The major points of this discussion was what was known when. Evil Death holds to they could have known for hundreds of years (making the Alien vs Predator movie make sense) I’m saying this was a more greed and opportunity move with little to no prior knowledge. Mother deciphered it was a warning beacon and not a help beacon (once Ripley started looking at it fairly late). The Company could have very well figured out more (presumably they have better computers that deciphered more of the beacon then the one onboard. OR could have been receiving status updates from Ash which we have no info on b/c we do not know the turn around time on communications in this movie) I maintain if they had detailed info before hand about the alien b/c they encountered it before in any meaningful way the whole thing would have been better managed. (remember if as Evil Death posited they KNEW about the alien BEFORE the ship even launched and mined the ore b/c of the transfer of Ash) This however strikes me as something that came up and they tried to wring and advantage out of it without knowing much of anything about the Alien prior to the events of the movie.
vandal,
yes he did know about the egg. It shows him viewing the egg in an X-ray that he hides when a crew member walks in. But that’s not what we were discussing we were talking about how much prior knowledge the company has. IF we fought them before on earth like the new movie claims and the company had that data they would very likely know about the egg and as Evil Death says they were sent mostly to collect a live Alien knowing what they were after it makes no sense (to me). The Science officer could have very well said they need to quarantine him or freeze him b/c it’s too risky to let him out with more study. I doubt anyone would have fought it. Remember Ripley was going to leave him in the airlock to begin with.
ps, sorry for using your name so much Evil Death but I was trying to put forth your contributions to this discussion so far.
Learn something about science, Darkhold - stat. Start with the difference between natural conditions and laboratory conditions.
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They wanted a live alien. And consider this - it was Kane’s idea to eat before they went back into hypersleep. If he hadn’t said that, then he would have been frozen all the way back to Earth. Having said it, however, Ash had no good reason to deny him - it looked like Kane was now fine.
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It grew fast, to be sure, but if you think it grew instantly to full size you’re an imbecile. We know it took at least as long as was required to get to the storage hold before it shed its first skin; that’s plenty of time to go in and stamp on the little fucker or to rig up a flame unit.
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That would be because finding scientific solutions is the Science Officer’s job. :rolleyes:
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Not unless the alien was hovering over the facehugged every single second, no. Aliens don’t attack androids unless provoked, remember?
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I explained this in sufficient detail upthread.
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If it looks like a chicken and clucks like a chicken, I don’t have to eat it to guess that it’s a chicken.
BTW, as to the ore mining - the Nostromo didn’t mine the ore. The Nostromo was a towing vessel that had been sent out to retrieve an automated refinery.
Well, no. But you have to consider that The Company, ultimately, is managed by people a lot like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. Some focus group recommendations and a chain of garbled memoes probably led to the whole Let It Do Maximum Damage retrieval masterplan being vehemently defended.
Topically, now: looking forward in a vaguely interested sense. I figure on it being a rental, unless the opening-weekend reviews are unexpectedly positive.
Hey, in my first post I mentioned the fact that there were plenty of good comic stories written, which are just the graphic novels in pure form. The fisrt Aliens vs Predator storyline was awesome! Even the conveluted Aliens vs Predator vs Terminator managed to pull off a rather interesting premise. And the arcade game that took place in California, was it?, was really good as well.
But you know what? Resident Evil had a GREAT storyline long before they decided to make a movie out of it, and look what Wes Anderson did with that. And I’ve already discussed the shit ideas he has for this upcoming movie. There’s a six minute or so little interview type movie out there on the internet with a discussion with Wes Anderson as he goes over some drawings and ideas for the upcoming film. I think I saw it threw apple.com. Wherever, look for it, and you will see that this is coming from the Freddy vs Jason field of crap…he’s already made one stinky movie with complete disreguard for an amazingly well developed storyline, and it looks like he’s getting ready to do the same.
Evil Death, for my sake as well, could you just repeat why you think the company didn’t continue to check out LV-426 after the Nostromo left…the only thing I recall you mentioning was something about Aliens being an afterthout to the original movie, thus all the facts didn’t line up. Maybe I missed something. Still, it doesn’t make any sense not to do so.
Also, I’m confused why you’d think the crew would look towards Ash for information on how to capture/kill the thing…from what I recall from the movie, they’re immediate response was to find weapons, chase the thing into an airlock, and kill it, and none of that really had any real insight from Ash.
Also, say W-Y is around in the present day according to the new script…Now, I can’t quite remember when Alien takes place, but it’s at least a couple hundred years in the future. If the company is there for this film, and manages to collect some information it’s hoping will pan out and helps with their interpretation of the beacon and situation on LV-426, how the HELL do you think they managed to keep that information secret, and prevent any other company from hearing the beacon and making the same connections? I mean, if the information is that important to them that they’d go threw years and years of subversion and planning in order to wait for just the right moment, what prevented any other coorporation from doing the same? Face it, the idea that they had any prior knowledge to the existance of the xenomorph on the asterooid is really just too far fetched.
