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First reviews for Neil Blomkamp's Chappie

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S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
jhmtehgamr20xx said:
This reminds me: where does the Queen come from? There's only one and I always assumed the lifecycle process for a Queen had to be different than that of regular xenomorphs. Always kind of thought it involved from hot Xeno-on-Xeno action, too much for us to handle probably.
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Cameron himself has answered this.
http://www.alienscollection.com/jamescameron.html
Briggs' next beef is with the Alien Queen, and for several reasons. His contention is that she destroys the original intention of the missing scene in ALIEN. This is perfectly correct, but I find it somewhat irrelevant since as an audience member and as a filmmaker creating a sequel, I can really only be responsible to those elements which actually appeared in the first film and not to its "intentions." ALIEN screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's proposed life cycle, as completed in the unseen scene, would have been too restricting for me as a storyteller and I would assume that few fans of ALIENS would be willing to trade the final cat-fight between the moms for a point of technical accuracy that only a microscopic percentage of ALIEN fans might be aware of.

In my version of the Alien life cycle, the infestation of the colony would proceed like this:

1. Russ Jorden attacked, they radio for rescue.

2. Rescue party investigates ship...several members facehuggered... brought back to base for treatment.

3. Several "chestbursters" free themselves from hosts, escape into ducting, begin to grow.

4. Extrapolating from entomology (ants, termites, etc.), an immature female, one of the first to emerge from hosts, grows to become a new queen, while males become drones or warriors. Subsequent female larvae remain dormant or are killed by males... or biochemically sense that a queen exists and change into males to limit waste. The Queen locates a nesting spot (the warmth of the atmosphere station heat exchanger level being perfect for egg incubation) and becomes sedentary. She is then tended by the males as her abdomen swells into a distended egg sac. The drones and warriors also secrete a resinous building material to line the structure, creating niches in which they may lie dormant when food supplies and/or hosts for futher reproduction become depleted (i.e. when all the colonists are used up). They are discovered in this condition by the troopers, but quickly emerge when new hosts present themselves.

Thus, even with the Queen's vast egglaying capacity, the Aliens are still a parasitic form, requiring a host from a different species to create the warrior or Queen stages of the life cycle. Since the warriors are bipedal with two arms (H.R. Giger's original design), it may be inferred that the facehugger is an indifferentiated parasite, which lays an egg inside a host, but that the resulting form (chestburster through adult) has taken on certain biological characteristics of its host. This would account for the degree of anthropomorphism in the design.

One admittedly confusing aspect of this creature's behavior (which was unclear as well in ALIEN) is the fact that sometimes the warrior will capture prey for a host, and other times, simply kill it. For example, Ferro the dropship pilot is killed outright while Newt, and previously most of the colony members, were only captured and cocooned within the walls to aid in the Aliens' reproduction cycle. If we assume the Aliens have intelligence, at least in the central guiding authority of the Queen, then it is possible that these decisions may have a tactical basis. For example, Ferro was a greater threat, piloting the heavily armed dropship, than she was a desirable host for reproduction. Newt, and most of the colonists, were unarmed and relativelyhelpless, therefore easily captured for hosting.

Please bear in mind the difficulty of communicating a life cycle this complex to a mass audience, which, seven years later, may barely recall that there was an Alien in ALIEN, let alone the specifics of its physical development. I had a great deal of story to tell, and a thorough re-education would have relegated ALIENS to a pedantic reprise of Ridley Scott's film. The audience seems to have a deepseated faith in the Aliens' basic nastiness and drive to reproduce which requires little logical rationale. That leaves only hardcore fans such as myself and a majority of this readership to ponder the technical specifics and construct a plausible scenario.
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S

Sean*O

Member
Damn.. now worried about Alien. I love the idea of ignoring Alien III and IV but it would be a waste if they put it in the hands of an incapable director. Maybe they should start looking at other options.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
MattKeil said:
And really if you know anything about ants (as Cameron himself mentions), you didn't even need to ask the question. Aliens is about as close to a flawless expansion on an existing idea as has ever been seen in film.
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You also gotta love how Cameron finished that Starlog Q+A (which he did before there was an Alien 3).

