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

Agreed, all the android stuff with David in Protheus-Covenant are the best parts of those movies and I'm invested in that story continuing. Raised By Wolves did some interesting things with that same thematic tool set.

 

Prometheus and Covenant are very rewatchable movies for me... for different reasons. Prometheus was not only the first film from the Alien franchise that I saw in theaters, but also the first film from the series that I had ever seen. I thought it was cool and frightening when it tried to be. I re-watched it last year and while there are some parts I wasn't as impressed with the second-go-around, I rank it higher than Covenant.

Covenant is pretty, dice-y CGI on the baby Neomorphs aside, but I found myself not caring about any of the characters on my first watch; then laughing and eye-rolling at the scenarios and decisions during the second watch. Even with the Medbay scene, one of the better sequences, I was cursing aloud at the decisions they were making. Or, that other scene when the one dude stuck his head to look at the thing because a being he just met and already mistrusted told him to...yikes? For me, Covenant is a very bloody comedy with an excellent [music] score. (It's not 'ha-ha-ha' funny, but more of a chuckle, I guess)

 

the "lets take our helmet off and pet the cute little alien" scene was like something out of Spaceballs. I actually liked Prometheus better than AC.

 

I own the Blu Ray of Prometheus; and that's saying something because I'm extremely picky when it comes purchasing new movies of any kind for my home library. I watched AC with reservations, however; mainly because I knew Noomi Rapace's character was out of the picture and learned later they killed her off-screen. IMO she could've been the next Ripley for the franchise. AC didn't do it for me at all really; of course the only scenes that did involved Elizabeth Shaw.

Spoiler: Masterful

I know AC left with a cliffhanger; though it doesn't seem like they're bothering to pick up from it.

 

I just wish Ridley would get on with it and make it clear what his point was , like he's not getting any younger.

 

Yah agreed he has something he wants to tell with Prometheus and Covenant storylines (and has often varied on the amount of other movies he says it'll take) and I'm sure the idea has morphed from Prometheus to Covenant (Damon Lindelof said whatever Covenant did it wasn't what he was thinking). Whatever the big story is maybe he can finally finish it with the TV series. But the indication that it's close future and Earth bound seems to contradict that.

Anyway I've always figured Ridley is leaving the Alien franchise toes up on the set of Alien 9 mid hollering "No! That needs more goo there! Dahhh!" Then they finish the movie anyway since he's storyboards the entire thing.

But I also agree if they want to toss all that out for a new Alien TV series then I'm cool with it if Ridley Scott is. Moar Alien anything is the priority. But I'm sure they'll be androids in it too.

 

So with Alien and Predator films being added to Disney plus Star, going to do a series rewatch. Probably space it out over a few weeks. Going to do a bit differently with starting with my favourite, Aliens.

So thinking going at it - Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, Predator, Predator 2, Alien Vs Predator, AvP Requiem, Predators, The Predator, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Alien.

Basically bookend with the two classics, meet in the middle. Timeline order you'd start with Predator and end with Alien Resurrection (Not sure if Predators in the timeline takes place after The Predator, kinda wiggle room if wanted). Release order, start with Alien and end with The Predator. Kinda like starting and ending with Ripley greatest ones.

 

Sounds like a miserable time Al.

 

Not for me! Only one that is a bit dicey is AvP Requiem but still Pregnant Bellyburster Aliens!

 

I'll go with that too.
All the movies, except for Requiem, have plenty of good stuff in them.

Brad Dourif getting all tonguey with a captive alien... Some fine twisted things in Resurrection.

They'll definitely get a Star binge

 

Oh cool, didn't know we had a thread for these!

Prometheus is an absolutely fascinating mess. The script is godawful and needed at least another couple drafts, and the editing is almost headache inducing, but I am very intrigued by a great many of the ideas that it presents and I find that it is gorgeous to look at.

