Tangential: Alien(s) brought H.R. Giger to my attention, for which I shall ever be thankful. My parents visited Gruyères in Switzerland a couple of years ago, and whilst they didn't tour the museum[0] (his art isn't their thing) they did take a couple of photos of the sculptures outside for me.
Strictly speaking it was invented in France, although I'll grant you that depending on exactly when TimBL had the idea for it, it may have depending on which side of the office he was sitting on.
His cafè just opposite the museum is also quite something, chairs and tables from spine-infested shapes.
And when in Gruyères then one should taste meringues double crème, or fondue in colder months.
And last but not least - its a region of Swiss pre-alps, mountains up to cca 2000m high, lovely hikes all around in picture-perfect nature and fields (government pays farmers to keep it looking nice) and even nearby very nice via ferrata on Moléson peak which I did 2 weeks ago, this time with some snow. It overlooks the castle and whole area from avove. That was interesting and intense experience while being alone on whole mountain.
My dad took me there as a kid a long whole ago when Giger was still alive, it was really something. The bar is amazing and the museum is... oppressively dark in a very unique way, like anything Giger ever did I suppose.
There's several lifesize necronomicons/xenomorphs, some earlier and later variants, Sil and the skull train, a lot of art that was never used in Alien and sequels but some made it later into Prometheus.
I always loved how the Nostoromo looked futuristic, yet cramped and dirty. The narrow halls and small rooms reflect the minimalism you would expect from a greedy corporation that considers its crew expendable, while the clutter and disrepair reflect what you would expect from the apathetic, disgruntled employees.
In one of the myriad making of / behind the scenes docs I've watched over the years, they described how after the first set was built it was decided it should be more cramped, so they cut a horizontal swath out of big chunks of it and lowered the ceiling forcing the actors to crouch and duck as they moved around.
Fantastic decision, the claustrophobia really adds to the creep factor IMO.
With all the back and forth over the props, also with Ridley Scott scrapping loads of spaceship footage in order to reshoot everything after repainting the models, I get the impression that communication was quite bad in the production. I'm sure we've all encountered this in industry to some degree but having months of work tossed because it ain't look right must sting somewhat.
This is just part of working in art and design. 90% of all my design work never made it to production. It’s the epitome of “the journey is the reward”. You need to find your satisfaction in doing the work not getting it released or you won’t last long.
Sometimes you can’t predict what will work until you see what doesn’t. I’d say that if you’re really developing something new you should have that experience at least once of having something you’ve worked very hard on scrapped because it just isn’t right.
I was taken by how freely they spent months of man hours on things to go 'meh' and casually throw them away. Different world. Quite holistic with their production costs
Once production starts the costs for many roles are locked in and they work till it wraps, often due to union rules and contracts. Anyone working in parallel with the film crews just does whatever the director/producers prioritizes since they’re not getting sent home.
It's definitely a different world though because you’re not supposed to go under budget. If investors give you $100mil to make a movie, they want to maximize the return on that $100mil, so if you’re $5mil under budget, they want you to go and spend that money to make it even better (usually in post production now, but back then it was less of an option).
Maybe because Anglos sometimes pronounce e like i and ei is more common in english spelling for a long vocal?
To be fair, German "ie" and "ei" is one of the few special rules which make no sense (or lost their sense in time). The 'e' in 'ie' is Dehnungs-e for elongation, just a notation that the i is longer pronounced (like Wiese, Biene). (Special rule: if ie is at the end of a word like familie (latin familia) often it is a diphtong and both vocals are pronounced).
"ei" is a bit stupid, because it is not pronounced "ei" but like "ai" or "ay" (eg Mayer).
I'm not sure the generalization is accurate. Most of us can remember the 'i before e' rule we were taught as kids, but the English language is a celebrated mess of borrowed words and guidelines masquerading as rules. It is admittedly confusing for native and non-native speakers alike, but if we throw a reliance on spell check into the mix, which does little to help with spelling a person's name, we just create more opportunity for degradation.
That said, it should be a pretty hard rule when writing about a person to, at the very least, check to make sure you spelled their name correctly.
