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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's actually really impressive. I was considering 3D printing one, but if results like that can be got just by modifying the NERF one...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    A fair amount of the audience was eating the eye candy too, so at least Darth Plagueis the Wise is in good company there. Or does this make him Darth Plagueis the Thirsty?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Dungeon Meshi really is just a great show. My watch group has decided to go backwards a bit for two older shows. Tonight we're starting Super Dimension Century Orguss and Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode Oracle, the latter being a loose adaptation of the first three episodes of the single player story from the Japanese MMORPG Phantasy Star Online 2. A lot of shounen stuff is ending soon or has just ended... My Hero Academia finally reached its conclusion, and its fans seem to be pretty pissed. I guess the ending was not a very satisfying one, considering how many bitter remarks are saying Deku's quirk should've been called "All For Nothing". The Jujutsu Kaisen fans seem to be pretty up in arms too, not happy with the mangaka killing off so many characters in such quick succession.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That's being antagonistic, which is not the same as being an antagonist. One is a synonym for being a jerk, one refers to a specific role in a story. She left so little of an impression I keep forgetting she exists. OK, so everyone's a sh*thead except for that one child soldier who was there to show that Sol is an even bigger hypocrite than the other Jedi.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Osha and Sol are the protagonists of The Acolyte... they're the ones who the story follows and they're the ones whose actions drive the plot both in the backstory and the present day events. Just because Sol is a bad person doesn't make him an antagonist. That, and his regret about it, technically make him more of a Byronic Hero given his disdain for the Jedi's rigid code, his tragic past, and his passionate belief in his own righteousness that sets off the show's conflict in the past. Mae and Qimir spend most of the series offscreen, they only really appear when they're interacting with the protagonists, and are defined pretty much entirely by their opposition to Osha and Sol. They are the antagonists. The line does blur a bit right at the end, but only because Osha changes sides right before the end. Had there been a season two and had Osha remained the show's focus character in it, Qimir would have been considered a protagonist then as her companion.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    "Protagonist" and "Antagonist" doesn't actually imply a moral alignment... they're not "Good guy" and "Bad guy", even if they are frequently used that way. By definition, a "protagonist" is just one of the principal characters whose actions drive the events of the story in a work of fiction. An "antagonist", by definition, is just a character (or concept) that plays an adversarial role to the protagonist in the story. Osha and Sol are the protagonists in the story, because they are the focus characters of the story and their actions are what drives the progress of the narrative. Qimir and Mae are the story's antagonists, because they are not the story's main focus and are acting in opposition to the protagonists. Moral alignment-wise... well... in terms of good guys, we have no good guys. Everyone left standing at the end of The Acolyte is either an unrepentant murderer or a corrupt Jedi looking to prevent the Jedi Order from being held accountable for the criminal actions of its members. The dead aren't much better. All four dead Jedi are co-conspirators in the coverup of a mass casualty event directly instigated by the Jedi, with Sol and Torbin both having directly instigated the violence and Indara having ordered the coverup. The witches aren't much better off, being an outlawed Cult of Evil living in exile who've used some kind of Dangerous Forbidden Technique to create a child and then split it into two children (or considering their behavior when grown, two halves of a whole idiot) and couldn't resist trying to antagonize the Jedi for no real reason. Everyone in the story is a sh*thead, so it's hard to care about anybody.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I know they'd already announced there were going to be one-shot comics about the backstories of some of the characters... but IIRC the only one they've actually published is the first one, for Kelnacca. I'd assume anything that hasn't already gone to the printers WRT The Acolyte is probably gonna be cancelled in light of the show's abysmal performance and cancellation. They're supposedly only part of a larger project anyway, so they can probably drop them without any real problem.