Alien: Covenant/Alien Series thoughts.

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The scientists and explorers in Prometheus and Covenant are some of the most idiotic 'smart' characters in probably any film ever made.
I was working as a biologist when I watched Prometheus. It was so fucking painful watching those scientists in the beginning I almost just shut off the movie. It was so fucking retarded and unbelievable it just ruined the rest of the movie for me.
 
The studios didn't even want this for Predator or The Thing. Hence the first scenes of those movies being a space ship landing (or crashing) on Earth. They had to make absolutely sure that even the most incompetent morons in the audience understood that there would be aliens from outer space in the film. The studio side of films have always wanted audiences to be spoon fed everything so that they don't miss a single piece of the plot. Everything has to laid out clearly and characters must regularly dump exposition to the audience like a narrator.

It's gotten to the point where the studios are basically showing the monster, plot twists, or the endings of movies in the trailers now. You can watch the trailers for so many movies and you've seen every story beat and plot twist. If Alien was premiering today the trailers would show the fully grown xenomorph and probably have lines like "Ash is a goddamn robot" so that there is zero mystery.
Yep. For the rare new movie I know I'll want to watch, I go out of my way to avoid trailers now. They ruin movies. No exaggeration there are movies I would have seen if I hadn't seen a trailer first because it gave away too much of the movie.

And the Thing, gah that fucking Spaceship at the start. It genuinely detracts from the film it's so fucking dumb. Slightly different reasoning but Big Trouble In Little China with the lawyer scene at the start where Egg Shen is saying how much debt they are all in to Jack Burton. That scene was forced on by the studio later because they were worried people wouldn't understand that Jack Burton was the hero.

They have no fucking clue.

This is why most of the movies I watch these days are either old and obscure or small budget ones where the studio hasn't bothered to interfere too much.

M. Night Shyalaman pulled a good one at the end of Split when you suddenly see Bruce Willis in the bar. I mostly don't like his twist endings but that was a nice one because it was so genuinely well done and on a different level than the plot itself. Almost a joke played on the audience.

I'm tired of watching movies made for people on the wrong side of the bell curve.

I was working as a biologist when I watched Prometheus. It was so fucking painful watching those scientists in the beginning I almost just shut off the movie. It was so fucking retarded and unbelievable it just ruined the rest of the movie for me.
I feel for you. I worked in software and was physically injured by the line in Jurassic Park: "This is UNIX. I know this."

The worst in its way was The Usual Suspects. Not because Kevin Spacey was in it, though that helped, but because from the start of the movie, like first parts of his interview, I'm thinking 'okay, but this is uncorroborated. When do they check his story against someone else's'. But it just goes on with this single source for everything that happens and at the end, the big twist is that he was making stuff up. Like, how stupid do they think the audience is? Though apparently they're right because everyone I was with thought it was mind-blowing.

I got off topic. Sorry! Um, Alien Earth is out this Summer....
 
Both of these touch on a particular beef of mine with Alien: Covenant. The muddled and messy religious themes. I presume they're going for "complex" but they don't pull it off. I also bought and read the novelisation (not great) which digs a little more on the captain's faith. It's stated that the rest of the crew don't trust him because he's religious. (Fun exercise, switch his Christian faith in the movie to Islamic faith and watch the studio execs panic).

Okay - you could work with that and say the setting is now predominantly atheist and religious people are looked upon as backwards. There's been elements that can tie into that in the movies, e.g. the prisoners in Alien 3 who in an earlier script were going to be an order of monks and that was why there were no women present until Ripley arrives. What do you get out of doing so? Well... I don't know? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ What the film does is effectively dump on religious beliefs by having them fail the Captain. But dramatically that undermines things because he's never been shown to push them on others or ignore logic because of them or anything else that would set up a pay off. In a story when you show a character trait and make it part of your themes you're usually either showing something that is thought not to have value does, or else you're showing that something thought to have value does not. What you almost never do is start off showing doesn't have value to reveal that it doesn't have value. Maybe in Tragedy (capital T) kind of.