Right, I before E except after C, except when you run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbor. Caffeine strung atheists are reinventing protein at their leisure. Plebeians may deign to forfeit either that or seize the language and reinvent it
Has anyone actually counted whether that rule is more often true than wrong?
Brief mention on Language Log back in 2009[0] says 'They are saying that teaching the list of "-cei-" words directly is a better strategy than teaching the rule: it is not sufficiently general to pay its way.'
It might be silly to impose rules on the English language at all.
And yes, I realize by putting that in an HN comment to live on the Internet forever, the ghost of every English teacher I had growing up in the US is going to haunt me, one by one, until I am mad and rendered unable to communicate because the anarchic amalgamation that is the English language has lost any shadow of sensibility.
In fairness, I find it a perfectly wonderful language to get creative with, but I really do believe its evolution as a sort of Frankenstein's Monster, composed of parts borrowed from German, Latin, French, etc, has allowed it to transcend into something that broke free of any rules we tried to impose upon it. We're taught different ways to write an essay "correctly" for the sake of appeasing specific branches of academia, grammatical structures that are often awkward and completely at odds with how we actually speak, inducting more and more colloquialisms and slang into the accepted dictionary authorities each year as the stodgy old guard, once considered rebellious and fresh, passes on to the next generation.
English is dynamic and alive, in that way, leaving our educational curriculum running to catch up. Believing that, I cannot blame even the most eloquent native speaker for getting things "wrong" from the perspective of a non-native speaker. It's likely that they learned different and flimsy rules at different times from different sources.
>How Deckerd can afford to live in one post economic meltdown is a bit unclear.
He's part of a precarious minority of semi-technical functionaries, armed bureaucrats afforded generous promotions and great inner leeway amidst the post-meltdown order of things, in return for their unquestioning allegiance to the same
Personally I prefer the PKD book. It was more nuanced. But the aesthetic of the first film was just wondeful. If somebody had sold cold cathode flouro umbrellas when the movie came out they would have cleaned up.
After Deckard did an exemplary job, everyone liked it so much that they they replaced his entire cadre with simulacra.
>Personally I prefer the PKD book. It was more nuanced.
Oh absolutely! Just recently bought a fake animal and pondered it. Love PKD for selling various angles on the same trip for decades; wonder if his OG exegesis can be read anywhere...
In the "Deckard is a replicant" version that Scott has defended for years, I assume he's simply living in someone else's place (unaware that it's not his own).
The recommendation on how many times to brush daily varies by country. In most spanish-speaking countries, for example , it’s thrice. (My unscientific poll: I googled for “tres veces al dia” and found media from a handful of countries promoting this frequency).
Latin American here: my coworkers used to (note: I'm remote now, that's why the past tense) brush their teeth after lunch, so if they also brushed in the mornings and before going to bed, that'd make it three times.
I didn't though, I'm not taking my brush & toothpaste to a public restroom ag the office.
It’s okay if you don’t, like, dip your brush in the toilet or place it in a dirty counter, and miles cheaper than paying for dental treatments. And it’s not like you’re taking your everyday brush and paste with you daily, right? You keep a secondary set at the office?
You know, I'm sort of frustrated that all the recent entries in the Alien franchise have been nostalgia bait. At this point I've seen those corridors so often I'm tired of them. A most unwelcome dilution.
> At this point I've seen those corridors so often I'm tired of them.
Heh, I can't get enough of them; it's a great visual design template to work from. And visual consistency of properties within a diegetic timeframe has to be taken into account, even if the newer entries' writers' rooms could profit from better talent...
That said, Alien: Isolation is still the best modern infusion into that universe, and one of the best games in my lifetime.
Alien: Isolation truly is an under appreciated masterpiece. One of the best video games ever made IMO. Aesthetic, sound design (put on headphones and watch the reactor purge scene or the spacewalk near the end it’s phenomenal sound design), emotional design, storytelling, it captures the setting in a way I don’t think anything has done since the first two films.
Cameron doubled down on the aesthetic in Aliens, he just changed the genre from horror to action. Both films were "peak 80s" (Alien was '79) and just ooze with what must be the absolute pinnacle of science fiction vibes.
