Sigourney Weaver on Alien 5 – “Neill’s Fulfilling His Childhood Dream”

Started by Corporal Hicks, Jul 21, 2015, 07:06:05 AM

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Sigourney Weaver on Alien 5 – “Neill’s Fulfilling His Childhood Dream” (Read 26,902 times)

Engineer

Quote from: Xenomorphine on Jul 24, 2015, 08:31:24 PM
Yeah, personally I'd prefer it to have always been uninhabited, but the rock formations were designed that way deliberately. If a future story wants to reveal LV-426 once was, in ancient times, an inhabited world which was reduced to a hive-covered Lovecraftian horror, I'd be fine with that.

I don't think Hadley's Hope would have necessarily uncovered anything, though. That would assume something was exactly underneath them. If there waere, say, an ancient network of tunnels, they would have probably just registered as natural caverns.

I always go back to how, technically, the egg chamber measurements have no way to fit inside what we saw of the derelict's hull. It's actually more plausible to interpret that scene as O'Bannon intended: It's somewhere the derelict docked to, possibly hollowed out by an even more ancient civilisation. I always found it intriguing that the chamber gives the impression of going on for possibly miles around that corner.

If someone were to start excavating beneath LV-426, who knows what they might find if they looked in the right place?
I think the unidirectional winds could cause bizarre rock formations like that easily enough though. There's some bizarre rock formations on other planets too, like Utah! Haha, jk.

Yea, I always loved that scene in the egg chamber and how it appeared sooooo long! And it sort of winded back and forth a little despite the ship arcing in only one direction...

pred169

Quote from: Xenomorphine on Jul 24, 2015, 08:31:24 PM
Yeah, personally I'd prefer it to have always been uninhabited, but the rock formations were designed that way deliberately. If a future story wants to reveal LV-426 once was, in ancient times, an inhabited world which was reduced to a hive-covered Lovecraftian horror, I'd be fine with that.

I don't think Hadley's Hope would have necessarily uncovered anything, though. That would assume something was exactly underneath them. If there waere, say, an ancient network of tunnels, they would have probably just registered as natural caverns.

I always go back to how, technically, the egg chamber measurements have no way to fit inside what we saw of the derelict's hull. It's actually more plausible to interpret that scene as O'Bannon intended: It's somewhere the derelict docked to, possibly hollowed out by an even more ancient civilisation. I always found it intriguing that the chamber gives the impression of going on for possibly miles around that corner.

If someone were to start excavating beneath LV-426, who knows what they might find if they looked in the right place?
I was more talking about the planetary scans finding signs of building ruins before the Hadley crew arrived as opposed to them finding something in the rubble. Of course a facility as large as the atmosphere processor and the hadleys hope colony. You'd think they would find something on a survey run.
  Now as far as the tunnels and the egg chamber, you are correct. I was thinking strictly film not script or novelization. Now I personally haven't read either the original scripts or novel but I have been meaning to.
   My point wasn't that LV 426 couldn't have been inhabited before... it was more I wouldn't expect a backstory of a decimated civilization to be done there. I kinda see it as a military staging ground or storage facility for bio weapons. So I agree it is more like LV 223 and probably any other LV planetoids in that system. I just don't see it being a civilized planet that aliens were unleashed on. Actually... maybe LV 426  was the storage depot and LV 223 was actually the science facility for the engineers. Maybe that's why in prometheus we see a couple of chambers with the goo and skeletal remains of other engineers. And on LV 426 we saw a chamber that seemed to stretch as far as you could see with eggs. Maybe the harsh environment on LV 426 is why they chose to store the eggs there as opposed to anywhere else. Maybe the lack of oxygen kept the "product" from mutating or gestation (egg morphing).

Just a thought. 

Engineer

On that note, I don't think the lack of oxygen would have made any difference... Otherwise the facehugger wouldn't have been able to survive once it jumped out of the egg, let alone keep Kane alive after bursting through his helmet visor...

