Alien (1979)

[IdleRich]

Isn't this a classic aesop fable type story

A man helps a snake and then the snake bites him. Stupid monkey

Isn't the aesop fable when the scorpion stings the animal carrying him across the river even though they will both die as a result - he simply can't change his nature.

You're thinking of The Snake by Al Wilson... unless that is itself based on aesop which could well be.

 

[sus]

Maybe I guess I've blended different stories but yeah there are a lot of parables like this. Stupid monkey stories.

 

[sus]

Stupid monkey thinks every form of life is a monkey

 

[sus]

Stupid monkey confuses the tiny dot that is monkeyintelligence for the vast highdimensional space of all possible intelligences. Then he dies.

 

[sus]

This is the mistake Yudkowsky thinks we are making for AI. I'm not sure whether I buy it but it's not crazy.

 

[IdleRich]

Stupid monkey confuses the tiny dot that is monkeyintelligence for the vast highdimensional space of all possible intelligences. Then he dies.

And he never learns sadly.

I bet Aesop never did a fable about how noone ever learns from history or example etc but he should have had the balls to say it.

 

[version]

Isn't this a classic aesop fable type story

A man helps a snake and then the snake bites him. Stupid monkey

No, because it isn't clear he's a threat until it's too late.

 

[Murphy]

Monkey can summon cloud

 

[sus]

No, because it isn't clear he's a threat until it's too late.

I get where you're coming from but also, Q: why did Shaw assume a machine's interests were aligned with hers in the first place? A: Because it looked like a human being, so she projected human qualities. Just like assuming an AI will treat you lovingly like its child because its name is "Mother." There is some fundamental error happening of skin-deep, name-deep reasoning. Not looking under the hood at the wiring.

I guess you could also argue that Shaw trusts the AI because the Company told her so. But maybe she should be a little suspicious that the Company's interests are aligned with hers, too?

 

[sus]

IDK trust games are complicated, and I'm not sure I'd do any better in Shaw's place, but I think this is very much a Stupid Monkey film, and that to a large extent, the humans' deaths are the result of a blind faith placed in foreign agents. Think the Captain in Covenant stupidly leaning over the xenomorph egg-sac, despite every nerve-instinct in his body screaming danger at him, because David says it's safe.

There's an over-reliance on authority, on an authority that doesn't have your best interests at heart, that feels symptomatic of modern life in certain ways. Of being a domesticated animal, a dog who trusts his owner because the world's too complicated so he delegates all his reasoning skills, puts his fate in another's hands.

Rem Koolhaas writes (tho he's not always a reliable historical narrator) that when Coney Island burned in the early 1900s, all the circus animals died waited for their trainers to come and direct them, rather than fleeing the flames

 

[version]

I was talking to someone last night about possible directions you could take another film and kept running into the brick wall of the first being more or less perfect, so anything where it's another crew landing on a planet and bumping into an alien just isn't going to hit the same way. I do think Scott and co. were pursuing it down some of the few fruitful avenues open to them in Prometheus and Covenant, the execution just left something to be desired.

Some of the ideas I came up with were:

• Something along the lines of the medieval colony conceived for Alien 3. The religious angle's a solid one, lots to mine. You could perhaps have a community living in the shadow of a derelict the way the villagers do Dracula's castle. They know to keep away, perhaps offer sacrifices. The ship exerts a psychic pull and calls to people like Orlock does Lily-Rose Depp in the new Nosferatu, gets into their dreams.
• A 70s conspiracy thriller done mostly through smoky boardrooms at the top of Weyland-Yutani. You get snippets of information about the alien, but it's primarily corporate espionage, political maneuvering, corruption. They're possibly dropping aliens into situations like the CIA dropping special forces into Vietnam for the Phoenix program, but it's only touched upon.

 

[version]

 

[IdleRich]

I was talking to someone last night about possible directions you could take an alien film and kept running into the brick wall of the first being more or less perfect, so anything where it's another crew landing on a planet and bumping into an alien just isn't going to hit the same way. I do think Scott and co. were pursuing it down some of the few fruitful avenues open to them in Prometheus and Covenant, the execution just left something to be desired.

Some of the ideas I came up with were:

• Something along the lines of the medieval colony conceived for Alien 3. The religious angle's a solid one, lots to mine. You could perhaps have a community living in the shadow of a derelict the way the villagers do Dracula's castle. They know to keep away, perhaps offer sacrifices. The ship exerts a psychic pull and calls to people like Orlock does Lily-Rose Depp in the new Nosferatu, gets into their dreams.
• A 70s conspiracy thriller done mostly through smoky boardrooms at the top of Weyland-Yutani. You get snippets of information about the alien, but it's primarily corporate espionage, political maneuvering, corruption etc. They're possibly dropping aliens into situations like the CIA dropping special forces into Vietnam for the Phoenix program, but it's only touched upon.

