TIL: Ridley (one of the main alien villains, and sometimes a final boss) from the Nintendo video game franchise, Metroid (that originated in 1986), was named after Ridley Scott.
I had the good fortune of seeing Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm in a theater and then going to watch Prometheus within the same two week span. It gave me a much greater appreciation for the movie [Prometheus], and what it was trying to do.
Very true. Hudson the character is deeper than what you see at first glance - always complaining, but apparently very competent and (barely) keeping it together.
Theres also Ethernaut, an Argentinian series that I think just has one series so far. People enjoy it, I didn't find it that interesting til the end. I just really dislike stories stretched thin over dozens of hours. I prefer Xfiles, Outer Limits, or aimple movies, that sort of scifi.
Not every comment need be about a fanatical robotic optimization for "relevance". Half the interesting on this site would disappear otherwise, you realize? Besides, what's wrong with mentioning how crappy these movies are (they really do suck) in a post that specifically names them?
Just spewing “media x is bad” without any context or explanation is just low effort and low quality discussion.
At best it gets ignored, at worst you start a flame war
And downvoted. Some people who comment here seem to have the conversational development of a pre-AI phone support bot (at least the newer ones can pretend to be slightly chatty). I do feel sorry for the social scenes that need to endure your presence.
Can just picture it: Bill from accounting casually mentions the new barbecue he installed because some water cooler talk about home repair reminded him of his yard, only for one of you to snap in with "How is this relevant?!"
Best creators are a little mad. Their best work is usually early work when their madness is tempered by limitations and other people around them.
But when success comes they become too big, rich and influential and their next movies are pretty much whatever they want them to be. And they are crap, because pinch of salt of their madness becomes whole dish.
It happened with Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Neill Blomkamp, probably some others.
It's also said that a director makes the same movie for entirety of their career. It's very visible in case of Ridley Scott. His later movies hit again and again the same perverse things that he consistently finds exciting.
I know this sentiment but for me it does not apply to Scott.
He made some great movies later in his career; Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, Prometheus and The Martian are all masterpieces imo.
The Last Duel was also pretty good
Being a good fiction consumer requires offering the benefit of the doubt up to a reasonable/personal limit of suspension of disbelief. The missing piece with that show is inconsistent and shallow character development. Lost (prior to the later season/s) is probably one of the better examples. It's still watchable but it could be better. Maybe they'll sort it out.
Id argue that being a good fiction consumer is not letting a brand or franchise become your identity and know when to drop something.
I saw the phantom menace when I was 12 and hated it. I was a massive Star Wars fan. I've seen nothing from Star Wars since and as far as I can tell I've missed nothing of value over 25 years.
Terminator 3, Prometheus, Ghostbusters reboot, many more.
We are not obliged to consume garbage.
That's the thing, though. Gigantic spaceships, alien panspermia, stasis pods, human-passing androids, underground alien bases, convenient maps in caves. All that disbelief can be suspended.
A handpicked team of professional astronauts on an interstellar mission being a bunch of complete incompetents over and over again for plot convenience is the real headscratcher that eventually makes it feel like the plot is an afterthought and makes you disengage from the film as a story rather then just pretty pictures.
It's a pattern you see a lot especially in sci-fi and action, and it's annoying because it's not like you couldn't have the glossy visuals or set-pieces if you also had coherent plots.
Agreed. Necessary suspension of belief vs unnecessary and contradictory.
For an in-depth list for 'Prometheus': "Red Letter Media talks about Prometheus" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x1YuvUQFJ0]. (To what extent were those due to Lindelof, not Scott?)
Hubris is a tough drug to kick. If you were a biology officer on a spaceship with a bunch of fancy tech, why wouldn’t you think you could poke and prod a giant alien worm? Part of the story is that everyone thinks that they are in control until something happens, they realize their mistake, and then they probably die.
> why wouldn’t you think you could poke and prod a giant alien worm?