By the way, it's not in the goddamed cat and it's not in Newt, either. I would never be that cruel
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H

HariKari

Member
He is almost never slammed for the actual directing part though, right? It's mostly complaints about the writing. Get this man a top notch writer and let him do his visual magic.
 
M

Moaradin

Member
HariKari said:
He is almost never slammed for the actual directing part though, right? It's mostly complaints about the writing. Get this man a top notch writer and let him do his visual magic.
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I think his movies look good but I don't think his style suits an Alien film. He could have more range, but I have yet to see it.
 
M

mattm025

Member
Is it possible that District 9 was great because he had Peter Jackson producing and keeping a watchful eye on Neill? I just find it so weird that Neill is struggling with these other movies.
 
S

samurai1226

Member
Just saw Chappie in the cinema. It's an okay movie, fun to watch but has some flaws.
The human characters are all kinda annoying, there's much screentime of humans you just cant like or relate too. Also the tone of the film is constantly changing. One scene tries to give the film an intelligent note, the next scene is totally funny and the next scene is action oriented, etc - It disturbs the pacing.

And there are some plotholes, where you ask yourself how that could really happen (
e.g. how they can just run through the gate of the weapon facility and break into the building and nobody cares like they dont have guards, or why does nobody observe what jackman is doing in the moose and tracks who does what with the robots?
)

But the film has some amazing CGI, like in District 9 there are a lot of scenes where you just cant tell if thats CGI or not.

Overall I guess a 6,5/10 would be fair. No must see, but overall good.
 
T

tcrunch

Member
Scullibundo said:
Cameron himself has answered this.
http://www.alienscollection.com/jamescameron.html
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One small wrinkle of "extrapolation" here is that in ants all the workers/soldiers/etc are female as well. The whole colony is female. A few males get crapped out very rarely so they can attempt to mate with another new queen, then they die. For aliens this means there needs to be some stupid flying alien that can't even kill anything and just runs around with a huge boner for a couple days before dying.
 
D

DECK'ARD

The Amiga Brotherhood
BobbyRoberts said:
I disagree about anything in Alien being "believable" on the face of it. In 1979, none of that was anything but horrifying craziness.



Adding "Holy fuck it can coat you in something that turns you into one of those eggs" absolutely fits with that. And remember, the Alien in that movie wasn't a screeching, sprinting thing, either. It snuck around. It waited on you. It moved SLOWLY when it wanted. So this slow-moving, malevolent, unkillable grinning penis monster from outerspace secreting some sort of dna-altering goo that turns your body into nothing more than material and food for a facehugger? That's a damn good idea. The natural fear that taps into is essentially being buried/burned/drowned. Just a different way. What if you were dying, you knew you were dying, and you couldn't stop it. That's not an innate, natural fear?

It's not like it can't fit with a Queen, either. It's just one more backup for the xenomorph - you let one of those fuckers live, it's going to start a whole new colony anyway because it just needs to snatch up a living organism, and then turn it into an egg, and have that egg hatch a facehugger, and have that facehugger implant a queen...

Ta da!
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It's rape, pregnancy and dying in childbirth. Nothing that far-fetched, and brutally simple in how it works.

Being turned into an egg is far-fetched, we have no human counter-point, and it also adds creation of a new lifeform without 'sex' and impregnation to the cycle. It breaks the brutal simplicity of it.

It's the act of rape by something entirely alien that defines our relationship with it. We're just a host, a completely disposable step along the way. Our life isn't needed for the creature to exist, as with the egg, our life is just taken in the process of it achieving its potential. That's far more brutal, and the xenomorph is a physical manifestation of the act that neccessitated it. Involving humans any earlier in the life cycle just undermines the significance of that stage.

