ALIEN / PROMETHEUS / COVENANT - SPOILERS INBOUND!!

[gaarg]

About the idea that aliens made humans as a bio-weapon and then...nah

 

I still think this movie is ok, it raises good questions and it has a lot of positive sides to it, like the one of the best visuals in recent high-budget movies.

 

Will ponder more on what could be behind the movie as a plot, that could work with almost no holes in it.

[QBLA]

this looks a lot scarier than Prometheus and don't deny it

 

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It's not scary... It just made me lol a lot... especially the mcdonalds dance sequence!

[danshoebridge]

 

Last Post

 

Ah really? I only just watched it.

 

I think the problem I had is not so much that it was a bad movie, but that it was a possibly great movie. You can see bits of greatness, and it makes some of the bizarrely terrible story decisions show out all the more.

 

I'm sure people have already commented on this, but WHAT THE FUCK was going on with the characters? Maybe it's too much to expect them to act with borderline professionalism, but most of them didn't behave in any way I recognise as human.

 

Most extreme case in point was the boyfriend character - you've dedicated your life to finding something extraterrestrial, after flying god knows how far into space, you're PROVEN RIGHT, there's alien buildings, reanimated heads, new life forms etc. A couple of hours (!) after first discovering this he's having a drunken sulk because he hasn't found any aliens to talk to yet. Was he expecting one to turn up on their arrival with a 'meaning of life' powerpoint presentation? It was a fuckin relief when he got fried. I kinda felt sorry for the actor - he may have just been a pair of walking cheekbones, but no actor on earth could have done anything with that character.

 

All the good interesting stuff - amazing design, Fassbender, giant man-sized facehugger squids (something I never realised I wanted to see until now), counted for much less 'cos you simply couldn't give a fuck about the characters. The only one that seemed to behave according to basic motivation, or even logic, was the android. Possibly also Charlize Theron.

 

It bugs me because with a few little changes (having your characters behave like human beings would be a start), I think it would have rocked my world.

 

Congratulations Prometheus, you turned me into a whining fanboy.

[awepittance]

you've just nailed it, it's not that it was a terrible or generically bad film. It seemed like a film with a lot of good ideas that got steamrolled in the end by studio numbers game, which makes it even more frustrating.

 

I know i've mentioned this before, but we'll just never get a studio film that expensive that has actual balls anymore, its not going to happen. Yeah the studio meddled with Fincher's Alien 3 but compare the size of the testicals on that movie to Prometheus. The main character commits suicide at the end! i mean thats just hardcore, not giving the audience even a glimmer of good feeling at the end. I miss movies like that.

Edited June 15, 2012 by Awepittance

[BCM]

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flol

[Atop]

for Asymm:

[Guest jasondonervan]

flol

[Guest Jimmy McMessageboard]

i dont know, i was just commenting on how the space jockey design is one of the most unimaginative boring and laugh out loud epic Alien designs since Mac and Me, it just looks so fucking terrible jesus christ haha

 

yup they are silly, all gymed out and yet did you see a gym on the planet?

 

 

 

I think the problem I had is not so much that it was a bad movie, but that it was a possibly great movie. You can see bits of greatness, and it makes some of the bizarrely terrible story decisions show out all the more.

 

 

 

totally agree here. the bad parts do not ruin the film for me but they irk. and make you wonder how shit decisions get made and no-one says "hold on that makes no sense"

[Atop]

nice new name Awkward.

[awepittance]

i dont know, i was just commenting on how the space jockey design is one of the most unimaginative boring and laugh out loud epic Alien designs since Mac and Me, it just looks so fucking terrible jesus christ haha

 

yup they are silly, all gymed out and yet did you see a gym on the planet?

 

and sorry to name drop Phantom again, but i dont think ive seen as much of a jarring open scene 'alien' reveal since Phantom when those trade federation chinese accent guys just proliferated the screen.

[QBLA]

for Asymm:

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That was straight up awesome!

[Alcofribas]

asymm that's exactly how i picture you listening to kraftwerk as a kid, yo!

[Guest zaphod]

went to see this for god knows what reason. didn't exactly stick to my previous post about never seeing it. anyway, it was actually much worse than i could have possibly imagined. a failure in every way. terribly written, acted, directed, edited. the stinger at the end with the new xenomorph popping out looked like a shot from avp. actually, i think paul w.s. anderson directed this. what a fucking disaster. i'm done with movies.

[Atop]

haha! liar. you are movies.

[Candiru]

I just realized that the space jockies in the film were played by underrated actor Barry Pepper.

[syd syside]

David was seen consuming food and drinks at the start of the movie, which is amusing because I assume his body doesn't need the nutrient and no one is watching him eating. So I really don't understand why he does it anyway since it doesn't have the purpose of making other humans feel at ease by giving them impression that he's just like them (look at him, he eats like us!)

