Amph On Earth, Everyone Can Hear You Scream: The Prometheus / Alien Discussion Thread (Romulus, Earth)

One of my favourite moments in the movie, which I think nails the theme in a nicely bloody way

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is David and Oram after Oram's been facehugged and their conversation "What do you believe in?" "Faith, what do you believe in?" "Creation." *SPLAT! Chestburster rips out of Oram meets eyes with David, raises it's tiny bloody arms and the music swells that is oddly kind of uplifting.* Very twisted but that kind of sells what the flick is about.

As for the AVP of it all (which I still try to cram into canon) and origins of the Xenomorph species

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It's shown in AVP that the Predators clearly have access to the Xenomorphs, however it's set about a 100 years before Prometheus and Covenant, but they had it before even going back 1000s of years. So I would wager that while David did "discover" how to turn the black goo into the classic Xenomorph (an evolution from the Neomorphs we see and the Deacon at the end of Prometheus) he wasn't the first person to figure that out. Somehow the Predators have access to the black goo / Engineers and they also made Xenomorphs. Also remember in Prometheus when Holloway finds the vial behind the Big Giant Head and it has it's own container and a Xenomoprh mural.



Which I always read as "in case of mass genocide, break vial." So basically while I buy that David "created" the Xenomorphs (as a long winded, twisted way to get back at Weyland for creating him) he wasn't the 1st one. Hell, David was on the Engineer homeworld and had been studying for years, he probably found the "how to make Xenomorphs" textbook. And tested it on poor Shaw

 

One of my favorite moments of the film is when this line is uttered:

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One wrong note eventually ruins the entire symphony.

 

I just assumed based on the line by the captain in Prometheus that the whole planet in Prometheus was meant for a munitions factory for weapons of mass destruction I never thought David created them it was made clear in Prometheus.

 

How did you interpret that as me not knowing that? I didn't say he was attached to this film "in name only."
As much as I try to be fascinated at how the series has taken an existential route with the engineers and David, I can't overlook things like

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the Covenant crew deciding to skip their researched planet for this one, and deciding it was safe just because the composition of the air was breathable.

 

Well as for them landing on the planet

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they had multiple reasons and Oram was against it but sort of got pressured into it by the crew who were freaked out what happened while they were in cryo. And also they had Shaw's message that they should have investigated anyway. To be fair, it was only a landing party as a recon mission and they didn't wake the whole damn ship up / land the Covenant and immediately set up shop. I'm not saying this crew is particularly bright but nobody in Alien movies are particularly bright anyway, aside from Ripley.

 

guess I just misunderstood what you said sorry
Sorry to hear you didn't like Alien Covenant.

 

I thought Covenant was the better Passengers movie. Passengers could have benefited from a xenomorph or two.

 

well - the alien attacks were very well done , scary and exciting etc.
and it was a well made movie and all that , but really - what was the point ? I mean I assumed that if Ridley, at his age now , decides to make an Alien movie it would have some important narrative to add to the saga .

those bits with David and Walter talking chicken and the egg seemed like they meant something but I can't say I got much from them .

also - there were some beyond-dumb cliche bits in this movie , more than once a character announces that they're going to wander off on their own for a bit --- !! I mean jeezus , it was like a horror movie parody moment .

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So this may be a dopey theory but rewatching Alien (1979), I had a thought - what if Dallas was "in on it?" Like, he's only following orders and knew why they were there (also why he's kind of irritated by the whole thing). The reason I wonder that is after Dallas bites it, Ripley has access to Mother and she is able to override the "For science officer eyes only" and finds out the mission priorities to retrieve the organism and all other considerations are secondary. So, since Dallas was the first guy with access to Mother, in theory he could have done the same thing. Yes, later on Dallas personally tries to kill the Alien but, at that point, even he's thinking it's gonna kill them all.

 

An interesting thought. I think he just didn't press Mother the way Ripley did and it was probably due to his passive personality and desire not to rock the boat with Weyland-Yutani -- sometimes people just choose not see evidence that they don't want to see, you know?

 

Yep. Ripley only did that because some things weren't adding up, which set off her BS detector. Ash's lies weren't making sense and that's why she decided to investigate.

 

That's a good point that Ripley didn't like what Ash was saying and she's more inclined to push Mother for questions. Dallas does literally say at one point "I just want to get out of here!" and that Ash was a new arrival on the ship. Making it a whole lot of Not His Problem. I do think it's kind of nicely ambiguous when Dallas is asking Mother "What are my chances?" and Mother doesn't offer up any help. Like he knows something and is trying to get more out of Mother. If anything, Dallas is probably guilty of being an unquestioning company man. Probably one of the few proactive things he does is try to bring Kane back in the ship and Ripley wasn't going to let him in anyway (Ash took care of that).

