Prometheus 2: Apparently it's happening

[Saul]

Prometheus is a beautiful looking film but it's got massive problems, mainly the stupid characters. It tried to give us something new while not actually giving us anything new and basically telling us to come back for the next two movies to find out what we wanted to see in one movie. Prometheus is the hot chick that asks you why John Lennon doesn't release any more albums.
Alien and Aliens are gold though, brains and looks. Alien 3 is not so bad either.

 

[NCC-1967]

Fox has lifted the embargo, so there are already plenty of articles on the movie around. Here's some interesting bits:

Spoiler

The Covenant's original course is diverted because its long range scanners pick up human life signs, not because David (or Shaw) sent a distress signal
The planet isn't the Engineers home world, but the home of an ancient race of humanoids, products, just like us, of an Engineer experiment
Said humanoids used to worship the Engineers (hence the temple with the giant heads from the leaked photos), but they were all wiped out by their makers
Shaw locked herself up in a chamber inside the Engineers ship and lived (or still lives?) there. To hide from David... or from something even more sinister?

 

[Richard Baker]

New Red Band Trailer out- shows a lot more of the xenomorph
http://collider.com/alien-covenant-new-red-band-trailer/

 

[Mage]

Prometheus is a beautiful looking film but it's got massive problems, mainly the stupid characters. It tried to give us something new while not actually giving us anything new and basically telling us to come back for the next two movies to find out what we wanted to see in one movie. Prometheus is the hot chick that asks you why John Lennon doesn't release any more albums.
Alien and Aliens are gold though, brains and looks. Alien 3 is not so bad either.

Meh, plenty of stupid ass decisions by stupid ass people in Alien and Aliens as well. Easy to say Prometheus is at fault there simply because we don't see it as an old classic.

 

[Saul]

It will never be a classic. While there are stupid ass decisions in Prometheus such as the scientist trying to touch a white alien snake he never saw before or getting crushed by a hula hoop it's problems run deeper than just those character moments.

 

[Mage]

It will never be a classic. While there are stupid ass decisions in Prometheus such as the scientist trying to touch a white alien snake he never saw before or getting crushed by a hula hoop it's problems run deeper than just those character moments.

Never said Prometheus is a classic. I said people don't see it as a classis. In any case, the problems some people mention, I know to be minor points to so many fans who adore the film. Hell, the stupid scientists even make sense. I doubt a highly reputable member of the scientific community is gonna pack up his shit and go into hypersleep for several years because some rich weirdo asks you to, with no further questions asked or answered. Ofcourse these guys aren't the cream of the crop.

 

[Mage]

Effing double post.....

 

[Saul]

The scientists. I dunno, I think that's kind of an excuse for bad writing because they couldn't come up with a more interesting way for them to get infected. Considering who funded the project and what he was paying I would be pretty sure he was paying for the cream of the crop.
Ultimately I feel the film was a wasted opportunity. I expected it to be a story that dealt with the origin of the human race, the actual implications of such a discovery in a more philosophical way, hence the name of the film and all. Prometheus was originally going to be just two movies that lead up to the beginning of 'Alien' and the Xenomorph was not meant to show up in the first movie. What we got now is an Alien sequel, not a Prometheus sequel and after this they have 2 more movies planned. I imagine this sequel will be unsatisfying in similar ways, i.e. we have to wait for the next two films to get the answers to the first one. We waited 5 years for this movie. How old will we be before we get to the end of this.

 

[Captain of the USS Averof]

Meh, plenty of stupid ass decisions by stupid ass people in Alien and Aliens as well. Easy to say Prometheus is at fault there simply because we don't see it as an old classic.

Yeah but…
a) Those people were truckers and grunts and not scientists.
b) They had common sense not to pet an alien snake.

 

[JWPlatt]

...A friend of mine did production design work on Prometheus, and he has oodles of stories about how obsessive Scott was on the tiniest pieces of set dressing.

My sympathies to your friend. It's too bad Scott totally failed in his obsession to detail when he approved the ridiculously tortured path to a so-called script, likely saying, "Just give me anything I can put the fuck on the screen" while Fox was saying, "As long as it opens." But hey, the visuals were great so Ridley is a genius.

...I said earlier in the thread that Prometheus is top-tier Ridley Scott...

Yes, you did. And it's still laughable bullshit.

Easy to say Prometheus is at fault there simply because we don't see it as an old classic.

No, it's easy to say because the script and screenplay were so pathetically inadequate. There's no point in character analysis about whether these people were true to their characters when the script writing itself was so fucking abysmal.

