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

but thats esentially what we got lickable characters good actors good script. i liked the Captain he even sang A crosby Stills And Nash song Love The One Your With that was awesome! and I liked Dr. Shaw! the things i mentiones were homages not bad story telling. the Jurassic Park and JW movies had the same thing with more comedy. Jurassic series and Jaws are esentially horror films with the killer being the Animal!

then you dont have movies people in the films have to make bad choices or things dont get set in motion. look at all the Jurassic Park and JW movies

 

Hang on just got home from work, have to put my super-nerd glasses on . I know way too much about this. There's only a few of the books I don't have but I'll try to be brief

This trilogy is the first EU and like all published until '05 is based on Dark Horse comics (generally better than the comic imo because you get backstory and inner thoughts). However they came out just as Alien3 hit so Hicks and Newt are changed to Wilks and Billie while Ripley is a robot duplicate programmd to think she is the real Ripley. Book 3 has one of the best xenos variant a Queen Mother. A bigger badder queen with guards almost twice as big as normal xenos.

After '05 reboot I really recommend Steel Egg ('07). It tried to be human's first encounter with the xenos and imo doesn't contradict Prometheus. It's like 30 some years before and technology like hypersleep is experimental. A race implied to be Space Jockeys wiped out an alien species with Xeno eggs.

River of Pain is also good. Tells whole history of the Hadley's Hope colony and dovetails into Aliens. Some of it is based on a comic Newt's Tale and other parts link up with Fire And Stone comic.

After that I suggest just reading the publisher's blurbs and decide which sound interesting. Most of then are total stand-alones and don't reference each other. The Dark Horse adaptations are in Omnibus form, fairly easy to find.

Covenant: Origins was good enough but short and there are no xenos (not necessarily a bad thing). A cult whose leader dreams of monsters in space are trying to sabatoage Covenant from launching. Made me like the people in the movie more not gonna lie but the plot seemed like half an idea.

Quick list-
Earth Hive trilogy
Rouge
Labyrinth
Beserker
Original Sin
Steel Egg
River of Pain
Cold Forge
Isolation

Edit- apparently my definition of a short list is 11 books...

 

I've only read the novelizations of the movies by Alan Dean Foster and some of the graphic novels.

 

What's Farfied supposed to represent on the Alien life cycle? The bipedal unfolding monster bit I guess. Dunno what Halloway would have been, he just looks like the infection is spreading.

 

I just chapter-skip the Hadley's Hope material, because the daughter-subplot and drone-gun sentry scenes are just too good to go without.

 

I am currently 200 pages into Alien: Into Charybdis and yeah, I'm sold. This is completely living up to the high standard of Alex White's previous Alien novel, The Cold Forge. Honestly, outside of the films, I don't think that there's anyone that's writing in this universe that really gets it the way Alex White does. There are some genuinely interesting science-fiction concepts at play in these books, lots and lots of corporate and international intrigue, and some really neat twists on the Alien itself, which come thanks in part to some revelations that actually link pretty directly to ideas that Ridley Scott introduced in his prequel films.

If you like the films, even if you don't care for expanded universe stuff, I really do recommend giving these two books a go.

 

Yeah, definitely do TCF first. Though Into Charybdis isn't really a sequel, there are things about it that work better if you know TCF going in.

 

I’ll have to check those two out.

 

One thing that I don't particularly like with Prometheus especially, is the gung-ho attitude of Holloway especially when they land on the planet. I would have preferred to see a more cautious, "NASA" type approach to their arrival, instead of suiting up and racing off out there, bumped helmets and high fives all round. The theme continues when they all take their helmets off. It is in stark contrast to the more restrained and suspenseful scenes that Scott uses in Alien when Lambert, Dallas and Kane leave the Nostromo.

 

This.

 

In the Fire And Stone comic a dude gets splashed with the accelerant and mutated like Feifeild but survives a while




Edit: Couldn't get my touchscreen to get after 2nd pic so doing this here, this is darkhorse.com preview of the issue to see whole sequence of human/xeno attacking remaining humans. The cover is one of my favorites of any comic. Wish could get it as a poster.

A different dude gets pounced on by a xeno and they both fall into some accelerant and it fuses to him. So creepy

 

But that’s the point, you saw the approach you prefer in Alien, why want that in every film? In Covenant the crew arn’t as gung ho but equally walk into danger.

Scott shows us different types of people leaping into the beyond. I personally found Holloway’s attitude cringeworthy and yet great storytelling. His zeal opens the whole crew to death.

 

I just think that it would have made for a more suspenseful arrival. The crew in Covenant seemed to be a bit more cautious as one would expect arriving at a new, unexplored world.

 

I think its Holloway, he is made leader of expedition with Shaw by Weyland, and Holloway has major hubris. Both Shaw and Holloway niavely think the Engineers, “want us to come find them.” I think how Prometheus plays out is realistic, that when you have gung ho leaders, you end up in peril. The same happens with the religious captain in Covenant who insists they check out the distress signal instead of protecting the colonists.

Scott makes a clear case for not letting religious zealots run ships in both films.

 

That makes sense. It always bugged me. Makes Holloway look like an idiot (which he is, to be fair)

 

The Cold Forge. While Into Charybids isn't *technically* a sequel, it is enhanced by prior knowledge of TCF, so if you do give them a go at any point I definitely recommend starting with The Cold Forge.

 

Gotta say, I'm not really thrilled about the look of Aliens: Fireteam so far. For a game that's been in development for at least three years (we first learned of it back in January of 2018, though we had no idea what it was titled until today) the announcement hit with kind of a whimper. I think the bad taste of Aliens: Colonial Marines is still very prominent in my mouth, and this seems to be tapping into a lot of those same wells (under the guise of being a Left 4 Dead Campaign/Destiny Strike-style experience, which seems to be way off base for the tone of what an Alien game should be). Ultimately, though, all of this really depends on the execution; I think they're going to be showing off some Fireteam gameplay on Thursday, so that's when we'll really get a proper idea of how this looks. I want to love this thing, but I feel like I need a bit more convincing than what we saw today.

I feel like most expanded universe stuff, be it books, comics, or video games, tends to really miss the mark on the Colonial Marines, presenting them straight up as these "OOH RAH" spewing "Ultimate Bada**es" without any sense of irony or satire to them - whereas in Aliens, James Cameron was all about building them up only to tear them way, way down during their experience on LV-426. It's obviously too early to really tell, but so far Fireteam seems to be yet again falling into the common Marine trope that has plagued so much of the expanded Alien material.

I'm at around the halfway mark in Into Charybdis so far, and so far this book has a very different take on the Colonial Marines than what we usually see in EU media, which is making them much more interesting than the standard portrayal of the Marines outside of James Cameron's Aliens thus far, and actually leans into the Aliens as a known quantity idea that you mentioned above which is interesting.

To date, Alien: Isolation remains the core Alien video game experience, in my opinion. I was initially turned off by that one, thinking that the idea of playing as Amanda Ripley was silly, but the game wound up pretty perfectly emulating the sense of terror of the original film. I had to dial the difficulty all the way down to novice to finish it, and even then there were moments where I nearly threw my controller across the room after a scary encounter. I game on PC these days, and have repurchased the game for my computer, though I have yet to replay it - I really need to build up the courage to do so.

I hope you like it as you push on deeper into the story! Dorian, man... what an awful guy. I love me a good corporate antagonist in an Alien story.

 

I still play Alien Trilogy on ps one. That game rocks.