I wouldn't call humans morphing into eggs a 'damn good idea', just a convenient answer that was unnecessarily far-fetched and went against their parasitic nature. That parasitic nature tied in perfectly to the underlying themes in play, it didn't need to be complicated, and thankfully it wasn't.
 
way more

way more

Member
TrumanBurbank said:
Even youtube reviewer Jeremy Jahns hated it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl_oQicsCEU

And he loves pretty much everything decent.
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These reviewers make me think of a critical part or the movie Lady in the Water.

wdSWU2D.jpg


ysxAAkN.jpg


Perhaps we should all reflect on this.
 
K

Knoxcore

Member
His visual style is great but everything else just falls short. Now I'm having reservations about him touching anything Alien.
 
A

Admiral Woofington

Member
On better news my local Alamo Drafthouse finally got "What we do in the shadows" from the Flight of the Conchords people. 95% in RT out of 105 reviews, and it has Jemaine Clement. AWWWWWWWWWWWW YISS.

Goodbye Chappie.
 
J

jhmtehgamr20xx

Banned
Scullibundo said:
Cameron himself has answered this.
http://www.alienscollection.com/jamescameron.html
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Very helpful and informative link there sir, thanks!

Something I feel like adding to what Cameron was mentioning regards the Xenos sometimes choosing to kill instead of cocoon: I don't know a vast deal on the habits and life-cycles of ant colonies (or any insect colony FWIW), but it'd seem to me as though the Xenomorph colony reaches a particular size in which they would deem their numbers "sufficient" given whatever resources they're working with, and choose to kill any other potential hosts as they are not required. I don't know how many people were at that colony in Aliens - a few hundred at least - but there were only maybe 100 or so xenomorphs in the film including the Queen. I understand that regarding birds, certain groups of birds may be in flight together in their own little clusters and then those clusters can assimilate into massive packs (especially in winter during migration time), and sometimes even different species of birds may straggle in (you can occasionally catch a crow with a flock of seagulls for example, at least in the city). I'm not sure if there are insects that do the same thing.

We've yet to really see two different sub-species of xenomorphs exist in a single film, but if that were to happen it'd be a great chance to see if xenomorphs operate in that way, or if it'd come down to each sub-species doing its own thing, as separate colonies, that would eventually fight each other. Especially if they both had a Queen (that could only happen assuming there are different queens for each sub-species type; I hate to use Resurrection as a reference here but that humany-ish xenomorphed killed its Queen, and was clearly a different sub-species than the others. So I'm inclined to think they'd react like that to any Queen but their own type (we saw that in a way with it treating Ripley like its Queen throughout the film).

I'm left to assume the amount of resources (heat, human hosts) the xenomorphs had for their colony size at the time the soldiers arrived was "just right" for the amount of space at the colony site that could support their hive, and they clearly had enough soldier-types of their own. Of course it could be as simple as the xenomorphs only choosing to cocoon people who are not an active threat; when Newt was found she wasn't an active threat so they took her in, same with Burke (comic-only). They probably could recognize the soldiers as threats even before they started attacking through pheromones, which they became accustomed to due to the civilians that were attacking them earlier on the colony. So that would also support Cameron's claim in thinking they're synaptic (the Queen most certainly is).

FTF said:
Ugh, down to 31%...well at least It Follows comes out next week.
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Back up to 33% but yeah it's about to peter out around the lower 30s mark.

A shame really. At least it'll be better received than Jupiter Ascending, and that's..........something.
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
DECK'ARD said:
It's rape, pregnancy and dying in childbirth. Nothing that far-fetched, and brutally simple in how it works.

Being turned into an egg is far-fetched, .
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Okay, so if fears/phobias of rape/pregnancy/death in childbirth (that it was a man who was raped and died in childbirth carried a LOT of weight there) can be pursued adequately via an unknowable space monster that sweats KY, why would suffocation/drowning by that same creature be so out of bounds?

