Quote from: Russ840 on Nov 18, 2015, 10:59:30 AMI am a comic lover. Don't know if you are but if not perhaps that's why you do not get as much enjoyment. More to do with the medium?
I'm not a big fan of comics, no, but as I said, I first came to the story via the novel, and that was the point at which I started scratching my head over the love it gets, and that feeling's since been compounded by reading the comic. Yes, I probably enjoyed the comic less because of the format, but it was the basic story it contained, which I already knew from the novel, that really disappointed me.
Quote from: Russ840 on Nov 18, 2015, 10:59:30 AMAlien by a heavy Metal. That is the 'Illustrated story' right?
Yep, that's the one!
Quote from: Corporal Hicks on Nov 18, 2015, 10:43:48 AMSo I know what you don't actually like - which bits in Book 1/Outbreak/Earth Hive/etc do you find cliched?
Well like I said when I reviewed the novel a while back, it was just the way so much of it felt like it had been lifted from other films and whatnot that pre-existed it, especially the first two
Alien films themselves. Caricature corporate stooges? Check. Insider working against the team? Check. Arrogant commander ultimately revealed as the traitor? Yep. Surprise android reveal? You betcha. It was the sheer volume of it, it felt as though - once they were off Earth - the entire story was built from plot blocks that had been stolen from other films and books and reassembled, and to compound the issue in each case these elements weren't done anything like as well as in the media they were borrowed from. Butler even gets ripped in half and reduced to a torso, a literal carbon-copy of Bishop.
Nothing wrong with borrowing stuff in principle, of course -
Aliens does it extensively with regards to
Alien - but it was just so frequent and on the nose in the comic, and in every case the borrowed elements were done in a far inferior way that only made it more obvious it was copying from much better material. Many of the other EU stories have similarly aped the films, but they at least seemed to either do it in a way that wasn't so blatant, or surround it with an interesting enough scenario that the copied elements were more palatable.
There were certainly good things in the comic. The Alien-worshipping religious cult was a nice angle, and I've already pointed out how much I enjoyed the initial set-up. But the good inventive stuff seemed to be heavily weighted towards the start, whereas a lot of what came later felt like poor rip-off more than anything. On top of that, the dialogue wasn't exactly stellar, the characters that didn't rely on you already knowing them from previous movies were dull and under-developed, and there were a couple of slightly daft plot contrivances too, most obviously Hicks electing to take Newt along for the ride on a military mission he is convinced will be suicide.