Alien: A Biological Dissertation

So the Alien trilogy is pretty awesome. Yes I said “trilogy.” Any movies based off of H. R. Giger paintings *have* to be awesome right? Sorry, I’m getting a little ahead of myself... For anyone who hasn’t seen them, the Alien movies are an iconic sci-fi/horror franchise started in the late 70’s. The basic premise of the first movie was a small crew of people of various occupations working on a cargo spaceship. They answer an SOS signal on some planet where they find an abandoned ship. (Ever since, this has been a typical sci-fi death sentence ala Event Horizon, Lost in Space, and Sunshine. You know, I don’t understand why they didn’t just name Sunshine Event Horizon II. It’s almost the exact same thing only it involves the sun. Anyway this is off topic…) While exploring the ship, one of the crew becomes a host to a baby alien. It gets brought onto the cargo ship where it kills everyone. But it’s not just about the killing. A large part of the movie is devoted to understanding the alien as a life form. The most interesting thing about it is that it goes through a few stages before it reaches it’s adult form. The concept of the facehugger phase is totally believable. It’s perfectly adapted for accomplishing what it needs to do. It has a bunch of long spindly legs for wrapping around the front of your head. Then under that there’s a long tail that It wraps tightly around your neck, usually incapacitating you. Point being, once it’s on you you’re not getting it off and it gets to have it’s way with you. It’s pretty sound reasoning. However, everything else about the alien is a little uh… less believable.

On the alien’s life timeline it starts out as an egg, (which always inexplicably hatches precisely when a human walks by it.) From the egg comes your facehugger. The purpose of the facehugger is to find a way inside a host organism, (mostly humans and always through the mouth.) Once it latches on to someone’s face it becomes somewhat mysterious as to what happens and how it’s accomplished. After a while the facehugger falls off of the victim’s face as a sort of dead husk. The victim, now a host to the alien, comes to and goes about life as usual until what is essentially a miniature form of the adult alien bursts out of their stomach and wriggles away into a dark secluded corner. At this point the host is dead.

Now going back to when the hugger first attaches itself to the face, what happened? Clearly the alien entered the host via the esophagus but what’s really weird is that the hugger and what comes out of the host’s stomach are completely different life forms. That’s perfectly acceptable because it happens with butterflies all the time. But when butterflies do it they don’t leave behind a totally intact dead caterpillar. Was the hugger just some kind of vehicle the alien was riding around inside of until it could get out and jump down someone’s throat thereby abandoning it? Or was the hugger a separate entity whose only purpose was to transplant an alien embryo in a nearby host and then die upon success of it‘s mission? But the real point I’m trying to make here is that it already hatched out of an egg, why does it need to further develop inside of a host? Shouldn’t it be more or less fully formed? If it is in fact a transplanted embryo why didn’t it just develop inside.. oh I don’t know, the egg it just hatched out of?! It’s like it has to hatch twice. And what if there was no host nearby or anywhere? Wouldn’t this be an evolutionary dead end? Or if not, it’s just an extremely inconvenient way to propagate your species.

When the juvenile alien exit’s the host, I dare say it’s small enough to cram snugly into a Pringles can. At this point the only thing it has left to do is grow. And holy hell does it grow! It goes from being about a foot tall to around six or seven feet in about half an hour. And somehow it manages to do this without eating anything. One minute it’s no bigger than a chicken and then the next time you see it it’s taller than the crew members. The law of conservation of mass just got suspended.

Another baffling time related discrepancy is how quickly the aliens multiply and establish themselves in a habitat. In the fourth movie, (OK yes it’s not really a trilogy,) a group of aliens get loose on a ship where they are being used as test subjects. No more than an hour later they’ve plastered entire corridors and rooms with their gross membranous snot goo, designated a room for their queen, started an assembly line of egg production in multiple rooms, claimed about a dozen people as hosts, hatched out of said hosts, killed several lab personnel, and created a fully mature human/alien hybrid. I’m aware that there is a difference in movie time versus real life time but in this movie it’s actually pretty similar. If the breakout had occurred at the beginning of the move, the aliens would have had enough time to create an entire civilization complete with night clubs and a sewer system. It almost makes the growth speed of the alien in the first movie look perfectly reasonable.

Something else interesting about the aliens is that they have highly acidic blood. Like so acidic that it can burn through several inches of metal in just a few seconds. I’m willing to let this slide for two reasons. A: I don’t know enough about blood and acid to make a legitimate complaint. B: It’s awesome.

Arguably the coolest feature of the aliens is their mouth within a mouth. Although if you think about it for too long it starts to sound kind of funny. I think I remember watching a Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers where Dale is watching an Alien parody on TV. Though instead of having two mouths, this one had like ten. They did have a valid point… if it already has two mouths, why not give it ten or twenty. It’s already outlandish. In the movie the inner mouth extends out of the outer mouth fast enough to puncture a skull and kill prey. So I guess that’s useful. The only thing is that since that mouth has to fit inside another mouth that’s about the size of a regular human mouth it has to be really small. Can you imagine having to eat solid food through a mouth half the size of yours? It would take forever. But since you never really see how the aliens eat I guess it could be argued that the small mouth doesn’t completely block the big mouth and they actually eat with the big mouth. Whatever...

