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

The audio drama (and Dark Horse comic, as well) are primarily based on William Gibson's second draft.

 

@The2ndQuest - thanks yeah, I've got that audioplay narrated by Lance. It's pretty good.

 

I work at a movie theater on the weekends, the posters get thrown out if no one wants them. I managed to get the Bus Stop poster for Covenant (the one that looks like a medevil hell-scape, vinyl, apx 6ft by 4ft, big enough to go inside a bus stop plexy thing.) It's the prize of my collection.

Also I'm trying to think of the Alien franchise in a One Canon(tm) kind of way, it would be cool if Origae-6 became old continuity's "Hiveworld".

 

The Predator in Requiem is pretty great and definitely the hero of the movie. One of my favourite things that happens in the movie is there's this whole very terrible subplot devoted to some high school student or something that eats up a remarkable amount of screentime and the Predator literally just kills her as an afterthought with the flying blade thingie when trying to take out the PredAlien. Entirely collateral damage and he totally didn't care.

I know the Prometheus and Covenant basically stomped the AvP movies out of existence (entirely up to Ridley Scott too). I think Lindeolf said once he mentioned a similarity to Prometheus and AvP to Scott and Scott just gave him a weird look.

Q: You said nothing is an accidental reference, so is there a possible intentional Alien Vs. Predator reference in that the Weylands are always seeking eternal life?

Lindelof: You mean in terms of Charles Bishop Weyland? Look, as to what’s canon and what’s not canon, for me as a screenwriter it’s transcended by Ridley as a director. Here’s the thing. Ridley invented this. He created this Alien universe. He birthed it out of his own heart and soul. So he gets to do whatever it is he wants to do and he wanted to use Weyland as a conduit in the story, and was not interested at all when I said to him, “You know, Weyland was a character in one of the Alien Vs. Predator movies,” he just sort of looked at me like I had just slapped him in the face. That was the beginning, middle and end of all Alien Vs. Predator references in our story process.

Personally speaking, I think one can head canon/wiggle room/No Prize AvP into the series. Charles Bishop Weyland could be a relative of Peter Weyland, maybe great Uncle or something. Peter inherited his empire after he went "missing". The aliens came from the black goo. Very ancient. Very probable that the Predators simply had access to a stash of it, especially considering Scott's take on the alien as bioweapon, and used them on their proving hunts on Earth. Now Covenant David Made the Alien even messes it up further but still wiggle room. Predators could simply have been able to engineer the Xenomorph before as David did. Maybe the 2000 Aliens were a bit different under the hood form the David-breed. Anyway, there's one moment in Promethesus when Halloway is in the big giant head room "This is just another tomb" and he finds a different vial at the back on a shelf (not on the ground as the other ones) and it has a green tint to it and above it is a Xenomporph mural.



So yah I kinda buy that they've been around via the goo for years before. Predators managed to make their own batch of hell even found one. David basically made it a "perfect organism". Or kinda like how the aliens in Resurrection are just cloned slightly different versions. So the AvP ones, kinda different. Deacon at the end of Prometheus, kinda different. That mural? Kinda different. David made the best one which is what we see in Alien and Aliens. heck there's even visual differences between the creature in Alien and Aliens. Maybe they look like that after awhile in Aliens? And also the Alien 3 dog alien, taking on aspects of the hosts and stuff.

Then there's the whole "crew being turned into eggs" in Alien which has been in and out of the movie in different cuts. Which could contradict the notion of the Alien Queen, but also totally doesn't. (chicken or egg, has to start somewhere) Or the PredAlien in AvPR which adds another aspect to the lifestyle. The dang thing changes. We see it in Promethesus. Can't nail a good Xenomorph down. David got the right one.

Anyway, the viral videos for Prometheus and Covenant are pretty essential viewing (I think the opening scene of Covenant was supposed to be a viral video by Luke Scott but Ridley liked it so much he made it the opening scene. Which is an excellent idea cuz it's a fantastic opening). Hopefully Star has them under the "extras" tab or I'll have to bust out my blu rays/youtube them in.

 

Agreed. That mural, in my mind, shows that the xenos have been around as of 100AD or so at least give or take. Possible the Engenieers used that strain of the black oil on other planets before deciding to release it on Earth.

