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

God this movie makes me so angry every time I think about it. The thing in the top picture is not a big bald guy in a fucking spacesuit like in the bottom picture, fuck you Lindelof and Scott 4ever.

http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111208192152/avp/images/2/26/SpaceJockey.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UyheCMRhcxo/T9LAAvMAc4I/AAAAAAAAFxM/TGzY03M3iNY/s1600/Prometheus+alien+in+space+suit+helmet+88015_gal.png.jpg

Hey, elephant-head spacesuit fashions change, man.

yeah that part in Alien is really good and weird. mysterious. another mystery ruined by revelation

in the sequel, on the engineer home planet, they explain that humanity (you) are a tangent to their own ego (I)
(You) Tan (I)
yutani
Weiland-Yutani

Also, we('re) on an i(s)land... like metaphorically or something.

Medieval diving suit design:

http://i.imgur.com/1qWB8.jpg http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111208192152/avp/images/2/26/SpaceJockey.jpg

they could also do a further adventures of the lil first alien baby

― da croupier, Monday, July 21, 2014 12:56 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yes

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

http://i.imgur.com/OgD57dF.jpg

<3

that's better than the whole movie

http://i.imgur.com/LENanHn.jpg

Lmao

Beautifully done.

http://imgur.com/Vn2nWD4

http://i.imgur.com/Vn2nWD4.jpg

excited (really!) to see how Exodus will complete the trilogy begun with Prometheus and The Counselor.

The Counselor almost makes more sense as part of the Prometheus mythos

lol

cant wait till Disney gets a hold of this franchise

was just thumbing through some old Kirby comics and lol space jockey (1976):

http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/dynamics/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2011/09/Eternals_1976_001_03-04.jpg

!

Kirby invented everything

I'm talking about the Nintendo character of course

is it wrong that i get kinda stoked every time i see this thread revived?

depends, are you looking forward to the sequel

holy shit at that kirby drawing, what's the comic?

I guess it's the kind of thing lots of people could have simultaneously come up with - it's basically taking WW2 pilot imagery and finding it horrifying and alien rather than heroic could be your basic post-Vietnam, post-60s reconsideration of humans' enmeshment in the electronic and mechanical apparatus (military or otherwise).

that's all just stock chariots of the gods imagery tho right?

that is Eternals No. 1 from July 1976. I have no idea if it influenced Giger's original design or not but both were shopping their artwork around Hollywood studios and optioning things for film rights around the same time.

The overall concept (space gods intervening in Earth's evolution to produce humans and OTHER THINGS) is not unique to Kirby at all but he puts his own spin on it and as far as this particular conception of the dead-god-in-a-ship imagery I would say that no, there is no one else that would have done it the way Kirby did, dude was unique and one-of-a-kind.

I'm with you Tracer!

as this particular conception of the dead-god-in-a-ship imagery I would say that no, there is no one else that would have done it the way Kirby did, dude was unique and one-of-a-kind.

I'd second that. Love Kirby. Not knowing much about him at this level, I'd also hazard a guess that he was the kind of old-school illustrator who really did that stuff how-to-draw books tell you to do - collecting National Geographic and museum catalogs and shit for reference imagery. If it has a Von Daniken quality, it's probably because Kirby spent some time studying and sketching Egyptian and Mesoamerican art - but again, just speculating.

speculations probably correct afaik. I do recall reading he kept stacks of stuff like Popular Mechanics and Nat'l Geo by his drawing board, and he pretty obviously used stuff like that for his collage work.

important find imo!

his reference material/collage work is a know thing, he was just less-known for collage than Steranko, etc due to his depth of work

I think Kirby was an army map maker during WWII. Always felt that informed him and the crazy-geometricness somehow. I love Kirby conspiracy theories about space gnosis/cosmic ascension. My fave is his adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey - the monthly series version is completely bonkers.

Kirby was a visionary, no doubt. Especially evident when he was left to writing and drawing (and editing!) his own work. I wouldn't be surprised if his space jockey idea was - erm - jacked by H'Wood. O'Bannon, Scott, et al were big comics fans.

From the Grantland interview with the dudes who did "The Guest:"

Speaking of underappreciated: Adam, you have to make your case for Prometheus, a movie that most people hate, but a small minority really enjoy. Why does it do it for you?