It's not even that the film dumps on religion - though I don't really enjoy that - it's that it's such a fucking mess. If the captain set down on the planet because of some religious belief ("God has sent us this. It would be wrong to turn away") then you could make it a theme of hubris or something. But they go out of the way to show us that the decision is one based on logic and discussion. And the whole juxtaposition of the religious captain with David - what are they trying to say? I don't think they know themselves. That religion / spirituality isn't what he thinks it is but that it's what David thinks? Something else?

What I think they're going for is some frankly antiquated themes of cosmic nihilism, the falsity of religion. It goes back to Prometheus with the whole "why did you create us?" theme of searching for the engineers. They want a Lovecraftian "the universe doesn't care, you have no purpose" horror. I don't think that resonates with modern audiences at all. It's a theme come up with by old writers who maybe grew up in an environment where they felt stifled by religion around them, or that religion was the establishment. I think some elements of it are meant to be an inversion of this. But what they're trying to invert isn't there anymore. And in any case, they do such a confusing job of it that it's hard to discern the message anyway.

There's no "who is right about religion - David or the Captain?", no "my beliefs were hubris and led us to our doom," no "my beliefs were mocked but gave me strength to do the right thing," no "these beliefs reveal some cosmic truth". It's just "these lines sound profound if we make a few vague Old Testament references."

The biggest moment of horror in Covenant for me, was when David misattributes Ozymandias to Byron. For several minutes I thought the writers might actually be that uncultured, though thankfully it was deliberate. But I think the writers thought that the audience wouldn't know and that Walter's correction would be some freaky gotcha moment that undermined our trust / confidence in David's abilities.
It's a fart sniffing movie. That' all it is, it pretends it's deep but it's very shallow. The film isn't really saying anything about life. It's a "bigbrain" movie from Ridley Scott trying to do his usual "I have a very complicated relationship with God and Religion" that we've seen with Kingdom of Heaven and 1492 but here it comes across more like a too edgy for you nihilist who saw David from the last movie and wanted him to be their power fantasy. Shaw from the last one dies off screen and David genocides the engineers so any intrigue Prometheus may have generated is gone here. The film gives a backstory to the xenomorphs, David creates the xenomorphs. Even though the appeal of the Xenomorphs were always that they were, well, literally alien. They represent the unknown danger.

With all this said, I kinda wish Covenant got a sequel to see what happens next.
 
With all this said, I kinda wish Covenant got a sequel to see what happens next.
Well per-canon, the Covenant mission launches in 2103 and the film takes place a year into the mission. So the events of Alien are approximately 17 years after that. They could do a sequel set in the gap though if they did they'd probably try to force it into setting up the events of Alien which I think could be a mistake. Though could be a way to explain why there is a crashed engineer ship on LV-426. You'd probably need to go further into Engineer lore to do so. So for those reasons and others I feel like a sequel should probably branch off from the Ripley arc and we have another colony world out there forgotten about and whatever David is doing on there.

Also, this feels like a mistake but David announces himself as David to Mother at the end of Covenant as David. And she addresses him as David. Shouldn't he still be trying to pass himself off as Walter? Eh, doesn't matter - you can head canon reasons for it.
 
Speaking of Predator, they're doing an animated anthology set in different time periods.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eWzPKrNoSyMI really don't like the artstyle and it's from the director of Prey so naturally it features a strong female Viking fighting the Predator. The Samurai one might be decent.
I will stick with this anthology that has Vikings and Samurai going up against Predators, thank you very much. It even includes a story with Mike Harrigan after he retired from the LAPD.
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Now that would have been fantastic. I would have lost my shit as people say, if I'd been watching a movie like this and that twist came in. My favourite Predator movie was Prey and they could have done that twist in it quite easily. It starts off purely a story about a young Comanche woman and though Sci-Fi elements creep in relatively early you still wouldn't know what you were watching until about half-way through.

I love it when a movie does a well-executed genre-twist (emphasis on well-executed) but execs rarely allow it.
Sunshine was a good genre twist movie. I was expecting some kind of spacemen save the world movie, but it turned into some slasher horror event horizon shit.
 