Again, the point where suspension of belief becomes too heavy to bear for some people is always interesting and fascinating to me. You can also look at like this: the prospect of becoming a horrific, unknowable thing, the powerlessness to stop it (and the pain you know you can't avoid as you slip towards that fate) is more than "realistic" to anyone who say, has lost someone to a terminal disease, and the fact that metaphor could be played out via a giant fanged dickmonster from outer space? I can roll with that.

I don't see why that has to be a breaking point, or why "They're just ants" is axiomatically a better decision. I don't even think it has to be an either/or. There's room for both, and I think you can and should blend them.

I think honestly being able to nail down their "nature" is a miscalculation in the first place. Maybe they're not just "parasites" - and part of what made the thing so fucking scary in that first movie is that you couldn't define what it was so easily. So yeah, the fact it can reproduce in multiple ways, one of which being the absolutely horrifying slow-motion, unstoppable slide towards a repugnant metamorphosis INTO the face-raping catchers mitt from outer space? That's a damn good idea, to me. So was the "they're big space ants" thing. But that one is also a little too reductive when it didn't need to be.
 
J

Jack Scofield

Member
If Aliens taught me anything, it's that James Cameron was completely clueless as to what made the alien so terrifying in the first place.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
Jack Scofield said:
If Aliens taught me anything, it's that James Cameron was completely clueless as to what made the alien so terrifying in the first place.
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Oh yeah? Tell me what that is. Then tell me why Alien 3 wasn't scary. Because Aliens is the only film I can think of that has 90 minutes of pure ramping, suspended terror that doesn't relent.

Let's not forget Ebert's initial review

The ads for "Aliens" claim that this movie will frighten you as few movies have, and, for once, the ads don't lie. The movie is so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy? It has been a week since I saw it, so the emotions have faded a little, leaving with me an appreciation of the movie's technical qualities. But when I walked out of the theater, there were knots in my stomach from the film's roller-coaster ride of violence. This is not the kind of movie where it means anything to say you "enjoyed" it.

I don't know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I'm not sure "Aliens" is what we mean by entertainment. Yet I have to be accurate about this movie: It is a superb example of filmmaking craft.

The director, James Cameron, has been assigned to make an intense and horrifying thriller, and he has delivered. Weaver, who is onscreen almost all the time, comes through with a very strong, sympathetic performance: She's the thread that holds everything together.

The supporting players are sharply drawn. The special effects are professional. I'm giving the movie a high rating for its skill and professionalism and because it does the job it says it will do. I am also advising you not to eat before you go to see it.
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S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
ViewtifulJC said:
Aliens, terrifying, lmao

Matt Zoller Seitz shows that shit to fifth graders brehs. Even they know the difference

Screen_Shot_2015-03-04_at_10.08.16_PM.png
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Kid really focusing on the film there with a bunch of his friends around likely making cat calls. Reminds me of this friend I had that would start making jokes, play on his phone or constantly go to the toilet whenever we had a scary movie on as kids. But he never found it scary, of course.

And as if to confirm, I actually clicked on your link.
We watched "Aliens" anyway. It went over well. The biggest challenge was dissuading kids from trying to predict every single thing that was going to happen. This is a generation of talkers. They have to comment on everything. No thought can go unexpressed.
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way more

way more

Member
ViewtifulJC said:
Aliens, terrifying, lmao

Matt Zoller Seitz shows that shit to fifth graders brehs. Even they know the difference

Screen_Shot_2015-03-04_at_10.08.16_PM.png
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One boy said that Ripley in her hyper sleep chamber looked like Sleeping Beauty. As this was an intentional reference on writer-director James Cameron's part (there's a Snow White reference an hour later) this seemed like a promising note on which to begin the screening. "I like the way this looks," one said. "It's futuristic but it's old school. It's almost steampunk." "This is like Team Fortress 2," another remarked. "Dude, shut up, this was made like 20 years before Team Fortress 2," said the kid next to him. "This is, like, every science fiction movie ever made," another said, as Ripley operated the power loader for the first time.

