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

(adds to D+ watchlist)

I loved Something Wicked when I was a kid, about the same time I saw The Creature Wasn't Nice, which at that time was the funniest movie I had ever seen.

You also have Never Cry Wolf from that era which is AFAIK the only straight-up Disney-branded film featuring a peen shot.

(Surprisingly not on D+.)

lol i just realized you all were calling Disney+ "D+". I just figured you were listing all the "D+" (as in grade) movies that Disney released. I thought, huh, some of these movies aren't any worse than C+, but different strokes ...

i like the idea that the "invitation" was just totally misconstrued, it was actually a warning, like they're pointing at this one particular star system and saying "NEVER go here, NEVER" and the prehistoric scribes are nodding and writing down "ALWAYS go here, ALWAYS"

anyway i just watched and loved this movie again and read (and loved) this ENTIRE thread again.

that's quite an achievement!

Thread good, movie terrible

been rewatching all the Alien movies after watching Covenant. it's been fun! could barely remember what happened in which ones.

we watched Alien on Halloween night & Aliens the day after

a fine, blessed run of movies

something about this time of year makes it just right.

though re Aliens: newt still drives me up the wall

i watched the first one again recently and had forgotten that Ripley calls Mother “you BITCH!!” - i had totally retconned that into the second movie, addressed to the queen. or maybe she says it there too?

she totally says it in aliens

i maintain that alien covenant is the best alien sequel since aliens

prometheus profoundly goofy yet with many effective scenes. though i’m overdue a revisit

yep aliens too. she says it in the powerloader scene

I had a friend in college with Hollywood ties. This is the barely internet era, so he would occasionally snag hard copies of scripts. One day he showed up with the "Alien: Resurrection" script and I thought, cool, I loved "Delicatessen" and "City of Lost Children," I can't wait to see what these dudes do with "Alien." Then I read it and thought, ugh, I don't really like this. Then I saw the movie, which was faithful to the script I read, and didn't like it either, but I think I only saw it that once.

(Fun aside: two other early scripts I remember getting from him were "A Life Less Ordinary" and "Pulp Fiction," both of course massively anticipated follow-ups to classics. I read the former and, once again, thought, oof, I don't like this thing, and the movie was indeed also faithful (and bad). But "Pulp Fiction," I had the sense to compromise and open it to just one page, where I saw the word "chainsaw" and knew better than to read any more.)

Back in the DVD era, the "Alien: Quadrilogy" boxed set was basically the best thing ever short of those massive Lord of the Rings sets.

(Another fun anecdote: that same friend once found a lost dog in his neighborhood, made some inquiries and found the owner, or at least their address. He rang the bell at the gate, was buzzed in, and it was Steven Segal.)

(Seagal)

i still have my Alien Quadrilogy dvd set
(me, an old)

used copies on amazon starting at $5.98, shit i might just pick it up

things that all good alien(s) movies have:

- female protagonist
- cryopods
- lack of consensus on quarantine best practice
- alien in tummy
- secret plan by the corporation to try to control the alien, leaving crew out to dry
- male robot with head torn from body but still talking
- strobe effects in finale
- flamethrowers
- an escape ship with the alien still on it
- a voice diary

- blue collar crew
- creeping dread

- predators

dormant computers turning on & gobledygook messages appear on screen

- predators

― you are like a scampicane, there's calm in your fries (bizarro gazzara), Friday, November 6, 2020

flagged without hesitation or remorse

while waiting for the night that my boo is up for Dune, i rewatched Prometheus this weekend... first time since the theater... tried to forget about Alien and try to watch it as just this big-idea scifi blockbuster. it looks fantastic and there's some genuine creepy stuff when they first get to the planet and encounter the black liquid, etc... but on the whole i was about as disconnected as i was the first time (see upthread for nitpicks, etc.). the Lindelhof search-for-god material is just so undercooked, and the Spooky Planet movie Scott clearly wants to make is undermined by the oversized and ill-defined cast, and several distracting and kinda pointless bits of plot (Guy Pearce especially).

the David character is delicious, and I remember the first time being like "well regardless of the other stuff, the David stuff was great" ... this time I was noticing the machinery a little more and it kinda bummed me out. his deal is that he seemingly knows everything, doesn't share any of it, and is Up To No Good, so at any given moment if things slow down, he can do something sinister to get the scares going again. everyone else makes decisions out of what the plot needs rather than anything that i recognized as growing out of who they were. even the black liquid seems to be getting its lines whispered in its ear right before Scott calls "action."

Alien: Covenant has a lot of similar problems, and i feel like the non-Lindelhof version of Prometheus might have basically been that movie: a rough-draft monster movie script set on a gorgeous and memorable alien world.

I've mentioned it on the rolling TV thread but if you are interested in staying adjacent to the Prometheus universe, Scott's Raised By Wolves is for you. NB: it is batshit beyond belief.