They could do a sequel set in the gap though if they did they'd probably try to force it into setting up the events of Alien which I think could be a mistake. Though could be a way to explain why there is a crashed engineer ship on LV-426.
In the Alien: Engineers script; the Derelict was the Prometheus Juggernaut ship that in the process crashed there due to the events of the film leading to it. The beacon that the Nostromo finds is actually Shaw at the last minute setting up a distress signal.

I personally hate this, but prefer it to anything you can do to connect the cinema abortion that is Covenant. It's still better to just think it being a potential bomber for a long ago alien war of some sort that crashed due to a containment breach; that was good enough.
Also, this feels like a mistake but David announces himself as David to Mother at the end of Covenant as David. And she addresses him as David. Shouldn't he still be trying to pass himself off as Walter? Eh, doesn't matter - you can head canon reasons for it.
My headcanon is Covenant never happened at all personally. If I am forced to include it, I'd change the plot to be them finding a world that seemed to maybe be settled given there are wild grass strains that grow on it that show signs of crossbreeding due to it being like wheat. Then the big reveal is that it got gene-bombed by the Engineers and there's a fungal killer cell based on Xeno parasitism that targets sentients. The rubbery neomorphs are that way due to being fungal like; particularly slime mold like.

I'd have also retconned that you never see the fucking Engineers. Hint at them, but only show their creations, like the Servants (the retooled Blue men), or the Pilots.
 
In the Alien: Engineers script; the Derelict was the Prometheus Juggernaut ship that in the process crashed there due to the events of the film leading to it. The beacon that the Nostromo finds is actually Shaw at the last minute setting up a distress signal.
Ehhh, I wouldn't be wholly opposed to what you just outlined. It would at least explain why the beacon is something they can decode which always seemed a bit weird for me for an alien message. It could still be of unknown origin given that she might be using some partially figured out alien tech to send it.

It does reinforce the xenomorphs as something created by the engineers though. Well, David now I guess. And I dislike the latter as much as you do.
 
Speaking of Predator
Thumbnail Predator looks like he hunts at McDonald's.

But seriously the canonicity of the Aliens vs. Predator movies has always been a grey area. If they're canon then you actually had a Xenomorph outbreak in Colorado. Not that the public would know about it because the film was so dark the army covered it up. And presumably there'd be records of the Antarctic expedition from AvP as well.
According to the main writer for the RPG, it's 3 separate franchises:
Andrew Gaska said:
The first thing to understand about ALIEN, Predator, and AVP is that they are three franchise universes.

AVP is officially a separate franchise and therefore a separate canon from Alien/Prometheus. Predator is also separate from AVP and Alien/Prometheus. If a Predator shows up in an alien project, that project is in the AVP universe and not Alien.

Easter Eggs are never an indicator of canon, they are surprise homages and nothing more. The separation of franchises is per Fox themselves and was handed to me as perimeters to follow when I first worked on the Predator Bible for them. Lots of people get frustrated by the AVP statements above. They want Predator in their Alien. Personally, I think both franchises are better on their own, so I’m happy about AVP being a third franchise.
and later down in the footnotes:
Andrew Gaska said:
  1. Only the Aliens issues of “Fire and Stone” and “Life and Death” are part of the Alien Universe. The Predator and AVP portions are not.
  2. Anything with Predator in it is part of the separate Predator universe instead, or…
  3. If an Alien and a Predator appear, that means it’s part of the separate AVP Universe. Even if it says it’s an ALIEN-labeled product and not an AVP one—if a Predator shows up it’s AVP).
 
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Didn't help that the film constantly made her right and her tribe brethren wrong to sow a message. I would've been far more okay with the film if it took place in say... the Genpei War period of Japan, where you had warrior women who'd defend the stead with their naginatas and so on.

Or like Seven Samurai, but it turns into Predator, and the protagonist is a lady bandit or thief.
Or just have a male protagonist because Indian Society didn't have the spare resources for women to play at war.

Female Samauri, or Female Ninja completely fine. Or have it one of the African female warrior societies. Don't just pretend that NatAm Society was some gender equality paradise adn ESPECIALLY not the fucking Comanche.

