I pretty much tell all my designers to 'take it all in, watch everything, listen to everything, read everything'. That's never failed me after over thirty years of living the creative life.
We are living in a proper sci-fi dystopia now.
Way ahead of you. I have a wonderful history of the Tanzanian People's Defense Force, 'Ujamaa's Army', on my bedside table.
I'm too busy writing them...
D'oh!
In my list of 'things I bet never happened'...
Some of us have already made settings for it: legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/5122...
And is the BDA accurate? There are plenty of operational air campaigns that have overclaimed by orders of magnitude. For example, in Allied Force it was shocking how few Yugoslav tanks NATO destroyed.
I seem to remember Michael Moore doing a TV documentary show where he badgered CEOs to see if they knew about their own product. Interestingly, the then-CEO of Ford was game. When Moore asked him to change the oil on a Ford car, he invited the camera crew home, changed clothes, and did it for them.
So here's a playthrough of a game I made some 23 years ago for the 40K IP. This brings back memories! I'm going to shuffle through the playlist and see if I can find any levels I worked on.
I've lived the creative life for over thirty years and my best stuff never took off, while my most successful stuff felt like a happy accident.
I notice they repeat that old saw about Hurricanes being assigned to bombers when the reality was that that was aspirational at best and because of the complexity and stochastic nature of intercepts, rarely achieved.
Why does this look to me like engineering a pretext for invasion?
Mike Martin told a terrifying story of how the ANP requested a British infantry company help them clear a village of 'Taliban'. It was only later that the squaddies realised the villagers had fought off the ANP because they raped their kids, and now the British had let them right back in.
It does feel a little like scraping the barrel, but... Brendan Fraser as Ike and Andrew Scott as Group Captain Stagg? I mean, there may be enough drama there to justify it. Plus they show the Slapton Sands disaster.
I gotsta say I rather enjoyed 'The Last Jedi'. After the complete goulash that was 'The Force Awakens' it was at least trying to break the mould, give us new vistas and characters, and a twist on some of the old.
Perhaps it was a mistake to write this. It's easy to be negative in these febrile times. I'd really rather talk about stuff I love and can enthuse about.
I wrote a piece on it for Dark Horse's 'Aliens' magazine over 30 years ago. I can't remember all the deets now, but I recall the production was highly toxic, with certain people making other lives hell. It sounded like a fairly savage edit process as well.
I can't say I'm a huge fan of 'Event Horizon'. Another film that's full of texture but is kind of dumb. But it's popular with a certain sort, so what do I know?
If you follow the production from Vincent Ward's original wooden planetoid to David Fincher's rapist prison, it's clear there were some interesting ideas there, before various strong voices (Weaver's amongst them) started dragging the production in different directions, pulling it out of shape.
My position on Blade Runner is that Ridley Scott doesn't understand his own film. By accident he got a bravura performance from Rutger Hauer in which he saves Deckard, proving himself 'better than human'. However, in Scott's preferred cut, Roy Batty is reduced to a killbot who saves another killbot.
Yours is a hard road, little priest.
Interesting. There's definitely a through-line to all that 1970s Erich von Daniken 'Is God an astronaut' woo in the franchise and you're right it's placed front and centre in 'Prometheus', though in a profoundly stupid way.
The Predator franchise has upticked with the last three films (and I include the animated one in that list). I had a good time with them, which overrode all and any questions I had.
I could not bring myself to watch 'Ovencant'. But then I cannot watch most Ridley Scott movies. They are generally terrible, and yes, I include 'Blade Runner' in that, which is inexplicably popular.
Strangely, I remain fond of Alien-cubed. It was a nightmare production, an orphan with many possible parents, but what came out the end had an identity all its own. It's in my list of interesting failures. I can watch it in a way I can't, say, watch 'Resurrection'.
I can cope with a movie in which people make poor decisions; not one in which everyone is consistently dumb. The greatest scene in 'Aliens' is when the surviving Marines decide to nuke the site from orbit and then the film becomes about how that sensible choice is friustrated by events and evil men.
You have identified the problem. If the audience can see that these putatively clever people are being fools, you're onto a loser.
When your xenobiologist runs screaming like a headless chicken at his first encounter with alien life you know you are in a world of stupid. Basically, everyone in that fillum behaves like the stupidest motherfucker in creation. And let's not get onto the autodoctor that somehow cannot treat women.
"Turn left! ... I SAID HANG A LEFT AND RUN TO THE SIDE!!!"
Sheesh...