Because 90% of the average moviegoing audience got it right. You can invent tortured reasoning for why a biology officer on a spaceship with a bunch of fancy tech would be dumber than the bottom 10% of humans, but the real explanation is just lazy/incompetent writers.
Agreed - that scene is literally in there as an excuse to exhibit a self-indulgent "gross-out moment". Why not just make a B-horror Troma monster movie at that point...
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.
Xenobiologist is tired of eating with the rest of the crew and eats in the lab instead seems reasonable. We didn't see the leadup to see the deviance normalized, we just get to see the end of it.
Alien:Earth isn't the best writing, obviously, but we're how far into the series, the writing just has to be enough plot to get to the xenomorph rampage scenes. It's like plot in a video game or an adult film; you have to have it, but it doesn't matter.
We’re at the end. The whole first season didn’t make sense after the first episode. It just nose dived.
People above have already stated the obvious. It’s a popcorn series and a check box. That’s it. No staying power. No one wants to watch robot children who talk to xenomorphs make them pets. No. Just no. These creatures do not follow instructions from a tweenager. Get away from her you bitch.
These are the same creatures that almost wiped out the predators… c’mon man!
> 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.
>Being a good fiction consumer requires offering the benefit of the doubt up to a reasonable/personal limit of suspension of disbelief.
Yup, here for it.
>The missing piece with that show is inconsistent and shallow character development.
To say the least. The whole series reeks of a movie stretched out to a series for TV. And the ship landing in the city? Right, how convenient… it’s just terrible writing. Made for teens so they can #metoo when we talk about how utterly terrifying that universe is.
IMO, adding a queen to the Borg destroyed the Borg. I was really intrigued by the Borg as presented in their first appearance. If you remember, they had a nursery with Baby Borg and a collective conscience, no individuality. Then came the queen, the ruler of all with some people having a "higher rank". Totally made the Borg irrelevant to me.
There was a TV show about an invasion of Earth, it went along fine until the last season, a queen was added, I could tell it was rushed and doing that changed its direction.
Same can be said about Independence Day, even though I did not like the queen addition, it did not take away from the whole movie and in a way a "queen" in that context made a bit of sense. The only thing is, if the Queen was killed, wouldn't that end these Aliens ? To me, a queen should not leave the home planet.
Alien movies were too much for me, things popping out of someone's belly would be a "close my eyes" type scene. But I really liked Promentheus. I did not realize until much later that was a prequel to Alien :) And I still think it is a good movie.
Insects. Queen bees, queen ants, queen termites. Feels nice an icky to humans.
Now, SF mostly gets this wrong as isn't that much of a leader, more of a 'starter' and many species have multiple queens and when one gets killed another is promoted from larva. This and the vast majority of behaviors are self organizing, and not ones from a leadership position.
> IMO, adding a queen to the Borg destroyed the Borg.
Having more than one episode about the Borg destroyed the Borg.
1st appearance: there are some things out there that human civilization isn't ready for. You wanna see an example? You really wanna see? Okay, you asked for it. OMG it's the Borg!
2nd through Nth appearance: Demystifying Borg Internal APIs
Wasnt the queen introduced in the sequel to Independence Day? The leaat of the films troubles. This is the worst thing I've ever seen, without hyperbole. I was convinced that it was an earpy attempt by AI to create something resembling a movie. I felt physically ill watching it.
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.
I think they meant "wouldn't have known." The ensemble cast didn't really give contemporary viewers purchase on who would ultimately be the one to survive by the end of the film. Nowadays, many viewers go into the movie already knowing that Ripley will be the one to make it through, which makes it easy to see her as "the main character."
Ripley being the survivor was a rug pull on the audience's expectations. Tom Skerritt (Dallas) was a well-known actor at the time, and would have been assumed to have been the default lead.
Queen in the Alien universe is very similar to ants - she creates the eggs from which the facehuggers hatch.