 

[Mage]

Yeah but…
a) Those people were truckers and grunts and not scientists.
b) They had common sense not to pet an alien snake.

Uhhu. And going into airducts where monsterkiller is hiding was genious.

 

[publiusr]

Alternative take: The Engineer ships have to be the best ships in the galaxy..

The ship we saw in the opeing of the last movie was a big saucer--half-way between V and ID4 size or so.
I think these horseshoe Juggernauts as they are called are shaped after a glyph in their language for death--at least that's my spin.

I think we may see two monsters here.

You have what looks like the xenomorph warrior--but I seem to remember a trailer where some of the small spore buds we see them step on--or maybe from a wheat stalk--enters the ear.

Remember the half-alien/half human thing in Alien: Resurrection?

I think we might see some mutation along those lines.

 

[Nightowl1701]

Spoiler: Oh, we definitely are. In fact... we might even see three.

That ear spore results in the backburster (and later, reportedly, skullburster) creature that grows into the 'Neomorph' - a variant Xeno covered in albino-white flesh instead of black biomechanical armor. This extremely fast-growing variant is what's seen pinning that screaming woman to the ground midway through the second trailer.

And who knows what else David's been cooking up in the decade between Prometheus and this movie...?

 

[Reverend]

The ship we saw in the opeing of the last movie was a big saucer--half-way between V and ID4 size or so.
I think these horseshoe Juggernauts as they are called are shaped after a glyph in their language for death--at least that's my spin.

Uh...not sure how that relates to what I said. Also: where on Earth does the "symbol for death" idea come from?

But so long as we're talking about that ship from the prologue consider two things: -
1) that ship was around at least four and a half billion years before the ones we saw were abandoned on the weapons facility planetoid and that it's *possible* they may have come up with a different ship design in the intervening aeons.
2) The classic Jockey Ship appeared to have a very specific function as a weapons delivery platform (or "battle wagon" as Ridley Scott put it.) It's unlikely such a ship would be around when they started seeding a lifeless rock with genetic material. So that thing we glimpsed was probably more like a transport, scout or surveyor.

Uhhu. And going into airducts where monsterkiller is hiding was genious.

IIRC a lot of that had to do with Ash's activities and the "all other priorities rescinded" message from the company. If you watch Dallas, you can tell his mood shifts towards the fatalistic before this incident. He's already pretty sure they're all going to die.

Also: what was the alternative? Go back into hypersleep with that thing crawling around the ship? Bugger that! Draw lots and have two people escape in the shuttle? Admittedly a better alternative but they weren't that desperate yet and Dallas may have suspected Ash would take measures to prevent it. Classic rock and a hard place situation.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I'm not convinced the first saucer ship we saw at the beginning was that far back, but possibly near the same time. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the planet the Covenant crew landed on looks way too suspiciously like the world that Engineer drank the black oil on, which is why they pointed out there is no apparent indigenous life to be seen or heard. They haven't evolved there yet. The black spores may be the first "living" things on the planet that lead to other things.

 

[publiusr]

Covenant looks a bit like this
http://riddick.wikia.com/wiki/Hunter_Gratzner

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Hmmm. I wonder if all that Riddick stuff is in the Alien universe, like Firefly apparently is?

 

[Reverend]

I'm not convinced the first saucer ship we saw at the beginning was that far back, but possibly near the same time. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the planet the Covenant crew landed on looks way too suspiciously like the world that Engineer drank the black oil on, which is why they pointed out there is no apparent indigenous life to be seen or heard. They haven't evolved there yet. The black spores may be the first "living" things on the planet that lead to other things.

It's a bit silly to speculate so broadly based on plot details from a movie nobody has seen yet, no?

All we have to go on in the first movie and the context of that and subsequent scenes are clearly meant to make us think we're witnessing the beginning of all life on Earth. So yeah, that would indeed place it around four and a half billion years ago.

 

[137th Gebirg]

It's a bit silly to speculate so broadly based on plot details from a movie nobody has seen yet, no?

No.

 

[Nightowl1701]

All we have to go on in the first movie and the context of that and subsequent scenes are clearly meant to make us think we're witnessing the beginning of all life on Earth. So yeah, that would indeed place it around four and a half billion years ago.

Not necessarily that far back. There could have been primitive amoeba/pre-plant life on the planet already. The last image going into the opening credits show what look like animal cells dividing in the waters. Animal life first appeared on Earth in the Cambrian (Era) Explosion, so roughly 541 million years ago. Still pretty far back, but not insanely so!