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

I'll take any and all Alien as possible, please. Dang bugs spread everywhere, y'know? And if Alvarez did an informal pitch enough that Scott liked it and called him years later, good enough for me.

 

Yeah the Alvarez/Scott connection leaves me excited for this. I was afraid this would be another Blomkampesque Alien 5: Aliens 2 idea.

 

I'm just watching the bonus's on Alien 3 , Vincent Ward's version sounds interesting but would've cost a fortune .

 

Ward's script sounds cool as hell for a fantasy movie but totally is out of place as an Alien movie.

 

I'm one of the few that actually liked Alien: Covenant, warts and all, and wouldn't've minded a direct sequel. Oh well.

 

Covenant's great. I have affection to varying degrees for Resurrection and Prometheus (in both of those cases, the script is a mess but it has interesting ideas and really solid directing from Jeunet and Scott), but Covenant is far and away the best (and most interesting) the franchise has been since Alien 3.

 

I hate Resurrection with a passion, love many parts of Prometheus and really don't like many other parts, and really like Covenant overall. However what I'm really a huge fan of are a couple fan edits of Prometheus and Covenant (the Workprint Edition and Chaos Edition, respectively). bstnx704 is probably familiar with them as an AvP Forums regular. I've never been a fan edit person before this but it really saved Prometheus for me and makes me like Covenant even more (mostly for adding back in The Crossing deleted scene).

 

I enjoyed Resurrection, but I saw it almost 13 years ago. I thought it was quirky and fun.

 

RANK EM!

01. Alien
02. Alien 3 (Assembly Cut or Theatrical)
03. Prometheus
04. Alien Covenant
05. Aliens
06. Alien Resurrection

This is the only franchise where I don't dislike a single entry. They all have stuff in them I love. But obviously I have preferences that certain films achieve, thus allowing for a numbered ranking.

And for the Yautja Stans...

01. Predator
02. Predator 2
03. The Predators (both films simultaneously because both have their moments, not many of them, but they do have them)

I don't count the AvP spin-offs as anything other than fun stupidity that is fun and stupid. But if I had to rank them, I'd give the edge to Requiem. Because, to quote Lucas from the beloved 80's hit The Wizard, "it's so bad!"

 

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

 

Alien
Aliens
Alien RPG
Alien Isolation

 

This is harder than choosing favorites among your kids....


Alien/Aliens (if time allows I like to watch them as a 4 1/2hr masterpiece)
Alien3 (started appreciating more as I got older)
Covenant
Prometheus
Resurrection/AvP1
(actually liked Res. more than 3 when it came out but I was in HS...it's still lower than Cov/Prom.)


AvP2: Requiem (the only one I really can't stand)

 

1. Aliens, one of the best films ever
...
The rest: meh

 

Btw We got a new Xenomorph variant in the comics


and RED NEOMORPHS IN A UPCOMING NOVEL

 

Aliens
Alien (by like a mircon less than Aliens)
Alien: Covenant
Prometheus
Alien 3
Alien: Resurrection

(then throwing in Predator)
Predator (first flick is basically right behind Alien if one intermingled it in an Alien and Predator ranking, it's great)
Predators
Predator 2
The Predator (And I like it a lot more than most where everyone else hated it.)
Alien vs. Predator
Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

Anyway, semi-related

 

Alien? Rescued the cat.
Aliens? Rescued the girl.
Alien 3? Rescued herself.

I love these films.

 

Free League Publishing, the makers of the Alien RPG, have announced a partnership with Titan Books - a series of three Alien novels that will be part of the cohesive narrative of the RPG universe, and include RPG material at the end.
I'm already sold!

 

Alien
Aliens
Prometheus (sorry, Noomi Rapace biased)
Alien Covenant
Aliens 3
-----------------------------

Has anyone got the chance to see the Netflix "Movies That Made Us" about Aliens? I watched it last week. Thought it was pretty interesting. Spoke to a handful of the crew, including Cameron.

 

So today I went to the Wintercon Sci Fi convention in Queens, NY. They typically feature some prominent celebrity guests from popular films (it was at one of these years ago that I actually got Peter Mayhew's autograph and picture taken with him). This year among the guests were several from Aliens. Among them was Jenette Goldstein (who played Rodriguez). She was easily my favorite character outside of Ripley (duh), so I got her autograph. You can see her talking about the film in the Netflix Movies that Made us about Aliens. Also there from Aliens was Michael Biehn, Mark Rolston, Ricco Ross, and William Hope. There was a Q & A of the cast as well (for some reason Michael Beihn wasn't on the stage, but I guess most people knew him more for that other James Cameron movie anyway). As Jenette was in three Cameron movies (T2 as John's mom, Aliens, and the Irish mother comforting her kids in Titanic, I asked her which role was most personal to her. Naturally she said the one with the children. She said Cameron was pretty adamant about her not crying during the scene, and that always got to her. There was also a great cosplay of Rodriguez that I had to take a shot of.

Spoiler: Jenette Rodriguez autograph

Spoiler: Q & A Panel

Spoiler: Rodriguez cosplay

 

Last one is great. She must get "Hey, Vasquez, you ever been mistaken for a man" like all day at the con.

Jenette Goldstein, like the entire cast, is absolutely perfect in the role. James Cameron movies always have pretty amazing casting anyway. (Apparently he had no idea that Paul Reiser was a comedian but just thought he was great)

 

The cast talked about Paul Reiser cracking jokes behind the scenes all the time. They also talked about how it was working with Bill Paxton; and effectively memorialized him.

 

Learning that Sigourney Weaver stood up for the crew and had solidarity with them was cool. I always knew Cameron was a "difficult" person and that there were production issues with an unhappy crew, but all the retellings before had painted Cameron as the hardworking, misunderstood genius auteur who was carrying the whole movie by himself and not being given a fair chance as an American outsider, Gale Anne Hurd as hated solely for being a pioneering girlboss, and the British crew as all spoiled, lazy, tea break-having incompetents. There was still some of that in the show, but also for the first time (that I've seen) the workers' side of the story was also actually acknowledged and humanized, and there was the consideration maybe--just maybe--Cameron and Hurd were actually **** bosses who still had a lot to learn about professional filmmaking. On that subject, the show still had a lot of romanticizing Roger Corman's exploitative "work ethic," a recurring narrative in Hollywood that never sits well with me.

I loved the ode to Bill Paxton. What a sweet man. Carrie Henn talking about how he was like her big brother on set produced some tears, ngl.

 

They did give credit to Cameron where it was due of course. When there was something he desperately wanted in the film but his producer/wife told him it would put them over budget, he used his own money to pay for it.

 

So apparently there was a "revelation" that one of the characters from Aliens was in fact transgender according to a bio screen. In the case that you didn't see it briefly flash on in the background, the bio for Joan Lambert (played by Veronica Cartwright) suggested that she had altered her gender from male to female. Not that it really makes a difference in the character; much less the plot of the movie.

 

Specifically, the character from Alien whose bio appears in Aliens. Yeah, that's been known for a while.