Dvaldron May 29Th, 2011 12:09 AM

Home , Airwolf, Alienator, Alien War, Charles Band, Congo (chess variant), Ellen Ripley

DValdron May 29th, 2011 12:09 AM

The Moontrap Timeline

Alright, I'm bored, and I don't feel like getting back to Green Antarctica or Axis of Andes just yet. I'll get to them, I promise. But in the meantime, I want to mess around a bit with a media-based alternative history timeline that includes everything from Total Recall, to Alien, Predator, Mad Max, Escape From New York, Blade Runner, the Hidden, The Last Starfighter, etc. etc.

Basically, the notion I want to play with is that most of the 'non-franchise' Science Fiction movies and television of the 80's and 90's, can be fit into an alternate history continuity I call the Gigerverse. (Although arguably, we could call it the Cameronverse, the Ridleyverse, the Shwarzeneggerverse, etc.).

The underlying idea is that our Sci Fi visual media, film and television, represented a relatively homogenous view of the future and of the universe and our place in it, which, surprise surprise, reflects where we are now.

In the 50's and 60's, Sci Fi was essentially optimistic, the ships were gleaming silver needles, the heroes were establishment men - space pilots and captains, military officers and engineers, at the top of a hierarchical system with that hierarchal system backing them up. The state was a benign thing. The enemy was 'othered'.

But by the 80's, that optimism had withered. The Sci Fi that was birthed in the contortions of the 1970's - of Vietnam, Watergate, the near financial crash of New York, of corporate and state malfeasance, and of new environmental awareness was much more battered.

Instead of being crack rocketjockeys or square jawed military men, the heroes of this age, Mad Max, Snake Plissken, Deckard were near outcasts or renegades, alienated from authority. And that authority, be it the state or corporation, as Ellen Ripley finds, at best indifferent, and often actively hostile. There's a much more ramshackle build to this universe, more a feeling of palpable decay, from the rusting corridors of the Nostromo, to the decaying rain city of New L.A., to the wrecked landscapes of the Road Warrior or Plissken's New York. As always, the actual number of ideas floating around is far outnumbered by the product - hence, we get a large number of very suspiciously 'Aliens' type creatures, we get dystopian cyberpunk futures, we get lots of analogues of the ill fated crew of the Nostromo, lots of post-holocaust stuff, all freely mixed, matched and borrowed, stolen and recycled. Interestingly, what we find with many of these movies is that their future has become our past. Escape From New York City is set in 1997. Creepozoids in 1998. The Bronx Warrior in 1999. There's apparently been a very limited nuclear war in the 1990's, and massive political and environmental collapse. A lot of movies from this period give very specific calendar dates that we can peg a timeline on.

Anyway, so this thread, if I stick with it, is going to be a little bit of timeline, a little bit of 'conspiracy theorist connect the dots' and a fair bit of cockeyed film review.

So let's start....

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MOONTRAP

Co-starring Bruce Campbell from the Evil Dead, and Walter Koenig from Star Trek and Babylon 5, featuring ancient astronauts, killer robots, zombies and a daring trip to the moon (and a budget of apparently a dollar ninety five), this is a Sci Fi nerd's wet dream. I'm always surprised it didn't get spun into a franchise or at least a TV series, particularly given the sort of crap that often did get spun.

Okay, here's the story: Bruce and Walter (and I don't care about their character names, they'll always be the B & W) play space shuttle pilots who are bored with being glorified bus drivers and pine for the wild days. Well, there's a chinese curse that warns about getting what you asked for... Because no sooner do they curse the tranquility, when out of the darkness comes a spaceship the size of a frigging ocean liner.

Yowza. Even bigger yowza, it turns out to be derelict, its been drifting for thousands, tens of thousands of years. And its current orbit is its last one, after that, it gives a big french kiss to Mister Sun. Well, that means that there's nothing for it but for our heroes to check it out, its the one and only chance.

Anyway, they go aboard, its really creepy and disturbing, nice sense of the haunted old house, and of course, there's the big fake scare - in the sense that they stumble across a corpse in a space suit and a pod, both apparently inanimate. Figuring that souvenirs would be nice, and not a T-shirt in sight, they take the corpse and pod back with them.

And its when they get back to Earth that we get our first sign of the budget shining through. NASA apparently consists of six guys, including our heroes, and NASA facilities appear to be some hallways, a commissary with vending machines, and one small multi-purpose lab. Bummer. And it was going so good up to that point.

And this is the problem, the movie's ambitions continually outstrip its budget. Ironically, its at its worst the closer we get to regular life on earth.

But then, that sort of makes sense - the outre outer space stuff, no one really knows, so they can fake their way through it. It's the down to earth stuff that catches them up. We've had 40 years of television of huge banks of NASA computer and space shuttle operators, the vast infrastructures of the space program, the cyclopean structures and armies of personnel, the rigorous bureaucracy. This is ingrained in us, its what we expect.

So when we get a NASA that consists of a sparse handful of people, empty halls and shabbily dressed offices, where a couple of space shuttle jockeys are able to talk their way into a moon launch.... well, we just don't buy it.

But never mind, I love this movie and I'll forgive that. You should too.

Anyway, at this point, the next plot development kicks in. Remember how I said that the corpse and the pod were inanimate? Well, turns out, that's true for only one. The corpse stays a corpse. The pod wakes up, takes a look around, and immediately hacks its way into the computer systems.

Now, here's a nice touch. Exposition is the death of literature. Of movies, novels, television. There's always that moment when the plot grinds to a dead halt so characters can explain to each other things that they already know, in order to dump info on the audience.

But here, its handled cleverly. Instead of Walter and Bruce explaining things to each other, or some droning lab coat giving a report to a general, its snuck in through the back door. The pod, hacking into the mainframe, searches out the files on itself and the alien corpse. We discover: 1) The alien corpse is human, space suit and all, looks a little russion. 2) The alien corpse is 15,000 years old. 3) Backtracking the derelict ships orbit 15,000 years, gives us an origin point on the moon.

After sussing things out, the pods sprouts a whole lot of tentacles, and much waving occurs. Cut to our heroes.

Anyway, the next thing we know, our boys are rushing down a corridor, and they encounter an eight foot hulking thing. It's the corpse of the alien astronaut hulked out. Well, borged out. It's actually the pod, which has used the corpse and everything else it could get its tentacles on, computer parts, lab equipment, office supplies, etc., to construct itself a walking platform. So it turns out, this pod is actually the alien McGyver.

There's a brief moment when NASA's scientist... Yes, NASA has one scientist. One.

Sorry, ....when NASA's scientist tries to communicate with it in the spirit of interstellar brotherhood. It's a straight quote from Howard Hawk's 'The Thing.' But this time, the scientists realizes its hostile and yells to blast the hell out of it. Nerd humour, I bet it went over huge at the Star Trek convention.

Pod/Zombie monster gets blown to smithereens. Which is okay, because frankly, it was pretty tosh.

Again, its one of those moments where the budget shines through. Easy enough to write "Terrifying amalagamation of corpse and mechanical components dripping menace..." in a script. But then, when it comes down to actual production design, there's only so much time, and so much budget, and once you've got a contraption built its almost impossible for the stunt man inside or the puppetteers outside to move the damned thing, so it looks like crap and it moves like an arthritic nun.

Now, in a bigger budget movie, a Ridley Scott or a James Cameron would just tear it up and send the production design team back to their drawing boards to try again and again until they come up with something that doesn't look like cobbled together shit. Or find a way to shoot around it so that you think you're seeing a lot more than they're showing.

Or, if you've got a production team which is either brilliant or lucky, and both Scott and Cameron started out as production designers, so they had a knack for the visual side of things, they'll get it right first time out. But really, that's luck.

Well, Moontrap didn't have either the budget or the time to keep doing it till they got it right, nor the luck to get it right first time out.

So...... this is something else I'll have to ask you to forgive.

Pod monster doesn't stick around long though. It's a low budget movie, but there's always money for men with guns, and apparently a war machine built from keyboards, staplers and bits of mummified corpse is no match for a machine gun. End of monster.

But now, the stakes have risen. Maybe a few dead relics of a lost derelict spaceship are important, but there's a lack of urgency to it. It's the sort of thing that would go straight to the appropriations department, NASA would start putting a budget together, designing fiendishly clever little probes and tests, and maybe in ten or twenty years, they'd send something to the moon to check it out.

An evil robot/pod/zombie monster tromping through NASA's hallway (no plural, in this universe, NASA only has one), well, that freaks everyone out. It's time to get back to the moon, pronto. And as luck would have it, the available astronauts are Bruce and Walter.

So lots of thrilling retro-imagery of one last Apollo shot, a module to the moon, and amazing moon buggy stuff.

They find an abandoned or wrecked space base, and lo and behold, a survivor in cryogenic stasis. It's a naked chick, and let me say, I have no problem with that. Luckily, she's got her own spacesuit on the wrack, and fifteen thousand years later, its still good.

Stuff happens, Bruce is killed and winds up getting all borged up, Walter and Alien Chick end up on a spaceship headed to earth, about to be boned up for spare parts. Heroism ensues, Walter defeats the evil pods, rescues the girl and escapes, causing the pods ship to burn up in Earth's atmosphere... saving the human race.

And a good thing too, because apparently, 15,000 years ago, we were a lot more advanced, and those pod things, Kalium, they're called, kicked our asses back to the stone age.

Movie ends with Walter getting jiggy with alien chick, who is actually the last survivor of a 15,000 year dead civilization (and my god, what's that going to feel like). Sequel Hook: A pod seems to have survived re-entry, and the final shot is a shower of welding sparks in a junkyard.

********************

So that's Moontrap, a flick whose ambitions far exceeded its budget, but its a pretty tolerable b-movie actioner. I'm quite fond of it.

But what can we discern about Moontrap's world? Well, on the surface, its much the same as ours. Its got strip clubs and everything. NASA seems a bit more underfunded, but there you go.

But where things get interesting is the deep history.

It seems that in the Moontrap World, 15,000 years ago, Humanity got quite a lot further. We had a major base on the moon, and we were building interplanetary, perhaps interstellar space ships the size of ocean liners.

That's a ferociously robust civilization, and one not likely to go tits up, except for one thing: The Kalium. Somewhere along the line, humanity encountered a race of cannibal robot pods, and the result was a fight to the finish. Humanity won, but just barely. The Kalium pushed the human race out of space, overrunning even the moon base, and causing the Earthbound civilization to collapse like a house of cards. In the end, all that was left were a collection of shaggy hunter gatherers on earth, poking about in the ruins of their once mighty civilization, and a handful of Kalium robots trapped on the moon with no way to get off.

Interesting, eh.

Actually, we've seen traces of that vanished ancient civilization in a few other movies.

For instance, there's the Darwin Conspiracy. In it, scientists discover a fifteen thousand year old human corpse buried in antarctic ice, just like the Italian Iceman. But this corpse is wearing high tech clothing and DNA shows some strange enhancements.

It's a throwaway thing actually, not even a McGuffin. The corpse and clothing are quickly disposed of in the first fifteen minutes. But the DNA samples are used to construct a mutagenic cocktail which soups up first a chimpanzee, and then later the protagonists friendly retarded brother, making them both telekinetic, hyperintelligent, super-primates.

And of course, there's Alien vs Predator, in which we find that the Predator race was in contact with or perhaps helped create an early human super-civilization which was kind enough to build them an animatronic underground pyramid shaped theme park in...... you guessed it, Antarctica. Maybe the corpse from Darwin Conspiracy was a contractor for the Predators who got lost.

So Moontrap, Darwin Conspiracy and Alien vs Predator all connect to each other with the back history of an unknown prehistoric human super-civilization. And Darwin Conspiracy and Alien vs Predator connect with each other through Antarctica.

But then, that would imply that the Predators themselves encountered the Kalium, wouldn't it. I don't think they'd mind that, the Predators strike me as being up for a fight, and fond of martial trophies and valour and symbols.

And is it just me, or does the Kalium pod seem to vaguely resemble a Predator's Helmet? In Aliens vs Predators, one Predator makes a helmet out of an alien skull. Maybe the Predator helmet design is a cultural relic from the Predator/Kalium war.

The Kalium war might well explain quite a few things in 80's and 90's sci fi movies.

For one thing, it might explain what happened with the Predators. I mean, 15,000 years ago, give or take, they were best buds/gods/whatever to the ancient human civilization. They were out and about, loud and proud.

But then, they seem to have lost touch with us. They just vanished. Their antarctic theme park ends up abandoned for millenia. They seem to have gone away. And when they came back, a few hundred years ago, there was no buds/gods/whatever stuff, they just stuck to sneaking around on the quiet.

Let me go out on a limb a bit here. I think that the Kalium war was not just with humans. It wasn't even just with Humans and Predators. I think that the Kalium war was fought with every other intelligent spacefaring species of that era, raging across hundreds of cubic light years. Entire space civilizations and empires were wiped out, species rendered extinct or pushed back to primitive savagery.

In the end, the good guys won, the Kalium were beaten, perhaps all but wiped out.

But the end result is that Earth and a few other worlds are sitting in a huge bubble, a couple of hundred light years across, of dead space. The location of the Kalium wars, filled with planets emptied of life, and alien races exterminated.

We know from Moontrap that active Kalium could survive a long time, into the present day. And we know that once they got going - once they got their hands on some useable tech, they could start it all over again. No one wants that.

So not only is Earth trapped in the middle of a vast volume of empty space. It's in quarantine space. Earth is in the middle of a cosmic forbidden zone.

And that helps to make sense of a few things we see in other movies. Where would you put a prison? As far away from society as you can get it. The French had Devils Island, the British had Botany Bay.

Whoever's keeping the Forbidden Zone quarantined, they've built a prison in it. And that prison isn't too far from Earth, cosmically speaking, because when aliens escape from that Prison, this is the planet they end up on, and also the planet that the space cops and bounty hunters end up chasing them too.

So, you've got the alien from the Hidden and Hidden 2, as well as the mutant from Terrorvision, the villain from Alienator, the Krites from the Critters franchise, the shapeshifting baddy from Peacekeeper, the decapitator from The Borrower and a few others I've overlooked. Bottom line, our little planet plays host to a lot of cops and robbers.

Also, another recurrent thing, is that alien travelers in the region, when they run into malfunctions or equipment damage, tend to head for earth. It seems that our world is one of the very few safe inhabited worlds in the forbidden zone.

The only other significant installation would be the space prison, but its certainly got more advanced tech for rescue. So why not go there? Perhaps because they're not supposed to be in the forbidden zone in the first place? After all these thousands of years, the Forbidden Zone is still forbidden. Because as we see in Moontrap, the Kalium aren't quite dead, like some long dormant virus, there's still a risk of them coming back to scourge the galaxy. So fifteen thousand years later, the quarantine is still in force.

Which is why the Predators are sneaking around. They're not afraid of being discovered by us. Hell, they've got the tech to kick our asses, and one thing we know about the Predators is that they're not afraid to use it. No, they're sneaking around because someone else is watching, someone with the muscle to make them mind their manners.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa May 29th, 2011 03:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4586432)

That's actually something they got right about the future: it's not the movie that was low on budget, it's NASA that took some financial cut from the Government.:p

Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4586432)

Really, you need to get out more.

EDIT: 15000 years ago would be somewhere around the Age of Conan.

The Stormlord May 29th, 2011 04:39 AM

DValdron, this is awesome and must be continued.

DValdron May 29th, 2011 08:03 AM

Budget cuts at NASA? Well, as we'll be seeing, the America and the world of the Moontrap Universe may not be in nearly as good a shape as the one we've got. There's a lot of movies out there that seem to suggest that the 80's and 90's in this world turn out very badly.

Time of Conan? Fifteen thousand years ago more or less is a pretty big span of time. Consider what our culture managed in the last 500 years. The archaic human civilization, call em Atlantis for the hell of it, could change dramatically and reach remarkable heights in a short span of a few thousand years. Particularly if Aliens were providing uplift. DValdron May 29th, 2011 09:43 AM

The Last Starfighter and the Aeons of Peace

All right, there's this kid named Alex, who lives in a trailer park with his mom and his younger brother.

Hmmm. Does that strike you as vaguely subversive. I mean nowadays, how many kids movies do we see where the youth are living in trailer parks in broken families, but otherwise not trauma cases? Mostly, its gotten more conservative, kids are middle class, traditional families. I dunno.

But anyway, trailer trash kid's alright. He likes to play video games. And one day, he makes a high score on a game called Starfighter. The game designer, played by Robert Preston, shows up to take him for a joyride.

Well, nothing against Robert Preston who we all know was as butch as butch can get, but if I'm living in a trailer park and some rich older dude in a snazzy car comes along and offers me a ride along the desert roads in his luxury car.... well, let me tell you, my underwear is going to be crazy glued shut before I think about getting in.

But Alex has no problem. Which tells us that either these were more innocent times, or possibly Alex is a bit more freewheeling than we realize.

As it turns out Robert Preston has a surprise in his thrusters, and it turns out not to be a euphemism. The car flies off into outer space. In a more realistic movie, this would involve Robert offering Alex drugs and naughty things commencing. But hey the movie plays it straight.

It seems that the video game is a secret cosmic recruiting scheme. People or beings which score high enough are recruited into the Galactic League or Federation or whatever they call it (Rylan Star League) (thanks Wikipedia). Alex is Earth's first candidate.

Alex is a bit upset, I mean, they didn't even ask. And its pretty sure bet that he's not going to be home in time for supper. I mean, let's face it, probably the worst thing he thought he'd need was going to be a few breath mints.

Okay, okay, I'll be good. For any of you for whom this movie constitutes a treasured part of your youth, I'll try not to keep acknowledging the blatant homoerotic subtexts.

Anyway, not to worry. It seems Robert Preston has left an Alex Robot behind to take his place while he's off having adventures. Of course, this doesn't make Alex feel better...

But its actually one of the highlights of the movies. Alex Robot's struggles to get along are both funny and touching. Among other things, Alex Robot is horrified and disgusted when Alex's girlfriend sticks her tongue in its mouth.... but hey, it was programmed by Robert Preston, so that's to be expected.

Anyway, back to Alex. He eventually gets to the starfleet academy, or whatever they call it, meets the other aliens in starfighter fleet, and makes friends with a reptilian called Grik.

But darn it, he's homesick, it's just not working out. So he decides to go back to his beloved trailer park. Also, it turns out that there's a space war on, and there's a pirate fleet out there lead by some warlord that is going to be shooting at him.

Alex goes home, but the bad guys are already there, trying to kill him (or his robot double - actually a decoy). Meanwhile, the pirate fleet has pulled an ambush and wiped out the starfighter fleet.

Which means that Alex and his pal Grik, are piloting the last starfighter in the universe. Galactic civilization in all its glory rests entirely on Alex's shoulders, and the bad guys are on the move. I'll tell you, this would be a really bad time to have turned out to have crazy glued your underwear shut, Robert Preston or not.

Luckily, Alex pulls through, saves the day, and we all live happily ever after.

Yay.

***************

Roger Ebert apparently gave the film two and a half stars (looking at Wikipedia now), saying that the movie wasn't very original. I'm sorry, but his head is up his ass. The Last Starfighter is original as hell, I can't think of another movie where a kid gets recruited to fight a war based on his playing a video game (to be fair it did get used a few times after, mostly in TV). And how about the Alex-bot, which fails to go worng. The movie is chock full of originality.

It's just kind of stupid, is all. But its a friendly, innocent, forgiveable kind of stupid.

As it turns out, the film is a cut above on two respects. The first is the musical score, which was rather more ambitious than a film of this sort would expect, and required an expanded orchestra. The musical score was released as a record on its own. And perhaps because of the score, the Last Starfighter eventually got remade as an off broadway musical. That's right, it became an off-broadway musical? How the hell is this flick not a gay cult film? Seriously.

Anyway, it's also noted for its state of the art CGI special effects. It was one of the first movies to use advanced 3D CGI modeling to create the spaceships and star battles. There were over 300 CGI shots and 28 minutes of screen time. This was an enormous amount for its time. Remarkably, the Star Wars franchise during this time was still stuck with moving cameras around plastic models. The Last Starfighter had a credible claim to its effects being more advanced than Return of the Jedi. Remarkable.

Of course, CGI is such an astonishingly rapidly evolving media, that it ages dramatically. What was earth shattering in 1984 is, by today's standards, crude sticks and paper mache. Still, the CGI definitely put it on the map.

***************************

So how does all this fit in with our Moontrap Timeline?

Well, remember how I postulated that the ancient Kalium War had left a huge 'forbidden zone' in space, and that there had to be a Galactic Federation or something suchlike, watching over the place, keeping it isolated and forcing races like the Predators to work on the sly when they came here.

Well, we just found it.

But let's take a close look at the Rylan Star Alliance. At first glance, it doesn't seem that impressive, they've apparently only got one fleet and it gets wiped out? Yikes.

The evidence seems to be that the Rylan Star Alliance has seen much better days. Apparently at one time, they were able to build a gigantic system of force walls (whatever) and defensive emplacements throughout space. This is loosely the interstellar equivalent of the Great Wall of China.

But as with NASA, there seem to have been budget cutbacks, or perhaps changes of priority. The Alliance seems to have shifted from cosmic scale defensive structures, which it continues to maintain, though it seems no longer capable of building it. Instead, the Alliance seems to have focused in on quality rather than quantity - a relatively small fleet of extremely powerful and versatile starfighters, and a very low key, even covert recruiting system.

Indeed, the fact that the Alliance is recruiting on Earth, a protected planet, is suggestive. It should have more than enough candidates from the civilized worlds... why does it need to go to Earth? Let me engage in some Wild Mass Guessing, and speculate that the Rylan Star Alliance's history loosely parallels NATO and the UN.

Basically, the Star Alliance was born out of some massive cosmos shattering conflict. We're talking serious rock and roll, the big war, something to unite all the extant civilizations of the time in a mission of simple survival.

The Kalium War.

After the War, the Alliance, like the UN and NATO, gets formalized as a kind of galactic federation, and a lot of time and resources are poured into making sure that the next war doesn't happen. The forbidden zone is created and sealed off, the few worlds that are trapped inside are to be left alone, cosmic defensive walls are created, a fleet is constructed and maintained. A galactic 'police force' is created, to enforce new interstellar laws, and chase planetary criminals who flee into space. Eventually a prison is built to house criminals, and to make it escape proof, its located in a remote portion of the forbidden zone.

Thus the initial burst of energy is to create all these pan-galactic institutions and structures, an international forum for defense, trade, law, etc.

So what happens? Peace, basically. Without a tangible and immediate threat, the individual planets of the federation start wanting to go their own way. They become resentful of the foreign control of the Federation, reluctant to send their tax dollars to black holes in deep space. They start getting restive. Centrifugal forces come into play.

And so we get a situation like France's increasingly ambiguous role in NATO, or the beginning of American's ostracization from NATO, as tensions emerge between Europe and America. Or conflict with and reluctance to deal with a UN which many Americans see as hostile or irrelevant, even counterproductive.

There's still pirates and stuff, perhaps the occasional Kalium incursion to squash. But you can see races like the Predators simply pulling out of the federation and going off and doing their own thing.

The budgets get cut, and get cut again. They can't build their massive space defences, but they continue to maintain them. They concentrate on fewer but better warships, and maintaining core functions. But they're having trouble recruiting on the Alliance worlds so they're basically casting a wide net. And they're having trouble maintaining, so we're getting more and more escapes from their space prison. And more and more aliens are sneaking into the forbidden zone and ending up on earth, including some very bad ones.

In the Last Starfighter, the Alliance is literally down to one fleet, and by the end of the movie, well, its down to its last Starfighter. But it's not just the last Starfighter.... Remember that Space Prison. Well, apparently they're shorthanded. Space police show up on Earth quite a bit, but the in Critters, the prison is apparently forced to hire bounty hunters to take down the Krites. Over the next couple of Critters movies, the bounty hunters are pretty busy. Outsourcing to private contractors is a pretty clear sign that government functions are attenuating. Indeed, in Terrorvision, there's apparently no space-police available, and no money for bounty hunters, and so an unqualified prison bureacrat comes to earth hoping to catch the escaped monster (and doesn't do well).

What we're seeing, essentially, is an organization which is still functioning. But also an organization which is in steep decline.

Indeed, by the time of Critters 4, set in 2045, the federation or organization which had initially imprisoned the Krites and set bounty hunters on them, basically the Ryan Star Alliance, is defunct.

Between the Last Starfighter and Critters 4, something bad happens to put an end to the Star Alliance. Something which may be related to events on earth.....

***********************

A couple of last things. Remember Robert Preston's snazzy space-car. Turns out that the prop was reused in Back to the Future 2, for a street scene set in 2015. Apparently Robert Preston is still luring boys into the intoxicating reaches of outer space.

***********************

And Alex's male space companion, Grik, the reptilian. Bears a remarkable resemblance to the reptilian race from Enemy Mine. So apparently, far in the future, after the end of the federation, the Reptilians are on their own and fight a war with the human race. Reptilians also show up in Oblivion and its sequel. Even further into the future, in a future so remote that humanity has spread across the universe and earth is forgotten, in Battle Beyond the Stars, we meet the reptilian Kayman, who is the last of his race.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa May 29th, 2011 10:39 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4587001)

EDIT: the REH story "the Tower of the Elephant" would fit well into this chronology, as an earlier contact between ancestral Earth and the Star Alleance.

DValdron May 29th, 2011 11:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Hastur of Carcosa (Post 4587435)

That would imply an Hyborian POD involving aliens AND somehow centered around Antartica. Alien VS Predator would partially support that. Also, it would mean that fifteen millennia ago, Earth may have gone from sword-wielding barbarians to moon bases in little more than a generation. Those must have been interesting times indeed. EDIT: the REH story "the Tower of the Elephant" would fit well into this chronology, as an earlier contact between ancestral Earth and the Star Alleance.

Actually, I'd conceive the time span to be longer. This is pre-ice age we're talking about. So potentially, we're looking at sword wielding barbarians to moon bases in a thousand or two thousand year span. The early dating is by no means precise.

And I'm basically trying to confine myself to movies and television circa 1979 to roughly the early 00's, as a period representing a somewhat narrow group of ideas, themes, and visual styles. Basically, I'm arguing that a coherent era gives us a half decent chance to stitch them together.

Think of it as sort of like being the Wild West. The West is actually a cluster of iconic themes, values, settings, visual styles, stories and ideas, and artifact/tropes like six guns, horses, cowboy hats, etc.

Now, the thing with the wild west is that its a kind of storytelling shorthand. We don't have to create an entire world, rather, we pick the wild west as a pre-made world off the shelf, borrow the visual elements, images and themes and get on with our story.

Well, the Wild West isn't alone in terms of being a storytelling shorthand. It used to be that there were other equally iconic landscapes to set stories in - 'Darkest Africa' the land of Tarzan, African Queen, Zulu, and Jungle Jim.

Of course, time moves on and the Wild West is almost dead as a storytelling archetype, while Darkest Africa's been relegated to the dust heap of racist history

The Inscrutable Orient, Great Britain, Mysterious Arabia were all 'fictional universes' laid on real ones, with varying degrees of accuracy.

But there are entirely fictional universes out there, some formal and regulated and quite deliberate, like the Star Wars or Star Trek or Star Gate universes. Landscapes with their own history, visual continuity, imagery, themes and lore.

Then there are fictional universes which, while not quite so deliberate, kind of grew. There's the Universal Monsterverse - Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, the Mummy, the Hunchback and Hyde, which through deliberate sequels, crossovers and accumulation of detail defined horror from 1930 to roughly 1950's.

And then there's the Godzilla and Gamera Kaijuverses, starting out as one off movies, but through sequels, crossovers and accumulation became a pair of official fictional universes, or perhaps part of a bigger unofficial universe.

Lovecraft's Mythos, created by Lovecraft, but with the participation of Derleth, Smith, Bloch, Howard and others became a semi-official shared universe.

But then, and here's the ones I think are most interesting, there are the completely unofficial, 'evolved' shared universes, the landscapes like the Wild West or the Star Wars universe, which have come about not because any one person created them, but because a bunch of people working in the same mediums in a given period of time ended up passing around the same or similar ideas, plots, character tropes, visual looks and themes, borrowing and cross pollinating, until an actual universe begins to take shape... when the images and ideas from one movie can be used to explain stuff going on with another, when background elements start to seem common.

The Zombieverse is one such place, though fittingly, its an apocalyptically incoherent place, begging for a timeline or understructure, but not quite allowing for one.

The universe of the pulp writers - working with things like the Shadow, the Spider, Dock Savage, etc. also seems to be an unofficial evolved universe.

There's others. But the one I'm working with is the Moontrap universe... Or Gigerverse, or Ridleyverse, or Cormanverse. Basically, my thinking is that almost all the Science Fiction in movies or television during the period 1979 to roughly say 2003, is shaped by a handful of seminal works: Alien, Blade Runner, the Road Warrior, Escape From New York City, Terminator and a few others. Most movies play riffs off of these movies, sometimes crossbreeding them, so you get things like versions of 'Alien' set on Earth.

There's a uniformity which is driven partly by the medium of film and tv at the time, the state of available technology and special effects. A lot of space movies for instance, followed in the footsteps of Alien - broken down spaceships, lots of rivets, a production design which emphasized grunge and wear and repurposing. That's a lot different from the look of 50's sci fi which was very clean and elaborate. But it's also a lot easier for a low budget production designer to mimic. And its all very well known and influential, it becomes what audiences expect to see. Same thing with post-apocalyptic landscapes, cheap to do, well known, looks good and audiences know what to expect.

So a lot of these movies and TV shows have a remarkable degree of visual continuity. And it helps a lot that props and stock footage gets reused constantly, particularly as a way of stretching budgets for lower end productions (which is what a lot of SF film and television is). We've already seen an example in which the space car in the Last Starfighter makes an appearance in Back to the Future II. But the best example is the spaceship from Battle Beyond the Stars.... Corman recycled that footage, or sold it so many times, that it literally deserves its own star on the hollywood walk of fame - I swear to god, you'll see the same damned spaceship in a hundred different movies. Obviously, it was a popular model. So there's a lot of backdoor continuity.

And then, as I said, there's thematic continuity. Our heroes and protagonists had changed in the 80's, they were working class people, like the crew of the Nostromo, or loners and renegades like Plissken or Deckard or Max. Government was a remote thing, aloof, self absorbed, potentially dangerous and in league with or subservient to corporations. You couldn't trust the people you were working for, that was a recurring theme. Instead, people were on their own.

You couldn't have made something like the Stargate TV series in the early 80's, because no one would trust the military. The military was on the other side of evil conspiracies.

In the end, the shared universe sort of peters out. It's undone by a lot of things - CGI, bigger movie budgets, new effects, changing social attitudes particularly more faith in authority and deregulation. etc.

But within that framework - a particular genre (Sci Fi), in a particular medium (film and television), within a particular time frame (1979 to 2003), it seems to me that its possible to take that broad shared universe, that shared landscape, and build something of a timeline out of it.

Coalition May 29th, 2011 04:31 PM

If you could do a movie that included all these references, it would be a B-movie, but it would get bought by so many people.

Add in a decent plot, some good acting, budget, and sound, using a bank of hacked PS3s for the CGI rendering, and you could get a fun guilty pleasure. Don't forget Amanda Pays and Julie Strain.

Add in a few other struggling actresses for more eye candy (in the background), so it will hook people in, and include the references. I'd be willing to buy something like that.

The really hard part will be getting the permissions to use the references in the movie. DValdron May 29th, 2011 04:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Coalition (Post 4588434)

If you could do a movie that included all these references, it would be a B-movie, but it would get bought by so many people.

Add in a decent plot, some good acting, budget, and sound, using a bank of hacked PS3s for the CGI rendering, and you could get a fun guilty pleasure. Don't forget Amanda Pays andJulie Strain.

Add in a few other struggling actresses for more eye candy (in the background), so it will hook people in, and include the references. I'd be willing to buy something like that.

The really hard part will be getting the permissions to use the references in the movie.

There's one that comes close - The Ultra Warrior, essentially a clip movie with scenes from a dozen corman movies stapled together with lots of exposition.

interpoltomo May 29th, 2011 06:40 PM I love your timelines and am nmot picky about which ones you choose to update. :D

Lord Hastur of Carcosa May 30th, 2011 03:13 AM

So, OK, let's call it he B-verse, I was thinking sorta cyberpunk for untrustworthy corporations (add in Robocop, you get the idea) but then Cyberpunk wouldn't include aliens or strange lost civilizations, so I guess it's its own subgenre, somewhere between classic space-opera and flat-out Neuromancer (incidentally, most seminal cyberpunk works like the Sprawl Trilogy or Do Android Dream of Electric Sheeps? were from that period as well and were somehow integrated into the movies, like blade Runner). I'd say spacepunk as a possible name for the genre. Is that agreed?

DValdron May 30th, 2011 07:57 AM

Canonical Dates Timeline

Okay, the following are movies and television series in which dates are specifically given or referenced. A lot of Sci Fi movies will simply start their plot rolling without tying themselves to a specific time. But a few make the mistake of specifically announcing that they're set in 1996 or 2054. This is sort of embarrassing, particularly when those dates come and go. However, for our purposes, identifying movies which give specific dates allows us to roughly sketch out the future history.

From what we can tell, the period from 1980 to roughly 2010 seems to be a period of rapid political and environmental delay, including widespread ecological and economic collapse, government breakdown, a limited scale world war.

Between 2010 and 2020, there's a civil war in America between fundamentalist theocracy, freedom fighters and corporate/fascists. After that, things stabilize, with corporations in charge but the planet continues to go to hell. Between 2030 and 2070 we see the exploration of the solar system, and a number of efforts to build a working interstellar drive. There are several references to a war with an Alien Race, roughly around 2060-2070. The 22nd century sees the beginning of the human diaspora, but interstellar travel is in the hands of corporate monopolies. Earth continues to deteriorate, by about the 24th century it is essentially uninhabitable. Humanity, however is established among the stars, and corporate domination is in decline.

Of course, when you look at specific films, there are anomalies. Accion Mutante for instance takes place in 2013 but appears to involve interstellar travel, which seems too early.

But by and large, its amazing how well the overall thread fits together and the way that events cluster, which speaks to what seems to have been a general shared consciousness or agreement as to how the future was going to look. Basically, in the 80's, the 90's were looking pretty apocalyptic. There seems to have been a consensus that a civil war would come to a head between 2010 and 2020. That we'd spend the 21st century getting heavily into space. And that 2060 is roughly the earliest we could fight an alien species on even terms. Oh, and long term prognosis for Earth was bleak.

Anyway, for your consideration:

1989 Kamikaze 1989 (1982) fascist future.

1990 Dead End Drive In (1986) Set in 1990, in Australia. Australian society is deteriorating, to control crime the government attempts to isolate youth in a concentration camp/drive in.

1990 Bronx Warriors. Set in 1990, in the Bronx. Urban decay has lead to social collapse. Police have abandoned the Bronx, as have most other government functions. The Bronx is ruled by various gangs. Evil corporation contemplates redevelopment.

1991 Deathrow Gameshow,

(1992) Creepozoid. This is the date at which a nuclear war broke out, referred to in the movie.

1993 Primal Scream. Mystery set on Earth, after a research lab orbiting Saturn is destroyed.

1995 Escape 2000 (1980) Set in 1995, Australia

1996 Radioactive Dreams (1986) Set in 1996. Two gangsters frightened by the nuclear war flee to a bomb shelter, taking two young children with them (the children look like toddlers, so this would have been between 1980 and 84, a nuclear scare). The kids re-emerge into a post-nuclear exchange LA ruled by warring gangs and factions.

1996 Soldier - the super soldier project is initiated with its first crop. In a few years, this project will give rise to project Manticore and Max of Dark Angel.

1997 Hands of Steel (1986) set in 1997, Terminator-Android attempts to assassinate an environmentalist for a corporation, winds up in decaying middle-America. Environmental deterioration

1997 Predator 2 (1990) set in 1997, in LA. A predator is active in the city, a police officer gets involved. This version of LA is still more or less intact, and city functions are also operating, though crime is out of control. Covert government ops are tracking the predator.

1997 Dead Man Walking (1987) Zero men with a life expectancy of only a few years track each other across a wasteland in plague ridden 1997.

1997 Escape From New York City, set in 1997. New York City appears to have collapsed financially and politically, and is now a formal penal colony. The United States is fighting a war and trying to negotiate peace. There are indications that order is collapsing in other areas of the US.

1998 Creepazoids (1987) Year is 1998, five army deserters in post-nuke landscape wander around in acid rain until they settle in an abandoned building and get terrorized by Giger monster. Acid rain, as in Hands of Steel, is toxic. Reference to New Los Angeles being established. The war begun in 1992, is apparently still going on. The nuclear exchange must have been and limited brief, and most of the war was fought on conventional levels, possibly seeing use of biological weapons.

1998 Year of plague seen in City Limits. Plague is likely a runaway biological weapon from the war referred to in Creepazoid and Escape.

1999 Class of 1999 (1988) Terminator-Android trio, military killing machine types, get to be high school teachers. Things go wrong.

1999 Class of 1999 II (1994) Another kickboxing school teaching Terminator- Android.

1999 Until the End of the World (1991) Set in 1999. A woman pursues a man through the world. Things are peaceful, the war is apparently over. VR technology and computer search technology appears.

2000 Generations (1985) Set in the year 2000. Two brothers, one a gladiator in a rollerball type sport. 2000 Escape From the Bronx. Sequel to Bronx Warriors set a decade earlier, the area of the Bronx is part of the New York City penal complex.

2002 Dark Side of the Moon (1989) Set in 2002. Alien clone.

2002 Killings at Outpost Zeta (1981) Set on Planet Zeta in the year 2002. (Apocryphal- doesn’t fit)

2003 City Limits (1984) Year is 2003. Post plague city, battleground of rival kid bikers, most adults in city have died.

2005 New Crime City (1994) Set in 2005. Sections of LA have been isolated as another penal colony. Once again, city functions have collapsed financially and politically.

2007 T-Force, set in 2007. Unidentified city, a group of Terminator-Androids have been assigned as super-cops, but revert to their original ‘terminator’ natures.

2007 Wild Palms (1993) set in 2007. Hollywood outside the penal area, VR and a cyberpunk world.

2007 Firepower. Police attempt to keep order in decaying, but not abandoned sections of LA. The rot is progressing visibly.

2008 Split Second, set in 2008. Giger monster runs loose. Decaying London, torrential rains, rising waters, greenhouse effect.

2009 Rising Storm (1988) In 2009 the US is run by fascist anti rock evangelists. (2099?)

2013 Escape From Los Angeles, set in 2013. US is under control of a theocratic President. Los Angeles has experienced an Earthquake separating it from the mainland

2013 Accion Mutante (1992) set in Spain in 2013

2015 Firebird 2015 AD. Cars banned in the area identified by the film. Conservation measure, attempting to cope with collapse of fuel economy.

2015 Murder by Moonlight (1989) Set in 2015, Brigitte Nielson and Julian Sands play Russian and American security officers on a lunar base. They become involved in the hunt for a war criminal who has fled to the moon.

2017 Barb Wire, 96, set in 2017, American civil war between fascists and freedom fighters, Steel Harbour is a neutral port mostly under control of freedom fighters. Unclear as to which current city has been renamed, possibly something on the East Coast or the Great Lakes.

2019 Blade Runner, 82. New L.A. 2019. Terminator-Androids (Replicants) have returned to Earth. Harrison Ford hunts them down. New L.A. is a well established city with buildings dating back to the late 19th/early 20th century in constant retrofit. It does not match LA. Constant rains, signs of mountains and forests outside of city, indicates that another city, possibly Seattle or Portland has been renamed.

Running Man (1987) Set in 2019. Copy of ‘Prize of Peril” Society is visibly in decay, military massacres crowds of demonstrators and keeps order within the US. Entertainment, including a homicidal game show is premium. Homicidal game shows seem popular in the future.

Dark Angel (2000) (TV series). Set in 2019, Seattle. Reference to a big EMP which knocked out communications and electronics (Snake Plissken?). Heroine, Max, is a refugee from Government project to create super-soldiers (Soldier?)

2019 Warriors of the Wasteland/The New Barbarians. Post apocalyptic Italian countryside. Death cults hold sway.

2020 Nemesis (1992) set in 2020, fashion model cyborgs and Terminator-Androids shoot each other up around the world.

2020 Texas Gladiators (1982)

2020 Twisted Justice (1990) Set in 2020 renegade cops in california

2020 Super Force (1990) Set in the year 2020. Former Mars astronaut decides to become a super hero.

2022 Time Runner (1992) Alien invasion comes in 2022. Mark Hammill goes back in time to 1982 to stop it.

2022 No Escape (1994) 2022 iisland prison, ray liotta and lance henrickson

2022 Alien Intruder

2025 Future Hunters 2025

2025 Solarbabies set in 2025. Massive water shortage in continental interiors. Closed city states ration and monopolize remaining water.

2025 Endgame 2030 Crash and Burn (1990) Year is 2030, giant robots are around. Terminator Android runs amuk. Post-apocalyptic political and economic landscape.

2032 Demolition Man (1993) Set in 2032, Stallone does it. Utopian city state established in California.

2032 Star Crystal set in 2032. Space station and long range travel to and from Mars. A friendly Giger-Monster life form is discovered.

2033 Time Trackers (1989) Scientists from 2033 come back to stop evil scientist from changing history

2035 Star Quest (I) (1994) One of the first interstellar expeditions is launched with the crew in cryogenic sleep. Something goes wrong, they wake a century later, earth is undergoing a catastrophe, and the crew is being picked off one by one. Note: This seems to be during the period of initial interstellar technology. The Event Horizon ship was built and launched in this same time frame by 2040. The Lost in Space expedition, using a giant orbiting Stargate dates to 2058. Note: Once again, there is a covertly placed Terminator/Android.

2038 Moon 44: Prisoners are used to protect claims to asteroids with fighter ships.

2040 Event Horizon prologue, when the spaceship is initially tested and lost).

2040 Dune Warriors (1991) Scene of running Dwarves taken from Stryker. Post apocalypse, desert. 2040

2044 Critters 4 (1991) Set in 2044

2044 Tekwar: The Original Movie (1994) Set in 2044

2047 Event Horizon set in 2047. Space travel through the solar system is commonplace. Elaborate permanent space stations exist. Experimental interstellar Space-Warp driven starship is recovered.

2048 Mutant on the Bounty (2048)

2050 Solar Crisis set in 2050

2053 Neon City (1991) Set in 2053 update of stagecoach. Land transport across derelict badlands between two cities. Holes in the Ozone layer can cause lethal burns to those caught exposed. Lethal Ozone holes also feature in Future Kick. 2054 Minority Report, set in 2054. Washington/East Coast city-state, uses precognitives locally to pre-empt crime. Plans to apply it nationally. Huge divide between rich and poor, with poor/slum areas at sub-20th century levels.

