Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, (and likely others)

http://i1261.photobucket.com/albums/ii586/thexeno2/monster.gif

I have never felt so strongly inclined NOT to impregnate a woman before...and I was already against the idea of performing such an act! Just...holy shit.

So first off the visuals are faultless, thats something we've come to expect from Scott though so no surprises there.

Now then, the faults. I have to say that the complaints some critics had about characterisation were not unfounded. Rapace, Fassbender, Theron and Elba - these were imo the most fleshed out characters. The others, sadly they seemed to serve as expendable redshirts. I get the feeling though that a lot of footage is on the cutting room floor, and if that was restored we'd probably care more about the others. Also, there were probably too many characters. If there had been less then more time could have been spent fleshing them out. I found this problematic towards the end when Elba and the other two crew members (look I don't even remember their names!) fly a suicide mission into the departing Engineer craft. Like I was convinced Elbas character had the motivation....but the other guys? Nah. It was almost like they decided to kill themselves on a whim :/


In terms of scares/squick. There was a few moments, but I don't think I'll be losing any sleep. During the sequence where Rapace has to get an organism removed from her womb I was getting kicked by my own baby, so you'd think that would give it some sort of extra impact, but it didn't. Maybe thats just because I'm a mega-hard bastard?

What else? I think this film probably poses more questions than it answers, and the door has been left open for a sequel. It defintely warrants a second viewing. Like I said before, there is probably a better 'directors cut' version just waiting to be put together, so I guess I'll have to wait for that. Overall I'd give it 8/10 if you want an arbitary numerical value. Its a better film than Resurrection, and any of the AVP films (duh!) and its probably better than the directors cut of Alien3. To be honest though, its feels kind of silly trying to compare it with any of the other Alien films, it stands up in its own right I feel.

Phew!

the baby squid/body-hugger didn't disturb you. It did occur to me in the cinema that maybe I ought to give some warning to the people on the forums expecting a baby.

the Titans (referred to in film as the Engineers, and before that as Space Jockeys) didn't plan to create humanity. Humanity was an illegal project by the Titan we see die at the very beginning (who I think of as Prometheus), and a few allied Titans (who are the ones who keep showing up in those archaeological finds).

Then the other Titans found out and got pissed. It's possible that they will happily create life, but have some prejudice about creating it in their own form.

Also, we need some other word than xenomorph for the Alienesque creature at the end, as it's clearly very different from the xenos to come (not least the lack of a tail).

And as a BTW - I've seen some speculation elsewhere online that the Titans being dead at that complex for 2,000 years means they decided to kill humans due to the birth of Christ and rise of Christianity, which is against false gods. Major did not do the research:

1) the edict against false gods predates Christianity, and is present in even pantheistic religions (where false gods are any from another pantheon).
2) Christianity didn't become a political power until the 4th century, so even if it was a reaction to the edict against false gods, they jumped the gun a bit.

but I guess we won't know until the sequel. The beginning sequence did have some sort of pseudo-religious vibe to it, with the monklike figure sacrificing himself. One thing me and Mr Octo didn't get, is that if the Engineers/Titans have the same DNA, and are supposed to have seeded life on earth, then how does that explain Dinosaurs and stuff that didn't evolve into humans. I'm wondering.....and this is a huge IF, that perhaps the engineers DNA would match any other DNA you could find on earth. Otherwise theres a bit of a hole there.

The other thoughts we had, was that the cave paintings and stuff were designed so that if humans got to a certain stage of advancement, they would come and destroy us....in order to maintain their dominance?

So many questions!

And as for our little friend, I was thinking proto-morph? But he isn't the only one who needs a name, we have our tentacled friend and the little snake like creatures too (didn't think they made much of them, they attacked that guy but then they ran off and didn't attack anyone else)

Something I've thought after digesting things is that you can see Lindelof's fingerprints all over this, there are a lot of red herrings and stuff. Like there were too many ideas being thrown around and they kept too much in.

the spacejockey at the beginning did indeed set out to create life on the planet. Since were never given a timeframe at this point it's safe to assume that this action could predate all organic life on the planet. This taken from the fact that the cells from the space jockey would have been within the water and evolution (as we know it) has proven that we evolved from primordial ooze.

The genetic code of a human and an ape isn't that far off either, it wouldn't surprise me that the solitary action of that single space jockey was enough to set in motion the entire evolutionary aspect of the human race itself.
Given a few more thousand years humanity itself may in fact evolve to the point that we too resemble the space jockeys.

However my main gripe in regards to the space jockeys in the film is that the references to the planet are all contained in seperate religious icons (as kris mentioned) this implies that space jockeys did in fact leave information for humanity to discover.
HOWEVER.

If we are to believe that the space jockeys who left this information behind were indeed friendly then why would they have directed the prometheus crew to a planet that is essentially a massive weapons factory?

If they were truly friendly then surely they would have left a star map to their home planet/area where friendly space jockeys lived?

That said I like the fact that they didn't just show the ship with millions of eggs from a queen. In fact I really liked the fact that the genetic evolution of the xenomorphs began from the black ooze and this in turn affected the worms within the soil which gave birth to the first stage worm carriers.

As I stated in previous posts, the xenomorphs continue to evolve based on the properties of the host body, so I loved that they created a new form of Xenomorph from the space jockey. This in turn would be a queen and would create the eggs that would be discovered by Ridey & Co essentially filling in the gaps of how the xenomorphs got on the rock in the first instance.

As the space jockeys share a large proportion of human DNA I loved that Ridley kept the shape of the alien like that of the iconic xenomorph but twisted it slightly to keep it seperate from the other films.

Overall it was a fucking amazing job!

Im just a bit wary of the fact that the dr is now flying to the space jockey homeworld with a cargo full of biological poison that is shown to effect the space jockeys rather quickly also.
She is essentially doing to the space jockeys what they were intending to do to humanity.

If they do decide to create another film then I hope they somehow pad it out to include more than just her and david's head in a satchel bag

Yeah David stole the show didn't he? I loved the part at the beginning where he was watching Lawrence of Arabia and then dying his roots to look like him 'The trick is not caring that it hurts' Awesome.