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

timely

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--toqo9hQX--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/pecgycqliufxkj9xjpl5.jpg

America's favorite teen meets the galaxy's fiercest hunter! Archie and friends hit Costa Rica for Spring Break, where party games and beach games are soon replaced by the Most Dangerous Game! What mysterious attraction does the gang hold for the trophy-collecting Predator, and will the kids even realize they're in danger before it claims them all?

https://judgetutorsemple.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/predator-vs-judge-dredd-vs-alien-rebellion-cover.jpg

I bought this for a friend last Christmas. I was going to quickly read it myself before I wrapped it, but I couldn't be bothered. Supposed to be good, though.

really good writer/artist list and Dredd vs Predator is a good pitch

alien vs predator vs robocop vs batman vs terminator vs archie vs judge dredd vs superman vs vs jla vs stormwatch vs charles barkley

we had a great thread on that once

So I finally just got around to watching this. And

I liked it a lot. As an Alien fan I was satisfied with the story behind the Engineers, and how it linked (from what we know so far) to the Alien species.

My only complaint comes with some of the characters - felt like there was an imbalance in their 'use' in the movie. And also, who chose this team for the mission ?! Some of them seemed completely incompetent in their roles, or they just didn't give a shit about anything.

But generally yeah really enjoyed it, look forward to the next one.

who chose the team? an incompetent megalomaniac iirc

Yeah I wasn't sure if it was him or Theron's character.

(X) Guy with mohawk, attitude

"Okay welcome, we're on this rather quite exciting mission with the potential to discover other alien beings and..."
"YEAH WHATEVS, *EYE ROLL* ROFL, JEES"

http://comicbook.com/2015/09/24/prometheus-2-to-be-called-alien-paradise-lost/

should have just gone with Alien vs. Paradise imho

Fantasy Alien
"Look Boss! The Predator Ship! The Predator Ship!"

They should drop the colon and do a straight adaptation of Paradise Lost featuring a cast of xenomorphs.

Paradise Lost... In Space!

Notable for its sympathetic portrayal of Space Satan.

One of the few musical adaptations where the lyrics consist entirely of hissing noises.

So who else just wants an Alien movie set after IV that shows the Aliens coming to earth and then maybe another one that shows them running rampant? Along the lines of the Apes reboots, but way crazier and more global on a World War Z scale. That's all I've wanted since 'Aliens'.

i don't think i want another alien movie at all and, based on the comic series they did based on Earth War, it would not be much fun
i would be down for a complete reboot of the whole fuckin' franchise. nu-ripley. otherwise, enough already.

Oh man, Earth War. What a disappointment that one was.

Scott just did Robinson Crusoe on Mars with a different name, so he gets to use a literary name this time.

You guys what if ALIENS came to earth
and they like wiped out humanity?
and everyone wound up living underground and stuff
and then SKYNET comes online
and TERMINATORS VERSUS ALIENS

spencer chow otm

So who else just wants an Alien movie set after IV that shows the Aliens coming to earth and then maybe another one that shows them running rampant? Along the lines of the Apes reboots, but way crazier and more global on a World War Z scale. That's all I've wanted since 'Aliens'.

This is pretty much the plot of the Alien comics that Dark Horse released after "Aliens", which follow the events of that movie. (The protagonist is an adult Newt, and Hicks has a large role too. IIRC Ripley is dead, probably because they didn't get the rights to use Weaver's likeness in the comics.) At the time I thought they were pretty good, though obviously Alien 3 made that whole continuity obsolete.

Anyway, shouldn't the new movie be called...

[drumroll]

...Parasite Lost!