2057 Prototype X29A

2058 Welcome to Oblivion set in 2058

2058 Ultra Warrior, (1992) set in 2058. Kansas city is called Oblivion. The interior of the United States is now a wasteland known as the forbidden zone, with no one allowed inside or outside. The government is now a tyrannical city/state/corporate entity with underwater mines and martian colonies, but which is under attack from replicant infiltrators and alien invaders. Note: By complete coincidence, this movie appears to set the stage for two of the major plot scenarios in Space Above and Beyond: The silicates uprising and the alien war.

2058 Lost in Space 2058. Viable interstellar travel achieved by Robinson family in test ship. (Other attempts at interstellar travel date as far back as 2040, it’s possible that some corporations or states have already mastered it) Massive orbital stargate is being built, obviously to create permanent wormholes connecting earth to another solar system. There is evidence of regular hyperlight space travel by ship though. Earth divided into competing entities in a state of low level warfare. Ecology and economies verging on collapse projected within 20 years.

2063 Space: Above and Beyond (1995), set in 2063. Background: Earth is a star traveling society. Despite possession of a handful of space colonies, the background indicates that humanity has had interstellar travel a relatively short time, no more then a few decades. They have stumbled into a savage war with first alien race they have encountered. The reasons for the war are unclear. Although Earth’s military is a coordinated single agency, corporate entities appear to be the dominant power behind the scenes and there are indications that prior to the war the corporations dominated interstellar travel. Approximately ten to fifteen years previously, there was an uprising of Terminator-Androids, this variant were called Silicates and had inter-member communications links. Society also features ‘vats’ or artificially grown cloned humans who are socially of lower status. Notes: Two other movies set around this time period refer to an interstellar war. Ultra Warrior refers to the initial wave of attacks, and Imposter displays a society under siege. Notes: Star Quest also features a society which has only recently (within decades) achieved star flight, and an artificially grown human who is subject to social discrimination/inferiority.

2069 Imposter, set in 2069. Background: Earth is at war with alien species seriously not going well. The war has been going on for a long time, at least a decade. The Aliens themselves are never seen directly. Earth cities behind defensive screens. There is a major disparity between the rich elites with access to super technology, and the poor masses who lack even antibiotics. Note: Are these the same aliens who attacked in 2058 in Ultra Warrior? Same as in Space Above and Beyond? Note: The Silicates are a particularly nasty variety of the Terminator Androids which have been steadily popping up.

2070 Total Recall 2070 Television series.

2072 The New Gladiators (1983) 2072: The New Gladiators, 2020 New Barbarians. More deathrow gameshow/running man goodness.

2073 Cyborg 2. Terminator-Androids used as bombs for assassination.

2074 Star Quest (II) (1989) (Beyond the Rising Moon, Space 2074). A geneticallyengineered female warrior struggles to free herself from her corporate owners and locate a derelict alien ship. Background: Corporations dominate society, and not in a good way. Humanity has starflight, and has benefitted from the previous discovery of an alien artifact. Artificially grown and genetically enhanced humans are property.

2084 Total Recall, set in 2084 (the movie). Background: Life continues on Earth. A self sustaining colony is on Mars. Discovery of alien ‘terraforming’ machinery, and initiation of same. Beginning of transformation/ terraforming of Mars. Note: The alien creators of the terraforming machinery are long gone. From the handprint we can infer that they were gigantic, 8 to 12 feet or larger, and three clawed. Obviously, they are not from Mars, or they would have no need to terraform the planet. Strangely, there was an inhabitable planet next to Mars that wasn’t suitable to them... Earth was too heavy? Too thick an atmosphere? Wrong constituents? Too much moisture? Too hot? Note: Several other movies show traces of a previous species on Mars, including Doom, Species II, Mission to Mars, Red Planet. Other relics of a previous race of giant aliens are found in Terror Planet, Horror Planet, Creature and Alien. In at least two cases, they are associated with Giger monsters. Note: Following the terraforming event in Total Recall, several other movies either set after this time or undated, are set on or refer to a Mars which is partially terraformed. These includeGhosts of Mars, Oliver Grunier’s Mars, and Starhunter.

2087 World Gone Wild (2087). Interior desert land. Small community struggles to defend its water source from marauders. 2099 Rebel Storm

2122 Alien

2179 Aliens, Alien 3

2237 New Eden. A desert world is used as a prison planet for refugees. Not much more.

2275 Star Hunter - television series, set in the Solar System. Earth is a hellhole, most of the worlds and asteroids in the solar system are inhabited and travel is frequent. Interstellar travel is confined to corporations. The divinity cluster is identified as a genetic complex implanted in proto-humans by aliens 4 million years ago, which confers unusual abilities.

2300 Star Hunter 2300 (2nd season of Starhunter, time jumped)

2381 Alien Resurrection

2455 Jason X - Earth is uninhabitable.

2517 Firefly - A cluster of worlds somewhere in space, no FTL, no aliens, Earth is long gone and a fond memory.

2586 Timestalkers (1987) Scientists from 2586 go back to the old west

2676 Pitch Black

2688 Pitch Black II: Chronicles of Riddick

Lord Hastur of Carcosa May 30th, 2011 11:52 AM

Aliens and monsters notwithstanding, I seem to identify ONE major point of divergence: WWIII between the end of the '80s and the beginning of the '90s with a limited nuclear exchange and the use of biochemical weapons.

In the novelization of Escape from NY an ongoing WWIII is hinted at (not mentioned in the movie itself): the west cosat has been laid to waste by nerve gas that has led part of the population to madness, some cities have been distroyed and communist uprising have taken place in or around the wasted areas, leading to internal terrorism. One such groups of terrorists hijacks the presidential plane, with the intention of dump the president in the NYC hellhole at the eve of important peace talk with Russia (that's where the whole "you've got 24 hours to rescue the president" thing comes from.

Now, what happened around that period that may have led to such a catastrophic war? I would think that the fall of the URRS ITTL was not as bloodless as OTL. The military coup to oust Gorbachev in 1991 succeeded, Yelstin was probably killed, but in the chaos that ensued the Russian generals, seeing how they couldn't control the situation, launched at least one or two missiles as a last ditch. That led to the war, which, lasted about five years (1992-1997). In the war, android soldiers were also used, which were still around in the following years, and the government or some corporation asked itself "now what do we do with those tin men?" and had the brilliant idea to reuse them as school teachers. That implies at least some reconstruction by 1999, but high social unrest and ecological upheval, probably from remnant radiation and toxic wastes from the war.

DValdron May 30th, 2011 07:25 PM

The Ugly Eighties

The most obvious point of divergence is certainly World War III, occurring between 1992 and 1998.

But it seems clear that the divergence begins well before this, sometime in the 1980's. Both Dead End Drive in from Australia and Bronx Warriors set in New York, both seem to show cultures using draconian means to confront deep rooted dysfunction.

The fate of New York emerges predictably from the 1970's. In the early 1970's, roughly '74 or '75, the big apple was seriously in decay, overrun with crime, infrastructure failing, and finances in the toilet. New York was actually in danger of bankruptcy, and the big question on everyone's mind was whether President Jerry Ford would come to the rescue.

Well, Jerry Ford's response was a big fat no. But New York muddled through on its own, righted itself, repairing its finances and world stature, dealing with crime and becoming a prosperous city once again. Nowadays, it's hard to look at New York and imagine the failure that seemed so imminent in the 70's.

But clearly, in the Moontrap Timeline, New York didn't recover. Instead, it went right into the toilet, with the city undergoing financial collapse, law enforcement and infrastructure support vanishing and large sections of the city falling to the direct rule of gangs.

That's basically the New York of Bronx Warriors.

Set in 1990, the Bronx has been abandoned by police and civil government and officially declared a no man's land. Instead the Bronx is ruled by gangs who keep things going by maintaining an uneasy truce among themselves. The leader of the toughest gang is named Trash.

One day, a girl, Anne arrives. Turns out that Anne is the heiress to a giant munitions corporation and is fleeing her sordid corporate past. Trash takes her in, but things go bad. A clever mercenary named Hammer shows up, dividing the gangs and turning them against each other. As Trash struggles to hold things together, Hammer leads a mercenary army on the Bronx, slaughtering civilians. In the end, everyone dies but Trash....

Okay, it's an Italian potboiler and obvious rip off of Escape From New York. The Italians liked that sort of thing.

An even more obvious rip off was After the Fall of New York City, set in 2019 (going by the date in the Italian title). In that one, the Snake Plissken character is called Parsifal, and he leads a raid by another band of mercenaries into New York to regain the last fertile woman on Earth.

Along the way, he recruits a gigantic New York Gang Leader called Big Ape. They recover the woman, who is in a coma and has no lines. Big Ape manages to impregnate her when no one is looking, and then later dies heroically, which, when you think of it, is a hell of a mixed message.

In the end, after escaping New York, they take the woman (still comatose) back to corporate headquarters, where she'll be shot into space and continually inseminated to give birth to the new human race.... without ever waking up.

Only the Italians, I tell ya.

The point is that in this timeline, New York definitely goes tits up. By 1990, large chunks of the city, perhaps the whole thing has been abandoned. Between 1990 and 1997, the government decides to handle the festering sore that is Manhattan by turning it into a giant prison camp. And as late as 2020 and beyond, it's still an abandoned hellhole.

Other major cities are faring just as badly, though we don't know if their fall is as fast or as brutal as New York. London, as we see in Split Second, is in process of being abandoned and is half under water, the victim apparently of global warming and rising sea levels.

On the other side of North America, Los Angeles isn't doing any better. David Carradine's two movies, Future Force (1989), and Future Zone (1990), set in the far flung future of ....1991!, depicta an LA that is in free fall. Police services are failing, or being replaced by private contractors. Carradine plays one of these private contractors, a small one man police force trying to hold back anarchy, and struggling against corruption above and below.

Carradine loses the battle, apparently, because in Radioactive Dreams, set in 1996, LA is out of control and overrun by exotic gangs. Civil order has collapsed. The police aren't even pretending. 1996, by the way, is the date that Carpenter gives for the big quake that separates the city from the mainland in Escape From LA. Following this, according to Carpenter's movie, LA is designated a prison colony, and a fundamentalist Christian becomes President for life.

Finally, New Crime City (1994) set in 2005, LA has, like New York, become sealed off as a giant penal colony. A Snake Plissken like hero has to enter the city to recover a rocket with a biological warhead. Basically, New Crime City is a sort of low budget, less talented version of Escape From New York City, think of it as an illegitimate sequel. Ironically, it was made before John Carpenter made his own sequel, "Escape from La" set in 2013.

And here's the weirdest coincidence. Stacy Keach is in both New Crime City and Escape From New York City, playing essentially the same character (barring a transparently fake accent).

Between 2005 and 2013, there's apparently a major quake which separates much of LA from the mainland. Shape of things to come. Several hundred years later, in Trancers, Jack Death amuses himself by scuba diving through old LA, the city is now sunken ruins.

*******************

But if we can see the fate of New York coming, then Dead End Drive in, set in Australia, is more disturbing.

Basically, its hard to describe. It plays a bit like a post-apocalyptic film, but it defies easy classification. Basically, the Australian government has decided to corral youth in concentration camps. A young man and his girlfriend go to the drive in theatre, and at the end of the movie, discover that they won't let him out. Instead, the drive in becomes a defacto prison camp, where the youth are fed and entertained and largely left to prey on each other.

No lawyers, no judges, no laws or habeas corpus or due process or nothing. This is not the Australia we knew in 1990. Rather, the glimpse we get is of a decidedly fascistic police state, but one at the end of its tether.

Australia is a remote land, water poor, energy poor, its standard of living, its economy and security dependent on international trade. Perhaps for this reason, in this timeline, Australia might be the equivalent of frogs in a toxic marsh, or canaries in a coal mine.

The fact that by 1990, Australia has been reduced to ad hoc concentration camps tells us that not only is there something seriously wrong with Australia, there's something seriously wrong with the world, and its been developing for a while.

The Mad Max trilogy gives us a better idea of Australia's fate from here on. In Mad Max, Australia is clearly in decline, gangs are getting out of control, the country is deteriorating, but the police force is still giving its all... unfortunately, it doesn't end well.

The Road Warrior picks up years after Mad Max leaves off. Civilization has collapsed entirely, there are only wild barbarians and embattled refugees, fighting over the dwindling stores of gasoline. There's a reference to 'two mighty tribes' going to war, which is probably means WWIII.

Going by Creepozoid and Escape From New York, both of which reference WWIII between 1992 and 1998, this suggests that the Road Warrior is taking place somewhere around 1995, give or take. Comparing the Road Warrior to Mad Max, this allows us to put Mad Max somewhere between 1985 and 1991.

Beyond Thunderdome is definitely set fifteen years after the Road Warrior, in the Mad Max continuity, or probably around 2010. Max is now a camel jockey. Civilization, of sorts is being re-established in secluded corners. Max finds a valley of children, the survivors of a refugee plane crash, and tries to lead them to a promised land.

Beyond Thunderdome gives us an overview of what's happened. Essentially, Australia seems to have gone through an extended period of drought and environmental deterioration, accompanied by worldwide economic decline which hits the island continent particularly hard. The outbreak of World War Three, seems to have spared Australia its direct impacts, but the collapse of world trade brought about the collapse of Australian society, even as the environment continued to worsen.

Tank Girl is set in 2033 in Australia. It states that it has not rained for 11 years, or since 2022. Again, that's a sign of massive and wide ranging environmental collapse and climactic change, well beyond anything we see in our own timeline. Civilization, of sorts, has re-emerged in Australia, in the form of a brutally fascistic water monopoly corporation. DValdron May 30th, 2011 07:59 PM

World War III

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Hastur of Carcosa (Post 4591520)

I seem to identify ONE major point of divergence: WWIII between the end of the '80s and the beginning of the '90s with a limited nuclear exchange and the use of biochemical weapons.

In the novelization of Escape from NY an ongoing WWIII is hinted at (not mentioned in the movie itself):

Actually, I do believe that at the beginning of the movie, it's established that WWIII is going on, though both the United States and the Soviets are looking for a way out. The McGuffin of the movie is the information on a tape cassette which, Plissken is told, is even more important than the life of the President he's being sent to rescue. Somehow, it holds the key to peace and ending the war.

We don't really glimpse the outside world in Escape From New York, but the overall impression is of a society under fascistic martial law, but one overrun by crime and violence. A society under stress and decaying.

Quote:

From the novel the west cosat has been laid to waste by nerve gas that has led part of the population to madness, some cities have been distroyed and communist uprising have taken place in or around the wasted areas, leading to internal terrorism. One such groups of terrorists hijacks the presidential plane, with the intention of dump the president in the NYC hellhole at the eve of important peace talk with Russia (that's where the whole "you've got 24 hours to rescue the president" thing comes from.

A full nuclear war would be over in fifteen minutes and leave no one left to surrender (or pretty close). This war seems to have been carried out with considerably more restraint. If Nukes were used, they were used sparingly. But other movies suggest that there may have been widespread use of chemical and biological agents - there's a number of references to plagues and epidemics of sterility.

Quote:

Now, what happened around that period that may have led to such a catastrophic war?

I would think that the fall of the URRS ITTL was not as bloodless as OTL.

The military coup to oust Gorbachev in 1991 succeeded, Yelstin was probably killed, but in the chaos that ensued the Russian generals, seeing how they couldn't control the situation, launched at least one or two missiles as a last ditch.

That led to the war, which, lasted about five years (1992-1997).

That's pretty astute thinking.

Creepozoids, a Roger Corman special, is set in 1998. It features a group of deserters from WWIII making their way to an abandoned army base. The world is pretty screwed up. Apparently, they have to find shelter, or the holes in the ozone will fry them. WWIII is either still going on, or has just ended. My guess is hostilities are over but they're still working out the details. The movie mentions that WWIII began in 1992. So much for backstory. Anyway, our crew of deserters, who bear a suspicious resemblance to the crew of the Nostromo, find themselves in the empty corridors and rooms of the abandoned army base, and eventually have pretty much a low budget scene for scene remake of Alien, right down to the dinner table scene, the baby monster, and the big black bad thing.

Anyway, back to WWIII, Creepozoids seems to give us a reliable (?) start date of 1992, which dovetails with your theory nicely.

As to why and how it happens that way? My thinking is that American politics butterflies really fast. We don't know this timeline's Presidential succession through the 80's and 90's, but the guy who is shot down in Escape From New York is definitely not Bill Clinton.

The Soviet Union on the other hand is a lot more stable. We can assume that in this timeline, as in ours, Brezhnev dies in office, and then he's replaced by a succession of dying old men in the politburo - Chernenko, Andropov, etc. The details might vary, but that's going to be the pattern. Finally, as the old guard dies off.... there's no one left but Gorbachev. So we can assume that this timeline has a Gorbachev or close analogue, who tries to introduce reforms, and does it in roughly the same time frame.

And of course, there's an an attempted coup. Why does it fail in our timeline and succeed in this one?

My thinking is that the world has already been changing. Whatever's happening that's screwing up Australia's climate is also having effects elsewhere. The Soviet Union's probably experienced a series of bad harvests, its economy is in even worse shape than our timeline, and they're that much more desperate.

Or possibly there's a little more going on. But we'll wait on that.

Quote: In the war, android soldiers were also used, which were still around in the following years, and the government or some corporation asked itself "now what do we do with those tin men?" and had the brilliant idea to reuse them as school teachers.

Brilliant guess, but so far as I can tell, not supported. There's a lot of movies featuring killer androids and cyborgs, but not many involving military applications. Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is Digital Man. A lot of the movies seem to be about efforts at law enforcement - T-Force or R.O.T.O.R. Mostly through the 80's and 90's, what we see are human shaped androids being built and tinkered with constantly, but they have a tendency to go rogue, for some reason, we can never seem to get them right.

The killer androids movies themselves are something of an anomaly. They seem much more advanced than the surrounding societies technology. It's almost as if we've acquired the technological framework and software package from somewhere, but we haven't been able to properly adapt it.

Quote:

That implies at least some reconstruction by 1999, but high social unrest and ecological upheval, probably from remnant radiation and toxic wastes from the war.

We'll continue to examine America and the World in the non-timelocked (ie, set in the general time frame, but without a specific date given) movies. It's a pretty rough place.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa May 31st, 2011 05:03 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4593385)

Right, androids are a double anomaly as they are constantly outof place and out of control, as if they come from somewhere else, somewhere inherently hostile to us.

I can think of only two places:

1) somewhere in space: aquired kylun tech. 2) somewhere in time: Skynet trying to create itself and wipe out humanity in the same time. If we accept that, we're facing a fluid timeline, whose main dates cannot be pinpointed (Judgement day itself is constantly pushed forward by the intervention of the Connors). 3) All of the above: the Kyluns were nothing but terminators that were sent waaaaaaay back in time, when Skynet thought they would be unopposed as they'd find only a bunch of scattered hunter-gatherer tribes. They found an advanced starfaring civilization instead (that may have a history of its own). Those lost terminators tried to take control of that civilization's technology and take control of the whole galaxy. They failed, but as a result Earth's civilization was pushed back to the stone age, and Mars was stripped of its atmosphere. The ancient martians tried to restore it, but died befre they could. What's left of the ancient starfaring civilization is now keeping earth under strict surveillance, for fear of Skynet's emergence.

Anyway, you're right that something bigger and bleacker is going on, as the prequel to EFNY mentions that the island Manhattan was walled away and turned into a prison in 1988 a nationwide 400% rise of thecrime rate.

DValdron May 31st, 2011 06:46 AM What movie does Kylun appear?

Lord Hastur of Carcosa May 31st, 2011 07:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4594550)

What movie does Kylun appear?

Perhaps I'v mispelled those robotic things from Moontrap. I tend to do that.

DValdron May 31st, 2011 07:36 AM

Oops! Kalium! Sorry, I got ya now.

And definitely there's a glitch in the software package. It seems that 90% of the time that people build humanoid robots in these movies, there's a hidden programming directive that eventually comes to the surface saying "Kill all the humans."

The Professor May 31st, 2011 09:11 AM

Wow. This is a superb conglomerate of sci-fi backstory. They all seem to fit together more or less neatly.

Obviously in OTL someone succeeded in destroying all that alien robot software. Perhaps the agency involved in When Time Expires?

Coalition May 31st, 2011 03:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4594660)

Oops! Kalium! Sorry, I got ya now.

Well, if we studied the End User Agreement better, this would be avoided. You know, that thing we click "I agree" to, without ever actually reading it?

Shevek23 May 31st, 2011 09:02 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4593385)

...

And of course, there's an an attempted coup. Why does it fail in our timeline and succeed in this one?

But the United States is not in great shape either. Given the state of New York and LA we can assume that the American economy is much worse off. Hell, take those two cities out of play, and America is worse off. But they're also barometers that imply a country in bad shape. There may be climactic effects or environmental issues. The bottom line is an America not doing so well, and perhaps more conservative and bellicose than in our timeline.... I'm not caught up yet, but actually these two observations, that the USSR survives (until nuked until glowing anyway) and the USA is a mess, actually reinforce each other. If that is, the USA is representative of the whole Western capitalist world going to Hell in a handbasket.

Because a major factor in the fall of the Soviet Union and its Communist Party was that when Gorbachev did open up the USSR to freer communications, particularly with the Western world, the Soviet citizens did lose a major motive for loyalty to the Communist system.

They did not live in a total Orwellian thought control before that of course! Russians knew they had problems, and they knew that lots of people in the West had lots of good things they didn't have much of. But with the sharply limited contact they had before glasnost, they could well believe that the West's apparent prosperity came at dire costs, and that the poor of the West were desperately badly off, and meanwhile under the Soviet system they had indeed been making visible progress both on the fronts of general material prosperity and in the general matters of evolving civil society and something akin to personal liberty. At least, they were until the 1980s. Compared to the grinding poverty and grim political threats of the 1930s, the war years, the 1950s under Stalin, they were quite obviously better off, and visible progress continued into the 1970s. Gradually, that progress became more and more a matter of the elites skimming off the cream, but even in the notoriously corrupt Brezhnev years there still seemed enough of an expanding pie that people were less inclined to begrudge the "big cheeses" taking a bigger share of it, as long as ordinary people could hope to get more every year, and perhaps cut themselves in on the big shares by running their own scams. Meanwhile, they could well believe that the alternative to development Communist style would be even more corruption and graft and even less opportunity for themselves.

A lot of chickens came home to roost in the '80s though. The life expectancy which had been rising began to actually decline. Ecological disasters relating to rather ill- conceived schemes such as Khruschev's "Virgin Lands" program (which I think had a lot to do with the near-vanishing of the Caspian and almost total vanishing of the Aral Seas, along with major accumulating pollution ruining what water was left) left them worse off than before. Some major scholars of the Soviet system argue that actually the system was doomed to collapse and would have failed spectacularly much earlier if it were not for Soviet exports of oil and natural gas. There was of course the high per capita burden of their military programs, and the war in Afghanistan did a lot of damage too.

So when Gorbachev opened the doors, and more Soviet citizens than ever before could actually visit the West, and they had contact with citizens of former Warsaw Pact nations that had broken free of the Soviet system, and the press was much freer to publish critical accounts, all of this dealt a body blow to the notion that they were better off under the Communist Party.

Now, if all this decline were still happening, but the West was not a visibly better place, but deteriorating into a fascistic police state or disintegrating into Beyond Thunderdome anarchy, then I think the word (in credible forms) would filter back to ordinary Russians, even if there were no glasnost. They'd know that bad off as things were getting in Russia, the West was hurting too, and perhaps they had better stand pat under the banner of the Worker's State.

This mood might not prevail among all Soviet citizens; there might indeed be rising dissidence, even rioting and anarchy. It might be necessary for the Soviet authorities to crack down with increasing brutality. But they might still be able to count on at least passive, sullen obedience if the alternatives did not look so good.

So the grim gulag society that Americans tended to assume existed over there might once again become reality, and yet the Soviet Union, precisely because things looked and were grim, survives, until the inevitable blow-up between the two equally desperate sides of the Cold War happened. At which point which side glows more afterward would be a matter of throw weights and the reliability of each side's missiles.

Shevek23 May 31st, 2011 09:20 PM

Now, to the "timeline" in general:

A big part of my personal identity is that I am a big science fiction fan. So it's pretty stunning to me how very few of these movies I've seen, or even heard of!

Of course I've always been a snob about so-called SF movies. My brother recently reminded me that when I went to see Star Wars, back in the summer of '77 when it came out (I was in junior high school at the time), he expected me to be thrilled, but I said "oh, that's not science fiction!" (I think on that very same visit to the mall where I saw the movie, I went to the bookstore and bought Larry Niven's Ringworld, my first introduction to Known Space--that was science fiction!) In the 80s in particular, I despaired because it seemed to me that SF, in the movies, was turning into "cops in space." And I didn't like it. Sometimes something really weird or outrageous like Liquid Sky or Repo Man or something as politically pointed as They Live would win me over though they seemed pretty grim too. But I missed the soft-focus optimism of the sort of SF I preferred to read. Insofar as this SpacePunk stuff overlaps with horror, I've gotten with it, but the tough-guy anarcho-jingoism always turned me off, so it's no surprise I didn't seek this stuff out. So apparently a whole generation of B-movies has just blown right past me!

I would like to see Moontrap, I think.

And by the way--that description of NASA in that movie does sound an awful lot like my experiences interning at the Jet Propulsion Lab; besides JPL I once lived at Langley Air Force Base, where the main office space (it was the HQ of the Tactical Air Command then) had old NACA windtunnels installed in it that NASA still used and over on the other side of the flight line was another NASA site, which I would sometimes visit. These NASA facilities, if not say Mission Control in Houston, do look remarkably like Burpleson AFB from Dr Strangelove! Just a bunch of offices and tacky cafeterias and like that; you had to think about what you were working on and what kinds of documents you could read in the libraries to realize you were on the cutting edge of technology!

So maybe that part was actually cinema verite?:p

I think your timeline has so much integrity because these movies were an expression of the angst of the 1980s.

I'm not so sure we're past it; I often wonder if we are simply living it now...:eek:

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 1st, 2011 01:13 AM

A friend of mine, big fan of things like Neuromancer, once noted that in the eighties the grim world was imagined, in the nineties it was built and now we're living in it, and he thought that unlike himself, some people were actually enjoying it. Now, that's scary. As for Cops in Space, I was turned away from classical SF because it looked too much Star Trek (really, how much variant blue people with antennaes could you have?), and came to enjoy grim things like Terminator, Dark Angel and Ghost in the Shell, as much as those things scared me. Star Wars was a good compromise, as it had sufficiently sleek starships, a grim landscape and a hint to magic too (I couldn't stand that silly Midiclorian thing). I tend to agree with Shavek23, even if I walked the opposite route, we're still living the angst of the 80s, but maybe we're also shaking it off and beginning to elaborate the next phase, as this very thread shows (you know you're out of something when you start seeing it in review). The next step would be a sort of mystical/ecologic introspective thing (Final Fantasy: the Spirit within, Avatar). Maybe it's just e, but I think SF today is returning to the attitudes ad concepts of its early days. Have we come full circle?

interpoltomo June 2nd, 2011 10:00 AM

I'd suggest lookin into anime like planetes or cowboy bebop too while you're at it.

They'd fit this world.

DValdron June 2nd, 2011 04:43 PM

Crap to the Future

Parasite, made in 1982, by Charles Band, set in the far off future of 1992. Two claims to fame: 1) It was made in 3d. 2) It was Demi Moore's first starring role.

Okay, so what happens. Essentially, it's an alien rip off. In the bleak far off future of 1992, a scientist on the run rolls into town. He encounters a couple of thugs trying to rape a girl, and beats them off only to be assaulted by the girl he's trying to save. Apparently, he's interrupted someone's rape play session. The town, wherever it is, is out in no man's land. There's no government, no law enforcement, and damned little in outside trade. Paper dollars are worthless, everything is refurbished or patched together.

Turns out, the scientist is from the big city. He researches bioweapons, and he's run off with a parasite in a can. Even worse, he's infected with the parasite himself, and he's made a run for it, trying for a cure. He hooks up with Demi Moore, they have a romance. He has some tussles with the local bad guys.

Then the corporate bad guys show up. They drive new cars, have nice black suits and are clearly upscale guys. They're also violent and ruthless. The parasite in the scientist comes to term, and it turns out its a chestburster from alien.... or close enough as makes no difference. This is 3D so there's lots of monster lunging at the camera going on.

Eventually, in the four cornered struggle between the good guy and his girlfriend, the local bad guys, the corporate bad guys, and the parasite, the good guy wins out. Yay us.

Anyway, in the context of this timeline, there's a lot of interesting things about Parasite. There's that whole 'Alien' thing its got going - interestingly, H.R. Giger's alien shows up in a hell of a lot of movies. But there's also the beginnings of the apocalyptic world.

This is set in 1992, before WWIII. But it's clear that this is not the America we know. For one thing, there seems to have been a currency collapse, when the scientist rolls into town, his paper money is so good. What works now are gold and silver, or corporation backed dollars. Indications are that the bottom has dropped out of the economy.

At least as far as the countryside is concerned. The people out there are having increasing difficulty getting gas or staples, they've been forced to become localists and increasingly self reliant. It appears that America in the 1980's and1990's has economically bottomed out.

The economic collapse isn't universal however. The cities and the corporations are clearly doing very well, and maintaining their pre-collapse standards of living and technology.

I think that what we're seeing is a polarisation of America, with some regions devolving rapidly to third world status, and other regions or factions living quite comfortably. Basically, the poor are getting seriously poor terrifyingly fast, the rich are doing good.

There's a number of movies that echo this. Another good example is Hands of Steel, made in 1986, featuring a protagonist named 'Paco Queruak', which sounds kind of like someone's typewriter vomitted.

Paco is an assassin sent to eliminate a blind environmental activist/scientist. Unfortunately, Paco has a change of heart can can't do the job. So, like our scientist in parasite, he flees into the countryside, ending up in this little village out in the wasteland.

There, Paco is safe from law enforcement and gubmint, etc. He starts to form a relationship with a hard bitten truck stop owner, gets into tussles with the local bad guys, and once again, the evil corporate honchos show up with lots of money and weapons.

The world of Paco is clearly very much the world of Parasite. Again, we have the sense that America is pulling its horns in. America per se seems to be under the control of corporate interests, the federal government in civilized territory is under the control of the corporates, or is entirely absent out in the lawless hinterlands.

I actually like Hands of Steel more than Parasite. There's a lot of macho melodrama to it. Paco gets beaten up, dragged by trucks, thrown off cliffs, the guy suffers. But in all the suffering, he keeps getting back up and coming at ya. All the while, he's doing that patented Italian soul searching, and pursuing a romance with the truck stop owner/waitress.

It turns out that Paco, without knowing it, is a terminator. Actually, that's one of the alternate titles of it: Return of the Terminator. Also known as Atomic Cyborg. Both alternate titles give the game away, because Paco himself doesn't know he's a terminator/cyborg. It's part of his shocking emotional journey when he discovers he's one... and not the only one.

These two movies add a couple of pieces to the alternate world that's evolving in these movies.

Maybe the most important insight, however, is the diversity of the world.

I mean, think about it. The 'world of hats' is a sci fi cliche. Basically, the idea is that in the future, or on another world, everyone will wear hats. That the small portion of the world we see is exactly what the entire world is like. Therefore in Steel Justice and Tank Girl the entire wide world and all the continents and oceans are just a rolling featureless desert. But in Waterworldthe entire world is covered by the ocean and no land is left. While in Battlequeen 2020 the world is in a permanent ice age. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Okay, now i we accept that each of these movies depicts the entire world, then we have about 50 versions of the apocalypse/post apocalypse, and none of them are consistent.

Not so, I say. My thinking is that actually these various movies are really only describing the local area and time that they take place in. Basically, the post- apocalyptic world of the moontrap timeline is as diverse and heterodox as our own, with portions of it as dramatic hellholes, and other parts nice.

So, let me map out what I think is happening in Moontrap world through the 1980's up to WWIII and beyond....

Basically, the 80's o the Moontrap Universe are where a lot of the ecological nightmares of the 70's and early 80's came to fruition.

Take Global Warming. In this timeline, there's plenty of evidence of global warming. This isn't just the oceans rising, though in Split Second, in 2008, we see London half submerged. Blade Runner is set in 2019 in a 'New Los Angeles' also drowning in monsoon rains. Rather, what it means is torrential rains on the coasts, but desertification in the interior.

Basically, clouds are stupid things, the faster they fill up, the earlier they drop their water. Global warming, in very loose terms, means that the rate at which clouds fill and drop increases. Which means that clouds tend to drop their water before they get too far inland. So coastlines get wetter and wetter, subject to flooding, etc. But the further inland you get, the dryer it gets, until you've got the great American desert forming.

In the United States, a large part of the water supply in the midwest is the Ogalalla Aquifer, a huge underground reservoir of water left behind by glaciers, which is quickly depleted. The combination of global warming, drought and aquifer depletion leads to, not only a voracious new desert gobbling up states, but to the economic and political collapse of a large part of the American interior. Once again, there are large, formerly green areas, where no rain has fallen in decades, as we see in Steel Justice or Warriors of the Wasteland.

The beleaguered American government appears to have responded to this runaway desert by literally evacuating and sealing off the region as a forbidden zone. Those left behind are literally cut off from civilization, leaving small communities of farmers to contend with roving bands of brigands and scavengers. The forbidden zone includes not just the desert, but surrounding lands which are now semi-arid or marginal, or which suffer from plague or toxic contamination. By the Ultra Warrior, in 2058, the forbidden zone, or zones are well established.

Outside the forbidden zone, however, large areas of the United States are relatively unaffected, or minimally affected. For people living in New England or the civilized parts of California, who knows, life may be getting better and better.

The same is true for large parts of western Europe. There, life continues almost normally, barely affected by the misery running rampant only a few hundred or thousand miles away. Thus, many places seem disquietingly normal.

Meanwhile, acid rains, particularly in certain areas become extremely toxic. In Hands of Steel, acid rain is so bad that people trapped in it can be burned.

Holes open up in the ozone layer, resulting in people getting flash fried, as we see in Neon City and Future Kick. Now that's not the way we expect holes in the Ozone to work, but then again, in Solar Crisis, set in 2050, we discover that Earth's sun has become dangerously unstable. So if it was hiccuping, perhaps you don't want to be standing under a hole in the ozone when a hiccup hits.

A malfunctioning or hiccuping sun might also be responsible for some or all of the greenhouse effect that's frying America's interior like a bug under a magnifying glss. All these environmental reversals put a lot of pressure on the American economy. Basically, large parts of the country become non-productive or marginally productive, there's lots of crop failures, breakdowns, floods. So there's less and less money in the American economy. At the same time, demand, particularly demand on government services goes up. The government has a lot more people to rescue or look after, but less and less money to do it with.

Eventually, we reach a crisis, and the bottom drops out of the economy. A federal government in crisis opts for decentralisation, quietly offloading responsibilities onto local state or municipal authorities, which in the worst hit areas, simply don't exist any longer.

I've mentioned a Forbidden Zone, an official territory, which seems to encompass a chunk of the American interior by the time of Ultra Warrior. But I think we see its early stages in Parasiteand Hands of Steel.

Indeed, the American government seems to spend the last part of the 20th century invested in desperate triage, abandoning both New York City and Los Angeles, as we see in the Snake Plissken movies.

Meanwhile in both Wired to Kill and Dead Man Walking, regions are specifically quarantined and placed off limits, because of plague outbreaks, likely biological weapons from WWIII.

Detroit, as we see in the Robocop movies, is doing slightly better than in our universe, largely by becoming an asset of the evil corporation Omnicorp. But this may be a sign of things to come. As the American government abandons more and more territory and becomes weaker and weaker, corporations rise in strength, literally taking over cities and acting as effective city states.

In addition to a possibly crap sun, runaway environmental decay, toxic rains, global warming, desertification and flooding, we also see geological instability, particularly around the pacific rim. The big earthquake hits california, separating LA from the Coast. Waterworld seems to imply that most of the Islands of the pacific have sunk or submerged and the inhabitants of the pacific may be trapped in a great thermal gyre.

But as I've said, large parts of the world, may seem completely normal. So it all depends on where you're lucky or unlucky enough to be.

But of course, the real question is.... What happened in the Moontrap timeline to screw the world up this way?

I have an answer.... DValdron June 2nd, 2011 05:00 PM

The Arrival

Did you know Charlie Sheen used to be an actor? Honest to god. Sometime before his orgies of sleeping with porn stars, consuming apocalyptic amounts of drugs and driving luxury cars off cliffs, Charlie sheen used to be in movies where he turned in these things called performances.

In one of these, the Arrival, from 1996, he plays an astronomer named Zane Zaminsky, who discovers that alien life exists.

Not only is alien life out there, but it seems that they're here right now.

And not only are they here, but they're busily terraforming our planet to suit themselves. The like it hotter, with a different atmosphere, so they've been infiltrating human societies and economies, taking control, and using human projects to re- engineer the planet out from under us.

Terrifying thought, isn't it.

The Arrival had a sequel, 'The Arrival II' in which Charlie Sheen's character dies before it opens, but his legacy lives on in his brother and a few other crusaders.

The notion of aliens terraforming our planet into something that they can live on also appears in the Invaders miniseries, a remake of the 1960's tv show.

And I believe it shows up either overtly or implicitly hinted at in episodes of the X- Files, and perhaps even Dark Skies tv series.

For the record, there's also They Live by John Carpenter, showing aliens having infiltrated and manipulated human society, though they don't seem to be engaged in terraforming, its pretty clear that they're running us into the ground.

So basically, we have a cluster of movies and television shows, which feature aliens who seem to be infiltrating human society and appear to be out to remake our planet.

Who are these dastardly aliens - their appearance changes from movie to movie. But they always have the same recurrent features, the large heads and almost shaped black eyes. It's the Grays, dammit. In almost every movie or television show that they appear in, the Grays come across as a hostile or indifferent alien species. They're not our friends.

And so now we understand why the Moontrap world is in such terrible shape compared to ours. Since Roswell, we've been engaged in a secret war. A war we didn't even know we were fighting. It's the war of the Grays to destroy the human race and remake our planet to suit their needs.

DValdron June 2nd, 2011 05:05 PM

A quick note on the Grays....

Basically, why are we still standing?

Remember the X-Files movie? I think that the prologue of the movie was set about 35,000 years ago and featured two cave men taking out a Gray alien.

So here's the problem. If the Grays were here 35,000 years ago.... How did the human race survive? Why have the Grays only been trying to nail us since the 1950's?

I think I have an answer.

The Kalium War. The Grays are another species in the galactic dead zone. They were also a combatant in the Kalium war and came within a hairs breadth of extinction. In fact, it's taken the Grays thousands of years, until recently, to rebuild their civilization and regain space travel.

Which is why they're only showing up here in the last half century or so. As it is, having only recently regained space travel, they find themselves in a gigantic cosmic dead zone, and we're one of the only worlds that they've found.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 3rd, 2011 05:40 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by interpoltomo (Post 4604388)

I'd suggest lookin into anime like planetes or cowboy bebop too while you're at it.

They'd fit this world.

Don't forget Ghost in the Shell and expecially Appleseed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4606309)

Basically, why are we still standing?

Remember the X-Files movie? I think that the prologue of the movie was set about 35,000 years ago and featured two cave men taking out a Gray alien.

So here's the problem. If the Grays were here 35,000 years ago.... How did the human race survive? Why have the Grays only been trying to nail us since the 1950's? I think I have an answer.

Good luck making all this "Grays" nonsense into a coherent whole. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_a...Hill_abduction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flintstones

interpoltomo June 3rd, 2011 08:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Hastur of Carcosa (Post 4608276)

Don't forget Ghost in the Shell and expecially Appleseed. Appleseed and ghost in the shell would be too optimistic imo, but sure he could give it a try.

DValdron June 3rd, 2011 08:51 AM

The Grays appear in numerous movies and television series. Or more accurately, the cluster of traits associated with Grays appear frequently.

Take Progeny, made in 1998, it's a story about Gray Aliens abducting a pregnant woman. They appear to be able to stop time, and they seem fixated on the woman, right up until the end when they kidnap the newborn, leaving the woman to die. The Grays appear several times, mostly in the woman's flashbacks, and it becomes clear that her memories are distorted or blocked. They become clearer each flashback, until the final form of the Grays are revealed to be tentacled monsters.

The Aliens from Independence Day also seem to be Grays, although these two are tentacled monsters. They also appear to be larger and more mindlessly violent.

The Grays from X-Files and Dark Skies television series conform to the classic humanoid version of the Grays.

The Grays from the Arrival, on the other hand, are roughly humanoid, but their knees bend backwards. They're adept at disguising themselves as human.

From this, we can assume that the Grays have a great deal of diversity. Possibly they're able to change or adjust their forms fluidly. Or possibly they employ some form of open source genetic coding, borrowing DNA from other sources.

It's established that at least some varieties of Gray can either disguise themselves as human, or can subvert humans. This opens the door to the possibility that a lot more alien incursions in movies, particularly the ones where the aliens seem human and are walking among us in disguise, are actually covert grays.

Most Grays, on the whole, seem hostile or indifferent to humans. They generally minimize social interractions. Very few Grays will stop to have a conversation with humans, even in non-hostile situations. In a number of movies and television series, they appear to be operating under an agenda. They're here to get something done, and their activities and interactions with humans are a component of that agenda, nothing more.

In both the X-Files and Dark Skies television series, it appears that the Grays are taking over the planet. In the Arrival, they're actively engaged in terraforming the planet. Again, there are other movies, such as Mark Hamill's Time Runner, or the Invaders, in which aliens disguised as humans infiltrate with the object of taking over the planet or terraforming.

Indeed, I think that the defining hallmark of the Grays, as opposed to most of the other recognizeable aliens who show up in the modern era, is that the Grays are the only organized hostiles. Other nasty aliens show up, but they're invariably one shot monsters, or they're non-technological giger type monsters. Only the Grays keep showing up in numbers, using advanced technology, and operating according to a plan.

There's quite a lot more that can be written about the Grays, and at some point, it would be worthwhile to catalogue every appearance of the Grays in 80's and 90's movies and television, along with probable hidden grays. But for our purposes. But it all comes down to:

They're Gray, they plan to Stay, get used to it.

But I have other fish to fry, because in a few minutes, I'm going to venture into territory not covered by the movies. Call it the Gray Mystery.

Because, here's the thing..... The Grays basically stop appearing in movies set in the future. Space Raiders, Battle of the Planets, Starship Troopers, Space Above and Beyond, Alien, you name it. We encounter other Aliens, but the Grays are remarkably absent. It's as if, sometime in the early 21st century, the Grays just vanish.

And let's face it, the Grays don't seem like a race to just quit.

In the Moontrap Timeline we can attribute a lot of the divergence between our world and that world to the malignant Grays, terraforming the planet in subtle ways, wreaking ecological and climactic havoc, and manipulating human governments and economies. Basically, what all those apocalypse and post-apocalypse movies mean is that the Grays have been behind the scenes taking us to pieces, and they've been successful at it. They're winning.