If you haven't seen these two films, you need to fix that this week. It'll change your life.
Scott tried to expand the aesthetics with Prometheus and Covenant. I felt the films did a great job of refreshing the look and feel while remaining faithful to the 80's. Unfortunately, the writing was trite and Scott's directing is averaging .200 at bat these days.
Romulus was not bad, though certainly not a masterpiece. At least it was better written and had better character arcs than Scott's recent films.
I'd rather have the performance of this series than whatever Jurassic Park or Star Wars have become.
Predator, oddly enough, has strangely been improving if you don't count Shane Black's entry.
I'm happy they keep making these, and I hope the writers and directors at the reigns keep experimenting rather than conforming to "safe" or "understandable by a general audience".
Alien and Aliens were masterpieces, but I've been consistently disappointed by everything after.
Let's agree to ignore the awful VS Predator crossovers for a second. I'm not sure they are canon anyway, and they are obviously cash grabs and not made with the same care of even the worst Alien movies.
Alien 3, while it has a cool idea (prison planet), is a mess as a result of executive meddling (the story can be read online). And they killed Hicks and Newt... bastards!
Resurrection was awful and awfully badly acted. I like Jeunet, but this was a hard miss. It has some cool visuals at times, typical of Jeunet, but the movie itself was embarrassing.
Prometheus was atrocious. Badly acted, badly scripted (characters making the dumbest of choices at every turn, professionals who don't know their profession -- xenobiologists who pet alien snakes, geologists who get lots at the first turn -- this has been discussed countless times). And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works. Aided by technology, Scott "pulled a George Lucas" and forgot the cardinal rule of scifi horror/mystery: less is more.
After this, I exercised the good sense of avoiding Covenant (the plot summary seems bad), and Romulus, and now the new TV show.
I think overall the gravest sin is that the Alien universe was meant to be sketched in the broadest strokes, and details and mystery kept, not overexplained.
I wish they had let the first two awesome movies rest in peace.
Extended universes suck.
P.S. same applies to Blade Runner. Then again, I didn't even like the sequel, so I'm sure I'll dislike the upcoming show :(
I love the franchise and my will to suspend my disbelief was strong yet the writing, acting and editing were soooo bad that I couldn't make it past the second episode. And that rock song ending entirely killed whatever was left of the vibe. I'm not even sure who to blame for this mess.
Yeah, weird how that seems to never come up. I sometimes have trouble keeping the movies apart in memory (Silent and Dark).
But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake that somehow got stuck in the elevator scene (and lost all of the original's lightheartedness in the process), that absolutely is my favorite piece of scifi movie trivia.
Tangential: Alien(s) brought H.R. Giger to my attention, for which I shall ever be thankful. My parents visited Gruyères in Switzerland a couple of years ago, and whilst they didn't tour the museum[0] (his art isn't their thing) they did take a couple of photos of the sculptures outside for me.
I'll get there one day.
[0]: https://www.hrgigermuseum.com/en/
That website was really frustrating on iOS, had to close it before seeing much.
Swiss people can't ever grasp html
HTML was invented in Switzerland, albeit by an Englishman.
Strictly speaking it was invented in France, although I'll grant you that depending on exactly when TimBL had the idea for it, it may have depending on which side of the office he was sitting on.
yes, that's the joke :)
Giger art should only be enjoyed rendered on a CRT in a damp dark cave for that in-universe feel.
Actually Giger's sculptures are rather interesting. But I agree about the print and paint work. It's too deep in the uncanny valley - in a bad way.
His cafè just opposite the museum is also quite something, chairs and tables from spine-infested shapes.
And when in Gruyères then one should taste meringues double crème, or fondue in colder months.
And last but not least - its a region of Swiss pre-alps, mountains up to cca 2000m high, lovely hikes all around in picture-perfect nature and fields (government pays farmers to keep it looking nice) and even nearby very nice via ferrata on Moléson peak which I did 2 weeks ago, this time with some snow. It overlooks the castle and whole area from avove. That was interesting and intense experience while being alone on whole mountain.