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Each major studio and network that decided to launch their own proprietary streaming service has been frantically searching for a "killer app"-type show that can be the main draw for their streaming service. That quiet desperation for a hit series to carry their platform has let a lot of studios and networks to greenlight series concepts that were not ready for primetime... and then cancel them just as quickly when they underperform for cost reasons. Streaming originals competing with each other on visual quality first and foremost has driven production costs through the roof. When a single season of a streaming original can have a budget rivaling that of a major motion picture, new shows going direct-to-streaming have to hit their stride immediately or risk cancellation. There's no more forgiveness for bad first seasons... unless you're Paramount, then you just set hundreds of millions of dollars on fire for no reason other than refusing to admit you were wrong. The Acolyte cost $180 million. That's 50% more than what was spent on The Mandalorian and very close to what was spent to produce Dune: Part Two ($190M). With its garbage viewereship numbers and overwhelmingly poor audience reviews, Disney would've had to be stark raving mad to renew it for another season. As it stands, it's one one of the most expensive direct-to-streaming flops of all time alongside fellow Disney+ one-season wonder She-Hulk.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Exactly. Qimir was an antagonist written for a more mature audience. He's friendly, reasonable, and sincere. He seems to genuinely care about Osha and Mae's wellbeing. But his sincere belief in his own philosophy also enables him to commit acts of the most staggering cruelty and violence secure in the knowledge that it's the right thing to do. Qimir's nice guy exterior isn't a mask hiding pure malevolence like Palpatine's was. He was probably a good person before he was driven to the Dark Side, and likely still sees himself as one. In that sense, he reminds me a lot of Marc Alaimo's Gul Dukat from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Dukat was another villain who was friendly, polite, and even charming whose self-centered morality enabled him to flip-flop between acts of genuine valor and hideous cruelty based purely on his own rationalizations. Qimir's quite a contrast to the extremely generic Jedi characters or the terribly underdeveloped doormat Osha and psycho Mae.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Alien: Romulus's director, Fede Alvarez, is also quite the fan of Alien: Isolation and credits it as a major influence on the movie. IMO, Alien: Isolation understood the assignment far better than any other attempt to continue the Alien storyline and nothing the franchise has yet produced can rival it for sheer claustrophobic horror. It's not just the xenomorph passive-aggressively hunting you all around Sevastopol ready to murder you the second you let your guard down, it's the literal isolation on Sevastopol station enforced by the homicidal paranoia of the Human survivors who shoot anyone they don't recognize on sight and the uncanny valley limitations of Sevastopol's Working Joe androids who repeat their limited interaction dialogs offering assistance, information, and safety advisories as they methodically pursue you intent on your death. Alvarez supposedly tried to use Alien: Isolation as a guide to making the xenomorph scary again for Alien: Romulus and I'd say he partly succeeded. Romulus's main xenomorph, the "Scorched" xenomorph, shows a lot more of the patient sadism that Big Chap in the original movie was known for. He's never far from the main cast, visible in the background of several shots, but he's also patient enough to put off striking until he can maximize his prey's fear. It's a big reversal from the titles after Aliens where the xenomorph increasingly devolved into a mindlessly aggressive animal. The only thing Alvarez really did wrong with the xenos was he gave the protagonists guns that could kill a xeno, which greatly diminishes the threat they pose. Isolation gave Amanda Ripley guns, but because they were low-powered weapons made for police work aboard a space station they could kill an android or a human but were too weak to do more than annoy a xenomorph, which preserved the tension.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Did anyone honestly think it was going to get a second season? The Acolyte was eight episodes of pure idiot plot starring an assortment of shallow stock characters... and Qimir.