Alien: Covenant/Alien Series thoughts.

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Supposedly the show has a higher than $250 million per season budget.
I'd say I don't believe it, but then I remember how often these fucking idiots turn to CGI to cover for their inability to plan and reshoot shit through, which means that it costs a lot more money for uglier work than the stuff made like 20 years ago with CGI. I also then have to remember that this was a nightmare project that almost died before the buy-out, and that RatCo likely interfered a bit. Not that it excuses Hawley.

I've thought on the other not really looking like real creatures I'd find in Alien, and I'd say out of the lot the only one I kind of like is the eye tentacle thing, and that's just because it sort of fits as a theme. Hell, if it was done right, its ability to hijack the body of the still living victim could be suitably horrifying, especially if you make the eye actually camouflage, like the mimetic skin of some cuttlefish, and they can appear in places where eyes are horrifying, since it propagates inside warm bodies. Make the thing a mollusc that mimics the organs of its foes, and eyes are used much like eye-spots to startle people.

The plant might also work; don't know what it could do or how it operates, but it might have something. But I don't care for the tick things and the other one. Also they're being used as stupid monsters, because that's probably the impression Hawley got back when Scott was dumb enough to think this show could be good and spoke with him.
They have to show what the result of a Xenomorph infestation is, other than everyone dies. Does the hive consume the planet and then go dormant? Or do you get "spooky" jungles with xenomorphs who are now just Jurassic Park raptors? One implies a designed purpose, the other implies that they are beasts who have an ecosystem. Of course these questions will never be answered. So really the Xenomorph is now Jason Vorhees.
In the comics they become the apex predator of all but what is seen to be their homeworld, where there's a monster that eats them for breakfast. They also lowkey terraform planets which have fallen to them. They are smarter than most animals, likely even recognizing their reflection, but there's little to no spark there barring their queens.
The Aliens have to have a purpose other than kill. That implies some greater threat. Of course the franchise will just be high concept slasher flicks. Or whatever this thing is Hawley is trying to write.
A favorite alternate take of the xenos I liked from a comic was they were the Great Filter. In the comic, it talks about how any race who becomes space faring will inevitably spread the thing like a great cosmic cancer. It will then cull off most lifeforms that it can infect, before they go dormant and die. It's hinted that Earth may have had them walk upon it based on a very few spurious fossils found in very old sedimentary rock. Like 3 billion years old.
I feel bad for those guys who spent all that time meticulously constructing the RPG setting and timeline that tied together and reconciled all the disparate and conflicting elements of all the films, comics, novels, short story anthologies, unused screenplays, etc in a way that was thematically and aesthetically quite cohesive and also impressively comprehensive in terms of including just about everything from the previous canon media, even the weird modern Ridley Scott shit or more obscure novels and comics, not just the much beloved fan favorites in the main film series.

It seemed like they had been commissioned to create the RPG by 20th Century Studios not purely as a media product of its own, but as a lore bible or reference for future novels and media, setting up lots of potential conflicts and storyline archetypes.
It also sucks because it's right there, but nahh. "Creatives" want to pretend their garbage fanfic takes which were already done in the setting and is right there for all to see is the better move. Even though it's fucking retarded.

AvP 2 the game has a person sleeved into a synthetic to save their life. It was done because they nearly died to a xeno attack as a young and snobbish scientist who is the son of a very important member of Wey-Yu's higher ups, specifically a manager/scientist who was a part of their synthetic division. It also actually explored already what this effect does; the mind template tends to struggle with its new existence, since the person tends to get mentally fucked by the experience. It also struggles to keep the engram stable; new personality traits sometimes emerge, and they tend to slowly become unstable.

For whatever reason Disney and Hawley chose to then do this to kids, and then make it creepier by having the actors infantilize the kids they are supposed to be (they're fucking 12, not 6), and talking about their body functions. Yeah no, the alien being subtlely rapey and sex involved does not excuse you from advocating noncery. Die in a fire.
Exploring the W-Y branches would be interesting since it was made during that age where the fear of Japanese was still prevalent in so much media and people's writings.
Exactly. If I had to make an Alien TV show, this would've been one of the first pitches I'd have suggested for it, where you show that the many tendrils of a conglomerate that owns worlds do not always know what the other parts do, or how they step on each other's toes at times.
AvP even explores on it where the American branch CEO dude was sort of the usual business pragmatic but not so retarded to keep going for an alien they keep losing to. The guy simply wanted to 'make a mark on someone' and did a heroic sacrifice against a Predator because the monster saw him nonthreatening for having cancer.
While I have no idea how canon AvP is to the Alien franchise as a whole, especially when both franchises are trying to fuse for real when it was simply a fun crossover movie like Freddy vs Jason, this implies that stupid decisions are from the Japanese branch...
It's not canon, but given RatCo's incompetence, they're going to try and force it to be.