THE CITY HUNTER

Quote from: Engineer on Jul 24, 2015, 11:18:46 PM
On that note, I don't think the lack of oxygen would have made any difference... Otherwise the facehugger wouldn't have been able to survive once it jumped out of the egg, let alone keep Kane alive after bursting through his helmet visor...
Cant aliens survive  without oxygen

Engineer

Quote from: THE CITY HUNTER on Jul 24, 2015, 11:52:22 PM
Quote from: Engineer on Jul 24, 2015, 11:18:46 PM
On that note, I don't think the lack of oxygen would have made any difference... Otherwise the facehugger wouldn't have been able to survive once it jumped out of the egg, let alone keep Kane alive after bursting through his helmet visor...
Cant aliens survive  without oxygen
That's what I was getting at

Xenomorphine

Pred: 'Inhabited' can mean a world full of wildlife. But even if we presupposed an advanced civilisation, it could be...

* Subterranean civilisation. Some species just prefer living beneath the ground. If the egg chamber was artificial, this might even prove that.

* Buildings on the surface, but covered by fossilised hive resin - the bone-like rocks are effectively covering what once laid beneath.

* Buildings so old, that they literally collapsed into rubble or corroded away. It's useful to keep in mind that it's only things made out of stone which are likely to last down the ages.

* A limited colony - just like Hadley's Hope was. Everywhere else being a once-thriving ecosystem. As the centuries wore on, nothing would be left.

As I say, I'd prefer if it was always uninhabited, but I also love O'Bannon's idea for what it might have once been. Especially how he wanted the planetoid to literally tie into the Lovecraftian mythos amd have the Alien a "blood-relative" of the nightmarish star gods. If a future story ever wants to show LV-426 as having once been a lot more active than we've ever seen it, the above methods could be how it's done.

Engineer

By "corrosion" you mean just naturally wearing away or erosion,  no rusting, right? I can get on board with that. But rusting over time, in the atmosphere, requires the process of oxidation, and the atmosphere prior to terraforming lacked any significant oxidizing agents such as oxygen... Nitrogen is essentially inert. :-).

Xenomorphine

Could be anything - including fluid. For all we know, it used to be covered in an ocean!

The geology is kind of interesting, though. I have a friend who knows a fair bit about that side of things and sent her the quote from the CMTM about Acheron. It was interesting to get her view on it. If I remember right, she said some of it was worded in an unneccessarily technical fashion, but that it basically checked out with what we saw on screen.

Engineer

Engineer

#68
I will concur with that. I found it funny when ash says "inert nitrogen" in the movie when describing lv425's atmospheric composition. The "inert" part was unessessary really. But I always took it as a laymen terms type of explanation for Dallas's sake (and the audiences sake, of course, lol).


Xenomorphine, did you check out the thread I linked to before??

Xenomorphine

I did, but thought better of contributing, because I don't remember my friend's advice. :)

I'll ask her again about the geology when I next can!

pred169

Quote from: Engineer on Jul 24, 2015, 11:18:46 PM
On that note, I don't think the lack of oxygen would have made any difference... Otherwise the facehugger wouldn't have been able to survive once it jumped out of the egg, let alone keep Kane alive after bursting through his helmet visor...
You could be right and of course I'm just speculating here but perhaps the aliens can survive without oxygen. And as far the facehugger supplying oxygen to kane... they may be able to transform other elements to oxygen. Kinda like how a rebreather turns carbon dioxide into oxygen.
  And what I meant with the lack of oxygen in the chamber being the reason the eggs were stored there was not based on life of eggs but the mutation factor. If you remember in prometheus (god I can't believe I'm quoting this movie) once the chamber was opened and oxygen was let into the chamber, everything reacted. The walls, the containers, even the murals changed. What if the supply of oxygen either A) activates the goo and begins the transformation process. Or B) the oxygen changes the composition and development of the goo. Thus changing the final product. Instead of it being alien type A it becomes alien type B and is resilient to a different set of elements. Like a virus... change the elements it is in and the strain almost always mutates and becomes resilient to the vaccines being currently used. It adapts if you will. Then it has to be studied to see what the new strains weaknesses are. Perhaps the eggs are the same way. Stored in a controlled environment so that the engineers can maintain the type of product they desire.

