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

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

So basically the chronology is, man invents Siri/OK Google/Echo, man brings that to its logical omniscient conclusion, then man says, fuck that, we prefer a silent green screen in one room.

i guess the nostromo is just a piece of shit mining vessel, maybe the company didn't think it was worth getting the siri module installed

there was one sequence i enjoyed in this - kinda - which was the final battle with the alien in the terraforming hangar - the evacuation of the air from the airlock looked great

actually now i think about it, how the fuck did david get an alien back onboard? are we supposed to believe he swallowed a lil' baby chestburster and regurgitated it when they were safely in orbit?

At some point the guy with the burned cheek got an alien in his ear? Don't remember seeing that, but so much shit just happens off screen here that's the least of its problems. They might as well have an alien burst out of lead woman's tummy in the pod and then had David immediately freeze it with her. Like, so little makes sense.

I want to see a sequel where David is raising 2000 screaming babies by himself.

Or, fuck it, where the crew of 12 or whatever was raising 2000 babies. "Alien: Sitcom."

i don't recall the burned guy getting anything in his ear but even if he did it'd be one of those creepy white aliens that burst out of him, not the the familiar giger alien that show up on the ship - those only come from the eggs/facehuggers

while i remember, can someone pls make a gif of the scene where the chestburster stands up out of billy crudup, extending his li'l arms, and add the caption COME AT ME BRO

what if a chestbuster comes out of a really religious dude and it is alien jesus

The final alien on the ship definitely comes from someone who is in the sick bay. How you got a face hugger in him is anyone's guess, but as nothing matters in this movie, that detail certainly doesn't matter either.

according to the wiki synopsis it comes from burned-face-guy - i guess the facehugger that grabs him manages to shoot its wad before it gets sawed off him?

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

Ripley yells at Mother when she's trying to deactivate the self destruct mechanism, I don't know if it's just in anger though.

Yeah, I kind of like that ambiguity! I want to say I assumed the screen interface was for more private interactions with Mother? Anyway, I know Ash was a sneaky android imbedded with them, but the first Alien shows that Mother was capable of handling herself just fine. In this one, why bother with a pervasive ship AI that has to remind the robot Walter to hoist up the main sail? Seems like a redundancy. For that matter, why have a human crew at all? They could just send lots of Walters around with 2000 embryos to start terraforming new lands.

I still want to know how they planned to change 2000 diapers at once.

new planet needs fertilisers, just gonna let the anklebiters shit where they please for the good of the ecosystem

On the one hand, the state of computing when Alien was made was very mainframe based, I think I got the impression when watching it that Mother was back on Earth and they just had communication rights.

On the other hand, robots.

For that matter, gah, how stupid to send 2000 embryos in the first place. So you'll have a bunch of useless kids to care for for a couple of decades before they can productively contribute and/or procreate. Yeah, that sounds like a strong plan.

Maybe they'll just unfreeze like a daycare class at a time, let them get old enough to take care of the next generation, rinse, repeat.

Yeah, I don't think any film with the whole frozen embryo scheme ever implies the intention is for all of them to show up at once. You let the first wave age to a point where they're autonomous, then one that can participate in childcare, and then can stagger the population waves a little more quickly after that.

You no what? I did really like the creepy ambient score.

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?

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, August 13, 2017 7:42 PM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I thought this was a remake of all 3 first Alien films morphed into a new story.
Seems to echo visually and several scenes seem to be semi lifted from elsewhere.

I did think it was a bit more coherent than Prometheus but that isn't difficult.

I assume there's a 3 coming sometime in the not too distant future.

seemed odd that James Franco was in such a small cameo in this. Looks like his role was originally at least a bit larger.

he had the best scene in the film, though.

Franco appears as the captain in that youtube prequel thing

his casting seemed like some sort of in-joke though

supposedly the home release has slightly different editing and screws up some of the homoerotic android-on-android action! unacceptable

Just watched Covenant, haven't read thread.

As usual lovely design and photography. Loved the solar sails, the location shots of the planet. And pale alien hybrid things why not.

What I didn't like was lots of stuff, and in particular:

- really stupid impulsive decisions taken by crew members that would have worked if acted out properly but no (e.g. 'man of faith' captain deciding to go off-course to that planet, man in white hat deciding to take the ship down into the storm instead of thinking of the colonists)
- supposedly professionals who scream and run around
- stupid shower sexy time punishment by the xenomorph. That can't be right surely. Killing as punishment for sexy showers is straight out of a slasher movie and it even tickled them with its tail before doing so. Fuck offfff.

Going back itt:

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 it had to be a two-person sexy shower because they had an extra character to get rid of.

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?

Androids much better just unblinkingly watching people die and they might or might not be chuckling about it or planned it that way rather than openly genocidal

see, for me, the awful choices and general dumbness of the characters just adds to the nightmarish sense of dread. maybe I'm just more eager to dump my suspension of disbelief for this franchise I dunno.

I do take this point - in this and Prometheus you can see that at least part of the intended vibe is meant to be terrible things happening in a free associative way, things that no human can even understand! - it's just that this is one of several competing vibes which, as it plays out, get drowned out or clash against each other.

life under trump has made general dumbness of characters thrust in absurd positions of responsibility a prerequisite now.

Agree wiith all the above disdain for Covenant. Ebert's Idiot rule employed so repeatedly in a visually dark and blandly staffed film made this a slog to view. Having watched Life recently, seems like quarantine protocol gets the same respect the Prime Directive got in original Trek. How hard would it be to write the characters as sensible, and tighten the plot? And the sexy shower scene? Wish I could say that's when the movie reminded me of later Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but that was much earlier. Clumsy and bad.

On the plus side, it was a free library borrow, so just out the time.

The slog continues:

Appearing as a guest on Empire Magazine’s official podcast, Ridley Scott revealed the next proposed Alien film will explore A.I.s gone rogue.

"I think the evolution of the Alien himself is nearly over, but what I was trying to do was transcend and move to another story, which would be taken over by A.I.’s. The world that the AI might create as a leader if he finds himself on a new planet. We have actually quite a big layout for the next one."

I can only laugh at this point

i'm imagining someone running, running, running away from a vast rolling circular historied franchise as it bears pitilessly down on him: "Forward!" he thinks to himself, "forward! I must go forward! The only escape is forward!"

Like, does he think people walked out of "Alien" 38 years ago saying, "What I'd love is to find out more about that Ash guy. What was up with that?"

Fine with that, at least he recognises what the most interesting aspect of the last two films has been.

lol mark

150 minutes of infinite fassbenders demonstrating their fingering prowess on each other or gtfo