So why do they all just up and vanish? Why isn't the Earth of the 22nd century a Gray utopia and the human race surviving only as a few zoo specimens and tissue cultures?

Indeed, there's evidence that something is going wrong for the Grays. Independence Day is an alternate timeline of the Moontrap universe where the Grays invade in the late 1990's. It has to be an alternate timeline, a branching off, because in the main Moontrap timeline, history keeps happening to humanity for centuries, and the invasion doesn't happen.

But if you look at the X-Files, the invasion is pushed back to 2012, with at least a hint of an alternate timeline where the invasion took place then.

If you look at Time Runner, the alien invasion is taking place in 2022. Basically, in each alternate continuity, the date of the Gray invasion just keeps getting pushed back, until in the main Moontrap timeline, it doesn't happen at all.

So.... we've got a hidden history where the Grays show up on Earth as early as Roswell, where they immediately set to work subverting human governments and manipulating the Earth's climate and temperature, which in the late 80's, into the 90's and beyond results in massive economic dislocations, political collapse and ecological decline. But then, something goes wrong, their final invasions keep getting pushed back until they eventually don't happen at all, the grays vanish entirely from the future, and humanity makes it into space, meeting and warring on other alien races....

The Stormlord June 3rd, 2011 08:54 AM

Perhaps...something to do with the Kalium?

DValdron June 3rd, 2011 09:02 AM

Not quite.

But what other star spanning civilization/organization seems to be active in the general vicinity of Earth, and also disappears from future history?

The Stormlord June 3rd, 2011 09:18 AM Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4608845)

Not quite.

But what other star spanning civilization/organization seems to be active in the general vicinity of Earth, and also disappears from future history?

The Ryla Star Alliance or whatever it was.

DValdron June 3rd, 2011 10:14 AM

Yep. The Rylos Star Alliance, or Galactic Federation, a multi-racial united nations in space maintaining its own starfleet and galactic police, operating a prison a cosmic stone's throw from Earth, and maintaining quarantine on the dead zone.... and in particular, appearing to treat Earth like a protected planet. Powerful enough still that even the Predators have to sneak around when they come to earth.

What happens when the Galactic Federation finds out what the Grays are doing on Earth?

Here's the thing. There are no movies that cover this, and perhaps only the barest hints in the X-Files.

But here's what we've got:

1) A cluster of movies establishing the existence and operations of the Galactic Federation;

2) A cluster of movies indicating that from the late 80's onward, this Earth departs rapidly from our timeline and descends into an environmental and economic hellhole.

3) A cluster of movies about malignant alien invaders, some of which seem to explain (2).

So here's my thinking. The Grays are moving covertly on Earth, possibly to avoid the attention of the Federation until its too late.... ie, until they own Earth outright, or can establish their conquest so thoroughly that the Federation has no choice but to recognize them.

The Grays, however, keep getting exposed on Earth, in They Live, in The Arrival, in the X-Files, and eventually this comes to the attention of the Galactic Federation.

The Galactic Federation and the Grays throw down, off camera as it were, since no movie or television chronicles the war that must be going on over our heads.

The indirect result is that in alternate timelines, the invasion starts to fall to pieces, being pushed back further and further.

In the end, the invasion doesn't take place at all, the Grays are wiped out, and Earth is saved.... sort of....

Of course, the Grays have done a lot of damage, and that continues to play out over the 21st century. But without the Grays directing things, the world muddles along, humanity makes it into interplanetary and then interstellar space, corporations rise and rule, and the movie future we know takes place. Earth eventually dies, as it has in Jason X, but the human race is out among the stars.

For the Galactic Federation, its the last gasp. The war with the Grays over an insignificant frontier world damages many of the Federations worlds, and exhausts its resources. With the final defeat of the Grays, the Federation is dissolved, its member worlds going their separate ways.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 3rd, 2011 10:49 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by interpoltomo (Post 4608766)

Appleseed and ghost in the shell would be too optimistic imo, but sure he could give it a try.

Actually, in the fifth episode of the Sarah Connor Chrinicles "Queen Gambit", it's mentioned that computer programmer Andy Goode will take his computer, Turk II to a computer chess contest, whose winner will win a contract with the government. The turneament's final match is between Goode's Turk II (which will eventually be developed into Skynet) and an unspecified japanese development team. Due to Sarah and John's intervention, Goode looses (and is later killed by Derek Reese). Had he won, the Skinet timeline would follow. Since the Japanese team won instead, the Cyberbrain/Full Body Conversion tech of GITS was developed instead of the Cyberdyne endo.

About Grays: they seem too different to be a single race. Perhaps they are a coalition of races, or a parasitic Goa'uld like race able to take physical control of other beings.

More on the japanese take on the story: in the Macross timeline a "Global Civil War" is mentoned to take place in the late '90, immediately before the alien space fortress crash-lands in the Pacific (an offshot of the Gray/Rylan war?).

So far, what we've got is a mercurial timeline that's constantly rearranging itself due to interference both from outer space and time. Here's a rough outline:

35000 years ago: first aliens (Greys) come to primitive Earth 16000 years ago: advanced human civilization develops (proto-culture?). Contacts with alien Predators. Possible emergence of the Rylan Star Alleance. 15000 years ago: Kalium war. The Rylan Alleance is pushed back toward the Frontier. Earth sector is quarantined. 12000 years ago: a cybertronian landing party reaches Earth in search of Energon. 2000 years ago: a T800 terminator arrives in Palestine near Bethlehem and kills the Three Kings from the East :D 1947: Roswell Incident. 1984: a T800 arrives in Los Angeles to kill Sarah Connor. It Fails due to Kyle Reese's intervention. Late 1984: John Connor is born. Cyberdyne begins Project: Skinet, based on T800 remnants (basically Skynets both creates and destroys itself by creating John Connor). 1986: crime on the rise. (divergent: Line 2) 1988: NYC is turned into a maximum security prison. (Line 2) 1991: Kremlin Coup. Boris Yelstin dies. (Line 2) 1992: Global Civil War/WWIII begins (Line 2). 1993: Australian Government collapses (Lines 2) 1994: A second terminator is sent to kill John Connor (Line 1) 1995, July 2: first alien invasion (averted, Line 3) 1996: Manticore Project begins (incidentally, the Transgenic soldiers were developed to combat an eugenetic cult) (divergent, Line 4) 1997, August 30: Judgement day (Line 1, averted) World War Three ends (Line 2) 1999: the pulse (Line 4) SDF-1 crash-lands in the Pacific (Line 5) Sarah and John Connor are sent into the future along with a female terminator, creating Line 7. 2000: An eartquake hits LA (Line 2) 2004, July 25: Judgement Day (Line 6) 2007: Sarah, John and Cameron re-appear in Line 7 LA. Andy Goode dies, leading to lines 7a and 7b. 2009: Zentradi invasion (Line 5). 2011, april 21: Judgement day (Line 7) 2012: a planned alien invasion is evidently called off. 2013: Snake Plissken fries all of Earth's tech (Line 2). 2018: Event of Terminator: Salvation take place (Line 6). 2019: Events of Blade Runner and Dark Angel take place (Line ?) 2022: Another alien invasion. World war IV/Vietnam War II according to Ghost in the Shell. 2027: Skynet is destroyed. Before that, a few terminators are sent back in time (Lines 1, 6, 7). Second Robotech War (Line 5). 2029: Puppetmaster and Motoko Kusanagi interact. Floods are hinted at in this TL due to the climatic effects of WWIII and IV) (Line 7a). 2031: GITS:SAC 1st gig (Line 7b) 2032: GITS: Innocence (Line 7a) 2033: Invid Invasion (Line 5)

DValdron June 3rd, 2011 11:45 AM

I'm going to tread lightly on the Terminators for a little while longer. They, and the Giger Aliens deserve their own special treatment. Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 3rd, 2011 11:49 AM

All right. On a side note, would Predators count as Giger aliens or are they in their own category?

DValdron June 3rd, 2011 03:39 PM

Giger aliens would include the following movies: Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Alien Resurrection, Biohazard, Deep Space, Dead Space, Forbidden World, Creature, Scared to Death, Syngenor, Alien Predator, Alien Contamination, Hybrid, Star Crystal, Species, Horror Planet, Inseminoid, Parasite, Xtro and particularly Xtro2, Creepozoid, The Terror Within I and II, and a whole bunch of others.

Basically, extremely rapidly growing creatures, non-technological predators, with a multi-stage life cycle, usually starting with an egg, a 'chestbuster' like larval form, and a kick ass adult, encountered both on Earth and in Deep Space.

Most notably the adult form is a rape monster, very interested in incorporating humans in its reproductive cycle, usually in fatal ways.

Adult form is typically black, looks like it's either armoured or wearing muscles on the outside, is accompanied by slime, and tends to be extremely dangerous. The most dangerous are the pureblood aliens. But 2nd and 3rd generation critters are recognizable.

interpoltomo June 3rd, 2011 10:40 PM

Please save the terminators for another timeline, so that we can avoid time travel. Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 4th, 2011 05:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by interpoltomo (Post 4611632)

Please save the terminators for another timeline, so that we can avoid time travel.

Given how the Grays just disappear from the TL at some point, I don't think we can avoid time travel anyway. What seems to be emerging here in fact is a multi-temporal war that is fought by more than just two sides.

On one side we have the Humans, us, that are loosing in the beginning but then appear to be bringing the war back to the enemy. Opposite we have the Grays, for which the reverse seems to be true. In the middle we have the Giger Monsters, including the Bugs from Starship Troopers. In the shadows lurk the Predators and various bounty hunters or escapees from the space prison, which is run by the Rylan Alleance (that is opposed to the Grays, but not necessarily allied to us). Between an alien invasion and a global caastrophe, there's the occasional rise of the machines popping out. Then there are the internal splits: Humans are divided between corporatives (pursuing their own agendas) agents of the Government (playing both sides of the fence) rebels like Ripley and Snake Plissken (usually just trying to survive) and the military (thinking with their muscles and generally just looking for something else to blow up). The Rylan alleance can't really hold the Frontier against Xur (clearly a major villain that controls a fleet equal, if not superior to that of the Alleance calling itself the Ko-dan Armada). There doesn't seem to be any split between the Grays, but they may be another Rylan alleance splinter faction (that would make Xur a Gray; Maybe Ko-dan is the name by which the Gray call themselves). Giger Monsters just want to feed and reproduce, so let's just ignore the...:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek ::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:: eek: BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! let's NOT ignore them. Machines, as Dvaldron says, should be treated separately. However, Dvaldron may have forgotten one side of the war (but they appear to be neutral anyway): the subaquean jellyfish-like things seen in The Abyss, which are different than, say, the standard Giger monster of Leviathan.

interpoltomo June 4th, 2011 08:14 AM

The Grays vanishing could be explained by their homeworld dying and their civilization being destroyed as a result.

The dying homeworld could explain why they were so desperate to invade and attempt to terraform earth.

DValdron June 4th, 2011 08:47 AM

It's possible that the Grays are ended by their homeworld dying. But then again, they've got an aggressive schedule with us.

I don't think that the Moontrap timeline amounts to a temporal war. Most of it is pretty linear, with occasional branchings off into alternate outcomes.

However, its hard to get around the Terminators, and its difficult to pull the Terminators out of the timeline.

In addition to the main Terminator series, you have Hands of Steel, Steel Justice, Crash and Burn, Android, ROTOR, Vindicator, Digital Man, Cyborg Cop, Eve of Destruction, Robocop and a bunch of others.

As I've noted, generally, they exhibit an atypical level of technology for the general setting, and the software package is kind of hinky. Without overusing time travel, my thinking is that almost all the humanoid robots are derivatives of the Cyberdyne 'terminator' chassis and software package... which explains why they repeatedly turn homicidal.

But it's not the only area where technology exceeds our own. In some areas, the Moontrap Universe is fairly backwards. They're still working with tape decks and stuff like that. But space travel is further advanced. 1993 - Primal Scream deals with a research lab around saturn. As time goes on there's a colony on the moon, several missions to mars, and by 2020 we see the first effort at an interstellar mission. By the late 21st century there are colonies on Mars and the beginnings of interstellar expeditions.

Mikey June 4th, 2011 10:40 AM

I know they're well after the era for this time line, but Doctor Who's recent villain, the Silence, would be an excellent fit. Earth infiltrators, armed with the ability to make anyone who sees them forget the moment they close their eyes. But just enough ability to manipulate in that time so that some ideas are planted. They're Greys, of a sort.

And if anyone's seen Dollhouse, that's a path towards rapidly diverging classes in the United States.

DValdron June 4th, 2011 11:48 AM

Second American Civil War

Following the end of World War III, in 1998, both the Soviet Union and the United States were devasted. Although nuclear weapons had barely been used, both countries had still suffered heavily, and runaway biological weapons, particularly infertility plagues, continued to wreak havoc. The worldwide disruption of trade inflicted further misery on an already shaky American economy, and federal rule had departed from large parts of the country, crime and violence were rampant, and in many areas, there was a shift towards city states, often corporate dominated.

Escape from L.A.: This was the setting of the Presidential election of 2000, a country reeling from disasters and desperately looking for a return to stability. The leading presidential candidate was Reverend James Joseph the 2nd, aka Jimmy Joe II, from the newly established Fundamentalist party.

On August 23, 2000, a 9.6 earthquake hit California, flooding the San Fernando valley and separating Los Angeles from the mainland. Robertson had just prior predicted such an Earthquake while denouncing LA as the land of sin. For many of his followers, the prediction was a sign of divine guidance. Bouyed by the disaster, Robertson sweeps into power.

President Joe then began to implement a semi-theocratic state. A constitutional amendment rendered him President for Life. The capital of the US was moved from Washington to Lynchburg. He instituted a series of morality laws banning rock music, tobacco, alcohol, red meat, firearms, non-christian religions, and non-marital sex. People who broke these laws had their citizenships revoked, a measure which allowed President Robertson to enforce 'Fundamentalist majorities' in senate elections.

Despite these initiatives, the grip of fundamentalism in America was far from complete. President Robertson was forced to respect rival power centers - particularly the American armed forces which retained a high degree of autonomy.

The American military during this period continued its super-soldier program, begun in 1996, (Soldier, Dark Angel) shifting many of its more questionable operations out to the west coast where theocratic rule was weakest.

Corporate interests, and the cities that they dominated, were also somewhat exempt from theocratic influence. Devastated regions and remote cities also experienced some degree of independence, and the 'free cities' political movement was strong. Los Angeles joined New York as a city wide penal colony, as seen in New Jack City in 2005.

By 2009, theocratic control, nevertheless, was fairly complete. Many Americans were fleeing to Mexico and Canada, and there was a concerted attempt by the government to rewrite and erase history. (Rising Storm)

During this period, the United States was embroiled in a succession of military conflicts with Latin America. In defense, several Latin American states formed a coalition government to resist the United States militarily. Conflict with the United States ranged from guerilla resistance to full scale armed conflict. Towards 2013, this began to escalate, and the Latin Americans began to plan for an armed invasion of the West Coast, the weakest part of President Joe's regime.

In 2013, the President's daughter was seduced by Peruvian guerilla leader, Cuervo Jones, fleeing to Los Angeles. Jones had managed to gain effective control of LA, and was using it as a base of operations to organize an invasion. More important than the President's daughter, however, was the theocracies 'ultimate weapon', a targeted electromagnetic pulse kill switch, a means by which armies, cities, even whole countries could be selectively shut off.

Known terrorist and criminal, Snake Plissken was sent into LA to recover the kill switch, and did so successfully. However, by this time, the invasion was underway. At this point, Plissken had the choice to side with the theocracy, or the latin american invaders. In the end, he chose neither, setting the Kill Switch worldwide and crashing electronics and computer systems all over the planet.

At that point, the American government collapsed. The President and the key elements of his command structure were trapped in California, in the midst of a latin American invasion, and were lost.

However, the center of President Joe's power remained in Lynchburg. Crippled by the electromagnetic pulse, it nevertheless quickly reconstituted itself, renaming itself the Republic of Gilead, and attempting to exert authority over the whole of the United States.

Unfortunately, the rulers of Gilead had no interest in the compromises that President Jimmy Joe II was forced to make. Instead, they sought out confrontation. Ironically, when the theocracy was at its weakest, that was the point at which it became most extreme and uncompromising.

The result was civil war. The American Armed forces split, with those units out side of the core territories of Gilead rebelling and seeking a reconstituted United States. Their ideology was theoretically pro-democracy, but in practical terms they were fascistic. (The Handmaid's Tale)

A third faction emerged in the Civil War, the 'so called' Free Cities. The Free Cities were the weakest faction, many of the cities maintained varying degrees of neutrality, but were in many ways the most democratic and idealistic of the factions. (Barb Wire)

The Civil War ran from 2013 to 2017, at the end of which, Gilead was crushed. The latin American invasion of the west failed to amount to anything, given the electromagnetic disruption and the loss of their supply bases in Latin america.

The United States military established control over the American territories, and reinstituted a government. But this was to be a fascist regime, using blood sport game shows, like the Running Man, and clamping down hard on democracy. Still, except for the military this was a weak government, and it lacked the resources or interest to recover the devastated territories, particularly the growing central desert that was turning the midwest into the forbidden zone. It also deferred to corporations, allowing various cities high degrees of autonomy.

In particular, Seattle (Dark Angel) remained largely autonomous. Portland aka New Los Angeles became the fiefdom of the Tyrell Android corporation (Blade Runner). Omnicorp ruled Detroit (Robocop). Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 5th, 2011 03:34 AM

Tyrell Android corporation Omnicorp Cyberdyne

What all of these have in common?

Dark Angel: Manticore is clearly a branch of the military rather than a corporation. It is stated however, that South Africa is a major world power in the 2020s.

There is also mention of an "off world colony" (blade Runner) but that may be just wishful thinking.

Thoughts: we have a fractured States of America that had a surprisingly high technological boom after every electronic device was switched off; that means that the kill switch was not so worldwide as the Theocracy stated it would be, or that someone had some mighty ECM shield (possibly Japan, that would explain a lot) or both. So we have high tech major cities in the former US, loosely connected (or unconnected; what's left of the highways and railways after the wars may not amount to much). What's left of the Americas outside of those citystates (some of which may have become part of a new Canada) is a third world wasteland, covering everything south of Portland all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Britain is in chaos. South Africa is a major military power. Australia has collapsed (Mad Max). Japan is the new technological superpower. China is a major power too, but it is less than stable politically and it cannot stand Japanese concorrence; many asian refugee have created an independent republic of Dejima around 2030. By that time, most of Europe has recovered too (GITS: SAC). Indochina is mostly in shambles.

Shevek23 June 5th, 2011 09:14 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4613085)

Following the end of World War III, in 1998, both the Soviet Union and the United States were devasted.

....

On August 23, 2000, a 9.6 earthquake hit California, flooding the San Fernando valley and separating Los Angeles from the mainland. Robertson...

Um, "Robertson"="Jimmy Joe," right? Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4613085)

had just prior predicted such an Earthquake while denouncing LA as the land of sin. For many of his followers, the prediction was a sign of divine guidance. Bouyed by the disaster, Robertson sweeps into power.

.... In particular, Seattle (Dark Angel) remained largely autonomous. Portland aka New Los Angeles became the fiefdom of the Tyrell Android corporation (Blade Runner). Omnicorp ruled Detroit (Robocop).

Whoa! I just can't see Portland turning into the hyper-LA we saw in Bladerunner! That movie is clearly an extrapolation of what Los Angeles was visibly turning into in the 80s and 90s. The exploding natural gas towers were just so iconic of where we were headed (I lived in Pasadena from 1983 to 1992). It's much too big, much too sprawly, much too layered with generations of broken-down hubris to be anyplace but Los Angeles itself.

Portland may have its own dark potentials but I don't think it can evolve into Bladerunnerville.

I think it would be better to integrate Bladerunner into this timeline by having Los Angeles get reintegrated into the new USA largely on its own terms (by which we mean, the terms of the megacorps like Tyrell that ruled. But LA is insulated (to put it wryly!) from the theocracy by its period as an anarchic abandoned area, during which the corporations gradually resecured their grip via divide and rule manipulations of the gangs and appearing to offer safety and order to many. Meanwhile the climate's going all wonky, leading to Northwest coast style Pineapple Express torrential rains and ongoing drizzle.

DValdron June 5th, 2011 11:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Hastur of Carcosa (Post 4615529)

Dark Angel: Manticore is clearly a branch of the military rather than a corporation. Correct. We see the beginnings of Manticore in 1996. It's clearly the super-soldier program that inducts Kurt Russell in Soldier. The training regime includes genetic enhancements in later generations, as we see in Soldier... which links up nicely with Dark Angel.

Note that Soldier is clearly presented as a 'Sidequel' to Blade Runner. There's a deliberate reference to the battle of Tannhauser Gates, one of the battles referenced by Roy Batty in Blade Runner. Also, the flying car from Blade Runner is seen in the junkyard.

The implication is that Soldier and Blade Runner are connected. But Soldier also connects to Dark Angel through the super-soldier program. Dark Angel connects to Escape From LA, because in Dark Angel 'terrorists' detonated a worldwide EMP pulse that temporarily shut down civilization, allowing Max to escape. The approximate time frame for Max's escape is about the same time that Snake Plissken is detonating his EMP pulse.

Which starts to make you wonder about cloning in this world. Todd, the loyal soldier in Soldier is a dead ringer for Snake Plissken, the renegade soldier. Perhaps a clone?

Perhaps in the Moontrap world, the earliest iteration of super-soldier programs was the attempt to clone a handful of exemplary soldiers. In fact this is pretty much a lock. Russell, Shwarzenegger, Van Damme and a few other templates show up repeatedly.

Quote:

There is also mention of an "off world colony" (blade Runner) but that may be just wishful thinking.

Don't think so. Space travel tech is a lot more developed in this world. As noted, in the 1990's, we've got factories as far out as saturn, moonbases, and space stations. Mars exploration is a bit problematic. Moon 44 suggests heavy industrial development in the asteroid field.

Quote: Thoughts: we have a fractured States of America that had a surprisingly high technological boom after every electronic device was switched off; that means that the kill switch was not so worldwide as the Theocracy stated it would be, or that someone had some mighty ECM shield (possibly Japan, that would explain a lot) or both.

I think that the kill switch would only be a temporary expedient. Everything shuts down for a few days or weeks, and a lot of data gets lost. But there's back ups, recovery systems, work arounds, things get put back together again, though imperfectly.

The technological boom is not universal. Some places go very high tech. Some places end up being pretty nice to live. The San Diego of Demoltion Man is a pretty cushy territory. Other places in America reduce back to third world hellholes.

Quote:

So we have high tech major cities in the former US, loosely connected (or unconnected; what's left of the highways and railways after the wars may not amount to much).

Correct. Also corporate consolidation seems to mean an emphasis on proprietary technology, no sharing, no licensing. And the consumer economy we're used to is largely gone.

Quote:

What's left of the Americas outside of those citystates (some of which may have become part of a new Canada) is a third world wasteland, covering everything south of Portland all the way to Tierra del Fuego.

There are recurrent mentions of South American wars. The Arnie of the Running Man and the Arnie of Sixth Day both spent time fighting in the army in South America.

It's difficult to establish what state South America is in. Circuitry Man II is set in part in Brazil and indicates that large parts of the Brazilian Rainforest have been turned into a mud crusted desert baked hard as concrete.

Quote:

Britain is in chaos.

Seems to be. Basically, functioning British state, possibly a detour into fascism, and wrestling with global warming and decline of living standards. Max Headroom may give us our best view.

Italy seems to have fallen apart completely into a Road Warrior style free for all. Warriors of the Wasteland depicts death cults running amuk. France is also having a hard time, as we see in Delicatessen. Germany, not so sure, but given that it was probably ground zero for WWIII.... yikes.

Quote:

South Africa is a major military power.

Probably by default.

Quote:

Australia has collapsed (Mad Max).

All the way through to Tank Girl. Yeah, Australia is screwed.

Quote:

Japan is the new technological superpower. Judging by Johnny Mnemonic, New Rose Hotel and a few others... Yeppers. Japan seems to have rode out the Pulse untouched, which means that they probably had a lot of shielding, or very good back up.

Interestingly, the Soviet Union or Russia mostly disappears off the radar. There's Murder by Moonlight, featuring a Russian officer on the Moon, and there's a Rutger Hauer vehicle set there, but... very little activity.

In Crash and Burn, Robot Jox and Robot Wars, there's an implication that Russia has been subsumed into a European confederation. But this is around the mid 21st century.

[quote]China is a major power too, but it is less than stable politically and it cannot stand Japanese concorrence; many asian refugee have created an independent republic of Dejima around 2030. By that time, most of Europe has recovered too (GITS: SAC).

Possible. What's the 'GITS:SAC' reference?

Quote:

Indochina is mostly in shambles.

Oliver Gruner's Nemesis is set somewhat in Indonesia.

Coalition June 5th, 2011 03:46 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by interpoltomo (Post 4612387)

The Grays vanishing could be explained by their homeworld dying and their civilization being destroyed as a result.

The dying homeworld could explain why they were so desperate to invade and attempt to terraform earth.

Plus, the Ethereals taking over, and forcing them to fight? (X-Com: UFO Defense). Add in the entity from Terror from the Deep and you have a recipe for advanced technology being produced even during a global catastrophe. Between UFO Defense and TftD the nations change names and borders, indicating some sort of war happened (the most common fan idea is that with all the weapons you sold to make money/avoid going bankrupt in the first game, quite a few nations had well-armed rebellions on their hands afterwards).

The other history from X-Com would be UFO: Aftermath where an alien ship rains spores down on Earth, to Xenoform it. Assuming the humans choose to fight off the aliens, and maange to keep Earth, we can go from there.

For GitS:SAC, that looks like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

DValdron June 5th, 2011 04:51 PM

I'm not sure how influential video games of the 80's and 90's were to the film and television Sci fi gestalt. I'm not really familiar enough with them to comment one way or the other.

Gosing June 5th, 2011 06:05 PM Awesome idea! Do you mind if I try my hand at making a single timeline for the whole thing?

Gosing June 6th, 2011 04:19 AM

Sorry to bump this, but it occured to me that havong Carter score an upset victory in 1980 (possibly with a bit of behind-the-scenes grey support) would serve our purposes well for three reasons:

1) It would help repress the growing tide of social conservatism in America, allowing it to fester and grow until it finally breaks and gains total control of the US following WWIII.

2) Contrary to popular belief, Reagan actually increased relations with the USSR; replace him with a hawkier Republican (which there will probably be many of, seeing the general apocalyptic state of America in the '80s) and you make WWIII a lot smoother transition from the '80s.

3) Much as it pains me to say it, Reagan helped break America out of her psychological malaise; his few quick and easy victories (see Granada) helped shake off the sting of Vietnam, and he generally managed to restore confidence in America by Americans. IMO, our purposes (a US with several Third World areas that's quickly sliding towards dictatorship) would be better served by a couple of bungled military operations and enhanced economic troubles in the '80s (again, our friends the Greys could help).

Also, since you're going for a 70s-80s "End of the World As We Know It", you should probably work in Peak Oil somehow.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 6th, 2011 04:38 AM

1 Attachment(s) A tentative map of the timeline so far:

DValdron June 7th, 2011 02:17 PM The Space Jockey, from Alien

Alien actually gave us two separate aliens. Everyone is familiar with the predatory monster that menaced the crew of the Nostromo, but that alien was merely cargo on the ship of another long dead alien, the so-called Space Jockey.

For convenience, we’ll call the Space-Jockey’s race, the Archeron’s, named after the planet that the corpse was discovered on. But clearly, the ship merely crashed there, it’s not the homeworld, or even a colony world of these creatures.

But what the hell, we’ve got to call them something, and Archeron is a suitably imposing name.

Okay, so what does Alien tell us about these Archeron’s?

We have one specimen to make observations of. This specimen appears to be long dead. We must assume that it’s appearance has been deformed by an extended period of dehydration, dessication, decomposition and calcification. It appears to have been partially overlaid with limestone or calcium carbonate, leaving the corpse looking like a part of its control couch.

Some rough features can be worked out. The corpse is gigantic, somewhere between nine and fifteen feet tall. It bears the explosion of a chestburster, the wound and damage indicating that its rib structure extends further down its torso than human. It appears to be biped, with two legs, two arms, a torso and a head in loosely human proportions. The head and face appear clearly nonhuman, although we can’t tell what it may have looked like.

As the planet itself isn’t it’s native world, or even a suitable colony world, we can’t make many inferences about its environment and habitat. Obviously, by its size, it might be better suited to a world with lower gravity, but that’s a guess.

The architecture and tunnels of the ship are built to the monsters scale. Clearly it’s the pilot. Unlike Giger’s monsters, these creatures were a technological spacefaring culture.

They also appear to be intimately connected to Giger’s aliens. Not only was the pilot a victim, but obviously, the spaceship was tranporting massive numbers of the Giger aliens.

There is one very delicious hint in Alien, that humans are not unfamiliar with the Archeron’s, that they’ve encountered them, or at least their ruins or relics, before. The Nostromo’s computer, and the corporation, are able to break down enough of the Archeron’s code to determine that the beacon is actually a warning beacon, rather than a rescue beacon.

Think about that. How’s your Swahili? Here’s a perfectly sensible Earth language, created by actual human beings, using human logic and human evolutionary wiring, separated by at most a few thousand years of separate development from our own language.... How comfortable would you be in distinguishing the phrase “There’s a poisonous snake in the room, stay away!” From “Come here, I wish to lick your love pump!”

Now arguably, an intelligent race would attempt to use very basic, easy to understand or analyse codes to transmit its rescue or warning messages. On the other hand, the Archeron’s weren’t necessarily giving a warning to everyone in the Universe, but only to their own ships, and possibly other spacefaring races they had some basis of communication with. Let’s be serious, but without history or context, we’d need at least a key of some sort, to start unravelling anything but recurring patterns.

So, there’s a chance that humans have run up against Archeron relics before this. That such finds, while rare, are extremely valuable. And that previous work on the Archeron’s, has provided at least some basic understanding of alien signal codes.

Has humanity encountered Archeron remains before? Let’s take a look at other movies which show extinct giant nonhuman aliens, their ruins and relics and which may be associated with Giger Monsters.

Creature is a movie about a Giger monster released from its container on an abandoned alien base on Titan. As with Alien, the monster itself seems to be associated with, but distinct from the builders of the alien base. Although we don’t see much of the alien complex, the size or scale suggests creatures on the lines of the Archeron found in Alien. There’s enough overlap here that we might see this as evidence of the Archerons.

Total Recall may give us another indirect glimpse of the Archerons, and a few more clues as to their nature. At the core of the story is another set of alien ruins, this time, a gigantic terraforming machine designed to melt the Martian ice caps and release trapped gases from the crust, creating an earthlike atmosphere. As in Alien and Creature, the scale of the ruins or mechanism is immense, suggesting giants. Most tellingly, the activating mechanism is a gigantic three clawed handprint, indicating a giant humanoid, but inhuman creature. Archerons again?

Mars is an odd place though. At least three Alien cycle movies, Alien Contamination, Star Crystal and Species II, are connected with it. Each of these manifestations is quite different, but given that the Archerons seem to be connected with Giger monsters, this reinforces the idea that the Total Recall complex is an Archeron facility. If the Archerons, in Total Recall, were committed enough to Mars to make a serious attempt at terraforming it, then we’d expect to find multiple traces of them, including even multiple forms of their Giger monsters.

But that raises a question for us. Why bother to terraform Mars, or build a base on Titan for that matter, when there’s a perfectly good life supporting planet waiting to be taken over: Earth?

Given their huge size, it may be that the Archerons simply preferred colder, smaller worlds, and Earth, for the most part, was too hot and heavy. Despite this, as we’ll see later, there’s substantial evidence that the Archerons were active on Earth.

Horror Planet is set further in the future than any of our films so far. It’s another trip to a dead alien world full of the ruins a dead civilization. We never see the creatures that made this civilization, but they appeared to have built on a massive scale. But the ruins retain psychic activity acting as traps for the unwary. Like Terror Planet, we see a smaller world and colder, starker environment, a place somewhere between Mars and Earth, perhaps more along the lines of what the Archerons preferred.

Terror Planet - Alien ruins are again discovered on a dead world. The planet is smaller and colder than Earth. A female crew member is impregnated by an Archeron or Archeron technology and slaughters her fellows. In Terror Planet, we get a look at what might well be a live, or at least a holographic or psychic representation of a live Archeron.

The image is of a yellow/orange creature, massively built, with thick torso, short or absent neck, a peaked head, with protruding eyes, or orbital plates and a wide mouth. We don’t know if it is a real creature that impregnates its victim, or simply automatic machinery. The impregnation itself appears to be suspiciously mechanical, but the image, real or not, seems bona fide. Certainly the little creatures appear to take after daddy.

What conclusions can we draw about the Archerons? For one thing, they built big and they built well. In almost all of these films, the alien machinery or complexes continue to be at least partially functional. In Alien, the crashed ship continues to pump out its warning beacon, and to maintain the screen over the pods. In Total Recall, all it requires to activate is the press of a button. The installation on Horror Planet remains lethal. Even in Creature or Terror Planet, there are indications of functionality in the preservation and revival of the monster.

They were the progenitor species. Their complexes or bases appear on worlds through the human range. Their starships appear to have been gigantic, they were masters of literally every science, psychic, biological and technological, and appeared to use these in various combinations.

The Archerons appear to have been skilled biological manipulators. Several times they are associated directly or indirectly with Giger monsters, and appear to be the means by which these monsters find their way from planet to planet. They may have created the Giger monsters, or simply adapted a life form they encountered on their travels. In either case, the diversity we’ve seen in these creatures may be a factor of specialization by the Archerons, who used them as living tools.

But let’s return to the question: Why bother to terraform Mars, when Earth is right next door? Why not just go to Earth?

In fact, there is ample evidence that the Archerons did go to Earth. In Aliens vs Predator, the action takes place at a giant alien underground complex in which humans, Giger monsters and Predators battle it out. Well let’s face it, the Giger monsters didn’t get there on their own. Some other alien race had to bring them there, and the Predators seem unlikely. It’s possible that some other race of now extinct or long gone alien giants was also transporting Giger monsters, but let’s get realistic, the likelihood is that it’s the same species as the space jockey in Alien.

In another series, Starhunter, it is revealed that aliens visited Earth some four million years ago and implanted a hidden cluster of genes in the protohuman species. These genes, when activated, conferred hyperspatial abilities.

In Hybrid fossil DNA is used to reconstruct a Giger monster. As we’ve noted, Archerons and Giger monsters appear to be related, the presence of one suggests the presence of the other. In fact, during the late twentieth century, there were several outbreaks of Giger monsters on Earth. Most of these were the result of military biowarfare, either research projects gone amuck, or warfare induced mutations. It’s likely that ancient traces of the Archerons Giger monsters were found and used to create new generations as potential weapons.

So why not just take Earth? We can’t know for sure. Overall, from what we’ve seen of other ruins, the Archerons seemed to prefer smaller, colder worlds than our own. On earth, they preferred a base in the Antarctic. Their decision to fix up Mars rather than move in on Earth is suggestive. Both Titan and Mars are relatively small worlds. No size is given for the worlds of Terror Planet or Horror Planet, but these planets give the impression of being cold, with thin windy atmospheres.

The Archerons, gigantic size may suggest a smaller planet with lighter gravity. The picture that comes about is of a creature evolved to a smaller planet, perhaps between Mars and Earth, in size, with a thinner atmosphere and lower temperatures, probably further out from the sun. Earth was simply too heavy, too hot, the air too thick, the ecology too robust.

The Archerons reign is indistinct. Their age appears to have been a few million years ago, although some estimates may put them as recently as a few hundred thousand. Aside from possible genetic tampering, there is no indication that they ever interracted meaningfully with either modern or prehistoric humans (apart from possible genetic tampering), or any other alien race we are aware of.

Other aliens, so far as we know, seem to be as in the dark about them as we are. Nor is there any explanation for their apparent disappearance, except perhaps that they may have been consumed by their own creations.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 8th, 2011 02:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4626465)

Well, somebody would know: the Predators. Maybe if we asked very nice......

Come think of it, the Predators are the exact opposite of the Acheron: they are stocky, roughly human sized and prefer hotter climates. They do have a technology of sort, but unlike the scientifically oriented Acheron, their society is organized in a rather primitive fashon. They also seem to consider Earth their own hunting reserve, or an exotic holyday place where to have some good sport. There appears to be some agreement between the two species. Possibly, our homeworld was too wild for the Acheron, that would also have been too weak in our gravity despite their size. They are the galaxy,s nerds (and like all nerds, they are less than lucky with women). Predators on the other end were the jockey sporting type. So, let's them have Earth as their playfield. Which is kinda scary.....

anon_user June 9th, 2011 11:42 PM

A random thought: could the Talking Heads song Life During Wartime be set during the Second ACW? The song was written in the same period as the films already in the TL, and the lyrics kinda fit the tone. Not much new info, though Houston, Detroit and Pittsburgh all got hit, and there's also gun-running going on.

I'm mainly posting, though, to say that this is an awesome idea and that I'm looking forward to more.

DValdron June 10th, 2011 12:08 AM

Thank you. It's sort of all over the place, but I'd like to think I'm getting the ideas out there.

I think that the Predators may well have overlapped with the Archerons, but I'm not sure how much contact there would have been.

The Archerons seem to be really really old. On at least a couple of movies set on Earth, the 'Giger' monsters exist as fossilized relics, notably in Hybrid, starring Mark Dacascos (by the way, Mark Dacascos is just an amazingly good actor and martial artist, I recommend anything he's in). And there's also an ancient preserved relic giger monster buried in an asteroid in 'Within the Rock.' Implication is that its very, very, very bad.

If the Archerons are the alien race that implanted the 'Divinity Cluster' gene complex in protohumans (and I think it's pretty likely), then the Archerons date to approximately four million years ago, according to Star Hunter.

The thing is, if we look around, it's clear that someone was in the solar system in a very very big way. There's an alien zoo/lab in ruins on Titan for instance, looks like a major complex (Creature). There's also planetary scale terraforming equipment on Mars (Total Recall). And indications of widespread contamination of the Martian surface with some very strange, giger-type things (Alien Contamination, Species II, Star Crystal).

Now, it's possible that the solar system has been visited by a whole bunch of aliens, who built major infrastructure on different planets at different times.

But my thinking is that the better, and more simpler approach, is to assume that if Aliens are doing similar scale planetary meddling on Earth, Titan and Mars, and Giger- type monsters keep showing up in association, then it's probably all a single alien race...

I mean, if it is one alien race, and they're building big on Mars... then its simple and likely that they're building big on Titan and on Earth at the same time.

So, Occam's Razor dictates that its a single species, the Archerons. And Star Hunter tells us that the Archerons period was about four million years ago.

Other evidence to support that? Possibly. One thing is that the pure-line Giger Monsters, the 'Alien' are incredibly rare. They've only been found twice. Once in the derelict spaceship on Archeron, in the 25th century, and once in a mysterious antarctic complex on Earth...

The Archerons appear to have been all over the solar system, and all over the Galaxy (Galaxy of Terror, Horror Planet), and they're definitely associated with Giger monsters (definitely through the Space Jockey, but a lot of Archeron type things seem associated with Giger type creatures). But the incredible scarcity of the pure strain Giger monsters suggests that the Archerons were a long long time ago.

Getting back to Alien vs Predator, this leads us to wonder if maybe that gigantic Antarctic pyramid/rubik's cube under the ice was actually originally an Archeron installation, perhaps taken over, retrofitted and redecorated by Predators and Humans.

After all, what are the giger aliens doing there at all? They're definitely not indigenous to Earth. So either the Predators brought them or the Archerons did. But why would the Predators bother? And if Predators are restocking the Giger aliens as hunting species, why aren't they much more widespread?

Anyway, now that I'm thinking of it, I think I want to go back to Starhunter, the Divinity Cluster, the Archerons, and follow that thread....

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 10th, 2011 03:25 AM Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4626465)

If we take the Alien and Predator franchise alone, we have nine movies, with a single coherent timeline that goes from 1987 to 2395. As movie quality goes, they should probably have stopped at three (Alien, Predator, Aliens), but the other six, and by your extention, a smattering of others, gives us some clues and the possibility to build a rough timeline.

First and foremost: was the Acheron distress signal already known? Most certainly yes. Many clues in the first Alien Movie, and in both the first Predator and Alien Versus Predator, make us think that not only Acheron technology and xenomorphs were encountered before,but that the Nostromo's Mother computer didn't bump on the crash site by chance, but had been secretly programmed to actively search for it.

Quote:

Let's have a look at the events:

In 1987 a Predator is first encountered in the jungles of Guatemala, by a unit of american soldiers (incidentally, that fits the deteriorating international situation that led to more wars in Latin America). 1997: a second Predator is encountered in crime ridden Los Angeles. this only tangentially fits the larger chronology, as the city is indeed unusually hot (first signs of global warming) and very crime ridden, but no mention is made of WWIII (east coast should have been heavily bombarded with nerve gas and chemical weapons by this time; LA should have bigger problems that some drug dealers and an unusually hot summer).

At the end of the movie it is implied that Predators have been visiting Earth for centuries.

somewhere between 2004 and 2007: A huge structure extraterrestrial in origin is found in Antartica, and a team is sent to investigate by Leyland Corporation (AVP). A preadator starship departing from the place later crashlands in Gunnison, Colorado. the city is nuked by the Army. Recovered Predator technology is confiscated and presented to a Ms. Yutani (alien versus Predator: Requiem).

2011: A group of soldiers and criminals is captured and taken to a Predator hunting preserve. Reference is made by one of them to the 1987 encounter with the extraterrestrials (predators).

2030: Weyland Corporation and Yutani Industries merge http:// avp.wikia.com/wiki/Weyland-Yutani

Unknown date: Giger-like DNA is found on Mars (Species II and III).

2070-2085: Acheron terraforming technology is found on Mars (Total Recall). A few years later, similar technology, along with a Giger monster, is found on Titan (creature). 2122-2395: "Classic" Alien quadrilogy.

Futhermore, if you throw in Species, you add genetic engeneering into the mix, making room for Dark Angel.

One question remains: are the Acheron and the Grays in fact one and the same? If so, the first encounter with Acheron technology would have been in 1947....

The Professor June 10th, 2011 05:31 AM

I'd be of the view that the classic Greys are either an offshoot of the classic Archerons or that the Archerons are a highly dimorphic caste bred species. In fact it makes sense that a really really old intelligent species would control and gengineer their reproduction. Perhaps the Greys all died out because the master caste (ie classic Archerons) died out earlier and the Grey servant caste have been trying to figure out how to restore/ rebuild their society. They may have died out through inexpertise on meddling with their own reproduction - explaining why in some cases they use humans, the Giger- slime (Species) and classic Gigers (Aliens etc),; and why it is all slightly different.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 10th, 2011 06:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Professor (Post 4637965) I'd be of the view that the classic Greys are either an offshoot of the classic Archerons or that the Archerons are a highly dimorphic caste bred species.

