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

Tracer - I hear that but I think it's a little too generous - I mean by that logic basically anything they filmed would be just the same as the first two films. "A paranoid king seeks to wed his daughter off to a xenomorph, but he has underestimated the alien's killingness and it all goes wrong when he tries planting one of the eggs in the ground expecting it to grow into a beanstalk" would make about as much sense. I think it sells the Paul Reiser character short, as well; we get to know him well enough that when his plan is revealed (actually, when it's pieced together by the other characters, using their respective intelligences and with the scene developing out of their individual ways of handling a situation), it makes sense. It was a bad plan (or a "bad call") but it's the kind of bad plan this ambitious but gutless weasel would have come up with then backed himself into as things went wrong around him. And at root you get it: obviously the xenomorphs are really dangerous, so sure, the unseen "weapons division" could probably do something with them. Got it.

Whereas, why Guy Pearce thinks an alien who once visited earth and did something with primitive humans and their DNA will grant you eternal life is just not even discussed. Having David put the goo in whatsisguy's drink is like the cheapest possible way to try and emulate Burke leaving Ripley and Newt to the face-huggers, sucked dry of all dramatic tension and monster-movie heart-pounding suspense. It just happens.

i am amazed y'all even knew what was going on at that point of the movie. I gave up pretty early

shame cos there was like 40 minutes of a quality movie in there

The point where I gave up was the sandstorm. I realize that is silly, it's not a plothole, it could prob well happen. But that was the point where the film just became generic to me.

'Oh, we've done another fifteen pages, quick, action beat!' 'Uh, sandstorm?' 'Great, and then they'll JUST make it to the ship. Awesome!'

It was a bad plan (or a "bad call")

i love you for this.

i'm going to watch this again, probably tonight, just to see about the goo in the drink. and everything else. but as for megalomaniacal rich guy's plan yeah, i just don't have a problem with it not being thought through, or founded on baseless speculation. megalomaniacal rich dudes kick plans into action on the basis of less all the time. as to why all the brilliant scientists he employs don't raise a few more red flags, to me it's just evidence of how the 1% use their power, money and influence to bend everyone else to their project. YES I WENT THERE. OCCUPY NOSTROMO.

http://tom.ledger.name/img/engineer.jpg

lol

t shirts available

Haven't see it since opening weekend and likely won't, but I still think this would have worked really well with the reveal that Theron is also a robot, a sibling of sorts to David. The film could focus on their jealousy and competition for the affections of their imperfect "father" who created them in the image of his real kids, then end with them outliving and/or killing everyone and left stranded on that planet, where they set up the distress beacon that leads to the events of the first Alien.

The fun thing about Prometheus speculation is that literally anything and everything would be as valid as the final product, whose greatest frustration was its wealth of dangling threads that no one made an effort to pull, let alone knit into something coherent.

exactly so.

it seemed perfectly clear that theron was a robot all the way through. they just forgot about it.

best scene is still the engineer beating weyland to death with the android head

nah, the only scene worth saving in this movie is the c-section

Art direction deserved an Oscar nomination. Damon Lindelof deserves vacuous obscurity.

oh yeah the space abortion scene, also good

I still hear it as "GIVE ME A SPACE ABORTION, NOW!" when she is yelling at the machine

lol

He's been really sheepish in interviews lately, like he knows what's up and how little many think of him, yet is, I don't know, maybe contractually obligated to take the fall or something and not throw someone else under the bus? I don't want to defend the dude, because his name is attached to too many things that fail for similar reasons, but I suppose one hypothetical (given how much work he keeps getting, and how so many in Hollywood praise him) is that he is a team player hack called in to save shitty scripts that stay shitty but end up with his name on it? I've told this story before, but once I interviewed David Koepp, and I specifically brought up the gymnastics girl vs. dino scene. He got pretty pissed, but once he settled down he had me turn off the tape and basically told me it was someone else's shitty idea and he was powerless to change it. So who knows?

Didn't the original script of this leak at some point, revealing that a lot of the bad stuff was in there before Lindelof was even brought in?

xpost

if you're a highly paid hack fixer who nevertheless leaves projects in as shitty a shape as lindelhof does while leaving your name on the front cover then you implicitly accept that people who pay to see that shit will say nasty things about you on the internet and in print. lyfe

He's certainly used to it as this point! These big budget things are just such a muddle that it's hard to believe he alone is to blame for something as giant and giantly wrong as this movie. This mess was collaborative

def agreed, its that he has form at this stage!

lol at koepp story

Didn't the original script of this leak at some point, revealing that a lot of the bad stuff was in there before Lindelof was even brought in?

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 28 September 2015 16:49 (2 hours ago) Permalink

I've read it! Alien: Engineers by John Spaihts. It's actually pretty good--certainly more coherent than the final product.

In the case of Prometheus I don't think Lindelof was called in to "fix" the script, I think he was hired to strip mine it and leave the rest for potential sequels.

This mess was collaborative

Well Alien's success was collaborative so I guess Ridley managed to capture some of the spirit of the original.

the thing about the Alien franchise that most everyone seems to miss is that for max suspense the Alien works best as a one-on-one booga booga monster, not a rampaging horde.

depends what kind of movie you're making doesn't it? 3 and Prometheus only had one alien each. It didn't make them better films

Maybe they need a horde of dog aliens?

i don't think 3 or prometheus dug deep on the booga booga factor.

