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

Left Behind is being made by Lindelof for HBO? I love Kirk Cameron!

hopefully its in the more fucked up vein of post rapture life like a thief in the night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly4CPRE_Ke0

this movie features a 8 yo kid going to the guillotine at the end

To be faur to the book, it's very much a secular rapture--faith makes no difference to who vanishes and who doesn't.

To be fair to Lindelof, he'll fuck it up.

thanks everyone for softening me up

i finally went in today purposely ignoring any connection to alien movies and expecting an independence day type of debacle. i really enjoyed the stupid characters and appreciated the opportunity for david to relentlessly hardson the scientists and people of faith. i think vickers hit it best when she called her dad a mad scientist or something. it was a pretty good b-grade sci fi film pretty much up until the engineer woke up. i would have liked it if more of the characters survived the ending too. i think the flame has been dishonored thoroughly enough at this point that we can dispense of the one human + one robot surviving formula. anyway overall i'd call it a pretty good c-grade sci fi movie and i enjoyed some of it enough that i've mentally downgraded all of the original movies to c-grade in my mind too. really appreciated idris elbas stephen stills line and also the engineered garments jacket fassbender was wearing for much of the movie.

really appreciated idris elbas stephen stills line

you nearly had me

i'm still waiting for the hilarious deleted scene where he finds out he porked a robot, cmon ridley don't let us down on the dvd release

"hilarious deleted robot porking scene" display name now up for grabs

fu it is i got rights mayyyne, i know my rights mayyne

"really appreciated idris elbas stephen stills line"

you nearly had me

yeah, one of the worst moments in a movie brim-full of them

whatever it was lovably off-key

it was so obvious and screenwriter-y to throw in a silly popculture reference at that point

Such writerly moves are heretofore referred to as "Lindelawful"

well i admit i'm a philistine but maybe its just more obvious to screenwriter types who hang w/ other screenwriter types swapping silly popcultural references (screensters?)

screendogs

so i guess what i'm hearing is that if you stretched this movie out to two or three seasons of tv it would be like a cross between lost and star trek

i also really liked the subtle messages in charlize's hairstyles and ugg boots

charlize is (physically) like a hitchcockian paragon of "cool blonde" in this movie. minus the couture.

stephen stills thing struck me as odd because if people are still talking about stephen stills at the outer reaches of the known universe then I'll be damned.

watched Alien for the first time in like 10 years the other day. I guess most already noticed this but Alien and Prometheus are basically beat-for-beat mirror images of each other. Like, even to the point of characters not acting very rational or intelligent. Pretty funny when Ash yells something to the effect of "Don't touch it!" and everyone just kinda pulls back and lets the little bugger run off! IT JUST BURST OUT OF SOMEONE'S CHEST FUCKING KILL IT WITH FIRE.

Also, yeah Alien is a great movie. Not as scary as I remembered. I preferred the look of the aliens in Alien 3 the best I think. why on earth would a "perfect" killing machine/organism be upright on two feet like that.

Pretty funny when Ash yells something to the effect of "Don't touch it!" and everyone just kinda pulls back and lets the little bugger run off! IT JUST BURST OUT OF SOMEONE'S CHEST FUCKING KILL IT WITH FIRE.

― ryan, Saturday, June 30, 2012 7:00 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right, because if a scary monster burst out of your friend's chest the first thing you'd do would be to run straight at it

dont try to retcon alien as being as dumb as this movie its not gonna work on us dog

one character (can't remember his name, with the headband) was about to hack at it with a machete! They stop because Ash tells them to.

i wouldnt do that because i dont think either movie is dumb!

They're in shock. Ash demonstrates some authority so they listen to him

and as i mention way upthread this is an early hint of ash's true motivations that is way more graceful than anything in p-dog

yeah that's true. it's the kinda thing that as a viewer certainly sticks out but it's believable that no one on the ship would have given it much thought.

it def didnt stick out to me the first time i saw it & i doubt my experience is unusual. something crazy and scary and covered with blood jumps outta someone's chest, it's not really strange that someone would be like, "stay away from that ferocious monster"

They don't know what it is or what it is capable of or whether it is toxic or contagious in some way, staying away from it doesn't seem like a stupid idea.

you're both right. i usually go into frantic kill mode if i see an nasty unwanted critter in my home but this would be a special situation. in any case, im impressed with headband dude's initiative!