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    OK, so I just got back from Alien: Romulus... and I will say this much for it. There are only three things about this that the studio didn't get right: The final monster's design. The Ian Holm deepfake. The entire goddamn story. Overall, Alien: Romulus excels in every technical aspect. The visual design is superb. The sound design is fantastic. The practical effects are wonderful. The digital effects are on the whole very impressive. Set design is great. Prop design is solid. It's a very pretty film... when the lighting permits you to see it, anyway. It's unfortunate that the two times the visual effects department let the film down were so prominent. Those two very prominent effects failures that undermined an otherwise visually stunning movie aside, the only point that really merits complaint is the story. Alien: Romulus is not an idiot plot... but it is a plot absolutely infested with idiots. The stories of Alien and Aliens worked as well as they did, in no small part, because the crew of the Nostromo and the marines of the Sulaco were professionals who did almost everything right... but it still wasn't enough to stop them from becoming Purina xenomorph chow. Even Alien 3 had its main cast give off the general sense that they were doing everything they could to remain alive once they learned Ripley's story was true. Alien: Romulus is much closer to the story of Prometheus or Alien: Covenant in that regard. The young crew of the freighter Corbelan IV suffer from severe cases of horror movie secondary cast member syndrome and as a result seemingly do everything they can to ensure that they die horribly, stupidly, or both. Rain and Andy, as guests aboard the ship, manage to be exceptions to this and are the only thing standing between the movie and "idiot plot" status. It may be marginally more explicable as these are dumb wagies who ferry raw materials from the surface to orbit rather than top scientists or veteran long haul space truckers, but they still display every "too dumb to live" trope you'd expect from horror movie non-survivors. It makes the movie painfully predictable. The most tedious part of Alien: Romulus is that it seems to be trying to tie up every plot thread it can into a neat little bow like the writers were afraid Fox would never approve another film after this one. Really, they could've saved a lot of trouble and nonsense and just made a movie adaptation of Alien: Isolation. It would've been a lot better and could've reused basically all of the same visuals. All in all, I hate to say it... but I was kind of bored throughout. Alien: Romulus wants to be a horror movie, but it telegraphs its scares so blatantly with slavish adherance to formula that even startling the audience is frankly a bit beyond what it's capable of. It has some gore, but not much and frankly it's not excessive or showy with it unlike some other titles in the franchise. The crew of the Corbelan IV are obnoxious and unlikeable and killing them off provokes exactly zero pathos because they are constantly displaying their Too Dumb To Live status to the point that it's almost a mercy when the consequences of their actions catch up to them. Rain and Andy are a bit more likeable, but their relationship is never given enough time to properly develop so her risk-everything levels of attachment to this obsolete android just feel suicidal. The showing I attended had around a dozen people in a theater designed for over a hundred, and around half of those walked out before the film was over... whether that was from the lateness of the hour or just boredom I do not know.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Androids/Synths in Alien are humanoid robots. They're made to look Human in order to better integrate into the Human workforce. Alien: Isolation featured a good example of why in the form of the Seegson Systems "Working Joe": a low-cost android for menial labor that was a true native of the uncanny valley with its chalk-white rubber skin and near-featureless CPR dummy face. The xenos typically ignore them because they're inorganic.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Since my plans for this weekend fell through due to contractor stupidity, I'm headed to see Alien: Romulus tonight. I'm not sure what it says about the film that, at the time I bought my ticket online a few minutes ago, I was literally the only person attending this showing. 🤔