About these scientists. I would buy the idea put across on this thread that Weyland insane rich dude, using poor judgement, hand-picked a selection of lunatics for the team, if the film showed us this.

The scene would probably involve Noomi and her boyfriend waking up from hypersleep, then slowly realising that there was something not quite right about the rest of the personnel, over a few days. Or perhaps David could raise his eyebrows at all of them whilst they were talking and that would be the subtle tell. There would be various hints in their prior behaviour as to what exact kind of horrible fuck up each of them was going to cause/suffer.

As it is, it's plausible, and like, was clearly going to be a big part of the movie at some point, but what we get doesn't really do the work of realising that.

There's another reading which would go: 'This planet is evil, the whole idea was doomed, and madness is inevitable for foolish humans who set foot on it'.

That's the reading that the film (i.e. the sheepish final edition we actually get) seems to be looking for

i like your idea, a movie about scientists slowly realizing that all the other scientists are nuts. could even go further, noomi rapace realizes husband guy is nuts too with his garbled up version of religion and science that's hollow at the core and really about his own desire to be great than it is the search for truth. so you could like, take the paranoia/and-then-there-were-none-thing that saturates alien but make that most of the movie. maybe in this pre-xenomorph universe the black goo (or whatever) is more like The Thing. people have aliens inside them but there's no chestbursting and all that, it's really a tense claustrophobic space movie, who can you trust, who is secretly a monster literally and figuratively. y'know... what they find out there in space is really just the empty parts inside themselves, the things they were hoping to fill up. could reinvent the whole symbolic framework of the alien series from there.

i never thought i'd say the best part of this movie was the terrible characterization of the scientists as morons but really if you wrote it backwards from that and purged everything else that didn't make sense this could actually have been really fucking awesome.

I can see that tbh

their biologist apparently last worked at a petting zoo

One thing the film did work hard at was going back to the spirit of the original Alien ...

An interesting thing about HR Giger's artwork is that while the thick claustrophobic style seems to have come out of nowhere, it does belong in a family tree that also includes Viennese fin-de-siecle artworks like this by Klimt. Again the 'biomechanical' style has definite precedents in other late 19th century decadent stuff, for example
this by Aubrey Beardsley is obviously in the same lineage as Giger's work. The sexual themes go without saying.

There's a lot of this vibe in the first Alien, at least while they're in the derelict at the start; with Aliens the alien itself detaches from the HR Giger aesthetic (which is also Viennese decadent aesthetic) and goes into a world which is distinctly post-war industrial, where it more or less stays throughout three and four. There's nothing mysterious about them by the time of four, they're just video game enemies of varying degrees of difficulty.

In Prometheus I thought that sense of decadence had been brought back - particularly when David decided to poison Charley in a baroque fashion, but also with Charlize Theron kissing her father's hand, and also in things like the charming little spacesuits the astronauts had dressed up in and their funny flashing weapons which were no use against Fyfield.

So credit where credit is due on that score. It's just such a shame that the blatantly obvious narrative - the engineers were a great and powerful race who discovered how to create life using Ye Wonderful Alchemickal Black Gooe (this would be one mural) but then their creations i.e. xenomorphs turned against them (this would be another mural) - seems to have been more or less scrubbed out by Lindelof and whoever else it was getting greedy for themes and breaking their shoe-horn in the process

xp by the way

So credit where credit is due on that score. It's just such a shame that the blatantly obvious narrative - the engineers were a great and powerful race who discovered how to create life using Ye Wonderful Alchemickal Black Gooe (this would be one mural) but then their creations i.e. xenomorphs turned against them (this would be another mural) - seems to have been more or less scrubbed out by Lindelof and whoever else it was getting greedy for themes and breaking their shoe-horn in the process

― cardamon, Tuesday, September 29, 2015 8:32 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

From what I gather that still is the basic story but Ridley & co. want to stretch this narrative out over several movies, which seems so bonkers to me.

i never thought i'd say the best part of this movie was the terrible characterization of the scientists as morons but really if you wrote it backwards from that and purged everything else that didn't make sense this could actually have been really fucking awesome.

Perhaps they should have done something along the lines of this being very primitive, experimental hypersleep technology at this point, and it gave everyone brain damage. would have made their behaviour way more believable.

i want to see ridley scott revisit the duelists but with david carradine in an alien costume and harvey keitel in the predator suit.

Thelma & Louise with Alien & Predator

Bob & Pilot & Engineer & Alice

So much for "Paradise Lost":

Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created in ALIEN with ALIEN: COVENANT, the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that began with PROMETHEUS — and connects directly to Scott’s 1979 seminal work of science fiction. Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world — whose sole inhabitant is the “synthetic” David (Michael Fassbender), survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.

ugh

hope it's just his head

fingers crossed for
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fimg1.wikia.nocookie.net%2F__cb20141006210926%2Fnew-monster%2Fimages%2Fc%2Fc7%2FEgo_the_living_planet.jpg&f=1

so down

i kind of liked a lot of the ideas in 'prometheus,' but the execution was spotty.

tell me more

i feel that your post may not be... 100% sincere.

no, just that your post more or less summarizes about 75% of this thread.

Sounds interesting.