My dad took me there as a kid a long whole ago when Giger was still alive, it was really something. The bar is amazing and the museum is... oppressively dark in a very unique way, like anything Giger ever did I suppose.
There's several lifesize necronomicons/xenomorphs, some earlier and later variants, Sil and the skull train, a lot of art that was never used in Alien and sequels but some made it later into Prometheus.
I always loved how the Nostoromo looked futuristic, yet cramped and dirty. The narrow halls and small rooms reflect the minimalism you would expect from a greedy corporation that considers its crew expendable, while the clutter and disrepair reflect what you would expect from the apathetic, disgruntled employees.
In one of the myriad making of / behind the scenes docs I've watched over the years, they described how after the first set was built it was decided it should be more cramped, so they cut a horizontal swath out of big chunks of it and lowered the ceiling forcing the actors to crouch and duck as they moved around.
Fantastic decision, the claustrophobia really adds to the creep factor IMO.
I’ve read it described as “used future” aesthetic.
[dead]
With all the back and forth over the props, also with Ridley Scott scrapping loads of spaceship footage in order to reshoot everything after repainting the models, I get the impression that communication was quite bad in the production. I'm sure we've all encountered this in industry to some degree but having months of work tossed because it ain't look right must sting somewhat.
This is just part of working in art and design. 90% of all my design work never made it to production. It’s the epitome of “the journey is the reward”. You need to find your satisfaction in doing the work not getting it released or you won’t last long.
Sometimes you can’t predict what will work until you see what doesn’t. I’d say that if you’re really developing something new you should have that experience at least once of having something you’ve worked very hard on scrapped because it just isn’t right.
I was taken by how freely they spent months of man hours on things to go 'meh' and casually throw them away. Different world. Quite holistic with their production costs
Once production starts the costs for many roles are locked in and they work till it wraps, often due to union rules and contracts. Anyone working in parallel with the film crews just does whatever the director/producers prioritizes since they’re not getting sent home.
It's definitely a different world though because you’re not supposed to go under budget. If investors give you $100mil to make a movie, they want to maximize the return on that $100mil, so if you’re $5mil under budget, they want you to go and spend that money to make it even better (usually in post production now, but back then it was less of an option).
There is is, Spielberg spelled wrong as "Speilberg" four (all) times in the article.
Does anyone know why Americans do this regularly, swapping i and e especially in words of German origin?
Maybe because Anglos sometimes pronounce e like i and ei is more common in english spelling for a long vocal?
To be fair, German "ie" and "ei" is one of the few special rules which make no sense (or lost their sense in time). The 'e' in 'ie' is Dehnungs-e for elongation, just a notation that the i is longer pronounced (like Wiese, Biene). (Special rule: if ie is at the end of a word like familie (latin familia) often it is a diphtong and both vocals are pronounced).
"ei" is a bit stupid, because it is not pronounced "ei" but like "ai" or "ay" (eg Mayer).
The weirdest dipthongs in German are definitely "eu" and "äu". I mean, /oi/? Wtf?
It’s a good thing - at least we know it was not written by AI
I'm not sure the generalization is accurate. Most of us can remember the 'i before e' rule we were taught as kids, but the English language is a celebrated mess of borrowed words and guidelines masquerading as rules. It is admittedly confusing for native and non-native speakers alike, but if we throw a reliance on spell check into the mix, which does little to help with spelling a person's name, we just create more opportunity for degradation.
That said, it should be a pretty hard rule when writing about a person to, at the very least, check to make sure you spelled their name correctly.
Right, I before E except after C, except when you run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbor. Caffeine strung atheists are reinventing protein at their leisure. Plebeians may deign to forfeit either that or seize the language and reinvent it
Has anyone actually counted whether that rule is more often true than wrong?
Brief mention on Language Log back in 2009[0] says 'They are saying that teaching the list of "-cei-" words directly is a better strategy than teaching the rule: it is not sufficiently general to pay its way.'
Which is basically saying the rule is worthless?
[0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1525
It might be silly to impose rules on the English language at all.