RIP to Stephen Stills’s accordion

his deal is that he seemingly knows everything, doesn't share any of it, and is Up To No Good, so at any given moment if things slow down, he can do something sinister to get the scares going again

lol you say this like it's a bad thing!

david's total contempt for humans and supervillain ambitions are among the best things about this.

if i have a criticism it's that there are too many main characters. is it noomi? is it charlize? is it fassbender? and for that reason some stuff doesn't quite click in - most obviously the romance/relationship between noomi & logan marshall-green.

there are some deleted scenes that actually have a lot of nice character moments. for instance, there's an argument between logan marshall green and noomi that makes their relationship feel like more than some lines in a script. and the idris elba/charlize bone-down gets a little bit of buildup earlier on. the fact that it's christmas comes through more. (!!) and there's actually a scene of the whole team finding some cutesy alien tadpoles in the goop and putting them in jars. everyone's incredibly happy - they all feel like they've just done something remarkable and unprecedented - there's a team vibe. so then when glasses guy later goes to pet the snake thing, it kind of makes sense. they'd just finished having a very benign encounter with cutesy ali-oids and it had been fine.

is it noomi? is it charlize?
I don't have this problem because if there's a vacant space where a character should be on screen, I infer that it's Noomi.

i love David's contempt and villainy! maybe I just want him to have an evil pet to talk to so we get just a little clearer picture of what he's trying to do. idk, i think i tend to be less engaged with villains who are SO many steps ahead of the heroes, it's less interesting to see a mastermind just setting up dominoes and knock them over.

like at the end of the film, Shaw still doesn't seem to actually grasp the sequence of everything that's happened and David's role in it. maybe she does and we don't get to see it because she has no one to talk to either. it's just not as emotionally relatable to me as watching Ripley come to terms with what she's fighting and then succeed in fighting it.

there are also just these weird gaps that make the characters seem like aliens to me. like, when David apparently recruits two characters to put Shaw into cryosleep with a monster inside her. one is the female scientist who's had a couple of lines so far but no personality; the other might be one of the unnamed grunts who get summoned out for scenes like when Fievel turns into a jumping zombie and gets set on fire. anyway for this cryosleep thing, i can't remember why David's not there but these two try to do it. Shaw overpowers them, runs away, gets the monster out of her... and none of this is ever mentioned again!! the most horrifying and bizarre thing Shaw has just been through, on top of her husband letting Theron burn him to death, and she never talks about it to anyone! does it change her relationship to David? to the scientist? they all go together to meet the sleeping Engineer but nothing in that scene acknowledges any of this... it's like it was a bad dream Shaw had.

and i don't wanna be the nitpicky "Top 400 Plot Mistakes in Prometheus!" guy, but this kinda stuff prompts double-takes from me.... as i was watching i was confused instead of absorbed.

the David character is delicious, and I remember the first time being like "well regardless of the other stuff, the David stuff was great" ... this time I was noticing the machinery a little more and it kinda bummed me out. his deal is that he seemingly knows everything, doesn't share any of it, and is Up To No Good, so at any given moment if things slow down, he can do something sinister to get the scares going again. everyone else makes decisions out of what the plot needs rather than anything that i recognized as growing out of who they were. even the black liquid seems to be getting its lines whispered in its ear right before Scott calls "action."

It has the vibe of an RPG run by a terrible GM just relentlessly telegraphing every clue while simultaneously railroading his players from scene to scene in a story he thinks is blowing his players' minds but is actually just boring them silly.

yeah i buy that. and the players figure out that the shifty suspicious NPC is a traitor immediately, but the DM won't let them do anything to act on that. the Star Wars prequels have the same thing going with the Jedi and Anakin/Palpatine, they never follow up on anything no matter how suspicious and it contributes to a vibe of "ehh, fuck these idiots, i don't care if they make it or not."

Scott's Raised By Wolves is for you

Well, it's for you if you like sporadically pretty nonsense with terrible acting, ridiculously nonsensical world-building, hammy SF cliches, appalling costume design and Scott reusing some of his earlier visual ideas to lesser effect. Like Prometheus but even less rewarding.

would not argue with any of those points EXCEPT the terrible acting one, which is accurate for most of the cast but not for the two android leads... and i MIGHT argue that all those same negatives apply to Prometheus as well, which I hated!

every description of raised by wolves on this board makes me think i would love it

Back in the DVD era, the "Alien: Quadrilogy" boxed set was basically the best thing ever short of those massive Lord of the Rings sets.

i have the blu ray equivalent and it's still truly the best

"But my programming tells me I must talk like a robot from a bad 1970s time-filling TV show."

I watched this the other day, makes a great addendum to the docs on the quadrilogy box set.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8974964/

These two massive books are very good indeed:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41KfgcWO9kL._AC_SY400_.jpg
https://fastly.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/1170xauto/public/aliens-cover.jpg

Oh yeah that Memory doc was great, super interesting

Alien is the fucking best movie

it's honestly wild in retrospect that Ridley Scott ever had a period where he made good movies

that is the god’s own truth

yeah. it happened though!

maybe he suffered a head injury at some point

You watch all the extras on Alien and Blade Runner with Scott talking about his ideas and choices and he really knew what he was on about. What the fuck happened?!?!

brainworms?

He was no longer surrounded by talented writers designers and actors who were not in awe of his presence.