For me, like you say, it's the execution, those guys high fiving as they kamikaze the ship, the guy from Ridings Trilogy letting the alien into his suit. I'd settle for Prometheus and Covenant but made again as not shit.

 

[version]

There's a deleted scene from the first one where Ripley finds Dallas still alive and cocooned into the wall and Brett in a similar situation and being turned into an egg. It's intriguing and pretty horrifying, but I can see why they cut it.

One scene that was cut from the film occurred during Ripley's final escape from the Nostromo; she encounters Dallas and Brett, who have been partially cocooned by the alien. O'Bannon had intended the scene to indicate that Brett was becoming an alien egg, while Dallas was held nearby to be implanted by the resulting facehugger. Production designer Michael Seymour later suggested that Dallas had "become sort of food for the alien creature", while Ivor Powell suggested that "Dallas is found in the ship as an egg, still alive." Scott remarked, "they're morphing, metamorphosing, they are changing into...being consumed, I guess, by whatever the alien's organism is...into an egg." The scene was cut partly because it did not look realistic enough, but also because it slowed the pace of the escape sequence. Tom Skerritt remarked that "The picture had to have that pace. Her trying to get the hell out of there, we're all rooting for her to get out of there, and for her to slow up and have a conversation with Dallas was not appropriate."​

 

[IdleRich]

IDK trust games are complicated, and I'm not sure I'd do any better in Shaw's place, but I think this is very much a Stupid Monkey film, and that to a large extent, the humans' deaths are the result of a blind faith placed in foreign agents. Think the Captain in Covenant stupidly leaning over the xenomorph egg-sac, despite every nerve-instinct in his body screaming danger at him, because David says it's safe.

There's an over-reliance on authority, on an authority that doesn't have your best interests at heart, that feels symptomatic of modern life in certain ways. Of being a domesticated animal, a dog who trusts his owner because the world's too complicated so he delegates all his reasoning skills, puts his fate in another's hands.

Rem Koolhaas writes (tho he's not always a reliable historical narrator) that when Coney Island burned in the early 1900s, all the circus animals died waited for their trainers to come and direct them, rather than fleeing the flames

Like in No Country For Old Men when people just stand there for Chigurh to execute them with the cow killer cos he tells them to.

Similar to the first episode of Utopia, just breathe this please... and they do, and they all die.

 

[IdleRich]

 

[0bleak]

@sus
Have you seen the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

 

[sus]

I was talking to someone last night about possible directions you could take an alien film and kept running into the brick wall of the first being more or less perfect, so anything where it's another crew landing on a planet and bumping into an alien just isn't going to hit the same way. I do think Scott and co. were pursuing it down some of the few fruitful avenues open to them in Prometheus and Covenant, the execution just left something to be desired

I think I'd have made Covenant and Prometheus one single film, removing a lot of the jumpscare buildup that's trying to replicate the incredible slowburn of the first Alien and going all in on worldbuilding instead. Two halves, symmetrical, with a questionmark in between as to what happened to Shaw, so there's suspense still.

Cut the entire first forty minutes of Covenant and the last forty minutes too. The problem is he keeps trying to copy the plot structure so you get the same predictable Alien v Heroine showdown, guns blazing, blowing the xenomorph into space, followed by the lurking threat of contagion/implantation/there still being a viable embryo aboard through cryosleep.

It's true that it's hard to follow a perfect film like Alien but trying to copy its structure exactly, with new characters/scenery, is not a good strategy for solving that problem IMO. Especially when the original structure worked precisely because of its novelty, its surprise, its suspense. Need to find new sources of vitality.

 

[sus]

I've been thinking that critical commentaries would be a great format. The main thing preventing it ostensibly is copyright yeah? But maybe you could release standalone audio to layer over

 

[version]

I think I'd have made Covenant and Prometheus one single film, removing a lot of the jumpscare buildup that's trying to replicate the incredible slowburn of the first Alien and going all in on worldbuilding instead. Two halves, symmetrical, with a questionmark in between as to what happened to Shaw, so there's suspense still.

Cut the entire first forty minutes of Covenant and the last forty minutes too. The problem is he keeps trying to copy the plot structure so you get the same predictable Alien v Heroine showdown, guns blazing, blowing the xenomorph into space, followed by the lurking threat of contagion/implantation/there still being a viable embryo aboard through cryosleep.

It's true that it's hard to follow a perfect film like Alien but trying to copy its structure exactly, with new characters/scenery, is not a good strategy for solving that problem IMO. Especially when the original structure worked precisely because of its novelty, its surprise, its suspense. Need to find new sources of vitality.

I don't think anyone's tried starting one in the middle yet, immediately dropping the audience into sweaty, panicked people several hours, or even days or months, into dealing with a xenomorph.