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

What a weird piece. Spends all that time coming around to saying things that people were saying about his general aesthetic and approach to film over thirty years ago! What's he going to write next, a semi-breathless piece about how Michael Bay likes shooting action scenes?

Meantime, Ridley's gearing up!

Ridley Scott revealed the next Alien film will feature a return to the ruined home world of The Engineers.

"We’re being written now. There’ll be three or four different players coming in to investigate. One of which will be the Engineers arriving back to find their planet decimated. I think those ships come and go on regular intervals. I see them as the gardeners of space.

"Where we go next is obvious. We’re gonna actually go to the planet. In so doing…I’m not going to tell you the story!"

I know you're all thrilled.

There’ll be three or four different players coming in to investigate

aliens vs predators vs humans vs muppet babies

I know you're all thrilled.

I am!

the underrated weirdo essay needed the title PYGMALIEN or gtfo

yeah idk after covenant i'm sorta excited for whatever the next one is, though it sounds like there'll be fewer gay robots, which, dud

Well whaddaya know? I really enjoyed "Covenant". Liked the pulpy haunted house / Dr Moreau vibe and I think David is now one of the best recent movie villains. A solid expensive B sci fi flick.

Yes of course

http://io9.gizmodo.com/ridley-scott-has-an-idea-to-work-ripley-into-his-alien-1796788933

We’re heading toward the back end of the first Alien so [using CG] may be feasible. I don’t think it’ll... but Ripley’s going to be somebody’s daughter. Obviously. We’re coming in from the back end. The time constraints, of what’s the time between this film, where we leave David going off heading for that colony, I think you’re probably two films out from even considering her.

grrrr

obviously coming in from the back end

dude turning into george fkn lucas before our eyes

He should retroactively insert unicorn shots into the original Alien.

He could insert the unicorn from the back end. Or from his back end.

ridley nooooo

see, it's like facehuggery, they rhyme

I can see it now, he wants to end his final Alien movie showing Ripley and others getting into their sleep chamber on the Nostromo.

also david was a stowaway and reprogrammed Mother and then downloaded himself into Ash and then while they were in hypersleep (this would be a post credit scene) he zoomed ahead of them to plant the space jockey and the eggs and all that

Spoilers!

I can't tell if Covenant is better than Prometheus, worse than Prometheus, or better because it is worse. There are certainly elements of it that are smarter, and yeah, there are certainly characters in it that are dumber, which is ... almost impossible. Either way, I've been watching this and decided I needed to go to bed so checked out how much time was left and holy shit, 28 minutes? It's not boring, and it looks pretty good, but I can't conceive of nearly 30 more minutes this movie needs.

The story is just being extruded like alien slime into a potentially infinite number of receptacles (films, eggs, whatever)

If Ridley Scott has his way, it'll go on forever, never getting to the promised land of the point of transition to Alien

Zeno's alien

no zenophobia itt pls

Omg it really is the Zeno's of origin monster stories though

Monster origin stories I mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KpZRJ4HE4Q

lol the YT ad that comes up with that for me says "egg customer refunds"

OK, man, the last 25 minutes of this are just so deflated and flat, with no suspense and all. There's a good movie in here somewhere, and maybe there was a good movie in Prometheus somewhere. That these two movies are all so expertly made on almost every level except the story and characters says it all. No wonder Ridley likes making movies about robots so much.

That said, I think the stupidity of the Prometheus crew bugged me more than the anonymity of this bunch.

this crew was wayyy dumber imo. at least the prometheus crew's whole mission was to go to a creepy basement planet, here they talk themselves into it on the flimsiest logic possible and can't even wait a day for the weather to clear.

That is stupid as is Crudup following David. But the last one had a guy petting an Alien snake monster, and a cartographer getting lost. And other stuff.

The lesson of half of these movies seems to be quarantine saves lives. I did like the expediency of this one just skipping all that waiting and cutting/gutting right to the monster.

Like in this one, they get a transmission from the middle of nowhere from a human. Who is the transmission from? Hmm, maybe it's coming from the only human ever lost in space before, A scientist known by name.

Mostly I was put off by the complete lack of suspense in this one. Just no mystery at all.

Anyway, long story short, this one was dumb but made me less angry.

In 2 years I won't even remember which one was stupider.

This one was stupid but it has better dumb horror movie thrills and gore so I like it much more than Promevfefe.

so i finally got around to seeing this and here is my hot take:

ridley shitt morelike amirite

i would like to point out that i have been otm in this thread

maybe they're planning to honour alien 3 by opening with the discovery of her corpse in a broken hypersleep chamber and that'll be the extent of her involvement

― Rush Limbaugh and Lou Reed doing sex with your parents (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, 21 December 2016 16:08 (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i really want danny mcbride to be the surprise sole survivor of this movie

― I am Socutus of Butt. Resistance is futile. (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, 1 March 2017 14:40 (five months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well close enough anyway

OK, man, the last 25 minutes of this are just so deflated and flat, with no suspense and all. There's a good movie in here somewhere, and maybe there was a good movie in Prometheus somewhere. That these two movies are all so expertly made on almost every level except the story and characters says it all. No wonder Ridley likes making movies about robots so much.

