Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant – Contemporary Horror of AI (2020)
(ejumpcut.org)63 points by measurablefunc 2 days ago
63 points by measurablefunc 2 days ago
Crazy how he turned out to be the villain of the Alien franchise too.
Private Hudson arc is the main show -
"I'm ready, man. Check it out. I am the ultimate badass. State of the badass art. You do not want to fuck with me"
"Well, that's great. That's just fuckin' great, man! Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now, man!"
"That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over!"
"What do you mean they cut the power? How could they cut the power, man? They're animals man!"
"They're coming outta the walls! They're coming outta the goddamn walls! Let's book!"
Thats from "Aliens", right? Not the movies in the title. As a sibling comment says, RIP Bill Paxton. Really enjoyed the similar army grunt stick from him in "Edge of Tomorrow".
Very true. Hudson the character is deeper than what you see at first glance - always complaining, but apparently very competent and (barely) keeping it together.
Theres an abridged fan version of the chinese 3 body series uploaded for free online, its in 3 movie length installments.
Theres also Ethernaut, an Argentinian series that I think just has one series so far. People enjoy it, I didn't find it that interesting til the end. I just really dislike stories stretched thin over dozens of hours. I prefer Xfiles, Outer Limits, or aimple movies, that sort of scifi.
Not a movie, but I have been really enjoying Foundation. High production values and good actors. I like the story in the series, but I haven’t read the books.
Not an action movie, but I enjoyed The Pod Generation sci fi flick a lot a year or two back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pod_Generation
> A long Prometheus article without even mentioning that's basically a Scientology ad? Ridicolous
How is it a scientology ad? Not being facetious, I really want to know.
Alien: Earth was the dumbest addition to the franchise. Hybrid synths that can “talk” to the aliens… pffft. Off the rails.
The last few films were of similar ilk. Prometheus started it with their David narrative. Just terrible writing.
> Alien: Earth was the dumbest addition to the franchise. Hybrid synths that can “talk” to the aliens… pffft. Off the rails.
It started off so well. The first few episodes were good/interesting/promising and the series seemed destined for greatness ( if they could stick the landing ). Unfortunately, it fizzled out in the latter half of the series as they turned the xenomorph into a silly pet.
Being a good fiction consumer requires offering the benefit of the doubt up to a reasonable/personal limit of suspension of disbelief. The missing piece with that show is inconsistent and shallow character development. Lost (prior to the later season/s) is probably one of the better examples. It's still watchable but it could be better. Maybe they'll sort it out.
That's the thing, though. Gigantic spaceships, alien panspermia, stasis pods, human-passing androids, underground alien bases, convenient maps in caves. All that disbelief can be suspended.
A handpicked team of professional astronauts on an interstellar mission being a bunch of complete incompetents over and over again for plot convenience is the real headscratcher that eventually makes it feel like the plot is an afterthought and makes you disengage from the film as a story rather then just pretty pictures.
It's a pattern you see a lot especially in sci-fi and action, and it's annoying because it's not like you couldn't have the glossy visuals or set-pieces if you also had coherent plots.
Agreed. Necessary suspension of belief vs unnecessary and contradictory.
For an in-depth list for 'Prometheus': "Red Letter Media talks about Prometheus" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x1YuvUQFJ0]. (To what extent were those due to Lindelof, not Scott?)
By this point, 'professional astronauts' is just another term for 'space truckers'. The film makers put in a lot of effort to point that out. Switch that in your head and it makes more sense. They have done so many routine missions, and it's all so routine, that they aren't prepared for non-routine. The whole structure of missions leaves the non-routine handling to synthetics. These are like key components of this franchise what the story it's trying to tell.
We reached the stars, but became alienated from both exploration and ethics. We lost the wonder and lost control of our fate. Life has become routine labor, corporate control, and synthetic oversight that isn't looking out for our best wishes even though we assume it is.
Exactly. If human characters don't react like real humans would, then that is much harder to 'justify' or 'suspend belief' about.
