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

Weaver was great, but the real difference is the screenplays. The first two were outstanding: quotable dialogue, well-drawn characters, narrative tension, meaningful plot twists

Exactly. In Alien, the crew goes into a hostile environment in full protective gear; there's a real battle of wills over breaking quarantine to let Kane back on the ship, and you only find out later why Ash was so keen to go against the rules when it first seemed like compassion--all well written and acted.

The chest-rupturing scene and the revelation that Ash is an android are two of the best plot twists in any movie, ever. But this level of narrative innovation is impossible to sustain through multiple sequels. The plot elements become predictable, and we get tired of seeing them rearranged.

It's the curse of the franchise. The Predator sequels suffer even worse in this regard.

Did Alien and Aliens just use up all the potential of this material? I can't readily envision what an equally creative follow-up to those two would look like. Aliens still had a lot to explore, since we didn't know much about the monsters yet. After that, though, what's left? You're stuck recycling the older ideas or muddling around in uninteresting aspects of the mythology like the origin of the creatures.

That's an anslysis that fits the prequels far more than the main series, I'd say.

(to it me, though it fits both)

It's somewhat astonishing they've never inflicted an Aliens on Earth movie on us (not counting the AvP duology of dreck)

Alien 4 sets this up, but I think by that point fatigue had set in.

An "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" style plot, where some indistinguishable humanoids carry Alien DNA and others don't, could be watchable.

Prometheus had a good premise, too, I think, and its first half hour felt genuinely interesting and new. But the commercial requirement to tie it to the "Alien" franchise ends up sinking the movie. I'd watch a movie that was solely about the Engineers, and their mysterious desire to create and destroy life on various worlds.

the Engineers are dumb as hell tho

yeah i mean there's hypothetically an interesting sci-fi movie to be made about an alien race that goes around meddling in life, but no reason to extend credit for this hypothetical good movie to the actual bad movie that is Prometheus - there's very little there that i'd call a keeper.

i don't think the first two films by any means exhausted the kind of stories/themes/whatever you could explore through the basic concept of this evil life form that grows inside people. they just got worse as genre movies, where they just repeat the beats of the first two movies ad infinitum. alien3 and alien resurrection both have some okay ideas that are distinct from those in alien and aliens, by lingering on different sides of the "i've got one inside me" angle. in alien3 it's the horror and burden of slowly realizing that, in resurrection it's the strangeness of dealing with a character who is not entirely human and seems okay with that - closer to a cyborg story really - and picking up the whole 'mothering' aspect in parody, a series of sick and wrong parent-child relationships. neither really goes for the body snatchers/Thing approach of "is one of us a mole??" - which is right i think, since it's just not what the xenomorph concept does best.

mind you, neither one is particularly successful at exploring these - alien3 is its sharpest and most affecting when it's focused on ripley and the thing inside her (and the vulnerability of this 'mother' in this fucked up violent hypermasculine situation)... but clumsy-with-a-big-budget on the rest. resurrection is just kind of a lightweight action adventure comedy thing. there are some genuinely horrifying bits but it doesn't sink its teeth into your psyche. boy is it fun to look at though.

I rewatched it during the week, and what I remembered as one of the most egregious elements (Jesus was an engineer) is actually just obliquely hinted at, it must be some interview with Scott / Lindelhof which planted that spider's egg in my brain.

it was Ridley

"If you look at it as an 'our children are misbehaving down there' scenario, there are moments where it looks like we've gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, 'Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.' Guess what? They crucified him."

Sky blue water wet &c but man this film is a piece of shit. My friends apologised to me after

Scott otm tho about the gold shield thing being lovely, and I do appreciate fassbender fully embracing the ridiculous but this was such a chore - my friends said similar stuff to those itt re "at least it was short & quick" but I really felt the 2hrs quite painfully. The stupidity was killing me.

I did laugh at the aliens golluming about & kicking ppl but not much else

if the roman out-of-control problem was running around in skirts maybe the emissary stopping it shouldn't have worn a dress, just sayin

imho let the spoilers fly at this point. i'm never going to see this and y'all's commentary will be more entertaining

All this has made me really want to rewatch Prometheus, ugh

What is wrong w u

this was really fun!

basically though its an insane robot movie not an 'alien' movie.

fassbender gave great insane robot. he was so much fun.

the middle part is ridiculous, but its done with a good amount of conviction

the last third was a hommage to previous alien films, including crazy ash

the LOTR aspects of this were all pretty funny

the whole thing was the funniest alien film, tbh.

oooookay, Ridley

im not sure ridley would call his own film ridiculuous, but wv

taken as a big budget action adventure film its pretty good

I think scott is bored of the aliens though. he really wants to make films about AI and evolution.

