Alien: Covenant/Alien Series thoughts.

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Overly Serious said:
Interesting. I'm not sure about the not understanding their own tech. I see where they were coming from but I feel it's because they have this idea of savage = low tech and enjoy the idea of savage low-tech people conquering smarter and more advanced people. I more enjoy the idea that someone can be savage and high tech at the same time. That's more interesting to me. I do like the idea of them being small in number though. That fits. And there's no reason to suppose a species would follow humanity's approach of breed uncontrollably. Especially if they're quite long lived which I think some of the media suggests they are.
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ITs not that they don't understand their tech, just they didn't develop it. They aren't technobarbarians, they just have no interest in any technology that doesn't enable more/better hunts. Any thing like building a new ship they would farm out to "nerd" races that aren't worth hunting; they would be able to build new plasma casters, etc but would need to have the "nerd" races refine the metals and forge the alloys.

They are intelligent enough to duplicate/reverse engineer and refine/adapt what they come across when encountering races that are as or more advanced.
But per the theory, they went from pre-bronze warrior nomads on a death world to FTL with no middle steps, which is why their culture is still "primative" but their tech is advanced. They were hunted by these other aliens, killed them, learned about their ship and how it worked, and built more on a craft-level without ever industrializing or "developing".
They have a galaxy-wide population of less than a million, so even taking months to hand-make a new gauntlet or caster is more than sufficient to keep up with the demand.

edit: That's also why they are so hard core on their mini-nukes, instead of just a low-grade personal incinerator. They don't want any other race doing what they did.

LordofCringe7206 Vol. 2 said:
I can't be the only one who doesn't want anymore Predator movies. We get everything we could get out of a film back in the first one. It is a type of franchise that works more in video games and comics rather than another film.
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Sort of.
Its not that I'm against more Predator movies, but they need to bring something good & novel to the table and understand what made the first two movies work; I have zero faith in the modern film industry to be able to deliver on either of these points.

Sort of the same with Alien. All the horror of the unknown from just xenomorphs is over, you need to bring something new and not retarded to the table which they have consistently failed to do since sort of 3 and really 2. I believe it was @Adamska who had a good idea a few pages back for an Alien movie where the Xenomoph wasn't the primary threat that I think if given to a competent screen writer who was focused on making a good film and not a soapbox for their politics, it would have been a good movie.

With Predator, we know they can go invisible, we know they see infrared, we know they are trophy hunteres. So expecting the audience to not know these things doesn't work, you need to introduce something new (and that isn't retarded; Predators tried to introduce the 'Civil war' but that was retarded) to keep the audience interested.
Prey could have worked if they weren't focused on MODERN AUDIENCES.

Sperg:
I think they could do a subverted Western. A compare/contrast with the mutual practice of scalping (we can't do that, that would show indians as nothing other than a group of wholesome chungus hippies in touch with the earth and the sky!) to Predator trophy taking, a posse of bounty hunters tracking a target to the Predator's manhunt.
But modern film can't get Westerns right anymore let alone handle subverting one.
 
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There's only so many ways you can do an alien or a predator story with the alien/predator as the main antagonist and Alien/Aliens + Predator/Predator 2 did all of them really

Isolated group of regular people/soldiers has to deal with alien(s)/predator(s) (Alien, Aliens, Predator)

Government with lots of resources available has to deal with alien(s)/predator(s) (Predator 2)

What else is there really? Despite the idea of aliens invading earth or another planet with a big population sounding cool, it doesn't make sense that the full power of humanity couldn't deal with them when a dozen USMC + Ripley killed hundreds of them with small arms and wiped out the hive on LV-426 with one nuke. For as terrifying as the aliens are, that's a very reassuring kill ratio when the aliens require one host to produce one alien. Humans have been shown time and again as being able to handle predators as well. You can't just do the 'outmatched humans overcome their disadvantages to triumph/escape the threat' again and again and again, that's what the Predator movies keep doing and they keep sucking. And increasing the scale and scope gets you slop like Prometheus and Covenant. Romulus was a much better movie but geez is it unoriginal, it's a bit of Alien, but mostly Aliens, on a space station with space refugees instead of space marines, plus a few elements from Prometheus and Covenant thrown in

@Ghostse is right that to make things fresh, have the aliens/predators be an element of the story, not the main antagonists. I'd love to see something where an alien infestation/predator hunt is present but firmly in the background except for 2-4 scenes where the alien(s)/predator(s) get to shine, they are incidental to the story, they aren't the main story themselves
 
Ghostse said:
I think they could do a subverted Western. A compare/contrast with the mutual practice of scalping (we can't do that, that would show indians as nothing other than a group of wholesome chungus hippies in touch with the earth and the sky!) to Predator trophy taking, a posse of bounty hunters tracking a target to the Predator's manhunt.
But modern film can't get Westerns right anymore let alone handle subverting one.
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I unironically think a false western is one of the best Predator ideas you can do, and if I had to hammer out a basic concept for what it was; I'd call it the Magnificent Seven meets Thirteenth Warrior on the Road to Redemption.