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Mate, that's not a plot hole... anyone who's worked a white collar job at a major corporation knows that that's a perfectly believable example of corporate bureaucracy in action. If it weren't for NDAs, there are SO MANY examples I could share just from my own work experience. Weyland-Yutani is a megacorporation. It's an even bigger, even more openly amoral, version of the multinationals we have today. Like any other large corporation, employees are going to be encouraged to stay in their lane and mind their own responsibilities and let their fellow employees get on with theirs. Odds are someone, likely multiple someones, at Weyland-Yutani are aware of the signal but it's either outside their department so they don't care, they've referred it up the chain of command in the direction of someone with the authority to Do Something about it but it hasn't reached them yet through the many intervening layers of management, the team responsible got reorganized and don't know who owns it now, the team responsible is busy with another crisis and have said they'll get to it later, the message got misrouted to the wrong department and deleted as spam, some mid-level functionary passed it along and it got forgotten in the to-do pile, I could go on. And on. And on. For hours. Literally. And that's not even considering possibilities like it being some executive's pet project that the rest of the company is in the dark about. To give a detail-stripped real world example, an issue that was filed back in July finally reached my desk last Friday at like 2pm. In the intervening time while the request had been kicked around different levels of management and areas of responsibility with each team saying it wasn't their issue, its severity exploded from a polite request for assistance in a non-specific near-future timeframe to an immediate and critical need for support to prevent a complete halting of development work. @Kanedas Bike is also dead-on correct about WY's past presentation. This is an amoral corporation that is not particularly bothered by large-scale capital losses in the name of their goals. In Alien, they were willing to sacrifice the Nostromo, its crew, and its massive cargo (a refinery and 20 million tons of ore) just to get their hands on an alien specimen. In Aliens, they either built the colony on LV-426 specifically to attract an alien or sacrificed it and all of its related resources to get one. In Alien 3, they shutter an entire city-sized working refinery and forge complex and sell its equipment for scrap because its caretaker population of twenty-two prisoners and three administrators died. In Prometheus, Weyland Industries's owner puts his company into borderline bankruptcy to find the mission to LV-223 based largely on Shaw's quackery. In Alien: Isolation, they buy the entire space station Sevastopol from a competitor and sacrifice its entire crew and the crew of the WY freighter Torrens in the hopes of getting their hands on a specimen. As much as I'd like to call this out as a bit of pretentious film snobbery... it's actually a pretty fair observation about splatter horror as a whole. The original Alien was psychological horror, but every movie in the franchise thereafter has been more of a splatter horror movie. People don't come to splatter horror movies for good storytelling. They come for the spectacle. For the grotesquerie. They're here for the visual effects. Good splatter horror is mindless entertainment, the horror version of a pratfall comedy. The Human characters are incidental. Almost props. The audience is there for the monster, which had better be gross and frightening and visually impressive, and how messily it disassembles the incidental Human cast before Generic Last Character A "defeats" it.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Nah... there's nothing wrong with expository dialog up to a point. If the characters can sum up relevant past events in a minute or two that's usually fine. It can even be leveraged to build suspense or tension depending on how it's handled. What was cut from Prometheus in the late draft stage was more like 10-15 minute expository dump, which isn't OK... but "show, don't tell" is not a universal law. It's also not where Prometheus really failed.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, that speaks as much to the lack of visually distinctive characters in comic books and comic book movies as it does to the "Who?" aspect of this minor secondary character from Spider-Man. It's hard enough to tell the various generically handsome and muscular brown-haired superhero/villain characters apart without their silly outfits. It helps not at all that the trailer doesn't even make this look like a comic book movie. It just sort of looks like a Russian John Wick. The rumor that "ghetto Joker" was Leto's idea is also false... codirector David Ayer was the one behind that decision. He added the tattoos and the grill to Leto's Joker to give the character a "modernized gangster look".