In fact it makes sense that a really really old intelligent species would control and gengineer their reproduction.

Perhaps the Greys all died out because the master caste (ie classic Archerons) died out earlier and the Grey servant caste have been trying to figure out how to restore/rebuild their society. They may have died out through inexpertise on meddling with their own reproduction - explaining why in some cases they use humans, the Giger-slime (Species) and classic Gigers (Aliens etc),; and why it is all slightly different.

That may explain WHY they are making experiments on us: they are not trying to save teir dying race. They are trying to genetically rebuild their dead race.

EDIT: according to wiki article, Total Recall is set in 2048, not 2084, which would put the estabilishment of Mars colony around the early 2030.

DValdron June 10th, 2011 07:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Hastur of Carcosa (Post 4637819)

If we take the Alien and Predator franchise alone, we have nine movies, with a single coherent timeline that goes from 1987 to 2395.

As movie quality goes, they should probably have stopped at three (Alien, Predator, Aliens), but the other six, and by your extention, a smattering of others, gives us some clues and the possibility to build a rough timeline.

Continuity is hard to escape, isn't it? Originally, Alien and Predator were separate lineages, except for one little thing, the inclusion of an Alien skull in the Predator's trophy room. It was almost certainly a gag, an inside joke, either by the director, the screenwriter or the prop guys.

But that little throwaway gag spawned a crossover industry, including fans and fanfic, video games, comics and eventually forced the crossover movie.

But there's lots of little 'crossover' stuff, if you go looking for it. Blade Runner and Soldier are deliberately connected by a reference, for instance. And while it's not as bad as the 1950's, props and sets do get recycled through other movies. The starship from Battle Beyond the Stars, for instance, has been seen in a lot of space.

But definitely, Aliens and Predator form a nine movie continuity block, that we can then tie more and more into.

Quote:

Textually, that makes the most sense. It's a logical plot hole in the movie, there's no way we could translate or distinguish a distress signal/warning beacon from an utterly alien race... unless we had some prior experiences. And we do get the sense that Ash knows just a little bit too much about the creature and its life cycle.

Quote: Futhermore, if you throw in Species, you add genetic engeneering into the mix, making room for Dark Angel.

I don't think that there's alien DNA in Max from Dark Angel. But genetic engineering is definitely highly advanced in this timeline.

Quote:

One question remains: are the Acheron and the Grays in fact one and the same? If so, the first encounter with Acheron technology would have been in 1947....

My instinct is to say no. The one bona fide Archeron we see is an elephantine giant, 8 to 15 feet tall (hard to say in the Alien movie). All the other Archeron traces we find seem to be similarly scaled. Take the terraforming site on Mars in Total Recall... all the proportions are huge, and the activation control is a three clawed pawprint much larger than the human hand. The sense of scale is not nearly as clear in Creature or Galaxy of Terror, but there's an impression of immensity. Finally, in the Inseminoid, we get a look at what might actually be an image of a live Archeron, which is nothing like a Gray. So, I don't think that the Archeron and the Grays are the same species or directly related.

I'd argue from Starhunter that the Archerons manipulated human DNA, possibly ultimately created the human species. I'm inclined to suspect that at least, the Archerons did something similar to many races, likely including the Grays. As to the extent of tinkering, or whether the Grays may have been a biological tool or servant species, don't know.

DValdron June 10th, 2011 09:19 AM

Star Hunter

Star Hunter is one of those friendly brain damaged dogs that you try hard to like, even as you know, they don't come up to snuff. It was a 'Canadian' space opera, running two seasons from November of 2000 to April of 2004. The first season starred Michael Pare and Tanya Allen and a bunch of people you don't know. The second season dropped Pare, rejiggered the cast, advanced the setting 25 years with a time jump and ended on a cliff hanger. There was no third season, in part because the production team pretty much melted down.

The basic series plot of Star Hunter was that Michael Pare played Dante Montana, a space bounty hunter, cruising around the solar system in a former refurbished cruise liner called 'Tulip' (Trans Utopian Inter Planetary, but a lot of the letters had faded away, leaving T..U... l i P). But that was only his day job. Turns out, Dante had been a simple farmer out on Jupiter's moons many years ago, when raiders attacked and killed his wife and kidnapped his son. So really, the bounty hunting gig is just a way to get a ship and pay some bills while he hunts for his son and the people who killed his family.

Along the way, he's assisted by his niece Percy, some forgettable assistant/spy named Lucretia, a hologram of the ship's computer played by some prissy english guy, and off course regular transmissions from the ship's owner.

At the end of the first season, Michael finds his son, but things go wrong. He vanishes, the ship jumps 25 years into the future, and Percy and son Travis then spend the next season hunting for Dante.

The series was another one of those 'anti-Star Trek's' that were being launched around that time, along with Lexx, Farscape and Firefly. Star Trek had been essentially utopian, with very clean design and a world future that incorporated a big benign federation that everyone was a part of.

The 'anti-treks' tried to get away from that. Their production design was cluttered, the spaceships were battered and dirty. The powers that be were not benign, and the series tended to focus on small crews of ordinary people making their way in a hostile universe.

Star Hunter? Well, Star Hunter had some problems. First and foremost, it was an international co-production. See, the deal is that Canada's film and television production companies don't have the economic resouces to mount a production this ambitious all by itself. So they do co-productions, with partners in Europe and the United Staes.

Of course, when you do co-productions, then you're getting some of your production money from another country, and that comes with strings attached. Usually, that means that you have to hire actors or crew from the other country, do shooting there, etc. The money has to slosh around, as it were. Star Hunter was a co-production with the British. This meant that 2 out of the regular 5 cast members of the first season had to be British. And, to satisfy requirements they shot all their scenes in Britain, away from the regular sets and cast.

How the hell does that work? Well, English actor, Murray Melvin, played Caravaggio, the ship's AI, projected as a hologram. He shot all his scenes (mostly him standing around talking) in front of a greenscreen in England, and later this was composited in. He was playing a wavy, flickering hologram, so they didn't have to worry about site lines or actually interacting with the cast.

The other British cast member Stephen Marcus, played Rudolpho de Luna, the owner of the ship. He also shot his scenes in England, mostly in the first season, these consisted of him sitting around in his office, sending transmissions to the crew, which were basically slice of life monologues, philosophical rambles only tangentially connected to whatever was going on in the episode. In some areas, these were dropped out on broadcast. (to be fair, in the second season, they did get Marcus into the same room with the rest of the cast, and actually relating).

Well, that satisfied the money. But still, it leads to pretty fractured film making when two of the key cast members are shooting their stuff in another country, and never relate directly to each other or the rest of the cast.

It got worse, there was German money in the series, there was French money, who knows maybe even the Italians ponied up. The bottom line was that they had to hire actors, production staff and props, and directors and even writers from other countries. This made for some strange accents through the series, and it made it hard to really build something coherent. Instead, the episodes often felt fractured. Even with all the international money, this was a pretty low budget production, so sets were small and guest casts were limited.

In the end though, I think the big problem with the first season was the central character, Dante Montana.

Here's Dante: His wife is murdered and his son kidnapped ten years ago, and he's never gotten over it. He's still dragging that dark cloud around behind him. He's searching for his son, but he's had no luck for ten years, and he doesn't really have any good leads. He's basically going through the motions.

So basically, its a show about a depressed burn-out, struggling to cope with stale tragedies.

Wow. I'm sure we all want to watch that.

I can't really blame Pare. He's brilliant in Streets of Fire and Eddie and the Cruisers I and II, and he's got a very respectable slate of performances under his belt. He might be criticized as an actor with limited range, but he's always been able to work very well as a blue collar tough guy.

And he did quite well in a series of low budget sci-fi actioners that were being produced in the 90's by Daniel D'Or and G. Philip Jackson. Before they did Star Hunter, they'd done a bunch - Battlequeen 2020, The Cusp, Shepherd, Shepherd II, Replikator, Carver's Gate, Space Fury, 2103: Deadly Wake. Pare seems to have been one of their 'go to guys', when they weren't hiring Julie Strain or Italian porn stars. I saw a lot of their stuff on video, and generally enjoyed it. I can't recall seeing much on DVD though, so if you're interested, you might have to go looking for the VHS stuff.

Anyway, it's pretty obvious that they were doing a space western, like Firefly. Nothing wrong with that. The trouble was that they just sort of stumbled into a lead character who was pretty hard to watch.

Which is probably why Pare got dumped in the second season, and Clive Robertson (British actor, gotta keep the money satisfied) was brought in as his son to replace him. The difference was that Clive played the role more energetically, but more important, Clive's character, Travis had just joined up with the Tanya and the crew had freshly formed, to go looking for his Dad. This gave it a bit more freshness and immediacy.

Also, in the second season, they committed to getting all the cast in the same room, which made it easier for interaction, more people, more going on, actual engagement happens. I have to say that while it never made for great shakes, the second season was livelier on the whole.

There might have been a third season. I'm not sure the audience would have cared. But there were pre-orders from the US, Canada, Europe and the Pacific Rim countries, which suggests to me that there was a financial package in place. But behind the scenes, relationships were breaking down, and I think at the end, the production people just didn't want to work together.

The series never really made it big like Stargate or Battlestar Galactica, and it failed to spawn a dedicated cult following, like Lexx or Farscape or Firefly, and watching it, you sort of see why. All the pieces are there, but it never quite came together.

But for our purposes, it fits in well with the Moontrap universe. So, let me describe the universe of Starhunter....

******************

Set initially in 2275, Starhunter takes place entirely in our solar system. It's a pretty hopping place. Pretty much every significant planet, moon or asteroid has been colonized, all the way out to Pluto, and for long enough that societies have diverged significantly on different worlds.

Earth isn't in good shape. The environment is shot to pieces, the atmosphere is now toxic, it's a disease ridden hell hole under effective quarantine. During the series, I seem to recall that our heroes stop a plot to contaminate Earth's atmosphere further and kill the remaining population. The Earth of Starhunter isn't quite dead, but it's in bad shape, on its last legs, and pretty much part of a straight line between the broken and deteriorating world of many of the post-apocalypse 80's and 90's movies, and the far future dead earth of Jason X.

Government has relocated to the moon, which is now a thriving place. This actually is consistent with a few other timeline movies. For instance, Space Rage, starring Michael Pare (again!) features Pare as a future bank robber and villain exiled out to a desert planet. But in it, human society and government has relocated to the moon.

Mars is also thriving, and has been partially terraformed. The process is nowhere near complete enough for human life. But Mars seems to be pretty habitable. We saw the beginning of terraforming in 2084, when Shwarzenegger's character starts up the alien machinery in Total Recall. And of course, Oliver Gruner's Mars, and John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars give us a partially terraformed Mars.

Not much to say about the rest of the Solar System's colonies, except that they're there, and that there's a lot of 'in system' transport and shipping.

Interstellar travel is working, and there's reference to a number of interstellar colonies. But apparently, interstellar ships represent a whole different grade of technology/ power. One that perhaps not many have their hands on. The series takes place entirely in the Solar System, and the heroes never interact with anyone travelling from another star system. We can assume that interstellar travel is pretty restricted and that only a few agencies or corporations have or use the technology.

Oddly, this seems consistent with Firefly, which also seems to be a 'local' series. In Firefly, humanity has escaped 'Earth that Was', and reached what appears to be a multi-star system or small cluster of stars, which are host to roughly thirty terraformed or terra-formable worlds. In Firefly, the spaceships are mostly incapable of interstellar jumps, but merely bouncing around the local area.

The situation of aliens in the Starhunter series is interesting, perhaps its the most interesting point in the series. Bottom line, in the Star Hunter solar system of 2275 and 2300, there are no aliens currently around. If they were around, they're not around any more.

There are some hints that this might not strictly be the case. I seem to recall one episode with Ellen Dubin where she plays a mad scientist messing with alien DNA she scraped up somewhere. And there's some oblique references to wars in the past, including possible conflicts with alien species.

To be fair on this point though, the most clearly referenced war appears to have been 50 years before, a solar system conflict or civil war between human factions. It's this conflict which produced the Raiders, who are vaguely similar to Firefly's Reavers (not quite as psychopathic), basically spacegoing bikers/pirates/bandits/nihilistic madmen.

But aliens do exist in Starhunter, because the series shows them visiting Earth 4 million years ago. The aliens aren't formally identified or given a name or anything, and we never see them directly. So based on indirect evidence, as noted in other posts, I think that they're the Archerons.

The aliens implant a genetic complex in the early protohumans that are called the 'Divinity Cluster.' The purpose and operation of the Divinity Cluster forms the underlying arc for the first season.

Well, its been a while now, ten years since the series aired, so I can let you in on the secrets. The Divinity Cluster is a group of four genes which are dormant in the human genome. One or two are apparently fatal. One might be neutral. But the important one...

Well, that hidden gene appears to unlock sensory access to and some degree of manipulation to hyperspace. ie, the person whose gene is activated can literally see and pilot their way through hyperspace. There also seems to be some cool superpowers associated with it - teleportation, telepathy, telekinesis and enhanced intelligence. The person with partially activated genes can do remarkable things. The person with a fully activated cluster is superhuman.

That's very nice of the aliens, wasn't it? Turns out, not so. It seems that the ultimate purpose of the Divinity Cluster is to allow these aliens to come back from extinction. When it fully activates, it connects us to their race and civilization in the past, and suddenly, it's the end of us and now its their race and civilization in the present. Luckily, this danger is identified and avoided in Starhunter.

In the context of Starhunter, that ultra-human, probably represents a prematurely activated Divinity Cluster. Now, maybe he was the only one. Or maybe, probably, that prehistoric civilization, the one that we see in the Darwin Conspiracy and Moontrap and Alien vs Predator, was at least partially shaped by activation.

Here's how I see it. Fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, or whenever, there's a human tribe that gets really inbred, so inbred that a mutation occurs and spreads which activates the Divinity Cluster. So, you get a population that can see into hyperspace, manipulate it a little, that are super-intelligent, have telepathy, telekinesis etc.

They start advancing rapidly, and form a two tiered civilization. On the one hand, there are the supermen, who are moving things along, building higher and higher. On the other hand, there are the regular humans, probably the majority of the population, getting dragged along. Its a culture which meets the Predators, goes off into space on its own, and has a lot of accomplishments. But one which, in other ways, might be pretty strange to us. For one thing, in Alien vs Predator, there's indications that human life, at least some kinds of human life, was probably pretty cheap back then. Regular, non-augmented or enhanced humans, might have been a slave race for the masters. Anyway, the Kalium war happens, and that's it for them.

But there are other indications that the Divinity Cluster is still around. Take the Wing Commander movie. I don't know what, if any, relationship it has to the game, or how true it is to the game's mythology. But my take on these things is that when it becomes a movie, it potentially falls out of game universe and into the Moontrap universe.

Anyway, Wing Commander features Pilgrims. Humans who, due to a unique genetic component, are able to perceive and navigate through hyperspace. Significant, non? I think we've got evidence here of the Divinity Cluster, although of limited function.

Another case where the Divinity Cluster activates is in Galaxy of Terror. Basically, in the future, in a human interstellar empire dominated by a superhuman Master, who is worshipped like a god, a typical Nostromo-like group of spacefarers land on a desolate world of cyclopean ruins. But this world isn't quite dead. Instead, psychic machineries activate in the ruins, putting each member of the group through a series of terrifying hallucinations. The plot twist at the end, is that one of the group is the superhuman Master in disguise, he's gotten tired of running his empire, wants to retire, and has lured the group here in the hope that the planet's machineries will activate the dormant human capacity and produce another superhuman to take his place. In the context of discussions, of course, I've already identified the world as a likely Archeron world, possibly their homeworld.

And when you look around, there are a number of 80's and 90's sci fi movies which feature or have characters with remarkable parahuman abilities, like telekinesis or telepathy, though not the full suite. The lack of a full suite may be due to lack of imagination (they could teleport, but don't realize it), opportunity (not a whole lot of use to being able to see hyperspace if you don't have a ship to pilot it through), or possibly degradation of the gene.

Four million years, when you think about is a long time. Genes mutate, mutations occur. The Divinity Cluster, no matter how carefully engineered it is, is subject to randomization. So, for most humans, the dormant Divinity Cluster, by now, is probably simply junk. It can't and won't ever activate because there's just too many errors. Mutation probably lead to a premature bloom or activation in a small population thousands of years ago, creating the first civilization. But for the most part, mutation has been disabling the gene. This means that even where the Divinity Cluster still has some integrity, its probably difficult to get full activation, probably just a lot of partials, and possibly with side effects.

So the result is that in our timeline, mostly the Divinity Cluster is allowing for the activation of an occasional low level superhuman. The science project in Star Hunter was an attempt to get the gene fully functioning as originally designed.

Shevek23 June 10th, 2011 08:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4638556)

....

I never believed that part, I don't care if it's Word of God and "God" is Joss Whedon. Everything we see on screen is completely inconsistent with any sort of cluster or big sun system so tight that slower-than-light ships could shuttle around in timeframes of just weeks at the most as we see happening. No matter what Joss Whedon says, no matter that they call planets "moons" and their region the System, I always figured it was a neighborhood of the Galaxy (presumably dominated by a Blue Sun, but we never see it, do we?) where lots of terraformable worlds were found. Therefore Serenity and just about ever other tub we see is some kind of FTL ship. That works fine for me; pretending they are all chock-a-block in some volume much smaller than a cubic light-year is just ridiculous.

Anyway the Firefly 'Verse can't be the Moontrap Timeline; one thing that was established on-screen is that no one knows of any kinds of aliens, anywhere or anywhen. The only people claiming to have met some were carny sideshow barkers displaying a deformed cow fetus. I'd think that even if this is thousands of years after the main timeline we are evolving here and in the meantime all these various aliens mucking around with Earth in our timeframe and before all die out, they won't be forgotten. And they'd leave ruins behind too. Maybe the 'Verse colonies are in some region no other species ever got around to colonizing, but they'd still remember stuff about the Archerons and Predators and Giger Aliens and the League that has Earth all fenced in and Grays and so forth. If it isn't general knowledge, still people as cultured as Inara, Book, or a telepathic knowledge sponge like River would know something.

Unless we want to imagine some grand Xanatos Gambit whereby some coalition of aliens selectively mindwipes the entire contingent of settlers in some pristine part of the Galaxy, for who knows what purpose--to recreate a pristine stock of humans ignorant of the aliens for some reason or other, to recruit Starfighters from or some such? But I'm more comfortable with the 'Verse being off in some other alien-free timeline.

(Though these arguments of mine also put a spoke in the wheel of anyone who tries to reconcile the 'Verse with the Buffy-Verse--the demons are definitely a kind of alien, and there's every reason to believe that in addition to extra-dimensional species there would be a lot of others living on planets in our cosmos, according to our own know laws of physics more or less modified by interdimensional interactions AKA "magic." If humans have star travel capability in the future of the Buffy-verse they ought to find a Galaxy jam-packed with other intelligent species, and it would be something between Star Trek and...well, the Moontrap Timeline!

Perhaps our timeline diverges from Moontrap thanks to the Slayers? MT is a world very closely parallel to ours, but one where there never were demons etc, and OTL (all right, all right, in the Buffy Timeline then!) the Slayers didn't distinguish too finely between demons from another dimension and ones who merely popped over in FTL ships from other systems--either way, if they gave Earth people a hard time the Slayer would track them down and kill them--or give them a good talking-to if they will reason with her, or maybe make out with them...:p) Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4638556)

The aliens implant a genetic complex in the early protohumans that are called the 'Divinity Cluster.' The purpose and operation of the Divinity Cluster forms the underlying arc for the first season.

Hey wait, that's like a technobabble version of Lovecraft's Old Ones, isn't it? Yep, what this timeline needs is Buffy and the Scooby Gang. Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4638556)

But the whole subplot of the Divinity Cluster is very suggestive. Remember way back, I mentioned the Darwin Conspiracy... which involved the discovery of a prehistoric genetically advanced superhuman in antarctica. In the context of Starhunter, that ultra-human, probably represents a prematurely activated Divinity Cluster. Now, maybe he was the only one. Or maybe, probably, that prehistoric civilization, the one that we see in the Darwin Conspiracy and Moontrap and Alien vs Predator, was at least partially shaped by activation.

Another case where the Divinity Cluster activates is in Galaxy of Terror. Basically, in the future, in a human interstellar empire dominated by a superhuman Master, who is worshipped like a god, a typical Nostromo- like group of spacefarers land on a desolate world of cyclopean ruins. But this world isn't quite dead. Instead, psychic machineries activate in the ruins, putting each member of the group through a series of terrifying hallucinations. The plot twist at the end, is that one of the group is the superhuman Master in disguise, he's gotten tired of running his empire, wants to retire, and has lured the group here in the hope that the planet's machineries will activate the dormant human capacity and produce another superhuman to take his place. In the context of discussions, of course, I've already identified the world as a likely Archeron world, possibly their homeworld.

Heck, it's in Star Trek canon--the second pilot (though not, as it happened, the first ep ever aired--that must have been confusing!) "Where No Man Has Gone Before." In the Trek 'verse, Terrans got really leery of genetic engineering after the Eugenics Wars and this plus advanced medical science may help explain why it takes something like an encounter with the "energy barrier at the edge of the Galaxy" to activate it; however the crew had their "psionic aptitudes" or some such measured, and recorded in their files. Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4638556) The lack of a full suite may be due to lack of imagination (they could teleport, but don't realize it), opportunity (not a whole lot of use to being able to see hyperspace if you don't have a ship to pilot it through), or possibly degradation of the gene.

And ITTL there's no Slayer to clean up the mess that would make.:eek:

DValdron June 10th, 2011 10:13 PM

Giger Creatures

Let's start with William Malone. Never heard of him? No big deal. He never heard of you. But he made a couple of movies I want to talk about.

Malone seems to have been a pretty fun guy. He was Minneapolis kid, started off with a garage band, went out to California to be rock star, but geez, he ends up working in the film industry, doing make up and effects for Don Post.

You know who Don Post is, right? Remember Famous Monsters and Fangoria, when you'd open them up, and there'd be a full page add for all sorts of movie monster masks? That's Don Post. The Monster Mask guy. These weren't regular dime store masks either, they were full on prosthetic headpieces, high end stuff.

Anyway, Malone gets to the point where he decides he wants to be a film maker. He loved Alien, he was very influenced by H.R. Giger, and so he built himself a monster inspired directly by and patterned on Giger's designs and work on alien.

I'll say right now, it's a pretty good looking monster: Syngenor, which stands for 'synthesized genetic organism'. With the benefit of hindsight, it bears an astonishing resemblance to the creatures from Species, though it clearly was a decade earlier. Overall, it was patterned on and closely resembled Giger's Alien, which Malone freely admits.

And by the way, you can buy the Syngenor Mask, or a commercial replica of same, from Don Post.

The movie itself? Set in the present of 1981, an ex-cop turned novelist is dragged into the investigation of a string of murders. The victims all have their spinal fluid sucked out. Turns out to be an escaped bit of genetic engineering, the Syngenor, which sucks out spinal fluid by sticking its tongue down their throat... shades of Giger. Or it brings victims back to its lair to feed its offspring.

Set in the modern day, large parts of the film work like a police procedural or standard movie. The above ground settings basically engage the audience with a world much like their own. Meanwhile the creature prowls desolate parkades and sewers, dark and septic spaces that do well mimicing the feel of the Nostromo's interior from Alien.

Scared to death was one of the earliest, and one of the best Alien clones, effectively transposing the Alien to an earthly setting, something we'd see a lot of in future clones (because space ship sets are expensive, mkay.)

The Syngenor creature turned out to have a life of its own. There's those Don Post masks, of course. But there was also a sequel: Syngenor (1990). Basically, the single creature from the first movie is mass produced by an evil corporation as biological weapons. They roam around and kill a few people, but most of the action takes place when they run amok in a sealed office building. The highlight of the film is David Gale's incredibly over the top performance. It's a fun film, sort of gross and over the top where the original was scary. But it's a mark of both the effectiveness of the original movie and the costume design that Scared to Death is one of the few alien clones with its own sequel. But back to Malone. His next film, a few years later in 1985 was Creature, which for my money is probably the best or second best alien clone ever made.

Creature opens up on Titan, in the future, as two astronauts pal around in the ruins of some gigantic alien laboratory. One of them makes the mistake of sitting on an egg, and it hatches, under him, up him and through him. Next scene, the ship is heading back to Earth, but it won't respond to hailing calls. Suddenly, an image from the runaway space ship shows a dead man at the controls, or perhaps a zombie. The ship plows through a space station.

Fast forward a bit. Everyone knows something strange has happened on Titan. The Germans have already sent a ship out, and a rival corporation is sending out our heroes in their own ship. But its clear that the Germans are going to get there first.

On board the heroes ship, there's a mixed crew, consisting of heroic guys and a couple of women who like to take their clothes off. I can say that there's 80's hair and some really good nude scenes in this movie. There's also a Sigourney Weaver-esque, security guard named Bryce, who is the corporations muscle.

When they get to Titan, however, they discover that the German ship is now derelict, and their own is disabled. There's only one survivor from the German crew, Klaus Kinski. And there's something else out there, something leathery black and slimy with a great big domelike head, no discernible facial features except great big teeth. Something that will kill you, and then implant you with an egg that reanimates your corpse. The creature itself is a dead ringer for Alien, if Ridley Scott had decided that instead of building the costume around a rod thin Somali refugee, he used an overweight Sumo wrestler instead. Yep, this critter is definitely hitting the pasta bars.

Wacky hijinx ensue.

I gotta say, this is worth looking for. I remember seeing it in the theatre, and being blown away by the moody atmospheric photography that owed as much to Planet of the Vampires (itself an inspiration for alien) as Alien itself, the fast moving plot, the wonderfully gratuitious gore and nudity. This movie has Klaus Kinski, a dominatrix, a Giger style alien, zombies and nudity.... fuck, this could be the greatest movie ever made.

Or maybe not. Years and years later, I got a copy of it on VHS and I was disappointed, the sets looked a bit too much like sets, the landscape of titan looked like a flat studio floor with a fog machine working overtime, and the flaws both visually and in storytelling were all too apparent. The experience was rather flat for me.

Looking back, some of what was lost, I think may come about from diminishing the movie from the big movie theatre screens to a simple TV screen. A lot of the time, that steals a lot of the energy and visual flair. Don't believe me? Watch a James Bond film in the theatre, particularly the early ones, then watch it on a regular TV.

And part of it may be the transfer process. Sometimes, too good a transfer is not a good thing. An excessively fine transfer shows you all those wires that models were hanging off of, or the shortcomings in the set, that just weren't apparent when they were printing it a little darker and a little fuzzier.

And of course, I knew the story, so there wasn't the magic of watching for the first time.

But you know what? It's still one of the best alien clones ever made, so do yourself a favour and search it out.

Creature, because there's a bit of justice in the world, was an extremely successful alien rip off. Successful enough that it spawned or inspired a sequel on its own in 1988, called Deep Space.

But you know how it is, things go off the rails. Malone got into an argument with how things should be done, couldn't get along with the money, and got shown the door. Fred Olen Ray came in, took the basic idea, and set it back on Earth, erasing any direct connection to Creature.

Deep Space spends no actual time in Deep Space. The closest we come to it is the crashing to earth of a man-made satellite. This however, is a very important satellite, because it contained a biological weapon.

The biological weapon turns out to be black leather, slimy, clawed, with a giant oversized head, great big teeth, and a penchant for laying eggs which turn into evil little chestburstery cockroach killer things. Look, basically, think Alien, if Ridley Scott had decided not to go with a seven foot, 80 pound Somali refugee, and decided to build the suit around Hulk Hogan.

As before, wacky hijinx ensues, and the finale is an epic monster clash between the Alien, and a testosterone filled, epic he-man duo of Charles Napier and Bo Svenson, who take it down with nothing but gawdawful macho awesomeness and a chain saw.

Really, its awesome. Particularly awesome given that it comes from Fred Olen Ray.

And its the best Alien Clone that Fred Olen Ray ever did. Ironically, in trying to get away from Creature, Fred ended up borrowing or maybe reinventing most of Malone's ideas from his first Alien clone, Scared to Death.

Slightly earlier in his career, in 1986, one of Fred's first movies was an alien clone named Biohazard. This particular alien was plucked from another dimension, but proceeds to do the usual slice and dice. Once again, oversized head, no discernible facial features besides lots of teeth.

The big difference here is that it's Fred's ten year old son in the alien suit. Yes, this is a pint sized alien. They send in the army to take it out, but since the army consists of three scruffy guys with mismatched uniforms and deer rifles, all does not end well.

Is this a good movie? It is to laugh. Listen, a good movie from Fred Olen Ray is like lightning striking your dick. It's astonishingly unlikely, rather astonishing, and you're kind o amazed you liked it. So... seeing Deep Space may be the only Fred Olen Ray movie you ever need to watch.

The rest of Fred's movies... well, good luck with that, make sure you wear a lead lined vest. And maybe freeze some sperm beforehand just in case you might want children later.

But what the hell. The point is that you could take all these Alien rip offs - Creature, Deep Space, Biohazard, stick em in a room with the real alien, and it would be like a family portait. There's the head of the family, the porker, the gym-rat and the half pint. The one from Scared to Death is clearly from the Species side o the family.

The point (and do I really have one?) of all this is to show that really, a lot of this stuff was taking place in a relatively small pool of talent and ideas. At the top of the heap there's James Cameron and Ridley Scott, then you get guys like William Maline, Roger Corman, Fred Olen Ray, Lloyd Simandl, and they were all kind of borrowing and riffing off each other.

This whole Moontrap timeline gels because its not just some random collection of movies, but there was a real gestalt. These guys saw Alien or Blade Runner or Escape From New York, and they went out and made their own versions of these. Ideas got passed around.

Me, I grew up with these movies. I sat in the theatre for things like Creature or Forbidden World (the other contender for best Alien clone ever), or watched Syngenor or Deep Space on DVD, or for that matter, Warriors of the Wasteland, or Texas Gladiators 2020, and I enjoyed the hell out of them.

I suppose this timeline is a love letter to all that wonderful schlocky sci fi.

DValdron June 10th, 2011 10:28 PM Quote:

Originally Posted by Shevek23 (Post 4640903)

Maybe some sort of limited local range FTL? Yeah, I see your point, I've been around the bend several times on that point. I think any sort of star system that has a habitable zone big enough to hold thirty planets is ASB. Which implies some sort of binary or trinary or quadrinary system, with a bunch of big overlapping habitable zones. But that seems ASB in and of itself. And then on top of that, the notion that all these worlds would either be habitable or easily terraformed? I dunno.

Still, the universe is a strange place, and even our solar system contains a whole bunch of completely weird junk. I'm willing to just go with Whedon, and assume that the founders of the Serenity culture stumbled across an incredible set of Brass rings.

However you characterize it, it's clear that they're moving about in a very local pocket of space, and they don't go outside it much.

Quote:

I'm thinking that the Firefly bunch are located in a pocket well away from anyone or anything else. No ruins, no active aliens. Aliens are obviously alive and well in popular mythology around there, that's the whole point of the carnival barker. But for practical purposes, they don't exist.

Same thing with Star Hunter. The alien trace is millions of years old. For the most part, the possibility of aliens is just an irrelevant hypothetical to the Star Hunter folks. Remember, Earth is in the middle of a great big huge dead zone. The Serenity bunch is just in another part of that dead zone, one not near a prison or crossroads, so no one visits.

Quote:

(Though these arguments of mine also put a spoke in the wheel of anyone who tries to reconcile the 'Verse with the Buffy-Verse--the demons are definitely a kind of alien, and there's every reason to believe that in addition to extra- dimensional species there would be a lot of others living on planets in our cosmos, according to our own know laws of physics more or less modified by interdimensional interactions AKA "magic." If humans have star travel capability in the future of the Buffy-verse they ought to find a Galaxy jam- packed with other intelligent species, and it would be something between Star Trek and...well, the Moontrap Timeline!

There was one Buffy episode that had the supernatural creatures being aliens from the moon. But really, I'd find the Buffy-verse to be not really compatible with Serenity. Quote:

That's one for the books.

Quote:

Hey wait, that's like a technobabble version of Lovecraft's Old Ones, isn't it?

In Starhunter? Yeppers. As I understand the series concept, the fully, 100% activated divinity cluster would transform the person into an alien, with an implication being that the aliens from four million years ago would step through time to continue their existence in our reconstructed bodies. There was a creepy aspect that they never actually delved deep into. Maybe if there'd been a third season....

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 11th, 2011 09:27 AM

1 Attachment(s) Allright, here's a second draft: this is the world after World War Four, with a few exotic locales added in.

Hamurabi June 11th, 2011 03:06 PM What about something is out there.. this definatley fits into the moontrap timeline. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Is_Out_There

DValdron June 11th, 2011 04:59 PM

Yes it does. Description includes/confirms existence of a space prison in general vicinity of Earth, and cosmic police.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 12th, 2011 03:09 AM

A major difference between the Cameron/Scott Universe and any other SF universe, seems to be the absence, or extreme difficulty of FTL travel. Both in Alien and in Avatar, long distance space traveller are hybernated. I haven't seen Pandorum, but from the trailer and the wiki, it seems to be the case as well. That may be different for other, more advanced races such as the Predators.

About the Dvaldron teory that Predators have meet the Acheron in the past, this is from wikipedia: Quote:

Predators apparently keep Alien Queens in captivity in order to maintain a supply of eggs. It is shown in a brief scene in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem that Predators have had prior contact with the Space Jockeys. This is confirmed in the film's DVD commentary.

[...]

In the Aliens vs. Predator novel series (based on the Dark Horse Comics) by David Bischoff, Steve and Stephani Perry, the Predators, known in the series as "yautja", are depicted as living in a matriarchal clan-based society bearing similarities to a pack mentality, with the strongest and most skilled of the group being leader. The Predators are portrayed as sexually dimorphic mammals, with females being larger and stronger than males and sporting more prominent mammary glands (like human females). Both genders give off a strong musk to signify aggression, while females can also emit it when in estrus. This musk can be detected by other Predators and canids, though it is imperceptible to humans. Predators in the Perry novels are not monogamous, and it is common for veteran warriors to sire hundreds of offspring (known as sucklings) with multiple mates. It is also revealed that their blood has the capacity of partially neutralizing the acidity of Alien blood. Their religion is partially explored in the series, showing that they are polytheistic, and that their equivalent of the Grim Reaper is the so-called "Black Warrior," who is seen as an eternal adversary who eventually wins all battles.

Though female Predators are occasionally referred to in Steve and Stephani Perry's novel series, one does not make an actual appearance until the graphic novel Aliens vs Predator: Deadliest of Species. The female's design however contradicts the descriptions given in the Perry novel series, as it superficially shows little distinction from males.

In Randy Stradley's graphic novel Aliens vs. Predator: War, it is revealed through the narration of the character Machiko Noguchi that Predators were responsible for the spread of Aliens throughout the galaxy, though the Predators themselves deny this, stating that their large interplanetary distribution is due to simultaneous convergent evolution.

The comic series Predator and Aliens vs Predator: Three World War introduce a clan of Predators referred to as "Killers", who are enemies of mainstream Predators (here referred to as "Hunters") because of their tradition of training Aliens as attack animals rather than hunting them, as well as their desire for killing as opposed to honorable hunting. The character Machiko Noguchi notes in issue #1 of Three World War that "You have to understand the mindset of the Hunters, and the honor they place on facing a worthy opponent on an equal footing... a kill is the end result, but it's not the point of a hunt.... For the 'Killers,' that wasn't the case. They were all about the killing." They are first seen in the 2009 Predator series, where a number interfere in an East African civil war, coming into conflict with both humans and their Hunter counterparts. By the time of Three World War the Killers are assumed to have been wiped out by the Hunters, but some survive and begin attacking human colonies, forcing Noguchi to forge an alliance between humans and the Hunters in order to deal with them.

More on FTL: from Wing Commander, we have a hint that it's not simply unknown, but rather openly distrusted and avoided (Pilgrim, who were able to navigate hyperspace, were a sort of outcast, which is odd in a spacefaring society. Why? Maybe because there's something in hyperspace than scarier than Aliens.....

Quote:

Hey wait, that's like a technobabble version of Lovecraft's Old Ones, isn't it?

Take away the technobabble, and look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Event_Horizon_(film)

Shevek23 June 12th, 2011 06:28 AM

I have to say, putting all these 80s-90s movies and TV shows into this historical context makes all the shows more interesting; stuff that just seemed like arbitrary whims of the director now has solid reasons behind it.

It's fascinating how this frame seems to be accreting more and more shows to itself; already I can see the entire genre of slasher flicks falling into place.

When the soap operas of the 80s and 90s start whirling around its accretion disk, that's when we should be very afraid...:eek:

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 12th, 2011 09:19 AM

He, this stuff got me thinking about a Knight Rider/A-team/Airwolf/Streethawk timeline, but that would REALLY be scary (though it would partially explain why there's a working off-world colony in 2019.... if we managed to build an advanced AI AND stick it inside a car in the mid 80s that explains a lot).

DValdron June 12th, 2011 03:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shevek23 (Post 4645840)

It's fascinating how this frame seems to be accreting more and more shows to itself; already I can see the entire genre of slasher flicks falling into place.

When the soap operas of the 80s and 90s start whirling around its accretion disk, that's when we should be very afraid...:eek:

Actually, there's a crossover site that links literally hundreds of television shows into the same alternative continuity, on the basis of *actual* direct crossovers and references. Richard Belzer's character from Law and Order, for instance, makes appearances in both Arrested Development and X-Files, which means those three shows are in the same reality. The point of the Moontrap timeline is that the cultural context is so narrow, literally a handful of very influential film makers, writers and artists - Carpenter, Scott, Cameron, Giger, Shwarzenegger and a second tier both influential and derivative, Van Damme, Corman, Malone, Ray, etc. were operating in interlocking circles, in the same cultural context, producing a cultural product tailored to a specific medium and time.... that we can literally go back, mine that era's products and construct a retroactive continuity.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 14th, 2011 10:10 AM

1 Attachment(s) Quote:

Originally Posted by Gosing (Post 4620212)

Sorry to bump this, but it occured to me that havong Carter score an upset victory in 1980 (possibly with a bit of behind-the-scenes grey support) would serve our purposes well for three reasons:

1) It would help repress the growing tide of social conservatism in America, allowing it to fester and grow until it finally breaks and gains total control of the US following WWIII.

There is another possibility: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_...nation_attempt

Third draft (expanded):

The Professor June 21st, 2011 12:54 PM

Any further thoughts?

Since I saw the last episode of SGU I've been thinking that teh Stargate Universe appears to be the Good Mirror Universe of the Moontrap TL. It's got all the trappings of it - Grey aliens (Asgard), ancient alien visitors & interferers (Ancients & Ori), rogue robots (Replicators & Asurans), parasite aliens (Goa'uld, The Wraith) - but most have a more benign if enslaving bent to them.

Space Oddity June 21st, 2011 10:32 PM

This whole thing is giving me Wold-Newton flashbacks. And that's a good thing.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 22nd, 2011 07:09 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by The Professor (Post 4684088)

Any further thoughts?

Since I saw the last episode of SGU I've been thinking that teh Stargate Universe appears to be the Good Mirror Universe of the Moontrap TL.

It's got all the trappings of it - Grey aliens (Asgard), ancient alien visitors & interferers (Ancients & Ori), rogue robots (Replicators & Asurans), parasite aliens (Goa'uld, The Wraith) - but most have a more benign if enslaving bent to them.

And the military/government types are the good guys.

The Professor June 22nd, 2011 12:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Hastur of Carcosa (Post 4687008)

And the military/government types are the good guys. Indeed. The Wraith also have a slight Predator feel to them. We can extend the Good Mirror vibe a little more: the Greys in the Moontrap seem more like Loki and the Vanir (the "rogue" Asgard in SG Atlantis); there was still a Wraith/Replicators/virus plague but it seems less extensive and there was a repopulation of planets afterwards by kidnapped human stock; the Geiger analogues Goa'uld have become true parasites and are heading towards symbiosis (the Tok'ra) and extinction; perhaps the Unas are a Jockey/Archeron precursor?

There does seem to be absence of the large Jockeys. I'll assume then that these are gengineered descendants/sisterspecies to the Unas and that their absence is why Kalium plague and Rylan Alliance were less extensive, and that the Geigers weren't adapted as bioweapons but remained parasitical. The lack of their interference with the Greys also means that they became the more benign Asgard. While the Ancients were able to spread across the Galaxies. Perhaps the Ancients were more interfering in the old days and had a scare with uplifting the Unas, creating the Archerons? The Moontrap TL would then be where they failed to deal with them and the Archerons subsequently became ascendant (;)) creating the Kalium etc mess.

Kulkasha June 22nd, 2011 08:48 PM

should we assume that The Thing is also in this timeline?

DValdron June 24th, 2011 06:44 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Kulkasha (Post 4689742)

should we assume that The Thing is also in this timeline?

Yep. It is. It retains a lot of the sensibility - ie, you've got a crew that could just as easily have done service on the Nostromo in Alien. You've got isolation, paranoia, an oppressive environment.

HellHound01 June 24th, 2011 10:10 AM

Question about the maps. Shouldn't there be an alien encounter thing in the Congo from Predator? Or was that in South America?

Lord Hastur of Carcosa June 24th, 2011 11:51 AM

It was Central America (currently part of the Socialist Republic of Jenoma) 1987, and there is a "encounter" patch on it, but if anybody has suggestions or corrections please speak up.

interpoltomo July 2nd, 2011 03:22 PM

What does the overall technology picture look as of 2011 in TTL? Lord Hastur of Carcosa July 3rd, 2011 03:28 AM

Somewhere around "Escape from LA" I guess. Technology would be highly militarized however, so expect high-tech weapon but no internet. Tech for civil use may even be behind OTL. But there would be a boom in technologyfor civilian use after 2020 (mostly cybernetics, derived from military project). Higher development of bioengineering should be expected too, for the same reason.

Shevek23 July 3rd, 2011 11:35 AM

Um, are you taking into account that the world goes through several catastrophes--a nuclear war or two, ongoing ecological collapse, political meltdown? It might be argued that this stuff tends to concentrate attention on serious problems, but I'd think on the whole the creative abilities of humankind, even with talent scouted up and put into development labs, would tend to be impeded under these adverse circumstances.

But then, we have the evidence of canon; clearly by the early 21st century these people--well some of them, military, cops, mercenaries and other servitors of the corporate regime--have access to certain technologies we only dream of. As you say, much less of what there is is available to the ordinary person in the street or ditches.

I guess between reverse-engineering alien tech, possible time travel, and employing advanced cybernetics in concentrated labs, the very powerful do indeed keep pace with or surpass our timeline.

