can't dispute it.

But if cross-overs are allowed, missed opportunity to make Blade Runner part of the universe as well. With just a few tweaks and making Ash and Bishop replicants rather than androids, could have had a marriage made in Heaven. If MCU style shared universe stuff had been in vogue back then, it would certainly have been attempted.

you have infinite stories you can tell. You could have xeno threats that aren't just the usual cast, and that was one of the things I really liked about Predators even if it wasn't utilized anywhere near to its potential.

That movie was such a bizarre mix of good and bad.

And I feel that's the only thing you can really do with Xenomorphs. For unarmed/underarmed and poorly trained colonists, even just a Xenomoph is a huge threat, but anyone ready for one or appropriately armed, its not going to be too hard to deal with.

Yes. Your zombie example is somewhat similar to I think you'd need to do. The difference of course being that the xenomorphs aren't unintelligent. They could be a real threat if they got loose on Earth. Hell, imagine if they got loose in the oceans and how hard they'd be to stop then! But in the urban nightmare that I imagine Earth now is - verging on Megacity One development - facehuggers and drones would be a nightmare.

I think that's how I would have done Alien 5 if it had ever existed. It ends with hybrid-Ripley on Earth. Could easily have a couple of facehuggers stowed away on the Betty.

Which to @Overly Serious point, the crew in Alien made some bad decisions, but no absolutely retarded ones (except for maybe not putting Kane directly back on the future X ray once the faceraper dropped off).

Kane is another one that people pick on, unfairly imo. Genre savvy modern viewers harp on how dumb he is to stick his face "in the egg" but he's wearing a helmet, it doesn't look particularly fast moving and it's established earlier that he is exactly the sort of person who would do this. Earlier when picking the team he says "I'd like to volunteer" and in the background I distinctly hear Lambert snark "That figures...". He's totally an over-achiever type who bloody well narrates everything he's doing because he wants to be the smart one on the records when they become famous. Listen to him grandstanding about "filled with leathery objects, like eggs or something" and "life... organic life!" Kane was never not going to stick his nose in there.

Also in Gorman's defense, the comms were disrupted by the hive structure, so Apone before getting grabbed couldn't hear his stuttered attempts to demand a fallback via flamer unit coverage in pairs. He actually did try to do his job, but was way out of his depth, and once the Sarge was down, the marines didn't have a central figure to rally to until Ripley took charge.

Gorman coming off as incompetent is a bit off I think. The the real word I'd use is inexperienced and out of his depth; mainly because he showed his mettle and what he could've been with more seasoning when he tried to save Vasquez, and willingly stayed with her to ensure a longer delay and so she wouldn't die alone. He also was willing to sacrifice himself to deny the enemy assets and to save the remaining survivors.

The older I get the more sympathetic I am to Gorman. Inexperienced is exactly what he was. You can hear him trying to do a textbook "I want you to fall back by squads laying down a suppressing fire..." or whatever he says. He probably got sent out on that mission as an easy first introduction to his own command because it was probably just a downed transmitter. His greatest flaw was pretending he was his panic when it went South and then turning on Ripley as the only thing he could do something about when she started acting without orders. Later when we see him he's a lot more humbled and he just mucks in with everybody else to help. He's honestly more comfortable being part of the group than leading.

I mean more specifically he should have pulled back his squad before enemy contact: either only send in his flamer-equipped troops or had everyone retreat to get weapons that could be used.

Yes - exactly, the colonists might still be alive and need help. They were almost there when Ripley realised the problem so you don't want to turn around and abort a rescue mission. Especially when they're accustomed to their motion trackers and infra-red and have no reason to suppose that these have failed them and the aliens are now actually all around them.

Don't get me wrong - he fucked up. But I've sympathy for him.