Not that it matters, since I ain't treating any of that shit canon.
I'm not even a lorefag, but it is just really weird that W-Y is treated as this 'generic bad guy corp', when AvP explored on it and was never poked again. There are only so many times W-Y can go full retard before people start questioning what the hell is going on in there and why does it want the Xenomorph so badly.
There's a reason the comics over the years were smart enough to come up with other megacorporations who sometimes repeat the same mistake or do something new with it. A favorite of mine was the one where they didn't even want the monster; they just wanted the hormones it secreted because it made for fantastically potent performance enhancing drugs.
How does Wayland-Yutani make money? They don't appear competent at anything.
They make their money because much like in cyberpunk dystopias they have a fuckload of subsidiary branches and departments. One of their biggest money makers was their dominance over computing and synthetic designs; the MU/TH/R systems and quite a few synthetic lines are either ones they personally designed or they bought out competition for. For example, at one time they owned Hyperdyne, the company that made Ash's model.

They also had a sizeable portion of the starship jump drive technology as well as owning a lot of shipping companies as subsidiaries. Lastly they made a lot of money on terraforming projects and on making fire-arms. Wey-Yu has a pretty strong gunmanufacturing industry, only rivaled by a few others like Armat and Heckler-Koch (yep, they're still around too).

They also have other divisions, like reverse-engineering and bioweaponry, but their big money makers tended to be tech aligned, specifically computer systems.
 
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Just watched the first 2 episodes of Alien Earth and it's very disappointing. So many things don't make sense and there are too many plot holes. I'll continue watching though as there's nothing else worth my time.

Also is it just me or do the Xenomorph's chrome colored teeth remind you of Mad Max Fury Road when the war boys spray their mouth with silver spray paint and yell "witness?"
 
How does Wayland-Yutani make money? They don't appear competent at anything.
They're like SpaceX and Google and Tesla and Microsoft and Chevron and Lockheed Martin and Wal-Mart and Ford (and their biggest competitors) and a million other things combined. I think they get most of their revenue from colonization, resource extraction, computer shit, weapons sales to anybody with the money to buy em, space trade, and androids

Why W-Y is so interested in xenomorphs has no explanation except the plot needs it to. Regular humans with conventional military technology of the 2100s would absolutely roflstomp xenos. The series has to constantly come up with because reasons for why the humans in that particular story are at a disadvantage facing them. W-Y could build androids or plain robots faster, stronger, more durable, etc., than xenos. But the monster can't be a nothingburger or the story will have no tension
 
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Also is it just me or do the Xenomorph's chrome colored teeth remind you of Mad Max Fury Road when the war boys spray their mouth with silver spray paint and yell "witness?"
It didn't remind me of that because I've never seen Fury Road, but I did notice that this alien has much more human looking teeth which was weird. They made it look like a horse. Also, is it me or has the xenomorph gotten a bit chunky. Sure looks it to me.

As to Weyland-Yutani and money, others have covered a bunch of it and yes, colonisation is a big part of it. Their terraforming technology radicalised colonisations and if you've played Alien: Isolation, one of the reasons behind Seegson's doldrums is that Seegson heavily invested in orbital stations and orbital manufacturing and then W-Y said: "Actually, we can make the world habitable". There are a lot of colonies out there. I mean a lot. Enough that you have large rival domains in space between the UA (United Americas which is a federation of North and South American states), the UPP (Union of Progressive Peoples, which incorporates Germany and Russia amongst others, America's nightmare scenario) and the Three World Empire - named after the fact it incoporated Titan, Earth and... Luna? In any case it is comprised by the United Kingdom, India and a few other bits and pieces. You also have a semi-independent region the Independent Core System Colonies which has a whole bunch of not-exactly-aligned worlds. Then of course there's no shortage of prospective colonies, weird little splinters and people who just dropped off the grid. There was a Chinese block but after war with the Americas they decided to throw in with Russia and Germany as part of the newly forming UPP.
(So even in Sci-Fi, American foreign policy is turning historical rivals into allies against it.:politisperg:)

The RPG did a stellar job (apologies for the pun) on wielding the whole thing into something that feels believable. Nations still exist, unlike in this absurd show. There are more than four corporations and the big ones like W-Y (who is the largest) are not wholly interchangeable with governments. W-Y is a British-Japanese company but does a tonne of business in the United Americas and has a lot of military contracts. They used to be just the Weyland corporation but they way over-extended on colonisation efforts and though colonisation is a big part of their profit now, it took a long time and a tonne of up front and risky investment. Which visionary Peter Weyland was down for but after he disappeared along with his daughter, things started to off the rails. Weyland Corp was effectively bought out by Yutani though publicaly it was more of a merger to conceal just how financially fucked Weyland Corp was behind the scenes. Superb long-term thinking by Yutani as eventually the colonisation efforts started to pay big bucks. That's why the Weyland-Yutani slogan is "Building Better Worlds".

