"What If There Are Other Companies Trying To Look At Immortality In a Different Way?"

Started by Nightmare Asylum, Jan 05, 2022, 03:03:56 AM

Author
"What If There Are Other Companies Trying To Look At Immortality In a Different Way?" (Read 14,323 times)

SiL

Quote from: BlueMarsalis79 on Jan 05, 2022, 02:24:05 PM
He said 60/40 I'd say that ratio's about right when you consider the original film honestly.

The Alien does not appear until around an hour in.
The Alien appears in the first half hour in the form of the eggs and facehugger.

Alien is absolutely not 60/40 Alien to world building. Once the eggs are discovered the plot revolves almost entirely around the Alien and how to deal with it. Even Ash's big reveal is pinned to the Alien and his relationship to it.

Crazy Rich

Sounds like something I may very well pass on.

Alien stories, the ones worth any salt anyway, have always been centered around the Alien itself.

SiL

Also so we're clear I absolutely wouldn't mind if this was a subplot through the series.

But any time Hawley is asked about the series he talks about androids and corporations and reinvention. That's what the series is about, that's what the focus is. The Alien never seems to rate a mention, which is a glaring omission if they're driving the plot in any meaningful way.

BlueMarsalis79

Perhaps that's worrisome indeed, but I don't mind on principle, but then it's always a question:

Do (the royal) you consider The Cold Forge and Into Charybdis centered around the Alien itself?

If so, then fine.

If not, we have examples of it working.

SiL

Quote from: BlueMarsalis79 on Jan 06, 2022, 12:18:04 AM
Do (the royal) you consider The Cold Forge and Into Charybdis centered around the Alien itself?
Haven't finished Cold Forge and never read Charybdis.

There are plenty of stories where the Alien isn't necessarily the primary threat, but they're still the driver. Labyrinth is a great example. Church is the main villain, through and through. But he's driven by his relationship to the Alien. Spears is the main villain of Nightmare Asylum, but again, spurred by his desire to tame and manipulate the creature.

But when Hawley speaks there's none of that. There's nothing linking the Alien to the companies or the robotics. The companies are looking into transhumanism and artificial intelligence -- and none if it seems to have anything to do with the Aliens.

That's where I fear this is going to seriously miss the mark.

Xenomorphine

I'm with SiL on this. Hawley's quotes have been indicating a worrisome pattern. I'm all for waiting to sample the product before judgement, but there have been some odd statements, so far.

"...the primordial past and the artificial intelligence of our future, where both trying to kill us."

What does that even mean? Outside of the prequels, only Ash (and maybe Bishop 2, depending on your perspective of that character's status) was deliberately trying to kill anyone. The 'evil robot' trope just wasn't a thing. Bishop deliberately and very cleverly subverted that and turned it on its head. Call continued that and further cemented robots being altruistic. Even Amanda's game gave us a synthetic who had no David 8-like hidden agendas.

This sounds like something Scott might have influenced, considering his comments about more prequels revolving around supposed (and largely baseless) dangers of AI development.

Synthetics aren't anything to do with immortality. They operate as servants, basically. Why should that somehow be competing with cyborg implants and mental consciousness uploads? They're completely separate fields. Possibly complementary, but not an either/or thing. Why is this being framed as only one of them being able to eventually 'win'?

"It's ultimately a classic science fiction question: Does humanity deserve to survive?"

Save us from this early 2000s nihilistic naval-gazing, please... If you personally feel like the entirety of human civilisation should be condemned to extinction, keep it to yourself. It doesn't make a character interesting to be asking that question, it makes them look somewhere between pointlessly suicidal and latently genocidal.

Hell, just go look up some old You Tube clips of Q debating that very premise against the Picard of old. It's been done to death and gets more boring every time it's presented as somehow refreshing and thought-provoking.

Fluff like this is padding the show doesn't need nor will benefit from. The Alien doesn't have to be on screen all the time, but as pointed out, it (or things directly associated with it) should be in some way what's driving the plot forward.

PsyKore


Local Trouble

Quote from: Xenomorphine on Jan 06, 2022, 05:21:53 AM
Save us from this early 2000s nihilistic naval-gazing, please... If you personally feel like the entirety of human civilisation should be condemned to extinction, keep it to yourself. It doesn't make a character interesting to be asking that question, it makes them look somewhere between pointlessly suicidal and latently genocidal.

Like this?


Perfect-Organism

Nice little update.  It's occurring to me that perhaps David is actually Weyland.  He was there as Weyland passed away.  Perhaps a memory transfer was taking place.

Kradan

Kradan

#24
Quote from: BlueMarsalis79 on Jan 06, 2022, 12:18:04 AM
Perhaps that's worrisome indeed, but I don't mind on principle, but then it's always a question:

Do (the royal) you consider The Cold Forge and Into Charybdis centered around the Alien itself?

If so, then fine.

If not, we have examples of it working.

Well, Alien, to be more precise - its biology and reproductive cycle  are very much crucial to the plot of both Alex's books

Spoiler
And one of the main characters turns into a litteral talking Alien
[close]


Quote from: SiL on Jan 06, 2022, 12:34:27 AM
Haven't finished Cold Forge and never read Charybdis.

Oh crap, so we still have to use spoiler tags ?

SiL

They've both been out long enough and God does that sound dumb as bricks.

DaveT937

60% Alien focus, 40% AI focus sounds ok to me.

That's what he's implying, right?

BlueMarsalis79

BlueMarsalis79

#27
And yet it's excellent, I truly deeply loathed the idea, before Alex White actually executed it- I still think it ought to be restricted to that one scenario. It is set up in such a way to never be replicated, and works not only narratively but thematically in surprising ways, and that in tandem with everything else amounts to what's the best "Alien story" pretty much overall and I know how big a claim that sounds but it's probably true.

Evanus

All the criticism seems a bit premature.

The stuff he's mentioned sounds good to me, and relevant to the films. I wonder how the alien will play into all of this. He probably just doesn't want to spill everything.

Nightmare Asylum

Yeah, I do find it hard to think that none of this would tie into the actual Alien situation at play in the series. Even Alien: Covenant, which is the most in-your-face android/"immortality" narrative of the six films (in terms David's ongoing legacy, and his desire to supersede his creators as 'God'), makes very specific and direct connection between David's ongoing development and the titular Alien.

We only have part of the picture here - broad strokes statements regarding elements of the world-building that are going to be at play in this particular iteration of Alien (no different than, say, if all we knew about before seeing the original film was the nature of the way Weyland-Yutani treat their employees, which we obviously know in hindsight now as having direct correlation to the Alien threat at hand in the film and how it gets on board in the first place). We're still a ways off yet from seeing how these elements of world-building that Hawley is leading us on with actually feed into the narrative and connect in the forefront to the Alien's presence, but that will surely come in time.

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