And yes, I realize by putting that in an HN comment to live on the Internet forever, the ghost of every English teacher I had growing up in the US is going to haunt me, one by one, until I am mad and rendered unable to communicate because the anarchic amalgamation that is the English language has lost any shadow of sensibility.
In fairness, I find it a perfectly wonderful language to get creative with, but I really do believe its evolution as a sort of Frankenstein's Monster, composed of parts borrowed from German, Latin, French, etc, has allowed it to transcend into something that broke free of any rules we tried to impose upon it. We're taught different ways to write an essay "correctly" for the sake of appeasing specific branches of academia, grammatical structures that are often awkward and completely at odds with how we actually speak, inducting more and more colloquialisms and slang into the accepted dictionary authorities each year as the stodgy old guard, once considered rebellious and fresh, passes on to the next generation.
English is dynamic and alive, in that way, leaving our educational curriculum running to catch up. Believing that, I cannot blame even the most eloquent native speaker for getting things "wrong" from the perspective of a non-native speaker. It's likely that they learned different and flimsy rules at different times from different sources.
The rule only applies to vowel sounds like the ones in believe/receive. There are versions of the rhyme that attempt to include this caveat.
> Does anyone know why Americans do this regularly, swapping i and e especially in words of German origin?
You should see what they do to place names like Edinburgh.
perhaps due to ignorance for the mnemonic rhyme "i before e, except after c"
It's wrong in Einstein's name, twice.
heh, every rule has exceptions
[dead]
I always loved Alien and Blade Runner because of this shared aesthetic. It gave the sense that the doomed ship Nostromo departed Blade Runner earth.
Owners of Frank Lloyd Wright homes licked their lips with glee when Bladerunner fans made the bricks-and-mortar movie-famous.
How Deckerd can afford to live in one post economic meltdown is a bit unclear. And those whisky glasses are worth a mint now too.
"Enhance" indeed.
Many go off-world to create real estate opportunities?
>How Deckerd can afford to live in one post economic meltdown is a bit unclear.
He's part of a precarious minority of semi-technical functionaries, armed bureaucrats afforded generous promotions and great inner leeway amidst the post-meltdown order of things, in return for their unquestioning allegiance to the same
Retconning 2049 into that was.. Hard.
Personally I prefer the PKD book. It was more nuanced. But the aesthetic of the first film was just wondeful. If somebody had sold cold cathode flouro umbrellas when the movie came out they would have cleaned up.
>Retconning 2049 into that was.. Hard.
After Deckard did an exemplary job, everyone liked it so much that they they replaced his entire cadre with simulacra.
>Personally I prefer the PKD book. It was more nuanced.
Oh absolutely! Just recently bought a fake animal and pondered it. Love PKD for selling various angles on the same trip for decades; wonder if his OG exegesis can be read anywhere...
In the "Deckard is a replicant" version that Scott has defended for years, I assume he's simply living in someone else's place (unaware that it's not his own).
people brush their teeth three times a day???
The recommendation on how many times to brush daily varies by country. In most spanish-speaking countries, for example , it’s thrice. (My unscientific poll: I googled for “tres veces al dia” and found media from a handful of countries promoting this frequency).
Latin American here: my coworkers used to (note: I'm remote now, that's why the past tense) brush their teeth after lunch, so if they also brushed in the mornings and before going to bed, that'd make it three times.
I didn't though, I'm not taking my brush & toothpaste to a public restroom ag the office.
It’s okay if you don’t, like, dip your brush in the toilet or place it in a dirty counter, and miles cheaper than paying for dental treatments. And it’s not like you’re taking your everyday brush and paste with you daily, right? You keep a secondary set at the office?
Keep it up until you're 20 or so until the enamel is properly hardened.
I thought the article was great, but I couldn't get that sentence out of my head!
In space everyone can smell you scream
How often do you do it?
Yeah three seems insane but less than two also seems insane.
You know, I'm sort of frustrated that all the recent entries in the Alien franchise have been nostalgia bait. At this point I've seen those corridors so often I'm tired of them. A most unwelcome dilution.
> At this point I've seen those corridors so often I'm tired of them.
