Weekend in review

[kingandy]

Friday I successfully picked up my Amazon package from the two nice men who now live in our old house.  It was odd going back - I'm not sure what I expected, but they'd redecorated the front hall, putting down a decent carpet and painting the walls and putting up nice light fittings, and basically making the place look livable.  Then I went home to Stretford, with the intention of going on to the SoS weekend.  Thanks to the Levenshulme detour, however, by the time I got there and checked my mail it was half past eight (see Friday's entry), and I decided to stay in and watch TV and Freakazoid.  And it was good.

So Saturday I made it over to SoS (along with stsquad, who came home at around midnight, taking advantage of the site's proximity).  It was nice and relaxing to just flop into old familiar places - both rules and characters - after a summer of extreme LRP.  It's odd, I'm now one of those old coots that people seem to turn to for rules calls.

The boy known as "Six" (due to the number of characters he went through at BattleHwok) turned up.  He is not a very good roleplayer, bless him, but at least he's enthusiastic - as a monster, he kept bouncing up and down and asking if he could play a monster that couldn't be killed because it would be so cool.  (This in the encounter consisting of unlimited waves of single-hit demons.)  Over the course of the weekend we learned that he has a fear of breasts (an ex-girlfriend used to beat him up with hers), he's bisexual and he has both attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders (ADHD?).  If you believe any of that.  Love him or hate him, you can't help but notice him.

I monstered two linears, and helped out at the start of a third.  (People still call them "dungeons" reflexively, which is something I've been trying to stop - though I realise I'll have to break the habit in myself first.  It wouldn't be so bad if people kept it OOC, but this isn't always the case...)  The final adventure of the weekend was a double-length, big-plot-wrapup affair, though, so by the time the Armies of God had finished stomping on the Wicked Feindish Demon Upstart and we actually got a decent tavern rolling it was past midnight.  Myself and stsquad got a taxi home at about half past one, he being exhausted from the smiting and me being sleepy from the regular employment.

Woke up on Sunday and went back to the site by about half eleven, for to pick up our kit (and Alex's car) and do our required cleaning duty.  Following this minor inconvenience (a blow which was softened by the many, many hugs from people that I love in a very real and physical way), zheers drove the entire household (us two men and tractorb) to see Alien Versus Predator.

(See summarized review here! I agree with most of Sam's points. More longwindedness follows.)

AVP:  Yeah.  It's an okay way to spend a couple of hours.  It's entertaining, reasonably pretty to look at, not too challenging.  It's basically a fanservice movie though.  The title itself doesn't make much sense unless you know about the source movies - in fact taking just this movie, one might think that the bipedal extraterrestrials were the title Alien, and the savage animalistic hunting machines were the Predator.  There's nothing in the movie itself to tell you otherwise.

Even the basic setup doesn't make a lot of sense.  Why's the temple made of stone?  it's clearly Predator-built, and it's got a sophisticated power source and cryogenic storage and such.  It's not like the Predators made any other great efforts to conceal the fact that they were advanced beings ... and if they're still making these little trips every hundred years, after all this time, what have they been using for human hosts before the whaling colony in 1904?  Why did they let humanity advance to the point they have?  There's an implication that the civilisation there was wiped out following an Alien escape similar to the one in the movie, during which the Predators set off their wrist-bombs, but it's still a hell of a lot of time to leave it dormant.  (What did they say, thirty thousand years or something?)

Continuity aside (and I'm not going to consider how well it fits in with the other movies because I'm not that big a geek), it wasn't a very good movie in and of itself.  Some of the effects were very poor, not what you'd expect in what's basically an effects movie, though there was a generally high standard.  What bothered me most was the pacing and structure.  It was very much movie-by-numbers.  Assemble team, throw team into killing bottle, they die one by one leaving single competent woman alive.  Admittedly the "sole survivor" thing is very much in the idiom of both Alien and Predator (at least the original movies), but that just means it's been done already.  Here, the slaughter of the team members happened far too quickly - within five minutes of that one guy pushing the Big Red Button half the team are facehugged, within ten they've spawned (defying everything we've come to expect, though perhaps these are specially bred by the Predators for speed).  The writers went through the motions of trying to make us care about the characters ("I've got kids!" "Me too!"), then got them chomped in the very next scene, which took things almost to the point of absurdity.  Talking about your home life is now a guarantee of instant mutilation.  There were some moments of coolness (the Alien tail-spear and head-buckler), but it was generally poor.

Finally, something I've never liked about the whole Predator-race scenario.  This entire extrapolated culture thing is based on the actions of a single being, in the first movie.  There's nothing in that movie to suggest that the entire culture revolves around hunting, or a strict honour code, or anything!  I hate when people take the behaviour of a single alien in SF and decide the entire rest of the species must behave that way, leaving no allowance for individuality.  It's like assuming the entire human race behaves like one hunter you met in the Australian outback.

On balance I am glad I saw it, but I don't think I'll be buying the DVD.

Following AVP we went home and watched the first episode of Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars on Special Advance Preview (wink-wink).  The sound had a couple of sync issues, and it was encoded in letterbox format thus played on the widescreen TV in glorious scanline-o-vision, but this did not detract from the joy.  Thus far it's a glorious romp through all things Farscape, tying up many a plot thread with plenty of recap along the way for the newbies, revisiting old friends and locales and even addressing the Human-Peacekeeper connection in a couple of throwaway lines which I feel sure will have no further impact on the plot (like they just wanted to clear that up for the fans while they had the chance).  There's a couple of plot conveniences and/or oddities (particularly the Rygel complication, surely (a) the crystals in his belly wouldn't have reintegrated, and (b) if they did they wouldn't have been properly attached to healthy bits that wouldn't digest them?  But Diagnosian tech is clearly far in advance of our own, and any inexplicable occurrances can be attributed to that.)  I can't really say much more about it other than It Is Farscape and It Is Good.  Will watch the second half as soon as Alex has properly downloaded it.