She is maybe much more dangerous than the ant queen but so are the “ants”
I meant in the context of the OP’s ask about the Alien’s dying off once the Queen is dead. They don’t operate like ants in a direct sense, etymology or logic, they operate like ants when it’s convenient for the world of Alien.
Agreed. The Borg used to be scary because they seemed unbeatable. They were like grey goo that could adapt to whatever you threw at them.[1]
Having a queen gives them a single point of failure. Suddenly they are a lot less scary.
[1] I kind of felt the same way about the Boogieman from Ghost Busters when I was a kid. Teleports between closets and the regular ghost trap doodad doesn't work on him! Shit!
A long Prometheus article without even mentioning that's basically a Scientology ad? Ridicolous
TIL: Ridley (one of the main alien villains, and sometimes a final boss) from the Nintendo video game franchise, Metroid (that originated in 1986), was named after Ridley Scott.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_(Metroid)
Crazy how he turned out to be the villain of the Alien franchise too.
I had the good fortune of seeing Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm in a theater and then going to watch Prometheus within the same two week span. It gave me a much greater appreciation for the movie [Prometheus], and what it was trying to do.
Private Hudson arc is the main show -
"I'm ready, man. Check it out. I am the ultimate badass. State of the badass art. You do not want to fuck with me"
"Well, that's great. That's just fuckin' great, man! Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now, man!"
"That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over!"
"What do you mean they cut the power? How could they cut the power, man? They're animals man!"
"They're coming outta the walls! They're coming outta the goddamn walls! Let's book!"
You mostly missed: “why don’t you put her in charge?!”.
Mostly.
Such a great actor. RIP.
Very true. Hudson the character is deeper than what you see at first glance - always complaining, but apparently very competent and (barely) keeping it together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7qCwofjymM
By the way, anyone else craving some good new alien/sci-fi movies right now? Or got any good ones to share from the last couple years?
Theres an abridged fan version of the chinese 3 body series uploaded for free online, its in 3 movie length installments.
https://disembiggened.com/
Theres also Ethernaut, an Argentinian series that I think just has one series so far. People enjoy it, I didn't find it that interesting til the end. I just really dislike stories stretched thin over dozens of hours. I prefer Xfiles, Outer Limits, or aimple movies, that sort of scifi.
Not an action movie, but I enjoyed The Pod Generation sci fi flick a lot a year or two back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pod_Generation
Annihilation (2018)
Sci-fi is a manifestation of society's diffuse subconscious in mostly semi-lucid nightmares.
Two (one bad, the follow up crap) forgettable movies.
So much wasted potential. I'll take any article or theory to retcon the movies into something that makes sense.
Let’s agree to disagree
How is that relevant?
"Could you substantiate that opinion?" is a better way to generate discussion.
(and FrustratedMonky's comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45561992] is useful discussion.)
Not every comment need be about a fanatical robotic optimization for "relevance". Half the interesting on this site would disappear otherwise, you realize? Besides, what's wrong with mentioning how crappy these movies are (they really do suck) in a post that specifically names them?
Just spewing “media x is bad” without any context or explanation is just low effort and low quality discussion. At best it gets ignored, at worst you start a flame war
And downvoted. Some people who comment here seem to have the conversational development of a pre-AI phone support bot (at least the newer ones can pretend to be slightly chatty). I do feel sorry for the social scenes that need to endure your presence.
Can just picture it: Bill from accounting casually mentions the new barbecue he installed because some water cooler talk about home repair reminded him of his yard, only for one of you to snap in with "How is this relevant?!"
They should just adopt Roberts rules and be done with it.
Best creators are a little mad. Their best work is usually early work when their madness is tempered by limitations and other people around them.
But when success comes they become too big, rich and influential and their next movies are pretty much whatever they want them to be. And they are crap, because pinch of salt of their madness becomes whole dish.
It happened with Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Neill Blomkamp, probably some others.
It's also said that a director makes the same movie for entirety of their career. It's very visible in case of Ridley Scott. His later movies hit again and again the same perverse things that he consistently finds exciting.