And Earth itself? Well though Ridley Scott probably envisaged something more like Blade Runner, depressed old sot that he is, it's supposedly quite nice by the point of Aliens. Assuming you have money, anyway. Much manufacturing has been moved off world, it's continually supplied by resource mining from the colonies. And colonisation programmes ease population pressures somewhat. Though each of the major powers has a central presence on Earth, they all seem to have a "don't shit in the nest" handle on interaction with each other. Well, they do now. So even when there are military conflicts out in Space, they try not to start throwing bombs at each other on the ground. At least that's my interpretation of things. There were the (very believable) oil wars in the Alien timeline. They weren't pretty.

One of the things I did like about Romulus - which was a real mixed bag for me - was the rationale behind why W-Y were so keen on the Xenomorph. Because too many colonies were failing and "man was never meant for Space". A minor hobby of mine is Space exploration as a topic and the number of difficulties in actually colonising other worlds is almost endless. So the idea of all these struggling colonies, still unable to break away from dependence on Earth supplies, the day to day scratching just to stay viable... that worked for me. I could see some radicals in W-Y science division exploring the possibilities of re-engineering mankind.
 
Well, they do now.
In fairness the last time a war happened on Earth they did have to nuke Australia. That one was a fairly recent one by the standards of the Alien RPG setting. I don't remember exactly why they had to nuke Australia. I think it has something to do with them either joining the UPP, or it was because they wanted to break away from the Three Worlds Empire because they were part of it or something like that. But yeah, as a whole Earth tends to be left alone, mainly because that's where a lot of damage can occur.

Space may be profitable, but the solar system is still the one of the main hubs of tech, industry, and so on. It's a key node of infrastructure as well due to being humanity's birthplace. It's bad business to burn down the rival's wares if it damages yours.

Also, I don't remember if it was the leading edge version of the game or if it was still in the new version that had it be a very big case of the haves and the have nots. Yes, good portions of it were well off and the environment quite nice, but it was for the rich guys who could afford that lifestyle. The rest had favelas, slums, and hab blocks and worked for a living. Also the environment does degrade over time. Earth became a poor and dirty shithole by Resurrection due to mismanagement of it and the economy and industry by then being mainly on other worlds.
 
In fairness the last time a war happened on Earth they did have to nuke Australia.
I am aware of that. I just didn't consider it a factor. ;)

Space may be profitable, but the solar system is still the one of the main hubs of tech, industry, and so on. It's a key node of infrastructure as well due to being humanity's birthplace. It's bad business to burn down the rival's wares if it damages yours.
Yep. Exactly this. The leaders of the factions are happy to feud and fight with each other. But not on their doorsteps. The UPP are the worst off in that most of UPP Space is fairly remote from Earth with only the barest sliver of a corridor to get there from Earth. Of course I don't really know what the Alien setting's specifics are about intercepting ships in FTL. You probably can't, least I've never heard of such. But it does mean longer journeys with few supply points in between.

The UPP has interesting background in that a number of their colonies are just ones that W-Y decided weren't economically viable anymore and just dumped on them. So they're more stretched in feeding and caring for everybody. I do find the idea of a Socialist federated society with modern tech and communications intriguing though.

All stuff which the rudimentary "Evil Corps" level of thinking in Alien: Earth is not remotely equipped to deal with, however.

Also, I don't remember if it was the leading edge version of the game or if it was still in the new version that had it be a very big case of the haves and the have nots. Yes, good portions of it were well off and the environment quite nice, but it was for the rich guys who could afford that lifestyle. The rest had favelas, slums, and hab blocks and worked for a living. Also the environment does degrade over time. Earth became a poor and dirty shithole by Resurrection due to mismanagement of it and the economy and industry by then being mainly on other worlds.
I think it depends a little on who is writing it and what they choose to focus on. I did take care to write "if you have the money" in my summary. What I was mainly getting at was Earth doesn't appear to be some eco-dystopia like one might imagine it portrayed, nor the Blade Runner world Ridley Scott seemed to want it to be. Fusion power, off-world manufacturing, off-world mining. Hell, with how economical Spaceflight seems to have become, probably off-world disposal of toxic materials. If you're poor, and there are certainly poor, sucks for you but you're poor in a wealthy world (for better and worse).
 
they took half of his Lungs from the Mary sues brother and impregnated it with the xenomoprh spern...harvested from a face hugger.
I haven't watched the third episode - first two brought me merely suffering. But I read a synopsis and apparently Wendy fights the xenomorph and kills it.