 

Though the mural likely indicated the capital-A Alien at some point during Prometheus' development, before Ridley decided to make David the creator in Covenant, I think it makes much more sense now to chalk the mural creature up to being some other byproduct of the Pathogen - something along the lines of the Deacon or the Neomorph, for example - rather than being a depiction of David's traditional Alien itself. As it stands, each 'offshoot' creature that we see in Prometheus has some element of the Alien, but not the whole package. The Hammerpede has the acid blood, the Trilobite has the same birth process and functions vaguely like a Facehugger, the Deacon is a form of Chestburster and has some traits of the Alien's body structure, etc. The way I see it, each of those traits are sort of 'baked into' the Pathogen and that is what the mural on LV-223 is honoring, and David, through his various experiments on Planet 4 in Covenant, extrapolated those functions, honed them into something much less random, and, honoring his own twisted and perverted view of the creation of life, shaped those traits into the strict lifecycle that leads to the capital-A Alien that we know and love. And we know that David's experimentation isn't quite done yet, as there is one piece still missing from the Aliens in Covenant - it isn't yet biomechanical. If you compare the Alien design in Covenant to that in the original Alien, you will notice that it is a purely biological design without any of the mechanical components grafted into its body yet. This was a conscious design effort on the part of everyone involved in Covenant. The implication there is that David still has a bit of work to go (and he has PLENTY of raw material to work with, in the form of all of those people in cryo on the Covenant). If Covenant ever gets a sequel, I expect to see these last steps in the development of the Alien factor into David's own downfall, with the mechanical components likely coming from his own body, and his own hubris causing his inevitable end in the fashion of many a classic mad scientist from Gothic fiction.

Ridley himself directed that opening Covenant scene with Weyland and David. I think what you might be mixing that up with is the viral short The Crossing, which Ridley directed to be part of the film, but then was removed and released as a viral companion to the movie along with Luke Scott's shorts.

 

The only mystery, in my mind, is if David made the Alien then how did an old abandoned Engenier ship have an entire cargo hold filled with eggs instead of Vases?

What if in the next movie is the ultimate shock, that dead space-jockey in the original film is actually David who got facehugged thus giving the Alien the biomechonoid look?

 

Retcon, most likely. The Derelict ship in Alien was absolutely intended to be ancient at the time of the original film's release, but Covenant retconned it into being significantly more recent, in order to make sense of the David as creator storyline. Unless, of course, another film down the line re-retcons Covenant and establishes that David isn't actually the creator, and that the LV-426 Derelict is indeed ancient as was originally intended.

Honestly, I would be shocked if something along those lines wasn't Ridley's intention moving forward. He almost seems to be plowing full steam ahead on the path towards that. And honestly, if he's going to do it, I say do it. It would upset a LOT of people, but for me, I just want to see Ridley see his vision through to its natural conclusion, however wild and outright bonkers that conclusion might be. The Alien franchise is chock full of wildly different interpretations of events and retcons anyways (just look at Alien 3's magically appearing Egg on the Sulaco!), since each director that comes in seems to have his own unique ideas about what the series is and how to tackle that, so even if he does that and people don't like it, some other filmmaker can just explore a totally different take on events (with an ancient Space Jockey, Derelict, and Eggs) down the line; I'm not really a stickler for continuity in any way with the Alien movies. I just want to see interesting filmmakers get to use these films to explore their own ideas with their own creative vision relatively unhindered.

 

yah it's probable the mural is a version that the pathogen eventually turns into, all of the Prometheus creatures as mentioned have elements of the classic Xenomorph. It's sort of what it's ultimately meant to be which is what David came to. But I don't think what happens in Covenant precludes the notion that the pathogen to Xeno chain existed in some form before David perfected it.

As for the LV-426 ship being ancient and having Xeno eggs, Covenant would indicate it's not that old since David only created the creature 10 years before. But yah depending on what the pathogen created and what and who it could still be that it was there before David made it. It all sort of ends up at the Xenomorph anyway eventually. Scott did say in 2020 that another Alien movie was in development so hopefully the TV show and Ridley's next movie could happen. It seems like if Ridley Scott wants to make an Alien movie, they'll let him make an Alien movie. Although considering how Covenant and Raised by Wolves have gone, he seems to be very interested in the synethic aspect of it a bit more than the creature.

Speaking of Luke Scott and synthetics, I caught the end of Morgan yesterday which I hadn't seen since theatres and it's still pretty great. I mean, look at this cast! Holy heck!