Okay, to that, I claim bullshit. Do you have any idea what holding the exclusive rights to inconclusive proof of intelligent alien life would be worth nowadays? A hell of a lot more than $42 million, I can guarantee! If the company was hurt by the loss of the Nostromo, I’m pretty sure they felt an even greater need to get a better suited unit down to that asteroid and get a sample and proof before anyone else did and their loss turned out to be completely useless. If they knew in advance what was down there, the would have sent several ships out to the place to investigate and collect. The Nostromo may have been the closest and gotten there first and not known about any of the others, and thus not contacted anyone else about it, but there’s no reason in hell to think that W-Y wouldn’t have sent more than one ship to investigate LV-426 if they knew exactly what was going on down there.
I’m not disagreeing with you on that, Elvis. However, if they gave retrieving an alien their best shot and it failed, they still wouldn’t try again until they were sure they could succeed. In the meantime, they’d keep all the information under Double-Hush-Hush Top Secret security while working on a new method of getting hold of them.
Sixty years passes uneventfully before a relatively low-level exec without Double-Hush-Hush level access finds out about the aliens. Thinking he’s encountered something new, he tries to do what the Company failed to do sixty years earlier, not knowing the full ramifications of his actions.
Are you deliberately missing my point? How is a ship where it runs amok a natural condition? It’s no more ‘natural’ then if they set up a maze and let it free with a few people wandering around in it. Do we study lions by having them run around a cargo plane? This is HANDS DOWN the worst possible way to ‘study’ it. No controls like a lab. And not a natural condition they can view without disturbing it.
How about “I am the science officer we have had something we don’t understand happen to you. You may have something wrong I cannot detect with this simple equipment. You’re going in hypersleep until we can study further”?
Thanks for the implied insult. I thought we were just having a lively discussion. Anyhow how did you get from my statement that I thought it grew up instantly? “loose and GROWING” not loose and 9 foot tall in 30 seconds.
once again you miss my point. You act like they would have been incapable of acting or would have come up with a decent solution if he hadn’t mislead them. It’s not like the company (if as you say the knew when they put Ash onboard) would have said “now they’re going to turn to you to advice. Say the flame thrower b/c we know it won’t work Haw Haw Haw” They had no good solutions at all. Science officer is irrelevant.
how do you know? I never saw Bishop in any of the ‘hive’ raids where the humans were attacked. Or in fact anywhere near the humans when the humans were attacked. He shows fear of going out and modifying the…(what was it? satellite?) outside b/c he doesn’t’ want to die showing HE does not know if Aliens attack androids or not. If he didn’t know it’s likely the company doesn’t know and likely Ash didn’t know. And we Definitely don’t know. I DO know the mother alien ripped Bishop in half first chance she got (course you could make the argument she was so pissed at that point she didn’t care and that’s fair enough) However even if it’s true the alien wouldn’t attack before the first face hug Ash messed up it would take care of business after that.
I don’t believe so. How did Ripley’s presence change ANYTHING other then knowledge? And it seemed like Paul Riser thought believing her was a shot in the dark not a sure deal.
well it looks like a duck to me. And at that I think this discussion is running out of gas. I think there’s no way to 100% know what when on too many holes in the original movie to know for sure.
heh thanks for pointing out they just towed the ore. That would buffer my argument more. They KNOW the Alien is on the LV planet. They transfer Ash. They send the ship out. The ship collects the ore then it goes and picks up an Alien? This isn’t a milk and bread run. It would have taken them less time to outfit a proper ship and send it. So they do something that takes more time, is less likely to complete the task, and is more likely to cut into profits?
My way you have an internally consistent movie with the only real question being why was Ash transferred (IMO a simple plot device to show he was ‘different’ from the crew that had been working together a long time)
Your way you have a convoluted conspiracy that’s riddled with logical holes. Who knows you may be right however one thinks at the very very very least during the commentary somebody would have said “see the company knew every step of the way what’s going on b/c we’ve had prior experience with the alien life form” it seems to me this movie was written as a first contact movie with a greedy shady company trying to get the money.
You seem to be taking it way to personal (in fact this whole conversation started with you taking a potshot at someone else I believe) take a breath. At the end of the day it’s just a movie. Fun to BS about and dissect but not something to get all worked up about.
Where does he say this? I’ve never heard this in either the regular or director’s cut – only Ripley’s question of “How long after we’re declared overdue can we expect a rescue?” and his hesitant reply of “Seventeen days.”
Disregarding the hijack about making nitpicky sense of the series’ plot arc: The new AvP will suck like a toothless Filipino whore. And yes, because of the director, whose track record of filmmaking ranges from “marginally watchable crap” to “unanesthetized dental work with rusty implements.”
It’s Paul Anderson. Wes is the guy behind Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore whose new movie will be The Aquatic Life, starring Bill Murray in his third appearance for the director.
And it’s Paul W.S. Anderson, as distinguished from Paul Thomas Anderson, the filmmaker responsible for Magnolia, Boogie Nights, and Punch-Drunk Love.
Oh, my bad…PAUL Anderson. Now who’s being nitpicky, Cervaise :: (just so you know, I am indeed kidding. I can’t believe after reading a whole bunch of reviews and such, I got the two directors confused like that; that’s pretty damn embarrassing on my part).