Why go next gen?

I’m still waiting for next gen consoles to be worth a damn but It looks like I have a while to wait yet. The main problem seems to be that I have to trade a reasonable price for quality games. In other words, the ability to play good games is more expensive than the ability to play bad games. Funny how that works…



PS3:
First off, it’s enormous. And the way it bulges out in the middle like that makes it look like an over-inflated life raft or something. I know I’ve seen computers this size, but computers do a lot of things. The only thing the PS3 needs to be able to do is run PS3 games. So why the hell does it need to be this big? Was it made in 1975? Are there vacuum tubes and tape reels in there?



Then there’s the price. I’m not going to pay $500 for the platform and then $60 for every subsequent game. It’s ridiculous. Not only that, they felt the need to make different models with different hard drive capacities at different prices. Well I hope you know the exact amount of hard drive space all of the games you will ever install is because if you don’t buy the correct amount you’re making a really expensive mistake. This isn’t a good thing. It’s just frustrating. Why have to install games at all? Well it makes load times shorter but what it ultimately does is inhibit the amount of games you can keep by varying degrees depending on how much money you fork over.

Maybe someday I’ll think about it when the price goes down enough but while I can still get new PS2 games and Devil May Cry and Splinter Cell cost $6 in the used bin I have little initiative to buy one.



Wii:
It’s embarrassing just saying the name of this consol let alone playing it. I remember when it was called the Nintendo “Revolution.” (Why does Nintendo always have to code name their stuff?) Anyway I recall thinking that the Revolution was a stupid name for a video game consol. Then later I was reading some magazine and learned that the official name was now the Nintendo Wii. Suddenly, the name Revolution seemed a lot less retarded than I had initially thought.




I couldn’t care less if my consol had motion sensing capabilities. In fact I think I’d rather it not have them. I understand the motion you
perform with the wii-mote is similar to the action in the game but it still doesn’t change the fact that you’re swinging around a TV remote like a moron.


The real problem though is that there aren’t any games on the Wii that don’t suck ass. God help me, I’m just not that enthused with creating a hideously deformed avatar and then suffering through nine holes of golf with it, or any other sport for that matter. Golf isn’t fun in reality. Why would it be fun on the Wii. Party games are stupid and so are mini games, at least as a purchase. Getting in shape is not entertaining either so I guess that cancels out about 96% of the games on Wii. Also I’m so tired of Mario at this point he can kiss my ass. We need another Mario game like we need another shitty Will Farrell movie.

The only cool thing about the Wii is that you can buy retro games off of the internet with it. At least it would be cool if you couldn‘t already get retro game roms off of the internet for free with your computer. Then it would be of great interest to me and wouldn’t seem like such a gravy train.


360:
The Xbox is obsolete. There, I said it. Well, maybe obsolete isn’t the correct word. It’s more like pointless. Since it’s made by Microsoft, every game on it is default ported to the PC. And if that’s the case then there is nothing an Xbox can do that a PC can’t do as well or better. So why would I buy one? Why would anyone buy one? (Unless they have a Mac.) It would be like if you had a regular computer keyboard and then went out and bought another keyboard that only had number buttons on it and was made specifically for typing numbers. And any time you wanted to type numbers on your computer, instead of using the ones on your regular keyboard you use the ones on your special numerical keyboard. Then it has a hardware failure and you have to buy another one. Doesn’t that sound like a worthwhile investment?

Holy Shit... I just realized that all of the consol names rhyme with eachother.

Lucky Star

Lucky Star is an anime series based on a comic strip. It’s unique in one aspect: I have no idea why it exists. How anyone could become legitimately engaged in this show is not something I can fathom. Right off the bat, the show’s intro assaults you with a song and dance performed by all of the main characters. Now this is an automatic failure in my book. There’s just something about anime characters dancing that pisses me off. And if this wasn’t bad enough, the theme song is one of the worst sounding and lyrically incoherent songs I’ve ever heard. The vocals in the beginning and end are so awful they don’t even sound like they’re emanating from human vocal chords. It’s easier to believe it’s some kind of evil robot or demonic entity‘s creepy mockery of the musical arts. The first time I listened I briefly wished I had been born deaf. After that, every time I started a new episode I had to turn off my computer speakers and drag the slider bar on my media player to precisely 1:30 and start there. If I see or hear anything in the intro at all I get extremely upset. I never thought I’d say this but I’d rather watch the intro to Tenjho Tenge

