This is going in c/electoralism
Predators are just space bourgeoisie doing big game hunter chuddery across the galaxy. Change my mind. :theory-gary:
ummm actually they're a proud warrior race tribe thingy that does stuff pushes up glasses
yeah they really Klingonified them as the movies went on. started with predator 2 and the "you fought with honor here's a cool musket" ending scene.
making them like the Klingons from star trek. warrior honor aliens like Lt. worf
yeah they were modified from inscrutable racist caricature orientalist aliens to basically space vikings with some asian aesthetics. this transition occurred after their "berlin wall" so in universe it can be seen as a cultural shift or maybe a restoration of ye olde ways but then there's genetic engineering and some virus and it gets really convoluted.
not sure how much Rodenberry, who was a Maoist, saw them originally as USSR allegory
Do you mean the first star trek series, or am I forgetting some trek? Either way, they're kinda the soviet union but not in any meaningful way, just a powerful adversary with a different culture. They get more.themes of honor worked into their culture in Next generation onwards. Most of the groups are on a gradient of Soviet Union to nazis, sometimes more coherent, sometimes less
Sorry, I meant The Original Series (TOS) not Star Trek Online (STO).
BTW, STO has some cool voice acting including some new stuff with Wil Wheaton. Including I believe the last voice acting by Nimoy in the tutorial for STO.
Yeah the first Predator was a shithead and "Took his ball and went home" at the end. I did like the "You fought with honor" ending in 2. The Predator having a pistol that was hundreds of years old instantly expands the world of the setting in really interesting ways. How long have they been coming to Earth? How long have they been hunting us?
Subsequent Predator media entries should have run with the Predators being douchebag, hyper-masculine soldiers who do big game hunting on primitive planets, instead of Klingonifying them.
They do to an extent. One of the metaplots in Predators is a conflict between the traditional hunter predators from previous movies and some roided up, 10 foot tall super-predators. The two factions are apparently having some kind of ethnic conflict with teh roid rager predators coming out on top.
The "Honorable Foe" thing shows up a few different ways in the movies. In the first AvP movie the Final Girl manages to solo kill an Alien during the Predator's right of passage hunt in an ancient Predator temple in Antarctica. The Predator decides that this basically makes her a blooded hunter too, so they team up together to try to find the alien queen. It's got a very game respects game feel.
This is the exact reason I vote for Aliens. They are just intelligent animals going about existing. Predators are just the "shitty rich trophy hunters" of space.
They have invented falgsc. True their eternity is chauvinist at times. However they do kill cops, soldiers, and other monsters. While they do take trophies of large game we can only assume there is also large scale conservation attempt going on beside that. They have constructed a dialectic system to combat liberalism. Why hunt monsters? To gain the perspective that prevents them from regressing into space liberalism. Somebody comes up and tries to abscond with your surplus value, we let it happen. They have mastered the combi stick and simply do not.
In their defense; Predator is a CIA wetworks team versus an Alien hunter. So who is really to say who the good guy is?
serious 1st alien is basically working class sci-fi. characters act as professionally as possible facing cosmic horrors. also love that kind of Apollopunk look of realistic space tech
Alien was pretty revolutionary in how it presented astronauts because up until that time they were either fresh cut military nasa types or epic heroes from some space drama. In alien they're just truckers doing what they can to get by, working class stiffs.
really made you feel for them too. no obvious horror personality archetypes, instead each death hurt me inside it was like watching regular people get fucked by something beyond their understanding. excluding the corporate android fuck that guy
hate that megacorp but almost bought a W-Y trucker hat just because i liked the logo.
what do you mean by apollopunk? i googled it thinking i was gonna find cool shit and got nothing
oh damn apparently it's an aesthetic i must have invented in my head lol. i've heard of "nasa-punk" but that's just relating to the game starfield. but in my mind it's basically kit bashing apollo-era asethetics and design and extrapolating how that same design philosophy could apply to the future. so basically durable, simple transitor computers, big bell rocket engines, lots of gray, tons of early digital switches, buttons, and CRT screens and exposed or easily exposed hardware for maintenance.
supposedly the Nostromo was inspired by a WW2 submarine but with the moon landings fresh in everyone's heads there was a definite eye for 70s realism and the design reflected that a bit.also it's technical stats state that it was originally an exploration vessel using a more advanced version of the Saturn-5s cryogenic engines until upgraded with either fission or fusion thermal engines with H2O for propellant.
neat technical trivia is that in the Aliens universe the ships use FTL drive that uses a (currently unknown to physics) field to change the entire vessel's mass into virtual tachyons, which force it to travel faster then light. going FTL causes reverse time dilation for the crew, making everything on the ship experience extremely long local time compared to Earth or orbital habitats. so hibernation is used to suspend the crew so they don't age rapidly. the rest of the ship is designed to be robust and using simple, time tested technologies so the reverse time dilation doesn't cause major failures.
So it is on on the axis fo event horizon/warhammer for warp madness?
nah more of the Interstellar (the movie)/timey wimey madness. i think there was some hints that if tachyons existed and went superluminal that you would basically get reverse time dialation effects but then again i have no idea where i read that. still would love to see a cinematic treatment of 40k warp drive. but then again real life theoretical physics with wormholes can get pretty batshit too
I’m thinking it’s a typo of atompunk but the tech design is too utilitarian to be that
That's one thing I really love about Alien. No one at any point does dumb horror movie shit. They all behave in reasonable, believable ways for competent people from a working class background. They don't get killed because they'd dumb, or because of bad writing, but rather because they're truly being hunted by something far beyond their capacity to deal with. I like Aliens for the same reason - All the things that go wrong are believable given what we know about the characters.