Speaking of interviews, I found one with Paul Anderson discussing Lance’s role in the film…apparently, he’s playing Charles Bishop Wailen, a billionaire pioneer in the robotics industry. I believe he’s suffering from cancer, or some life-threatening illness and is hoping of finding some way of gaining imortality, or some shit. He is indeed the creator of the Bishop android, founder of the Wailen-Yutani Company, and somehow this doesn’t interfere with continuity?
The Bishop model was developed years after Ash’s model, and the creator was alive and kicking in Alien 3. So, unless the guy discovers the chryo-tubes in this movie, I’m really thinking they’re screwing the pooch on this one. What is it with people and feeling the need for a person to help keep the movies related. I mean, for an Alien movie, you need the aliens, not the same characters. Why stretch reality so far just to have some stupid, unnecessary “similarity” to help people "understand this is an Alien movie? I think we’d get it it without Ripley or Bishop, or anyone else.
Am I the only person who thinks that an Alien movie without Ripley would be like an Indiana Jones movie without, well, Indiana Jones? Why do people fixate on the monsters, instead of on the human characters - who, frankly, are what made the series so good in the first place?
Because the movies are called Alien, not Ripley Saves the Universe. The point was to introduce a terrifying creature, not a great hero. I admit that it was the character of Ripley and her exploits with the aliens that helped make the movies work, but that also had a lot to do with excelent writing and directing as well. HAve a story with Ripley without the Alien, and you’ve got little to go on; but the Alien provides so much potential to go so far without Ripley, that it’s ridiculous to have the franchise tethered to her. I mean, there are a number of comics and stories out there that have nothing to do with Ripley, and a lot of them are pretty damn good.
I admit, at first, I didn’t really like the idea when they killed her off in 3, but after I got over the initial shock, I realized what an incredibly gutsy thing to do, and was absolutely brilliant, because it openned up the opportunity to do so much with the storyline. Then the writers fucked it all up by coming out with Ressurrection and destroying a perfectly good opportunity to do something refreshing and great, instead of something cliched and reused.
I haven’t seen A3 in a while - I’m waiting to get my AQ box before I do - but is it impossible that the second Bishop who shows up is an android instructed to lie to Ripley? Do we see him bleed?
Even if we do, it’s just possible that he’s a descendant of the AvP character.
(PS: It’s “Weyland” - it’s written all over the walls of Hadley’s Hope in Aliens SE.)
Even without the Special addition Alien3, you see him bleed, and he is indeed, a real human being in three. And according to what I’ve read, the guy in AVP isn’t a decendant, it’s the same guy. (I really should start bookmarking my these sites, but I’m at work, and most of them get deleted. Anyway, a simple Google search will put you in touch with a lot of fan sites that will have links to the interview, so…)
hmmm is it possible to come back to a thread that you promised to leave after the subject changes?
Anyway on this one I think Evil Death is right. Sure there’s blood but his ear is 1/2 ripped off and he barely flinches. He just stands there. He’s an andriod or pumped up on smack. (prehaps it’s even more stupid like the orignal creators brain in an andriod body)
And this doesn’t prove anything but the scene selection says “never trust ‘A’ bishop”
Could the Bishop in Resurrection just be a clone with the same memories? Seems like they perfected cloning technology. I mean, if I had myself cloned and my memories remained intact, I could pretty much say I am Levdrakon, right?
Anyway, is it true Sigourney is opposed to the film? If so, is it because she really cares about her character and continuity? Or is it just that this new film is going to pretty much wipe out the separate Aliens/Predator franchises? I realize making Freddy vs. Jason doesn’t preclude making more Jason & Freddy movies. But do you think there will ever be new Alien or Predator movie on it’s own?
There is no Bishop in Ressurrection. I was always a little baffled by the fact that the guy in 3 takes a wrench to the head, and carries on a conversation with half the flesh on his head sticking out at an awkward angle, but the fact he’s bleeding and not gushing white stuff is supposed to point out that he’s the real deal. And, just in case I don’t know why I’m doing this because we’ve discussed so many plot points already, but in the Director’s Cut, there is a shot of him lying there, after getting hit, holding his ear, looking at his blood soaked hand and screaming “I’m not a droid!” It was the intention for him to be the actual Bishop creator from the get go, and not just another droid.
As for why Sigourney was opposed to it, I read that it was because she felt it would screw up the continuity of the Alien franchise (imagine that!). She says something to that effect in one of the interviews on one of the many discs in the Quadrilogy set, and I’m sure if you searched around on the net, you could find enough interviews where she mentions it would be a stupid idea. I don’t think she’s too concerned about her character’s continuity, seeing as how she apparently wanted Ripley to die in Aliens.
They’re apparently working on an Alien 5, but I’m not sure if all of that is just hersay. Weever’s looking forward to it, and wants it to deal with heading back to the xenomorph homeworld. And I think if someone had enough interest, they could easily make several Predator movies (again, both franchises have numerous comic book/video game storylines, so it’s not like it’s hard to come up with ideas).
: (just so you know, I am indeed kidding. I can’t believe after reading a whole bunch of reviews and such, I got the two directors confused like that; that’s pretty damn embarrassing on my part).