Lets take our helmets off in a unknown hostile enivroment?
Lets play with giant worms with teeth, as if in real life those things wouldn't scare the crap out of you even if they weren't alien.
Id argue that being a good fiction consumer is not letting a brand or franchise become your identity and know when to drop something. I saw the phantom menace when I was 12 and hated it. I was a massive Star Wars fan. I've seen nothing from Star Wars since and as far as I can tell I've missed nothing of value over 25 years. Terminator 3, Prometheus, Ghostbusters reboot, many more. We are not obliged to consume garbage.
> I saw the phantom menace when I was 12 and hated it. I was a massive Star Wars fan. I've seen nothing from Star Wars since
Too bad; after seeing the recent Disney mary-sue-iffied, everyone-carries-the-stupid-ball, hey-look-new-big-bad-with-no-explanation-of-where-he-came-from movies, my estimation of the prequels went up by a considerable amount.
In light of the newer movies, those prequels are actually very very good; a very mature take that approached mature themes ("So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause", and many more I can't think off right now).
Maybe your 12yo mind was not sufficiently mature enough[1], but your middle-aged mind might be - you should seem them again.
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[1] Hell, I saw them in my mid-20s, and even then I was not mature enough to appreciate the subtext and themes. When I saw them again recently in my mid-40s, I was much more aware of things in the world, especially how impressionable Annakin was, because now that I am older I see how actual adults are easily impressionable at that age (mid-20s).
What if the Prequels were movies with the same actors, acting in the same way, to the same script, but had nothing to do with Star Wars? Would you still think they were full of mature themes, or that it's all a bunch of half-arsed tropes that panders to the lowest common denominator[1]?
_____________
[1] Swordfights! Intrigue! Romance! Cute robots! Cool races! Only You Can Save the World!
>Being a good fiction consumer requires offering the benefit of the doubt up to a reasonable/personal limit of suspension of disbelief.
Yup, here for it.
>The missing piece with that show is inconsistent and shallow character development.
To say the least. The whole series reeks of a movie stretched out to a series for TV. And the ship landing in the city? Right, how convenient… it’s just terrible writing. Made for teens so they can #metoo when we talk about how utterly terrifying that universe is.
Best creators are a little mad. Their best work is usually early work when their madness is tempered by limitations and other people around them.
But when success comes they become too big, rich and influential and their next movies are pretty much whatever they want them to be. And they are crap, because pinch of salt of their madness becomes whole dish.
It happened with Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Neill Blomkamp, probably some others.
It's also said that a director makes the same movie for entirety of their career. It's very visible in case of Ridley Scott. His later movies hit again and again the same perverse things that he consistently finds exciting.
I know this sentiment but for me it does not apply to Scott. He made some great movies later in his career; Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, Prometheus and The Martian are all masterpieces imo. The Last Duel was also pretty good
Sci-fi is a manifestation of society's diffuse subconscious in mostly semi-lucid nightmares.
It’s down for me right now. See https://web.archive.org/web/20251012183954/https://www.ejump...
So much wasted potential. I'll take any article or theory to retcon the movies into something that makes sense.
"Could you substantiate that opinion?" is a better way to generate discussion.
(and FrustratedMonky's comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45561992] is useful discussion.)
Not every comment need be about a fanatical robotic optimization for "relevance". Half the interesting on this site would disappear otherwise, you realize? Besides, what's wrong with mentioning how crappy these movies are (they really do suck) in a post that specifically names them?
> Besides, what's wrong with mentioning how crappy these movies are (they really do suck) in a post that specifically names them?
Assuming you're talking about Prometheus and Covenant, I enjoyed them. Not quite as good as the first (1979) or the second (1986), but I did indeed enjoy the last two.
It's the Alien:Earth series that I stopped watching after 3 or 4 episodes. I did not enjoy that one bit.
Alien Romulus was also not enjoyable; there was no progression of the stories in the universe. At least Prometheus and Covenant attempted expanding the original story. A:E and A:R didn't even bother - with very few changes, those both could be about any alien-filled universe, not specifically about the one started with Alien(1979).