 

also

 

I like this interpretation of the film, which the infamous SomethingAwful film enthusiast SuperMechaGodzilla posted on their movie board.

 

 

"Well let's get down to brass tacks: this film is hilarious.

 

Guy Pearce in an old man suit appears out of nowhere, says "i want immortality," and then gets bludgeoned to death with Michael Fassbender's still-conscious severed head. This is funny. No, it's the funniest film I've seen in theatres since District 9.

 

Weyland's death is a stock ironic comeuppance played for extreme camp. The film glosses over it because it know that this is a trope. The glib speed with which it dismisses the search for immortality is the same with which it dismisses all the other characters' motivations. Dude say he wants money? DIES. Dude says he wants friendship? DIES. These aren't random deaths. They are equated by this same tone and attitude. Humans are stupid and die because they're stupid.

 

David reads Liz Shaw's dreams and then tells her straight up: you are a shallow character. Her dream looks like a hallmark card. "Your entire motivation is that you're infertile and your dad died of Ebola. I just summarized it in two sentences." The moral: robots don't have souls, and neither do people. But the robot is smarter because he understands this. If you've seen Blade Runner, you know what the warm-toned recording of the dream of a happy family means. It means she's a replicant.

 

"It's a quote from a movie I like."

 

Look at the specific quote from Lawrence of Arabia: 'the trick is not minding that it hurts'. David's character feels everything the humans feel, but he doesn't mind it. He's built up his ironic distance, he constructs his own identity and puts on an incredibly campy performance. The whole film aligns with his POV. As I said in general chat, Prometheus is a masterpiece of straight-faced camp.

 

The very first shot is quoted from 2001 (it's a quote from a movie I like). Prometheus is transparently Scott's grand statement on Science Fiction as a genre. It's not 'hard' science fiction. It's "Science Fiction", deeply embedded in quotation marks. The Prometheus/Pandora myth is like Scifi 101, first day of class. It's THE example of mythological proto-scifi. It's referenced in Frankenstein, the first piece of Science-Fiction literature. Alien references it. The films that Alien references reference it. The films that reference Alien reference it.

 

So the characters fly into space seeking all the answers to their questions, and what do they find? A rational, promethan man locked in an unending struggle against a irrational, pandoric vagina monster. Just slapping against eachother until there is a literal, onscreen shuddering climax and postcoital release. Again: this is funny! You can imagine people staring at this scene and saying "hmm... what does this all mean?" Or, better yet: "how did the squid monster grow so big without a food source?" - just angrily looking for logical clues in this prolonged sequence of a vagina and penis locked in combat.

 

Scott's grand statement on sci-fi is to issue a moratorium. The point of Prometheus is that these stories pretty much always boil down to the same basic archetypal conflict. The humans are painfully mundane - they are all artificial. Only David sees through the guise and understands that he's a character in a movie. This is a loving ode to gleefully bad sci-fi.

 

Important scene: Naomi Rapace looks at some bleeps and bloops on a screen. Two bar graphs allign. "This is it," she cries. "This is everything!" We cut back to the bar graph, and watch it bleep and bloop a while longer. Wow, what an impressive bar graph. Next scene, it turns out she just wants to get fucked.

 

There are two distinct scenes in the film of wacky dames who just need a good deep-dicking. One gets an abortion, the other crushed by a huge black protuberance. A guy smokes pot and then dies instantly. This is Friday the 13th logic. The class conflict in Alien is notably absent. All these people are rich idiots, so we're not supposed to cheer for them. Idris Elba, the closest thing to a 'lower class' character puts on a Southern Accent, says YEEHAW! and rockets his ship into a wall to save the day. Michael Bay would give an approving nod.

 

Why is there a zombie scene? Because it's wonderful slapstick. He gets shot like fifty times and his head gets run over. I couldn't stop laughing. But more importantly, the 'zombie' exists to shows us what Charlie was turning into. For a second, I though it was Charlie, back from the dead. Again, this treats the characters as slightly interchangable.

 

There are at least two shots lifted straight from Luigi Cozzi's (in)famous Italian Alien ripoff Contamination.

 

Prometheus owns. "

 

Edited June 16, 2012 by compson

[syd syside]

Moar sex allegory/jokes:

 

* I learned back in my screen studies class that Alien can be seen as an allegory for fear of the gheys. Seeing men being penetrated by phallus-like object. But back then you can only get away with scenes of a man being attacked before we cut to black/other scenes. So I just can't believe Ridley got away with showing a man taking a figurative phallus object on the mouth this time around in "Prometheus". Twice.

 

* Also if one feels cheeky about it, one can argue that the 2nd man taking phallus object on his mouth can mean something different. The phallus object that penetrates the Engineer's mouth comes from vagina-looking creature. Does that mean that some women harbors the desire to penetrate a man using a strap-on? :P

[Alcofribas]

so, any time something in this ("masterpiece") film is really stupid it was meant to be stupid to like show how stupid stuff is and stuff.