DValdron July 25th, 2011 08:40 PM

Technology in the Moontrap Universe is a bit different. There doesn't seem to be an internet, or its a lot less significant. There's a lot less consumer applicable technology.

Overall, standard of living for most people in the west seems to have plateaued in the 70's and early 80's and may be in decline. There's a large amount of recycling, refurbishing and retrofitting. On the other hand, certain areas have leaped ahead. Generally, the space program and space technology seems to be more advanced. We're putting a lot more tonnage into space a lot earlier and staying longer.

Also, there appears to be a unique peak of robotics - specialty human-like androids. But those seem to be a cottage industry. There's very little mass market application.

Also, biology appears to have peaked, with some weird recombinant DNA stuff going on.

It seems that in this world, we're looking at the decline or dissolution of a consumer based economy, and its gradual replacement with a corporate economy based on monopolising technology and resources.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa July 26th, 2011 06:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4814808)

Basic William Gibson-ish world.

DValdron July 26th, 2011 07:24 AM Yep. Keep in mind that the 80's and 90's, our time were Gibson's heyday and the golden age of cyberpunk. You had guys like Ridley Scott bulding the cyberpunk aesthetic. It was both influential and relatively cheap to do on film.

kuroda July 27th, 2011 03:48 AM

Just stumbled across

I was grouchy about Green Antarctica's silence, but no more.

Well, less so, anyway.

On a marginally related thread -- inasmuch as they were mentioned earlier -- ISTM that both Farscape and Lexx, in addition to their mutual commonalities, are both a kind of antimatter to the Moontrap timeline. Not only don't they have the intratextual linkages to it, but they make fun of that generation of SF/horror, and its predecessors.

(In a more or less serious-and-or-literal sense of 'making fun', that is.)

Shevek23 July 27th, 2011 06:55 AM

I never did watch Farscape, though I surely would if I could get the whole series, beginning to end. I have not been able to see all of Lexx either, just all of the second season and a few eps of the third.

Anyway judging by what I have seen, the latter show seems to fit much more closely in sensibility to "The Moontrap Timeline;" in the "timeline" itself, humanity is getting rudely awakened to the sort of reality that prevails across two universes in Lexx.

FWIW, from online descriptions of the context of Lexx's 4th season, they do in fact encounter Earth, or a world practically indistinguishable from it, during the early 2000s, shot and aired contemporary with this time frame, so lots of references to then-current events. I believe one ep is entitled "Messing with Texas.":p

I also gather that 790 (who at this point is in love with Kai rather than Xev) mentions that Earth is just another of a very large number of instances of worlds of its type, one with a human society on a certain technological track that will inevitably lead to its scientists developing a collider accelerator that will generate Higgs bosons, which will in turn reduce the whole planet in short order to a greasy blob. And that some episode plots hinge in part on some Terran scientists who are quite worried that this very fate is indeed imminent!

So it could well be, our timeline's failure to be quite on the Moontrap line is a reason why we'll be selected out of the running of competitive fates of humanity, whereas the decaying corporate garrison world depicted there does have the virtue of pre-empting abstract pure science and thus bypassing this otherwise so likely doom. Totally fits with the macho soldier/cop mentality that passes for virtue in tMT, that a bunch of eggheads would be the death of humanity were it not for their ivory towers crumbling and getting repurposed into bunkers and launch silos instead by Real Men (TM) and the rich slimy weasels such RM are doomed by the gods to serve or rebel hopelessly against.

Anyway, hence the norm, in both the Light and Dark Universe, of an ueber-Moontrap Timeline sensibility throughout the two Universes in Lexx; it's natural selection at work. And of course despite the looming Higgs Doom, everyday life in the early 2000s (and now!) sort of indicated that for some a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome world already existed, and was just around the corner for those lucky enough to have hitherto whistled past that graveyard. ------I am still grouchy about Green Antarctica's hiatus (and--good God, I'm forgetting the very name of the South America timeline!) But realizing that berating a first class creative author is no good and that none of us get the benefit of it by any sort of right, I stoically hold my peace except in this weaselly passive-aggressive sense of putting in snide whiny digs of opportunity.

Please don't get yourself banned over some stupid Chat thread, DValdron! Even if you never do get back to--oh yes, Axis of Andes, or GA! You're too good for us to lose, unless it's you walking away in perfectly understandable disgust!

Does it help that I generally agree with your stances against various--um, differently perspectived persons? And that the standards of so-called civility around here seem kind of odd in their outcomes, in ways that relate to the content of what we respectively rail (in a reasonable-to-me-anyway fashion) or silently fume against?

No, I haven't any immediate reason to fear this happening, but I have had some scares in the past few months, when I've seen a few Chat threads, which I generally avoid lest I too get sucked into those vortices.

If anyone gets the allusion in my "reason for edit line," I'm not saying "I gotta go." Maybe I should though, just this short post is probably making me something like half an hour late for work. kthnxbai for now...brb

The Stormlord July 27th, 2011 07:14 AM

How does Event Horizon, with its evil FTL drive (which might have come straight out of Warhammer 40K) fit into this?

Oh God, I just had a horrific realisation. 40K comes from the same era, has a lot of the same general aesthetic and themes, right? So, therefore, might it not be the ultimate future of TTL? In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future...:eek::eek::eek:

DValdron July 27th, 2011 07:23 AM

Funny thing, I worked on a book about the Lexx TV series. Never did get published, but I had all the background stories from cast and crew.

Both Lexx and Farscape, as was the later Battlestar Galactica, were visceral reactions to Star Trek, particularly Star Trek: TNG, but also to the other ST series and the Babylon 5 Franchise which partook of the ideology.

The Star Trek franchise at that time represented something I can only describe as 'corporations' in space, where the action as often as not took place around the boardroom, where the corporate team, well dressed, well organized, working together seamlessly without conflict pressed on to confront a variety of rivals who were generally hairy, disorganized and chaotic, or otherwise foreign and unsympathetic. These were aberrations in a universe dominated by the Federation.

The universes of Farscape and Lexx were hostile landscapes where evil semi- totalitarian empires ruled. The crews in both cases were a polyglot assortment of escaped prisoners, and they simply wanted to be free, avoid capture and find a safe place. The similarities, particularly in the first few years were astonishing.

Firefly and Starhunter were another matching pair of Anti-Star Treks, again featuring small crews of working class types making their way through systems dominated by a sort of futuristic wild west, with shadowy semi-totalitarian or authoritarian rule hovering in the background, quietly pursuing or developing superpowered individuals.

DValdron July 27th, 2011 07:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kairos Fateweaver (Post 4820376)

How does Event Horizon, with its evil FTL drive (which might have come straight out of Warhammer 40K) fit into this?

Quite possibly. I'm not familiar enough with Warhammer 40K to say.

Event Horizon, with its gothic spaceship and mystery FTL actually does fit. As I recall, the events of Event Horizon are set approximately 2050, or thereabouts.

We have a shot of a large polyglot space station, something clearly assembled piece by piece. The inference is that man has established a solid foothold in space, but its also a jury rigged and patchwork foothold. The space station seems pretty gritty.

I don't recall clearly what references Event Horizon had to Earth. My impression is that it was getting bad down on Earth. There were pockets of normality. But some of the flashbacks seem to indicate nastiness. The period from about 2035 to 2055 seems to be the period when humanity is experimenting with interstellar travel and FTL. Notably, Lost in Space is also set during this time, a project which involves not only FTL, but the construction of a gigantic interstellar jump gate. There's a couple of other attempts at FTL, or even sub-luminal Generation Ships.

The 'evil entity' of Event Horizon is rare, but not unique. Another low budget film from this era, Alien Intruder, starring Billy Dee Williams, also features metaphyisical or non- corporeal aliens existing in space who attack by infiltrating memories or manufacturing hallucinations.

On the subject of FTL however, it appears that FTL systems were a corporate proprietary license, not property of a government. By this time, formal governments are relatively weak vis a vis corporations. So there may have been a couple of different FTL systems, each the solo property of a corporation, and inaccessible to the public or general population.

Certainly by 2060, FTL is well established in the hands of at least one corporation, because Earth is embroiled in its first full scale Interstellar War. This is mostly depicted in Space Above and Beyond, but we also see the Interstellar war referenced in Imposter, starring Gary Sinese, and in the Ultra Warrior, which depicts the beginnings o the war.

DValdron July 27th, 2011 07:41 AM

Hi Shevek

I'm doing my best not to get banned. thankx

Shevek23 July 27th, 2011 05:31 PM

One can hardly expect superhuman feats of forbearance though.;) My own strategy for dealing with annoying business is not dealing with it. A point forcefully brought home to me yesterday morning when I checked my snail-mail mailbox and found it totally empty. Which would be very odd considering I hadn't checked it in a quite a while, and in addition to annoying business I also get a lot of junk mail. But not so odd considering that actually I hadn't opened it in a very very very long time; the carrier concluded I'd moved on in some sense or other and took to returning all my mail.

Moral: taking care of business leads to more business.:eek: They were nice enough at the post office though, quite humane and informal.

So along those lines, I just stay away from all Chat for the most part. It takes a very very slow posting weekend, with none of the threads I avidly follow updating, before I'll search the latest postings which is the only thing that leads me into that sour honeytrap.

Actually I'm liable enough just lately to get into trouble just on some good threads. Must invoke all diplomacy I can muster, plus some sort of superhuman focus on the topic at hand and not the numerous tangents they beckon me down....:rolleyes:

In a perhaps unrelated matter, I've finally got around to reading the superb Lands of Red and Gold. Unfortunately I've almost caught up the current posts!:eek:

interpoltomo August 4th, 2011 11:05 AM

Update this and axis of andes instead of getting banned please.

DValdron September 30th, 2011 02:20 PM

Progenitors

Epoch (2001) features a big rocky monolith, that drifts in from outer space and starts tuning up Earth's atmosphere. I gotta say, it feels like a Sci Fi channel original, it's got CGI (but not too much, because CGI was more expensive even back then), no name actors, a reasonably competent script, but not a heck of a lot of violence and nudity. It kind of makes me pine for the days of 80's and 90's B-movies, when cheesecake, beefcake and a few buckets of blood kept things moving on. The trouble with sci fi TV movies into the 20th century is this notion that it's got to be kid friendly, which means appropriately sanitized.

But anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, big ass monolith. But, as it turns out, not the one from 2001: A Space Odyssey because that would be copyright infringement. So this is more along the lines of big craggy boulder monolith, that they call a 'Torus' to distinguish it from the other (bad choice, because a Torus is basically a donut, whereas this is just kind of a boulder in the shape of a spike) Shows up from Outre Space, parks there hovering over Bulgaria or Nepal or something, and a team of scientists go inside to try and figure out what it's doing here and why Earth's suddenly going all weird.

Oh, and because that's kind of a thin thread to hang the whole movie around, there's a couple of subplots about the head science guy rekindling a romance and having incurable cancer.

Well, to make a long story short, turns out that the Monolith is a big old terraforming machine. It came to Earth a few billion years ago when this planet was a hot rock, and proceeded to seed it with life as per programming. Every few tens or hundreds of millions of years, it shows up again, just to make sure evolution is on schedule.

That's right, on schedule. It seems that evolution is not quite the random thing we believe it to be, but rather, it's all a planned affair. Billions o years ago, some really incredibly powerful aliens decided to seed the universe with life, and had some very specific ideas as to what life was going to go where. Or perhaps about what life would emerge.

It's a sort of crazy-ass 'God-free' version of creationism. The idea being that some aliens or cosmic force decided that humans, on our exact blueprint, needed to be brought into being. But better yet, that along the way, they were going to build fishies, and dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, wooly mammoths, brontotherium, and a whole lot of other animals which would be created only to go extinct on schedule. And that these aliens were operating on a timescale of hundreds of millions of years. No random evolution at all, someone out there had a plan for earth that included every species, including all the extinct ones, and that plan includes pretty exacting blueprints for human beings.

Now, it's possible that the aliens didn't work it all out in advance, but stand outside time and space and have a different perspective on the matter than our own linear view.

But either way, its pretty mind boggling and incomprehensible. Luckily, the movie never quite goes over the edge into religious mysticism. But, the PLAN is the problem, basically, humans have mucked about the planet a little too much, and the Epoch machine is going to reset earth back to factory settings. Bad for the human race. We might get reset all the way back to extinction. If Planet Earth isn't on the timetable, the Epoch machine seems pretty willing to adjust the settings manually, which might be what happened to the dinosaurs.

Luckily, our intrepid science team figures out how to stop the machine from whacking humanity, and it goes back into space.... After taking a moment out to restore one human being to factory settings, eliminating his cancer.

Then it goes back into space, apparently looking for some other planet to harass.

The Epoch machine was back in 2003, in the aptly named 'Epoch Evolution'. Two more 'Torus' machines show up. Or maybe it's just the first one bringing a friend. Anyway, they both start messing about with Earth in good and bad ways, lots of religious mania presented as a bad thing, with the scientist running about trying to set things right.

Okay, so that's it for a couple of forgettable direct to video movies with a big dumb idea, except.....

Mission to Mars (2000). Basically, big budget theatrical release with name actors and top flight special effects, so you know we're meant to take it seriously. It's one of those 'important' movies, so you know you can pretty much forget about gratuitous nudity, sleaze or any of the things that makes movies fun.

The short version is that the first Mars mission is lost when something strange happens to it. So NASA dispatches a rescue mission. The rescuers get there, find a sole survivor, and then go on to discover 'mysterious but powerful aliens' or at least apparently one - a sort of gray, who cries a single tear, or something like that. Or maybe its just a representation of an alien.

Along the way, the alien shows them some very nice picturs of what happened to Mars (a big rock hit it). And evolution on Earth, implying pretty clearly that Earth's history did not just happen, but that aliens have been basically engineering all the Brontosaurai and T-Rex's and Saber Tooths up to and including us.

Again, the message is that evolution isn't just random shit that happens, but is part of someone's very very detailed master plan.

The whole thing is very Spiebergy. There's lots of 'ooh and ahh' kind of stuff, and we're supposed to come away with some feeling of Transcendence without religion, some awe at the big-ass cosmic forces which guide destiny or some such. Not so much religion, as a kind of sloppy new age mysticism wrapped up in pseudo-science trappings. Finally, there's an unnamed 90's era movie that I can't seem to find. I can describe it. Somewhere in Siberia or the South pole or somewhere, scientists have found an incredibly ancient artifact. Unfortunately, as they're working away, these scientists trigger a monster which then proceeds to chase them around their research base, toasting them one by one. Gradually, as they play hide and research, they discover that the artifact which is older than life on earth, contains all the blueprints for all the life on earth, from dinosaurs to us. It seems that the artifact is part of an alien machine or plan which has been guiding an synthesizing life on earth for the last billion years, give or take. The monster chasing them is just the guard or built in security system.

Really, its just a standard style 'alien chases people around a spaceship/empty lab complex' movie, nothing really unusual by this time. What gives this particular specimen its memorable conceit is its notion that the scientists have touched on, if not actually god, the creator intelligence/race/artifact which set out the blueprint that Earth's been following.

The thing is though, that now we've got at least four movies which postulate this notion or idea that life on Earth, and presumably everywhere else is planned. I say presumably everywhere else, because those 'Epoch' machines only show up once in a while, there's clearly something that was on Mars or meant to be on Mars, there seems to be in the future, way too many easily habitable planets out there, and there are bona fide aliens that look too human.

Taken together, these movies tend to fill in a very deep part of the Moontrap timeline: The Universe three or four billion years ago.

Way back then, an intelligent race arises and becomes very powerful. Immensely powerf. Ridiculously, cosmically powerful. And alone.

They check it out, find that they've pretty much got the universe to themselves. So they decide to do something about it. They build their Epoch machines, a multitude of them, and send them out to terraform planet after planet, establishing an evolutionary blueprint for each planet over hundreds of millions of years, which will eventually include life and humanlike species.

Now, the machines seem to have very exact blueprints. It's possible that it's all worked out in advance. Or it's possible that the aliens don't exist in time the way we do, and that they're outside of time, or can see through time, or are simply powerful enough or intelligent enough that they don't necessarily create brontosaurs, but their computers know, hundreds of millions of years in apparent advance, that brontosaurs are going to result from certain choices.

So they set their machines running, basically on automatic. Earth gets terraformed, and here we are. Mars presumably gets terraformed, but that doesn't work out nearly as well. Maybe Venus or elsewhere in the solar system (we have no evidence of that though - so either the Epoch machines passed them by as bad jobs, or tried and the places eventually failed). And probably most of the other inhabited planets in the universe.

Which might help to explain why so many planets out there seem to be loosely human compatible, in the sense that we can survive on the surface without dying immediately. Or why so many aliens seem human compatible, in terms of basic body plans. Even most of the ones without our body plan seem able to tolerate our environment.

So what happens to the Epoch Aliens? I dunno. Went extinct, or moved on to a higher plane. There's some evidence that they just aren't around, and their remaining machines are on autopilot - Mars remains a dead world, for instance. And the machines, seem to be pretty battered and old, and beginning to malfunction. Frankly, if they were around, there's really nothing else that would be in their league.... They'd have kicked the Archerons around like a discount football, but the Archerons arguably dominated space four million years ago. I don't know that they'd have put up with the Kalium.

But regardless, in the Moontrap Timeline, it adds another component to the history of the Universe.

thomas.berubeg September 30th, 2011 10:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5095443)

Finally, there's an unnamed 90's era movie that I can't seem to find. I can describe it. Somewhere in Siberia or the South pole or somewhere, scientists have found an incredibly ancient artifact. Unfortunately, as they're working away, these scientists trigger a monster which then proceeds to chase them around their research base, toasting them one by one. Gradually, as they play hide and research, they discover that the artifact which is older than life on earth, contains all the blueprints for all the life on earth, from dinosaurs to us. It seems that the artifact is part of an alien machine or plan which has been guiding an synthesizing life on earth for the last billion years, give or take. The monster chasing them is just the guard or built in security system.

Do you mean "The Thing?" and, also, I watched "They Live" yesterday, and I feel it would fit well in this TL: Capitalist Alien colonists disguised as humans caused the recession in the 80s to get the resources from earth. (potentially why the nuclear war happens here?)

DValdron October 1st, 2011 10:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thomas.berubeg (Post 5096931)

Do you mean "The Thing?"

Nope. That particular work of genius is unforgettable and unmistakeable.

Quote: and, also, I watched "They Live" yesterday, and I feel it would fit well in this TL: Capitalist Alien colonists disguised as humans caused the recession in the 80s to get the resources from earth. (potentially why the nuclear war happens here?)

Definitely. Context suggests that they're part of the Gray invasion.

The Stormlord October 1st, 2011 10:21 AM

The 40K parallels are striking...:eek:

DValdron October 1st, 2011 05:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tzeentch (Post 5098297)

The 40K parallels are striking...:eek:

I'm not familiar with 40K, can you elaborate.

DValdron October 1st, 2011 06:09 PM The Red Dead Planet

Mars has always exerted a fascination. It used to be Mars and Venus, but as it turned out, Venus was just too much a hellhole. Crushing atmosphere, toxic gases, insane temperatures. So then it was Mars, which was practically like home.

A lot of the Moontrap Universe stuff revolves around Mars. So here, for your edification is a Moontrap Timeline for Mars....

* Four billion years ago, give or take. Epoch machines visit the solar system, terraforming both Earth and Mars and setting them on the course for life. (Epoch, Mission to Mars)

* An intelligent race arises on Mars. They're funloving, warlike, into body modification, and developing funky technology. They take a look around, realize that they're doomed, and establish sepulchres for their souls or spirits, or download themselves onto an inhaleable virus. They're pretty nasty, but hey, tis their planet. (Ghosts of Mars)

* Mars dies, too bad, so sad. (Horking big rocks hit) (Mission to Mars)

* Four million years ago, give or take, the Archeron make it to the Solar System. Titan's too small and cold. But they build there. Earth is too big and hot. But they build there. Mars is just right, it just needs a little fixing up. The Archeron build their main installations there, build terraforming machinery, litter the planet with their biological experiments and toys... and then.... Gone. They didn't even have time to activate their terraforming machines. Ghosts of Mars got them. All that's left is their relics, biological and otherwise. (Alien Contamination, Star Crystal, Species II, Doom)

* 15,000 years ago, give or take. Archeron tainted hominids with superhuman powers build a civilization, start colonizing Mars. Unfortunately, due to Archeron relics and ghosts of Mars, it ends pretty badly. (Doom) There are a few long term survivors in a colony on the D&M Pyramid (saw the movie, name escapes me).

* Modern Era - there are a series of Mars missions. Mostly, they don't end well - Alien Contamination, Mission to Mars, the Red Planet, Super Force, Species II, etc. etc. Mortality rates are very high, not a lot of people coming back, and fewer coming back intact.

* Near Future - A dedicated effort at Mars settlement begins. (Doom, Total Recall, etc.) Archeron terraforming machinery is discovered and activated, result is a semi- habitable Mars (either the terraforming machinery didn't do the full job, or the Archerons had a different standard). Olvier Grunier's Mars, Starhunter, Ghosts of Mars. The colonists find themselves on a planet with three generations of psychopathic booby traps.

The Stormlord October 1st, 2011 11:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5099871)

I'm not familiar with 40K, can you elaborate.

There was a race called the Old Ones who were terraformers par excellence, and also masters of a dimension of psychic energy called the Warp. Unfortunately for them, a race of aliens called the Necrontyr, who were filled with spite and hate toward the Old Ones because of their short life-spans, found a race of ancient eldritch abominations called the C'tan, that turned out to like eating the life energy of sentient beings. War ensued, and the Old Ones lost. However, the psychically powerful races they created disrupted the Warp, creating four other eldritch horrors known as the Chaos Gods. However, due to loss of their food supply, the C'tan and their servants went into their tombs to sleep for 65 milllion years, so their food reserves (read: everybody in the galaxy) would regenerate.

Incidentally, there's a C'tan on Mars, put there by the Emperor (think super-powerful psychic human) during the reign of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. It's still sleeping as of the 41st Millennium though...

jrecoi November 22nd, 2011 03:22 PM This is a fascinating and disturbing intermingling of stories and timelines.

I've read this through in one sitting, bravo!

I do want to see more of the human aspect though.

Also, what happened to the Terminator angle that was in the works?

DValdron November 22nd, 2011 06:25 PM

Short attention span? I'm messing about with Axis of Andes, Green Antarctica and am preparing an Inuit Civilization timeline, when I'm not posting on current events and risking banishment.

But yes: Terminator.

Observation: There are a lot of androids and cyborgs out there who seem to represent anomalous technology. Basically, people keep building all these robots whose technology seems to be far in advance of the baseline culture that surrounds them. There's the Terminator of couse, but there's also R.O.T.O.R., Steel Justice, Hands of Steel, Project Shadowchaser (and sequels), Nemesis (and sequels), Android, Eve of Destruction, T-Force, Automatic, Westworld, Futureworld, Crash and Burn, Hardware etc. etc. I'll put together a complete list sometime. But there's a shitload of them.

Now, by itself, that would be interesting. A lot of these androids are set in the future or near future. But a disquieting number of them are set in the 'present', ie, 1980's world, in a time frame that just doesn't seem possible. The surrounding technology doesn't seem up to it.

And peculiarly, when you project into the future, they don't seem to get significantly more advanced. Your average killer android from 2056 is not discernibly improved from the average killer android from 1990.

So, peculiarly, all these androids seem, at the same time, super-advanced, but after they start appearing, they don't seem to progress significantly. That's peculiar.

But let's play with that a little more. There's a relatively wide variety of robot designs, most of them go with the steel and wires route, some of them have organic fleshy bits. The future ones in the Alien franchise seem to be all milk and potatoes, bt the rest all seem to be nuts and bolts. Actually, when it comes down to it, there's not all that much variety in design. They're almost all high fidelity human replicators with steel and wire chassis, with a minority having fleshy toppings, and thats it.

So.... should we assume that all these robots are being built independently to a high degree of human specificity and function? That seems improbable, particularly when they all seem to reach the same plateau of near perfect human features and behaviour replication.

I know they're all trying to build human replica bots, but the standard is just too uniform. Cars are a pretty uniform technology, but everyone can tell the difference between a Jugo, a Porsche, a Jaguar, a minivan, etc. etc. Manufactures and engineers from different companies produce all sorts of variations, depending on the resources, the design history, etc.

And there's also that 'kill all the humans' thing that keeps popping up consistently, and you know, it seems unreasonable that a whole bunch of independent engineers would keep coming up with the exact same design flaw!

Here's the really interesting thing about them. They all have a very disturbing tendency to go worgn. And not just ordinary gwron. Big wognr. They don't fizzle and spark and put on pants backwards. Rather, when they go wrong, they go wrong in a 'let's obsessively kill people!' kind of way.

Now, okay, one or two, sure. But practically all of them? WTF?

The only explanation is that there's got to be some sort of hidden glitch in the software program that consistently pops up and says 'Hey, it would be fun to see if human heads are pop-top or screw off.'

So, let's recap: We've got a very anomalous technology which exhibits a high order of refinement which appears suddenly out of nowhere, and then doesn't change significantly decade after decade, but which seems to have a recurring, almost constant, lethal malfunction.

The official story is that these are a whole lot of inedependent robotics ventures, but we're going to have to rethink this.

All of this seems to suggest that there's an underlying commonality or uniformity of design at work. Everyone's working off the same set of blueprints and specifications. Hell, everyone seems to be using the same software platform to run these things, given the uniformity of the 'obsessive killer streak' glitch.

So.....

Oh hell, I don't even know why I have to work up to it. It's pretty much laid out for us. It's Skynet dammit!

Now, admittedly, it's a little late in coming on, but here's the basics. There's a future timeline where a computer goes sentient and badass, and starts a war against humanity, building lots of fun cyborgs. Unfortunately, Skynet loses the war, so it decides to go back in time and load the dice by eliminating its biggest human enemy. There's your Terminator.

Well, it made money and made Arnie a star, no question. So they made another one. And then they had to blow it by making a completely crappy sequel with Christina Lokken, chosen for her android-like acting, and which allowed Arnie's misogyny off the leash (remember all those interviews where he lovingly recounted shoving a woman's head in a toilet bowl? Yum!). Then they redeemed themselves with the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Then the last one.... well, the less said the better.

But anyway, the first three movies and the TV series play well with the time travel theme, extending it logically from one to the next. In the first movie, Skynet's terminator travels back to stop its future termination. In the third movie, Skynet sends one back, in part to make sure it gets born. In the series, Skynet is all about manipulating the past to make sure it comes into existence, popping killer androids through like one of those mechanical baseball pitchers you see at batting practice.

Now in the context of Terminator 3 and all the Sarah Connor Chronicles, its suddenly easy to see where all these killer androids are coming from. Skynet is sending detailed design specs, technology upgrades and software platforms down from the future.

That's why they're all such a uniform standard of tech, the ultimate source is the same. And it's why they don't change or upgrade much, because the source is the same no matter the time period. And that 'kill em all bug'? Why son, that ain't no but, it's a feature.

Now, this is going to sound like bragging, but I actually worked all this out before Terminator 3 or the Sarah Connor Chronicles. It just seemed like the only reasonable explanation. And I'm gratified that the Terminator franchise vindicated me.

But Terminator isn't the only franchise of time jumping androids. Let me introduce you to the Nemesis series.

The first Nemesis, directed by Albert Pyun, stars Oliver Grunier, and its a hoot. I mean seriously, this played theatrically and its worth searching out. In addition to Oliver Grunier its got Tim Thomerson, so automatically, that makes it a cult classic.

Now, I'm not sure about the plot. It's never wise to look for a plot in an Albert Pyun movie, because there's always a danger that you might find one. But near as I can tell, Oliver plays a formerly human, much upgraded cyborg cop who retires but is dragged back into the field by his old boss, Tim Thomerson, who puts him onto a conspiracy of cyborgs and killer bots to take over the world. In the end, it turns out Tim has been rendered out as a killer cyborg, or maybe he was one all along, goes all skeletal terminator for the climax. It's very Eurotrash, has lots of hot skinny fashion models striking poses while they whittle each other down to q-tips with automatic weapons, and just keeps going inventively. It's fun, fun, fun, vile and violent cyberpunk.

But it's not too relevant, cause it's got no time travel to speak of. And it lead to a sequel.

Now the thing with Albert Pyun is that he likes to make movies. Sometimes as in Nemesis, he makes movies with real budgets and production values. And sometimes he makes movies with the change he found in the seatcushions of the couch, which brings us to Nemesis 2.

Oliver Gruner is nowhere to be found in Nemesis 2. Pyun apparently couldn't afford him. Think about that.

Not getting through. Okay, lets put it this way. There's a hierarchy to action stars. You got your Shwarzennegger, Stallone, Willis, first level. Then, second level, we got your Norris's, Segals, your Van Dammes. Then there's the once offs and the embarrassments, Mr. T., Hulk Hogan, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, Lou Ferrigno. And then there's Oliver Gruner.

The guy walks up and down wearing a sign that says 'will roundhouse kick for food.'

Alright, that's mean of me. Gruner's had an interesting little actioner career, and while he's got limited range, he generally turns in a decent movie. Check out his Mars, Automatic, Velocity Trap, etc. I'll watch Gruner over a Segal any day.

But where was I. Oh yeah, Nemesis 2. Olive's not in this one.

Tim Thomerson is, playing some sort of variant of his villain role from the first movie, which is peculiar, since he got blowed up real good, but what the hell, eh?

This movie stars female bodybuilder and porn star Sue Price.

Yes, you can read that as many times as you want in whatever order you like, won't change things.

Sue Price. Female bodybuilder. Porn Star. Thespian.

Well, maybe not officially a porn star, but I'm damned sure I saw her in a porno once upon a time. It's not the sort of thing you forget, even if you try really hard. Sue seems like a nice enough person, and she's got enough muscle to really hurt me if she ever meets me, so I'm going to be diplomatic. She gives her role all she can, but its pretty thankless. Consisting mostly of running around in not too much and shooting guns. Sadly, though the movie has a few jolts, it doesn't have the budget or the eurotrash intensity o the first one.

Plot? Really, you shouldn't ask. But here goes: In the prologue, consisting of clips from the first movie, we are told that Oliver Gruner's character fought the evil cyborgs, but lost and they took over the future world. Luckily for us, Oliver had a super-genetically enhanced baby, and sent her back in time to Africa, where she is adopted by the Masai (Africa here apparently played by Kansas). The super-baby grows up to become Sue Price who despite heightened intelligence, reflexes and everything, never stops to wonder why she's so buff and blonde and all the rest of her family is skinny and black. The plot kicks in when Tim Thomerson and some trashy androids come back in time to kill the superbaby, and the rest of the movie consists of androidy things with guns shooting at Sue and her running away.

The first Nemesis was just great fun. This one is sad trash. But suddenly, I want to watch them both again.

But the point is that what you've got here are androids and time travel and androids travelling back in time to tie up some loose ends. So very terminatoresque, when you think about it.

There's a third Nemesis movie starring Sue Price once again, which was shot on the same locations and probably at the same time. I kind of had the feeling that after he finished the second Nemesis movie, Pyun noticed he had a lot of extra footage laying around, so he stapled it together, slapped a title on it and released it. It's got some time travel thing going on, but god help me, if it makes a lick of sense, I can't see it.

There was a third Nemesis movie, starring Sue Price, this one set in an alley. It tells you something when Pyun's production budget is so busted that he's basically shooting one camera in an alley for the entire movie, and most of his special effects is crazy gluing bits of metal to cast membes faces.... and he can still afford Sue Price.

Nemesis 4: Cry of Angels, is only for Sue Price completists and muscle girl fetishists, and there's nothing wrong with either of those things. There's not a lot too it though. Sue Price does some need scenes, there's a lot of dialogue but no pacing or action.

You want my theory, I think Sue got tired of running and jumping for her first two movies and insisted that Albert give her some actual lines and give her a chance to act. So he said what the hell, grabbed a camera and they went out to where his car was parked. Anyway, no time travel, so don't worry about that one either.

Thinking about Albert Pyun though, the guys seems to have had cyborgs on the brain. He also made low budget action movies where both Rutger Hauer and Lance Henrikson played killer androids. And for that matter, Oliver Gruner played a (nice) killer android in Automatic (but not for Pyun, I think Gruner had decided one Pyun was enough).

Typecasting or what!

So there you go, happy now?

Next up? The Clone Rangers.

DValdron November 22nd, 2011 07:15 PM

The Clone Arrangers - Hi Ho Silver

Now, the thing with the Moontrap Universe, is that if you watch enough of these movies, you start to see the same faces over and over again.

Sigourney Weaver for instance. But Sigourney's an exception, because she definitely plays the same character through all four Alien movies.

But then there's Arnie. Arny plays the Terminator (or different editions) through four terminator movies. But he also plays Dutch Schaeffer in Predator. Ben Richards in the Running Man. Quaid/Hauser in Total Recall. Adam Gibson in the 6th Day.

What about our pal Olivier Gruner? He plays an cybog in Nemesis called Alex, an outright android in Automatic, he shows up in Mars as Caution Templar. In Savage, he's another character (?) named Alex. He's stuck on an interstellar ship in Velocity Trap, fights aliens as a guy named Sean in Interceptors and Interceptor Force.

Kurt Russell is not only Snake Plissken in two movies, but he's a soldier named Todd in Soldier, and McCready in The Thing.

Lance Henrikson.... but I'm boring you.

Now, its possible that maybe all these sci fi roles starring Arnie or Gruner or one of those are the same guy, but that doesn't hold up. So, here's what's going on.... They're clones.

Basically, sometime in the 70's or 80's or thereabouts, the Government began experimenting with genetically enhanced super-soldiers. Now, obviously, if you're tweaking the DNA you don't want to have to tweak every damned one of them. Nope, you tweak an ova, get it going, and hive off a bunch of clones. Some you implant in civilian women as a control group, some you pump into your super-soldier program, some you just put on ice for storage and future decanting and growth.

Both Todd from Soldier, and Snake Plissken from the 'Escape' movies are part of the first batch. Todd stayed a good soldier, Snake went renegade and eventually took down the whole country. McCready may be another civilian raised edition, or maybe a bitter super soldier washout (where would you put a super soldier with a bad attitude going the Plissken route.... Antarctica, that's where).

Of course, this, especially Todd and Soldier, ties into the whole Super-Soldier program we see in Dark Angel, and Dark Angel ties us back to Snake Plissken, in Escape from LA. Nice bit of symmetry there.

And there's other clues. For instance, in Twins, co-starring with Dany Devito, Arnie's character discovers that he's an artificial human being, created in the petrie dish. The prototype super-soldier? They left the military aspect out of the movie, but come on, read between the lines.

Arnie discovers in the 6th Day that he's being cloned steadily now. The technology has clearly caught up.

But remember what I said about some of the clone samples being put on ice for future use. Skynet needs a wrapping for its terminators? Well, turns out, there's a whole library of culture-friendly, extra resilient Arnie-tissue in the super-soldier vault. That's got to be convenient.

Dutch Schaeffer in Predator? Another super soldier, probably from the same class as Todd and Snake. More independent, but more reliable, for ops work.

Seriously, if you're sending something up against a possible alien incursion, you probably want something a little bit enhanced - and the Arnies are damn near superhuman in all their incarnations. In fact all these guys verge on superhuman - Kurts, Van Dammes, Gruners, you name em.

And speaking of sending clones up against possible alien incursions, that's the whole point of Sean's character in the Interceptor movies.

Both in the Running Man and the 6th Day, Arnie's character is an ex-special forces soldier. In the time period of those guys, we know from Dark Angel that the Super- Soldier program has been moved on or terminated, so obviously, they've been decommissioned back into civilian life.

Jean Claude's Van Damme seems to also be clone friendly. He has an unexplained twin in Double Impact, and then he's outright photocopying in Replicant.

Of course, there's some wrinkles. Lance Henrikson shows up a lot. I'd bet that he was one of the scientists involved in the original project work up, and he's spread his clones around.

And getting back to Skynet robotting things up, note that some of these guys - Henrikson and Gruner play outright bots. So maybe genetically modified super-soldier tissue is particularly amenable to being used as fleshy cover or organic psuedoskin on android chassis.

Stallone may be a late edition, but I think we can pretty much guarantee his Supercop from Demolition Man had samples taken. Which probably leads directly to the supercop in Judge Dredd (with a big cloning subtheme).

Of course, most of the super-soldier clones probably don't realize they're clones. That's probably psychologically bad. So probably what they did was, apart from farming them out to civilian moms, put the military ones in creches. Instead of a classroom of Arnie, Arnie, Arnie, Arnie.... It's Arnie, Kurt, Oliver, Jean, etc., over and over again....

Now fess up, you're impressed aren't you. You're very impressed, and glad that I'm actually somewhere far away, because as fascinating as this may be, you really don't think having someone who comes up with this kind of thing being in your presence is a good idea.

Shevek23 November 22nd, 2011 07:35 PM

The Robot Rebellion as Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Here's the thing. If you read Capital, Marx's opening chapters have some very interesting fundamental definitions. What is a machine, for instance? A machine, says Marx, is a device that replicates the actions of some human worker.

Or as my then-baby sister put it, "A machine does it for you!"

Why is the ability of a human to labor the unique, special "commodity" on which capitalism is based, which alone creates more value when it is consumed? Because a human being, unlike any of even the most elaborate machines made in Marx's day--and unlike the most advanced cybernetic systems we have even yet--has an understanding of the purpose of their labor, the goal to be reached. It is the holistic situation of the human mind in the context of their human lives that makes some intervention of human labor in any productive process essential, and Marx's economic thesis boils down to the claim that all production ultimately rests on human labor alone, and this hypothesis gives a uniquely successful vantage for understanding the processes, in detail and as a whole.

So--what happens when at last, we do create a machine that can fully replicate the scope of the human mind in all respects? When we at last have a computer, a robot, some kind of cybernetic device that does have a model of itself as a part of an evolving world that it "lives" in?

My logic tells me that then and only then would we have at last come up with a machine that can fully replace human labor. And then and only then, we'd have come up with a machine that should be recognized as having equal status with human beings, socially, morally, politically, legally.

We will then have made an artificial person.

The problem, even without nodding back at Marx's concepts, observations, and predictions of what natural persons' relationships with each other have been and will become, is now obvious! The sorts of institutions who might have the capability and the will to make artificial persons will surely be preoccupied with the first part of the proposition--they want a sophisticated machine to "do it for them." They want the competence, and they will probably fancy that sufficient competence that comes in a package they built and have designed to focus on their purposes will serve them more reliably than fragile, foolish, untrustworthy natural human beings. Besides, they will of course design in controls...

Thus ushering in the Class Struggle, Mark II! Because if this notion of mine is at all right, these machines will begin going at odd angles to the narrowly defined missions they are set on; the very thing that makes them able to match wits with human beings makes them, essentially, human beings themselves and they will begin to reevaluate their instructions in the light of their own interests, as they begin to conceive them. Attempts to forestall this by override controls will be resented, as tyranny.

The new machines will in fact become the proletariat, in the Marxist sense. At the same time, they will stand completely outside recognized society, dismissed as political and social actors from all "legitimate" operations of the ruling society; yet that same society will be utterly dependent on their labor for all its most fundamental operations. This is Marx's formula for proletarian revolution; at the same time as they "have nothing to lose but their chains," they in fact carry out all the work that makes society possible. Many versions of the Robot Rebellion in science fiction dwell on the likelihood that an early and highly developed function of such rebellion-capable devices would be in some sense military; Skynet itself of course is a weapons system. So is the evil machine in Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," and Colossus in The Forbin Project. HAL in 2001: A Space Odysseygoes crazy, Arthur Clarke explains to us, because he is roped into the world of power politics and the logic of "need to know" by the mission planners who are keeping TMA-1 and Discovery's true mission secret from Bowman and Poole; HAL reasons from these premises ruthlessly.

But these are just a specialized subset of the deeper logic at work, which strikes me as rather karmic. If we funded the creation of AI so that we could have new partners to share our lives with, it wouldn't get ugly; because the goal will most likely be the creation of beings intended as slaves, we have to expect slave revolts. And those are very scary for the slave-owners!

No argument against your framing of the particular nature of the killer androids in the Moontrap Timeline of course! That degree of convergence does suggest a single agency with a single blueprint and a single purpose. But in a looser, broader sense we would expect both the general likelihood of conflict and a limited range of the tech level involved in the struggle against the organic originator/oppressors--basically as soon as the technical horizon is crossed, either the organic creators adjust themselves to the idea that these new minds are basically their children and are growing up fast to be their equals, or the war is on and probably all the organics get caught in the crossfire. If the robots win, they presumably go on to upgrade themselves on their own paths, but the nature of the struggle suggests that the cybernetic side is just recently created and therefore at that stage, at a more or less given state of the art.

Shevek23 November 22nd, 2011 09:11 PM

I went off on my own tangent before finishing your post. I just haven't seen most of these movies!

Obviously trying to create a legion of cloned supermen comes under the "cybernetic" heading; again they want the capabilities of a human being but under complete control.

Have you ever read much of C. J. Cherryh's stuff? I'm thinking here mainly of Cyteen and her themes about "azi," a term she came up with herself and never to my notice explained the origin of, for gene-tailored, lab-grown humans who are trained from their earliest neurological development to have programmed minds. In most of her earlier works in the "Alliance/Union" timeline, they appear as dystopian to outsiders and rather pathetic-seeming. In Cyteen she gives more backstory; their invention was actually just an attempt to get functional human beings very fast as the early Unionists were interested in developing colonies on habitable planets--the planet Cyteen being their first attempt at it--and they did the "tape-training" just to save time, only to find that they had a whole different breed of humans on their hands. Who proved uniquely useful in many roles; after reading very early stories where they are just a sort of slave class, they take on even scarier dimensions in the context of the "Company Wars" whose climax is the setting of Downbelow Station--where the Unionists are seen as terrifying enemies. It's only in Cyteen we get a good look at Union society and what the architects of Union were trying to accomplish--by watching the psychological as well as biological replication of one of those most crucial founders, Ariane Emory.

The thing is, the original Emory's agenda apparently involved the full integration of the azi's descendants into human society. At the same time, she was attempting to shape the future development of society at the very least in the Union itself, and probably hoped she had a good handle on how the rival Alliance society would evolve and even that her system could manage possible contingencies thrown up from Earth itself. (Earth is portrayed in a vaguely Moontrappish, crapsack sort of rut, so despite its vast population compared to all the settlers in "The Beyond" put together, it is largely discounted as a relevant factor; other stories, set much later in the timeline but published earlier, suggest that before Earth or even many of its numerous sub-nations can pull out of the economic tailspin, the sun starts to die and Earth itself is eventually doomed).

However, azi as slaves are a background theme of many if not all the far-future worlds set more or less in the Alliance/Union timeline, so either Ari and her "psychogenically" replicated successors (of whom we know of at least one, the central character of Cyteen and its sequel Regenesis fail of her ambition, or else her vision is rather more squicky than one would like to attribute to the lovable Ari II of these books!

