They're Remaking 'Alien' -- the 'Prometheus' thread

"I'll show them! I'm going to run away and get some of those eggs from my cousin's science project and bring them back and THEN they'll see! Oh fuck I'm out of fuel. *coughs* God I feel shitty."

lol

The first series of Alien comics from Dark Horse could have been a decent movie/TV series... I especially like this part:

A scientific corporation has acquired an alien Queen, and begins harvesting eggs. A weird cult that believes the Aliens to be God's spiritual rebirth breaks in and they all give themselves up for facehugging. Earth is overrun.

any excuse to post this guy again
http://images.wikia.com/avp/images/c/cc/Alien-Jockey4.jpg

so bummed out the engineers don't actually have elephant faces. inexcusable!

If they did David could make some heffalumps and woozles joke right before his head got ripped off.

sadly enough, Prometheus is probably accurate on that score

In the comics, the Jockey is shown to have an elephantine trunk. This is inconsistent with the original concept. An inspection of the concept art done by H.R. Giger, shows that the "trunk" is supposed to be an air hose and there is a helmet surrounding the Jockey's head. This is also supported by the fact that soft tissue such as elephant trunks do not fossilize. This does not leave out the possibility of a different kind of trunk, but the one depicted in the comics is very much like an elephant's. None of the works depicting the Jockey with a "trunk" are considered canon - the only canon appearance of the Space Jockey is in Alien and its novelization and directly related works.

THEN GIVE ME A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRUNK

i hope this is like star trek, showing how the young version of the original alien learned how to become the alien he is today

― s1ocki, Thursday, May 28, 2009 2:03 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also i hope it is set at alien academy

― s1ocki, Thursday, May 28, 2009 2:03 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

was i basically correct about this?

SPACE TRUNK

Isn't that a Parliament album

The more I think about Prometheus, and remember the first and deeply shitty Alien vs Predator film, the more I realise Prometheus didn't even do much that was new. Substitute engineers for Predators, and put the pyramids on Earth rather than LV 223 and you have most of the same (dumb Erich von Daniken) ideas in both films, plus dying Weyland is also in both.

Perhaps the space jockey is really a fossilized Snuffleupagus.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5kw49te421qk2jwqo1_500.jpg

In the comics, the Jockey is shown to have an elephantine trunk. This is inconsistent with the original concept.

i dispute this reading from ALIEN SPECIES WIKI. Concept art below, there's no obvious way of telling what is creature and what is suit - which is the whole damned point of biomechanicalism anyway.

http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r198/adwendakon/Giger/AlienPilot.jpg

they might have been referring to this

http://www.museumsyndicate.com/images/3/20287.jpg

of course it may have just been the fashion to wear the trunk over the shoulder that season

prometheus < alien 4 < alien 3 < aliens < alien < giger

not sure where AvP fits in that scheme

the offensive shit-ness of this movie is making me nostalgic for the whimsical french shit-ness of alien resurrection

yup

"perhaps if the movie had been a bit more abstract and artful in general, i'd be willing to forgive the apparent idiocies and poor narrative construction, but this isn't a stylized aesthetic indulgence - it's a brain-dead, piece-of-shit would-be blockbuster."

this makes no sense to me

― Fas Ro Duh (Gukbe), Wednesday, June 13, 2012 3:22 PM (3 hours ago)

i mean that if the whole had been more satisfying on an artistic level, then the poor acting & characterization, nonsensical plotting and goofy spiritual pondering might have been more tolerable - might even have contributed some interesting texture to the whole. but it didn't engage me any more as a work of art than as a piece of pop entertainment (if that distinction can be sustained). it's not stalker or suspiria or even fantastic planet.

i would like to agree with contenderizer that the argument that a movie has cool "themes" doesn't really have any bearing on whether it's any good or not, while at the same time pointing out that that argument basically constituted his defence of avatar.

― brony ver (s1ocki), Wednesday, June 13, 2012 3:25 PM (3 hours ago)

my defense of avatar was basically that i enjoyed it. simplistic and rehashed as it was, cameron knows how to tell a story cinematically. he establishes character and context efficiently, builds narrative arcs that make sense and pay off, understands pacing and tension, knows how to generate emotional effects, etc. the "cool themes" part was secondary, though the conversation bogged down in a long argument about that.

it's not stalker or suspiria or even fantastic planet.

i did basically enjoy prometheus because it was a little bit of all these things to me!

that's cool. i might like it more on a second pass, but i don't know that i'll ever get over the disappointment (verging on betrayal, silly as that sounds). expectations are a curse.

