Are You Happy With The Engineers?

[Immortan Jonesy]

Are you happy with the Engineers? if no..what would you change?

[Xenomrph]

I can live with the Engineers so long as the Space Jockeys get brought back as a separate species, but I wouldn't be heartbroken if they got erased entirely.

The Engineers are a neat idea..... for a non-Alien movie. Used in an original sci-fi story they've got a ton of potential. Used the way they were in 'Prometheus', they actively undermined one of the most fascinating things about 'Alien'.

[Nightmare Asylum]

I'm indifferent, if that makes sense. I really like/appreciate what Prometheus set out to do, and I love the original incomprehensible being in Alien. Each take fits the particular story being told well enough that I don't really care about continuity discrepancies between the films when I'm watching them, despite (obviously) recognizing that there is a retcon in intentions behind the Engineer. I will say, I think that the aesthetic of the Engineer slots into the Alien universe very nicely.

If they ever decided to separate the species then sure, whatever. But as it stands I've made my peace with them being one and the same.

[Evanus]

I like them. I think they're a pretty good addition to the franchise, and I hope we get more of them. I wish they'd be bigger though.

[Nightmare Asylum]

Bigger Engineers:

[j0nesy]

i really like the engineers, both their look and what we have gleemed from the limited knowledge we have of their existence

having said that, i really hope it turns out that the space jockey is a different race

[Immortan Jonesy]

While I love eldritch horror, I can deal with them being the same as the pilot of the Derelict. However I wish they were bigger. I know that an oversized design could make them look ridiculous or unrealistic, but I think the Engineers are too small for my taste.

On the other hand, I would have liked them to be more "angelic" in appearance: neither male nor female, but something in between.



I know you guys are laughing now and thinking I want giant albino transsexuals. 

But no. I just don't like the Doctor Manhattan vibe. I still dig the ancient greek vibe in their faces though. I am also interested in the idea of ​​hermaphrodite beings who have lost the ability to reproduce by sexual means, with the creation of mankind as an attempt to explore that lost world of their biology. I can portrait in my mind these alternative Engineers. Sexless beings who worship the Alien because the sexual nature of the aforementioned creature.

Bigger Engineers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ruuTs134k

Such a great commercial. I had forgotten the Moebius imagery. 

[Nightmare Asylum]

If bigger versions of the Engineers interest you (in a super interesting art style) check out some of this artist's work on Twitter. Here's one thread of a sort of web comic featuring that concept, and if you go through his page you'll find tons of other great Alien/Engineer related stuff. The artist actually used to be a member here ages ago using the name "Spaghetti" and even back then I loved his work, so it was incredibly cool when I started seeing that instantly recognizably style pop up on my Twitter feed occasionally.

https://twitter.com/Carapace777/status/1254431682607767560

[SM]

Spaghetti's stuff is great.

[Corporal Hicks]

Aesthetically speaking I love the Engineers (from Prometheus, definitely). I thought the stuff with the Last Engineer was f**king creepy! Those black eyes. It actually looked scary! I also like a lot of the surrounding themes with creation and death. I think that's genuinely interesting, and another one of the reasons I like the David aspects of Covenant because I love his own frustration at the lack of procreation.

But I don't dig them as a reinvention of the Space Jockeys. I'm one of those that likes to think the Engineers are just emulating certain aspects of the Space Jockey, including some of their technology.

[The Necronoir]

I didn't respond to the poll, because all the options are skewed toward some level of dissatisfaction, which I don't feel at all.

To me, they were the best part of Prometheus, and I would have preferred it focused more on them than the uninspired monster designs. They managed to encapsulate a sense of majesty and omnipotence, while still remaining eerie and disconcerting. I'm not bothered enough by the apparent size discrepancies to want to change that either, and thought the more mechanical portrayal of their suits and pilot chair were interesting.

That said, I wasn't such a fan of the more overtly human ones we saw in the Covenant flashbacks, if indeed they were the same race. While I don't think the "space jockeys" need to be a separate species, I would like to see future iterations focus on pushing the designs toward the more biological end of the spectrum. Thematically it could deal with a species dabbling too far in genetic engineering, to the point that they began to devolve into more nightmarish, monstrous forms, perhaps merging irreversibly with their technology (giving us the OG pilot and its ilk).

