rigorousintuition.ca

...here we go again...

Katherine Waterston is awesome but... meh. Oh yeah, and Michael Fassbender at least tries.

Simulist » Tue Jun 19, 2012 2:23 pm wrote:

brekin wrote:

It's interesting to compare the Prometheus take on the Engineers with Nazi Aryan mythology exemplified by Kossinna.

Yes, and one of the things that's interesting is that if these Aryans were supposed to be such "supermen," then why were they always depicted as having such little dicks?

I mean, if you can't even have a big dick in YOUR OWN mythology... well, let's just say that there might have been some overcompensating going on in other pursuits.

In ancient Greece, a big penis was considered indecorous. A curse on an enemy might go, "May your son be born with a large penis!"

Hitler believed the Greeks were Germans who'd had the good sense to move to a warmer climate, that only Germans could have created such a civilization.


That's all I got.

I haven't seen Prometheus.

semper occultus » Thu Mar 02, 2017 4:43 am wrote:...here we go again...

God, that looks boring. Like that show Thirtysomething meets Aliens.

At least Damon Lindelof is out of the picture, so hopefully it will be a reasonably entertaining scifi/horror flick, but after the utter shit that was Prometheus (Elvis, if you do watch it I recommend doing it as a drinking game. Take a drink every time one of the crew does something stupid, and have an ambulance on standby) I'm not holding my breath, and the trailer doesn't exactly help.

Oh, and of course they have shelved Neill Blomkamp's Alien movie, the one with reasonable odds of actually being good (a sequel to Aliens with Ripley, Newt and Hicks, with Alien3 and Resurrection never happening).

[quote]Von Däniken's theories have been thoroughly debunked[/quote

Okay, perhaps they have. Or maybe we still don't have enough information about the ancient past to know more of the truth. The photos which became famous after his book was published are fact. the strange "runways" and ancient landscaped artifacts are real. Maybe these things created long ago were just done for fun. ??? ???

DrEvil » Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:17 pm wrote:At least Damon Lindelof is out of the picture, so hopefully it will be a reasonably entertaining scifi/horror flick, but after the utter shit that was Prometheus (Elvis, if you do watch it I recommend doing it as a drinking game. Take a drink every time one of the crew does something stupid, and have an ambulance on standby) I'm not holding my breath, and the trailer doesn't exactly help.

Oh, and of course they have shelved Neill Blomkamp's Alien movie, the one with reasonable odds of actually being good (a sequel to Aliens with Ripley, Newt and Hicks, with Alien3 and Resurrection never happening).

I might like a sequel to Alien (singular) with none of the subsequent movies ever happening. The popular 2-hour advertisement for the Marines, Aliens was the disaster already. Alien 3 was a bold attempt to erase it. Everything else has been shite. Prometheus is like a white supremacist fantasy, with the beginning of the giant white man alien seeding life on earth. Gross!

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And Prometheus had Michael Fassbender propositioning "fingering" to himself as well as a terrifyingly ridiculous bit with a newborn alien. The rest of it was forgettable, disposable garbage. All infused with Ridley Scott's conviction that he is saying Very Importat Philosophical Things About Being Human.

JackRiddler » Sun Mar 03, 2019 9:31 pm wrote:

DrEvil » Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:17 pm wrote:At least Damon Lindelof is out of the picture, so hopefully it will be a reasonably entertaining scifi/horror flick, but after the utter shit that was Prometheus (Elvis, if you do watch it I recommend doing it as a drinking game. Take a drink every time one of the crew does something stupid, and have an ambulance on standby) I'm not holding my breath, and the trailer doesn't exactly help.

Oh, and of course they have shelved Neill Blomkamp's Alien movie, the one with reasonable odds of actually being good (a sequel to Aliens with Ripley, Newt and Hicks, with Alien3 and Resurrection never happening).

I might like a sequel to Alien (singular) with none of the subsequent movies ever happening. The popular 2-hour advertisement for the Marines, Aliens was the disaster already. Alien 3 was a bold attempt to erase it. Everything else has been shite. Prometheus is like a white supremacist fantasy, with the beginning of the giant white man alien seeding life on earth. Gross!

.

As it happened, and I think this story is up on about page 3 of this thread, I was late to the theater, and missed only the part about how White Gods from Space Created YOU. Since what I saw felt like the start, I didn't think I'd missed anything, and only saw the first bit later on TV. Anyway, this made it a lot more entertaining, and when they started doing nothing but stupid things (like just landing and walking outside in the first place, instead of orbiting and studying for a while), it was more fun than most horror movies. I was sad about Charlize not making it at the very end. I like her.