Sorry, I didn't notice Forks and Sparkle already mentioned those Dark Horse comics.

would like a crossover that explores what happens if a facehugger gets a mogwai. do the mogwai rules carry over to the resultant hybrid?

ffs can a mod pls close Tuomas' drumroll tags I opened this thread in the library

lol

xxxp and the Dark Horse comics posited that the species of the Space Jockey looked like the thing in the chair, not like a guy in a suit, and was a screen-accurate 12-15 feet tall rather than 7 ft. as in Prometheus.

http://i.imgur.com/RQsB00N.jpg?1

Would love to read a capsule description of what their deal was in the comics.

Mark Verheiden's first Aliens comic book series (aka Aliens: Book One) depicts a living member of the Space Jockey's race as malevolent. Revealed to be alive 13–15 years after the events of Aliens, this Pilot is called a partner to the one from LV-426, and at first refrains from attacking humans due to its apparent immense hatred of their common enemy, the Xenomorphs, saving the story's protagonists on their mission to the Xenomorph homeworld. But it is then revealed the Space Jockey intends to wipe out and/or enslave humanity and conquer the Earth once its joint war with the Xenomorphs is over and that it is using a beam from space to begin terraforming the Earth into a cold and uninviting environment like LV-426. The Space Jockey creature in the series communicates telepathically with humans.

disappointing, barely preferable to lindelhof's nonsense.

I do like how much it looks like an angry Snuffleupagus in that last panel, though.

I would pay to watch Roberto Spiralli's mogwai/alien film and also TERMINATOR VS ALIENS

It's a trip to see those pages in color. That series made excellent use of halftone B&W.

there's (nearly) a comic for you, mh

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/69/AvPvtT.jpg/250px-AvPvtT.jpg

I should've known.

terminator's a paper tiger in this fight, way clumsier than predator and the acid for blood thing doesnt bode well re: alien.

SKYNET

does Bill Paxton star in that comic story? Because, you know.

would be cool if the predators are only after terminator because of its uncanny resemblance to "dutch" schaefer, and they get more than they bargained for in a wacky case of mistaken identity

Caught this again on film4 the other night, I thought

- seemed much more coherent on a second watch on TV, than it did first time at cinema
- even so it keeps leaving things unanswered, in a way that does not entrance, but merely aggravates the viewer
- not just bad acting but the wrong type of acting
- they're in and out of that tomb like nobody's business, compare with Jurassic Park's strict day/night/day sequence
- when I say the wrong type of acting I mean the actors should have stayed on an oil rig for six months, trying to catch the ordinariness, and small tics and tells of people in a confined space
- there's a Lovecraft story called The Nameless City where our narrator wanders down into a ruined city discovering things about the civilisation that lived there, its rise and fall, going deeper until he falls into a pit at the bottom where they've all turned into lizards ... that's the plot they should have gone for right there

OTM. Especially about the Nameless City, which is exactly what this film should have been. Instead it's much more 'hey here's another cool-looking but totally random occurrence, whatever'. i saw prometheus before really having watched any of the other Alien movies, and enjoyed it enough at the cinema to go back and watch the first two. I'd dismissed Alien/Aliens before, thinking that I'd basically seen enough spoofs and references to them that I didn't need to watch them. But they really are masterpieces, and watching back Prometheus the other night I could see two things: a. it is a very frustrating film, especially if you're familiar with the Alien backstory; and b: it's still a good laugh, a fun action film with enough cool bits to keep it from flailing under its own implausibility.

I remember the pacing of their exploration of the lost city just feeling so wrong and perfunctory. Like I feel like they spent less time than John Hurt did in the original Alien just like, grappling with this unfathomable mystery one room at a time. All of a sudden it's like, no big deal.

At this point all I think of when I think of this movie is the F! This Movie podcast where the one guy points out that Guy Pearce's motivation (which is driving the whole plot) is based on his assumption that if you find your creator, the first thing they will do is give you eternal life. Which is kind of a weird assumption to make. "So, what, it's the Bozo Big Top Prize? Congratulations - You found me!! So God is now a scavenger hunt?" It just makes no sense and it seems to be what makes everything happen.

