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

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

otm

Alien: Fisting

they don't call him Fistbanger for nothing

wasn't a robot by himself on a new planet already the setup for the last movie? i guess it could be kind of funny if it's just fassbender trying to get a thousand xenomorphs to follow his flute-based commands like the pied piper. no no, hang the drapes higher, i said, line them up with - oh god dammit let's just start over...

he won't be done until he can get a xenomorph to play the flute

Started watching Covenant in short episodic bursts just to placate the awful god Curiousity. I guess it was implicit in Prometheus but I was surprised when in the first few minutes Weyland came out as an evolution denier. A very flawed foundation for the whole filmic enterprise to be built on.

xpost Gonna have to evolve some opposable thumbs first.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAswFNNXoAALf-3.jpg

its modal phase, i guess

not that it isn't already in some respects but i would like to see the series branch towards a more 'buddy comedy' strain

read that as "buddy cop" for a sec. which i could see more easily. one's a robot, one's a xenomorph. to track a killer, they're going to have to work together.

When one's a host and the other's a parasite, symbiosis ain't always easy!

maybe it could be like hitoshi awaaki's parasyte, where the xenomorph fails to launch and our hero is a teenaged boy with an extra inner jaw that talks back to him and thirsts for blood. or he could have a facehugger for a hand I guess but at that point they really would have to buy the rights.

1000-year-old David is pulled from hypersleep to track down Predator: "I'm too old for this shit! I'm just two weeks from retirement!"
Arnold as Blade Runner, decapitates David: "Considuh yourself retiyahed."

yeah a reboot of alien vs predator is clearly right around the corner, with david as the master of the dumb pyramid, forcing his little toys to fight. I guess you could make Guy Pearce the mastermind though and have the Terminators be the next stage in the David robot lineup.

"I know now why you cry. It is to make tears for the rain!"

Will take me a while to finish watching Covenant at the current rate, still at least i won't forget a single moment of ridiculousness. Like, if the ship's ai can detect something that might harm the sails, why can't it automatically retract the sails? Why would you have stasis chambers hanging like so many shirts in a wardrobe? How could a stasis chamber internally combust? (It seems like this is an expected outcome because they have a contigency plan involving a giant tool for ripping the lid off. Which doesn't work.) Why would anyone entrusted with being second in command of a spaceship say something as ludicrous as "i don't believe in luck"? Oh right because he's a 'person of faith'. Who isn't trusted to be put in charge but is trusted to be put in a position where he might have to take charge. Why are the sails all or nothing? Seriously it is apparently one huge series circuit where a single break renders the whole thing useless.

a friend off to watch blade runner: TNG sourly predicted on twitter the day when the BR and the xenomorph-predator franchise-universes folded into one another: except instead of "engineers" he said "navigators" by mistake

i very much want an alien-predator-replicant-dune crossover franchise-universe to come into being, it wd be lowgrade crap but it at least drown ridley scott out

(i *think* a xenomorph-the thing crossover franchise-universe already exists in comics but i too may be misremembering) (i don't read comics really, i just read about it somewhere)

That amazing Alien sax pic instantly reminded me of

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c7/AlecEmpireHypermodernJazz20005.jpeg/220px-AlecEmpireHypermodernJazz20005.jpeg

I rewatched this and...it’s still good.

It’s funny that Scott made the Martian, an optimistic paean to scientific competence and human ingenuity, nearly back-to-back with this gleefully misanthropic Gothic sci-fI meatloaf with extra ketchup.

It’s as if the humans in these prequels are as David the android sees them: vain, short-sighted, foolish, doomed. There’s a lot in common here with the implicit worldview of Scott’s other recent-ish flick The Counselor. Possibly Hannibal too. A hostile universe teeming with predators of all sorts.

So in essence what I’m trying to say is I that want a scene where an alien humps the windshield of a convertible.

that was basically in this movie, and it was terrible

No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams

The Counselor was such a hilarious misfire, latebloomer otm

except instead of "engineers" he said "navigators" by mistake

well it was originally the pilot aka space jockey, till scott decided this fabulous unheimlich biomechanoid was just a guy in a suit.

still hoping for a new retcon that establish that the space jockeys are actually the Protoculture or at least the Zentradi

yep i entirely understand the mistake i just want to see more of this dude:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/fb/3b/48fb3b245b85cb5b987fcab224c397ba.jpg

robotech crossover already happened
https://i.imgur.com/F8M0Nlf.png

When the Zentraedi attacked Macross island the Prometheus aided in the defense of the SDF-1. Supplying fighter planes and squads to back up the islands defenses, the Prometheus held in the ocean as the SDF-1 launched into space.

When the SDF-1 activated its low orbit atmospheric hyperspace fold it transported the Prometheus to the far orbit of Pluto. With the Carrier not being space functional or flight capable the SDF-1 immediately docked the Prometheus on the Port side. (Left side) After it was docked the Carrier provided great support, with it's extra fighter squadrons and flight deck, which launched the planes throughout the show. Prometheus was destroyed along with the SDF-1 later on Earth during Khyron's attack on New Macross City.

Am done with Covenant. I started to enjoy at at one point, after they set down on the planet, as a slick but still ridiculous b-movie - well I laughed when the lander blew up anyway. But it tanked again when David showed up, hard to pinpoint the absolute nadir in a sea of minima but I think it was when he taught the new born alien to macarena.

https://d26dzxoao6i3hh.cloudfront.net/items/3c011p420Q3n0w1l3X2l/Alien.jpg

ayyyyy i'm chestburstin' over heah

Ah, Riddles.

http://ew.com/movies/2017/12/04/ridley-scott-alien-franchise-covenant/

“People say, ‘You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,’ so I put a lot of that in Covenant and it fitted nicely. But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that’s more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting....

“They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a f—ing language! And they couldn’t decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where’s it gone? They could have already implemented something we don’t know.”

“They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a fingering language!

Pray this doesn't mean he is planning a remake of Colossus: The Forbin Project.

I’m all for it. I really liked Covenant (don’t @ me) and the evolution of David into a mad scientist/Hannibal Lecter-type figure. A psychotic android wreaking havoc in space? Break out the flutes and sign me up!

A remake of Colossus: The Forbin Project is long overdue imo, but I'd probably rather have Wes Anderson do it