(sorry late reply but i just rewatched alien 1). i forgot they had a small arsenal of firearms, one of which was a directed energy weapon (according to an entry in the script), but they leave them on the mess table.
its a great "show don't tell" that they know they can't risk either putting a hole in their hull or cracking the xenomorh's skin.
Aliens, the Giger look rocks and they're more fun to play in the AvP games
As creatures, the xenomorph
As movies, they're so different there's no real comparison, and the first films of both IPs are so good I would classify them as perfect movies, in that they perfectly achieve doing what they meant to do
Yeah there are a ton of crossover comics. The Predator's culture and society gets deeply expanded on. Aliens show up all over the place in a way that stretched belief. And there's years and years of them.
I don't think he actually cares at all about the conflict in the jungle, he's just looking to take on the toughest prey he can.
Turns out trying to shoot assholes starts to approximate praxis over time
Hey now Predator 2 is good. It's got Danny Glover, drug cartels doing goof ball sniff up giant lines of blow and wield m60 machine guns, cops get owned, we get to see the pred society in more detail, and the voodoo guy takes the predator on with a cane sword. Alright the movie sucks but I enjoyed it as a kid, okay?
the opening scene with LA just being roving gang wars and fires everywhere is so funny
Demolition man is my favorite "LA is an urban hell" movie because it's satire so they turn it up to 11.
the rat burger scene stands out as one of the most memorable for me. just a red-blooded american man eating a disgusting sewer rat patty because that's all he knows
It's even got CIA guys getting owned again. The Predator series has a pretty high CIA body count.
Alien is coolest because they operate as a hive even without the queen, the aliens build colonies and shit, basically anprim power :anprim-pat:
That's actually a cool point, I never thought of that :crush:
Fishmouth Gang because:
-Alien dreadlocks with cool gold rings on them
-Sick mesh clothing underneath the armor, clearly appreciate rave culture
-Are all canonically trans/nonbinary
-Skulls rule
I read an official book ages ago where it turns out that they're like frogs, and just naturally change their sex every few months. I don't know if nonbinary is accurate since they still use male and female, so more like... eternally binary? Idk, but basically sex transition is as common to them as something like menstruation is to us
There is no quality control for Predator EU stuff, so there's actually a couple different accounts of their sexuality
But my favorite (and most popular iirc) is the one where the sequential hermaphroditism is triggered by very high social status, e.g. they've hunted enough and claimed enough honor and experienced enough triggering phereomonal and neurological events that they become female, and can now give birth, and naturally become members of the ruling class in doing so
They also allow a human to join them in the comic books, she gets to wear their armor and use those weapons. It's been a minute since I've read them as I was a kid but I remember thinking it was rad.
Predator killed Jesse Ventura
this would've been the better timeline tho
The Xenomorphs have that really creepy and groundbreaking HR Geiger design, even if they don't make sense.
Alien. Better acted. Predator is a toxic masculinity chud-fest. True that Sigourney Weaver is a gun grabbing :LIB: but as a series, I still prefer it.
I think “Prey” changed that for Predator franchise and made chuds real mad about it.
You're definitely right about that. I liked Prey quite a bit. As far as movies go, I found it fresh and inventive.
However, I LOVE Aliens (the second one) and Prometheus both. Prometheus has its problems, but I loved the premise.
True that Sigourney Weaver is a gun grabbing :LIB:
Wait, like irl or in the franchise? I feel like in the franchise her whole identity is that she hates this company so much she will literally kill everyone - including herself - to fuck the company and save others in the process?
IRL, she was very upset that she had to do so much gunplay in the second movie as she was very against all that. She revealed this in interviews.
Ripley the character is what I consider grill boss done right. Such a well made character and I loved her portrayal. Despite being a lib, that woman can act. She has range too, I loved her in Ghostbusters as well.
I'll go first
I saw more Predator stans the last time I saw an AVP post, so I'll just go ahead and say that I think Predator is boring
For starters, they're way too humanoid. Like, yeah, they have a fucked up crab face, or whatever, but theyre basically just scarier versions of humans with better technology
Now, comrades have elucidated me with regard to interesting things re: gender identities and shit in the Predator lore, I have to say that stuff is pretty cool. I don't totally remember how it breaks down, but I do remember finding it interesting when someone explained it on here
Alien imo is just a better creature all around. I have to say, I think its a better franchise, too - but ima completely put that aside. Giger was an amazing concept artist. (I've had more nightmares about Alien than I could possibly recount)
Alien is superior in my mind because they don't need thumbs and an enlarged frontal lobe because spits acid in your face and stabs you through the heart with their tail tip
The little mouth is also funny and cool, and creepy.
I prefer predator to aliens, but alien is one is my favourite movies. My wife is also a huge fan of the series, to the point where we have hr gigers concept art hanging in our hallways. I say of the two, xenomorphs are way more interesting, but preds get credit for looking rad as hell too.
never watched Alien, nor most of the Predator movies, but Prey fucking slapped
Alien is a classic in every sense and well worth watching. Great VFX, the monster is iconic, good performances, and sooo much tension.