It's specifically the Commanche that's hilarious, since it's one of the more patriarchal native societies anthropologically speaking. It's hilarious to see people try to whitewash tribes and edit their legacy, since most of it's oral tradition that had to be written down.
Again, you want to have a Comanche protag and down play the fact their idea of a good time was to raid a farming village, rape the women, abduct and brain wash the kids, then break the men's limbs, and throw them face down on low fires so they could laugh at them as they slowly burned to death while they tried to crawl out, that's fine. But not a woman. lol.

Speaking of Predator, they're doing an animated anthology set in different time periods.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eWzPKrNoSyMI really don't like the artstyle and it's from the director of Prey so naturally it features a strong female Viking fighting the Predator. The Samurai one might be decent.
The art is absolute fucking garbage.
The WWII story looks to be absolute dogshit, the Viking story is going to be a retarded gender special retelling of Beowulf, the Samurai story might be ok but I'm certain they'll fuck it up. To day nothing of the mulatto mystery meat I'm sure is goign to be maxed out on faggotry.

I will stick with this anthology that has Vikings and Samurai going up against Predators, thank you very much. It even includes a story with Mike Harrigan after he retired from the LAPD.
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Based.

I personally hate this, but prefer it to anything you can do to connect the cinema abortion that is Covenant. It's still better to just think it being a potential bomber for a long ago alien war of some sort that crashed due to a containment breach; that was good enough.
I never even got the impression the Derelict was a bomber. To me it just seemed like it was space ship, something got the Space Jockey, and after it crashed something (the thing that got the Jockey) set up house and filled the lower level full of eggs.

there's a fungal killer cell based on Xeno parasitism that targets sentients. The rubbery neomorphs are that way due to being fungal like; particularly slime mold like.
This is the shit I'm talking about. You wouldn't even need to have it related to Engineers/Xenomorphs and you've got an Alien-set up with a brand new xeno threat. Its not that hard to shake up the classic formula without doing a retarded deconstruction.

And you are 100% correct we should have never seen Engineers

Ehhh, I wouldn't be wholly opposed to what you just outlined. It would at least explain why the beacon is something they can decode which always seemed a bit weird for me for an alien message. It could still be of unknown origin given that she might be using some partially figured out alien tech to send it.
TBF its a distress beacon, not exactly an encrypted secret porn password file, something usually easy to detect and encode.

I always felt that it was to show that W-Y knew about ships like the Derelict, or just other sentient races in general, and was looking for them.

Sunshine was a good genre twist movie. I was expecting some kind of spacemen save the world movie, but it turned into some slasher horror event horizon shit.
Big thing I didn't like about Sunshine was they started from a fairly hard sci-fi premise and then went into weird supernatural slasher territory. Like if it had been a softer set up like Event Horizon I wouldn't have batted an eye. And I guess I felt it was a really dumb, cheap cop out - the guy just being absolutely insane was more than enough.
(also about how they are going to restart the sun with a bomb but w/e)

The worst in its way was The Usual Suspects. Not because Kevin Spacey was in it, though that helped, but because from the start of the movie, like first parts of his interview, I'm thinking 'okay, but this is uncorroborated. When do they check his story against someone else's'. But it just goes on with this single source for everything that happens and at the end, the big twist is that he was making stuff up. Like, how stupid do they think the audience is? Though apparently they're right because everyone I was with thought it was mind-blowing.
Its a modern day noir (so rewind the criminal justice system and detective work to 1950) and they do cover that in the film: Kint's lawyer used his leverage to get him a full walk, just a 90-day suspended sentance; Kint's just waiting for his paper work to clear to go free and didn't need to talk to the cops at all, so they didn't have time to run his story to ground - doubly so since they were focused on Keaton.

As for verifying his story, everyone except the one Armenian is dead (and he's unconscious until exactly Plot-hundred hours) so its Kint's word against no one's. The Detective is from New York, and Kint aggrevates the LA detective out of the room so when he starts making up street hoods there is no one there to correct him. And they did run down parts of the initial statement. Edie is found dead, etc. And Kint's fabrication wasn't total lies.

Also TUS was back when Spacey still had his shit together. Since his character walked with a limp he filed down the parts of shoe that would drag on the ground. He's got high on his own supply and quickly devolved to Typical Faggot Behavior but don't shit on when he was doing good work just because couldn't quench his thirst for teen bussy.
 