There is a howler of a scene in this that is exactly like this KITH sketch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh_IlJj0hqY

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i weep for the big-budget action adventure film if this is the best we can expect. feel like idk 'force awakens' would be a better baseline for something like that - plot that moves forward, tension that goes somewhere, story with a climax, and most importantly characters you can understand and name when it's over. alien: covenant would do sooooo bad on the "describe this character without saying what they look like or what they did in the plot" test. nobody's actions make a lick of sense except the two fassbender robots', and a lot of those comes down to "crazy robot is crazy so he does things" which isn't much to get excited about. david's got a screw loose so he killed everybody. killed an entire civilization, killed so many people it makes any further antics of the xenomorph in the other films seem kinda insignificant. you wonder why the Company spends so much time trying to get the alien when the black goo is obviously the choice weapon of mass destruction, and works by magic.

meanwhile so now the xenomorph's origin is: space jockeys create humans with black goo, humans create robot, robot is mad at humans so it kills humans, then robot is just crazy, he's misattributing poems so he also kills millions of space jockeys. robot tinkers around with black goo for ten years until he gets the face-hugger, robot sits in cave on space jockey planet waiting for space crew to stop by so he can show off xenomorph if they live long enough. weird that he doesn't just take his space jockey spaceship to earth or something, but anyway. just seems a really cheap and tossed-off atrocity, a genocide in fifteen seconds with some dubbed-over unreliable-narrator stuff to rub it in. so, guy pearce and the prometheus crew - noomi rapace in particular - are now responsible for one of the most horrible crimes in history. should have just left david's head in a ditch on planet prometheus. oopsie! if this came at the end of prometheus and we understood what david's motivations were, it might potentially have felt like something other than a shoddy rewrite of the last movie's conclusion and a dickish offscreen death for noomi. stupid of her to waste so much time desperately trying to survive in the last movie. would be better for the whole universe if she'd died on the space operating table. at least it's gutsy: probably the most hated moment in the whole series to date is newt and hicks and bishop all dying horribly during the credits, and scott decides to rip that off?

meanwhile these guys are the worst space crew in the history of space crews. and yeah it's a colonizing ship but they're the crew of said ship, presumably with some kind of extra training since they have all these lives in their hands, but nobody acts like that except the kristen stewart lookalike on the bridge, and all she gets to do is delay somebody else's terrible decision until it's convenient for her to reverse her position and let the plot move forward. i wanted to throw things at the screen every time anybody else made any kind of decision - just a spree of "ffs don't go into that creepy basement" moments. the whole planet is a creepy basement and we've barely met the people when they make the bad decision to go there so it just feels like "look, it's in the script that we go down into this creepy basement, can we just be done with this argument and prep the landing module?" eventually crudup goes into an actual creepy basement on the say-so of the guy he has a gun on because he's acting so creepy and unreliable. "listen pal this is all too creepy, and you are gonna give me some answers, RIGHT NOW!" "sure thing, just step into my creepy basement and it will all become clear" "cool should i invite the others, they're probably wondering if i found mary sue's horribly murdered corpse, or i could at least let them know that you're acting all creepy" "no no, why trouble them with all this" "ok sure thing sounds good"... christ.

or at the outset: "this ionic storm could really tear up our landing shuttle!" uh... so why not wait a while before you land your shuttle? like just chill in orbit for a week? everybody seemed glad to be out of hypersleep... break out some of the good rations and take your time. finish some of the repairs on the ship or something. maybe if you spend more than four seconds checking out this mysterious planet, you might learn other things about its suitability for your space colony, like the presence within walking distance of your landing site of an enormous city full of millions of corpses. nah hurry up we gotta get to that creepy basement by lunchtime.

also, the john denver thing, wtf was that and why did it have to go on so long. what was noomi even trying to do? it's a good thing nobody wanders into david's creepy lab until right when the plot requires them to or his story would have unraveled a lot quicker. after all, they're all just ... hanging around while one person fiddles with the radio. "man I'm bushed after those alien attacks, my turn for the shower!"

no one even expresses any curiosity about the giant ancient city. the wheat is forgotten, john denver is forgotten. you'd think they might be like "hey david so I'm fuzzy on the timeline, when did she record that message again? and... why john denver?" it's hard to effectively thematize the meaning of humanity and why we are driven to do the things we do when nobody in the movie acts like any human being you've ever met.

ty DC this is the review I've been waiting for

this movie has two different scenes of someone getting offed by an alien when they think it's all over and go to take a shower. i mean come ON.

and I haven't even gotten into the garbage last sequence on the spaceship, or the mean-spirited twist, which you see coming for so long that it's only surprising because it's been obvious for SO long that you finally go "huh, well, i guess they're NOT going to.. oh no wait, they are, there it is." so i guess david's going to commit more heinous atrocities but after seeing him murder possibly an entire civilization (or maybe a backwards antique branch with no security or defense systems, who knows really, film doesn't care) what's a couple thousand colonists?

They should have a movie where a lone Alien lands on what it thinks is a deserted planet only to learn that it is overrun with Davids.

The farther we get from Alien and into these, the more it becomes a signpost for anti-auteurists, since everything good in the movie came more from O'Bannon, Shusset, Giler, Hill, Giger and Cobb than it did Scott.

