Yea this is the side effect of trying to expand on something that had a simple premise and message. By trying to flesh it out you add a bunch of shit that was never meant to be there in the first place. This isn’t a case of filling in holes in a mythology, but plugging holes that don’t actually exist. Kinda why I never gave a fuck about the Space Jockey. It was never important.
But Aliens hasn’t been about rape in a long time so I guess the theme isn’t really relevant anymore anyway. It’s not really in Prometheus at all for example.
They do not only impregnate males. Facehuggers target any viable host, regardless of sex. Ripley had a Xenomorph inside of her in 3. A colonist in Aliens was shown having a chestburster come out of her. A face hugger also tried to hug Ripley and Newt in Aliens when Burk set one loose while they were sleeping.
Right, but in the original movie the screen writers objective was to make male viewers uncomfortable by raping and impregnating men and that is what Shaft Agent is referring to. It was very purposeful choice by the screen writer and Ridley Scott to have the men be the ones getting violated and not the women.
Shaft very specifically refers to the first movie being “Simple before all the sequels.”
you’re right for xeno attacks, but i’m not 100% sure it was a coincidence a male was the 1st. they definitely imply that xenos (at least the drones) have male affinity. even in the sequel James Cameron even went out of his way to give info on Lambert being MtF trans.
i’ll need to watch it again, but i can’t remember a single woman that was killed in Aliens by a drone xeno.
And yes the original Alien was basically a rapist in space before Cameron turned them into Starship Trooper bugs. The whole species is riddled with sexual symbolism thanks in large part to Giger’s influence. Ridley is reclaiming the Alien from Cameron’s ENTERTAINING albeit bullshit interpretation. I love the Alien Queen though. But as we see in the new trilogy and even Alien Resurrection, the species are not limited to one reproductive cycle.
We see them reproduce in many ways, and by that I mean initiate their core lifecycle which is eggs > hugger > Adult. In the case of Shaw in prometheus, she was functionally an egg that gave birth to the hugger. So really, they need an incubator for the hugger, followed by an incubator for the adult. The Newborn in Resurrection was essentially the liberation of the species from the limitations presented by the need for hosts, an evolutionary peak for the species.
Bullshit interpretation? Uh…no. A fucking Tim Burton fan could call Christopher Nolan’s Batman films an ENTERTAINING albeit bullshit interpretation. IMO, they’d be wrong.
Cameron’s interpretation was just a different, yet a completely competent standout on its own. Aside from being an unabashed action film, it’s arguably my favorite of the series. Sadly, Fincher, Jeunet and Scott himself (a la Prometheus) have never re-sparked that fire from the first two films.
In your opinion they didn’t sparked the fire that is.
I love Alien3 and Prometheus and think they are spiritually closer to the original than anything else. Aliens is an incredible film and arguably one of the best sequels ever conceived. But it did not due the Alien character favors.
The Alien were a perfect organism in 1, and the Dragon in 3 (biblical satan awaiting the birth of the antichrist). In Prometheus they were divine and revered spiritually.
In Aliens, they were bugs saved only by the majesty of the Queen.
You’re talking about how brilliant Aliens was which no one is arguing with. I am talking about Cameron’s interpretation of the Alien species which was a far cry from the calculated and sinister stalker from the first film.
Nope, I was just refuting a single word here: “bullshit.”
Nothing was bullshit, it was merely different. Everything else you’ve posted I pretty much agree with.
Assembly Cut of 3 is really worthwhile. Too bad Fox didn’t let Fincher do his thang. Resurrection though?..eh…the basketball scene was fun. Prometheus was very good, though the continual dumb shit said and done by “the world’s best” scientists on a trillion dollar mission annoyed the shit out of me. I couldn’t take it seriously.
Resurrection is acceptable, not as bad as what people made it out to be as usual. I enjoyed the OST, the cinematography especially the underwater scene was excellent. But I consider it closer to an offshoot/spin-off than part of the original trilogy. I recall Weaver saying that this is what attracted her to the film to begin with, that she wasn’t going to play Ripley, rather she was a new character Ripley 8.
For which she did a great job. The conversing, self-sacrificing Xenomorphs, wonky gameshow-host-like general, and Winona lost that shit for me though. At least it had Ron Perlman and Brad Dourif.
I blame Whedon completely completely for Resurrection. He tried to make an Alien Comic into part of the original saga which is retarded. That bullshit should be limited to the EU like the craptastic AvP movies.
The reason they cloned Ripley was because they had blood samples of Ripley from Alien 3 (there is a scene of this) and there was no other record of known hosts in those 200 years. Since the Aliens actually grow out of the host much like an organ or an embryo, and actually assimilates the host’s DNA - it was a given that the reverse would be true, that the exchange of DNA goes both ways and the host becomes part Alien too in order to grow the alien to begin. Movies like Prometheus cement this idea further which was the intent of Ridley since the beginning. It’s just we have never seen up until Ripley 8 a host that survives the Alien gestation.
Shaw is another human that survived the Alien gestation, and her DNA has likely been forever altered by the Xenomorphs even after giving birth.
Anyway, that guy in the video is almost as annoying is the worst parts of Resurrection.
