Alien5: It's a Bug Hunt (pre-release thread)

Chappie isn't a sequel to one of the biggest movies ever, or a prequel to the biggest movies ever. Blomkamp will be fine.

 

This conversation inspired me to re-watch Prometheus. Having seen it a few times now the story feels pretty clear to me:

The Engineers created life on Earth and continued to guide and support humanity as it developed. 2,000 years ago they changed their mind for an undisclosed reason. They prepared one of their bio-warfare ships to destroy the Earth, but one of them spilled some goop causing an outbreak that killed them all. When David wakes up the last survivor, he realizes they're humans and then proceeds to try and kill them all then take his ship to eliminate the Earth.

I'm watching the cut scenes now and they spell out events even more so. Idris Elba tells a story about how he witnessed a bio-warfare spill as a soldier that almost caused an outbreak because somebody dropped something. The life creation ceremony is larger with several Engineers watching and handing the sacrifice the jar.

Also fascinating: the infected scientist who attacks them and they're forced to kill? He looks like a xenomorph in the cut scenes! I would have preferred that. There's also a lot more with the Engineer. He actually talks briefly to David and has an extended fight scene with Shaw in the life boat. I can't believe they cut that!

The one question I have (aside from the 2,000 years ago event) is... is the thing the sacrifice drank supposed to be the same thing as the xenomorph black goo? Or just something vaguely similar? It caused him to literally disintegrate to that his DNA was spread through the water.

Another bit of symbolism I never noticed before. David talks about how all children want to murder their parents. What does Shaw do to kill the Engineer? She sicks her aborted baby on it! She uses her baby to kill her parent!

 

Similar, but not the same stuff. The 'black goo' is actually a two-part formula - a clear fluid (which may be the drink from the film's beginning) and a black add-on ingredient. The recent comic Prometheus: Fire and Stone referred to it as 'Pure chaos. It's like this stuff can't decide what it is. It doesn't just have a genetic makeup, it has every genetic makeup all mixed together... and it's aggressive." They later name it a "genetic accelerant."

 

I also wonder if the Engineers had a cure for the black goo. If they were planning to infect Earth with the weapon so that humanity was wiped out, surely when it was done they would kill all the xenomorphs and have a nice fresh planet to start over with?

 

I remember reading an interview with Ridley Scott and somebody asked him about the event that happened 2,000 years ago that turned the engineers against humans, and he kind of hinted that maybe Jesus was an engineer and we crucified him. I thought that would be a cool angle for the story.

 

I don't see how you could do that in an actual story. I mean, was there literally a ten foot tall bald alien preaching to people and getting nailed up on the cross?

 

Have you seen the end of Alien 3?

I wonder if anyone involved in the production ever thought that Engineer stuff through.

 

If they had a cure, the surely it wouldn't have killed them all. More to the point it seems they can't even contain it properly. You'd think carrying something so aggressive in such vast quantities they'd have a better contingency in case of a breach than "run away!"

My take on the black goo is that it's a medium for a programmable nano-virus. The one in the prologue would have been specifically programmed to breakdown engineer DNA and use it to kick-start life with some specific gene sequences encoded from the outset.
The goo on the ship would have been the weaponized version, designed to adaptively convert any organism it comes in contact with. What would theoretically happen once all life on a planet it wiped out/assimilated depends on the Engineer's motivations. If they're only interesting in wholesale destruction then they'd simply let things run their course and mark the world off-limits. If they want to reclaim the planet then logically the organisms would have a fail safe of some sort.

Another possibility is that there are more than one faction of Engineers and the ones that created us are in conflict with the ones that tried to wipe us out.

Of course that makes the star map "invitation" somewhat illogical, but that never made sense. Maybe the idea at one point was that the invitation they kept finding was actually a warning repeated to mankind throughout history: "don't go here!" and it was just lost in the shuffle of all the re-writes. It would be a subtle way to resonate with Alien and the derelict's distress beacon turning out to be a similar warning.

 

What was the reason again to destroy life on Earth after they helped creating it?

And what happened to the Alien queen that laid all the eggs inside the ship? What is the lifetime of a Xenomorph anyways?

 

<<What was the reason again to destroy life on Earth after they helped creating it?>>

That's the big mystery of the film that the sequel will be about. Ridley Scott said in an interview it's because Jesus was an Engineer and they killed him.

http://www.movies.com/movie-news/ridley-scott-prometheus-interview/8232?wssac=164&wssaffid=news
Movies.com: You throw religion and spirituality into the equation for Prometheus, though, and it almost acts as a hand grenade. We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

RS: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Lets’ send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it. Guess what? They crucified him.

 

Except their deaths are caused either by Ripley and co. being uncharacteristically stupid and not double checking for eggs before going into cryo-sleep, or Diabolus ex Machina, or probably both.