I guess the other thing is that he assumes that whatever random black goo they find in the first room where they find something interesting might possibly give you eternal life if you drink it dissolved in a glass of tap water. But he's less sure about that one and so he has his robot test it out on the whiny guy who manages to be disappointed by discovering a spectacular lost civilization on another planet. It's like if the villain in Last Crusade just wandered around the Middle East drinking any liquid he could find in any container in the hopes that one of them might conceivably be the Grail. Except at least he has heard of something called a Grail and believes it to be a vessel for drinking liquids out of, whereas Guy Pearce has no reason to think the black goo is any more interesting than anything else they have found on this planet, or might find tomorrow, or next week.

So those are the two big things that make everything else happen in the plot, and they're both so removed from the way we would expect a person to think about things that all you can do is really just say it's what happens, like an eight-year-old summarizing the plot. And then the old man wants to be young again so he talks to the giant white guy. Actually, this is about how the Wikipedia plot summary reads. What a disappointment this movie was.

the old man's motivation is essentially the same as the motivation of every other human baddie in the alien movies: that we can harness the talents of the alien and bend them to our own selfish wills. no it doesn't make much sense but he's a crazy old man who's afraid of death and has spaceships at his disposal. hell yeah he's gonna drink stuff if he thinks it might help. anyway this greed leads him, as it led paul reiser before him, to commit the chief sin of alien movies: not respecting the alien's otherness, its killingness. it's basically grizzly man in this respect. the driver for everyone else is, once they realize what they're dealing with, getting off this fucking planet before we all die (as it is in every alien movie).

It's a bit like they come up with a structure of how to put a film together, then think what have we got that can connect this with this to keep the story going without looking at the internal logic of why you would actually use the object that way. like if you were actually going to do an archaeological dig at a site there are processes that you would follow but since this is a film you just need to show some token activity at node point tagged archaeological discovery.
So yeah the original films did seem to be better on that level that there were some self interested crew members of a salvage vessel going around their business when they apparently chance upon a strange discovery. There are things that aren't really fleshed out, I think the ship itself is very sketchy but I haven't watched the film in a while.

So a better story teller would have looked at who these individuals on the Prometheus were supposed to be, what their motivations and normal activity would have been and made the film with that in mind. At the moment I'm left thinking about the big talking point about Charlize Theorn not copping on that if the wheel is running in a straight line, it might just be a good idea to diverge from what that line was instead of just trying to run faster than it. Is taht the way that anybody without a pronounced level on the autism spectrum would behave? Probably not & I would guess its because that's not a fleshed out character, more of a stick figure that's tied into a larger sketchy plot. So would hope that further volumes in the franchise might address that a bit better.

I think I quite liked the film on watching it despite it having some glaring wtfs. It is quite atmospheric in places and funny in others. yeah.

Yeah shit like "charlize theron can't turn left" is egregious to a level far beyond "no true scientist would do this!!" pedantry

Funny as in risible, yep. Atmospheric, sure, but it isn't Tarkovsky. It's plot and character driven and the plot is incomprehensible garbage, the characters witless imbeciles. The Wikipedia page is astonishing, it makes it seem like a well respected movie. Ebert gave it four stars! Wtf.

like an eight-year-old summarizing the plot

There's a script extract somewhere up thread (of the 'charlize theron can't turn left' scene), all the DRAMATIC moments are highlighted in CAPITALS and it reads just like something written by an excited eight year old.

I said it must be the worst blockbuster of recent years, but that might be wrong, I suspect Man of Steel is probably as bad. But this one is just all bad, it's not particularly atmospheric, it has the colored neon-lights going for it, but that's it. Stuff like sandstorms and monsters come as if editing was done by a scriptwriting manual and a timer, destroying all attempts at building a mood. And it took the one franchise thematically focused on mothers and women and turned it into the usual whining about father figures. It's just horrible. And it's not even fun.

http://joelrobison.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/tattly-singles-haters-gonna-hate-1-lg-300x300.jpg