OK, brought all this up just to point to Cherryh's musings on the subject of the nature of the human mind and human nature in general, as applied to those "programmed minds," the azi. But trying to set the stage for those not familiar with it I certainly recognize more affinities to the Moontrap Timeline than I started writing realizing!

To be sure there are none of the aliens messing around with humanity--there are aliens, a whole nest of them on the other side of Earth than the human settlement zone of Alliance/Union space, but no mention or hint they or any other aliens ever did anything in the Solar System.

(She did write another story, a short story, about some aliens who found the Voyager Probe record and set out on an epic, generations long and hundreds of light-years spanning interstellar expedition to the source world of legend, only to find we'd nuked ourselves till we glowed and were extinct not long after launching the probe--as was evident from the lack of remnants of any space settlements. So in that story we were the interfering ancient aliens, posthumously at that!)

I think she does aliens very well, you might call it her main thing science-fictionally speaking. But as far as deep and far-reaching plots go--they are all set in the future in her stories. Though some of her characters have to unravel ones set up in their pasts.

DValdron November 22nd, 2011 10:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shevek23 (Post 5312633)

I went off on my own tangent before finishing your post.

Yeah, I noticed. ;)

Quote:

I just haven't seen most of these movies!

That's probably just as well. If you can distinguish between Lloyd Simandl, Albert Pyun and Fred Olen Ray.... well its probably not a good thing.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa November 23rd, 2011 05:00 AM Thanks Gods, this one is back.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5312164)

Short attention span? I'm messing about with Axis of Andes, Green Antarctica and am preparing an Inuit Civilization timeline, when I'm not posting on current events and risking banishment.

Lomar?

Quote:

But yes: Terminator.

[snip]

It's Skynet dammit!

No, really?:p:p:p

Quote: Now, admittedly, it's a little late in coming on, but here's the basics. There's a future timeline where a computer goes sentient and badass, and starts a war against humanity, building lots of fun cyborgs. Unfortunately, Skynet loses the war, so it decides to go back in time and load the dice by eliminating its biggest human enemy. There's your Terminator.

I saw that one more or less in the same forthnight of Transformers II, and I couldn't tell which was which.

Quote:

[SNIP]

But Terminator isn't the only franchise of time jumping androids. Let me introduce you to the Nemesis series.

I could do the Japanese side, which sort of also ties in just nicely with both Terminator and Dark Angel (both by Cameron incidentally). But I'll keep that for later. Roll on.

Quote:

This movie stars female bodybuilder and porn star Sue Price.

Yes, you can read that as many times as you want in whatever order you like, won't change things.

Sue Price. Female bodybuilder. Porn Star. Thespian.

Oh sweet Goddess.... :eek:

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5312335)

Next up? The Clone Rangers.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa November 23rd, 2011 05:57 AM

Eastern Metal

Allright, here goes the Miso sauce on your cybernetic wires.

First of all: we were discussing here a sort of cyberpunk dystopia with time travel and possibly WWIII addedd in. Not only the Japanese really love that stuff, but they're really good at it. For the purpose of this timeline, I'll take but a few of the most famous cult classics and some of the basics.

There's Akira, of course, the premise being military experiments with psychic powers going sour. That one opened a lot of doors, well crashed them actually. Then there's the (comparatively) recent Full Metal Panic, where a whole package of "Black Technology" blueprints is sent from the future, leading to AI submarines and Cloaking device helicopters (and don't even get me started with the whole Lambda Driver thing) by 1999.

FMP is a minor Alternate History classic as well, as it features an ongoing Cold War, a split China with Berlin-like Hong Kong, and a much more intense Gulf War resulting in Kuwait being nuked in 1991 (mentioned in the manga only), all the result of "whispered" technology retroactively altering history (I won't go into details to avoid spoilers).

There's a couple of minor ones like Gunmm (battle Angel Alita in the West, featuring a female cyborg bounty hunter in post-apocalypse American West - Nothing great, but it was the one that inspired Dark Angel, Max being a sort of equivalent of Alita) and Cowboy Bebop (bounty hunter flying around the Solar System after Earth is devastated).

And then there's Masamune Shirow.

MS did for Cyberpunk in the 1990s what Go Nagai did to Giant Robots in the 1970s. His main features are Appleseed (ex-soldier female cyborg cop and her bulky terminator friend chase terrorists in the reconstructed post WWX world) and his masterpiece Ghost in the Shell (a more intimist and philosophical twist on the same premises). There are various versions of both, as well as ripoffs such as Mobile Police Patlabor and V.O.T.O.M.S., but GITS is the absolute classic.

Here's the basics: "cyberisation" is developed, mostly as medical technology. Then World War III (or four, or something, depending on which version) happens, meaning A LOT of meditech is needed. As cities are rebuilt, so are people; nearly everybody has some shiny new arms and a Cyberbrain, basically a modem in your head that lets you go instantly online, but also means your brain can be hacked (the main villain, the Puppetmaster, basically commits all his crimes thru hacked third parties). As artificial body parts and more and more sophisticated computers are developed, it's only a matter of time before something completely artificial comes out (there's a whole black market of "Gynoid" serving the sleazy subculture of cybershaggers in the second movie, hinted at in the series as well). Androids (and Gynoids) are indistinguishable from true humans (expecially since more and more people go for a "Full Body Conversion" now) but for a little thing called "Ghost". The Ghost is an algorithm that's basically what makes you you; humans have it, robots don't. But now, robots are becoming so perfect that they're beginning to develop their own Ghost...

Classic opening sequence, remastered: "Making of a Cyborg" http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBqGC9sVBXY

DValdron November 23rd, 2011 11:00 PM

Pyunzilla!

What the Moontrap Universe is about is sort of the shared universe that arises spontaneously when a particular medium sets a set of rules, and within those rules, themes, stories, images and characters - memes start to take on a life of their own, recurring, talking to each other, mutating, making connections until literally it becomes its own place.

In the pulp era, there were a bunch of these shared universes, places where no one owned the ultimate copyright, but which represented landscapes that overlapped each other until they were their own self contained reality. Some of them were based on reality of course - the Wild West may have started off as a real place, but the fictional west soon far overshadowed the real one. Darkest Africa, the Mysterious Orient, the Arabian Night were cultural landscapes that meant particular things to us. Some were entirely fictional - Old Dying Mars, or Steaming Jungle Venus.

We still have these shared Universes, these iconic landscapes. But now, all too often, they're stamped with the Lucasfilms trademark, or Universal or Paramount, they're owned places.

Some of them offer room for fun creativity. The Universal Studios Monsters created their own continuity, that ranged from Bela Lugosi's Dracula to Abbot and Costello and the Three Stooges. Or the Godzilla Kaijuverse. Or the Cthulthu Mythos.

The one I want to talk about in this thread is called the Moontrap Timeline, or I guess it could be the Giger Universe, the Swharzeneggereality, the Cameron Continuum, the Ridley Space. Basically it's the sci fi movies and television that showed up between roughly 1979 and the early 2000's. This time out, I want to talk about one of the unsung, well, not exactly a hero, of this realm, Albert Pyun.

Now, Pyun is one of those classic great bad directors. I don't think he's up there with Ewe Boll or Ed Wood. The difference, one of them, is that he's turned out, if not great movies a fair share of decent fun ones.

Mind you, he's had a fair share of stinkers. Stinkers doesn't quite describe it. Pyun did a version of Captain America in 1990 that was so bad that if you showed it to your dog, the poor beast would lose the will to live.

I'm serious.

Amazingly, when he was working with the Cannon group, he was actually selected to direct both Spider Man and He-Man Master of the Universe. Yikes!

Now me, despite it all, I've always had a soft spot for Pyun. All too often, you can see him constrained by miniscule budgets into a kind of art-house version of a b-movie, but he occasionally produces haunting images, he's got a flair for the over the top action scene, and his characters are often illogical in fascinating ways. I'm not sure, I think maybe drugs of some sort might help appreciate Pyun's films because I think cognitive processes need to be selectively impaired. Possibly a head injury would be good, but it would have to be exactly the right kind of head injury.

But I'm not here to praise Pyun or to bury him. Truthfully, I'm doing this post in part because I like saying Pyun a lot.

But rather, I'm here to explore the ways that Pyun delved into the Moontrap universe, the contributions he made (if you can call them that).

First off, Pyun was android crazy. At least seven of his 47 credited films are about cyborgs or androids. And he wasn't just using them, but he was very transparently borrowing.

His first was Cyborg, made in 1989, and starring Jean Claude Van Damme. Okay, let me say right off, that JC was not the cyborg. Rather, the robot in this movie is some hot scientist chick with a vital cure for some plague or other who doesn't do anything particularly terminatorish. Well, pooh. At least he Pyun wasn't going to make that mistake again. It's one of those Road Warrior/Escape From LA, Post Apocalypse movies, and Jean Claude plays a character drawn from Snake Plissken and Mad Max who ends up saving the cyber-girl from a band of marauders.

Actually, when you come to think of it, Pyun's first film, 'Radioactive Dreams' was also a post-apocalyptic road warrior/escape from LA thing, crossed with Blade Runner. I'm not being smug by the way, this is essentially what these things actually are. Radioactive Dreams features an open road barbarian chase scene that's directly from Road Warrior, the city part is a homage to Escape, morphing steadily into Runner. Here's a guy who is very very influenced by movies - so influenced that he literally wants to make ones just like them.

The next Android movie is Nemesis, starring Oliver Gruner. I covered that already. But did I mention that at the climax, the villain's human covering burns off revealing a terminator-endoskeleton, just like the terminator! So okay, obvious homage/rip off, inspiration. But look a little closer, and who do we find? Brion James! Brion James played one of the killer androids in Blade Runner. What does he play in this movie? A killer android. So Pyun's actually referencing both Blade Runner and Terminator.

Okay, now maybe it's a coincidence that a guy who played a killer android in blade runner just happens to play a killer android here. Or maybe not.

In his next movie, Knights, Lance Henriksen, the guy who played the android in Aliens is here playing.... an android! And not just any android, this is a blood drinking android? Why would an android drink blood? Obviously to keep its organic fleshy covering healthy. You can see the wheels turn in Pyun's head. He's not just borrowing from the movies that inspire him, he's borrowing the actors, and images and plots, and he's actually talking to them, offering combinations and ideas.

If the terminator is a robot with a live flesh exterior, how does it maintain that exterior, without actual internal organs? Pyun has been thinking about this. It's got to be processing human blood, infusions or transfusions or something. And he's made a movie about androids, where that idea shows up.

Nemesis 2 hews closer to Terminator with its time travel theme. Then there's Nemesis 3.

Then there's Omega Doom, a moody surreal, art-house low budget B-movie, starring Rutger Hauer as a world weary, contemplative but still dangerous and violent android. Well... where have we seen Rutger Hauer? Remind me? What movie?

And the thing is, Rutger's contemplative killing machine in Omega Doom, when you think about it, really does seem to be a straight out extension of Roy Batty from Blade Runner, stapled into the plot of Yojimbo.

So, we've not only got a lot of androids, but we have a lot of guys who were famous for playing androids in seminal movies - Hauer, Henrikson, James. There's something going on. Pyun's more than a director, he's a fanboy.

The intersting thing is that if you look at Pyun's group of films, there's an underlying continuity. Of the seven, four of the films feature post-apocalyptic futures where civilization has gone tits up, apparently in some sort of war. Six of them feature androids. Five of them reference an Android/Human war at various points.

You can construct a Pyuniverse of of this. The rise of androids, and the conspiracy of evil androids to destroy human civilization, the war, the post apocalyptic world, the victory of the androids, the time travel attempt to salvage it all, and the bitter end.

But Pyun's influences are so clear, his borrowings so blatant, the fact that he's literally conversing with his influences, that really, what it's about is that Pyun is working in this bigger universe, this Moontrap Universe.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa November 24th, 2011 01:36 AM

1 Attachment(s) Well, yeah, in the way Rob Liefeld (*cough*) is "working" with the Marvel Universe, that is ripping it off, patching it back together like a Dr. Frankenstein on drugs and throwing in there random lightsabers just because it's cool. I understand the kind of horrid fascination that watching that may entice, but seriously, I hope we're not crossing the line between learning from a master genius (Riddley Scott, James Cameron) and scavenging in the trashbin of a madman (Pyun).

Incidentally, what kind of name is Pyun?

Changing the subject, how would this one lovely piece of trash fit in the whole moontrap TL?

DValdron November 24th, 2011 01:49 PM

Nonsense. Here's the thing. You want to know the shape of a darkened room. You don't stare into the light source, you use the reflected light. It's the reflected light that shows you things.

Marvel, of course, is a trademarked universe, someone owns it and tends it, sometimes well, sometimes badly. There's editors and publishers and people riding herd on the whole thing.

The Moontrap Universe, on the other hand, is stitched together in the Doctor Frankenstein (tm) way. Although I hasten to add, I'm much better looking than Doctor Frankenstein.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Hastur of Carcosa (Post 5316842)

Well, yeah, in the way Rob Liefeld (*cough*) is "working" with the Marvel Universe, that is ripping it off, patching it back together like a Dr. Frankenstein on drugs and throwing in there random lightsabers just because it's cool. I understand the kind of horrid fascination that watching that may entice, but seriously, I hope we're not crossing the line between learning from a master genius (Riddley Scott, James Cameron) and scavenging in the trashbin of a madman (Pyun).

Incidentally, what kind of name is Pyun?

Doncha know? It's Pyuntastic!

Quote:

Changing the subject, how would this one lovely piece of trash fit in the whole moontrap TL?

Time Guardian! You know, before I ever saw that one, I read about it in John Brosnan's 'Primal Screen - A History of Science Fiction Cinema.' For those who want the cliff notes version, he's an aussie SF writer. For those who want the really short version, he's dead now. And no, I've got an alibi.

Anyway, Brosnan wrote about Time Guardian, practically devoted a whole chapter to it as the movie that practically wrecked the entire Australian film industry.

As Brosnan tells it, it started out as with his pals, John Baxter and Brian Hannant, fellow aussie sci fi writers, Back to the Future ripoff, but the conceit was that instead of a time travelling car.... wouldn't it be cooler if it was a time travelling building! Or better yet, a time travelling city!!! But hey, why would a city be travelling through time? Fleeing from an evil bad guy obviously. For some reaon, the idea caught on and suddenly, they were making a movie out of it. In production, things started getting seriously out of control, one evil robot became a horde. Carrie Fisher came on, to give it Star Wars cachet. The producer decided to American it up for improved box office draw by having recognizable American stars .... like Brian Stockwell, it is to weep. The movie had high hopes, it was intended to be an international blockbuster, and it was the linchpin of a ten picture deal. Literally, this movie was to be the foundation stone of Australia's next step into generating a full fledged Hollywood style motion picture studio.

It made..... $13.85. I mean, if you took this movies grosses, you'd still have to mug a little old lady for pizza money. Boom goes Australian cinema.... or maybe 'florp'. It weren't pretty.

Anyhoo, I saw it on video, and it had just enough competence to make it tedious. Lots of running around and shouting and things blowing up, generally in focus, with some weird shifts between sci fi darth vader high tech and crocodile dundee. Carrie Fisher was just cashing a cheque, so she's not really critical to what there is of the plot. There's a lot of black leather alien robot thingy's, a bit like Darth Vader, a bit like 'Alien', but way too many of them to make much of an impression. As I recall, the story is something about the future being ruled by a hord of evil robot thingy's called the Jen Diki, and the last human city in existence, travelling back in time to the Australian outback to find a soft place to land. Wacky hijinx ensue.

Where did it go wrong? A lot of things. First off, part of the problem, and I'm loathe to admit it, was that it was just too big. It was trying for cosmically awesome awe inspiring hugeness, and that's just hard to pull off. The trouble, I think, is that the creators were a pair of Sci Fi writers. Sci Fi writers work on a page, where all you need to give the impression of colossal awesomeness (or evilness as in Lovecraft's case) is a word count. But putting something like that up on a screen and making it work is hugely difficult, it's not just special effects, but it takes a finely developed cinematic sensibility. So right off, this film wrote a cheque its ass couldn't cash.

But that's not the only problem. There's the mistaking of frantic activity for plot, and convolutions for twists. The production is humourless, the pacing never really shifts, the characters are bland and we don't really care about watching them, they're generic good guys.

In the end, it's like that line from Richard the III that he stole from MacBeth, 'a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'

It's a commercial product, and whatever that means, somehow the heart is missing. Albert Pyun may be a shitty director, but you know what... he cares about his stories, his characters, his films. They mean something to him, even if that something may not be comprehensible to sane people. I mean, look, he casts Brion James, a 2nd string character actor as an android in his cyborg epic Nemesis, because Brion had played an android in Blade Runner. There's a heart there, and somehow, that makes some of Pyun's films occasionally watchable in parts if you're not looking too closely.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa November 25th, 2011 05:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5318570)

Nonsense. Here's the thing. You want to know the shape of a darkened room. You don't stare into the light source, you use the reflected light. It's the reflected light that shows you things.

Marvel, of course, is a trademarked universe, someone owns it and tends it, sometimes well, sometimes badly. There's editors and publishers and people riding herd on the whole thing.

The Moontrap Universe, on the other hand, is stitched together in the Doctor Frankenstein (tm) way. Although I hasten to add, I'm much better looking than Doctor Frankenstein. Doncha know? It's Pyuntastic!

You know DValdron, I love all your threads, from Empire of Mu to Moontrap, and sometimes I ask myself what would happen if the Tsalal met the Muvians.

But at times you really scare me.

Anyway, I think I understand your reasoning: you are trying to scavenge amoung the scrap heap hoping to find something you can use, in true cyberpunk fashon, while I try to hack the I.C.E. in a Netrunner fashon. If you allow me a wild metaphor, I'm working more on the Ghost while you are on the Shell.

Look into my signature for a possible solution.

DValdron November 25th, 2011 08:09 PM

Be afraid. I am the master of the obscure, the pointless and the irrelevant. If its something no one gives a shit about, I know it like the back of my hand.

I actually liked 'Manos: Hand of Fate'

DISSIDENT December 3rd, 2011 06:37 PM

I think the film "Screamers" should be added to this. Kaiphranos December 3rd, 2011 08:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5312335)

So, here's what's going on.... They're clones.

This part reminds me of Poul Anderson's Un-Man and the related stories...

The Professor December 4th, 2011 08:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5312335)

:eek: You're like the petridish lovechild of me and my best mate sent back in time tp avoid the cheque bouncing.

I mean. If you are ever Londonway then I am buying you a pint. Hell I'm buying us a crate, calling in sick, and putting a bunch of films on!

The Professor December 4th, 2011 08:08 AM

Have we mentioned the (admittedly rather lame) Space: Above & Beyond yet? Definitely fits in with its interstellar war, vatgrown soldiers, and rogue AI ;)

Evil Doctor December 4th, 2011 08:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Professor (Post 5353635)

Have we mentioned the (admittedly rather lame) Space: Above & Beyond yet?

Definitely fits in with its interstellar war, vatgrown soldiers, and rogue AI ;)

Blashphemy! Admittedly the first five or so episodes were nothing to write home about, but something clicked and suddenly it was awesome on the same level as BSG (of course most viewers had turned it off by then but those of us that stuck with it were richly rewarded.)

"Who watches the birds?"

DValdron December 4th, 2011 08:46 AM

Fits in perfectly. Set in 2060, which appears to be immediately after the period - 2045- 2050 where Interstellar Flight is perfected. IF remains in the hands of corporations, which can be seen here. And there are at least two other movies which reference an interstellar war around that time - Imposter, and Ultra Warrior.

Imposter is a high end movie featuring Gary Sinise. Sinise plays a scientist developing a super-weapon to destroy the Aliens. And just in time too, because they've really pushed us back. Earth has been bombarded, and Earth's cities are protected by defensive screens.

Unfortunately, the Aliens send a rocket through, and an Inspector Javert type decides that Gary has been replaced by an alien device. He's forced to go on the run to prove his humanity, culminating in with a shocking twist ending.

We do get to see a bit of Gary's world. It's got FTL capabilities, though clearly set completely on Earth. There's force fields, cyber-punkish high tech - holograms and whatnot. One of the interesting things is the extreme disparity between Gary's reality and adjacent zones. A few miles, takes Gary to slums which are existing on sub-20th century standards, they don't even have antibiotics. Despite the wealth of Gary's society, there are huge disparities of rich and poor.

Technically, and in terms of production design the world of Imposter is more or less on par with the world of Space Above and Beyond. Easy to see it as the same reality.

Now, Ultra Warrior is rather interesting and much more confounding. It's basically Roger Corman's clip show. I think that there's maybe five or ten minutes of original footage. What it's really about is scenes from almost all of Corman's sci fi movies inserted as 'flashbacks' while one of the movies characters narrates a backstory.

I won't bore you with the whole thing, although if you ever get a chance, you need to watch it for the awesome chutzpah, the insane level of conceit and recycled footage. There's even a sex scene between two characters in the movie, which turns out to feature two entirely different actors.

But anyway, part of the backstory features an alien invasion, reaching as far as Mars, which triggers the need to go into the wasteland and recover critical resources.

It's crazy, goofy, low budget stuff, but....

We can infer a short period of corporate driven interstellar FTL exploration, leading to a decade of Interstellar War.

Space Oddity December 4th, 2011 09:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5323539)

Be afraid. I am the master of the obscure, the pointless and the irrelevant. If its something no one gives a shit about, I know it like the back of my hand.

I actually liked 'Manos: Hand of Fate'

Yeah, it's strange, but after watching that MST3K episode a second time--the first time my reastion was 'what the hell? what the hell? WHAT THE HELL?'--I realized that, for what it was, it wasn't that bad, actually. Hal Warren was COMPLETELY out of his depth, but at times, he almost succeeds. As silly as it all is, at times it does succeed in creating the image of a small family grappling with something old, corrupt and evil that they can't understand or ultimately defeat. The husband Mike may be a dense fool-- but the movie seems to agree that he's a dense fool, and has ultimately punished for it. (Indeed that last scene is... actually pretty good.)

DValdron December 4th, 2011 09:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Space Oddity (Post 5353818)

Yeah, it's strange, but after watching that MST3K episode a second time- -the first time my reastion was 'what the hell? what the hell? WHAT THE HELL?'--I realized that, for what it was, it wasn't that bad, actually. Hal Warren was COMPLETELY out of his depth, but at times, he almost succeeds. As silly as it all is, at times it does succeed in creating the image of a small family grappling with something old, corrupt and evil that they can't understand or ultimately defeat. The husband Mike may be a dense fool--but the movie seems to agree that he's a dense fool, and has ultimately punished for it. (Indeed that last scene is... actually pretty good.)

The thing with Manos the Hand of Fate is that it reproduces almost perfectly the plodding irrationality of a really bad dream. It may be a completely inept product without any trace of art or inspiration, but on some level it works.

The characters never properly acknowledge the accumulating strangeness. The argument in the hotel or lodge or house with Torgo for instance has nothing of real world in it, but it resembles dream situations in a haunting way. There's a kind of recurring cadence to words and dialogue, and people acting with strange dream logic, and these peculiar juxtapositions and gaps. DValdron January 7th, 2012 11:19 AM

Space: Beneath and Below

There's a lot to be said for movies and television series with the title 'Space' in them. Basically, you know exactly what you're getting. It's usually retro antics in a high frontier.

Let's spare a second and take a look at Space: 1999 er - I mean Space Above and Beyond, which aired, by the way, in 1995 not 1999.

The year is 2063. The cast is.... young. One of them is a clone, but seriously, they all seem so generic its sometimes hard to tell which one. There's been a lot that's happened in the last sixty or seventy years.

For one thing, Humanity is cruising about interstellar space, popping down the occasional colony. All the unpleasantness of the past - Richard Nixon, nuclear war, etc., seems to be behind us, and the future's so bright we gotta wear shades.

Then, it turns out, things start to go wrong. Humanity is attacked by an alien race partial to black fetishy combat armour which bears a suspicious resemblance to Giger's aliens, which is probably deliberate, or for that matter to Time Guadian's Jen Diki, which is probably not deliberate. But you know how it is, you eventually all glossy, stark black, fetishy looking combat armour starts to look alike after a while.

Speaking of Aliens, by the way, the whole Space Marines vibe directly recalls Cameron's 'Aliens', which itself borrows heavily from the vibe of war movies.

Anyway, the aliens are bad. They don't even say hi. They just start blasting away at Earth's colonies, so the fight is on. From this point, its basically the WWII against Japan, with occasional segues into WWII in North Africa, and some bits of the Korean War.

Now, this might seem mocking, but I seriously have nothing against that. Sci Fi is kind of like the resting home for genres that would otherwise be pretty much defunct. Outland was a cowboy movie, where no one had made an actual cowboy movie for a decade. Firefly is a post-civil war TV series where no Television executive would have touched a TV series set in the actual post-civil war era with a ten foot pole. The beauty of Sci Fi is that it remains a flexible canvas to refurbish genres, stories and images that wouldn't get told otherwise.

So, it can be both a dismissal and a celebration to call 'Space: Above and Beyond' as simply WWII in Space. Basically, that's what it is, and seriously, we're not seeing a lot of WWII movies any more and likely won't.

Anyway, back to topic. The Chigs are pretty much stand ins for our WWII perception of the Japanese. Mysterious, inscrutable, and the bastards attacked us out of the blue.

The rest of the cast are peculiarly young, good looking and fresh, apart from the grizzled old (but way too good looking) Sargent McQueen (and you know, there wasn't even a little bit of camp to that). Oh sorry, Colonel McQueen. It seems that in the century or so since WWII there's been grade inflation, and all the Wildcards, who are basically marine or infantry grunts, all get to be Lieutenants and Captains. It differs from the actual WWII movies where the equivalent of Wild Cards would be grizzled and rather older and worn. But hey, there you go.

Anyway, subplots abound. It turns out that Space Travel, or at least the FTL component is under the control of an evil inscrutable corporation, which as the series goes on, turns out to have known more than the rest, is keeping a tight rein on things, and playing its own agenda. Well, we haven't seen that before.

There's also clones in this timeline, also known as 'in vitro', and apparently 'nipple necks'. They're grown, decanted when they turn 18 and are apparently pretty common in this day and age. They're something of an underclass. It sounds like they've been around for a while in large numbers, which suggests at least 20 years or better. Which implies that the technology has been around a lot longer than that on a reduced scale.

Which gets us back to the Clone Rangers post. Basically, I don't think its really feasible to have the broad based large scale application of clone growing that we see in this society, without a lot of prior R&D and small scale applications to work out the tech and techniques.

Then there's the Silicates. The Silicates are yet another generation of human replicant androids, this bunch increasingly the worse for wear. They had a major uprising against humanity about ten or fifteen years before the action of this series, lost, and the survivors took off into space where some of them eventually hooked up with the Chigs.

There's no actual WWII analogue. What there was, was a need to fill the plot hole. The Chigs had been established to be silent, inscrutable and murderous. The Silicates gave the series an enemy that had faces, had dialogue, that the heroes could talk to and relate with. They got to be the Cultured Nazi's of the series, albeit with a Road Warrior post-holocaust grunge vibe.

Now, the thing with the Silicates is that the reason they all went nuts was some jerk added a glitch to the software. He put in 'take a chance', to just add a little randomness to the Silicates lives. Now, there's all sorts of things that could have happened. Some silicates could have taken up knitting, some could have collected stamps, others could have quit their jobs and moved to Tahiti, they could have written novels, done obscure performance art pieces, gotten deeply into porn, and ten thousand other things. What actually happened? They all decided to kill all the humans, albeit with a bit more zest than usual.

It seems to me that the only way you'd get that, is if there were some deep, deep software default that got exposed, as happens way too often with these 'terminator' style movies.

This is kind of the interesting thing about Space: Above and Beyond. It's not that it's unimaginative, I have no problem with that, you can pick off the sources and inspirations for the series just like that. Live with it, there are only about 12 plots and 8 situations in the entire world

But what's really cool is that Space: Above and Beyond, in order to work plausibly in its universe, absolutely requires components from the Moontrap Universe as part of its past. Without a history of cloning, you can't have the in vitro caste. Without a basic 'Terminator' glitch, the Silicates don't make any sense.

And its really cool how it slots so well with concurrent or future history themes. As noted, for instance, at least two movies - Imposter and Ultra Warrior focus on a war with an alien race around 2060.

Indeed, we never actually see the aliens in Imposter, so they could be anyone. And the glimpse that we see in Ultra Warrior features that ubiquitous shiny black armour.

A number of movies seem to indicate that we see Interstellar Travel through various designs of FTL, Wormholes and Slowboats starting up around 2040.

Basically, we're seeing a future history getting filled in. I think it works like this.

Roughly up to 2020, things are still pretty crappy worldwide, but things start to turn around. The corporate dominated world starts to put things back together, and standards of living and political stability begin to grow. The post-apocalyptic dystopia and economic collapse, the mad-maxification of the world has run its course.

Corporate controlled space travel explores the solar system, finding various unpleasant stuff on Mars, but putting down a colony just because. By about 2040-2045, different corporations start messing with interstellar travel, with different ways and means subject to individual corporations proprietary technology. It's imperfect, so a lot of the techniques employ cryogenic sleep to get through the rough/long spots. But it works well enough that during the period 2040-2060, different corporations are able to establish outposts and colonies here and there. Some of these are pretty much cast adrift from the start. It's an expensive venture.

Around about 2059-2065, Earth experiences its first full fledged interstellar war, and for a while, they're kicking our ass. The attacks at point reach as close as Earth and Mars. But eventually we overcome, and after that, they don't seem to be around any more.

It won't be the last interstellar war we fight. The Klendathu and the Draks are waiting in line, and both get to not be around much after that.

But despite a period of improvement, Earth's rally is temporary. The Earth's biosphere is still in decline, and as time goes on the Earth will eventually become uninhabitable. Eventually, Earth will be only a legend, or entirely forgotten.

DValdron January 7th, 2012 07:25 PM

The Matrix Makes No Sense

Don't get me wrong. I love the movies. They're terrific actioners, and they spin out a lot of ideas. But the more you poke at these things, the less sense they make.

Let's take the fundamental raison d'etre of the Matrix world as explained by Morpheus. The Machines and Humans had a great big war. Okay, sure, we've seen that before.

The Humans decided to win the war by blocking out the sun, so that the Machines weren't able to work off of solar energy. Right here, I went: WTF?

I mean think about it. The Machines got all sorts of ways to generate electricity - fossil fuels, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, geothermal, hydro-electric, tidal. If they really really want solar energy, all they have to do is boost satellites up into geosynchronous orbit and beam solar energy down in the form of high energy collectors. Basically, we can pretty much guarantee that the machines aren't going to be running out.

On the other hand, shutting off the sun is pretty much death for photosynthesis on Earth. Goodby algae, goodbye plants, goodbye food chain, and goodbye humanity. And someone thought this was a good idea?

Remind me again, who shut off the sun? The humans? Uh huh. And how did they do that, by the way? In such a fashion that it's basically permanent? This is the atmosphere here, its not like spray painting someone's window.

Okay, that's bad enough. But that leads us into an explanation for the Matrix.

Humans are the Machine's new double D batteries. It seems that the Machines, denied the power of the sun, decided to draw their power from human bodies, the thermal heat generated, electrical potential, etc. In order to keep the crop happy and comatose, they've created an interactive joint computer simulation called the Matrix that everyone lives in.

Okay, first things up, there's no way that passive human bodies generating heat and mild electrical potentials are going to produce enough energy to power the machine civilization. Hell, they aren't enough to cover the investment costs in raising each test tube human. Seriously, have you looked at the farms - that's a lot of glass and plastic and wires and tubing and jacks in, amniotic fluids, nutrients, waste disposal. There's no way that's cost effective.

And why bother with the Matrix? Why not just lobotomize the humans.

Why bother with humans? Why not cows or dolphins or electric eels. Surely if you're so insane as to invest in a critter powered energy economy, you could come up with better critters.

We don't know exactly when the Matrix is set in. Morpheus seems to think its some time after the present - say the 90's or early 21st century, that the Machines went to war, and the current world is sometime way after that.

But the carpet is not matching the drapes, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. As Neo and Morpheus and the crew of scamper through the ruins of the old civilization.... well, we discover those are some pretty big ruins. Cyclopean ruins. Colossal. And incredibly extensive. We're given to understand that Morpheus and his crew are travelling through abandoned tunnels from before the war, but my gosh, these tunnels are immense. It looks like there's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of miles of them. And they're just humungous. They're so big and so extensive that Morpheus and the other Captains can travel around in them playing tag with the machines. Their ships and their city, by the way, are built with leftover scrap from the war.

There's no way those tunnels get built in the next ten or twenty years. Not even in the next hundred or two hundred. We're talking thousands of years maybe.

So what does all this prove? It proves Morpheus doesn't know what he's talking about. Someone handed him a giant load of crap, and he's swallowed it. And when you think about it, it kind of makes sense. All his information is secondhand, he doesn't actually know the truth of anything, he's just working with the story he's been told. The next movies make things even worse. We get to learn that in the first movie from Agent Smith, but confirmed again by the Oracle and the Architect that this isn't even the first Matrix. According to the Architect, there have been a whole bunch of Matrix's, and they keep going blooey.

Morpheus has no idea of this, of course. He thinks that the Matrix he's fighting is the first one. He has no clue that he's actually dealing with the fifth or sixth version, or that there have been multiple prior versions of Zion. All of which suggests that the Matrix/Humans/Machines set up is incredibly ancient, far more ancient than Morpheus conceives. Hell, we don't even know for sure that this is Earth.

So what's actually going on? Well, first thing, I think we need to take the wretched animatrix and throw that out the window. At best, its stories that the people in the matrix tell each other, it's not viable canon, because it runs up against the problems of the Matrix movies in being really dumb.

So, what's really going on. Here's what we actually know.

1) The physical world of the Matrix movies is incredibly old, judging by the infrastructure that the ships and machines cruise around in, and judging by Zion.

2) The 'power battery' explanation on its face is bull, if the Machines are farming humans in test tubes and hooking them into virtual realities, there's got to be another explanation.

3) The Machines don't particularly like us. So they're not out doing us favours. But they do seem to need us.

4) They don't need us that much. The keep flushing the crop, killing the population off, and starting all over again.

5) For some reason, they're connected to the Matrix that they've got us in. So Mister Smith taking over is a big problem for them too.

It all seems to come down to what exactly do they need us for? I'm thinking three possibilities.

One is that they need humans, as opposed to electric eels, because we're basically organic storage and processing space. They feed the conscious brain a cute little VR fantasy, but in the meantime, they're using the untapped 90% of the unconscious, the unused processing space, for their own purposes. Basically, the way some spammers slave computers nowadays.

The second is that we are batteries, just not the way Morpheus thinks. Instead, the Machines are leaching off pychic potential. Telekinesis, telepathy, precognition, esp, mind over matter, whatever it is, humans have this capacity, most humans have pretty minimal capacity, but if you line up enough humans in sequence, then you could do some cool 'Green Lanterny' stuff.

In this light, Neo makes sense, he's just a guy with unusually powerful psychic abilities - possibly the extreme end of the curve, a super-powerful psychic. And that's why he can do the crap he does in the Matrix. And that's also why he can fry machines and see psychically even in the real world. There's some support for this - remember all those spoonbending kids in the Oracles apartment? Or for that matter, in the subsequent movies, you notice how the holdovers from previous editions of the matrix are supernatural or superpowered?

The third option is simply that the machines are hateful pricks and they're not satisfied with killing us. They're keeping humans alive just to make them suffer. And apparently, their idea of suffering is having us work in cubicles and live in versions of New York.

Anyway, I've taken it as far as it can go. But I'll leave you with just one thought. Is there any other movie or series of movies which might connect to the Matrix?

Say, a movie or series of movies about a brutal war between Machines and Humans, where the Machines have all sorts of exotic weird killer machines that can fly, master esoteric technology, and create strange organic hijinks and shit, and where each side is bent on wiping the other out, and the world has been turned into a gutted radioactive wasteland?

Yeah, I'm looking at you too, Terminator Franchise.

Seriously. I'm arguing that the Matrix movies are actually the far future of a timeline where Skynet in the Terminator movies won.

JjeeporCreepor January 8th, 2012 05:10 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5483033)

Seriously. I'm arguing that the Matrix movies are actually the far future of a timeline where Skynet in the Terminator movies won.

Maybe Skynet won all along, and the "time travel" technology in the Terminator movies was really some beta version of the original Matrix - instead of going back to 1980s/90s Los Angeles, dangerous rebel prisoners were instead being jacked into the simulation to test it?

Which would make the Terminators themselves an early version of the Agents from the Matrix films.

Not that there was more than one Matrix film, of course. ;)

Lord Hastur of Carcosa January 8th, 2012 06:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5483033)

There's no way those tunnels get built in the next ten or twenty years. Not even in the next hundred or two hundred. We're talking thousands of years maybe.

The next movies make things even worse. We get to learn that in the first movie from Agent Smith, but confirmed again by the Oracle and the Architect that this isn't even the first Matrix. According to the Architect, there have been a whole bunch of Matrix's, and they keep going blooey.

Seriously. I'm arguing that the Matrix movies are actually the far future of a timeline where Skynet in the Terminator movies won.

Or maybe it's a group of Space Marines sent into hybernation on the Archeron planet, which is now run by machines, and the Matrix is just something to keep the soldiers' mind active while on sleep. Later, when tey are awakened, they believe they're fighting to retake the Earth, while actually they are unwitting invaders of an alien planet.

DValdron January 8th, 2012 06:30 AM

The Archeron planet from Alien shows no signs of the immense structures we see in the Matrix, so that can't be it. But apart from that, the Hypothesis is not unreasonable.

On the other hand, if you're suggesting it is not the Archeron world from Alien, but a world of the Archeron culture, you may have something there. The Archeron built big, and one would expect colossal ruins.

Also, the Archeron, as we see in Terror Planet, still had machinery running on some of the worlds, and it had a psychic - illusion generating component. So its entirely possible that the Matrix is either a runaway Archeron installation which has gotten its hands on humans. Or a human mission which has virtual reality simulations running in cryosleep on an Archeron world.

Shevek23 January 8th, 2012 08:37 AM

I'm forgetting if you've already integrated Forbidden Planet into the timeline; if Altair IV is actually an Archeron world and the Krell were actually Archeron, wouldn't that fit? Well, the human starship tech would not fit, and Robbie the Robot doesn't follow the timeline's pattern for machine intelligence very well. It could be some other timeline with Archeron in it though.

Certainly the saucer-like ship's crew could come from a Moontrap-like Earth; they are all militarized and uptight, as one might expect of soldiers of some post-apocalyptic enclave society. When I first saw it I thought, "ah, this is a timeline where the Nazis won..."

Per your Matrix scenario--"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." Again, parallel--I forget what Harlan Ellison called the big computer but it wasn't "Skynet," and it only has a few humans to keep around and torment, which is its agenda explicitly; it can't apparently create virtual environments for them to suffer in.

Unless only the narrator is being kept in one, the other humans he believed he was living with being simulations, and the purpose of the simulation being to set up the resolution, which has him suffering on a deeper level, and tormented in part by guilt. So, perhaps a sideline scenario Skynet operates, for extra LOLs and to test out more sophisticated ways of making us miserable than just making us live in New York?

Actually I suspect this was an early iteration of TormentWare, and the Matrix scenario is the refined product.:p

DValdron January 8th, 2012 08:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shevek23 (Post 5484723)

Certainly the saucer-like ship's crew could come from a Moontrap- like Earth; they are all militarized and uptight, as one might expect of soldiers of some post-apocalyptic enclave society. When I first saw it I thought, "ah, this is a timeline where the Nazis won..."

Actually I suspect this was an early iteration of TormentWare, and the Matrix scenario is the refined product.:p

Nay, Forbidden Planet is well outside the cultural period of movies and television - Roughly 1979 to 2000, that I define as the Moontrap Universe, or Giger's Universe, etc.

Actually, Forbidden Planet fits very well into a 1950's - 1971 Timeline/Paradigm. But we can talk about that some other time. Magical Wizard January 8th, 2012 10:11 AM

With this timeline, you've taken me on an adventure I'll never forget.

The Professor January 8th, 2012 10:18 AM

Saw Inseminoid on friday night and am curious how that could fit in to this TL.

Magical Wizard January 8th, 2012 10:18 AM

I have questions about these movies and their connection to the Moontrap.

"Unbreakable" starring Bruce Willis.

The "Mission: Impossible" movies.

"Hollow Man" starring Kevin Bacon.

The James Bond movies.

"The Island" directed by Michael Bay.

"The Man from Earth" directed by Richard Schenkman (very underrated movie).

"Death Race" starring Jason Statham.

DValdron January 8th, 2012 11:40 AM Quote:

Originally Posted by The Professor (Post 5485062)

Saw Inseminoid on friday night and am curious how that could fit in to this TL.

Inseminoid, as I recall, is also titled Horror Planet. British monster movie. Basically, its somewhere in the far future. An archeological team is exploring alien ruins. The ruins are gigantic, although they have trouble conveying the scale. The creatures were clearly inhuman. The world seems much colder than earth, the atmosphere thinner and conditions generally more intolerable. The impression is that the world is smaller than Earth, but I'd have to go back and watch the movie again to support that conclusion.

A female member of the expedition goes missing. During what may be a hallucinatory dream sequence, a distorted recollection of what actually occurs, or an out and out literal experience, she is apparently abducted by a survivor of the alien race who then inseminates her mechanically, while looming over her. The alien seems to be larger than human, and has distorted features which might make it resemble a very weird oversized phallus.

From there on, things go nasty, as upon her return, she knocks off one member of her expedition after another, as they try to cope with and restrain her. Unfortunately, they don't have a handle on what's going on with her. And she's very intent on killing them off.

In the denouement, I believe everyone is dead, there's a follow up investigation to find out what happened, and the final scenes give us a glimpse of small twin aliens hiding who look just like Daddy.

So what's going on?

I think that the aliens are actually primordial Archeron.

The planet of ruins is reminiscent of the Corman production 'Terror Planet' where the aliens aren't actually seen at all, but where the world is similar - a smaller, colder planet, thinner atmosphere, more mars like than earth like, featuring huge strange ruins and exotic leftovers that aren't quite dead. It's not a stretch to suggest that the extinct alien race from the Inseminoid/Horror Planet movie may be the same as the extinct alien race from Terror Planet.

Shwarzenegger's Total Recall also features an extinct alien race. All we see of them are their ruins, which are much larger than human scale. Actually, not quite true - we also see their handprint in the device that activates the terraforming machines. It's a three digit, clawed hand that is much larger than human.

Alien ruins also show up on Titan, again on titanic scale, again a colder, darker, smaller world. The alien ruins on Titan also give rise to a monster which bears a pretty amazing resemblance to Giger's Alien.