Essentially the posse that forms to deal with the Skin Taker is made up of people that are made up of those whose lives are harsh and shit. One's a former confederate turned bandit, one's a railroad worker who is desperate for the bounty, one's an old widower miner who's getting on in years and seeing a silver rush town quiet down after he tried and made it big, one's a sole survivor of a hunting party got by the Taker and seeks justice/vengence/an end to the nightmares, and so on. It'd culminate in each finding a piece of redemption and what they seek, even if most if not all of them die to take the Skin Taker with them.

The end fight scene would be that the remains of the possse would use the old mine to lure in and kill the Taker. One of them, likely the bandit, intentionally does what the Yautja do; he uses dynamite to cave in and crush/kill himself and the Taker after lasting long enough and hiding deep enough to ensure a mutual kill. In that he finds redemption, as the survivors tell tall tales about each member of the band.
 
Stolen from the Star Wars thread but completely relevant here too with people already cooming about getting to consume product.
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draggs said:
What else is there really?
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For example, I think what could be fun is if you have a Mid-90s post-Iron Curtain story, it starts out as an Under Siege/Broken Arrow 'Russia General Goes Rogue' sort of film, only for a Predator "game warden" to step in to stop them from killing the favored prey with nuclear fire. The issue there is you couldn't make this film without some retarded anti-nuke message. Have the nuke-happy Russian General seem crazy, but he's actually just read up on the "Baba Yaga".
I like the set up, but its only half baked because without something else it sort of under delivers on the premise.
Maybe have something like the Russians actually manage to kill a Predator?
Or maybe the General isn't set on overthrow of Yeltsin, he modified some cold war RADAR that was able to pick up Predators landing to hunt siberian tigers and believes the earth is being invaded by aliens and that's why he broken the launch codes on the nukes. He refuses to talk to the government because due to records that show the Soviets and Americans were collaborating on trying to acquire Predator technology so he thinks the government is compromised by Aliens.


Another idea:
And again, modern Wokism would stop this film from being made and/or any good, but have a Conquistador film. A group of Spanish Conquistadors hunting Maya with their Aztec allies. You juxtapose the Spanish who are used to having a massive technological advantage now.... not. And add in Aztec brutality where they wander right into the Predator's trophy hunting and don't even realize it.
As a narrative framing (borrowing a bit from an idea I had for a not-shit version of Indian Jones 4) you could say have them searching for El Dorado only to learn at the end the "city of gold" was the metallic hull of a large Predator craft.
You could have the corrupt, worthless priest seeming to be saved from "the Devil" by his faith (i.e. unarmed so an unhonorable kill) and in his arrogance try to take a predator's trophy.

Another idea, is fuck with the framing.
Start with a heist film. A group of very bad hombres doing some sort of heist, Bank heist, robbing/executing a drugdealer Triple Frontier style. They are escaping in the aftermath, and the usual getting knocked off one-by-one, but its one the crew who doesn't want to share the score.
Then you get the double twist that the predator that was stalking them wasn't hunting them, it is an "escaped felon" who has driven the robbers into the path of Predators (either there on a hunt or ones trying to retrieve the prisoner and it knew they wouldn't be able to resist) so it can take their ship and escape the planet

Unironically, I think the Predator anthology is the right sort of IDEA: 15 or 30 minute episodes so you get right to the good part. They just they are utterly assing up the execution (and the thing with WWII fighter is abysmally retarded)
So off the short format, If you wanted to go for something more tongue and cheek, have a cold-war James Bond figure who is more Johnny English but triumphs because he keeps ending up in the same places where there is a Predator who doesn't deem him worth killing because he's always captured or some overly complex death trap when the Predator shows up. So have deep irony where the Predator's ship is full of the remains of Donut Steel bond villians because the Predator deemed them worthy of hunting, while Special Agent Fuckboy manages to keep escaping and living.
 
Lots of very interesting ideas. I had a similar one with South America in the era of conquistadors but with a twist - the Yautja are known to the Aztecs and maybe even associate with them to a modest degree. Cast the Aztecs brutal and bloodthirsty culture as being influenced or even inspired by the Yautja. The conquistadors don't stumble on a predator, they stumble on a society that is in league with the demons and provides them prisoners and warriors to test itself against. Imagine some dirt arena with a frenzied mob of Aztecs chanting Huitzilopochtli... Huitzilopochtli... and then from the hut emerges a predator, ready to fight as aztec warriors picked for this begin to circle him. And the conquistadors watch in shock.