 

Dallas did not suspect Ash of anything. Hence he did not need to seek an override. It's an ok fan theory though.

 

I'll take okay! Poor Dallas, though, he's definitely guy out of his league just trying to do his job and make big decisions at the same time.

I do like the through-thread in almost all of the Alien movies that the people are just pieces by The Company (Ripley's speech in Alien 3 is pretty on-point about that). That's even in Prometheus with Weyland masterminding the trip so he can talk to space aliens. I don't think Alien: Covenant really has any sort of people being pushed around by an uncaring corporations, they're just particularly unlucky by stumbling onto a murderous alien infection and a psychopathic robot. Well, maybe what happens to the crew / Shaw can be seen as being "used" by the system, quite literally. And they're all sort of hopelessly packed into their cryo containers for easy experimentation as the credits roll. And that particular psychopathic robot was made by the corporation so it still kinda works.

 

I can't see Fox saying to Scott "No, we don't want your Alien movie and another installment in one of our sci-fi franchises, thank you very much Sir Ridley Scott". The wheels are moving along (it's been mentioned the script is being written) and if this does about equal to Prometheus overseas, I can see it happening. The four, five or seven movies Scott keeps mentioning, I never quite pictured that happen. But Scott already has his next movie lined up and it ain't an Alien flick, but maybe it'll just be 1 movie in between Alien films as opposed to the longer gap between Prometheus to Covenant.

I would say don't expect to see the Covenant crew again but maybe as mutated abominations or alien incubators or something.

Oddly, I still hope we get more flashbacks of David and Shaw. Scott did say at one point he can think of a movie about Shaw and David in between Prometheus and Covenant. But maybe some critical piece-filling flashbackery in the next one. I have a personal pet theory the reason the Engineer homeworld is in such good human-life sustaining piece is maybe David teraformed it to meet Shaw's biological specifications. (after he wiped out the "locals", as it were). Maybe they actually had a grand old time for awhile until something else happened?

In other news, there's a Empire podcast spoiler special with an interview with Ridley Scott for Alien: Covenant. His responses are somewhat esoteric but it was revealed that the A-B-C-D android naming convention was broken for this one because the Fassbender droids are named after Alien screenwriters / producers David Giler and Walter Hill. (headcanon / suggestion in the podcast, Walter is his middle name. Maybe it test marked better. How about Eugene Walter?)

 

I have this odd feeling that David's story wrapping up isn't going to be David = LV-426 Space jockey. But David = Ash. Would explain why Ash was suddenly "glitchy" if David literally is just uploaded into an Ash-body (and so enamored of the Alien). Also David and Ash are the only ones in this time with a distinct very human personality, Walter and Bishop are pretty "android". But maybe that's cuz Ash is David! Ahhh!!

(There's also Call but she's hundreds of years into the future. Or whoever that Bishop guy is in Alien 3, I still say he's a droid, dammit, even though you can see blood on him near the end.)

 

So there was about a 70% percent box office drop from Week 1 to Week 2. Some feel like this jeopardizes the follow up film to Covenant. I have mixed feelings about Covenant, but when I left the theater after watching it, I wasn't hyped for a follow up film.

I feel like the Alien franchise has become like the Terminator franchise where the first two films were great, but the rest are just subpar films.

 

I loved Alien: Covenant. It actually reminded me of The Lost World: Jurassic Park a few times while I was watching it (particularly the use of those giant, Redwood-like trees), and even my Dad thought the Neomorphs acted like Velociraptors. Alien: Covenant does a lot of call backs to both Prometheus and the original Alien movie. It adds nicely to the mythos, but doesn't bog itself down with a lot of blatant references like I feel it could have. I saw a lot of Spielbergian directorial style in Prometheus, and I see a lot of The Lost World in Alien: Covenant. It's a natural continuation sequel like The Lost World is, not just a sequel to Prometheus, but a sequel to the franchise in general. I think that Covenant, like Prometheus, will find its appreciation in the years to come. It's a thinking movie, like Prometheus was. It leaves you with thoughts to ponder. It definitely terrified me a couple times. And it's good horror, too. It's bloody, like Michael Myers in space, but it doesn't use cheap jump scares. The shower scene in particular came back into my mind when I took a shower tonight before dinner. The movie had the perfect kind of squick that Giger would have LOVED. He always went for that kind of "let's freak out the men in the audience" kind of sexual horror, and I liked the usage of some more of his designs in the Engineer city. Oh, and that they used some of Giger's art as David's drawings. A nice tribute to Giger, I feel.

 

Ya know, I think I would have enjoyed the film more if it heavily featured the Engineer home world, especially considering how Prometheus opened that door and how the film ended. It certainly would have expanded the characters and world building of the franchise.