The show’s plot is nonexistent. With the exclusion of a few episodes, it’s just four high school girls doing every humdrum activity you can think of: They talk about food, how to prepare food, and how to eat food. They do homework, text on cell phones, ride public transportation, and use computers. They also walk and talk, sit and talk, and stand and talk. I know this sounds quite thrilling and totally foreign to you but please try to contain yourself. I think Lucky Star is supposed to be a comedy but it’s really not that funny at all. However it never ceases to amaze me how it manages to keep you hoping for a payoff and then it never actually delivers. It’s like it tells you half a joke every episode and then stops before reaching the punch line thereby tricking you into watching it. In reality the show’s just a bunch of random unrelated scenes, (of the above mentioned content), thrown together. The thing that bothers me the most about the flow of the episodes is the lack of scene transitions. There are almost no transitions and it makes it really hard to follow sometimes, like when the scene cuts away and all of a sudden everyone’s wearing different clothes. Or when a character calls a person on the phone that they were just talking to in person a second ago. Or when they just slip a completely random and totally irrelevant two second clip in between two scenes, making you wonder if the people making it spent any time at all in post production. With negligent editing and zero plot development, you could just about watch the series upside-down and backwards and it wouldn’t change a thing.

There are countless anime references in the show but they’re never executed with any sort of tact. It’s always “Hey! Look at my new Sgt. Frog key chain!” Or “I love your Full Metal Panic plushie!” There’s also manga and magazines like New Type inserted within episodes. They aren’t spoof or even recreated versions though, they’re just literal scans of the front covers digitally added in. Kyoto Animation is the studio responsible for creating the Lucky Star anime. Therefore, any other series created by Kyoto Animation is fair play for showcasing and saturating every single episode of LS with to an annoying degree. Occasionally they reference an anime not under their jurisdiction. Of course when they do this they have to censor everything said and shown. Every time they say the name of the show it’s bleeped out. And every time they show a picture it’s blurred out. Now if legally they aren’t allowed to convey this information then why the hell are they talking about it? If you can actually figure out that they’re talking about the Gundam franchise then that’s great. But if you can’t then they might as well be discussing the socioeconomic parallels between chronosynclastic infundibulums and a totalitarian government. Nothing they say during these segments is going to matter to you in the slightest. It’s going to ridiculous lengths for a gag that was never going to be funny, interesting, or worthwhile in the first place. Actually the most elaborate and dynamic scenes in the show are always anime reference scenes which is pathetic because it leads me to believe that that’s the apex of the shows focus. In other words, the best thing they have to offer is content someone else made and we’ve already seen. How much effort/talent does that take?

i.e. About *this* much…

This is the show’s mascot… As you can see it’s a reanimated severed cat head grafted on to it’s own dismembered tail. Quite horrifying really. What sick bastard spawned this abomination of nature?

As I already said, Lucky Star is about four high school girls around 17 and 18 years old. But for some reason they’ve been drawn to look like they’re about eight, except for Tsukasa who look’s like she’s six. In fact pretty much all of the characters in the show look too young to be the age they’re supposed to be. The main girls look like they should be playing hopscotch on the playground. Their teacher and the police officer look like they could be high school freshmen. Miyuki and Konata’s moms somehow look younger than Miyuki and Konata. The only person that looks almost old enough to be who he is, is Konata’s father. That means that in the show he’s probably like 85 years old. It’s very weird watching high school freshmen come home drunk and listening to flat-chested eight-year-old girls talk about their periods. It’s been a while since I was in high school but I distinctly remember there being boobs. And that’s another thing, occasionally Miyuki will appear to have breasts but only when it is called to everyone’s attention how “big” her breasts are. After that, she morphs right back into a billiard-table-chest like everyone else.

If there was a main character in LS it would probably be Konata. Incidentally she’s my least favorite character. Her voice is annoying. She's about three feet tall, has blue hair and walks around with her eyes closed half the time. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with her mouth. I guess she was born with a cleft pallet or something. She’s also addicted to anime, manga, and video games which I can’t help but see as a cheap ploy to connect with the target audience which undoubtedly has the exact same vices. It’s this latter quality that makes her character not believable. Girls are mentally incapable of being that enraptured by video games. Also, they never really show the video games that she plays. It’s always just her sitting at a computer, her holding a PS2 controller, and her saying “I played video games last night.” Why don’t they just show the damn games?! That would actually be interesting. I don’t care who got a new cell phone or about the correct way to eat a disgusting brown blob filled with goo. Show a shooter headshot or some finisher move from a fighting game. Or something like that Virtual Valkyrie MMO story from that one episode of Mission Hill. That was funny. Whatever… The games she plays probably suck anyway.

At the end of every episode is a short segment called Lucky Channel. All it is, is this manic depressive girl and a guy with perpetually closed eyes sitting at a desk talking about ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Sometimes what they say is pertinent to the show but mostly it’s just asinine garbage. Actually most of the episodes of Lucky Channel are a great magnitude funnier and more entertaining than Lucky Star itself which is more sad than anything. I guess that’s why they put it at the end.

In the last episode of Lucky Star there’s a culture festival at the school and all of the girls decide to do a cheerleading number set to music for it. And surprise surprise, it’s the exact same dance and song from the intro. I’ve never watched a show possessing such bad taste that it would use the worst part of the show, (the part I’ve avoiding watching 22 times since episode 1), for it’s own climax. I mean what the hell made them think this was a good idea? And I still have no idea why it’s called “Lucky Star!”