Agree about the unfortunate cameo. As always with these long-lived franchises, the extended universe media brings some much needed heft to the world-building, and I wish the films had the time and interest to dig into it. I did get a sense of some of this weight in the production design (and like The Force Awakens the biggest thrill for …
Agree about the unfortunate cameo. As always with these long-lived franchises, the extended universe media brings some much needed heft to the world-building, and I wish the films had the time and interest to dig into it. I did get a sense of some of this weight in the production design (and like The Force Awakens the biggest thrill for me was to see this world be "lived in"), and I don't implicitly have an issue with long-tail vignettes about regular people being rolled by some fiendish high-minded pursuit of people or organizations without moral scruples. And unlike Sonny, I'm an obnoxious sort of neoliberal that believes that markets can fail in many ways while still succeeding at being markets, so an evil corporation exacting its will isn't a logical leap (but as a funny aside, in the deleted scenes of Alien 4, there's a line that mentions that Weyland-Yutani was sold to Wal-Mart, apropos of 1997).
My friends and I recently started the pen and paper RPG, and the factional backstories are fascinating when laid over the films. Weyland-Yutani is ostensibly a corpo-state assembled from an alliance of Great Britain and Japan and built on their material strength as terraformers; United Americas is the US-Europe-South American consortium, and the Union of Progressive Peoples is the Sino-Ruso faction, plus all the rogue colonial outfits and weird cultists. These factions are in various states of cold and hot wars, and I think some acknowledgement of this in the films would spice things up a bit.
Agree about the unfortunate cameo. As always with these long-lived franchises, the extended universe media brings some much needed heft to the world-building, and I wish the films had the time and interest to dig into it. I did get a sense of some of this weight in the production design (and like The Force Awakens the biggest thrill for me was to see this world be "lived in"), and I don't implicitly have an issue with long-tail vignettes about regular people being rolled by some fiendish high-minded pursuit of people or organizations without moral scruples. And unlike Sonny, I'm an obnoxious sort of neoliberal that believes that markets can fail in many ways while still succeeding at being markets, so an evil corporation exacting its will isn't a logical leap (but as a funny aside, in the deleted scenes of Alien 4, there's a line that mentions that Weyland-Yutani was sold to Wal-Mart, apropos of 1997).
My friends and I recently started the pen and paper RPG, and the factional backstories are fascinating when laid over the films. Weyland-Yutani is ostensibly a corpo-state assembled from an alliance of Great Britain and Japan and built on their material strength as terraformers; United Americas is the US-Europe-South American consortium, and the Union of Progressive Peoples is the Sino-Ruso faction, plus all the rogue colonial outfits and weird cultists. These factions are in various states of cold and hot wars, and I think some acknowledgement of this in the films would spice things up a bit.
Actually, that scene establishing that Weyland-Yutani got bought out by Wal-Mart was also reinstated into the film itself as part of the extended cut.