Quote from: Xenomorphine on Apr 27, 2019, 03:41:22 AM
This would have made a lot more sense with a human character driven semi-insane by loneliness with some sort of protective equipment.
Neither Ash nor Bishop cared about longevity. Why would this synthetic? Especially as it/she could just need to plug herself into the ship's reactor for power, go temporarily dormant or simply copied/transmitted its memory and code, in order to effectively 'survive'.
Why did the character care about the facehugger? We're not given any reasons. The character's motivation (psychologically relating to something in a similar predicment) is something a human would do, not an AI, which wouldn't have any reason to care. But, sure, let's assume the opposite - so, the droid decides to do the one thing which would guarantee it dies? Why not just coerce it back into frozen stasis?
A human character could have gone down that path. They'd make up the typical David 8-like logic, where the adult Alien would be seen as a 'continuation'/reincarnation of the facehugger. They'd be fearful about self-preservation, but not about sacrificing someone else to that fate. Doing so could even have made a nice call-back to Golic. Or even have the story feature a Newt-alike, who the audience is initially led to believe is a similar distrusting survivor of a massacre, only to be revealed as convincing herself to sacrifice the newcomer for some allegorical 'greater good', before commandeering their ship and leaving the impregnated victim behind, like she's talked herself into believing was a bargain struck with the facehugger (like Golic similarly did).
Agree with this.
Rewatched this, just to make sure I know how I feel about it.
This one was weird. And least of all because of the friendly hugger. It was such a unique combination of the good and the bad. I liked the story idea, mostly. I like Xenomorphine's idea better. But the core concept is alright. Nothing revolutionary. But at least not so much by the book formula. But the execution was all over the place.
The bad:
Some of the editing and camera work. Playing an android that's an actual character and not just a bad guy plot device is very hard, I get that. Still, wasn't a fan of the acting... Not bad, it was okay, but not convincing to me. Didn't like her even close to as much as I liked all the other androids in the movies. I even liked the performance of the android in Ore better. Again, not bad, but it needed more work, more takes. The actress was trying to be more robotic than any other android in the series. This is after Ash, so she should've felt more human, but maybe kept the childlike aspect of Bishop. And it did feel a bit cheap when they literally took and mashed up the Ash run and David's drawing habit into one droid.
The spacesuit looks meh. Looks like a cheap cosplay.
The facehugger. Even though I can get behind the idea, it was explained solidly enough, it still feels wrong. They didn't sell the idea hard enough, I had to be apologetic to give it a pass in my mind. They should've shown less of it, especially around the droid. It looks silly and certainly feels like the hugger was a pet. Not unforgivably bad, but the idea could've been executed better. My biggest problem was that the hugger looked bad. Very bad. Unconvincing. Thus, they shouldn't have shown it that much or in that light. Still not as bad as Harvest... I'm so grateful that Specimen used a CGI hugger, if something like this was the alternative. Looked very rubbery, like a toy. The hugger's look was my biggest problem.
The aesthetics here weren't the best and really made the whole thing look cheap in this short.
The good:
Again, the story idea gets points for being more original than some of the others were, the core isn't a bad premise at all. The space scenes. The music was just great! Nice one there. The atmosphere was enhanced by the music and somewhat countered the cheap feel of the spacesuit, hugger, acting... The final shots were very nice.
Overall, not bad. Nice core idea, great story potential, always appreciate the perspective of an android, but this needed more work. Too many things felt cheap IMO. Somewhere in the middle for me, not the best one at all, but by far not the worst one.
Originality for originality's sake means nothing if the execution is not up to par. So much potential there, but not quite fully realized, by a long shot.