And Alien: Covenant? I just flat out love that one. It takes what works in Prometheus, discards what didn't, and expands on it exponentially. It's Hammer horror is space, gothic and macabre, and the presentation of David is as chilling as it gets. Does him using the Engineers' pathogen to 'create' the original Alien step all over the original film thematically? In a sense, yeah, it does. I kind of don't care though, because I find the idea of the awful, repressed android that hates his creators (and his creators' creators) molding this entity as a sort of affront to them (and an extension of his, shall we say, lack of reproductive abilities... in a very H.R. Giger-inspired fashion, if you catch my drift) to be just as interesting, though different, a take on the original material. Covenant is the most mean-spirited one of these has been since Fincher's Alien 3, and the most grotesquely twisted since Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection.

On top of all of this, with my thoughts on the prequel films here, I'll also just add that the original Alien is my favorite film of all time. And I find the whole series of films, all six of them (the AVP films simply do not count ) to be fascinating in the way this is really as close as you get to a big, Hollywood blockbuster 'auteur' driven franchise, where every single filmmaker, from Ridley Scott to James Cameron to David Fincher to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, is able to put wildly different stamps on each individual installment. I hope that the Noah Hawley television series in the works is able to follow suit, but mostly, I just want to see Ridley Scott get one more stab at doing a third prequel to follow up on the threads left dangling in Covenant before we move onto the next filmmaker's own unique take on the material.

EDIT: I see some Raised By Wolves talk going on in this thread as well, so I'm just going to add that I'm very into what that show is doing so far, and I can't wait to see where Aaron Guzikowski takes things in the second season. It is looking like Ridley Scott won't be able to direct any episodes in the second season, since his schedule with his upcoming feature films is so tight, but his fingerprints are already all over the look and feel of the show, and Guzikowski and his team have been steering the ship in some incredibly interesting directions.

 

Hate to say it on a star wars forum but Alien is my favorite franchise, even AvP 1 would be great if it was longer and rated R. (See my love of the alien made like a Paul W.S. Anderson film ) Commercialism totally worked on my cuz saw the toy commercials back in 92' and have been hooked since.

If I could edit Alien and Aliens into a 4hr 20some min. film Id call that my favorite of all time cuz I can't pick between the two.

That said was very disapointed Covenant killed Dr Shaw in between movies. For any readers the comics series Fire And Stone and Life And Death do a better job of explaining the black mutating oil than Proethues did.

Eidt: <palpatine's voice> ironic, I came here this morning to post about Alien comics and found the movie thread itself.

 

I absolutely loved the promotional "David 8" teaser for Prometheus. Michael Fassbender is great in this movie. I love his line when the scientist says to him as they exit Prometheus on landing "You, boy. Come with me" and he brushes back his hair and just says "I'd be delighted" - Awesome.



On a wider note, I am a massive Alien franchise fan. I love the whole mythos. I go against the grain and even think that Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection are great. Alien 3 (Director's Cut) is really underrated, and Alien Resurrection has probably the coolest crew this side of Firefly.

 

Aye, I like Alien 3 just as much as Aliens, honestly (and put both of those just under Alien). Alien 3 has problems, for sure, but given what an absolute mess that production was, how could it not? If anyone hasn't, I highly recommend Charles de Lauzirika's documentary Wreckage and Rage: The Making of Alien 3. It can be found in the 'Alien: Anthology' Blu-ray box set.

Alien: Resurrection is a strange little movie that I can't help but enjoy. Resurrection owns its off-the-wall tone through and through (even if its tone isn't quite consistent with the preceding films), Sigourney also gives one hell of a performance, and I find the movie to be grotesque in a rather enjoyable way. Resurrection is pure pulp - it's like a silly 90s Dark Horse Aliens comic with a sick sense of humor come to life; I see it as being pretty removed from the other films in both tone and literal placement in the timeline, but it also doubles down on some weird concepts that I find to be right at home in this universe. Where else would I turn if I wanted to watch some clone derived of Alien and human DNA caress its genetic abomination of a 'grandson?'