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Remember when teasers were supposed to tease the audience with the content of a show or movie? This looks like an almost Harmony Gold Convention Tour-level effort... they hastily edited a reflection of Earth onto stock footage of the xenomorph and for three seconds and cut to a title card so basic it probably took the intern who made it longer to find the official franchise font in the Adobe AfterEffects fonts menu than it did to make it. The real irony is this teaser uses the one thing that likely won't actually be in the show, since it's set 30 years before the Engineer ship is discovered on LV-426 in the original movie. English! 🗣️ The Engineer who designed it was dwelling perhaps a bit too much on what his species had lost. 🤣
  19. Seto Kaiba
    In what way is that a spoiler? It's a bloody interquel set between Alien and Aliens. 🤣 That it'd be connected to the others is basically a given because it's an interquel and the alien had to come from somewhere. There's only two options at that point in time, and that's a tie-in to the first movie or the second. It's not like the slobbery git showed up uninvented of its own accord in response to a WY lonely hearts advert in the space papers. Never mind the franchise's obsession with each new chapter having to tie into the others somehow. Even Alien: Isolation wasn't free of it and that was a video game about someone whose only film appearance was as an archival photo in Aliens. That's just SOP for the franchise.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    What'd he do that earned him everyone's ire, anyway? Considering the flaws in his prior comic book movie appearances - Suicide Squad, Justice League, and Morbius - were down to failures of writing, direction, and visual design I can't imagine him being in a movie like Kraven the Hunter would have a material effect on its quality in and of itself. It's actually kind of impressive his professionalism didn't permit him to show up and sleepwalk through each scene once he realized the kind of scripts he had to work with.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's mentioned in Alien: Resurrection directly... though as with so many things in that film it's painfully dumb. Ripley-8 is a clone and shouldn't have any of the original Ripley's memories. But she does. When the scientists on the Auriga notice this, they hypothesize that because her DNA ended up a jumble of Human and Xenomorph due to the cloning process that the clone inherited the xenomorph's genetic memory. Apparently the gestating chestburster gets a bit more than just physical traits from its host. So Ellen Ripley's memories were preserved in the xenomorph's genetic memory. The blood she left on Fiorina 161 was tainted by the xenomorph's DNA, so the clones created from that blood sample inherited that genetic memory and thus part of Ellen Ripley's memories too. It was the Resurrection's way of almost-but-not-quite bringing Ellen Ripley back from the dead for the sequel. Ripley-8 can talk and act like Ellen Ripley and even remember events from Ellen Ripley's past despite technically being a totally separate person who never met the original because she has Ellen Ripley's memories via her xenomorph side. So, in theory, you could do this with other people too and clone anyone who'd been facehugged back to life as long as you had a sample of their blood from during the gestation process. The only problem is they might be a tiny bit sociopathic and have spicy blood thanks to the xenomorph DNA. 🤣
  22. Seto Kaiba
    This just in, Jared Leto has officially beat the allegations of being in Kraven the Hunter. 🤣
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Considering they were able to clone Ripley back to life using "genetic memory" from the xenos, I kinda suspect they don't even need to invoke "the multiverse" for that.😵‍💫 Maybe we'll find out that thanks to the black goop and the xenos everyone who's ever been got by one exists in a massive telepathic shared memory like the victims of the mold in Resident Evil 7 and 8. I'll get to see this movie either later this weekend or next weekend, depending on how things shake out. My hopes for horror are not high, but I'm trying to remain at least cautiously optimistic.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how many pieces of Alien media have shown the xenos are perfectly fine spacewalking without any kind of protective gear, I doubt that's enough to kill it. Annoy it, sure. Piss it off? Probably. Starve it? If it's left to drift for long enough. Kill it outright? Not a chance. Bumping into it's gotta be a one-in-a-trillion shot, but that's a hell of a destructive space speedbump to run into. That probably means the two that Amanda Ripley ejected from the Torrens are floating around near KG348 (or may have fallen into the gas giant). Considering she "disembarked" the Sulaco as it was leaving orbit of LV-426, Queenie probably made an unassisted return to the planet's surface after falling from orbit... which is to say, she probably fell out of the sky and went "splat" in a distinctly unsurvivable manner.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    You sure about that? He's not on the cast list on IMDB or mentioned as being in the film by any news source I can find. The only context I can find in which he's even mentioned in connection with Kraven the Hunter is statements by sites like ScreenRant and IGN that Kraven the Hunter is the newest film in what's being called the "Sony Spider-Man Universe" (or "SSU"). That Sony-owned shared universe setting somewhat counterintuitively contains zero Spider-Man films but it does contain the two already-released Venom movies, Morbius, and Madame Web, as well as the soon-to-be-released Venom: the Last Dance, Kraven the Hunter, and an as-of-yet unrevealed Summer 2025 film that may or may not be Spider-Woman or The Sinister Six. Leto's own filmography does not list him as being involved in Kraven the Hunter either... the only two projects he's listed on after Morbius are Haunted Mansion and Tron: Ares.
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