Also, wtf is with the aliens now emerging as little homunculi instead of the snakelike chestbursters we're used to? When that one popped out of Crudup and raised its arms in response to David everyone in my theater laughed.

Scott is after all the guy who did "Hannibal." I think that movie remains the template for current Alien batshitery.

The farther we get from Alien and into these, the more it becomes a signpost for anti-auteurists, since everything good in the movie came more from O'Bannon, Shusset, Giler, Hill, Giger and Cobb than it did Scott.

i mean, script-wise, sure, but imo at least 70 percent of why alien is good is the way it's shot

(and design-wise)

i'm treading lightly itt since i still haven't seen this and i want the lols to be fresh

but really the problem with this whole series since aliens is that the aliens aren't interesting antagonists in themselves since all they want to do is feed and procreate and spread drool around

no-one has been able to put them in any context which might make them interesting again - it's always 'corporate shenanigans lead to human-munching' and really who gives a fuck when we're almost ten movies in (if you count the aliens vs predator movies)

The planet of the Davids, where half are good and half are secretly evil! Whom do you trust?

Yeah, for sure, but a large percentage of that is down to Giger's and Cobb's designs for the derelict and the Nostromo. (Film is collaborative etc etc.) I don't want to discount what Scott can do, but without a good writer, strong producer and good production design he turns out turds.

scott's best work relies heavily on production design - he clearly sees the value of it and i think he's a lot more involved with the direction of it than you're giving him credit for (and his obsessively detailed alien storyboards shows how blurred the lines were)

beyond the fact that it was always purely a narrative device and hence had neither in the earlier films, i don't really understand the utter terror fear of further exploring the private and/or potential social* life of the xenomorph: instead we're stuck with completely underwritten ensembles of unconvincing humans who no one gives a fuck about, completely underwritten ensembles of unconvincing engineers (aka big grey rubbery humans) who no one gives a fuck about, and genocidal robots

*yes OK as BG they were (acc.backstory) bred as a weapons experiment or whatever so didn't initially have an ecological niche -- they're kind of anti-ecology by design, survival of the bred-to-be-worst-fit -- BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY'RE UNLEASHED HAVE TO ADAPT TO ONE ANOTHER? or *learn* to live on a world that can't just support them in hunter-gatherer mode (as in this mode they will quickly strip it of everything then die themselves)**
**i mean obviously this would be dealt with even worse by ridley, who can't wait to jesus everything up

s/b as BG sez

self-xp eg

http://37.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljs6i0y7FD1qinfuro1_1280.jpg

The planet of the Davids, where half are good and half are secretly evil! Whom do you trust?

One David always lies. One David always tells the truth. One David just combs his hair in the mirror all the time. Can you determine who is who in only three questions (and a mirror)?

i think the last time there was even the suggestion of doing something different were the various competing scripts for alien 3, none of which were even particularly good ideas in themselves, so it's been at least a quarter-decade of grunting out tedious variations on aspects of movies from 1979 and 1986

About the gay characters
http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2017/05/17/why-i-wont-see-alien-covenant/

Is the escape from the lab in Alien: Resurrection the high point of the idea that Aliens actually think and co-operate?

or *learn* to live on a world that can't just support them in hunter-gatherer mode (as in this mode they will quickly strip it of everything then die themselves)**

I think that's part of the point - both of them as bio-weapons and of them as crashingly unsubtle (and thus great) capitalist metaphors.

Is the escape from the lab in Alien: Resurrection the high point of the idea that Aliens actually think and co-operate?

yeah, this is never addressed again as far as i can remember, which seems like a missed opportunity

we only ever see a single generation of aliens in any of these movies - what happens if they're captured by someone competent for a change and there's a breeding programme which lasts for hundreds or thousands of alien generations? what happens if you breed them with a broad range of 'sacrifice' species, since we've only really seen human and canine aliens? what if it turns out that it's worth breeding aliens despite the risk since something about their genetic makeup can cure cancer or extend life or facilitate human exploration of space?

i'm already losing interest in this as i write it tbh but god i wish they'd turn the series over to someone who might do something batshit with the most tired premise in cinema

Not sure what potential people see in continuing this series. What would you want?

At one point Jeunet said he was doing another but I doubt that's still on the cards. Shinya Tsukamoto said he'd like to do one, but that's just too good to be true.

the only two modes this series has ever worked in is squelchy-squelchy psychosexual nightmare and shooty-shooty action-survival

make a fucking romcom or a musical next, honestly - just anything to get it out of the rut it's been in for my entire adult life

Classic meet cute

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/aliens/images/9/94/Alien_facehugger.jpg

It is a romcom! (And a musical if you count McBride singing along to hologram Noomi)

classic cute meat

http://cdn.images.dailystar.co.uk/dynamic/33/photos/342000/alien-egg-371342.jpg

Michael Bay could do wonders for this franchise