Also, I do still find it amusing the way that Ridley's two prequel films (quite accidentally, mind you) helped Resurrection's weird cloning shenanigans and DNA melding make more sense than ever before, given what we now know about the Pathogen, the way it seems to interact with human hosts, and the way it was used by David as the core building block with which to create the Alien itself.

If I were to rank all of the films, I would probably do so as follows:

Alien
Aliens/Alien 3
Alien: Covenant
Alien: Resurrection
Prometheus

 

Another good read is the unmade William Gibson Alien 3 script that floats around online. There was also an early concept where the story was going to use monks on a wooden planetoid, the religious element was sort of kept.

Resurrection's grotesque style is down the madness of French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose movies Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children are surreal brilliance. I know that Joss Whedon had input to the script and as said, Elgyn, Hillard, Christie, Vreiss, Johner and Call, the crew of The Betty are just awesome. They are like a proto-Firefly crew, but way cooler. I have this kind of pained frustration that the actors and crew characters never got their own movie or a TV series, because they would be epic, like a low-down, dirty version of Blake's 7

 

There's actually a novelization of Gibson's first draft (I think his second is the more widely known version) coming later this year, so I'm pretty excited to get my hands on that.

Of the abandoned versions of Alien 3 that never saw the light of day, though, Vincent Ward's wooden planet one is always the one that interested me the most. I do like the way the monks kind of evolved into Fiorina-161's prisoners, like you said. The wooden planet is such an interesting visual concept that I would love to see brought to the screen, be it a future Alien film or in something totally unrelated.

 

Apologies for the double (and necro, in this case) post, but I was going back reading through old posts in this thread and just stumbled upon this post and I just wanted to clarify something.

David finding the eggs, rather than creating them, and following Engineer blueprints rather and his own recipe, was never in any draft of the script. That was purely an invention of Alan Dean Foster, when writing the novelization, because he didn't like the film's interpretation of David creating the Alien. Ridley's intention from the very beginning of Covenant's development was always for David to be the creator.

For me personally, speaking as someone that actually really likes Covenant's take on things (in the film, not the novelization), I'm of the mentality that Covenant kind of allows us to have our cake and eat it too - David creating the capital-A Alien thematically works within the framework of what that film presents, and has interesting ripple effects into the other movies as well (from the very beginning H.R. Giger's terrifying creature has always been, for all intents and purposes, walking sex, and the idea that, in-universe, this creature was crafted by the repressed android with a metaphorical hardon for defiling the very method of creating life that his creators, who he detests, uniquely possess while he does not just makes a ton of sense to me) while also allowing the core element of the Alien's construction, the ever-mutating Pathogen, to be totally ancient and unknowable in origin while allowing the extent of its application, with the potential for a great many other eldritch horrors that aren't David's Alien, to come of it.

 

@Lobot's Wig that promotional short was very good, and made me to think that David was "born" on Prometheus in transit. When he reads the crew's dreams, those are the first people he's ever met. The way the film explores the relationship between created beings and creators is fascinating, and the most philosophical of the series imo.

True story about the first time I saw Prometheus in theater, someone in the audience started screaming "We need help!" during the abortion scene, I think because somebody was having a panic attack or something.

 

Prometheus was the last and I'm pretty sure only Alien movie that I saw in the theaters. The Sigourney Weaver ones either came out while I was still an infant or I had just lost interest in with the later sequels. And it's the only one I currently own on Blu-ray.

 

Speaking of the promotional shorts, this one for Covenant is interesting in that is was actually directed by Ridley (as opposed to his son Luke, who did all the others for Prometheus and Covenant) and was actually originally intended to be a scene in Covenant before getting removed (which in my opinion was for the best, though it is very intetesting to see in isolation).

 

The Alien RPG incorporates a lot of elements from script drafts, including the wooden planet.

 

I have an online RPG group I've been playing with and we've gone through Hope's Last Day and Chariot of the Gods so far; really great stuff, and the attention to detail is inane. I especially loved Chariot. We're going to be starting up Destroyer of Worlds pretty soon.