usually go into frantic kill mode if i see an nasty unwanted critter in my home

it's true, when a threatening thing popped out of my mom's torso that one time I smashed it with a phone book

you gotta get it before it runs under the refrigerator!

yeah, i reject any insinuation that alien is anywhere near as dumb as prometheus. alien may not be a perfect movie, but it's very well thought-out and the character motivations make good sense, imo. prometheus is moronic in comparison, and the "big themes" are by no means a plus.

scientist in prometheus observes the presence of an alien worm in his eyeball, but rather than seek medical attention, ignores it in favor of playing unprotected in the dirt some more. for fuck's sake.

I am always putting off going to the doctor for stuff

i like something filmcrithulk said that you can address smart, intelligent topics in the dumbest way possible, which the movie does

see i dont think either movie is dumb at all but i do think people acting a bit irrationally (or maybe emotionally) is an intentional theme in both--it's the source of chaos or contamination, maybe.

the alien has acid for blood. if they kill it it'll eat through the hull. also ash wants it alive.

Maybe this has been mentioned upthread but is it consensus that Prometheus retcons the eggs in Alien to be the canisters? Giger always claimed they were biological weapons, but this makes Aliens and the later sequels (and the poster for alien, which features an egg that doesn't look like a canister at all) out of canon.

in alien, there are sensible barriers erected to prevent contamination (suit seals that aren't broken willy nilly, airlocks, decontamination procedures, quarantine periods, etc). when these barriers are circumvented, it's for entirely sensible and sympathetic reasons. the "irrationality" on display is rational in a sense, in that it's a reasonable-seeming product of the characters and their circumstances.

in prometheus, there are no apparent barriers. it's as though no one has ever so much as considered that contamination might even be possible. what's worse, people behave in an utterly nonsensical fashion. their behavior has relation to comprehensible human motives or emotions. it's an irrational sort of irrationality.

well the egg on the Alien poster doesn't look like anything like the eggs in the movie. It's an actual hen's egg.

fassbot is pretty good in this movie. there really wasn't any standout characters in the avengers, to compare a movie that was received better, where characters also act weirdly to service forward motion of plot.

is it consensus that Prometheus retcons the eggs in Alien to be the canisters? Giger always claimed they were biological weapons, but this makes Aliens and the later sequels (and the poster for alien, which features an egg that doesn't look like a canister at all) out of canon.

hard to say for sure. the thing is that geiger's alien was always said to be "biomechanical", and the cannisters might well be biological products of a sort. it seems reasonable to suppose that the xenomorph might be a device engineered to produce more weapons ("cannisters", bugs, acid, black goo, whatever).

in alien, there are sensible barriers erected to prevent contamination (suit seals that aren't broken willy nilly, airlocks, decontamination procedures, quarantine periods, etc). when these barriers are circumvented, it's for entirely sensible and sympathetic reasons. the "irrationality" on display is rational in a sense, in that it's a reasonable-seeming product of the characters and their circumstances.

yeah in fact breaking one of these barriers is a huge tense plot point! i really like that part. "wait a minute."

and the thing i like best about the sequel is how it spends all this time showing you the marines' Badass Military Hardware and setting them up in deliberate contrast to the basically unarmed and unprepared crew of the first movie, and then (in the unload-your-guns-you-might-shoot-the-reactor scene) thinks of a reasonable and non-stupid crack to put in their control, which like these things do spiders very very fast.

but i love movies in general where everything works all slickly until it breaks. the system's gonna be, um, compiling for twenty or thirty minutes, so, some of the minor systems, they might go on or off or whatever.

find nedry! check the vending machines!

another great thing about ash is when he lets contaminated john hurt in - which seems almost first like a compassionate human thing to do until u realize why

sorry but david was such a dumb character, as ok as fassbender played him

everyone has their own opinion but alien/aliens are IN NO WAY as dumb/contrived/c-grade as prometheus

"Alien" works better because, duh, they all learned the lessons illustrated in "Prometheus." Worry about contamination, when an alien lizard creature rears its head don't try to pet it, join your local outerspace worker's union to avoid Company exploitation, etc.

ha

there is no way prometheus is as dumb as alien or aliens, which are careful and nuanced studies of corporate culture under stress in the vein of robocop and terminator