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

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.

yeah i guess i'm just voicing the conventional wisdom.

'Missed Opportunities: The Movie'

this movie was like watching Michael Stipe drink a tainted Pepsi

remove the last seven letters and you're there

That's a decent sounding premise actually. Will probably still be crap.

Hoping this is just going to be a movie-length version of campy late-90s CanadianTV sci-fi The Lexx.

Has Scott made a film that people have actually liked since Gladiator?

Black Hawk Down pretty much was where I hit the pilot eject

Gladiator is shit tbf

yes it's called Prometheus

Gladiator is shit tbf

― John Dope Assos (Noodle Vague)

I'm not a huge fan, but it is considered a classic by many. Unlike Prometheus.

Point is that Scott's hit rate is low enough to look accidental by now

Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created in ALIEN

Scott is obviously #3 or lower in the list of people involved in the creation of the ALIEN universe.

Prometheus got me hooked on Alien. I watched it again with my OH and she loved it, then we went back and watched Alien through Alien 3 and loved those. In retrospect Prometheus only suffers from an ostensibly nonsensical plotline, but it would be amazing if this new film went on to explain some of the ostensibly random events in Prometheus. (It won't)

Gladiator is considered a classic by many civilians

Prometheus, gladiator both very different types of failure at least.

In retrospect Prometheus only suffers from an ostensibly nonsensical plotline

That's a big "only." Also there's no way the 15-foot tall petrified creature in Alien is the same as the 8-foot tall albino in a suit in Prometheus. The OG Space Jockey was supposed to appear so large in proportion to humans that Scott had children in spacesuits used in the long shots.

Scott is obviously #3 or lower in the list of people involved in the creation of the ALIEN universe.

Kinda hope Dan O'Bannon's estate puts out a hit on him.

imo gladiator is ridley scott making his own braveheart film without all the gibson trappings and the "hah hah, throw the gay guy out the window" scene that was played for laughs

minus also bagpipes

My brother pointed out that both films have a near-identical scene of the main dude in battle bellowing "HOLD...HOLD.....HOLLLLD.....NOW!" and that's how you know they are a great general

Giant Wheel Thing: The Movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_PeQCPq8QA

for all its flaws, a better film than prometheus

Alien: Covenant will apparently be the first of three more prequels, Ridley Scott now claims in new interview filled with garbled Ridleyspeak:

"So I’m now going to the next one, which is the next evolution directly connected with the first one, which was this Shaw, when he replaced Michael Fassbender in two pieces and we’ll kind of pick it up there and it will evolve. When that’s finished there’ll be another one and then another one which will gradually drive into the back entrance of the film in 1979.”

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/ridley-scott-alien-covenant-is-844051

ok whatnow