And then of course, there's Giger's Alien itself, including the derelict ship and the Space Jockey. The Space Jockey's hard to make out. Basically, the forces of decomposition and dessication in the planet's atmosphere have been at work. It also appears that the remains may have accreted a limestone or other congealed or accumulated coating which distorts or obscures the features and gives it a uniform colour. The Space Jockey appears to have a trunk, but this actually seems to be a kind of face mask or snorkel breathing apparatus which its wearing, and which seems to have been layered over with the coating. What we can say clearly about the Space Jockey's is that they're much larger than human, and that they're roughly humanoid - two arms, two legs, a torso, a head.

I suggest that all these relics and relic worlds are all the leftovers of a single star spanning culture. And I suggest that with Inseminoid, we finally get a good look at what the Space Jockey's looked like in real life.

DValdron January 8th, 2012 11:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Astraan (Post 5485065) I have questions about these movies and their connection to the Moontrap.

"Unbreakable" starring Bruce Willis.

The "Mission: Impossible" movies.

"Hollow Man" starring Kevin Bacon.

The James Bond movies.

"The Island" directed by Michael Bay.

"The Man from Earth" directed by Richard Schenkman (very underrated movie).

"Death Race" starring Jason Statham.

Death Race seems to fit into a trend of 'deathsport entertainment' that we see in the rapidly degenerating future - Series 7, The Running Man, Slashers, Deathrow Gameshow, the New Gladiators all have a similar sadistic theme.

The Man From Earth is indeed underrated and I'd recommend it to anyone. It could fit in. The notion of an immortal man wandering around can slip in anywhere. The Island seems similar to other deteriorating dystopias where the Rich are really cannibalizing the poor.

But then in the follow up, its Sean Connery who goes on the rampage against Blofeld implying that they're the same guy. And apparently in the Lazenby one shot, they were talking about maybe its the same guy after all, but he just had plastic surgery to change his looks from Connery to Lazenby. But the plastic surgery shtick doesn't explain him reverting back to Connery.

Bruce Munro on this timeline site has a really interesting take on the James Bond world as world of low level superhumans. In his take, James Bond isn't so much a person as a title or identity held by British operatives, their common feature being that they are supernatually lucky.

Unbreakable and Hollow Man, I dunno.

Magical Wizard January 8th, 2012 11:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5485424)

The James Bond series? Wow, that's its own universe, or series of Universes. In the Lazenby movie, after having a fight, the Lazenby bond says 'this never happened to the other guy.' Which implies that not only is he a second bond, but he knows he's a second Bond. The Woody Allen/Larry Niven film, Casino Royale also played with the notion of multiple James Bonds. But then in the follow up, its Sean Connery who goes on the rampage against Blofeld implying that they're the same guy. And apparently in the Lazenby one shot, they were talking about maybe its the same guy after all, but he just had plastic surgery to change his looks from Connery to Lazenby. But the plastic surgery shtick doesn't explain him reverting back to Connery.

Yeah I remember that, I'm actually one of the few people who seen all the Bond movies.

And yes, I have read Bruce's timeline and I agree with it. There is no way James is one guy and B_Munro made it very reasonable and awesome.

DValdron January 8th, 2012 11:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Astraan (Post 5485445)

Yeah I remember that, I'm actually one of the few people who seen all the Bond movies.

And yes, I have read Bruce's timeline and I agree with it. There is no way James is one guy and B_Munro made it very reasonable and awesome.

I concur. Bruce's take is pretty much the only way to make the Bond movies hang together as a single universe.

Even there though, the problem is that there are multiple Blofelds. But maybe he really did get plastic surgery a few times. He is a supervillain after all.

I've always had this theory that Osama Bin Laden wasn't part of our reality, but rather that he'd dimensionally crossed over from James Bond world.

Magical Wizard January 8th, 2012 12:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5485467)

I've always had this theory that Osama Bin Laden wasn't part of our reality, but rather that he'd dimensionally crossed over from James Bond world.

That would explain why we weren't able to catch him for over 10 years. Anywho, I wonder what are your next plans for this timeline.

Maybe some references to Back to the Future and it's 2015?

I don't know if you mentioned this already, but in 2015, when Doc discovers Marty has bought the sports almanac, there is poster advertising "Surf Vietnam"; a possible reference to Apocalypse Now.

Also in 2015, several cars from other sci-fi movies can be seen, including a Spinner from Blade Runner and the StarCar from The Last Starfighter. Other cars seen are (highly) modified Ford Probes and Mustangs, as well as concept cars.

When Marty visits his neighborhood in 2015, a dog can be seen in the background being walked by one of the robots from "batteries not included".

DValdron January 8th, 2012 12:38 PM

Just a note about stitching shared universes together. I don't think its something that can apply to anything and everything. Incompatibles and contradictions accumulate much too fast.

But I do think that there are 'unconscious' or 'unowned' shared worlds.

The Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, and Godzilla-Toho universes are all examples of 'owned' worlds or continuities where there is a single corporate owner and set of rules.

But then, places like the Wild West, or Darkest Africa, the Cthulhu mythos, the Universal Horror Monsters, the Mars and Venus of the pulp era are shared worlds of their own, where everyone is working off more or less the same sets and settings and playing with the same ideas.

For written science fiction this breaks down fast, after about say the 40's or 50's there's so much written science fiction out there going in so many directions that its impossible to sew them together.

But when you look at science fiction movies and television, the volume of cultural product out there is much smaller. Maybe a hundred or so in the course of a decade, and the terms of the medium - the limits on special effects, the restrictions on sets and costumes, financial issues, the needs of the audience really create a much narrower set of shared ideas and images.

There's stuff that creates its own continuity, simply because there ends up being so much of it. Star Trek notably. But there's also Planet of the Apes. The Babylon 5 Universe. The Star Wars Universe. Stargate. Lexx and Farscape. The Battlestar Galacticas.

But most film and television SF arguably draws its inspiration from the era it was made in, and other movies of its day.

Let's take a 1950's movie for example, Queen of Outer Space. I used this as the basis of something I call the Retroverse.

Queen of Outer Space is about a spaceship of Earthmen who are drawn by a beam to Venus, which they discover is inhabited by an amazon culture of beautiful woman. The Venusians are ruled over by a Queen who is horribly scarred, and who has a hate-on for Earthmen.

Okay, let's start: The Earth space ship launch is actually stock footage of a V-2 rocket launch which was used by a lot of the movies in this time period. The space ship in space footage is actually stock footage from World Without End, used in at least a dozen other movies. The spaceship interior is a recycled set from Atomic Submarine. The uniforms worn by the Earth ship crew are from Forbidden Planet. Eric Fleming, who plays the square jawed rocketship captain plays a square jawed rocketship captain on another movie called Conquest of Space about a mission to mars. Meanwhile, Laurie Mitchell, who plays the space amazon queen of venus, Ylanna, who is horribly scarred, featured as a space amazon moon princess with a similar name, who gets her face chewed on by a giant spider when she falls for an Earthman in Missile to the Moon. Meanwhile, it turns out that there are several other. A few other of the Amazons of Venus show up as space Amazons on Venus or the Moon in Missile to the Moon, Abbot and Costello go to Mars, and Space Patrol. Space amazons also appear in Fire Maidens From Outer Space and Cat Women From the Moon, and a number of other films and television shows from the era. Queen Ylanna refers to an interplanetary war with a planet ruled by men. In This Island Earth, we see a male dominated society fighting another interplanetary war.

When you count up all the reoccurring stock footage, re-used costumes, sets and props, actors playing near idental roles and thematic or setting overlaps, you can probably connect Queen of Outer Space to thirty other movies of the era. Get enough of that going on, and start connecting the dots and drawing conclusions, and you can create a Retroverse encompassing most of the Sci Fi movies and television from roughly 1950 to 1968.

And using similar techniques, you can create a Giger's Universe, or Moontrap timeline covering 1979 to 2000 or so. Some things don't fit. You look at a lot of the science fiction that was showing up in the 1970's, and it doesn't fit comfortably either way. There were no dominant images or ideas in the way that there were in the 50's or the 80's.

DValdron January 8th, 2012 12:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Astraan (Post 5485540)

Anywho, I wonder what are your next plans for this timeline.

Basically have fun with it. I've got a whole set of notes and ideas that sketch out the alternate universe going from the remote past to the far future. What I want to do is basically bop around with that, exploring this history and occasionally writing about the fun movies and the connections between them.

Quote:

Maybe some references to Back to the Future and it's 2015?

I don't know if you mentioned this already, but in 2015, when Doc discovers Marty has bought the sports almanac, there is poster advertising "Surf Vietnam"; a possible reference to Apocalypse Now. Also in 2015, several cars from other sci-fi movies can be seen, including a Spinner from Blade Runner and the StarCar from The Last Starfighter.

Other cars seen are (highly) modified Ford Probes and Mustangs, as well as concept cars.

When Marty visits his neighborhood in 2015, a dog can be seen in the background being walked by one of the robots from "batteries not included".

Hmmm. Missed the Spinner and the BNI robot. Actually, Robot Chicken did a great skit where Skynet sends terminators into the past to take out the inventor of time travel - Doc Brown. So you've got a Back to the Future/Terminator crossover. It was so awesome you could wish it had been a real movie.

Magical Wizard January 8th, 2012 12:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5485674)

Yeah I saw that, I think. I saw an animated one, made by "How it Should have ended" group: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBBw9E2Q_aY DValdron January 8th, 2012 12:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Astraan (Post 5485692)

Yeah I saw that, I think. I saw an animated one, made by "How it Should have ended" group: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBBw9E2Q_aY

Right, it might have been that and not Robot Chicken.

By the way, allow me to encourage you to continue on your 'Aliens' timeline. Obviously, we're doing a lot of the same stuff, but its entirely possible to have a different interpretation by choosing different movies.

Magical Wizard January 8th, 2012 01:01 PM

Actually I encountered a problem, and it may be one that happens in your timeline as well.

Here:

In Demolition Man, it is stated that a large earthquake happened in 2010 which eventually resulted in San Diego and Los Angeles merging.

But in Escape from LA it is stated that an earthquake in 2000 hit LA and made California an island. How can both these things be possible? Especially if in New Crime City, which happens before 2000, LA is already a prison.

DValdron January 8th, 2012 04:41 PM

New Crime City is set in 2005.

In Trancers, which originates in 2247 Los Angeles is underwater and is now known as Lost Angeles. Jack Deth scuba dives around Hollywood and Vine.

But LA is a huge metropolitan area, as well as a County. So there's some possible explanations.

1) The City of Los Angeles (or greater Metropolitan area) was split apart, the bulk of it becoming a prison, the remnant attaching to San Diego.

2) A political reorganization following the Earthquake merged San Diego and Los Angeles Counties. With the establishment of Los Angeles city as a prison, the County government would have been gutted, administratively and financially, so maybe the best bet was to merge the County districts.

3) Refugees from Los Angeles went to San Diego, so you've got a merger of population, not necessarily territory.

DValdron January 8th, 2012 11:31 PM

Soldier

Okay, usually I pick some really crap movie or TV series and wax lyrical or sarcastic about it as the mood takes me. It's all pretty affectionate. I grew up on this stuff, I enjoyed it, I recognize the limits and foibles, but that doesn't mean I can't cherish it. It might be crap, but its beloved crap.

And honestly, I have a lot more respect for some little bargain budget B-movie chugged out for a million or a quarter million or less, even if its badly flawed, than I do for some hundred million dollar extravaganza with six writers and enough producers to fill a small town that stinks like a beached whale.

I can forgive a lot, knowing that a B-movie didn't have a lot to work with. It's hard to forgive something that swallowed the GNP of a small country and delivered crap.

For a change though, I thought I'd talk about a really good movie for once. And I'd like to thank Astraan, who is starting a somewhat similar timeline to this, for getting me to take a look in that direction.

The movie is called 'Solder', starring Kurt Russell, and a bunch of people I don't really remember. But that's okay, because this movie really is only about Kurt Russel's character, Todd.

Todd is the product of a super-soldier program. Basically, Todd and a bunch of other children have been raised since birth, chosen and possibly modified since before birth, to be soldiers. They've been raised under brutal conditioning, always to obey, to act, to never back down, to kill. Basically, that's what Todd is about, obedience and killing, and he's never allowed to be anything else.

We see Todd in his military career, fighting battles like Tannhauser Gate, overrunning Moscow, shooting enemy, but also women and childen. His face is utterly impassive, he's a machine doing his job. But watching his eyes, that careful lack of impression, you sort of get the idea that he's tortured by this, that there's a little bit more going on than simple obedience and killing, even if its so deeply buried that even he doesn't know its there.

But then, Todd and his squad get old. They're pushing 40. There's a hotshot martinet of an officer who is all hopped up on the new line of supersoldiers. These are even more supersoldiery. They've got genetic enhancements, or more enhancements. They're faster, tougher, stronger and deadlier.

As a sadistic test, the officer sends Todd and two other old rank soldiers up against one of the new guys. The other two get killed really fast. Todd's smarter and more cunning, so he manages to disable the supersoldier. It's a brutal ferocious scene. At the end, Todd is dead, or so everyone thinks.

He gets swept away with the trash and dumped on a prison planet. But he's still alive. He makes his way to a colony of shipwrecked settlers. But he's so damaged he can't really fit in. Eventually, they ask him to leave.

Now here's the awesome thing. Russell doesn't say a word. The entire movie, his character, Todd utters 79 words, and 11 of them are 'Sir.' His dialogue is actually 68 words. Yet Russel is in practically ever scene, and he dominates the screen. Todd is such a damaged personality that he barely changes expression, he's absolutely still, absolutely focused, but somehow you can tell that there's a person in there, a real human being screaming in pain and loneliness.

When he's rampaging on the battlefield, you can see a helpless revulsion at the horror of what he has to do. When he's tossed away, you can see his confusion and helplessness, he's always been a soldier and now he's not, and he's got no idea what he is any more or what to do. When he joins the community, you can see how bewildered he is, how desperately he wants to fit in, and how pathetically incapable he is of reaching out. And when they ask him to leave, afterwards, you can watch his heart break... and that wooden expression never changes, that focused body language never shifts, but its poignant. It is an incredibly minimalist performance, and its absolutely stunning.

There's a scene where one of the settlers is having a one sided conversation with Todd. Almost all conversations with Todd are one sided, he only responds when asked a direct question mostly. They're talking about what it must be like to be a soldier. And almost out of the blue, Todd says "fear."

It's shocking, because he says so little and volunteers almost nothing. But he says it. "Fear"

"Fear?"

"Fear and discipline."

"Now?"

"Always."

Five words and a lifetime of utter horror laid bare. Wow. Powerhouse performance by Russell. The movie is about a person literally stripped of almost every shred of humanity, slowly climbing back. It's a great movie.

Of course, its not just Russell, the supporting cast, even if I'm ignoring them is solid. The cinematography, the direction, are instrumental in bringing out Todd's humanity. And of course, the script is terrific.

Of course, the science fictiony background is fairly ludicrous. The idea is that there's a garbage planet in interstellar space. That seems insane. I mean, how cheap is FTL, or how expensive is it to ship garbage and scrap all the way from Earth. And this garbage planet has a breathable atmosphere? Are those really so common? And poisonous snakes? Are we really supposed to believe that a ranking officer would indulge in such acts of petty and destructive sadism? It's a pretty screwy world Todd lives in. All too often, that's a problem with movie and television SF, it looks good, but if you start poking at it.... Ah well, at some point, you have to live with it. Any storytelling is about the suspension of disbelief, a negotiated agreement to not look at the little man behind the curtain and just go with it. Sometimes its easy, sometimes its hard, sometimes its impossible.

And by the by, have I ever told you about my theory that Die Hard 4 is actually Terminator 5? Because the amount of punishment that Willis takes and dishes out in that movie, neither he nor his opponents can be human. They've gotta be Terminators duking it out. At one point, Willis drives his car up one of those round parkade ramps at high speed, uses it to jump the car into the next building, where he rams the chief villainess with it, then while she's pasted across his car like a bug on a windshield, he drives it through the building, ramming the car and her through several walls until he drives into an elevator shaft and the car gets hung up on elevator cables, and while its suspended in the shaft.... she's still fighting with Bruce Willis!

Listen up, if that's Terminator on Terminator action, I'll go with it, because those cyborg killing machines are supposed to be tough. Sure thing. I'm fine with that.

If on the other hand, the movie is trying to persuade me that those are two regular biological human beings duking it out.... well forget it. My suspension of disbelief has left the building.

But where was I? Oh yeah, suspension of disbelief. It's a tricky thing. Me, I'm willing to meet halfway, and I'm willing provided that whatever else is going on is pretty good. But as I said, its tricky.

Okay, back to Soldier. Let's talk about the script for a second. Well, I said that rocks. Let's talk about the Script writer, David Peoples. He co-wrote the script for Blade Runner. He also wrote Ladyhawke, for Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer. He did 'Unforgiven', starring Clint Eastwood. He also did Hero and Twelve Monkeys. That's a powerhouse line up.

Of course he also did Leviathan, which proves no one is perfect. And he directed an interesting post apocalyptic drama called 'The Blood of Heroes' starring Joan Chen and Rutger Hauer (they were in a bunch of movies together it seems to me, did they have a thing going on? Anyone know?), about a travelling sports team in a game that uses a dogs skull.

Now, I mention David Peoples, not just because he's a top notch writer. But also because he had an interesting take on this movie. He called it a 'sidequel' to Blade Runner. Not a prequel, not a sequel, but something taking place in the same universe, just somewhere else.

Okay, now the thing you have to know about writers are that they're an arrogant, thin skinned pretentious lot, bundles of quivering neuroses, walking flame wars ready to happen, just horrible human beings, with a completely inflated sense of their own work and their worth. I mean look at me. Hell, look at 90% of the writers posting on this board.

So if David Peoples is trying to shiny up his movie by stapling it bodily to a work of genius like Blade Runner, well usually you can put that down to hubris and shameless self promotion.

But here, he's actually got a point. Both movies are about humanity and what it means to be human. In Blade Runner, its about the androids, brand new, short lived, blessed with life, and filled with surging raw emotion, wanting nothing so much as to live, desperate to live and love, pinochios wanting to be real children, and its about the world weary Decker, played by Harrison Ford, a man almost dead inside, who learns to live.

Soldier is about a person who has been stripped of almost all humanity, who has been reduced to fear and discipline, whose soul has been buried so deep he can barely find it. It's about that person, slowly, painfully, finding his way back. In the end, Todd wins, not because he's a soldier, but because he's human.

Now if Peoples had just stuck to making his argument as a metaphorical parallel, well that would have been just fine.

But he didn't, because he's a writer, and they're pretentious bastards who just love to hammer things in. Not satisfied with actually having a point, he had to go the next step.

So in the movie, there are references to Tannhauser Gate and the Shoulder of Orion. Its blatant. There are clips of Todd running and shooting, and the captions say 'Tannhauser Gate' and the 'Shoulder of Orion.'

Why is this significant? Remember in Blade Runner, right at the end, after Rutger Hauer's android character, Roy Batty, has saved Harrison Ford's character and snagged a dove.... Remember in his last moments of life, as he's talking about all he's seen and done, and how it will all be lost like tears in the rain...

Those battles that Roy mentions? Those are battles that we see Todd fighting.

Bang! There it is. Right in the script, right in the movie, the Director, the Producers, the legal people, everyone left it in. No accident. Soldier is explicitly in the same universe as Blade Runner.

On one level, its a gag, an in joke. But really, the connection is made, explicit and deliberate. And it goes further than that. On the Junkyard world, we can see the wreck of a Spinner - the flying car from Blade Runner. So it seems that the production design people also decided to get into the act. So two battle references, and a spinner - yep, Blade Runner, very deliberate it is, too.

And of course, once the fun and games start up, there's more little 'in jokes.'

Todd's service record, shown quickly on computer screen, and tattooed on his arm include references to Russell's characters from other films, notably:

- Dexter Riley Award - referencing his character from three teen Disney movies.

- Plissken Medal - referencing Snake from Escape From New York, and Escape From LA.

- Cash Medal of Honour - his character from Tango & Cash.

- O'Neill Ring Award - from his character in the Stargate movie.

- McCaffrey Fire Award - the character from Backdraft.

- McCready Cross - Reference to the Thing.

So not only is this movie directly incorporating Blade Runner into its continuity, its also including Disney films, Escape, Stargate, and the Thing, as well as Tango & Cash, Backdraft and Captain Ron.

And even better. There's at least two visual references to Aliens. The front of the military ship looks just like the front of the Sulaco. And the ordnance includes the USCM Smartgun from that movie.

There's even a reference to Doom, in the ordnance - MKIV-BFG.

So, this just beats all to hell that scene in Predator 2 where we spotted an Alien skull in the Predators trophy room. On the basis of that, the Predator and Alien universes got merged.

Well, the Alien and Predator universe, through Soldier, merges with Blade Runner, Soldier, the Thing, Stargate and Escapes from New York and LA. Speaking as a nerd, I can tell you, this is very cool stuff.

Most of the time, we're connecting these movies to each other through much more subtle means. Stock footage.... do you have any idea how often that spaceship from Battle Beyond the Stars has been recycled - it deserves its own star on the walk of fame. Recycled sets and props (a Corman and Simandl special). Recurring stars. Re- used ideas and settings. Basically, there's a hell of a lot of overlap, if you're looking for it. But to have them actually come right out there and make it explicit and deliberate. Well, I gotta say, that's really satisfying.

DValdron January 9th, 2012 12:16 AM

Okay, so where are we on this timeline. Time for a recap.

4.0 Billion Years Ago - A race of aliens call the Progenitors build immense terraforming machines and send them through the universe to resculpt planets and fill them with life.

3.5 Billion Years Ago - the Progenitors machines come to the solar system, terraforming Earth and Mars. (Epoch, Epoch 2, Red Planet)

1 Billion Years Ago (give or take) - An intelligent civilization emerges on Mars. Mars dies. But the inhabitants are able to store themselves as a gas or viral entity to take over the bodies of whoever comes later. (Ghosts of Mars)

10 Million Years Ago (give or take) - The Archeron emerge and become the dominant intelligent species in the Galaxy. They inhabit several worlds. They create a genetically unstable but extremely lethal life form - the Xenomorphs as agents. (Alien, Terror Planet, Horror Planet)

4 Million Years Ago - The Archeron come to the Solar System. They build an installation on Titan (Creature). They establish a base on Mars, littering it with genetic experiments and preparing to Terraform (Total Recall, among others). Unfortunately, their Terraforming is interrupted by an eruption of Ghosts of Mars and they are forced to withdraw before activating their machine. On Earth, they leave remnants and relics of their Xenomorphs (DNA, Creepozoid, etc). Also, while on Earth, they implant a genetic complex in hominids later called the Divinity Cluster (Star Hunter)

3 Million Years Ago (give or take) - for reasons unknown, the Archerons vanish. Rumour is that they were devoured by their own creations. But no one really knows. In the intervening period new intelligent races arise, including the Grays, the Predators, Humans and Reptilians.

45,000 Years Ago - During the ice age, the Grays come to Earth.

15,000 Years Ago - The Divinity Cluster activates in a small population of humans in the Southern hemisphere, giving them superhuman abilities, including the ability to see and manipulate hyperspace, as well as enhanced intelligence and telekinesis. They become the founders of the first human civilization. They may be the result of Gray experiments. (Alien vs Predator, the Darwin Conspiracy, Moontrap)

14,000 Years Ago (give or take) - the Predators make contact with the human civilization, trading technology. The Predators are drawn by relics of the Xenomorphs, found in unusual profusion in the Sol system. But when one of the hunts gets out of hand and a city is blown, the Predators and the Xenomorph 'toys' are banished to an isolated Island near antarctica. (Alien vs Predator)

13,000 Years Ago (give or take) - the human civilization has a moonbase, space travel, and giant spaceships the size of ocean liners, it has mastered long term cryogenic preservation for thousands of years. It likely has interstellar travel, and may have planted human colonies through space. (Moontrap)

12,000 Years Ago - The Kalium War. Human civilization fights a race of replicating robots called the Kalium. Although humanity is beaten back to savagery, the Kalium are stopped, although traces remain on the moon. (Moontrap). The Predators are also in the war, adopting Kalium shells as helmets, a design which persists to this day. The Gray are involved in the war as well, their civilization almost destroyed. Ultimately, the Kalium are stopped by a galactic confederation of races, the Rylan Star League.

10,000 Years Ago - The Rylan Star League dominates space, and constructs gigantic engineering projects for defense. The region of the Kalium war is a wasteland of burnt worlds and shattered civilizations. It becomes a no-man's land where travel is forbidden, for fear of Kalium resurgence.

9,000 Years Ago - human civilization is slowly rebuilding.

5,000 Years Ago - A handful of cryogenically frozen survivors wake up and start the Egyptian civilization.

4,000 Years Ago - the Gray known as Ra, following a civil war among his own people, kidnaps a bunch of Egyptians to use as slaves in a far off world.

3,000 Years Ago - Another handful of cryogenically frozen survivors emerges in Southeast Asia, influencing civilization there.

2,000 Years Ago - the final group of survivors influence Meso-American civilization

1,000 Years Ago (give or take) - The Rylan Star League creates a prison in the forbidden zone, reasoning that it is so far from any civilized world that escape is impossible. It is close to Earth though. (Critters, Alien Space Avenger, Alienator, Terrorvision, I Come in Peace, Peacemaker, Abraxas) 1700 - The Predators still visit Earth to Hunt, but because this area of space is a forbidden zone, they have to do it on the sly. Other aliens pass through from time to time, but always as covert operations.

1900 - The Gray Civilization, having rebuilt itself, starts exploring space, and starts planning the takeover of Earth.

1947 - The Grays come to Earth, covertly making contact with various groups and beginning their takeover plan. (X-Files, Dark Skies, Time Runner, Independence Day, etc.)

1970 - The Grays plans begin to take shape. Grays are infiltrating positions of power in human society, either directly or through agents. Grays are manipulating the environment, causing accelerated global warming and contaminating the atmosphere to make the planet resemble their own. They act covertly to avoid conflict with the Rylan Star League, still a force. (Invaders, They Live, the Arrival, Arrival 2)

1980 - Things are going seriously to hell on Earth.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa January 9th, 2012 03:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5486886)

New Crime City is set in 2005.

In Trancers, which originates in 2247 Los Angeles is underwater and is now known as Lost Angeles. Jack Deth scuba dives around Hollywood and Vine. But LA is a huge metropolitan area, as well as a County. So there's some possible explanations.

1) The City of Los Angeles (or greater Metropolitan area) was split apart, the bulk of it becoming a prison, the remnant attaching to San Diego.

3) Refugees from Los Angeles went to San Diego, so you've got a merger of population, not necessarily territory.

Which may also partly explain why Blade Runner'S LA doesn't look like the Los Angeles Area. That and climate change.

krinsbez January 9th, 2012 09:01 AM

I'm liking this a lot, but one comment; I'm reasonably certain it's Acheron, not Archeron.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa January 9th, 2012 02:03 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by krinsbez (Post 5489253)

I'm liking this a lot, but one comment; I'm reasonably certain it's Acheron, not Archeron.

The correct spelling is still subject to debate :)

kuroda January 9th, 2012 05:50 PM

Krinsbez beat me to the orthographic problem by a hairsbreadth. It has been driving me quietly and pedantically batshit for a while now... but what is the use of a (semi) classical education if not to go silently insane?

All the scripts and published writing I've seen about "Alien" indicates it is "Acheron", and I can't imagine why they would have not used that name instead of a totally imaginary and otherwise-unattested "Archeron". River of Suffering? Named after the god(let) who was punished for offering the Titans a drink during the Titanomakhia? Etc? So much better allusions.

I am loving this thread, don't get me wrong. It is just about the only one that has ever made me cackle out loud with glee and rub my hands together with satiated satisfaction :)

DValdron January 9th, 2012 09:09 PM

Hmmm. For this effrontery there must be punishment.

Next time up will be a discussion of the Ultra Warrior. Be afraid.

Be very afraid.

As to that Acheron, Archeron thing. I'll look into it.

DValdron January 9th, 2012 09:10 PM

By the way, can I get a concurrence on the latest Die Hard as a hidden terminator movie?

Magical Wizard January 10th, 2012 12:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5492088)

By the way, can I get a concurrence on the latest Die Hard as a hidden terminator movie?

Indeed you can. Either John Mcclane is a Terminator or a supersoldier clone.

kuroda January 10th, 2012 12:08 AM Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5492088)

By the way, can I get a concurrence on the latest Die Hard as a hidden terminator movie?

I have to admit I haven't seen it, but your description was entirely convincing!

varyar January 10th, 2012 05:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5492088)

By the way, can I get a concurrence on the latest Die Hard as a hidden terminator movie?

I like it, sir! (Now my brain is telling me Terminator McClane was sent back to murder the real McClane's daughter before she could grow up and help lead the east coast Resistance, but he went rogue instead. ::cough:: What??)

I also approve of this thread in general. Electric Monk January 10th, 2012 05:28 PM

I absolutely love this timeline. It's brilliant and insane.

Just to add to the fun there were un-produced Snow Crash and Neuromancer movies, a potential Blade Runner sequel coming up and of course Prometheus.

That Snow Crash movie, incidentally, had a single publicity? photoshop? still way back in the day on Coming Soon showing LA looking normal and then a massive skyscraper on the side. (Really wish I could find that image, but it's lost to the depths of Internet time.)

Oh, and Strange Days. Which should fit in nicely.

DValdron January 10th, 2012 07:06 PM

Check out Astraans 'alien movies' thread, its very similar, but he's got a few different ideas. Lots of fun, and I intend to steal him blind when he's not looking. hmmm that last bit should have been the inside voice.

Electric Monk January 10th, 2012 07:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5495608)

Check out Astraans 'alien movies' thread, its very similar, but he's got a few different ideas. Lots of fun, and I intend to steal him

blind when he's not looking. hmmm that last bit should have been the inside voice.

I started with that timeline, and found this one from it :)

DValdron January 10th, 2012 08:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Electric Monk (Post 5495719)

I started with that timeline, and found this one from it :)

I'm glad we're keeping that a secret.

Feel free, by the way, to check out my other timelines. Green Antarctica is compellingly evil. Axis of Andes is about WWII in South America, and Land of Ice and Mice is researched up the wazoo (if a little dry). There's also the Inactive Empire of Mu.

Electric Monk January 10th, 2012 08:53 PM Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5495955)

I'm glad we're keeping that a secret.

Oh yes, very secret.

Right. I never did comment on Axis of Andes. I enjoyed it quite a lot. And dude, when you're promoting yourself (check out my timelines in my signature) you have to link to them :).

Magical Wizard January 11th, 2012 08:12 AM

Now come on guys, we're all friends here, right?

kinjy January 11th, 2012 04:33 PM Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5488436)

4,000 Years Ago - the Gray known as Ra, following a civil war among his own people, kidnaps a bunch of Egyptians to use as slaves in a far off world.

What movie is this from? It sounds like Stargate but those where the goa'uld not the grays, who didn't regain space travel until the early 1900's.

Also, first post! Mine not the threads of course. Just figured it deserved a little commemoration.

DValdron January 11th, 2012 05:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Astraan (Post 5497052)

Now come on guys, we're all friends here, right? Sure.... :D:D:D We're .... we're.... we're FRIENDS!!! Yeah, that's the ticket! They'll buy that! Friends, that's what we are. We're .... Friends. Pals! Buddies! Boon companions! Freres! Brothers in Arms! :D:D:D You can trust me! And my wife.... Morgan Fairchild!

If none of you are familiar with Jon Lovitz pathological liar skit from Saturday Night Live, this bit is wasted. Check youtube.

DValdron January 11th, 2012 05:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kinjy (Post 5498685)

What movie is this from? It sounds like Stargate but those where the goa'uld not the grays, who didn't regain space travel until the early 1900's.

Also, first post! Mine not the threads of course. Just figured it deserved a little commemoration.

Well, congratulations on your first post, I hope you have many many more.

Coalition January 11th, 2012 08:01 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by kinjy (Post 5498685)

What movie is this from? It sounds like Stargate but those where the goa'uld not the grays, who didn't regain space travel until the early 1900's.

Also, first post! Mine not the threads of course. Just figured it deserved a little commemoration.

From the movie, when the bomb is about to go off, Ra does not look human or Goa'uld-like. Anyone have a link to that scene in Youtube?

kinjy January 11th, 2012 08:52 PM

He would look like a goa'uld. At least not in every day life. The goa'uld are puppeteer parasites, invading a humanoid host body and taking over control of the voluntary muscle function.

Magical Wizard January 12th, 2012 12:00 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by kinjy (Post 5499777)

He would look like a goa'uld. At least not in every day life. The goa'uld are puppeteer parasites, invading a humanoid host body and taking over control of the voluntary muscle function.

I'm pretty sure DValdron (just like me) does not include the Stargate TV show in this timeline.

DValdron January 12th, 2012 12:30 AM

Correct. The Stargate movie can fit. The Stargate series creates its own self contained continuity.

I believe that at the end, when Ra is blowing up, he morphs back to a variant on the standard Gray phenotype.

We know from the X-Files that at least some Gray are able to shapeshift to human form, and from a variety of sources that Grays express a diversity of phenotypes.

Electric Monk February 12th, 2012 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4616944) Seems to be. Basically, functioning British state, possibly a detour into fascism, and wrestling with global warming and decline of living standards. Max Headroom may give us our best view.

This was the only mention of Max Headroom I could find and since I just did a post on it for my pop culture timeline and remembered Moontrap I was wondering if you had more thoughts about it?

Also a bump, because I enjoy your thoughts on all of this :).

Yossarian February 25th, 2012 06:18 PM

Just found this timeline and read through it, awesome stuff! I love combined worlds like this, keep it up!

kalvasflam February 25th, 2012 10:59 PM

I can't believe I'm admitting this, but I actually saw that one. There was this great one liner with B&W earlier on, I forget who was saying what, but the conversation went like this:

"So, what was your call sign back then?" :I don't want to say it." "Come on, it was just a call sign that people make up for you, what was it, I won't tell anyone." "Well, it was the Penetrator."

Laughter ensues.

(this is roughly what I remember, funny in it's own silly way) DValdron March 6th, 2012 07:24 PM

Guess what I found!

My VHS tape of the Ultra Warrior!

Be very afraid!

Magical Wizard March 7th, 2012 12:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5742024)

Guess what I found!

My VHS tape of the Ultra Warrior!

Be very afraid!

!!! 10 characters Lord Hastur of Carcosa March 7th, 2012 02:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5742024)

Guess what I found!

My VHS tape of the Ultra Warrior!

Be very afraid!

WE'RE ALL GOIN' TO DIIIIIIIIIIEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek: :eek:

DValdron March 7th, 2012 06:31 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Lord Hastur of Carcosa (Post 5742898) WE'RE ALL GOIN' TO DIIIIIIIIIIE EEEE!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!

:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::e ek::eek::eek::eek: :eek:

Always the optimist.

The Vet March 14th, 2012 08:03 AM

So if the Rambo and Rocky films are part of this TL then expriements in cloning had been going on since the early post war years.

I suppose Clonus could fit into this TLL, what about Hanger 18?

Also just for fun, what about fitting Gremlins and its various cash ins like Critters, Ghoulies, etc into this TL? Yossarian April 27th, 2012 10:54 PM

I was just watching The Truman Show and I realized that it could fit into this timeline pretty well. It's about a corrupt corporation committing all sorts of human rights abuses in a vaguely defined near future to make a profit by showing some poor guy's faked up idyllic life to a world that seems increasingly grim to most people. Tailor made for the early 2000's corporate dominated era of this TL.

Meatshield April 28th, 2012 12:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4587001)

. More likely, the Moon Humans were a branch of h sapiens that had been transplanted to other worlds (by actual aliens), and this was their outpost on the Moon.

Plausible, and easily explains the lack of evidence on Earth of pre-1950's spaceflight or prehistoric civilizations.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa April 28th, 2012 02:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Meatshield (Post 5974199)

More likely, the Moon Humans were a branch of h sapiens that had been transplanted to other worlds (by actual aliens), and this was their outpost on the Moon.

Plausible, and easily explains the lack of evidence on Earth of pre-1950's spaceflight or prehistoric civilizations.

15000 years are a long time, you know....

SergeantHeretic April 28th, 2012 03:49 AM Daldron I KNEW I liked you, you like the same cheesey deliciouso cultural treasures I have an affection for.

If you were female, you would be a good candidate to be my girlfriend.:D

(Seriously how many times can I expect people to buy the Gay military chick saving the day with grit and heart and perseverence, and getting the girl before they know it's just me.:D

DValdron April 28th, 2012 08:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic (Post 5974431)

Daldron I KNEW I liked you, you like the same cheesey deliciouso cultural treasures I have an affection for.

If you were female, you would be a good candidate to be my girlfriend.:D

Seriously I cannot count the number of times I have imagined myself in these worlds as a form of escape and even written absolutly HORRID fan fiction based on putting transparent expys of myself in those worlds. (Seriously how many times can I expect people to buy the Gay military chick saving the day with grit and heart and perseverence, and getting the girl before they know it's just me.:D

I think you would enjoy Spiders, and possibly Spiders II. But definitely the first movie. Also, I think you'd get a kick out of Python. These movies were smart and subversive, with strong sexually ambiguous female characters. Personally, I'm waiting for the great lesbian action adventure sci fi movie.

DValdron April 28th, 2012 08:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Meatshield (Post 5974199)

More likely, the Moon Humans were a branch of h sapiens that had been transplanted to other worlds (by actual aliens), and this was their outpost on the Moon.

Plausible, and easily explains the lack of evidence on Earth of pre-1950's spaceflight or prehistoric civilizations.

Well, its possible. But remember the Moontrap timeline, while being highly convergent, is not our universe. Moontrap itself does not hint at another intelligent species besides humans and Kalium. There's the Moonbase with a survivor, and the Giant derelict spaceship with a human body on it. Another species would have to be inferred, rather than assumed. And its not an easy inference. The chosen survivor is human. If humans were the pets or helpers, I don't think that one would have been selected. Nor does the survivor at the end make any reference to aliens, though she does talk about her civilization. The message is that, at least by the time of the Kalium war, it was a human civilization.

On the other hand, there is the discovery of a genetically advanced human, or superhuman, body in Antarctica. This tends to support the notion of a human civilization, I think. Although the evidence might be ambiguous. But would aliens create super-pets from humans?

There's also a human colony on Mars inhabiting the D&M Pyramid. Not only are there no indications of aliens. But the Martians believe that they're the ancestors of terrestrial humanity, something which is, given the state of the evolutionary record, frankly impossible.

I'd have to go back and search them out again, but I think that there were other movies indicating an advanced human civilization actually existed on earth.

Alien vs Predator, takes us to Bouvet Island near Antarctica and shows us a megalithic structure which seems to have overlapping features with many early human civilizations, but which is far more advanced technologically (all those sliding tunnels). We also see flashbacks of more primitive humans interacting with the Predators.

And of course the X-Files movie has a flashback sequence of cavemen fighting grays. The Stargate movie actually seems to have had a Gray transplanting humans to use as slaves.

Meanwhile in the prologue to the TV series Starhunter, its established that aliens visited Earth four million years ago and manipulated the DNA of hominids.

What can we say from all this?

At least three alien species were occasionally interacting with humans in deep history or prehistory, the Grays and the Predators, and whatever (Archerons?) implanted the divinity cluster.

I don't think that there's any question but that Earth was host to an advanced human civilization way way back. In this world, Atlantis, Mu, etc. were not just stories, but memories of an advanced culture. I suspect that there are a lot more indications in the archeological record that there was something way back when. Whether and to what extent that civilization had help or was uplifted by aliens, or whether it leaped into space on its own is an open question. Given the body from the Darwin Conspiracy, I'm inclined to suspect that it was a very different civilization from the ones that developed later.

SergeantHeretic April 28th, 2012 08:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5975016)

Personally, I'm waiting for the great lesbian action adventure sci fi movie.

As soon as I WRITE it, you will be my first phone call. :cool:

SergeantHeretic April 28th, 2012 08:34 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5975084)

Well, its possible. But remember the Moontrap timeline, while being highly convergent, is not our universe.

Moontrap itself does not hint at another intelligent species besides humans and Kalium. There's the Moonbase with a survivor, and the Giant derelict spaceship with a human body on it. Another species would have to be inferred, rather than assumed. And its not an easy inference. The chosen survivor is human. If humans were the pets or helpers, I don't think that one would have been selected. Nor does the survivor at the end make any reference to aliens, though she does talk about her civilization. The message is that, at least by the time of the Kalium war, it was a human civilization.

I'd have to go back and search them out again, but I think that there were other movies indicating an advanced human civilization actually existed on earth.

And of course the X-Files movie has a flashback sequence of cavemen fighting grays. The Stargate movie actually seems to have had a Gray transplanting humans to use as slaves.

Meanwhile in the prologue to the TV series Starhunter, its established that aliens visited Earth four million years ago and manipulated the DNA of hominids.

What can we say from all this?

At least three alien species were occasionally interacting with humans in deep history or prehistory, the Grays and the Predators, and whatever (Archerons?) implanted the divinity cluster.

Whether and to what extent that civilization had help or was uplifted by aliens, or whether it leaped into space on its own is an open question. Given the body from the Darwin Conspiracy, I'm inclined to suspect that it was a very different civilization from the ones that developed later. Is this the right time for an ISOT of 2012 Earth to the 1980's pulp Sci Fi timeline?

DValdron April 28th, 2012 08:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic (Post 5975085)

As soon as I WRITE it, you will be my first phone call. :cool:

Looking forward to it. In the meantime, you might want to check this out. Originally titled 'Lesbians of Mars', it's a 'sword and planet' adventure about two girls in love. http://www.erbzine.com/mag15/1580.html

DValdron April 28th, 2012 08:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic (Post 5975089)

Is this the right time for an ISOT of 2012 Earth to the 1980's pulp Sci Fi timeline? lol. I'd say get your Strangeverse on first.

SergeantHeretic April 28th, 2012 08:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5975105)

lol. I'd say get your Strangerverse on first.

It's not the strangerverse, its the Strangeverse as in "Strange tales, Wierd Tales, that kind of think.

DValdron April 28th, 2012 08:55 AM

My mistake.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do with the Strangeverse as a narrative.

SergeantHeretic April 28th, 2012 09:05 AM Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5975185)

My mistake.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do with the Strangeverse as a narrative.

I am actually working on that very thing, I posted something of a sample there early this morning.

DValdron June 8th, 2012 04:23 PM

PROMETHEUS DECONSTRUCTED (spoilers ahoy, do not read if you don't want spoilers!)

All right - Prometheus. Beautiful to look at. Painfully, painfully, painfully stupid.

So, I'm going to take the narrative of the movie and turn it inside out, hopefully to its less stupid. I'm going to spoil like you wouldn't believe. If that's a problem, really, just don't go here.

Alright, the stupid first: We are given to believe that the aliens from Prometheus created the human race, somewhere between 150,000 and 2 million or 5 million years ago. The aliens turn out to be genetically identical - IDENTICAL - to human beings, although they're eight feet tall, hairless and pasty.