Demanding quality from science fiction is bizarre. Real sci fi fans embrace the shitness

fantastic planet? surely you mean forbidden planet?

oh no no any space jockey prequel should be a lot more like fantastic planet than forbidden planet

fantastic planet is basically like the seventies made a movie about itself starring its favorite drugs

ok this thread is now about the antikythera mechanism and fantastic planet, please allow me to mash up the wikipedia entries for each into a mind melting face slammer of prose

Terr and the Wizard's champion have child-sized animals bound to their torsos in such a way as to prevent the combatants from using anything but the beaks of said animals to attack. The lower back dial is also in the form of a spiral, with 223 divisions showing the saros; it also has a smaller subsidiary dial which displays the 54 year "triple saros" or exeligmos.

Over the next several scenes, it is shown how the Oms have adapted to life on the Draags' planet. German Philologist Albert Rehm; Derek J. de Solla Price (with Charalampos Karakalos and his wife Emily); Allan George Bromley. Snail-like animals weave clothes onto the Oms, predators that would eat Oms are in turn hunted and efficiently stripped of useful materials, and the gene pool is kept well-mixed. Damp, salt-laden marine environments would quickly corrode the gears, rendering it useless.

why don't our astronauts have elephant helmets? maybe this is holding us back.

https://www.google.com/search?q=weyland+linkedin

hey man i got la planete sauvage on dvd, you know i'm bout it bout it

i just dont see the prometheus connection

love when terr interrupts the imagination session

i guess i'm just in love with draag culture if you know what i mean

why don't our astronauts have elephant helmets? maybe this is holding us back.

Have NASA, SpaceX, etc. flight-rated this guy's stuff? http://bobbasset.com/

what I was trying to say is "the engineers" should totally be like draags
sauvage is so much more fun than verboten

Fantastic Planet, trippy as it is, is real social-commentary classical sci-fi at its core.

ok - the last 20 mins of this were some crazy unexpectedly batshit Cthulhoid Hollywood filmmaking. What a confused yet gorgeous looking film.

Demanding quality from science fiction is bizarre. Real sci fi fans embrace the shitness

It's this attitude that's given us Joss Wheedon, Lindelof and co.

whoa there buster

So when does this movie open again?

the last 20 mins of this were some crazy unexpectedly batshit Cthulhoid Hollywood filmmaking.

Which is why Del Toro said Mountains of Madness had to be scrapped, b/c it has a lot of the same plot

Avatar is dreadful. Far worse than this.

I'M GLAD THAT's SETTLED

Which is why Del Toro said Mountains of Madness had to be scrapped, b/c it has a lot of the same plot

yeah, the similarities really are striking. engineers = elder things; black goo = shoggoths; curious explorers, ancient ruins and heiroglyphics, angry gods all present and accounted for.

I like this:

http://m.hitfix.com/motion-captured/prometheus-second-look-digging-deep-into-spoilers-and-questions

http://badassdigest.com/2012/06/08/sam-strange-remembers-prometheus/

Once upon a time, there was a show called Lost. The show was really popular because it allowed people to enjoy hokey sci-fi conventions without feeling like nerds. Everything supposedly serviced a very human story elevated high above geeky crap like that. It pulled this off simply by averring that it was pulling it off. It also kept things vague enough that people would invent the show's integrity all by themselves. By the time characters were time traveling and drinking magic water right and left without abandon, it was far too late for people to call bullshit and walk away. Brilliant.

So I hired that Lost guy to write Prometheus. I figured it would go the same way. We'd get people to buy tickets on false promises of thrilling intellectual storytelling and then kind of abandon all that halfway through. It's too much work to make a great movie. But a great trailer is child's play. The masterstroke was calling it an Alien prequel and letting that pedigree do all the work for us. Again, brilliant.

Prometheus is about a ship called "Prometheus" that goes looking for sort of a literal Prometheus. In a really cool looking prologue, we see a muscular Space Albino drink Space Acid so that he falls apart into Earth's water supply, therefore creating humans. But not Chimps...

Demanding quality from science fiction is bizarre. Real sci fi fans embrace the shitness

― badg, Wednesday, June 13, 2012 10:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is exactly backwards.

Although maybe not, if you're positing that "science fiction" and "sci-fi" are two different things.

distinction between scifi and sf can just diaf, afaiac

SCIENTIFICTION 4EVER