Why does the Alien franchise need more freaky horror stuff rather than human

[Xenomorphine]

Stop whining about how actual artificial intelligence functions please for the love of God, they always functioned as artificial humans ever since Alien's conception.

Emulations of human behaviour aren't the same as literally thinking like an emotional human 24/7. It's the difference between typing to a really advanced chatbot and another human being.

What 'Alien' films should primarily focus on is in the series' title.

If Scott wants to doom-monger about supposed dangers of AI, he really needs to visit some actual AI programmers and understand that the problem isn't, typically, how smart/malicious it is, but how dumb it is and difficult to learn how to achieve even incredibly basic tasks.

He'd be better off wanting to explore the dangers of people investing dumb AI with incredibly important outcomes. Like the Chinese Communist Party giving its own monstrously powerful AI the power to decide who gets sent to death camps - to the point where even its own technicians don't understand how it's arriving at the decisions it does, but get told by superiors to shut up and let it continuing to do its thing. That AI isn't being evil, it's being nonsensical and those in power don't care.

And that's happening now.

[Kradan]

While I might not have phrased it in such, um, straight-forward way, I do share Blue's feelings

[BlueMarsalis79]

You have to accept that the androids and artificial intelligence are replicants in all but name in the Alien franchise, it's not just an emulation of humanity to Ridley Scott and pretty much everyone else to touch the series in any capacity, but an extension of humanity itself.

[gold]

I have said this since the beginning.

Alien had a right to be a B movie in 79 and 86. A simple slasher movie because that's all it really was. A "pretty" slasher movie because of Scott and Cameron but a simple blood and guts survival movie and nothing more.

It doesn't have this right in 2022. We are sick and tired of YET ANOTHER group of people get eaten. That's all it is. People get eaten, blood and guts, roll credits. Think about it. It's all it is. You'd almost be ashamed in admitting you are a fan because of the base simplicity.

The only movie that (nearly) broke this mold was Prometheus.

Just when you thought the producers had woken up to the potential that was there, it went downhill.

 Where they could have expanded on the scripts of 79 and 86 and grown the franchise -exponentially- they actually shrunk their own universe by saying an angry robot made that mysterious creature using lab experiments.

It's highschool level script writing.

Imagine if they had used the design language of Giger. Examined why the shapes are so vile and disgusting and beautiful and pleasing at the same time. Satiating the human mind. Repulsive and attractive at the same time. Two opposing emotions felt simultaneously, the base level paradox for a simple human mind. A taste of something higher than the processing capacity of the human mind.

Imagine if like Event Horizon the franchise had steered into the realm where the xenomorph originated. Perhaps outside the universe, a realm of pure consciousness and emotion, no memories, no logic, just being. Perhaps where the creator(s) of the universe originate. Perhaps a higher step on the matter-information-consciousness ladder. Perhaps a place where the base level understanding is paradox and all "logic" lies above it.

The engineers having tapped into this realm during their toying with genetics.

Imagine a movie not about the simple fear of being eaten, but of the fear of to be or not, to choose between thinking and feeling.

Perhaps to be able to ask the entity there about the dichotomy between emotion and logic.

 So much could have been made of this franchise. An examination of the essence of what it means to exist as a consciousness in this universe ALONGSIDE being a slasher movie for the B crowd that like that.

[SiL]

You have to accept that the androids and artificial intelligence are replicants in all but name in the Alien franchise, it's not just an emulation of humanity to Ridley Scott and pretty much everyone else to touch the series in any capacity, but an extension of humanity itself.

What franchise have you been watching?

Androids in the Alien franchise are obvious. They bleed milk and are made of spaghetti and glass beads. They cannot pass for human like the organic androids of Blade Runner.

Ash wasn't an extension of humanity, he was the ultimate corporate plant. He didn't pose any real philosophical questions for the crew.

Bishop has programmed behavioural inhibitors. Synthetic crew members are taken for granted. His artificial nature is used to sow doubts as to his loyalties, not reflect on the nature of mankind. In Alien 3 he's used as a glorified terminal.

