What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

Aliens is my favourite movie pretty much and I have to agree that the queen is the weakest bit. Having a horde of these things coming at you because they want to make more of them is way scarier.

A long time ago I made the decision to never watch another movie in the series after Aliens. I've stayed true to that decision. I have such a profound respect for those first two movies, I put them behind only Ghostbusters and The Enpire Strikes Back in my list of favorite movies. To continue the story of Ripley, Newt, and Hicks never sat well with me. They earned their victory. Let them have whatever life was waiting for them.

I won't be seeing Covenant, either. Just because it's Ridley Scott attempting a return to form for the franchise, it's still indulging in the inane and ultimately damaging trend in Hollywood to explore the origins of our nightmares. I don't need to know how this shit came to be. I certainly don't want to understand it. To do so works to lessen their effect. It sounds like I'm not missing anything.

Feelitmon wrote: But man, that self-contained lifecycle in the original movie (as fleshed out in removed scenes and the novelization) is just so cool and otherworldly. Egg -> facehugger -> chestburster -> bigfucka -> egg. Love it.

Most of the bughunt games that try to simulate the Alien franchise ignore the lifecycle and just focus on the iconic standard adult xenos.

Two that got it right:
Intruder (Task Force Games) skips the egg portion, but otherwise goes through the life cycle.
The Awful Green Things From Outer Space (first published in Dragon magazine #28). Game designer/artist Tom Wham claimed at the time that it was not based on Alien and it was just a big coincidence, but I suspect he was trying to cover his ass since it was published mere months after the movie came out. This game had a life cycle of egg - baby - adult, plus one additional stage of "fragements", which fell somewhere between egg and baby and was the result of attacking any alien with a weapon that broke the alien into survivable pieces.

Josh, we have reached a cultural point where the demand for television shows and movies far exceeds the creative capacity of people creating such entertainment. So we get all these damn sequels and prequels and stuff story-boarded almost directly from comic books.

Everybody wants fucking LORE. LORE LORE LORE. Backstory for everything. The ONLY time this has EVER worked in a film series' favor has been...Star Wars. Because part of the concept was to create a lived-in, storied setting that we are sort of coming in on in the middle of a serial narrative. So it made sense for there to be more explanation, and for the most part, everyone but George Lucas that has added to the official LORE of Star Wars has been respectful and thoughtful about it with some exceptions.

But not every god damned movie needs LORE. Like John Wick- do we need MORE explanation than a suggestion of a larger "world" out there? All of the detail should come out in small bits through the storytelling, instead of the storytelling service as a vehicle for LORE.

Alien had no LORE. You got a SENSE that these folks were blue collar schmoes pulling a haul, some typical The Company is Real Bad stuff in the peripheral, and then a solid and quite simple survival horror story with a beginning, middle and end.

Look at Fury Road too. All of the LORE is self-contained. That part where they see the stilt walking dudes is so weird and mysterious...and at no point did I think "man, I hope they do a whole movie where they go into their backstory and fucking LORE."

LORE ruins movies. Witness Hellraiser, which I think is the best example of this happening. Movie 1- Cenobites, holy shit! Weird, extra-dimensional S&M demons who have unknown purposes and agenda. Where did they come from, why are they here, what do they want? AWESOME! Movie 2 kept that up, good job! Hellraiser 3 started explain all of the fucking LORE, gave Pinhead a lame origin, and pretty much disarmed all of the weirdness and enigma. And the results were D-U-M-B.

But then there is The Matrix. It goofs up with having a lot of talking about stuff, but it actually doesn't overexplain itself. In fact, a lot of its LORE is really subtle. Like the part with the Merovingian and his henchmen, who are hinted at being vampires and werewolves and ghosts. There's no extended walk-and-talk where characters talk about it.

Logan handled its LORE really well, but it is also the best movie of 2017. The past films are almost unceremoniously disposed of. There's some talk about them, but nothing is explained and extrapolated on...because only the parts that are relevant to the LOGAN story are even really brought up.

Enough with it. SO tired of "shared universes" and all that crap, I just do not care about that kind of storytelling anymore. I mean, there are like ten film franchise deals and all going on...eventually this shit is going to CRASH HARD. That god awful Guy Ritchie King Arthur movie was supposed to be a multi-film deal and I am sure it is full of teasy-tease LORE shit...but it bombed completely, so who is going to care about its fucking LORE.

LORE LORE LORE. Just shit to talk about on the internet, really. Not important story material. Thanks a lot X-Files, Twin Peaks, Lost, Marvel...

MOAR LOAR didn't work for star wars though either.

no one i know liked seeing anakin become vader much less the midiclorians...

in the forward direction...force awakens introduced a bunch of weak sauce too that didn't serve the series well.

The time before and after the OT was so much cooler in our heads and in our discussions.

for the most part, everyone but George Lucas that has added to the official LORE of Star Wars has been respectful and thoughtful about it

Read again.

Actually, the Clone Wars wound up being cooler on the show than I imagined it.

alien also had that used, lived in look. if it didn't need more lore, then star wars shouldn't either. that lived in look was all we needed at the time.

i don't need to see how han wins the falcon from lando, but i bet that's gonna be on film...

star wars has problems beyond Lucas and disney is just gonna keep crapping it out.

That's ok. I preferred Rogue One and Force Awakens then any of those prequels. They're doing ok so far.

Except they're not.

We can't say more lore worked for Star Wars except...

Unless we can also say more lore worked for Alien except...

But we can't in either. I can't say more lore has worked for the Alien franchise...except everything after Aliens.

Either digging into a franchise's lore works or it doesn't. I can't say that the extra SW films beyond the OT made it better than it already was. There are good parts for sure, but on the whole....unnecessary for the franchise beyond making more money for studios.

And with three posts on this point, I've gotta be done.

Check out version of Alien 3 script with space monks on a wooden space station, great read.

Finished the script, Shell. The 2nd half got pretty good and you can see that Ressurection got inspired by the idea of a group trying to get from a to B during a disaster, like those old disaster movies. I liked that this time we follow where Bishop goes too for a dual adventure of sorts.

You can totally see why they passed up on this ya? If Ridley survives the end of Aliens and has been the star of both movies so far, you can't make the third one not about her.

Also the idea that the pathogen is a virus that you sort of randomly catch or not is pretty lame.

Still it was pretty exciting and I was reading certain parts pretty quickly cuz I was wanted to know what was going to happen

Saw Alien Covenant, it is pretty redundant.
As opposed to Prometheus, there are some actually bona fide good scenes. And it makes more sense overall.
On the bad part, it's treading a path we've been down before. There's nothing remotely surprising there. The general disregard for quarantine protocol and basic common sense (the equivalent of going alone down the basement) is kind of irritating. It's just lazy film-making.

And the "lore" is really dumb. The origins of the xenomorph are dumb, but a lengthy exposition about them is even dumber. See posts above. It just takes all the mystique out and replaces it with a B-movie shlock (except it doesn't acknowledge how stupid it is and aims at high philosophical concepts instead). Also, I felt like Ridley Scott wanted to make a Blade Runner sequel instead, but went for the IP that was available.
This movie has way more to say about replicants and their relationship with humans than about the titular alien. In fact, my major complaint is that the alien is not prominent enough, it is treated more like an annoying animal than an actual threat to humankind.

I keep telling myself I need to watch "The Lost City of Z" because I read 3/4 of the original piece it's based on, but then I put it off, and it moves to a theater that's further away because nobody is watching it, and now I've resigned myself to watching it in the basement if I can ever get the kids out of the way.

"...a mesmerizing Charlie Hunnam..."