Reply With QuoteOnly bad thing about this movie is that we lost Alien 5 for it. Looks good from the trailer and this prologue mini film is pretty good overall.
yeah EXACTLY. Hey here's a scary space monster that will eat you, but we actually spend loads of time and effort actually making it scary. I think it was mostly luck that idea was so effective twice, or maybe twice and a half in a row. Digging it out with no new ideas except injecting some proper new age bullshit into the mix isn't going to work too well. It's likely this will be bollocks.
Only bad thing about this movie is that we lost Alien 5 for it. Looks good from the trailer and this prologue mini film is pretty good overall.
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In slightly related news: R.I.P. Bill Paxton.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39097834
I don't think that Prometheus has any pretenses about explaining the origins of humanity. The stuff about the Engineers is its premise, not its message. There's plenty to criticise about Prometheus, but you can absolutely tell good stories with its premise.
Game over, man.Originally Posted by N'Al
Pretty shitty news, especially as he seemed to be having something of a career resurgence lately (it was great to see him pop up in Agents of Shield).
The prologue is all about how humans were made in their image. It's an attempt at a creation myth.
But it's an unnecessary premise and it's not carried by the plot. It's just complication without complexity.
They are trying to explain the design decisions of the original movie. But we don't need to know who the giant, dead navigator is in Alien. It's just another technologically advanced victim of a chest bursting space plague.
It's foreshadowing. You can't out tech mother f^#@in' nature.
Prometheus tries to invent relevance where it is not needed using writing that is incompetent.
I think they ought to roll with the origin thing. Forget the colonists and go for what happens to the protagonist of Prometheus when she follows the trail back to the home planet of our creators. Prometheus was no Alien but done well the sequel to it could be fantastic. Meeting our creator? The one who sees us as so inferior? The one who needs a lesson from the pupil? A morality play is a good thing in the right hands.
I wish they had a reboot on Alien 3. Killing off Newt so a dull story of prisoner mistrust and very little redemption could take place was stupid. Just Newt being alive would enhance the story line. It took an idiot not to see that.
That's what Alien 5 was going to be about. It wasn't going to be called Alien 5, but I've forgotten the name it was going to have.
Was going to bypass Alien 3 onwards and go in a different direction with Michael Biehen + Newt being in the cast + Sigorney Weaver.
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@Nicker: Obviously the beginning of the film is a creation myth, but I'm sure Scott never looked at the film as anything other than fiction, and as such, the problem of Prometheus IMO isn't the premise, it's the execution. It's the uncharacteristically stupid protagonists, it's the silly ways of dispatching characters. The film doesn't cohere. The premise of mankind meetings its creator, and guess what? It turns out they hate our guts! There's potential in that, but that potential was squandered by a script that at the very best should've been a first draft.
Also, and this is an example of the stupidity of the script, for all the parallels to Alien, it turns out that neither the ship nor the Engineer in question are actually the ones found in Alien, because it's a whole different planet that just happens to have a similar but not identical name. Unless they somehow reverse-engineer (ha!) that whole thing, which wouldn't make it less stupid, though.
It takes a writer. It always does. There is absolutely no fucking substitute for writing. It takes somebody who loves the genre. Beyond that it takes somebody who loves mankind. Sure there are writers who hate mankind who write well like Updike seems to but not for science fiction or even movies in general. There is no heart without that love. Without heart that fight to the death struggle is pointless. Without heart a win is meaningless even. Intelligence is even a poor substitute. That drive to survive which has bought us our current place is no small thing. It did not bring a single person here. It brought us all here, those of us not giving the ultimate sacrifice. And when combined with intelligence, as science fiction often does, it is a wonder to behold.
I would go see that Alien 5.
I agree, Thirith. It was a squandered opportunity to either make a simple monster movie or a deep dive into the meaning of life, the nature of courage, a metaphor for growing up... It managed to miss all marks by aiming perfectly between them.
If had started from a place of calm, like the ISS or a moon mission, staffed by stable, hand picked professionals, informed by well rehearsed procedures - then the descent into chaos would be a journey. Instead it went from dumb to dumber.
I thought it would be tying up story threads introduced in Alien. Instead it starts a whole new narrative.
And I don't think this new addition is going to fix those problems. Not judging by the writing thus far especially.
Good riddance to any Prometheus sequels. The idea that humans could create a film about an advanced interstellar civilisation was damned from the start.
We cannot even make films of past human cultures that aren't reflective of our contemporary selves. Not even 100 years ago in the same country. That's how narrow our scope is.
If I had the resources, I'd make a movie about silicate aliens who communicate through microwave packetbursts that alter the recipient's molecular makeup as part of the message. It'd also have a scene with spontaneously thawing frozen pasta, because we've got to have something to relate to.
Why is this necessarily a bad thing, though? What you've written there fits Shakespeare's plays as well - he *always* looked at other cultures in order to say something about his own - and they're pretty okay, all in all.
Good Scifi is always a mirror. That's basically its function.
Promethius wasn't doing that either for what it's worth.
I wish there were more authentic explorations of really foreign cultures though, including past and future ones. It's not written in stone they have to be a mirror, and I usually take a movie alienating its audience as a positive sign that it's really breaking into new territory and consciousness expanding.
Shakespeare's approach to other cultures is understandable in its historical and social context but it's actually not okay by today's standards.
Given an authentic account from a different culture I can usually make the connection to my life myself. I dislike the idea that it should be a message by the director.
That's a bit simplified. It's usually an extrapolation that uses current events as a start and creates a warning where they may lead. And if you went and made a film about an alien civilisation that lost its social cohesion because its biological evolution cannot keep up with its technical advancement - please do that!
But an advanced civilisation is by definition impossible to portray for us, so the pretence that it's about anything but ourselves (and the director's message) will wear very thin and the chance for preachy kitsch extremely high. Like Avatar but worse. I have no curiosity for that.
I'm not sure how advanced civilisations are impossible by definition to portray. Arthur C. Clarke tried to do that with the Rama sequels; I can't say that he succeeded exactly, but the fact that we don't know of any advanced civilisations through experience doesn't mean we can't extrapolate what they may appear to be like. Everything we define and shape is going to be from humanity's experiential perspective, obviously -- we're self-aware to various faults, and that's where the mirror comes in. Do you mean that we can't do truly alien perspectives because we're not alien ourselves?
New trailer!
It looks pretty.
Looks like they ditched almost all of Prometheus for a straight-on Alien story, which is actually a very decent way to move forward if done right.
Hrm. Still not convinced.
It wasn't scary in the slightest. Not sure whether that is because the Alien has now become so ubiquitous in pop culture you need to do something really different - not sure Aliens in a Wheat Field is that.
Ridley, prove me wrong!
True, I doubt it's going to be a good straight horror movie, not least because there's no haunted house in space vibe going on. But a decent sci-fi/horror genre entry -- well, we'll see.
How bad is that for spoilers? Is it the film in miniature, like the prometheus trailer?
"Aliens in a Wheat Field" reminds me of the finale of the scrapped Vincent Ward script of Alien 3. Wonder if they took inspiration from that when making this new film.
Last edited by <Username>; 9th Mar 2017 at 04:42.
We have arrived at our new home which apparently hasn't had any remote surveying done on it. Everybody off the ship without any environment suits. Let's see of there are any toxic or infectious agents the good old fashion way. But let's bring the tiny-wheeled Fisher-Price solar powered wagon along, just in case we need to transport any infected people back to our secure refuge. Should we close the door behind us? Naw!...
The procedurals.... they hurt my head.
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