Alien: Covenant Discussion

[T Dog]

There's a popular theory that the Engineers are emulating the Jockey's and not actually them.

Maybe, it wouldn't surprise me if they retcon the retcon. Jon Spaights also talked about an idea he had for grand/elder engineers which I assume would be the similar to the Jockey from the original.

[whiterabbit]

There's a popular theory that the Engineers are emulating the Jockey's and not actually them.

Maybe, it wouldn't surprise me if they retcon the retcon. Jon Spaights also talked about an idea he had for grand/elder engineers which I assume would be the similar to the Jockey from the original.

The vibe that I got from Prometheus was that the engineers were mimicking another race. I know that Ridley Scott said "what's inside of the suit", that it's a suit, however what if he's just throwing us off or hell he could literally change his mind at this point? The mechanical vs biomechanical differences in the ships and "suits" are just too huge. Plus the alien in the above murals reminds me of angles and demons. The entire alter and deacon mural. The black liquids properties. That green crystal or seedling/spore. The Engineer drinking the stuff on any planet USA and how the entire movie was edited. I think the edited out scenes showed us where they originally planed this movie to go but didn't. So I think it is left wide open. Resurrecting the truly alien Space Jockey's is definitively doable and I would not be surprised if they did it.

Plus the engineers didn't steal fire from the Gods to give man, they stole it for themselves and gods punishment was to wipe them out. It was probably the alien(aka fire) that was stolen and through experimentation they harnessed it's demonic qualities. The footage cut from the opening scenes in Prometheus was done because it showed it as a sacrifice, where as what we got in Prometheus was just another experimentation.

Yea I think there could literally be something huge that they are drawing that black goo from. That the alien isn't a mere creation.

[D. Compton Ambrose]

I feel something of that nature would be simply too confusing for a general audience. That's a fairly subtle thing that only long time fans are going to really care about I think. Joe Schmoe in 2015 probably saw Alien or Prometheus once or twice and has no real firm grasp of the fundamental details being so different.

They had a goal in mind with Prometheus, retcon the ideas from Alien, and in some sense backfired. Now the best thing they can really do, honestly, is just own it.

I wouldn't even mind the idea of the Engineers being statue-esque human-esque if they weren't implicitly trying to say they A. Made us, B. Were genetically connected to us.

The former annoys me because it's simply not true. It rings hollow. The scenario is so highly implausible for a number of reasons that it distracts from what Ridley's other two Science Fiction films did so damn well: The grounded realism. It's one of the saving graces of the Alien redrafts that they got rid of, as the producers said, "Von Daniken bullsh*t." All that ever does is drag the quality of a Science Fiction piece down, and the only time i've ever really seen it work out okay was Stargate, but that series was tying into mythology and a lighter action-adventure style. The Alien films, were at least, striving for some kind of a grounded reality. A believably. Verisimilitude. 

I wish Scott would take some inspiration from the images of JPL and NASA, from Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" and like the rest of Hollywood, get the needed wake up call that Earth is a spec, amidst a dozen other specs, in a corner of the galaxy that is filled with millions of specs. We're tiny. Not everything relates to our blue ball, nor should it, and half the fun of Alien and Predator is the mystique, the mystery, the intrigue. How the Alien relates to humanity has nothing to do with literal relation. Quite the opposite, what makes it so damn interesting is that we can see some connections to things on Earth in terms of a reproductive cycle that makes plausible sense, but everything else about the creature is different, Alien, to us.

The same goes for the Jockey. But that kind of movie's time has come and gone.

My "Prometheus" would have been a very different movie. It wouldn't be distracted with answering some lofty pretentious question like "Where do we come from?" Because that's a question that the human race in the 21st Century should already more or less generally understand. We came from the by-product of billions of years of evolution on a planet that went through some incredibly dramatic and cataclysmic events to get where it is. We spent the majority of our early evolution starving, scared, and confused.

Though I will say Covenant seems to be borrowing one idea for what my "Alien Prequel" story would have been. Which would have been drawing from history a little bit. Once space travel had been "perfected" by Weyland/Yutani, ships were being churned out to send colonists to the nearest charted stars where habitable and semi habitable worlds were scouted. One ship would be off to a planet, maybe even an exo-planet, with remarkably similar conditions to Earth. Upon arriving they'd find that something evil lurked beneath the surface of an ancient jungle, and instead of the "advanced" settlers bringing a disease to an indigenous people, the indigenous people would introduce the settler's to a disease. The Alien, or a variation.(I always hoped if they did an Alien prequel/spin off, that they might use the winged beast that Giger had drawn as a basis. That thing would be friggin' terrifying if executed right.). The film would end telling us that the events and data had been logged, recorded, received by Weyland-Yutani and archived. Giving us an idea of where they first learned about the alien life form and it's potential as a bio-weapon. Something semi-concrete but not directly showing us "how the Derelict crashed" or anything of that sort.


That's just me, though...

I think it can be that way again. As long as Ridley doesn't show too much of the Xenomorph, and doesn't center the plot around its origins too much and saves it for a latter installment, I think Neill Blomkamp's film (with the proper writer and screenplay, of course) can be the saving grace the saga needs. Ridley is just going to have to step back and let someone else take center-stage.