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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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. 🤔
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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".
  10. 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. 🤣
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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. 🤣
  14. Seto Kaiba
    This just in, Jared Leto has officially beat the allegations of being in Kraven the Hunter. 🤣
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It never ceases to surprise me how many people don't understand the difference between "subjective" and "objective". There are a lot of disappointed grade school science teachers out there. "Objective" means "not influenced by personal feelings or opinions". Objective measurements are quantitative. Measurable. Not dependent on individual perception. An objective statement about a movie is something that can be demonstrated as an irrefutable fact like "It was made in <year>", "it was directed by <person>", "it made "x amount of money" at the box office". "Subjective" means "based on, or influenced by, personal feelings or opinions". Subjective measurements are qualitative. "Good" or "fun" or "enjoyable" are qualitative value judgements based on individual criteria and arbitrary scale and therefore subjective by definition. There's no unit of "fun" or "good" or "enjoyable" you can measure. It's based on individual perception and individual value criteria that are not universal or necessarily shared by any other person. Large numbers of people can come to the same subjective value judgement of a movie - like that Morbius was bad or that The Godfather was good - but that doesn't make that mass subjective value judgement objective because it's just a consensus opinion based on individual arbitrary criteria not something measurable. The closest you can get to an objective measure of "good" in a movie is its profit margin... but the quantifiable extent of its commercial success does not necessarily translate to audience enjoyment or artistic competence. For a great demonstration of that reality look no further than the Star Wars movies produced under Disney. Almost all of them made substantial profits, but are nevertheless judged to be bad movies by many fans. By the same token, people can go to a movie they find "bad" and still have fun with it because it's "bad" in a way they happen to find enjoyable. That's all subjective. Now now, don't blame the actor for the crimes of the writer and director. Even the very finest actors can only do so much if the script is an incoherent mess or the director's creative vision is in dire need of corrective lenses. Doubly so if they're stuck in the unenviable position of playing a character half a dozen other actors already have, with each director having a separate and distinct vision for them. Looking at the director, J.C. Chandor, he seems to be a relatively green but also relatively celebrated new director. He's only directed four prior films (Margin Call, All is Lost, A Most Violent Year, and Triple Frontier), but his work does seem to be pretty well received when it comes to film festivals and small-circle sorts of critics awards. He seems green enough that he's almost an unknown quantity. The writers... are less inspiring. Richard Wenk's filmography boasts writer credits on The Equalizer, The Expendables 2, Vamp, American Renegades, and the remake of The Magnificent Seven. Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (credited together) aren't particularly inspiring either. They worked on Iron Man, Punisher: War Zone, Transformers: the Last Knight, Men in Black: International, and Uncharted. Comic books are clearly not foreign territory to them, but the presence of titles like The Last Knight and Uncharted does not inspire much hope. I'd call it a coin flip whether Kraven: the Hunter will be fun or just funny looking.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Has anyone seen anything corroborating the rumors that the story involves the original Big Chap? I saw that while browsing and haven't been able to find a source.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    People watched it because it's fun... it's a tongue-in-cheek action comedy that's not afraid to take a few shots across the bow of the excessively serious MCU. Which makes it the perfect break from the MCU. "Good" is subjective... and what we see with audience fatigue is that people get less willing to tolerate "more of same" even if it's something they would normally enjoy. My favorite example of this is Star Trek: Enterprise, which went down in flames ratings-wise because it was more of the same product audiences had been getting for almost 15 years by that point. People came back to it years later and realized it was actually pretty good TV, but it was so much like what preceded it that audiences just didn't want it so it was judged "bad" at the time. Nah, I think a lot of folks got tired of Spider-Man pretty quick. He's not a very deep character - most superheroes aren't - but once you exhaust his 2-3 iconic villains (Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, and I can't think of a third) and he gets the girl there's not a lot left for him to do. The movies can't exist in the same kind of eternal status quo the comics do, so he can only have a certain amount of character development before he stops being interesting. From what I understand, the comics keep doing this to him too... resetting him over and over because he gets boring once he's married, lands at least moderately stable employment, moves out of Aunt May's house, etc. I think Kraven here is something like an attempt to do something with the property other than just endlessly rehashing Peter Parker's formative years. They picked a decidedly un-super villain from Parker's rogues gallery, and seem to want to develop in a very un-cartoony direction. The trailer feels very John Wick to me, with the implication that Kraven is a badass quietly passing the time until someone ruffles his feathers... then it's everyone else's funeral, literally. It's enough that I'm actually kind of curious to see what direction it's headed in. It really doesn't look like a comic book movie even though it is one. I'll probably go see this one when it hits theaters, out of morbid curiosity if nothing else. (It'd have to struggle quite hard to be worse than Borderlands, and I voluntarily went to see that in theaters.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    He did. We've got multiple pieces of official art of the wedding. They even had a kid together before Megaroad-01 went missing in 2016.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    In all honesty, I don't think Deadpool in any way disproves that the superhero movie genre is suffering severe audience fatigue. I'd argue its success is in no small part because of that fatigue. Most superhero movies are high-stakes serious business stories where the fate of the city/country/world/universe/multiverse depends on the heroes. Doing that all the time, without a break in the middle to de-escalate things, makes subsequent escalations less impressive and burns the audience out more quickly. Deadpool, Deadpool 2, and now Deadpool & Wolverine are that de-escalation. They're a breather episode that isn't afraid to poke fun of how grimly serious the other titles are. Sony's Spider-Man is a great, and related, example. They've never been able to get more than three movies out of Spider-Man before audiences get bored with the character. They have the rights to the series in perpetuity as long as they put out a movie every six years, and through that they have the rights to his rogue's gallery and supporting characters, so here we are with a movie about a member of Spider-Man's rogues gallery coming out three years to the day after No Way Home seemingly reimagined as Great Value John Wick rather than doing a more typical superhero story or supervillain origin story. That's the thing, though... those (bad) movies and the multiverse shenanigans are being done because audiences are getting bored with the most mainstream superheroes. The studios want to keep this gravy train going indefinitely because they paid a fortune for those acquisitions. So they're hitting up less widely known superheroes and trying to move into different kinds of stories because you can only sell the spandex brigade punching space monsters so many times in a row before audiences are just bored with the whole bit. Three movies seems to be the limit for any given superhero or superhero team... even extremely well-received ones like Guardians of the Galaxy.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It's good all the way through. A title that solid is a rare prize indeed. The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army Was a Human continues to underwhelm. Honestly, the 3D CG animation in this looks SO BAD that it actively detracts from the action. It's really bad when the CG animated monsters have to talk, because they make almost no effort to match the lip flap. My Deer Friend Nokotan has kind of fallen off into a "well, let's just do nonsense" approach, and it's not really funny anymore because they only really have one joke now.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Sounds like the reviewers agree that Romulus is very much in the mold of the original, but just can't agree whether or not it's a good thing. For what it's worth, that makes me a bit optimistic about the film's prospects. I'm still worried it'll go too heavily towards the Aliens route and make the xenos unscary. I'm gonna wait 'til next week to go see it myself, my local theater suuuuuuuuucks, but I'm cautiously optimistic for this one.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I've never been a fan of American comic books, but looking at film industry-wide trends it looks to me like comic book movies and streaming originals have exhausted a lot of the novelty of the recognizable flagship comic properties and the law of diminishing returns has kicked in. The studios are branching out in the hopes of finding something fresh that can keep the money coming in, because audience fatigue is a thing and they (and every other corporation) made unrealistic promises of unlimited growth to their shareholders. That's how they hide the really bad CG and cheap set design in IMAX... make it too dark to see a ****ing thing.
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