 

A synopsis has been released for the upcoming novelization of William Gibson's Alien 3 script, confirming that the book is indeed based on his first draft (whereas the comic and audio drama adaptations from a couple years ago were based on his second draft):

https://bnccatalist.ca/ViewTitle.aspx?id=29966759

Overall, despite my love of Vincent Ward's wooden planet and monk concept, I think the version of Alien 3 that we actually got is the best of the lot, so I'm pretty content with where things ultimately went. I will, however, be grabbing this novelization of Gibson's first draft for the historical value of it all, since I find Alien 3's whole history and its vast array of concepts to be about as fascinating as the film itself.

On the topic of books, I don't really read very many 'expanded universe' Alien stories (I do, however, have a rather large collection of behind the scenes books for the various films in this franchise), but there are a couple novels that I've quite liked. Alex White's Alien: The Cold Forge is actually a pretty fantastic sci-fi novel through and through, and is without a doubt in my mind the best non-film story bearing the Alien title, and White actually has a second Alien novel, Into Charybdis, coming out later this month. Scott Sigler's Aliens: Phalanx is also pretty fun in the way it presents a world that is very detached from all of the technology, space travel, politics, corporations, etc. that traditionally dominate the Alien universe.

 

I think Gibson's 1st draft had the xeno infection be airborne like a virus (way freaky apt now) and then it happened in Alien: Covenant with the people ingesting airborne spores so when that happened I immediately thought of the unmade Alien 3.

 

Haven't seen Alien 3 in awhile, but I remember the variety of British accents being almost as spectacular as the visual effects.

 

Wellll the answer is that David didn’t make them.

There’s a scene in the Alien: Covenant extras of David broadcasting his intentions to W-Y and basically laying everything out; he makes it pretty clear that the black goo in Prometheus is sort of *derived* from the Xenomorph, which the Engineers had a sort of love-hate relationship with. It’s on the BR and digital editions as ‘Alien: Advent’.

 

That's what @bstnsx704, @BigAl6ft6 and i have been kicking around. I think everything makes more sense with the dialouge in the Covenant novel where David says upfront the Alien is the "pinnacle of the Engeniers' biotech" and he is trying to make his own version. I imagine they used the Pathogen before and Lv-223 was both lab and storage depot.

As I said before I try for a One Cannon in my head. Everything from Earth Angel when Dr Dainiel Ripley killed an alien on Earth in the 50's to Original Sin the Ressurection sequel novel that tried to explain how The Company knew enough to send the Nostromo out near LV-426 to pick up the distress call a few years before Prometheus came out. Strangely I'm not as much of a stickler for strict continuity with Alien than Star Wars. Maybe it' because the comics and books never had a really tight continuity to begin with.

 

Well, actually, I personally lean more towards kicking that passage from the novelization to the curb (since it doesn't stem from any iteration of the script, and was just an example of ADF rebelling against material he didn't particularly care for) and aligning myself more with Ridley's own interpretation of events (which is what David states in the film itself), with the "main" iteration of the Alien not existing until David created it.

That being said, I also wouldn't be shocked for a future film (or, potentially show, since we know that Alien's next foray into the spotlight is in a Noah Hawley run series... I really do hope we get a third Ridley Scott prequel film as well, though) to retcon that and re-recontextualize the Alien itself as something ancient (rather than just the Pathogen being ancient).

I am very much like you, @Darth_Foo, in that I'm not really all that hung up on canon with Alien. So much of the appeal of the series for me stems from the way that each filmmaker injects their own ideas and styles into the material, and if those particular takes conflict, then so be it.

 

Obligatory reminder on the many insanities of Prometheus...

 

Prometheus does have what may just be the sexiest space suits in all of cinema, though... even if they (and so much else from the film, to boot) are essentially pulled from Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires.

 

I've tried to go back and revisit Alien 3. Nope, still hate it.

 

I think the only time I saw that movie in its entirety was the first time it was shown on HBO.

 

Alien and Aliens are in my top 10 ever.

 

I think Prometheus is my favorite of the franchise at this point. David is the best android character imo, and the abortion scene the grossest and most nerve-wracking. Aliens has better comedy and meme-worthy material, and Alien is more atmospheric, but as a total package I like Prometheus best. It also has the most thematic complexity, even if it's on the nose. But I like all of them.

 

Bill Paxton is like a walking quotable meme in Aliens.

 

yeah i'm not a big Alien fan and Prometheus actually fascinated me

 

Prometheus was the most mean-spirited, terribly-plotted one of the bunch -- the Creators wanted to wipe out the human race because Jesus was a Creator and we killed him. OK boomer...