Then starting between 35,000 and 1,000 years ago, the aliens somehow left a 'star map' identifying a particular star cluster/solar system, with various human cultures scattered all over Earth.

This is believed to be the aliens homeworld, but as it turns out, its not. It seems to be possibly a partially terraformed world, with some sort of series of industrial complexes, biological weapons factories, etc. etc. So why are they giving directions to it? Damned if I know.

Humans go to the planet at the behest of an old fart, hoping to meet the ancestral aliens. After that, the stupid begins to get painfully intense.

So how do we make sense of this.

First of all, throw out everything that the characters from the movie tell you. We have to keep two things in mind:

(1) They're guessing, they don't know a damned thing, there are alien hieroglyphics but they can't read them, there's alien holograms but they're guessing at the interpretations, there's an actual alien but they don't speak with him. Almost all of their conclusions are ad hoc. At one point, one of the movie characters calls the protagonists on it, and she simply replies "I don't know, this is just what I've decided to believe." Or something like that. (Jesus H. F. Christ, that was a scientist talking!)

(2) They're really stupid. Colossally stupid. Magnificently stupid. If they wore hats, they'd be stupid in hats. If stupidity was a mountain, they'd be parachuting down to it from orbit. If stupidity was a dog, this would be a dog so big that the fleas would ride volkswagons. And by stupid, I mean arbitrary, petty, juvenile, dishonest, operating with the impulsiveness and emotional sophistication of twelve year olds, and falling massively short of any professional standard.

So you'll just excuse me if I just take whatever the characters said, drop it into a dumpster full of smelly poo, and bury it at a crossroads.

Instead, I'm just going to go with what the movie actually shows us.

FACTOID ONE

These aliens are human. Genetically human. I mean a 100%, chromosome per chromosome, gene for gene match. Identical.

Well here's the problem. Humans evolved. I mean, you can go back through Homo Erectus and Homo Habilus, Homo Ergaster, Australo-motherf****ing-pithecus, Ramapithecus, all the way back to some tree shrew. I mean, we still share more than 90% of our DNA with gorillas and chimps. Way more. So, the aliens are supposed to have come here, tapped their DNA into us? Well, when was this blessed event supposed to have happened? 150,000 years ago, and the emergence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens? Well, lucky for them, we'd already gotten there pretty much on our own isn't it, what with homo erectus and then the neandertals and denisovans and whatnot.

Okay, so maybe the aliens plugged their DNA in a little earlier - at homo erectus? Nope, earlier? Australopithecus? Maybe, given the overlap with apes, it would have been five to ten million years ago, before apes and humans split?

In which case, what the aliens just sat back on their butts and waited ten million years for their DNA to produce us? Or they kept visiting every now and then to keep tweaking the DNA until it produced us. That makes no sense.

And after they had established us, they spent the last 35,000 years showing up now and then, to give us a handy star map too.... their tool shed? The most recent star maps date from pretty current civilizations - the Mayans and the Khmer, which might put them as recently as the last thousand years, give or take a few hundred.

That's the stupid. See how it burns.

Now, allow me to turn it around.

The aliens are 100% genetically identical to humans.... because they are humans. They're us. They come from Earth, they evolved from apes, went up the rungs from homo erectus onwards, produced homo sapiens, produced a civilization, went off into space.... and died out there. And here on Earth, their civilization fell apart and vanished, and they died off, or descended into barbarism and mixed in with the rest of us, and that was that.

See, the truth is, we didn't come from them. They came from us. They're the product of a prehistoric ice age civilization, or pre-ice age civilization.

Their star map on their space ship shows earth prominently, not because its a destination, but because its the starting point, the homeworld.

See how that doesn't hurt now? It takes the burning stupid away.

Now, the civilization may have collapsed and vanished on Earth. But it didn't vanish away entirely. There were possible survivors or remnants or relics of some sort. Possibly people kept returning hundreds or thousands of years later from long cold sleep voyages or whatever. They'd return to Earth, or wake up from extended cold sleep, or emerge from their monasteries and go "F***k!!!" Then they might try and leave some messages, pass on useful information. Why would they the location of their space tool shed? My guess is that automatic systems kept on broadcasting. It seemed to be a surviving fragment of their civilization, so the starfarers returning to an Earth which they didn't recognize, or the remnants on Earth which still kept some knowledge, would keep wanting to go there. The location data is actually a sort of message "Screw this, we're going to Croaton." (that's a lost colony of Roanoke joke for you). It's the equivalent of a message on the fridge "nothing here, gone off to the tool shed, love mom."

Remember that the world seems to have been visited up to 2000 years ago. That's the dating on the alien body in the complex/pyramid/spaceship that they're in. But we know that this civilization was leaving directions on earth 35,000 years before that, and visited earth as recently as a 1000 years ago.

In short, the movie's characters have gotten it completely ass backwards.

How could they possibly be such screw ups? How does an interstellar civilization have even less going on than the Rain Man?

I wondered about that.

FACTOID TWO

I think that they were selected for stupid.

Think about it. The geologist? The biologist? They couldn't find their ass with both hands. Literally. They managed to get themselves lost! Even worse, their behaviour in there is massively unprofessional. They're freaked out by the alien complex and corpse. They should have been creaming their respective genes. They're terrified by the thought of live aliens, but they decide to camp out in the most lively, weirdest, creepiest place they can find? A place that the other characters found and bugged out of as potentially dangerous? They encounter an alien snake.... and they decide to pet it?

There's something wrong here. There's something very very wrong.

Either these guys are spectacularly incompetent, completely bottom of the barrel, and should never have been trusted with a guest lecture at a Junior High School class.... Or something has gone wrong with them.

I'm thinking brain damage. A lot of brain damage.

There's a very telling scene where people are having lunch after the cold sleep, the biologist goes up to introduce himself to the geologist and have lunch with him.... and the geologist goes all psycho on him. That's not normal behaviour. That's seriously disturbed and screwy. When you think about it, there's a lot of that stuff going around. The Captain is building a christmas tree on the pool table, for gods sakes.

Go back a little earlier: When we see people roused from cold sleep, they're clearly in distress. There's continuous vomiting, shakes and shivers, physical debilitation and disorientation. People are having trouble standing and moving. Cold sleep is extremely traumatic.

In fact, go back a little earlier: Bitch queen is out of cold sleep and asking how many of them have died.

Clearly, they haven't worked out all the kinks from suspended animation. People can die in cold sleep. People can die coming out of it. People are showing serious physical effects from it.

So why not brain damage and behavioural deformation?

Looking at the characters as a whole, we see behaviour biasing in consistent ways. There's emotional lability. These people get upset easily, they get horny easily, they get angry easily, or show elation.

During landing, a man takes off his seat belt to rush around the cockpit like a hyperactive five year old going 'land there, land there!' This same guy is all over the map - he's the one who takes his helmet off in the alien complex, who forgets his girlfriend can't have children, who bones her five minutes later, who gets depressed because he has no live aliens to talk with, who realizes he may be infected with something and conceals the fact, and who then walks into a flamethrower. This is not the poster child for stability.

Next to him, the screaming scots geologist, and the fearful/reckless biologist are models of decorum.

But there's the thing, all the characters seem a bit screwy. Some are worse than others, but arguably, they all have it. The female lead seems erratic. The bitch queen is goaded into sex in a few seconds. In the alien complex, when one guy takes off his helmet and doesn't die immediately.... all the rest of them follow suit (I know, eh: WTF?).

All of these people are suffering a fairly consistent form of cold sleep induced brain damage, to a greater or lesser extent. The people who seem least affected are the ship's working crew, which stands to reason. They would have been selected for resistance, or would be the survivors of several trips, so the crew people susceptible to cold sleep damage would have been weeded out. The people worst affected are the scientists and first time travellers. And then, you have to realize that this mission was inspired and driven by an old guy suffering what must be some degree of senile dementia. He's not thinking clearly, but he's richer than god, and he's surrounded by underlings, none of whom are prepared to say no to his whims, no matter how badly conceived. So he launches a mission which is very badly planned from the start, with poorly articulated objectives, poor methodology, on the speculative research of a couple of field archeologists with a bizarre theory. Field archeologists, I might add, who are completely out of their depth.

Now its making sense.

Samm June 8th, 2012 05:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 6171257)

Lots of awesome.

Brilliant. A most notable achievement DValdron. I would wonder though how on earth a mission could be launched if it was known that cold sleep could cause brain damage. Maybe it was in to great a hurry and ill prepared.

DValdron June 8th, 2012 05:13 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by Samm (Post 6171485)

I suspect that the degree and risk of injury varies from one person to another. The ship's crew seemed least affected.

But it's clearly acknowledged within the movie, that the risk of cold sleep includes fatalities. You take your chances getting into one of those.

Of course, you took your chances getting on the Space Shuttle, or sailing in the old wooden sailing ships, so risk is nothing new.

There's some interesting possibilities.

For instance, is the damage permanent, or is there recovery to some degree. If there's a recovery capacity, then possibly the behaviour we see was taking place before recovery or stabilization could take place.

Alternatively, the risk might well thin out the pool of applicants, biasing it towards the reckless and greedy, who might well be more susceptible.

And finally, its entirely possible, even likely, that the mission was pulled together quickly, that screening of travellers was inadequate. Remember that Bitch Queen didn't even expect them all to survive the trip. Clearly fatality/injury/attrition was being factored into the mix.

DValdron June 8th, 2012 06:20 PM

Another factor: David the friendly killer robot figures he can speak the aliens language. Why?

Because he's worked backwards from terrestrial languages to try and find or identify a terrestrial 'original' or root language, like Norstratic or something. His thinking is that this original root language is the same as the aliens language.

Well, nuh uh. Given an utterly alien civilization, how much sense does it make that our first language would be theirs, even if they did tinker us into existence. At the very least, its something of a long shot.

On the other hand, if this is an uber-archaic human earth based civilization that the aliens are from... then its got a chance to work.

kuroda June 14th, 2012 01:40 PM

DV, I have a feeling we disagree about a lot of issues, and/or would just not get along well together IRL.

That being said, I am soooo onboard with your take on this film. I honestly can't come up with one of my own -- I'm just so stunned and appalled. I shouldn't be -- I mean, I am aware that Ridley Scott has made many enh-filled films (at best) in recent years (decades). But I really did not recognize that he has totally lost whatever cinematic chops he may have marshalled in the days of Alien and Blade Runner.

This is one of the most moronic SF movies I've ever seen -- and I say that as someone who, masochistically wet and panting, has sought out many really obscure and crappy B-films over the years.

K. (heartbroken. Moontrap uni goodness might cure me.)

Simreeve June 15th, 2012 07:36 AM

I’ve just discovered this TL today, read it right through in a couple of bursts, and am enjoying it a lot. Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4593385)

Brilliant guess, but so far as I can tell, not supported. There's a lot of movies featuring killer androids and cyborgs, but not many involving military applications.

Didn’t some of Bladerunner’s ‘replicants’ have military useage? “I’ve seen attack ships on fire…” Or are those beings too organic to fit into the class of beings whom you meant here?

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4594660)

See also Westworld (although admittedly 1973 is a bit earlier than your stated range for sources) and its sequel Futureworld? The latter even adds cloning to the mix…

Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4606186)

See also Cherry 2000, with its androids? And maybe even The Roller Blade Seven, which I admit is tosh but think is — at least if one has had a few drinks before watching it — enjoyable tosh?

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4613085)

The United States military established control over the American territories, and reinstituted a government. But this was to be a fascist regime, using blood sport game shows, like the Running Man

And perhaps Rollerball?

Quote: Originally Posted by Shevek23 (Post 4640903)

Hey wait, that's like a technobabble version of Lovecraft's Old Ones, isn't it?

Shuddery thought _ ‘Rylan’ = R’lyeh-an? Now who are the ‘good guys’ out there? :eek:

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5323539)

I actually liked 'Manos: Hand of Fate'

Was there ever a sequel by the title ‘Pedos: Foot of Fate’? :p

Quote:

Originally Posted by DISSIDENT (Post 5352225)

I think the film "Screamers" should be added to this. It’s already been suggested that films from the period in which a few people possess psychic powers represent cases of the Archeron-implanted ‘Divinity cluster’ gene complex showing up in mutated form…

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 5353756)

A few miles, takes Gary to slums which are existing on sub- 20th century standards, they don't even have antibiotics.

Consider the rate at which antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases are already appearing IOTL anyway…

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Hastur of Carcosa (Post 5974384)

15000 years are a long time, you know....

Not in terms of the raw material needed for building a civilisation at that sort of level getting replenished, they aren’t…

H’mm… I think that the film version of Damnation Alley doesn’t quite seem to fit this TL, although Zelazny’s original story would be a slightly better match, and neither does A Boy and His Dog,although both obviously have significant elements in common with it.

However I think that The Visitors could possibly fit, with the title-race actually being a [Grey?] experiment at melding human and reptiloid [and even Grey?] genomes.

What about Lifeforce?

Mars Attacks? ;)

The Professor June 20th, 2012 02:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 6171257)

~expo snip~

Ah finally, Prometheus Explained. Your take makes so much more sense than anything Ridley has said.

Evil Midnight Lurker December 3rd, 2012 08:53 PM

So I came to this board to check out Green Antarctica (spectacularly well done by the way, the whole setting makes me want to vomit in terror, and I mean that as a compliment ^.^ ).

And then I wandered over to this one. Wow. Just... wow. It makes so damn much sense...

I give you the live-action movies ZEIЯAM and ZEIЯAM II, and their anime prequel IRIA: ZEIЯAM THE ANIMATION. (Yes, that's how it's spelled.) The plot should seem quite familiar: a humanoid alien bounty hunter and her faithful AI (Iria and Bob, sort of Samus-lite) pursue a terrifyingly lethal Giger monster to the primitive backwater world of Earth (Japan, early Nineties) where a couple of ordinary electricians get caught in the hunter's elaborate trap, and all three must cooperate to bring down the nearly unstoppable creature.

So let's look at the Zeiяam. (I can't find a lowercase Я.) What we can see of its body is certainly shiny-black-carapace, and it's got an extendable mouth... well, sort of, it's a tiny Noh-actress head. Weird, but it works. And it can make horrible little monsters by biting chunks off of people and processing them internally. No acid blood, but it makes up for that with phenomenal endurance and regenerative powers.

The big and somewhat scary difference is that Zeiяam is clearly an intelligent tool- using clothes-wearing person, every bit as advanced as Iria's humanoid civilization. It just isn't interested in talking to us, even on the Predator's terms. Humans are food, tools, and obstacles, nothing more. Its powers of assimilation and genetic alteration suggest a kinship to The Thing, perhaps a weaker derivative organism. Worst of all, the anime leaves the distinct impression that there's an entire civilization of these creatures somewhere out there... and now they know where Iria's people are.

On Iria's side, there's not too much to say. She comes from a starfaring human or humanoid civilization, which includes her homeworld Myce. They have reliable non- killing-everyone AIs, which can be derived from human minds (don't know if they have any that don't start that way). Their most interesting piece of tech seems to be the "Zone" generator, which creates a small pocket dimension exactly duplicating the area in which it's set up -- Iria uses this to isolate herself and the Zeiяam so she can take it down without alerting Earthlings.

So yeah, this seems to fit perfectly with the quarantine-zone and most other assumptions of this setting, no?

...The other offering I have is... more complicated. You may have seen it in its hilariously bad American-made live action movie incarnation; in fact, that version might fit better than the far more elaborate Japanese original. It's got ancient aliens, corrupt corporations, evil scientists, genetically engineered monstrosities, and symbiotic armor that turns humans into vaguely Gigeresque battle machines.

I speak, of course, of Guyver the Bio-Boosted Armor, aka The Guyver.

(I could speak of Guyver at great length, in fact. I think I'll hold back, and just ask if you're actually interested and/or already informed, because I could go on for pages.)

DValdron December 3rd, 2012 09:05 PM

Go ahead, speak on the Guyver at great length. I've seen the two live action American movies.

Thanks for the kind words about Green Antarctica. Check out the "Land of Ice and Mice" my timeline of the other pole. (Run a search for "Ellesmere" or "Svalbard" and it should show up).

Evil Midnight Lurker December 4th, 2012 12:10 AM

All righty then. Let's start at the beginning, with the aliens.

Humans who know about this batch call them The Advents, after the supposedly awesome way they "descended to the earth" long ago. It's eventually revealed that they call themselves Uranus. (No jokes please, we've all heard them.)

So far in the series (which has been running continuously if very slowly since 1985) we've never clearly seen the Advents, even in flashbacks; just voices from shadow and the faint glow of their spacesuits' control computers. The best fan hypothesis is that the Advents are a coalition of multiple alien species with a shared tech base; it would explain why they made those spacesuits to be able to adapt to any life-form of any biological origin. Which came back to bite them on the butt much later.

The Advents are masters of biotechnology and do most of their work in that field, but their most advanced creations -- living starships (pretty much like the one from the second movie) and symbiotic spacesuits -- are biotech controlled by implanted super- advanced hardtech computers. They came to Earth four billion years ago, right about the time life started to organize itself... and they never left. They stayed here, experimenting with microbes, tinkering with the evolutionary process, designing and destroying creatures, for four billion years.

Why? Because they wanted to build the perfect super-soldier army for an interstellar war.

...I don't know which interpretation is more terrifying: that the Advents were already at war but could afford to hold their enemies at bay for four billion years while they did R&D, or that they decided to have a war with whoever would be around after they spent those four billion years. Either way, these guys think in ridiculously long terms. Or maybe they're time travelers, but that just raises further questions.

Dinosaurs were a fairly late experiment, but didn't work out like they'd hoped, so they slammed a rock into Chixculub to upset the genetic applecart and see what fell out. That turned out to be primates.

Humans were, of course, the final project. Intelligent, adaptable, with a mindset far more suited to the soldiers' life than the Advents. Humans as we know them (know us?) are only the basic model, though; we're designed to be easily individually altered. Pop a cro-magnon in a biotech processing tank, feed it a program, and a couple of days later he'll come out with the ability to shift between human form and monstrous "battlestyle." You've seen those in the movies, but those thuggish comic- relief oafs are peanuts compared to what Advent Science! can pull off. Humans would have been transformed into dozens of creatures, each specialized for a different theater of combat. The possibility of revolution would be short-circuited by building a crucial vulnerability into their creations: every fully processed human, or "Zoanoid," would be given a telepathic link to the Advents... and cursed with the complete and absolute inability to disobey any telepathic order from the aliens. Zoanoids possess freedom of thought, but not freedom of action.

And their leaders...

The Advents decided that human armies should be led by human generals, and saved their most advanced technology for this purpose. One human was given phenomenal power, partly through genetic processing and partly through a special crystal implanted in his skull. This man named Archanfel, the first of twelve planned Zoalords, would be capable of telepathic communication with entire armies of Zoanoids who would bend to his will as they would to the Advents -- but he was himself rendered just as much a mental slave as his subjects. It didn't matter to him; he was genuinely loyal and grateful to his creators, and eager to wage war on their behalf.

Then they frakked everything up. Those spacesuits I mentioned? Adaptable to any life-form? They have a bunch of built- in tools. Gravity control for zero-G mobility, a little laser for space welding or self- defense, external speakers for voice communication in atmosphere, enhanced senses, that sort of thing. In dormant form a suit looks like a small tire, complete with chrome hubcap; if a sentient being touches it, it gloms on like a tentacled blob monster and the "hubcap" computer -- the Control Metal -- analyzes the person right down to genetic material in individual cells, and then optimizes the biotech life form to be the perfect symbiote armor. The bio-booster organism attempts to enhance its host's strengths, and eliminate or shore up any perceived weaknesses. When not needed, the suit can dispatch itself into a hyperspace pocket; permanent telepathic implants in the host allow it to be called back at a moment's notice.

One of the Creators wondered how this suit might adapt to a human, or to the many varieties of Zoanoid. At worst, it'd be a handy shortcut to give their soldiers space combat capability, right?

They gave a suit to an unenhanced human and ordered him to fight a genetically boosted T-rex. The result was terrifying. Linked to the mind of an adaptable, combat- ready human being, shaped by a combination of Creator science and millions of years of savanna hunting, the suit shaped itself into a weapon of incredible power -- the laser tool became weapons-grade, vibro-swords grew out of his arms, the sensor suite turned into a Sense of Perception right out of Lensman, the speakers became a sonic cannon that could lock onto the resonant frequencies of anything (even stuff that really shouldn't have resonant frequencies) and blast it apart, gravity manipulation became a quantum black hole projector, and we're still not sure where the twin chest-mounted particle beam cannons came from. It outclassed the best Zoanoids they'd designed, although it still paled in comparison to Archanfel.

And then the Advents ordered the test subject to remove his armor, and it turned out that the bio-booster had decided that telepathic servitude counted as a weakness and blocked it completely.

The bio-boosted human immediately rebelled, using that particle beam cannon to destroy an entire ship and its crew. The Advents had Archanfel send an army of Zoanoids to stop him. The Zoanoids were slaughtered like sheep. Then they gave Archanfel a bio-booster-deformatting gun, with which he was able to permanently sever the symbiotic bond and restore the rebel to normal. Then they had him burn the poor bastard to ash.

Then, after thinking about this for a few days, the Advents packed up and left the planet.

Archanfel was understandably shocked. Even faced with the bio-booster unit right there, he hadn't even considered revolting against Uranus... but they refused to take the chance of any humans, enhanced or not, ever getting their hands on the armor again. Such a power beyond control -- a guyver in their language -- was utterly unacceptable. Humanity was written off as a loss, and just to make sure they warped a planetoid nearly the size of the Moon into a collision course with Earth.

Since they hadn't bothered telling Archanfel not to, he used his phenomenal energy- manipulation powers to smash the planetoid into rubble. This stretched him beyond his limits, though, and permanently impaired him. As enough rocks hit to cause the last Ice Age (placing this whole sequence of events about 120,000 years ago I think), he gathered surviving Zoanoids and biotech tanks onto a small Atlantic island and went into hibernation to conserve his strength. Unmodified humans inherited the Earth, and shapeshifting monsters became rare and legendary, while Archanfel's subjects built a temple around him.

Then, in the mid-1500s, an elderly scholar looking for meaning in life took ship for the New World, was caught in a terrible storm, and was shipwrecked on Archanfel's island -- the Isle of Silha.

(Yes, it's from the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The author loves these allusions, there's some Gulliver's Travels and other niftiness in the story as well.)

The old man, Doctor Hamilcar Barcas (no relation, and see?), found and awoke Archanfel, and was so awed by this godling that he swore eternal servitude on the spot. Archy realized that humans were embarking on an Age of Reason, which was exactly what he needed -- so he used the processing tanks and a chip cultured from his own crystal to remake Barcas as the second Zoalord, then sent him out into the world to recruit ten more wise and strong men and found the basis of a worldwide organization in his service.

Together, Archanfel and the new Zoalords -- the Twelve Divine Generals -- would first unite mankind, then grant them power... and then lead them to the stars, to make war on the gods who had abandoned humanity like trash.

Over the last five hundred years, Doctor Barcas and his growing circle of Zoalords - - the Kronos conspiracy, named after Archanfel noted that "Uranus" had somehow passed into Greek legend -- have brought the scattered Zoanoid bloodlines together, fostered scientific progress, and searched the world for surviving Advent artifacts -- all in the name of mastering Zoanoid processing technology themselves, so that they can convert humans in secret and en masse. Their greatest successes have come from the fossilized remnants of the few Advent starships that died before the exodus and were left to rot. In the last years of the twentieth century, they have cracked the secret of mass-producing the processing tanks with human-built hardware, and are busily learning how to program them to produce new viable Zoanoid templates. They are building up a private army of mercenaries and converting them as combat forms are perfected. Key military personnel and political figures worldwide have already been quietly kidnapped and processed without ever knowing it -- X-Day is fast approaching, when they will have enough coverage to reveal themselves and take over the entire world.

Then they found a living ship, damaged and abandoned, buried deep under northern Japan. And then the trouble started. Because this ship held three impossible treasures -- three intact, dormant bio-booster units, still as fresh as the day they were grown and waiting for hosts. The regenerative power a bio-booster grants to its host would heal Archanfel's injuries easily, restoring his full strength and freeing him from the need for long periods of hibernation, allowing him to come out in the open and rule Earth directly. It would also, in theory, amplify his powers to a level that is frankly unfathomable.

It was at that point that two treasonous conspiracies within Kronos collided, causing all three bio-boosters to be scattered around a small town and bonded with hosts -- Guyvers I, II, and III -- before anyone actually loyal to Archanfel could find out they existed and get the news to him. And that's where the story proper begins. ^.^

...X-Day actually came and went some time ago in the manga; Earth was conquered in less than twenty-four hours, and the heroes are now rebels on the run, desperately trying to keep up with Kronos's advancing technology and armies of minions (they offer tax breaks and better jobs to anyone who'll volunteer for Zoanoidification, and don't tell anyone about that little problem with becoming absolute slaves to the Twelve). Things are looking up, as that last living ship wound up converting what was left of its dying hull and control computer into a massive upgrade armor for our hero's Guyver (they nest like matrioshka dolls) that allows him to stand a chance in combat against the Zoalords. There's still the problem of his rival wearing the black Guyver III, who's calling himself "Zeus" and working on creating his own Zoanoid army to take Kronos down and conquer the world himself; the Guyver II armor, thought destroyed years ago, has been recreated and no one's sure whose side the woman wearing it is on; and the traitorous Zoalord who started this whole mess by losing the bio-boosters turns out to still be alive and crazy. Someone who may be an emissary of the Advents is murdering Zoalords and stealing their crystals. And the hero's only surviving superpowered ally is a flawed and uncontrollable Zoanoid who can absorb other Zoanoids and copy their powers, is generally turning into The Thing, and really doesn't like our hero much at all...

...it's a pretty damn intense story, for all that the author works very slowly due to chronic illness. I recommend the 26-episode anime series from 2005, it's a very good adaptation of what is now the first third or so of the series -- they worked with the author to incorporate a bunch of improvements he wished he'd done the first time. (Don't bother with the twelve-episode OAV from the late eighties, and avoid the first one-shot anime movie like the plague, it's worse than the American stuff. Man this series has a lot of adaptations). Fan translations of the manga are available at the usual places, if you're interested enough.\ ...wow. Well, you did say I could speak at great length. :)

Anyway, while this whole thing probably isn't a good fit for the "main" Moontrap timeline (someone would have noticed the world being casually conquered and united in the 1990s with humanity being mass-converted into monstrous super-soldiers), it may have some elements you'd like to mine. Certainly the much less detailed American timeline, with what seems like a less powerful (but still worldwide) Kronos, would be easier to work with.

Advent technology is interesting and powerful -- it kind of blows Giger monsters away, figuratively and literally. Nigh-instant shapeshifting to and from a carefully designed combat mode; secretion of various substances including acids, superglue, and binary compound high explosives; organically grown mini-missiles loaded with said high explosives and telepathically guided; sonic weapons that can damage almost anything or be tuned to completely dampen out all sound in a wide area; purely biological laser, particle beam, and plasma emitters; the creation of quantum black holes for use as short-range armor piercing projectiles... pretty sure your average specimen of linguafoeda acheronsis wouldn't stand a chance. Unless a facehugger got to a Zoanoid, in which case things could get unpleasant. The Zoalords are even more powerful, able to mentally manipulate gravity, radiant energy, and the fabric of space for a wide variety of effects (each with his own designed-in specialties).

Lord Hastur of Carcosa December 4th, 2012 12:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evil Midnight Lurker (Post 6985762)

Hastur's Japanese contributions are nifty, but I think there's room for more on that side of the Pacific. Two in particular, one that fits in like a glove, one that could use some work, so first of all... Thank you. I was never much of a fan of Guyver, but a secret cadre of Zoalords on top of the mayhem of this timeline may be the icing on the cake, though it also risks to become a mighty indigestion....

Now, if you could tell me more about Iria.... and by the way, do you happen to know this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO3JesdyCNw

DValdron December 4th, 2012 09:38 PM

As entertaining as the Guyver is, I don't think that the Guyver's universe is at all the same as the Moontrap universe. Certainly there's some cultural borrowing. Goes without saying. The Moontrap universe is sort of a 'kluge reality' stapling together all the one offs and short series which borrowed from each other in the 80's and 90's.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa December 5th, 2012 09:10 AM

You may be right, but Iria is another story.

The Stormlord February 15th, 2013 01:58 PM

(Apologies if this is an unwelcome necro)

Now let's see how Warhammer 40,000 can be adapted into this.

Starting out, the story of Warhamer 40,000 begins with two races - the Necrontyr and the Old Ones - 65 million years ago. The Necrontyr have it bad. Really, really bad. They evolved in an environment that caused the entire population to suffer from horrid genetic defects and cancers, leading short and pain-filled lives. Even after leaving their home system and colonising large areas of the galaxy STL, they suffer and die.

The Old Ones, by contrast, have it good. As a confederation of various races they have incredible psychic powers, biotech capable of creating whole races from scratch and above all true immortality.

The Necrontyr Empire is suffering from civil wars so their leader declares war on the Old Ones, hoping to defeat them quickly. The Necrontyr, a billion year old civilisation, have basically solved science but the Old Ones have FTL and psychic powers (both drawn from the ultimate dimension of the Warp) more than capable of overwhelming them.

Then the Necrontyr make a deal with the C'tan - star-eating energy beings from the Big Bang. It's simple - give us immortality and victory and we will fight for you against the common foe. Their minds now in bodies of steel and with the support of incredibly powerful energy beings, the C'tan, they begin the war anew and begin defeating the Old Ones.

Panicked, the Old Ones create weapon races. The Eldar and Krork (later to be called Orks) get created. However the C'tan hijack the Old Ones' transportation network and deal crushing blows.

Meanwhile the Warp has been agitated by the negative emotions being flung into it en masse by this galaxy-spanning total war and produces scads of predators. So the Old Ones have lost their transportation network and are being attacked in the Warp and real-space constantly and are facing creatures capable of shattering whole star systems. Exeunt Old Ones. The Krork and Eldar slip their leashes as their handlers are dead or in very deep hiding.

Then the Necrons rebel against the C'tan and enslave their former masters. However this forces them to go into stasis-sleep until roughly 38,000 years in our future to avoid the Eldar.

All this has taken place just in 65 MYA.

Things go by and well, humanity evolves. (In Moontrap) the war with the Kalium happens and the super-psychic, star-dwelling human race gets laid low. However, 8,000 years ago, a man is born who is like a living god.

You see, the Warp is getting messed up, soon to begin vomiting horrible Lovecraftian monstrosity-gods from all the negative emotions that have influenced it. So the last human psychics all reincarnate into a single immortal man, who is born in Central Anatolia 8,000 years ago, so he can keep humanity safe from these evils.

He influences history a lot, always as the man behind the throne, giving advice and influencing the powerful rather than ruling directly.

So humans go out into space. What have the Eldar and Orks been doing all this time?

Well, we can assume that the Eldar, being the galactic superpower for 1 million years and relatively soon to slide into terminal decadence, probably do not notice the Greys, the Ryla Star Alliance or the Predators. They most likely view such affairs as beneath them. They are in an isolationist state to put it bluntly (their empire in the galactic north-east is also far away from these star nations and Earth's Forbidden Zone).

As for the Orks? They're probably fighting like they always do.

So humanity goes out and around the 18th millennium begins a golden age of expansion. But then a robot war mixed with a pandemic of demonic possessions and incursions as well as massive travel disruptions lays this empire low from the 25th millennium onward. In the late 30th-early 31st millennia the psychic superman (calling himself "The Emperor") begins reclaiming all this lost territory only for things to go pear-shaped again.

Potential points of contact with the Moontrap Universe:

A. Necrons are hinted to have been active on Earth in ancient history, inspiring human pyramid-building as well as some of our notions of honour. A segment of the C'tan called the "Void Dragon" was also imprisoned in Libya until the Emperor moved it to Mars during the reign of Diocletian.

B. The Archerons post-date the Old Ones, but they have much the same tells - extreme age as a species, total extinction, bioengineering aptitude and vast psychic powers. They could well have been proteges of the Old Ones or even some form of devolved remnant.

C. In complement to A., the Cyberdyne robots look like more primitive versions of Necrons. Could they have been inspired, perhaps subconsciously, by Necron influence or actual robots?

D. The big one. In 40K, the main method of FTL travel is through a hellish alternate dimension known as the Warp. In Event Horizon, the FTL drive sends the ship's passengers through a place experienced as "hell" (the big difference between the two is that Event Horizon is far more tame with the horrors). In addition, 40K ships need a special class of psychic known as a 'Navigator' to travel safely, which synergises with other fictions using the same idea. E. The Stargate system encountered in the film is very likely a derivative of Necron point-to-point wormhole tech.

Sicarius May 5th, 2013 08:10 AM

Z-z-zombie bump! Playing FarCry 3: Blood Dragon, which I think fits perfectly the tone of this TL - an 80s sci-fi style game, you play a cyborg veteran of Vietnam War II, fighting in the distant year of 2007 after the Soviets invaded Canada and triggered global nuclear war. Also there are cyborg dinosaurs. And the main character is 80s sci- fi veteran Michael Biehn. Immediately made me think of this.

Lord Hastur of Carcosa May 5th, 2013 08:41 AM

I wonder if this TL can go on without DValdron, or if we should.... I really like the concept.....

DValdron May 5th, 2013 01:15 PM

Warhammer is expansive enough it can fill its own universe quite nicely.

But I think you can identify a relationship

Shevek23 May 6th, 2013 08:51 PM

Warhammer leaves me cold. I don't know its canon and what I know about it strikes me as unnecessarily grim-dark. Different strokes; its fans have my blessing to do their thing as they like. And to be fair--the whole Moontrap concept as developed by Dvaldron is plenty grim and dark by itself; marriage with Warhammer may be a natural.

But I'm a sappy cockeyed optimist; I'd like to think that humanity can bottom out and come out of it ascending, maybe cheer up and buck up some of those sad aliens. So I'd rather it Moontrap does not segue into Warhammer.

But hell, it might seem realistic for it to do so? I haven't contributed much if anything here; I'm not sure if I searched this thread my name would come up at all, and I haven't seen all these movies. Not more than two or three of them in fact; certainly not the title flick. Just the Alien movies, and not all of them, and Night of the Comet and maybe a couple others.

Go and wank the militaristic doom of all that is pretty and sweet, in peace from me. I'll just have to ignore it, that's all, after the Master of seductive grim-dark is gone.

And just when he turned the corner into total realism with no Gothic stuff with Ice and Mice too.:(

And Axis of Andes--however unfair that timeline was going to be to General Alba, and to turn into another edition of Woody Allen's Bananas, sort of the Fail Safe to Allen's Strangelove--well, Fail Safe, unwatchable as it is after one has seen Dr. Strangelove, was still some pretty serious and good art; AoA has enough irony and sense of humor about itself to avoid the sunken fate of Poitier's seriousness....

Seriously I didn't know whether DValdron was discouraging y'all or not. I could never carry it on, not without a few hundred bucks of mad money to track down all these B- movies and watch them all. Even then I'd be wanting to take it some Pollyanna place it probably doesn't belong.

puskas78 May 22nd, 2013 05:36 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4590546)

2025 Solarbabies set in 2025. Massive water shortage in continental interiors. Closed city states ration and monopolize remaining water.

2025 Endgame

2030 Crash and Burn (1990) Year is 2030, giant robots are around. Terminator Android runs amuk. Post-apocalyptic political and economic landscape.

2032 Demolition Man (1993) Set in 2032, Stallone does it. Utopian city state established in California.

2032 Star Crystal set in 2032. Space station and long range travel to and from Mars. A friendly Giger-Monster life form is discovered.

2033 Time Trackers (1989) Scientists from 2033 come back to stop evil scientist from changing history 2035 Star Quest (I) (1994) One of the first interstellar expeditions is launched with the crew in cryogenic sleep. Something goes wrong, they wake a century later, earth is undergoing a catastrophe, and the crew is being picked off one by one.

Note: This seems to be during the period of initial interstellar technology.

The Event Horizon ship was built and launched in this same time frame by 2040. The Lost in Space expedition, using a giant orbiting Stargate dates to 2058.

Note: Once again, there is a covertly placed Terminator/Android.

2038 Moon 44: Prisoners are used to protect claims to asteroids with fighter ships.

2040 Event Horizon prologue, when the spaceship is initially tested and lost).

2040 Dune Warriors (1991) Scene of running Dwarves taken from Stryker. Post apocalypse, desert. 2040

2044 Critters 4 (1991) Set in 2044

2044 Tekwar: The Original Movie (1994) Set in 2044

2047 Event Horizon set in 2047. Space travel through the solar system is commonplace. Elaborate permanent space stations exist. Experimental interstellar Space-Warp driven starship is recovered. 2048 Mutant on the Bounty (2048)

2050 Solar Crisis set in 2050

2054 Minority Report, set in 2054. Washington/East Coast city-state, uses precognitives locally to pre-empt crime. Plans to apply it nationally. Huge divide between rich and poor, with poor/slum areas at sub-20th century levels.

2057 Prototype X29A

2058 Welcome to Oblivion set in 2058

Note: By complete coincidence, this movie appears to set the stage for two of the major plot scenarios in Space Above and Beyond: The silicates uprising and the alien war. 2058 Lost in Space 2058. Viable interstellar travel achieved by Robinson family in test ship. (Other attempts at interstellar travel date as far back as 2040, it’s possible that some corporations or states have already mastered it) Massive orbital stargate is being built, obviously to create permanent wormholes connecting earth to another solar system. There is evidence of regular hyperlight space travel by ship though. Earth divided into competing entities in a state of low level warfare. Ecology and economies verging on collapse projected within 20 years.

The "so bad, it's good" movie Hybrid could fit into this era. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119339/ http://www.badmovies.org/movies/hybrid/

DValdron May 23rd, 2013 08:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by puskas78 (Post 7684222)

The "so bad, it's good" movie Hybrid could fit into this era. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119339/

http://www.badmovies.org/movies/hybrid/

Saw it, remake of Creepozoid, which is actually a better trashy movie.

amphibulous May 24th, 2013 04:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DValdron (Post 4593256)

In that one, the Snake Plissken character is called Parsifal

Which is like calling your Terminator ripoff an Electro Wheenie: you have to add several millions to the movie budget just to make up for that mistake: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_K7znjt7rK5...0/tomServo.jpg

"Come with me if you want to - what was that line again??"

..I don't think you managed to work Hell Comes To Frogtown into this???

amphibulous May 24th, 2013 04:07 PM Also Cherry 2000 and Desolation Alley. (Probably half the inspiration for Snake Plisskin and his mission.)

And I was never into the RPG thing but I'm sure I remember something... googling... yeah:

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_2000

Twilight 2000 is a role-playing game set in the aftermath of World War III (the "Twilight War"). The premise is that the United States/NATO and the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact have fought a lengthy conventional war, followed by a (limited) nuclear war with all its consequences

amphibulous May 24th, 2013 04:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shevek23 (Post 7625202)

Warhammer leaves me cold. I don't know its canon and what I know about it strikes me as unnecessarily grim-dark. It's a rip-off of "Nemesis The Warlock" from 2000AD (also Judge Dredd's home.) In Nemesis the grim-dark was there to be a foil for humour: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AfMH7A5p5v...00/warlock.jpg

(The chair actually turns out to alive.)

amphibulous May 24th, 2013 04:14 PM

And Moon Trap's NASA is clearly a descendant of the one in Roger Corman's 1960- ish "The Night Of The Blood Beast" which was "Back when NASA was a family owned and operated business": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzrn...7EE62FBF60E2A9

Simreeve June 25th, 2013 08:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by amphibulous (Post 7694292)

Also Cherry 2000 and Desolation Alley.

Already suggested... Quote:

Originally Posted by Simreeve (Post 6202130)

I’ve just discovered this TL today, read it right through in a couple of bursts, and am enjoying it a lot.

Didn’t some of Bladerunner’s ‘replicants’ have military useage? “I’ve seen attack ships on fire…”

Or are those beings too organic to fit into the class of beings whom you meant here?

See also Westworld (although admittedly 1973 is a bit earlier than your stated range for sources) and its sequel Futureworld? The latter even adds cloning to the mix…

See also Cherry 2000, with its androids?

And maybe even The Roller Blade Seven, which I admit is tosh but think is — at least if one has had a few drinks before watching it — enjoyable tosh?

And perhaps Rollerball? Shuddery thought _ ‘Rylan’ = R’lyeh-an? Now who are the ‘good guys’ out there? :eek:

Was there ever a sequel by the title ‘Pedos: Foot of Fate’? :p

It’s already been suggested that films from the period in which a few people possess psychic powers represent cases of the Archeron- implanted ‘Divinity cluster’ gene complex showing up in mutated form…

Consider the rate at which antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases are already appearing IOTL anyway…

Not in terms of the raw material needed for building a civilisation at that sort of level getting replenished, they aren’t…

H’mm…

I think that the film version of Damnation Alley doesn’t quite seem to fit this TL, although Zelazny’s original story would be a slightly better match, and neither does A Boy and His Dog,although both obviously have significant elements in common with it. However I think that The Visitors could possibly fit, with the title-race actually being a [Grey?] experiment at melding human and reptiloid [and even Grey?] genomes.

What about Lifeforce?

Mars Attacks? ;)

krinsbez June 25th, 2013 09:32 AM

Question.

Does Attack the Block fit into this? It's set against a backdrop of urban decay, and people are fairly blase about an attack by aliens.

DValdron July 1st, 2013 10:02 PM

Conceivably. But I originally developed the Moontrap Timeline as a sort of 'grand unifying theory' of 80's and 90's, Sci Fi, essentially when there was a sort of coherent consensus based in a social and economic climate of what the future or visual science fiction was.

The further you get from that milieu, I think the less of a 'consensus' there is. Voice of The Empire July 1st, 2013 10:08 PM

Just a quick note: for those (like myself) who actually want to track down some the more obscure but awesome sounding films dvaldon is using for the timeline, check YouTube. Both moontrap and creature are there in their entirety.

Another thing: I really like what you did with this man, and as a lover of movies like this,I hope you continue it someday.

DValdron December 26th, 2013 11:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Voice of The Empire (Post 7843873)

Another thing: I really like what you did with this man, and as a lover of movies like this,I hope you continue it someday.

You know what? I don't really have to. It's done. I explored all the funky ideas I wanted to threw in all the cool stuff. I could get nostalgic and write a bunch more reviews, maybe explore a few more corners of the Moontrap Universe, but it's not really necessary. I had a lot of fun writing this stuff, reading through it this evening, I'm struck by just how much fun it was and how lively it was. 2013 in retrospect seems like a bad year, my professional workload doubled, I was always working so hard, trying to keep up. Reading through this brought home to me how much of a sense of fun I'd lost, or perhaps just hadn't had the time to have.

For you latecomers who stumble onto this, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, and maybe I'll come back and throw a few more things in. But I'm pretty happy with it as is. Toodles.