Big thing I didn't like about Sunshine was they started from a fairly hard sci-fi premise and then went into weird supernatural slasher territory. Like if it had been a softer set up like Event Horizon I wouldn't have batted an eye. And I guess I felt it was a really dumb, cheap cop out - the guy just being absolutely insane was more than enough.
(also about how they are going to restart the sun with a bomb but w/e)
It went full slasher, but not so much supernatural. The evil captain guy had a psychotic breakdown, and then spent 6 years alone on the ship, staring at the sun and giving himself burns for shits and giggles; literally full insane.
The nuke thing was explained in some commentary, and should have been in the movie...some physics thing called a Q-Ball was fucking with the sun, and they hoped the nuke would merk it, and allow the sun to fire back up again.

One of my fave genre change movies though was the OG From Dusk to Dawn. I watched it as a teen and sure as hell didn't see the turn from crime caper to fucking vampires coming
 
According to the main writer for the RPG, it's 3 separate franchises:
Good reference, had not seen that. I'm glad to see Alien: Isolation is classed as Tier 1 canon.

Its a modern day noir (so rewind the criminal justice system and detective work to 1950) and they do cover that in the film: Kint's lawyer used his leverage to get him a full walk, just a 90-day suspended sentance; Kint's just waiting for his paper work to clear to go free and didn't need to talk to the cops at all, so they didn't have time to run his story to ground - doubly so since they were focused on Keaton.
This is off-topic (I know that's my fault) so I'll just say again that my problem isn't with whether the police can verify anything or not or even if the police believe it or not. My issue is that the audience is expected to go along with Spacey's story and from minute 1 in that movie, everything he says I have a mental box hovering there that is waiting to be ticked before I'll engage with his story. None of the dramatic beats of the movie work if you're sitting there thinking "this is probably not true." He's a known criminal with a motive to lie. What's worse is that everyone I saw the movie with went "*gasp* he was making it up" at the reveal.

One of my fave genre change movies though was the OG From Dusk to Dawn. I watched it as a teen and sure as hell didn't see the turn from crime caper to fucking vampires coming
I took a woman to see that on a date. Thankfully she was in hysterics at the "Pussy! Pussy! Pussy!" scene.

So if Predators were to be canon in the Alien franchise, how would they be worked in in a serious backstory way? Like did they know the Engineers? They use xenomorphs as a kind of ultimate prey so did they buy them from the Engineers? Steal some? Commission them? Given we see Predators going back to ancient society they must have overlapped with the Engineers so what is their relationship? What would fit best with Alien lore and tone?
 
So if Predators were to be canon in the Alien franchise, how would they be worked in in a serious backstory way? Like did they know the Engineers? They use xenomorphs as a kind of ultimate prey so did they buy them from the Engineers? Steal some? Commission them? Given we see Predators going back to ancient society they must have overlapped with the Engineers so what is their relationship? What would fit best with Alien lore and tone?
I just pictured the Predators evolving on a death world where Xenomophs barely make the top-10 threats to existance.

My personal head cannon is that they live in on an incredibly harsh world, some advanced aliens arrive or crash (and die horribly; to Predators or just local fauna) and the ancient Predators are able learn how to operate the alien tech and get off world.
Thinking on it a bit, I guess a fun story might be a space jockey crashing onto their world like on LV-426, and the Predator "founding fathers" reverse engineering the craft and leaving as the Xenomorphs completely xenosterminatius their home world.

Or possibly they were scouted and used as native warriors by some other advanced species, and they either turned on the race/side that hired them or could even still be clients - basically Indians helping out the British and getting rifles. Or even the ones we encounter being the sci-fi equivalents of the Washington tribes going after whales with .50 cals.
"Treaty lets us hunt these species in or out season, Grey Face".

