FarPlanet

Upon rewatching "Alien Covenant" for the third time recently, the discovery of just how deep the influence of Peter Weyland and his company, Weyland Yutani, have drastically impacted the known universe which the Alien films take place came into full view.
Weyland funded the mission to discover the engineers in "Prometheus," he created David, the self aware and free-willed Android that is ultimately responsible for creating what we know as the xenomorph, his company is responsible for discovering them on LV-426, for returning there to capture them and use them as bioweapons, his company returns in the next film to take Ripley in order to extract the queen inside of her, and even Alien Resurrection" could be tangentially tied to Weyland’s company as who else in this future hellscape of interplanetary discovery would have the resources to fund studies into cloning and making a xenomorph queen/human hybrid?
The article I propose is taking a deep dive into how Weyland was far more integral to the creation and manipulation of ever single person and android connected to the Alien films (we’re going to disregard AVP as those two films break cannon) like a spider knows everything that occurs within its web. Weyland had the resources and capability to look out into the known universe/galaxy and see how interconnected everything is and how he could control events even past the death of his physical body (spoiler alert, I think he also created an AI that is himself that continued to manipulate everything still even beyond his death). I would like to conclude on the theory of what the next film would then have to accomplish in order to complete the new trilogy and tie all six canonical films together.

Alex Garland has been making his name in the film industry for sometime now. Primarily with his contributions to the high concept, hard science-fiction genre. Writer of such films as 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Dredd, as well as directing the films Ex Machina and Annihilation, Alex Garland has an ability to meld incredible storytelling about space travel, artificial intelligence, and futuristic tech with touching human emotion and true to life character flaws. His most recent endeavor has seen him take a step back from the big to the silver screen in his television debut, Devs: an eight-part stand alone series involving quantum computing, determinism, and humanity (in every sense of the word).

The article would highlight several aspects; Alex Garland himself, the technology of the show, the allegorical elements between technology and religion, and the philosophical and ethical issues such as determinism, multiverse theory, morality, and the illusion of free will. This article will be discussing the show in rather in depth details so a Spoiler Warning should probably be addressed rather early in the article.

Video games have been around for nearly fifty years now. Over the past few decades, trends have come and trends have gone within video game culture. When games started utilizing open worlds, many other games followed suit. When games decided that climbing mechanics were the next big hit, many games began to replicate this feature in their own way. But there is one game mechanic that no matter how much time passes or what stage in the video game zeitgeist we are in that remains, bar none, the best feature a video game can have. That’s right, we’re talking about grappling hooks.

There is just something so wholesome, so endlessly fun, and so rewarding about being able to traverse a wild terrain by slinging a grappling hook and getting the job done; perhaps there’s only one way to cross a wide ravine surrounded by waterfalls, maybe you need to gain the high ground on an enemy and lunge your katana into their torso from above, maybe you’re being chased by a horde of undead and a quick grappling hook to the rooftops if your best escape, or maybe you just want to see what happens when you grappling hook an enemy soldier and tether them onto a moving helicopter.

Explore the top games of the last fifteen to twenty years that featured grappling hooks and discuss the value of such a useful mechanic while also discussing other games, their mechanics, and how and why those mechanics are inferior (I.e. yellow markers to indicate climbable structures, active building mechanics, stealth mechanics, dual-wielding, etc.).

Enter the Gungeon is a rogue-like video game (procedurally-generated dungeon crawl levels featuring unique gameplay and permanent death of the player) released more than four years ago. The game features four playable characters, with three additional characters that may be unlocked through completing in game objectives, each featuring their own unique weaponry and bonus items to help the player on their journey into the Gungeon: a bullet-hell dungeon where at the bottoms lies the gun that can kill the past.

The title alone must sound silly. The explanation, perhaps even more so, but let me tell you: Enter the Gungeon slaps so hard. It’s unique gameplay, storyline, unlimited pop-culture references, and rewards for each Gungeon run(geon) that encourage players to come back again and again make this game endlessly replayable.

In this article, delve deep into the gameplay, why the game is so relevant, highlight its pop-culture references, why the gameplay is so much fun, why its structure makes it the perfect game for long-form gamers or those that only have an hour at a time to enjoy, and all around why it deserves as much attention today as it did upon its release.

Stephen King has built his career being the foremost prolific and successful horror storyteller of our generation. Or has he?

In his almost fifty years of publishing stories, he has a tendency to repeat the tales and tropes he finds interesting again and again because if there’s one thing King is not afraid of, it’s putting out his first draft while he hones in the story. "Here’s my story about a murderous car. No, wait. Here is my story about a murderous car. Okay, hang on. This is my story about a murderous car."

Controversially, King’s best work is when he branches away from the supernatural, the ghostly, and the otherworldly and steps into the realm of ordinary people in real situations. An author who after a car accident is taken in by a crazed fan only to be brutalized, a man wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife succumbing to life behind bars but secretly plotting his escape, or an author is murdered and his killer stashes his unpublished works before being sent to prison but after his release goes in search of his hidden treasure only to find a child has stumbled upon his prize and the lengths he is prepared to go to get back what is his. All of these scenarios are horrifying, but in a wholly different way than utilizing some fantastical element like telekinesis or inter-dimensional monsters.

It is at the core of stories like these that we find real characters that we can relate and connect to and it is there that we find the heart and capability of Stephen King’s true storytelling abilities.

Since the introduction of the horror genre, our love for being terrified has only grown. What is it about being frightened to death that makes us feel alive? Is the rush of being able to view others in horrifying situations from the safety of our homes a voyeuristic thrill? Oh, you better believe it.

The trouble is, what happens when the familiar tropes stop scaring us and the over saturation of horror films reaches critical mass and we can no longer reach the same euphoric terror we once had? Unfortunately, the same ideas from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have been rehashed and repackaged so many times over to the point where the things that should scare us couldn’t even frighten a small child.

Hollywood’s peddling of mediocre films has flooded the genre into a frail, shambling corpse of its former glory. The lumbering serial killer pursuing its victims at a pace never exceeding that of a brisk walk, the family wronged by a group of depraved lunatics to the point where the only justice is bloody vengeance, a small group surviving the never-ending onslaught against an insurmountable force, and the supernatural/demonic force that wants to inhabit our heroes has been driven into the ground so deep that you’d think Jason Vorhees had his undead boot pressing on the back of its skull.

However, there are some directors that exist today that are able to take the old, outdated tropes from these bygone eras and bring them up to date in refreshingly gruesome ways. Directors like Robert Eggers, Leigh Whannel, Jennifer Kent, David Robert Mitchell, Panos Cosmatos, and Jeremy Saulnier have all contributed to the revitalization of modern horror by taking what made the previous generation’s horror movies that we loved great and updated them to fit into our current world.

Taking an introspective look into new films, what they’ve adapted from earlier cinema, and how they’ve redefined tropes to make them stand among the best of what modern horror has to offer.

In the 1993 film Groundhog’s Day, Bill Murray’s character Phil Connors became trapped in an ever-repeating time loop, reliving the same events of a single day in a small Pennsylvanian town. But how long was Phil actually trapped? How many days, months, and years transpired as he became a villain, suicidal, and ultimately the (problematic) hero and broke free?

Does waking up next to Rita the next morning completely void their relationship because of his intimate knowledge of her due to his repetitive cycle of cheating his way into her heart? Oh, yeah, and let’s talk about why.