And we all seem to not be bothering with spoilers here on the basis that it's beyond spoiling, right?
 
I'm not watching this thing unless it gets rave reviews by the end, but I will say to overly, I always thought Alien series Earth should've been a bit of a utopia. The space station in Aliens is very sleak and nice. It should be something that could be ruined by xenomorph invasion. Not just for the rich or whatever, but actually a good place overall that we'd have sympathy for if taken out.

I guess I'd rather see W-Y and the other corps keep a good Earth and have some reason to wreck later.

Maybe have it kind of a Rome situation, where the home planet/city is great while the feeding it zones suck. Maybe that's where they'll take this. And IRL Rome didn't need the cliche 'corporation' nonsense to take it down either. Whatever on this I guess now, I'm kind of fed up with the series like Star Wars. They blew it a decade+ ago.
 
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I'm not watching this thing unless it gets rave reviews by the end, but I will say to overly, I always thought Alien series Earth should've been a bit of a utopia. The space station in Aliens is very sleak and nice. It should be something that could be ruined by xenomorph invasion. Not just for the rich or whatever, but actually a good place overall that we'd have sympathy for if taken out.

I guess I'd rather see W-Y and the other corps keep a good Earth and have some reason to wreck later.

Maybe have it kind of a Rome situation, where the home planet/city is great while the feeding it zones suck. Maybe that's where they'll take this. And IRL Rome didn't need the cliche 'corporation' nonsense to take it down either. Whatever on this I guess now, I'm kind of fed up with the series like Star Wars. They blew it a decade+ ago.
You're right and that's kind of how it is in the lore. Not a perfect society by any means - still plenty of rich vs. poor. But a world reaping the benefits of colonisation. However, the creator of Alien: Earth said that he wanted it to be about class, rich vs. poor, etc. Apparently his idea of this is to have people dressed in Regency make-up and wigs refusing to evacuate a building because they're "having a dinner party" and "I'm friends with so and so...". It's the most absurd take.

A lot of writers from privileged backgrounds have a weird idea of how "the rich" are seen and think they're going to appeal to and be popular with "the ordinary people" by showing rich and stupid idiots who pay the price for being rich and stupid idiots. And some people enjoy that on the nose take, I admit. But I think most of us aren't full of hate for someone being rich. Especially the Middle Class who see it as aspirational. What people hate are the connected elites who fuck everything up for the rest of us and can't be removed. He's trying to portray some kind of "new aristocracy" in a really heavy-handed way. But that's not convincing to me and it doesn't even feel that Alien. The people who removed Ripley's flight licence weren't evil or wildly privileged aristocrats. They were doing their jobs in the plodding and routine way that slowly treads on people because it's big and clumsy and blind to people's plight. The woman who says "It's a rock, no indigenous life" isn't wearing a powdered wig and snorting at Ripley. She's a middle manager who has slowly floated to the level of her incompetence and not really listening. They're not even *that* incompetent. Ripley isn't just proposing an alien lifeform - that's a known thing - she's proposing a whole sentient, FTL capable species (so far as they know). On a world that albeit not explored, has had a human presence for over twenty years. They don't even go all out on punishing her. Her licence is suspended and they pay for a six month psych evaluation and therapy and decline to press any criminal charges at this time. Hell, even Burke isn't that bad at the outset. He's probably fifty-fifty on whether Ripley is crazy or not himself and what he does is let his ambition lead him to take a stupid risk and send a couple of people to check something out. Despite Ripley's reports he probably doesn't have a real idea of how dangerous these things are. And it's a whole colony, not some small crew of unprepared people who are also sabotaged by an glitchy android. He's wrong and he's sleazy. But at that point he doesn't know how bad his bad call is. He thinks this is a bit of a corporate sneakiness that might pay off. Sure, later on we see how treacherous he can be when under duress. Ripley figures out it was him who sent Newt's parents to the ship and he knows that if and when she makes it back, his career and probably his life is over. Again, he's sleazy, treacherous and willing to let someone die to save his neck. But he's not "Ha ha ha! I'm rich and I wear a powdered wig and don't have to evacuate a collapsing building" Evil™.