And now you know ... the rest of the show.

ETA: Oh, and before zheers left we watched most of Dexter's Laboratory: Ego Trip, which was enjoyable as always.

CHILD MANDARK: "No! I always wanted the core!"
ADULT MANDARK: "No! I stole the core!"
MATURE MANDARK: "No! The core is mine!"
FUTURE MANDARK: "No! Just because I'm bitter and jealous!"

Comments

[pkgem.livejournal.com]

"Finally, something I've never liked about the whole Predator-race scenario. This entire extrapolated culture thing is based on the actions of a single being, in the first movie"

There is nothing in either the second Predator movie nor AVP to suggest that their entire civilisation is based on hunting. We've only actually seen a few ships. The Predators look pretty advanced and, as I said in my lj entry, I'd rather think of them as a sub-sect of their society or even a "club" of adrenaline junkies or "old boys"(+girls?) that like to hunt. Like a masonic cult with hunting at the heart of its rituals or a bunch of high society toffs with too much time and money on their hands who just cannot get what they want from all the designer drugs and pleasures that their world offers and need more, something more primal.

I think it would be cool if the ship with the Predator-Alien hybrid got back to the homeworld (or system) of the Predators and ran riot and the "Predators" down there are just normal types, white and blue collar workers, scientists, politicians, shop-workers. They die just as easily as us humans as they don't work out like the "Hunting junkies" and they don't have such ready-access to the same technology (again because they're not hunting enthusiasts). They have to call in their military to sort it out. In fact, the "Predators" we've seen may be in training for SAS style combat units. That could work too...

[kingandy]

Yeah, that was more a comment on the Predator mythos in general than this specific movie. The public (or at least fanboy) perception of the Predator species is that their entire culture revolves around the hunt. I'll give you that we can't write off the entire species until we've seen the homeworld (maybe the military are the only spacefarers! Maybe these are outcasts, which is why they're operating on a small, insignificant planet on the outer rim! Maybe the rest of the Predator species detonated their own planet thousands of years ago and these are the tribal remnants of a once-great civilisation, utilising the artefacts of that dead race in a ritualised cargo-cult manner!), and you could probably do an excellent story about that, but the problem is that's not going to happen. If the Predator culture is ever explored, it will turn out that yes, they are all excellent hunters who operate under a strict honour code. Except perhaps for the odd individual. Because that is the way fandom works.

[pkgem.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I suspect you are right. However, until I see or read anything to the contrary, I'm gonna imagine that they are'nt all that way.

I'm not gonna read the books Sam recommends for that reason - they seem to have fallen into the "fandom" cliche you are right to be annoyed at.

[samharber.livejournal.com]

The AVP books (Prey and Hunters Planet) do a good job of outlining Predator culture. I'll have to dig them out again.

Some links

[samharber.livejournal.com]

Prey and Hunters Planet

[redhillian.livejournal.com]

What about the concept that maybe it's seen as hunting, like fox hunting is here.......

[kingandy]

That's what I always figured. That the guy in the first movie was just some rich guy who liked going off to out-of-the-way planets in his private jet and bagging some lower life forms.

[kingandy]

PS you're still going to have to tell me what you did to Six at some point.

[redhillian.livejournal.com]

What we did IC or OOC though, and do you want the IC or OOC answer.... ;)

[kingandy]

Well obviously I don't know IC.

So Both, and OOC.

[redhillian.livejournal.com]

Well... (reaches for phone)

[kingandy]

Oh. That's much less exciting than I thought. Thus, I shall ignore it, and make up something more entertaining.

Mmmmmm.

[pkgem.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That's kinda what I was thinking except with a bit more ritual. Though, I suppose red jackets and stupid hats are ritual; just not cool ritualism.

[gowhonker.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the film, and will be buying it on DVD.
Yes, it was cheesy, yes it was just fan-fic with a budget, yes it was soooo formulaic it almost hurt, yes it was badly written and plotted.

But it had a Predator throwing down WWF/whatever moves on an Alien.
That's what i paid my money for.
It was in no way about the humans, or characterisation, or plot, it was all just an excuse to have a Predator put the smack down on an Alien, and then the Alien Queen to put the smackdown on the Predator.

It would have worked better as a romantic comedy.

Also, the Predators didn't leave it dormant, so much as continental drift moved it away from inhabited areas.
I believe the earlier 'flashback' was teh tale of another, similar, temple, and the tribal humans recorded what they knew as best they could.
I also imagine the Predators used the humans to build the pyramids, but installed the underfloor heating, fusebox and alarm system themselves. Hench ancient civilisations knew about basic pyramid constructions, but not thermo-nuclear devices...

[kingandy]

I liked when somebody said, with a straight face, "Ancient maps show Antarctica without snow..." Maybe modern maps of ancient times, but I don't think there were any ancient cartographers at that point.

Of course, given that they've already shifted the Earth's history a few degrees to the left a la Stargate, maybe on that Earth there are ancient maps...

[samharber.livejournal.com]

Actually there are some unexplained maps that date back to about the 15th century that show the Antarctic coastline without the ice cap. Its believed that these were copied from earlier maps of an unknown origin.

I would dig out links, but I'm drunk and tired.