yeah idk if i can really get on board with ‘prometheus is bad because its about creationism’? the movie is a completely literal take on the daniken ‘ancient aliens’ nonsense that extends it to its logical conclusion- we haven’t seen those bastards for like 5000 years, it is clear that they must fuckin hate us for some reason our human minds are too puny to comprehend
if you go deep into the deleted scenes lore more of the Christianness of the idea comes out in a way that is too embarrassingly on the nose to take seriously (the engineers hate us because we killed jesus, who they created to show us their ways) and it is good that they took it all out.
the engineer just beating the shit out of the first life forms he sees after being de cryogenized or whatever is such an incredible moment, the longer versions of that sequence, or any attempts to clarify the ‘lore’ of the movie, really remove the special spice layer that pushes the movie from Hard SF wankery to beautiful cosmic horror imo.
‘this thing looks like a person and appears to have in the past acted in ways that are vaguely legible and identifiable to me turns out to hate my guts and is too lethal for me to even have a chance to communicate with it’ is to me a really good twist on the basic premise of Alien
creationism is really funny though like sometimes i regret not being raised christian because i never had the opportunity to be a precocious child asking a priest “why did god invent pooping” or sth
i like the implication that the medpod is just for weyland and he doesn’t care if his own daughter can use it
the exasperation and terror programming gcode into a laser cutter claw machine then hopping in without general anesthesia would be medical horror enough without the alien
if you cross your eyes while fassbender is reciting ozymandias to other fassbender and the engineers die en mass during a flashback in convenant it’s like zack snyder’s right there
the rush to get to name brand alien xenomorphs and facehuggers and eggs etc is fucking boring. give me black goo and zombies and a horrible squid pregnancy any day
whenever i see the green lasers and ACOGs i think shit at least aliens had props
I’ve been thinking about stuff like this too because of how much Romulus unexpectedly leans on Resurrection, which was itself already an extremely self-conscious, remix type movie that in retrospect might be the epoch of the current cultural moment. It’s two years before the Star Wars prequels, even.
Joss Whedon was 15 when the first Alien came out and Resurrection is him reworking the ideas from something iconic to him in his childhood and doing so in a nakedly affected way: The very first line of the movie is a callback to one of Newt’s lines in Aliens, the computer is called “Father” because the computer in the first movie was “Mother,” etc. All in service of something that doesn’t need to exist in the first place, that has to invalidate what came before in a really tortured & hokey way to justify continuing a plot that definitely reached its terminus. A movie where you know that re-upping for a fourth installment wouldn’t have been the first choice of anybody involved, certainly not Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but it was a chance to work and make some money. A name brand recognition movie dredged up because a spreadsheet said it made sense. And so on. We live in, of all things, Alien Resurrection world.
I watched the pilot and actually kind of liked it! But I figured it was one of those things where the series proper would never have that kind of concision or pacing ever again and I’d be tuning in each week to watch them trek another mile across Iceland to evade the scary robot.
yeah the last Christmas I had to spend with my likudnik brother in law before my wife’s sister got divorced we settled on watching that because it was a kind of stupid that we could both tolerate
Yeah but Ripley torching all her own disfigured clones is a very mean spirited commentary on a franchise that has overstayed its welcome that is both a) totally on brand for Alien and b) would never fly nowadays. I do think Blade Runner 2049 is semi good about this (no you’re not the true heir to the hero after all…Sorry bud) but most other belated sequels have gone the opposite route
Will always respect Covenant for the flute scene, absolutely wild act of cinematic revolution. One of the most memorable moments I’ve had at the cinema in recent years.
I really hate Prometheus, and it’s blowing my mind to see so much positivity about it.
But I will say that my take on this scene is Engineers are viscerally disgusted by how humans look, and this dude woke up from a monster-making experiment gone wrong and immediately sees a bunch of creepy little goblins. I’d probably freak out and step on em too.
Like, it’s possible that every roach I kill is whispering, “Why do you hate us?” I dunno.
It’s been a week since I sawr it, but Romulus basically filled me with this feeling of, like
Look: some people accidentally made a really, really good movie in the 70’s. Fantastic acting, set design, creature design, and edit. Lightning in a bottle.
And since then it’s just been more and more piss in the Mountain Dew with each installment.
My feeling after Romulus was, “Just let it go. Make a new thing. It’s okay for a movie to be a movie.”
Every attempt to add to the lore only takes. Every clarification makes obscure. Every attempt to obscure makes clear.
Sorry for my late reply, perhaps my wording was a little strong. I’m mostly praising the complete disregard for audience expectation in that scene. Like, I imagine none of the normie (not to be snippy) Alien fans in the theatre signed up to see an “Alien” film with a nearly 4-minute scene of two androids playing the flute with not-so-subtle queer undertones.