That's the sort of nuance and believability this show has no capability of.

Also, the aristocrat who continues to crawl along the floor for a while with the lower half of his body missing. I presume I'm supposed to head-cannon that as him having some cutting edge cyborg modifications. Although I'm 50/50 on that not being the intent and the director just thinking it's cool and plausible to see the guy do that. The xenomorph in this is absurdly variable. We see it kill a dozen people in about five seconds. And then later as the W-Y cyborg guy is getting into the lift, it kills another 7 or so people right behind him. The directing is very clumsy. The intent is supposed to be that he's put his gun down and has to flee, I think. But the gun is two feet from his hand all this time and he had no difficulty shooting the xenomorph earlier. And before that at the party, Hermit (what's with all the stupid on-the-nose names in this show) literally has the gun in his hand ready as the xenomorph jumps right over him directly in front of the barrel and he decides to try and run, purely so the W-Y cyborg guy can save him. Oh, and the xenomorph chooses Hermit alone out of everybody to land next to and sit there menacing him instead. Which isn't the worst thing in isolation (see what I did there?) as in the movies we've seen it draw things out before killing someone. But here you've just shown it in some insane killing frenzy but out of the dozen or more people killed in a minute, it stops to hiss at him.

This is terrible.

EDIT: @mlanguishi As an aside, I only saw that you're written a reply to me by chance. If you reference someone, it's a good idea to use their actual tag like this if not doing a quote.
 
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The idea of a ship filled with the galaxies top trumps of horror parasites, crashing into a city that has absolutely zero clue what to do about them, is a neat one. It could be interesting seeing the future city go to absolute shit trying to contain the seething tide of monsters. That's not where this is going though, it's self fellating, trying - and failing - to do a story about the idea of body swapping transhumanism, and also there's an alien that mean mugs the camera and acts retarded every now and again in it.

Also a single child in a synthetic body, literally beats the shit out the xeno; and tosses it around like a ragdoll. I'm just kind of baffled how they thought that would make me go 'ahhhhh, scary alien!' when clearly Bishop could have been spin kicking their heads of with little to no issue.

EDIT: THERE HAS GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY OF STORING THOSE FUCKING EGGS REEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Fun story, I have worked in a biolab before, where we handled BSL2+ material. There was a type of strep that would give you a very nasty rash and might be fatal to around 2% of the population if they get infected. We had that shit locked down so tight that just going in the room required a once a year training, with an exam, and a sign off from three different people. However, they store those xeno eggs like cans of Monster Energy in a paki shop. Insane.
 
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Hell, even Burke isn't that bad at the outset. He's probably fifty-fifty on whether Ripley is crazy or not himself and what he does is let his ambition lead him to take a stupid risk and send a couple of people to check something out. Despite Ripley's reports he probably doesn't have a real idea of how dangerous these things are. And it's a whole colony, not some small crew of unprepared people who are also sabotaged by an glitchy android. He's wrong and he's sleazy. But at that point he doesn't know how bad his bad call is. He thinks this is a bit of a corporate sneakiness that might pay off. Sure, later on we see how treacherous he can be when under duress. Ripley figures out it was him who sent Newt's parents to the ship and he knows that if and when she makes it back, his career and probably his life is over. Again, he's sleazy, treacherous and willing to let someone die to save his neck. But he's not "Ha ha ha! I'm rich and I wear a powdered wig and don't have to evacuate a collapsing building" Evil™.
Don't they establish in Alien (through Ash exposition) that W-Y had already decrypted/translated the distress signal, and set the Nostromo's route so it would pick it up and then be 'forced' by interstellar law to go investigate? Though why they'd send a half-dozen space truckers, and then a whole colony of civilians decades later, and finally a single squad of USCMC does point to their general derpiness. They could have sent a scientific team with overwhelming USCMC firepower as security from the start, or any time between Alien and Aliens, instead they keep doing things the perfect way to make sure the xenomorphs run amok every time. If they want to see how good xenomorphs infest and fight they could have easily secured the Juggernaut and done all that in a controlled setting but nooooooooooooooooo
 
I think it'd be funnier if W-Y actually wanted the Xenos because they secrete a type of food sweetener that tastes the exact same as sugar, but with zero calories. Like how an actual megacorp would do things.

EDIT: Words cannot describe how much I genuinely couldn't give a single flying fuck about this body swap plot. It's not interesting, they aren't doing anything interesting with it. I don't watch Alien things for high concept sci-fi, I watch it to see the fucked up lifecycle of a human sized aphid wasp, while it does its thing.
 
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