Seriously the Alien Queen just happens to lay either two eggs or a special super awesome egg on the way back or somehow managed to take time out of trying to eat Newt just to do that despite inflicting some trauma to her reproductive system, no one bothers to check to make sure the ship is egg free despite the danger that poses, the ship's emergency evacuation protocol is to chuck the evacuees at a planet without any system that keeps them from slamming into the ground and possibly dying, Weyland Yutani just happens to have their own military transport ships and troops with equipment to deal with an Alien and decided to go through the whole having to being sneaky plan to get an alien back to Earth instead of using their own stuff and likely actually pulling it off instead of the clusterfuck that the plan in Aliens degraded to, not to mention it kind of implies Weyland Yutani went from regular evil megacorp to ridiculously powerful evil mega corp in the space of a few weeks maybe a month t the most.

And don't give me the nihilistic universe crap, the only horrible thing humanity ran into in this universe was one extremely hostile lifeform on one moon in god knows how many planets they've been to with space travel being about as common as car travel. So probably less dark than Star Trek circa the Original Series aka the incredibly optimistic universe.

 

^Most of the flaws you point out are just down to good old fashioned bad writing. I mean the EEV thing itself makes sense if the point it to jettison them into deep space (assuming the ship is liable to be a total loss), but what is the likelihood of the ship passing close to a habitable planet at the time of an emergency? Hell, why would a ship that's presumably travelling at a significant percentage of C (if not actual FTL) risk getting anywhere near that close to a star in the first place, much less a planetary body?

I mean it's not a "space station made of wood" level of piss-poor-grasp-of-science, but it's not far off.

 

Ms Weaver was talking about A5 on BBC Breakfast TV the other day. Without actually saying 'I'm doing it', she said I'm doing it...

 

Well I could buy a facehugger getting onboard the Sulaco it came up with the queen, the egg is a harder one to swallow.

Even if you want go with a wild theory of the Company send another ship and went to the wrecked Alien ship and put an egg onboard the Sulaco why would they do that? in the hopes that it would impregenate one of the survivors and they were following the ship would pick up a distress call and transfer Ripley and co to another hypersleep chamber in order to get past quarrantine. The ejection of the lifepod was an unforseen event. But I would want to give them ideas.

 

I'd go for the 'Company' was experimenting and wanted an enclosed environment to release a sample in. The recording of the events on the Sulaco was faked and Ripley (or a clone) launched onto the selected planet with dummy bodies.

Hicks, Newt and possibly Ripley are still alive and elsewhere...

 

The only good explanation that makes any sense is that Bishop brought the egg onto the Sulaco. Probably some fail-safe program (thanks to Burke) was tripped inside him to make certain a living alien made it into Company hands no matter what. While Ripley was searching for Newt in the nest, Bishop snuck in from another area, grabbed an egg and hid it in the dropship's landing gear before going to pick Ripley up. It wasn't personal - he couldn't defy his programming.

"It was with us all the way."

 

How could Bishop possibly have gotten to the egg chamber ahead of Ripley *and* without any of the drones noticing and ripping him to shreds?

While of course the reality is that it simply wasn't possible given what we saw in 'Aliens' and is merely the result of lazy writing; the only thing even vaguely resembling a half-way believable scenario is that the Queen laid the egg(s) in the dropship's landing gear bay on the way up and Ripley (Bishop & Hicks being in no shape to do so) never thought to check.

IIRC in one version of the script (which may have made it into the workprint cut) the facehugger was a special "Queenhugger" that could lay from embryos before dying. Hence only one egg and why it didn't jut die after implanting Ripley.
I think there was also a bit where it was Newt who was originally implanted, but when she started to drown in her cryotube, the still only partly formed queen embryo (rather gruesomely) crawls out of her mouth and into Ripley's. Not sure if any of that was filmed, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a storyboard depicting it.
Mind you that film was revised so much I loose track of all the withertos and why fors.

 

And we have to remember the development hell Alien 3 went through.

 

If he ignores the last two Alien movies I'll pay to see it. Otherwise, pass.

 

1: He had the whole of the time Ripley was down in the nest (fifteen minutes, more or less) to circle around, find another way in, land, grab the nearest egg, haul it back to the dropship and take off again. Remember how he kept Ripley waiting?
2: As we saw in Alien Isolation, the xenomorph doesn't consider androids a threat unless it's actively fighting them with something or if it's simply in the way of its real target (As Bishop was on the Sulaco flight deck). Inorganic = just part of the scenery. And (from the Xeno's POV) anyone stupid enough to steal an egg intact instead of destroying it deserves what they'll get.

I think you're referring to this particular page from the Alien3 comic adaptation. (Of course, if it's that far along already, why does it even need to still be in a host?)