I'm curious what didn't work for you about those movies?
Just spewing “media x is bad” without any context or explanation is just low effort and low quality discussion. At best it gets ignored, at worst you start a flame war
> Ripley defeat the alien queen
What is it with "queens" in SF ? Off to a rant :)
IMO, adding a queen to the Borg destroyed the Borg. I was really intrigued by the Borg as presented in their first appearance. If you remember, they had a nursery with Baby Borg and a collective conscience, no individuality. Then came the queen, the ruler of all with some people having a "higher rank". Totally made the Borg irrelevant to me.
There was a TV show about an invasion of Earth, it went along fine until the last season, a queen was added, I could tell it was rushed and doing that changed its direction.
Same can be said about Independence Day, even though I did not like the queen addition, it did not take away from the whole movie and in a way a "queen" in that context made a bit of sense. The only thing is, if the Queen was killed, wouldn't that end these Aliens ? To me, a queen should not leave the home planet.
Alien movies were too much for me, things popping out of someone's belly would be a "close my eyes" type scene. But I really liked Promentheus. I did not realize until much later that was a prequel to Alien :) And I still think it is a good movie.
>What is it with "queens" in SF
Insects. Queen bees, queen ants, queen termites. Feels nice an icky to humans.
Now, SF mostly gets this wrong as isn't that much of a leader, more of a 'starter' and many species have multiple queens and when one gets killed another is promoted from larva. This and the vast majority of behaviors are self organizing, and not ones from a leadership position.
> IMO, adding a queen to the Borg destroyed the Borg.
Having more than one episode about the Borg destroyed the Borg.
1st appearance: there are some things out there that human civilization isn't ready for. You wanna see an example? You really wanna see? Okay, you asked for it. OMG it's the Borg!
2nd through Nth appearance: Demystifying Borg Internal APIs
Wasnt the queen introduced in the sequel to Independence Day? The leaat of the films troubles. This is the worst thing I've ever seen, without hyperbole. I was convinced that it was an earpy attempt by AI to create something resembling a movie. I felt physically ill watching it.
Well in the case of the first Alien movie, the whole thing is a left-then-right metaphor about conception, birth, motherhood, and gender roles in biology. If you were alive when it originally came out you wouldn’t know that Ripley is the true lead of the film (a now commonly known fact about the franchise). This idea plays off of scifi with male leads. The film then does A LOT to foreshadow Ripley as the lead and mother figure. So in the case of Alien it was a statement on traditional science fiction films. The Queen was added later in the sequels on an evolution of the birth theme.
A queen in Alien universe doesn’t operate like ants do. She is just the largest most vicious female amongst the brood.
> If you were alive when it originally came out you wouldn’t know that Ripley is the true lead of the film
?
I think they meant "wouldn't have known." The ensemble cast didn't really give contemporary viewers purchase on who would ultimately be the one to survive by the end of the film. Nowadays, many viewers go into the movie already knowing that Ripley will be the one to make it through, which makes it easy to see her as "the main character."
Ripley being the survivor was a rug pull on the audience's expectations. Tom Skerritt (Dallas) was a well-known actor at the time, and would have been assumed to have been the default lead.
Queen in the Alien universe is very similar to ants - she creates the eggs from which the facehuggers hatch. She is maybe much more dangerous than the ant queen but so are the “ants”
> adding a queen to the Borg destroyed the Borg
Agreed. The Borg used to be scary because they seemed unbeatable. They were like grey goo that could adapt to whatever you threw at them.[1]
Having a queen gives them a single point of failure. Suddenly they are a lot less scary.
[1] I kind of felt the same way about the Boogieman from Ghost Busters when I was a kid. Teleports between closets and the regular ghost trap doodad doesn't work on him! Shit!
TIL: Ridley (one of the main alien villains, and sometimes a final boss) from the Nintendo video game franchise, Metroid (that originated in 1986), was named after Ridley Scott.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_(Metroid)