"This movie has so many cliches in it," a boy said when Colonial Marines disembarked the drop ship and made their way through rainy darkness to enter the alien-infested colony. My son told him, "This movie was made in 1986. It invented all the cliches."
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Frost insisting that "it doesn't matter" when the "poontang" is Arcturian confused a couple of kids. "It means he's bisexual," one explained.
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God damn, kids are smarter these days.
 
W

Warm Machine

Member
Jack Scofield said:
If Aliens taught me anything, it's that James Cameron was completely clueless as to what made the alien so terrifying in the first place.
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There is an undercurrent of straight up "alienness" to the Alien. It isn't just a monster it has/had an uncomfortable wierdness in it.

Cameron focused on it as a visceral monster and removed this sense of the bizarre.

Interestingly I think everyone short of Ridley Scott didn't capitalize on the Alien's ability to camoflauge into a industrial complex/ship.
 
A

A_Gorilla

Banned
tcrunch said:
One small wrinkle of "extrapolation" here is that in ants all the workers/soldiers/etc are female as well. The whole colony is female. A few males get crapped out very rarely so they can attempt to mate with another new queen, then they die. For aliens this means there needs to be some stupid flying alien that can't even kill anything and just runs around with a huge boner for a couple days before dying.
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Think of them like termites then, termite workers/soliders are sterile males and females. Though I have always imagined most aliens save the queen to be hermaphrodites as Giger intended.
 
W

Warm Machine

Member
Scullibundo said:
Huh?
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The Aliens in Alien's came out of their own hive walls, not the walls that pre-existed in the structure of the atmosphere processor. At least that is what the movie shows.

I'm as much of a fan of the movie as you are. The screenplay is incredible as is the direction. It's as good as movies get.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
Warm Machine said:
The Aliens in Alien's came out of their own hive walls, not the walls that pre-existed in the structure of the atmosphere processor. At least that is what the movie shows.

I'm as much of a fan of the movie as you are. The screenplay is incredible as is the direction. It's as good as movies get.
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But bro, you're forgetting the Queen coming out of the dropship's landing gear. :O
 
A

A_Gorilla

Banned
Jack Scofield said:
If Aliens taught me anything, it's that James Cameron was completely clueless as to what made the alien so terrifying in the first place.
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You can only be scared by the alien once, the very first time you see it. Cameron understood that, hence why didn't even bother to make another horror film because now that we knew about the aliens lifecycle and how it looked like it will never be as intimidating. Alien Cubed didn't learn this lessons and thats why it sucked so hard (among many, MANY other reasons).
 
F

Fancy Clown

Member
Warm Machine said:
There is an undercurrent of straight up "alienness" to the Alien. It isn't just a monster it has/had an uncomfortable wierdness in it.

Cameron focused on it as a visceral monster and removed this sense of the bizarre.

Interestingly I think everyone short of Ridley Scott didn't capitalize on the Alien's ability to camoflauge into a industrial complex/ship.
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Agreed. The alien in Alien was exactly that, "Alien" with a capital A. In Aliens they were giant scary space bugs, complete with a queen bee to reproduce, rather than the horrifying "people get turned into the eggs" that was in the Alien directors cut.
 
I

inm8num2

Member
ViewtifulJC said:
Aliens, terrifying, lmao

Matt Zoller Seitz shows that shit to fifth graders brehs. Even they know the difference
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Loved reading that a few days ago. My favorite part is the end.

"There could be face huggers hiding under the couch right now," one said after a while. There was laughter at this. Then silence. Then stray nervous chuckles. Then a longer silence.

The boy who earlier had suggested alternatives to "Aliens" asked the first boy to "just shut up about the face huggers."
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Seitz missed a golden opportunity to scare the shit out of these kids once the lights went off. I would have put on a baseball glove, snuck into the room, and grabbed the face of the "just shut up about the face huggers" kid.
 
K

KodaRuss

Member
Saw Chappie with my wife tonight and we both liked it.

I am usually pretty easy to please though. District 9 was better for sure but we both enjoyed this more than Elysium.

Probably a 7/10
 
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