This is off-topic (I know that's my fault) so I'll just say again that my problem isn't with whether the police can verify anything or not or even if the police believe it or not. My issue is that the audience is expected to go along with Spacey's story and from minute 1 in that movie, everything he says I have a mental box hovering there that is waiting to be ticked before I'll engage with his story. None of the dramatic beats of the movie work if you're sitting there thinking "this is probably not true." He's a known criminal with a motive to lie. What's worse is that everyone I saw the movie with went "*gasp* he was making it up" at the reveal.
Oh gotcha, that's completely fair then. I will say tbcf to your folks that that sort of narrative twist much less common when it was released.
I can't really say because the twist wasn't exactly spoiled for me, but I knew enough about the film to not fully trust Kint so I found the twist really good but not earth shattering. I like the film, have seen it multiple times and knowing Kint's lying doesn't overly detract from enjoying it and its clear it was made by someone who liked the film they were making (Someone who also turned out be a bussy-chasing hollywood faggot...hmmm). but I also know its a movie a lot of people go way too hard on.
I guess - I hate "unreliable narrator" shit some authors do because I think its complete bullshit that you're supposed to ignore those plotholes but THESE plotholes were obvious signs they were hallucinating! But TUS didn't trigger that in me, because I think its clear there's definite elements real events in his story and the audience is never directly challenged figure out which is which.

edit: and I guess to expand on that a bit, I think your reaction of continually pressing X is the one Singer was trying to encourage people to have. The story is told from the detective's side, and you're supposed to keep your focus on Keaton because the Detective is focused on Keaton. The twist is make you feel what he's feeling - 'I was focused on the wrong guy and it blinded me to any other possibilities".

or tl;dr: I take it as a heist story of Kaise Soze eliminating a lose end (and then several other loose ends) and ducking the cops vs. any sort of Rashomon sort of story so I still enjoy it despite knowing the twist.
 
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They should just let Alien and Predator die, and if possible scrub the last three movies of each franchise from history. I would love to meet the guy who came up with the autistic superpowers predator movie
 
I love it when a movie does a well-executed genre-twist (emphasis on well-executed) but execs rarely allow it.
even the examples people use, they really don't. if you go back and watch the trailers its fairly obvious every twist, but a horrific amount of people truely do go in blind. it reminds me of how my parents saw Shia Lebouf in a film and decided to keep watching, and that's how they watched the film Nymphomaniac
He's got high on his own supply and quickly devolved to Typical Faggot Behavior but don't shit on when he was doing good work just because couldn't quench his thirst for teen bussy.
no he didn't, he was knocking out performances until the bitter end, fucking Netflix only exists because people wanted to see him on a tv show, that was shocking to people because he was such a highly regarded actor.

go back to the trailers for that movie Plummer replaced him in, everyone was hyped.
He's a known criminal with a motive to lie.
you have to remember it was the 90s, he was a cripple and everyone besides that one guy were small time crooks, they treated Klint like he was a retard, are you going to trust an autist to lie so effectively? like that was basically the big twist, a guy that everyone in theaters put in the same box as Chris Chan completely got one over on a detective.

also look at the rest of the cast, you have one guy who can't make eye contact and has the posture of a dinosaur, vs 4 other dudes who look like they'd be cast as the "leading man" and this was so long ago that you didn't really have non-handsome actors everywhere on film and tv. it was extremely well cast, a modern kiwifarms equivilent would be a Chris-chan or James Rolfe, out of everyone else imagine them as thr criminal mastermind.
 
you have to remember it was the 90s, he was a cripple and everyone besides that one guy were small time crooks, they treated Klint like he was a retard, are you going to trust an autist to lie so effectively? like that was basically the big twist, a guy that everyone in theaters put in the same box as Chris Chan completely got one over on a detective.
Maybe I'm the autist then because that carried no weight with me. How do I know he is a bad liar because he seems like one? I have no reference.

Anyway, sorry - completely off-topic, we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. I suspected he was lying from the start and if you don't believe what he says then his entire story has no dramatic beats for you.
 
Anyway, sorry - completely off-topic, we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. I suspected he was lying from the start and if you don't believe what he says then his entire story has no dramatic beats for you.
Ash is an example of someone lying from the start and being well written. Ash is even lying about being human and it fools the characters and audience. And there are lots of instances foreshadowing or revealing Ash being some type of traitor or purposefully bringing the alien onto the ship. The first Predator film had Dillon who was also lying to the other men about their real purpose and mission.
 
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