I know this sentiment but for me it does not apply to Scott. He made some great movies later in his career; Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, Prometheus and The Martian are all masterpieces imo. The Last Duel was also pretty good
It’s down for me right now. See https://web.archive.org/web/20251012183954/https://www.ejump...
Thanks! we'll add that link to the toptext as well
Alien: Earth was the dumbest addition to the franchise. Hybrid synths that can “talk” to the aliens… pffft. Off the rails.
The last few films were of similar ilk. Prometheus started it with their David narrative. Just terrible writing.
Being a good fiction consumer requires offering the benefit of the doubt up to a reasonable/personal limit of suspension of disbelief. The missing piece with that show is inconsistent and shallow character development. Lost (prior to the later season/s) is probably one of the better examples. It's still watchable but it could be better. Maybe they'll sort it out.
Id argue that being a good fiction consumer is not letting a brand or franchise become your identity and know when to drop something. I saw the phantom menace when I was 12 and hated it. I was a massive Star Wars fan. I've seen nothing from Star Wars since and as far as I can tell I've missed nothing of value over 25 years. Terminator 3, Prometheus, Ghostbusters reboot, many more. We are not obliged to consume garbage.
That's the thing, though. Gigantic spaceships, alien panspermia, stasis pods, human-passing androids, underground alien bases, convenient maps in caves. All that disbelief can be suspended.
A handpicked team of professional astronauts on an interstellar mission being a bunch of complete incompetents over and over again for plot convenience is the real headscratcher that eventually makes it feel like the plot is an afterthought and makes you disengage from the film as a story rather then just pretty pictures.
It's a pattern you see a lot especially in sci-fi and action, and it's annoying because it's not like you couldn't have the glossy visuals or set-pieces if you also had coherent plots.
Agreed. Necessary suspension of belief vs unnecessary and contradictory.
For an in-depth list for 'Prometheus': "Red Letter Media talks about Prometheus" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x1YuvUQFJ0]. (To what extent were those due to Lindelof, not Scott?)
Exactly. If human characters don't react like real humans would, then that is much harder to 'justify' or 'suspend belief' about.
Lets take our helmets off in a unknown hostile enivroment?
Lets play with giant worms with teeth, as if in real life those things wouldn't scare the crap out of you even if they weren't alien.
Hubris is a tough drug to kick. If you were a biology officer on a spaceship with a bunch of fancy tech, why wouldn’t you think you could poke and prod a giant alien worm? Part of the story is that everyone thinks that they are in control until something happens, they realize their mistake, and then they probably die.
> why wouldn’t you think you could poke and prod a giant alien worm?
Because 90% of the average moviegoing audience got it right. You can invent tortured reasoning for why a biology officer on a spaceship with a bunch of fancy tech would be dumber than the bottom 10% of humans, but the real explanation is just lazy/incompetent writers.
Agreed - that scene is literally in there as an excuse to exhibit a self-indulgent "gross-out moment". Why not just make a B-horror Troma monster movie at that point...
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.
Xenobiologist is tired of eating with the rest of the crew and eats in the lab instead seems reasonable. We didn't see the leadup to see the deviance normalized, we just get to see the end of it.
Alien:Earth isn't the best writing, obviously, but we're how far into the series, the writing just has to be enough plot to get to the xenomorph rampage scenes. It's like plot in a video game or an adult film; you have to have it, but it doesn't matter.
We’re at the end. The whole first season didn’t make sense after the first episode. It just nose dived.
People above have already stated the obvious. It’s a popcorn series and a check box. That’s it. No staying power. No one wants to watch robot children who talk to xenomorphs make them pets. No. Just no. These creatures do not follow instructions from a tweenager. Get away from her you bitch.
These are the same creatures that almost wiped out the predators… c’mon man!