Karmamatterz » Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:13 am wrote:

Looks 100 percent to me like some group very ambitiously laid out the plan for a city, including a charming park at the bottom of this picture, with the more densely streeted downtown just above that. Guess where the parade route is (easy), guess where the palaces would go (several possibilities). And then it was never started. Maybe they were never going to build it unless the gods would zap it into existence once the plan had been offered. "If you build it, they will come." Then, after the gods did not respond, they had a revolution that massacred the planners. Or less fancifully, maybe a plague got them. I mean, you had cathedrals in Europe that had to suspend building for like 150 years at one or another point because of other shit that happened. (This actually happened with the Kölner Dom.) But nothing is 100 percent, so I could be full of bullshit. What's the estimate on how many of these people there were, anyway? Do the main thoroughfares point toward things you would want to connect, like water or farmland, or towns or harbors?

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JackRiddler » Sun Mar 03, 2019 8:31 pm wrote:

DrEvil » Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:17 pm wrote:At least Damon Lindelof is out of the picture, so hopefully it will be a reasonably entertaining scifi/horror flick, but after the utter shit that was Prometheus (Elvis, if you do watch it I recommend doing it as a drinking game. Take a drink every time one of the crew does something stupid, and have an ambulance on standby) I'm not holding my breath, and the trailer doesn't exactly help.

Oh, and of course they have shelved Neill Blomkamp's Alien movie, the one with reasonable odds of actually being good (a sequel to Aliens with Ripley, Newt and Hicks, with Alien3 and Resurrection never happening).

I might like a sequel to Alien (singular) with none of the subsequent movies ever happening. The popular 2-hour advertisement for the Marines, Aliens was the disaster already. Alien 3 was a bold attempt to erase it. Everything else has been shite. Prometheus is like a white supremacist fantasy, with the beginning of the giant white man alien seeding life on earth. Gross!
.

You take that back! Aliens is one of the finest pieces of action/horror ever made.

I'm not sure I would call it an advertisement for the marines either. Their commander is incompetent and gets half the squad killed right off the bat, and the rest are either panicking or being so macho it hurts. The actual heroes are a civilian woman and an android incapable of doing violence. The one sympathetic marine spends the last part of the movie unconscious while Ripley saves the day.

I also like Alien 3, but man is it bleak, and not nearly as good as the first two. The rest is shit, especially Prometheus.

There's also Alien: Isolation, the only good Alien game, which has been turned into a digital series that uses the game's cut-scenes plus additional content to tell the story of Ripley's daughter (spoiler: there's an alien). All the episodes are up on Youtube:

Episode 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wafu9S8Mjas

Episodes 2 - 7:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEg7YizUCUs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_zwEUF7cY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wScmgQl3284
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNkPT3d8B5A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kFDbMhk_-w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZPCn81bdLE

I haven't watched it yet so I have no idea if it's any good, but I've played parts of the game which is excellent and scary as eff.

My first reaction to watching Alien Covenant was disappointment. "David created the Xenomorph? Really?!?" I thought it sucked (forgive my glibness). I was really hoping for some reveal about how and why the Engineers created the Xenomorphs. Bummer.

I watched the movie with commentary and Ridley talks about the beginning, finding the engineer ship, showing that it crash landed on the side of the mountain. But then we have a sequence where David arrives smoothly. releasing the black virus on the engineer planet. How did the crash happen? Did David crash after arriving? He can pilot the thing, but not land it? In the commentary, Ridley reveals the arrival sequence was thought up on-set during filming, it wasn't part of the original script. Huge plot hole revealed, I thought.

I recently watched Alien Covenant again and was mildly entertained (mildly as in it beats looking at a wall for two hours), but it's not a very good movie. The crew aren't as painfully stupid and incompetent as the people in Prometheus, but it still has David spouting nonsense and it's still a sequel to Prometheus which completely wrecked the Alien mythology by stripping away all the mystery of the original. This might be personal taste, but the aliens don't need a back story, and the dead pilot really doesn't need to be an angry member of the Blue Man Group.

I didn’t like PROMETHEUS (the characters weren’t engaging; too cerebral, imo), haven't seen Alien Covenant , but will never forget viewing the original, much more atmospheric Alien (40 years ago!) for the first time at the Uptown Theater in Washington. Their wide, curved screen with the long opening credits, slowly revealing the title, set the stage for the great cinematic roller-coaster-ride it became by combining sci-fi with what seemed like real life. I don’t remember as much of the alien’s scenes as of the humans; their camaraderie sharing meals; the glittering gold chamber where Dallas communicates with ‘Mother’; the various tensions (class, sexual, sexist, competitive, hierarchical?) between crew members; the workers’ concerns about possibly forfeiting their financial shares, etc.. (My only complaint at the time was that Tom Skerritt exited the film too soon.)

One scene I esp. found esp. memorable was w/ Harry Dean Stanton searching for the cat......the hanging chains jingling like wind chimes; water from above spattering like rain on him and his hat. The sounds alone in the first minute of that scene were elegant, classy touches: (From the ‘Director’s Cut’)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pFkGFIfK8A