That said, I think the stupidity of the Prometheus crew bugged me more than the anonymity of this bunch

the crew was so aggressively dumb in this i was actively rooting for them all to be eviscerated

billy crudup's character was like a richard dawkins straw man of what religious people are like - butthurt and permawhiny that people 'hold his faith against him' but so easily-led that he's wiling to follow a visibly-evil robot's directions to fondle and then stick his head inside a throbbing, roiling alien egg

then when he wakes up after being facehugged his reaction isn't 'HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED' it's 'what do you believe in, david?' fuck you, dude, i'm glad you got splatted

you're right about the the production design - it's so beautiful i spent most of my time despairing that it was all in support of something so tedious. there's a title card after the credits that says the movie created 15,000 jobs and required hundreds of thousands of man hours and i was like 'BUT TO WHAT END'

fassbender was the best thing about this, clearly - i was particularly taken with his latterday iggy pop haircut when he first showed up. i have to wonder if anyone who watched this didn't immediately see the walter/david switcheroo coming as soon as he cut his hair, though

remember the bit when all the dumb idiot Engineers were gazing up at David's ship in rapture before they got annihilated

I fucking hate the Engineers

other best thing about this is the hilarious handwaving about how david went from being a severed head in a bag to a having a body capable of elaborate feats of fingering again - shaw built him a new one!

so shaw, an archaeologist by trade, rebuilt an impossibly advanced robot, presumably with her bare hands, using whatever she could salvage from an alien spaceship which seems to contain nothing but empty corridors and the occasional hologram? ok cool, thx ridley u fuck

the engineers are stunningly shit, yes

i think someone mentioned it upthread but lol again at the writers trying to unpaint themselves from the corner created at the end of prometheus, forcing them to go to an engineer planet, by just killing all the engineers as soon as david arrives. problem solved!

WHO PLANTED THE MOTHERFUCKING WHEAT

as much as anything else the engineers look like trash, they are clearly made from the same bad plastic as the jar jar binks sticky tongue toy

they literally picked the most boring design possible

then look at this cool dude

https://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/aliens/images/0/0a/Space_Jockey.jpg

fuck you for making me relive that horror again tbh xp

the quarter-assed religious stuff in this was infuriating too - billy crudup's pointless faith, david's crucified alien experiments, katherine waterston's nail necklace, all adding up to precisely fuck-all

Can't remember, when David nukes the engineer planet does Scott cut to a tiny child engineer hugging its mother?

Amazingly, though, I can think of so many ways this one could have been worse. Imagine if they encountered David leading an army of aliens! I smell sequel ...

The religion stuff was indeed total BS, but everything about this was BS. It was totally mechanical and the entire plot could have been dispatched with in 15 minutes for all they care about telling a story here.

By the way, weirdest thing in this: when hooded David rescues them, he's all "come with me (if you want to live)." His face is obscured and, if you are dumb, you're supposed to say, who is this dude? He's all running around in his hoodie, makes it back to his haunted castle. Then he addresses the crew and ... there's no big lower the hood reveal! He keeps his hood up, obscuring his face, and is all "I am David, what's up, bro?" And keeps the hood up! So even after they "reveal" him, for no good reason they keep him hidden. Then at some point he must think, well, no reason to keep the hood up, and takes it down.

And Walter, wtf? You're a smart robot, you know the drill, what were you waiting for David to do? Crudup, you're clearly a dummy, I don't expect more from you. But Walter? You're supposed to know better!

Later on, back on the ship, there's a whole scene where Mullet McBride is all "I have to take Mother offline for 8 clicks" or whatever, and I thought, aha, convenient contrivance to get Mother out of the picture! And then the next scene she's up and running again, anyway.

Speaking of which, Mother is just AI, like Walter/David with no legs. So why couldn't she handle important shit, like taking evasive action when some solar storm is brewing or whatever? Why is she only Siri-level AI? In Alien, Mother is perfectly capable of handling shit on her own, here it's just like "Mother, what is today's weather like?" "Mother, has James Franco won an Oscar?" "Mother, convert 2 cups to ounces."

http://chainsawsuit.com/2012/08/02/chainsawsuit-ruins-it-for-you-prometheus-2/

* The crab aliens are incredibly lethal when first encountered, yet at the first sign of hunger, Williams says he’ll just “grab and eat one of those crab aliens.”

Speaking of which, Mother is just AI, like Walter/David with no legs. So why couldn't she handle important shit, like taking evasive action when some solar storm is brewing or whatever? Why is she only Siri-level AI? In Alien, Mother is perfectly capable of handling shit on her own, here it's just like "Mother, what is today's weather like?" "Mother, has James Franco won an Oscar?" "Mother, convert 2 cups to ounces."

and mother in alien communicates through text on a green screen rather than via generic robovoicechat

maybe the mother on nostromo is just shy i dunno

I could have sworn they talked to Mother in Alien ...

I guess there is a lot of janky modem noise. You know the logical endpoint of this is Scott remaking Alien, right? To modernize all the effects and tech and stuff?

yeah, dallas and ripley talk to mother iirc but the replies are all in text on a screen

plus they have to go to a specific room to speak to mother, they're not just cutting about the ship yelling at her whenever they like, like they do here