 

and whenever there's like a penisy thing than it's like allegorical and stuff about sex and gays and stuff.

 

basically, all of the trite, asinine b.s. in this movie is like a "quote" from another, much better film or an "allegory," or "archetype" of mankind and his foolish ways. also, phallus.

 

*jots it down*

[syd syside]

so, any time something in this ("masterpiece") film is really stupid it was meant to be stupid to like show how stupid stuff is and stuff.

 

and whenever there's like a penisy thing than it's like allegorical and stuff about sex and gays and stuff.

 

basically, all of the trite, asinine b.s. in this movie is like a "quote" from another, much better film or an "allegory," or "archetype" of mankind and his foolish ways. also, phallus.

 

*jots it down*

 

more to jot down

 

http://metaphilm.com/index.php/detail/alien/

 

These days it’s sometimes hard to talk seriously about the ethics of sex. That’s where the Alien movies come in. Of course, with four directors, figuring out what they’ve got to say is another story.

 

“Within each seed, there is a promise of a flower, and within each death, no matter how small, there is always a new life. A new beginning.” —Dillon, Alien³

 

In 1979, Ridley Scott filled theatres with the most terrifying science fiction film of all time: Alien. At the time, it was hailed as a superb thriller and a genre film light-years ahead of its time. What few realize is that Alien and its three sequels are bearers of serious moral criticisms and explorations in the realm of sexuality. As with any good horror flick, it’s really all about the dangers that come upon those who misuse sex.

 

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)—Feminism and the Return of Priapus

Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)—Gender Reintegration, the Untraditional Family, and Ancient Matriarchy

Alien³ (1992, David Fincher)—Aggressive Patriarchy and Freedom of Choice

Alien: Resurrection (1997, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)—Brave New World

[Hoodie]

Except that a "phallus" penetrates that one guy's mouth in Alien, so it's not like it hasn't been done before.

 

And the alien's head was a giant dick, that too.

 

edit: honestly, give me a movie and i'll show you how it's about sexuality/feminism/capitalism/communism/religion/the soul/whatever you want.

Edited June 16, 2012 by Hoodie

[syd syside]

*jots it down*

[Alcofribas]

quick questions: are there films that cannot be read as sexual allegories? what exactly is gained by pointing to a snake-like thing going down some one's throat and saying it looks like a dick? now that we said something looks like a dick in a film it's a sexual allegory?

Edited June 16, 2012 by Alcofribas

[syd syside]

quick questions: are there films that cannot be read as sexual allegories? what exactly is gained by pointing to a snake-like thing going down some one's throat and saying it looks like a dick? now that we said something looks like a dick in a film it's a sexual allegory?

 

The Nostromo crew is symbolic of a chief sexual movement of the twentieth century,second-wave feminism driven to its ultimate realization. Gender lines are blurred nearly out of distinction—the women look almost as masculine as the men—and the ship’s “Mother” computer acts in a highly un-motherly and un-nurturing manner by sacrificing her “children” to a creature that can make their company very rich. Rather than men and women coming to a midpoint between masculinity and femininity, the men have remained essentially as they were while the women became more like men.

The alien creatures symbolize the feminist stereotype of traditional sexuality, deformed and mutated after two centuries of repression—an ironic twist on feminist rhetoric of “repression.” The aliens embody masculine aggression with the ability and desire to reproduce, and they “impregnate” one of the crew members (a male action) through a form of rape. Ripley accepts the common wisdom of feminist assertiveness in order to destroy the alien.

While the humans are largely androgynous and infertile, the alien species takes pleasure in its reproductive capabilities and uses them to their fullest extent. The humans have long since separated sex from fertility, dividing essential parts of their nature. In the ancient world, male fertility was worshipped in the form of the god Priapus, and sexual pleasure was yet unsevered from the begetting of new generations. In this cold, dark future, humanity has so distanced itself from its natural powers that its repressed fertility has found an incarnation in something horrible and violent. Feminists assert that men have always been afraid of female sexuality, but now Ripley has reason to fear the great fecund sexual power of the male.

But while Ripley’s embrace of feminism gives her the ability to destroy the alien creature, in the end it leaves her as cold and heartless as the cargo ship she has destroyed. As she leaves an account of the incident in the ship’s logs, she does not even weep for those so violently murdered. She shows more compassion for her cat than for her former crewmates. Soon she finds herself longing for another way of making sense of the world—something, perhaps, more traditional.

 

these are just different perspectives on the alien universe, its not necessarily the right perspective but its interesting to think about

[Alcofribas]

HOLY SHIT, check this out:

 

Prometheus, Alien, Aliens

 

 

[syd syside]

*jots it down*