Engineer

Pred169- I understand you're just speculating, but I'd like to offer up some food for thought on this. If oxygen were to be a mutagenic agent for the black goo and/or the alien, then why didn't the alien mutate once on board the nostromo? Or once lv 426 was terraformed? The black goo itself is a different story; it was the mutagen itself. But if it was reactive with oxygen, why'd the engineers keep it in a facility that contained oxygen? I had heard a theory (or maybe it was more than a theory, I'm not sure) that the black goo was activated or "inspired" by the psychological state of the beings around it; in other words, it created monsters because humans were evil! I think that's silly, and I really REALLY hope that's not what Ridley Scott was trying to convey with that story element. I hope the black goo was just a weaponized version of the black goo used at the beginning of the movie...

Xenomorphine- please do contribute! Even if it's just fact checking! I don't have access to the CMTM; my primary source has been the movies and things I've heard people on the forums say regarding the scripts and novelizations. If I got a detail horribly wrong, I'd revise that 'theory' as neccessary. Worst case scenario, I'd have a rebuttal! Lol. I'm aiming for a stimulating conversation that's headed in a different direction than the typical conversations here. So if you find something I have horribly wrong; I'm not going to rage-post or anything like that!

THE CITY HUNTER

Quote from: Xenomorphine on Jul 25, 2015, 12:33:33 AM
Could be anything - including fluid. For all we know, it used to be covered in an ocean!

The geology is kind of interesting, though. I have a friend who knows a fair bit about that side of things and sent her the quote from the CMTM about Acheron. It was interesting to get her view on it. If I remember right, she said some of it was worded in an unneccessarily technical fashion, but that it basically checked out with what we saw on screen.
Do any of you guys remember AVP 2 primal hunt who was those Aliens you fight in the beginning as a Predator.

pred169



Quote from: Engineer on Jul 25, 2015, 08:03:01 PM
Pred169- I understand you're just speculating, but I'd like to offer up some food for thought on this. If oxygen were to be a mutagenic agent for the black goo and/or the alien, then why didn't the alien mutate once on board the nostromo? Or once lv 426 was terraformed? The black goo itself is a different story; it was the mutagen itself. But if it was reactive with oxygen, why'd the engineers keep it in a facility that contained oxygen? I had heard a theory (or maybe it was more than a theory, I'm not sure) that the black goo was activated or "inspired" by the psychological state of the beings around it; in other words, it created monsters because humans were evil! I think that's silly, and I really REALLY hope that's not what Ridley Scott was trying to convey with that story element. I hope the black goo was just a weaponized version of the black goo used at the beginning of the movie...

Xenomorphine- please do contribute! Even if it's just fact checking! I don't have access to the CMTM; my primary source has been the movies and things I've heard people on the forums say regarding the scripts and novelizations. If I got a detail horribly wrong, I'd revise that 'theory' as neccessary. Worst case scenario, I'd have a rebuttal! Lol. I'm aiming for a stimulating conversation that's headed in a different direction than the typical conversations here. So if you find something I have horribly wrong; I'm not going to rage-post or anything like that!

Who's to say it didn't? Maybe the creature we saw wasn't what the engineers had intended. Maybe the alien WAS the mutation. Maybe it was supposed to look like the ultramorph or something to that effect. And if that be the case that would also explain why all aliens turned out like they did on LV 426. Same base but slightly different than the first we saw because as it gestated inside kane he was exposed to both the non oxygenated environment in the chamber and the high oxygen area or sterile environment on the nostromo. The ones that gestated after terraforming were only exposed to oxygenated environment. May explain subtle differences.
  The engineers didn't keep the goo canisters in an oxygenated environment. They were kept in a chamber void of oxygen. That's why when the door opened to the chamber the murals on the wall changed. If I'm not mistaken David actually said something to that effect, that the murals were changing do to the oxygen.

Engineer

Ok, you got me there! :-)

But I prefer to think of it as the alien is not a mutation; it just is what it is. The black goo from prometheus I don't even like to think about! Lol

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