Heh, I can't get enough of them; it's a great visual design template to work from. And visual consistency of properties within a diegetic timeframe has to be taken into account, even if the newer entries' writers' rooms could profit from better talent...
That said, Alien: Isolation is still the best modern infusion into that universe, and one of the best games in my lifetime.
Alien: Isolation truly is an under appreciated masterpiece. One of the best video games ever made IMO. Aesthetic, sound design (put on headphones and watch the reactor purge scene or the spacewalk near the end it’s phenomenal sound design), emotional design, storytelling, it captures the setting in a way I don’t think anything has done since the first two films.
Thanks for reminding me: I need to finish that game. Visually it's a masterpiece.
True, a brilliant and extraordinary game. We completed it with my kid a couple days ago, tons of fun.
A perfect replika of Alien the original movie and its retrofuturism.
Cameron doubled down on the aesthetic in Aliens, he just changed the genre from horror to action. Both films were "peak 80s" (Alien was '79) and just ooze with what must be the absolute pinnacle of science fiction vibes.
If you haven't seen these two films, you need to fix that this week. It'll change your life.
Scott tried to expand the aesthetics with Prometheus and Covenant. I felt the films did a great job of refreshing the look and feel while remaining faithful to the 80's. Unfortunately, the writing was trite and Scott's directing is averaging .200 at bat these days.
Romulus was not bad, though certainly not a masterpiece. At least it was better written and had better character arcs than Scott's recent films.
I'd rather have the performance of this series than whatever Jurassic Park or Star Wars have become.
Predator, oddly enough, has strangely been improving if you don't count Shane Black's entry.
I'm happy they keep making these, and I hope the writers and directors at the reigns keep experimenting rather than conforming to "safe" or "understandable by a general audience".
Alien and Aliens were masterpieces, but I've been consistently disappointed by everything after.
Let's agree to ignore the awful VS Predator crossovers for a second. I'm not sure they are canon anyway, and they are obviously cash grabs and not made with the same care of even the worst Alien movies.
Alien 3, while it has a cool idea (prison planet), is a mess as a result of executive meddling (the story can be read online). And they killed Hicks and Newt... bastards!
Resurrection was awful and awfully badly acted. I like Jeunet, but this was a hard miss. It has some cool visuals at times, typical of Jeunet, but the movie itself was embarrassing.
Prometheus was atrocious. Badly acted, badly scripted (characters making the dumbest of choices at every turn, professionals who don't know their profession -- xenobiologists who pet alien snakes, geologists who get lots at the first turn -- this has been discussed countless times). And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works. Aided by technology, Scott "pulled a George Lucas" and forgot the cardinal rule of scifi horror/mystery: less is more.
After this, I exercised the good sense of avoiding Covenant (the plot summary seems bad), and Romulus, and now the new TV show.
I think overall the gravest sin is that the Alien universe was meant to be sketched in the broadest strokes, and details and mystery kept, not overexplained.
I wish they had let the first two awesome movies rest in peace.
Extended universes suck.
P.S. same applies to Blade Runner. Then again, I didn't even like the sequel, so I'm sure I'll dislike the upcoming show :(
Have you watched Alien: Earth?
I love the franchise and my will to suspend my disbelief was strong yet the writing, acting and editing were soooo bad that I couldn't make it past the second episode. And that rock song ending entirely killed whatever was left of the vibe. I'm not even sure who to blame for this mess.
Yes, that and Romulus is what I was thinking of. Alien Earth has that whole fanfic-style flashback episode.
This look all comes from Silent Running (1972).
Yeah, weird how that seems to never come up. I sometimes have trouble keeping the movies apart in memory (Silent and Dark).
But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake that somehow got stuck in the elevator scene (and lost all of the original's lightheartedness in the process), that absolutely is my favorite piece of scifi movie trivia.
Also see, but not to be confused with, Space Truckers:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0120199/
What a weird coincidence; I made a "Space Truckin'" comment under a YouTube vid less than 24 hours ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWDsSDNpS8c&lc=UgyEogAS5P_Hm...
Double coincidence: it was I who posted this ten years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9254748