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

(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.

yeah DC i don't think shaw knows what david's up to, really. she just thinks he's a bit of an idiot robot (which he is) and doesn't really understand how desperately she needs this thing out of her, so she kicks ass and takes matters into her own hands.

agreed that some of the supporting cast are like..... who? one of the co-pilots who crashes heroically with idris elba into the side of the alien ship, i swear it was the first time i'd seen him on screen for the whole movie.

i did miss glasses/hoodie hipster guy. he should have stuck around for longer. i would have liked to see a long tense 'here kitty' scene with him. part of the reason this movie doesn't end with the visceral satisfaction of the others imo is that you never get a good old fashioned human-vs-alien throwdown, which is what forms the centerpiece of the climaxes of the first two movies. noomi just sets the alien and engineer against each other. which is kind of brilliant and amazing - and you do get the odd sense of rooting for the alien here, the same way i rooted for Houston in the World Series, even though they'd squashed the Red Sox over and over - but doesn't carry the same catharsis. that said i can't quite get the image out of my head of the alien octopus thing slumped over the defeated engineer. truly evil shit

yeah images are where this is strongest imo. i even like the pale, weird, deep-sea-cave-creature designs for the monsters. Scott has done fantastic-looking bad movies before - i always think of Black Rain, which has the most mediocre generic "80s cop movie in Japan" script imaginable (i'm sure i've posted about this somewhere), but is still kinda worth watching for the nighttime scenes in Osaka. i assume he's got a really visual imagination, he gets drawn to projects where he can picture great shots on film, and he makes those shots happen. to be clear, of what i've seen of his filmography (which isn't much!), most of em he's also got a good script and great leads.

Earth you say

Alien is currently in development at @FXNetworks. The first TV series based on the classic film series is helmed by Fargo and Legion's @noahhawley. Expect a scary thrill ride set not too far in the future here on Earth. pic.twitter.com/jZe1CRFAZD

— Disney (@Disney) December 10, 2020

"Noah Hawley Alien series set on Earth" is a phrase designed to irk me

i didn't know who noah hawley was so i was like "i hope this is absolute nonsense!!!" maybe it still will be

fuksake

Kurt Sutter Alien or GTFO

The mommy issues possibilities are RIGHT THERE ffs

https://i.imgur.com/HoPXUME.jpg

i am told this is a test audience viewing the chest bursting scene in Alien

lol at the two guys

I just watched this for the first time. It was sooo fuuucking stuuupid. Bulk of this thread otm.

Maybe if Scott had bothered to actually watch AvP he could've avoided making a movie as bad as AvP.

"Noah Hawley Alien series set on Earth" is a phrase designed to irk me
― it bangs for thee (Simon H.), Friday, December 11, 2020

In hell, hopefully.

Tony Scott’s Prometheus would have ruled.

avp is a really good movie

um

The FX series, for which Hawley says he’s finished the first two scripts, will tackle class warfare and “what happens when the inequality we’re struggling with now isn’t resolved.”

“If we as a society can’t figure out how to prop each other up and spread the wealth, then what’s going to happen to us?” he teased.

also:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/ridley-scott-interview-last-duel-b1936054.html

The franchise is now being rebooted as a TV series by Noah Hawley (who successfully turned Fargo into a long-running show). Wherever they go, whatever they do, “It’ll never be as good as the first one,” Scott grins. “That’s what I’ll say.”

Is there a Raised By Wolves thread? Search is failing me.

two great flavours together at last

A new Ridley Scott produced ALIEN movie will start shooting in 🇭🇺 Budapest in the next days pic.twitter.com/5FmYEptISR

— Eduard Habsburg (@EduardHabsburg) March 4, 2023