[Nightmare Asylum]

That said, I wasn't such a fan of the more humanoid ones we saw in the Covenant flashbacks, if indeed they were the same race. While I don't think the "space jockeys" need to be a separate species

To be honest, when I first saw that scene my initial thought was that that "Paradise" was another world that the Engineers had seeded, and that those beings were another one of their creations, like us.

[The Necronoir]

That said, I wasn't such a fan of the more humanoid ones we saw in the Covenant flashbacks, if indeed they were the same race. While I don't think the "space jockeys" need to be a separate species

To be honest, when I first saw that scene my initial thought was that that "Paradise" was another world that the Engineers had seeded, and that those beings were another one of their creations, like us.

That's a definite possibility, and a valid interpretation. There is some ambiguity about that though, as the specimens we see in David's workshop seem to bear more resemblance to the ones from Prometheus in terms of size and appearance. If they are just another "seeded" species, they seem to have had a level of familiarity and contact with their creators that humankind didn't receive.

In any case, I didn't find anything particularly inspired about their design, and I'd much rather see a full-blown Gigeresque biomechanical civilisation than the "space Romans" we saw.

[irn]

I've said it many times on this forum before that I really don't like the Engineers concept. To me it completely undermined what made Alien 'alien' and brought in silly fantasy elements to a well grounded, serious sci-fi franchise. I believe it has done so much damage to the series that it may be impossible to bring it back.

As Xenomrph said above, it would have been an interesting idea to work with if it had been its own thing in a film totally unconnected to the Alien series.

We are where we are now with it. Personally I'd be happy if they took out all the 'ancient aliens' nonsense and revealed that the Engineers are actually human creations (like the Replicants from Blade Runner.

[Immortan Jonesy]

That said, I wasn't such a fan of the more humanoid ones we saw in the Covenant flashbacks, if indeed they were the same race. While I don't think the "space jockeys" need to be a separate species

To be honest, when I first saw that scene my initial thought was that that "Paradise" was another world that the Engineers had seeded, and that those beings were another one of their creations, like us.

There is some ambiguity about that though, as the specimens we see in David's workshop seem to bear more resemblance to the ones from Prometheus in terms of size and appearance.

They all are supposed to be Engineers. But yeah, the one in David's lab is more similar to the ones from Prometheus. The in universe explanation might be different caste.

I've said it many times on this forum before that I really don't like the Engineers concept. To me it completely undermined what made Alien 'alien' and brought in silly fantasy elements to a well grounded, serious sci-fi franchise. I believe it has done so much damage to the series that it may be impossible to bring it back.

As Xenomrph said above, it would have been an interesting idea to work with if it had been its own thing in a film totally unconnected to the Alien series.

We are where we are now with it. Personally I'd be happy if they took out all the 'ancient aliens' nonsense and revealed that the Engineers are actually human creations (like the Replicants from Blade Runner.

They should explain that everything is an Ancient Conspiracy. So the Engineers are genetically engineered super humans, created by Weyland Yutani in the future as part of a secret terraforming project using Space Jockey technology, which was obtained from never-before-seen artifacts (not the Derelict) made by the Mala'kak species: Non-carbon based life forms similar to pachyderms, capable of generating symbiosis with machines, sometimes altering space-time around them or even reality itself. They're not ancient, nor entities from a distant future. They just exist above everything.

Now back to the "Replicants", the experiment got out of control, triggering a transhumanism event were the Engineers become an unstoppable Posthuman civilization. They can perceive time in a non-linear way thanks to Mala'kak bioengineering. This makes them able to interact in the past, present and future. We are our own gods, and yet we are biased by our own arrogance. Building better worlds is our motto.

Then, our creation David discovers that the Derelict has been on LV-426 for millennia with the original Alien, which makes David another Ossian  I'm looking forward to see that villain ego fall from the highest 

Plus, in this "what if" scenario there might be some kind of City in a Bottle, so to speak. A background of the City Noir kind, which look like an in between Cyberpunk & Biopunk world; where the Engineers are being born. A setting like the one featured in the movie Dark City. Or even something like Blade Runner meet BioShock.

And this should have been the true home world of the Jockey. 

https://youtu.be/i9eg7Pzk15g