Call is again treated as a glorified toaster oven when she's revealed.

The expanded series regularly features android soldiers that are barely more than robotic.

Occasionally the series has dipped its toe into more-human-than-human robots (the first comic series has androids that don't know they're androids), but it wasn't until Prometheus that we went to Blade Runner-esque existentialism about the nature of creation and identity.

The Alien franchise pretty consistently treated androids as yet another alien force within the universe, an uncanny valley of almost-real.

And for what it's worth, replicants are just organic androids with a fancy name because they thought people calling them "andies" like they do in the book would sound silly. It's not meant to indicate they're something more than androids -- they're just particularly sophisticated.

[BlueMarsalis79]

Way to miss the point completely.

Yes they are an extension of the Alien in their function as inhuman from the outside and when programmed so but human beings are capable of the exact same type "of programming" Burke and Michael are just as amoral as Ash was, but Bishop and Call show that they're just as capable of being as human as we are in fact even more so, more humane than humans.

Their blood's white instead of red, apart from that they're organic and mechanical on the inside, just like the replicants. Ridley Scott always made a point of contributing that organic element from design aspects to even giving them human characteristics like Ash's admiration for the Alien and his sexual urges not either necessary in something programmed to be purely functional or logical, Walter's altruism, Bishop's preferences in Aliens and Alien³ and Call's desires and constant self loathing in Alien Resurrection. 

[SiL]

Replicants are meant to pass for humans inside and out, androids in the Alien franchise aren't. There's no existential dilemma in their anatomy, they're unapologetically artificial.

Replicants pose the question of what does it mean to be human, and part of that is to remove the obvious mechanical elements. They're meat and flesh and blood, they think and feel - but is that enough to be human?

The Alien franchise has almost never used androids to pose these questions. It's just never been a priority and trying to act like it's always been there is just wrong.

Like,  Bishop is specifically humane because he's programmed to be - he doesn't have a choice. He doesn't learn the value of human life like the Terminator, he's just not capable of thinking otherwise.

Philosophical pondering about artificial life isn't a cornerstone of the franchise and hasn't been treated as such by most people who touched the franchise.

[Local Trouble]

Philosophical pondering about artificial life isn't a cornerstone of the franchise and hasn't been treated as such by most people who touched the franchise.

Just wait until Noah Hawley sinks his teeth into it.

[SiL]

Sigh.

ironically the Alien franchise is closer to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in its handling of androids, in that they're unquestionably Not Human, but that's not to say their artificial lives have no worth.

[BlueMarsalis79]

Philosophical pondering about artificial life isn't a cornerstone of the franchise and hasn't been treated as such by most people who touched the franchise.

Just wait until Noah Hawley sinks his teeth into it.

Can't wait.

Especially because I just don't agree that it's not been a cornerstone since the beginning, they have always been a bridge between us and the Alien tbh, it's just how explicit one wants to get with that.

[SiL]

Yeah but they haven't. They only feature as major characters in 75% of the original movies and fully 1/3rd of the original android characters is explicitly a preprogrammed synthetic assistant.

And of the remainder, one was in a movie where the link between us and the Alien was a literal human alien hybrid.

And the remainder, the OG, is just a reskinned mad scientist from the 1950s. He admires the Alien because that's what sci fi mad scientists do.

Saying they're historically treated anything like the replicants and have been by most people to touch the franchise is just ... demonstrably wrong.

[BlueMarsalis79]

If you say so...

This will just go in circles.

[SiL]

It's hard not to when your argument amounts to "that's not what I want to think".

[BlueMarsalis79]

"I do not have the years required nor the desire to indulge you."

[Stitch]

I think if you take the series as a whole then, no, androids in Alien aren't supposed to pass for human, like replicants do.

In the original film, however, the whole point of Ash was that he was effectively a sleeper agent, and none of the crew realised he was an Android simply because he did pass for human. It doesn't go into the philosophy of how human is human, like Blade Runner, but it does touch on similar fears of the 'other' looking just like us, as BR does.