Victorian London might be fun as well, though with a very high risk of not pulling it off. You had the whole Jack the Ripper affair, you have those curling mists of fog. Or you could do India - set it in colonial era Calcutta. The predator would love that - the heat, the humidity, the chaotic swarm of life and some perspiring English officers attempting to deal with the growing panic and unrest as something is hunting the natives. Or strange variant on that, have it set in Northern India and the humans be a squad of Russian soldiers. Though I think I prefer Calcutta and English officers as most of the mains.

What is steadily being moved away from in the Aliens movie is something of the cosmic horror angle. For all their flaws this is one thing that Prometheus attempted to do - restore the feel of an uncaring universe that has horrors we cannot understand. Romulus attempted this too with Ash's little speech about how mankind was never meant for the stars and that we're dying. We just can't cope with the horrors and trials of the dark universe. It's an almost impossible challenge due to ever increasing exposure of humanity to the xenomorphs but a truly great Alien movie would somehow recapture the horror of the unknown.

This may be why, in defiance of all reason, Alien 3 is probably my favourite Alien movie after the first. It has a bleakness and a strangeness I enjoy. Assembly Cut, naturally.
 
BrunoMattei said:
I honestly think it's fine. Weyland-Yutani existing in the year 2100 doesn't invalidate anything that happened in Predator 1 and 2 (the good ones) or even anything in 3 (the okay one).
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Damn it's rare to see someone like both Predator 1&2 while also thinking Predators was okay, nice to see someone have good taste. Sadly I'm not optimistic about the new film but I would like it to be good.
 
draggs said:
idk if it's canon or not but in the comics the predators are a matriarchal society (OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO WOKE ALREADY CONQUERED THE YAUTJA), the females run everything and the males go on hunts to impress them. It's implied they could fuck humanity up bad in a war-war if they wanted to but have no interest in it, the hunting and ritual and honor stuff is to keep the males occupied because otherwise they'd all kill each other competing for females. Lots of males still get killed fighting each other over petty bullshit because predator testosterone is no joke frfrnocap. The females are hugely narcissistic from the way the males simp for them and their main focus in life is enjoying the simping and making sure the males are kept kinda in control via hunting
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I don't know if it's a personal fever dream, fan theory, dark horse comics or if I picked it up elsewhere, but I swear I've read something about the predator hunter society essentially roidmaxxing themselves by tweaking their own DNA. They speedran survival of the fittest is what I'm saying.

I couldn't think of a better visual example but more or less from left to right in a couple of thousand years instead of a million years and they will continue to evolve themselves.
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Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
I don't know if it's a personal fever dream, fan theory, dark horse comics or if I picked it up elsewhere, but I swear I've read something about the predator hunter society essentially roidmaxxing themselves by tweaking their own DNA. They speedran survival of the fittest is what I'm saying.
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Oh that's from the Autism Predator movie made by Shane Black.

It was horrible.

As for the movie pitches, I think my favorites that could work would be the 19th century Indian period piece, since you could play it as a bit like how the British put down the Thugee cult. Lean hard on stuff like Flashman but spirals slowly into a mild horror angle. The other I like is Broken Arrow, but that just fits another period genre that works real well. Honorable mention is Jack the Ripper as a Predator or Huitzlipochtli.
Tricky said:
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That might've been what I was thinking of, since I forgot about this movie.
 
The CGI predator face looks much worse in a still frame than it does in motion. And the mandibles and mouth are definitely smaller which throws the proportions of the head off from what we've seen of predators before, the head in general isn't anywhere near as broad. It looks much more feminine. But the MC predator is confirmed to be a male... oh god it's not a troonator is it
 
draggs said:
But the MC predator is confirmed to be a male... oh god it's not a troonator is it
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If the first attack takes place in a women's bathroom, we'll know.
draggs said:
The CGI predator face looks much worse in a still frame than it does in motion.
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Sorry but no, it looks terrible in motion as well. Hopefully they can redo it in time. And though I shouldn't judge on a few seconds, if she's an android then her delivery of "you're hunting something that can't be killed" feels very at odds with the usual synthetics we see. Too human.
 
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:thinking: Species 37, Special Order 937... I'm sure it's nothing. Anyway, seems like non-human hosts are back in style, so maybe some of those old Kenner toys are going to show up.
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You people have already put more thought into all this in the past few pages than anyone working on these franchises have post Predator 2.
 
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