> 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
> handpicked team of professional astronauts on an interstellar mission being a bunch of complete incompetents over and over again
It's set up in the future. Observing current trends it's quite realistic for everyone to be really, really dumb by then.
>Being a good fiction consumer requires offering the benefit of the doubt up to a reasonable/personal limit of suspension of disbelief.
Yup, here for it.
>The missing piece with that show is inconsistent and shallow character development.
To say the least. The whole series reeks of a movie stretched out to a series for TV. And the ship landing in the city? Right, how convenient… it’s just terrible writing. Made for teens so they can #metoo when we talk about how utterly terrifying that universe is.
> Ripley defeat the alien queen
What is it with "queens" in SF ? Off to a rant :)
IMO, adding a queen to the Borg destroyed the Borg. I was really intrigued by the Borg as presented in their first appearance. If you remember, they had a nursery with Baby Borg and a collective conscience, no individuality. Then came the queen, the ruler of all with some people having a "higher rank". Totally made the Borg irrelevant to me.
There was a TV show about an invasion of Earth, it went along fine until the last season, a queen was added, I could tell it was rushed and doing that changed its direction.
Same can be said about Independence Day, even though I did not like the queen addition, it did not take away from the whole movie and in a way a "queen" in that context made a bit of sense. The only thing is, if the Queen was killed, wouldn't that end these Aliens ? To me, a queen should not leave the home planet.
Alien movies were too much for me, things popping out of someone's belly would be a "close my eyes" type scene. But I really liked Promentheus. I did not realize until much later that was a prequel to Alien :) And I still think it is a good movie.
>What is it with "queens" in SF
Insects. Queen bees, queen ants, queen termites. Feels nice an icky to humans.
Now, SF mostly gets this wrong as isn't that much of a leader, more of a 'starter' and many species have multiple queens and when one gets killed another is promoted from larva. This and the vast majority of behaviors are self organizing, and not ones from a leadership position.
> IMO, adding a queen to the Borg destroyed the Borg.
Having more than one episode about the Borg destroyed the Borg.
1st appearance: there are some things out there that human civilization isn't ready for. You wanna see an example? You really wanna see? Okay, you asked for it. OMG it's the Borg!
2nd through Nth appearance: Demystifying Borg Internal APIs
Wasnt the queen introduced in the sequel to Independence Day? The leaat of the films troubles. This is the worst thing I've ever seen, without hyperbole. I was convinced that it was an earpy attempt by AI to create something resembling a movie. I felt physically ill watching it.
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.
> If you were alive when it originally came out you wouldn’t know that Ripley is the true lead of the film
?
I think they meant "wouldn't have known." The ensemble cast didn't really give contemporary viewers purchase on who would ultimately be the one to survive by the end of the film. Nowadays, many viewers go into the movie already knowing that Ripley will be the one to make it through, which makes it easy to see her as "the main character."
Ripley being the survivor was a rug pull on the audience's expectations. Tom Skerritt (Dallas) was a well-known actor at the time, and would have been assumed to have been the default lead.
In the marketing materials, Tom Skerritt got top billing as Dallas. He's also the captain of the ship.
Queen in the Alien universe is very similar to ants - she creates the eggs from which the facehuggers hatch. She is maybe much more dangerous than the ant queen but so are the “ants”
I meant in the context of the OP’s ask about the Alien’s dying off once the Queen is dead. They don’t operate like ants in a direct sense, etymology or logic, they operate like ants when it’s convenient for the world of Alien.
Pink Freud: The Dark Side of Your Mother
> adding a queen to the Borg destroyed the Borg
Agreed. The Borg used to be scary because they seemed unbeatable. They were like grey goo that could adapt to whatever you threw at them.[1]
Having a queen gives them a single point of failure. Suddenly they are a lot less scary.
[1] I kind of felt the same way about the Boogieman from Ghost Busters when I was a kid. Teleports between closets and the regular ghost trap doodad doesn't work on him! Shit!
Gotta have a boss fight at the end