Wingard: Because it’s a massive, epic kind of disaster of a movie. It doesn’t make any sense really, it’s all over the place, but there’s a genuine stylization to the film that I’ve never seen before. It’s one of the best-looking movies that’s come out in the last 30 years. The cinematography’s incredible, the sets are incredible. I’m a sucker for sci-fi films, but on top of that I absolutely just love Michael Fassbender’s character in it. If he wasn’t in that film, the movie would be kind of a disaster because those other characters don’t really hold up, you know? But he’s an iconic character. I love so-called movies that are bad movies, but Prometheus is one of those movies that people are gonna come back around on in 20 years. There’s gonna be midnight screenings of that thing. People were too hard on it because they wanted Alien and it’s not Alien. I was disappointed when I first saw it, but then when I realized that after the screening we had a two-hour discussion of the film, just trying to figure out how the creatures in that film work. Like the liquid goes into your glass and then you have sex with somebody, and then they have an alien and you melt and turn into a zombie person. We were just trying to figure out what is going on in this movie. I kept watching it in the theater — I ended up watching it like three times — and each time I went with a different group of people, and each time it resulted in another two-hour conversation. I was like, “This never happens,” and that’s why I think this movie’s brilliant. It really is on its own level.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-guest-adam-wingard-simon-barrett-dan-stevens-halloween-the-terminator-1980s-movies/

Idk if incoherency is a virtue in and of itself

Incoherence even

So this guy's standards for greatness is whether people can argue for hours about something that made no sense and had no thought put into it? And he's not on ILX?

Somebody dispense an invitation on a vellum scroll to him at once!

Not knowing much about him at this level, I'd also hazard a guess that he was the kind of old-school illustrator who really did that stuff how-to-draw books tell you to do - collecting National Geographic and museum catalogs and shit for reference imagery.

Most newspaper strip and comic book artists would accumulate what they commonly called a 'Swipe File' - ie visual reference for all kinds of objects, places, costumes etc. Wally Wood was meant to have a particularly impressive Swipe File. And Kirby was known to take his collages from science mags and the like. He was also very definitely a commercial artist, and his work often riffed on popular trends (ie Planet of the Apes in Kamandi, James Bond movies in Nick Fury) - so yeah, the Eternals was definitely Kirby's response to Chariot of the Gods, filtered through his own cosmic imagination.

By the time of the Eternals, Kirby had also been exposed to the work of the French comics artist Phillipe Druillet, who Dan O'Bannon would've known from working on Jodorowsky's Dune. So I think Kirby was also responding to that Metal Hurlant-style of cosmic excess, and that possibly accounts for some of the Alien-vibe that that Eternals spread gives off (although equally, I'm sure someone like Moebius was familiar with Kirby's work by the time he came to work on Alien). Separating all this out is interesting, but difficult.

his reference material/collage work is a know thing, he was just less-known for collage than Steranko, etc due to his depth of work

Well Steranko's early style is basically Kirby + Pop Art. Kirby laid out all of Steranko's early Marvel work, and by the time they worked together on Nick Fury, Kirby had already been using collaged material extensively in the pages of Fantastic Four. So I think Steranko's use of collage was almost certainly directed by Kirby's prior example. Kirby of course based the character of Mister Miracle partly on Steranko, so I don't think there was any hostility on Jack's part towards Steranko running with/expanding on his bag of tricks.

It's been years since I've read von Däniken, but IIRC one of his books has a piece of South American indigenous art where a god is sitting inside a chariot (which Däniken of course interprets as an alien astronaut inside a spaceship), and the composition of the pic is similar to Giger's Space Jockey and the Kirby panel above. So maybe both Kirby and Giger were simply inspired by that instead of Giger copying Kirby?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-N-Tpad1T3hw/UwFWWBNN70I/AAAAAAAAKbk/EcKP3xqIJWk/s1600/Pacal.jpg

I love so-called movies that are bad

That guy is how you say an idiot

No alien/xenomorph in P2, says Ridders:

"The beast is done. Cooked. I got lucky meeting Giger all those years ago. It's very hard to repeat that. I just happen to be the one who forced it through because they said it's obscene. They didn't want to do it, and I said I want to do it, it's fantastic".
"After four, I think it wears out a little bit. There's only so much snarling you can do. I think you've got to come back with something more interesting. And I think we've found the next step. I thought the Engineers were quite a good start".

Great post, Ward Fowler, thanks.

Not surprised that a director fond of unpredictable, ambiguous tones would love movies that show massive ambition and complete incompetence at the same time

Yeah, arguing about a movie that makes no sense for two hours is a low bar for its merit. I'd like to think most of this thread is so-called schadenfreude.