Episode 213 Topics Include:
- Enter: Anderson
- Rian's comic buying habits: A foregone conclusion
- Featured Review: Prometheus
Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Episode Songs:
Black Swan -Thom Yorke
This Podcast May Include Some Explicit Language
...It Also Most Likely Contains Some Spoilers
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great episode, guys! good having you back together. :) congrats again on the baby, Jesse!
ReplyDeletelike i said on Twitter, man, this episode played out like an episode of Hoarders or something. i love Hoarders, though, but it's always kinda stressful at the same time and i felt that way with this one. whew. i'm still blown away by how many comics you read, Rian, purely from a temporal standpoint, like how do have the time to read all of them?! it seems physically impossible to me.
blah, Prometheus. i liked the first hour okay, but mostly i thought it was boring and stupid. i pretty much checked out, oddly enough, when the monsters first showed up. that snake scene was so stupid, then all the monsters in the rest of the movie looked like crap. such bullshit design work.
i still don't get how those two guys, one of whom was the MAP GUY, got lost in the pyramid. makes no sense. and i don't get how Idris Elba's character somehow read the movie script so he could explain all the military depot stuff to us. BLARGH.
the movie felt like you could rearrange most of the scenes in a different order and things would make the same amount of sense. nobody reacted to anything from scene to scene, and no scene affected the next scene very much, there was no thrust to anything.
and then the Alien connection also is too confusing. like okay, the Jockeys are seemingly killed by their own black ooze (i guess?) which seemingly accidentally and completely randomly later gives rise to the proto-alien thing at the end (which also makes no sense because of the Giger murals on the pyramid walls with a pretty clear Alien-looking motif, so did the Jockeys know about this proto-facehugger/proto-alien event which seemed to be a total accident?), but then that means that the other Jockeys must have come BACK to this planet for some reason, found the proto-alien and proto-facehugger and, despite the black ooze-spawned monsters previously killing all their friends, were like "oh cool, let's use this" and that plays a part in their creating the Alien lifeforms we know so then basically the black ooze, being what gives rise to the Alien, kills them all a SECOND TIME? so they effectively just get killed twice by this stupid black ooze? or do other proto-aliens get birthed somewhere else somehow? even though it seemed like it was an accidental combination of black ooze + human + space jockey..? plus that suggests that somehow the monsters they already created with the ooze weren't somehow lethal enough to begin with and this proto-alien is somehow MORE deadly than other deadly creatures that the Engineers want to perfect it? WHY? i guess the bigger question is who gives a shit?
it felt like so much stuff was missing to me, and i found out apparently there's a cut that's 20-30 minutes longer so maybe things make sense in that one. whatever.
anyway. boring.
oh yeah, i also hated when Janek the captain and the two nameless nobody pilot guys heroically sacrificed themselves in this big completely unearned music-swelling moment. give me a break. all on basically a hunch Dr. Shaw had, too, like she tells them the ship is heading to earth to destroy humanity and without question Janek is like "OKAY!"
ReplyDeletei don't even know how Dr. Shaw found that out, i can't remember, it seemed like everything she and the other characters did was based on a hunch and nothing more concrete than that. the whole movie felt hunch-based. like basing this entire frickin' mission on Shaw's hunch that MAYBE the Engineers created humans, Weyland's hunch that MAYBE there was an off-chance the Engineers knew about eternal life, if they even existed in the first place. Weyland basing his hunch on another hunch of Dr. Shaw's, haha. taking off their helmets in the pyramid: hunch. torching mutating love interest guy: hunch. guy previously scared of aliens touching an alien creature that he figures must be friendly: hunch. opening the ship doors for mutated guy even after previous mutated guy: hunch. heading back into pyramid after it's killed everyone: hunch. entire plot of movie: hunch.
If one is to take anything from our conversation about comics on this episode, I'd think it would be that I DON'T have time to read all of my books, which is part of the problem. Although our grand plans for my pull list seemed to have broken down by the end of the episode, I am still working on thinning out my subscriptions. I also managed to sort out another full long box of comics to get rid of last night. I'm sure there will be another update on my situation on the show before long.
DeleteOn the topic of Prometheus...it had a lot of problems. So many problems that I'm growing tired of discussing them all. It's not a good movie. I was worried that it would taint Alien and Aliens, but with a few weeks of hindsight, I'm ready to simply call the movie "harmless". I'll always view it in a bad light, but I'm not too worried about it anymore. I'd likely be in a different position if everyone but me loved the film, but since most people seem to agree that it was a muddled mess, I don't feel the need to dwell on it too much anymore. With any luck, there won't be a sequel and the Alien franchise will be left the hell alone for a while. The last decade has given us 3 bad Alien films, and I dare say that's enough for a while. At least until the reboot, which I'd bet is coming down the line at some point in the not-too-distant future considering the way Hollywood seems to work.
i guess i figured that even though you have books piled up that you eventually do get through them all, right? even if it's just flipping through looking at the art? i wish i could help, man! :\
Deleteyeah, i'm with ya. even though i wrote a ton about the movie in the comments here i'd actually mostly forgotten about it until a day or two ago when somebody tweeted about it and then i saw you guys were reviewing the movie. even aside from its muddled-ness, it's pretty unremarkable even in terms of bad movies.
At the current time I have a little more than 2 full long boxes devoted to completed mini-series' that I've yet to read, and another 2+ long boxes filled with unread TPBs and hardcovers. On top of that, I have one of those spinner racks that you'll see in comic book stores in my bedroom loaded up with comics I've yet to read. It's getting pretty out of hand. I've been trying to get myself on a regiment of reading the new stuff before I go back and read older stuff, but I'm perpetually about 4 weeks behind in my reading.
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