Empire's ALIEN COVENANT Exclusive Cover, and Image Scans Revealed!!

[Infected]

I don't understand...  In what way has Scott retconned the Space Jockey? 

-Windebieste.

Well this complaint comes up with regard to proportions. People have always complained that Prometheus depicting the Space Jockey as a pilot suit for a large humanoid did not match up with the original, which depending on who you asked either looked like a fossilised alien (although you could write this off as the suit having bio-tech which decomposed), or looked like a suit for a creature with a much larger chest cavity and thinner/longer arms.
But for all intents and purposes, it has been retconned and the humanoid proportions of the 'suit shot' in Prometheus are now canon.

The problem is with the scene where they look in the eye and the face of the jockey pilot, and you can see that mouth and tongue open.
You see the head and the body is also totally different, i can relate and understand the people who complain about it, IF this is the end result and only engineer/jockey we will ever see.


And maybe in the real final ending of his last movie, he will show us this creature, with 10 second screen time, and it will always be a mystery and he will take it into his grave (Ridley)

[Molecules]

I doubt they all engage in dangerous biological experimentation/engineering, their civilization would surely have classes.

these ones look more like elders, rulers or something

So in the Empire magazine still of this Paradise race, we see they are pinkish-skinned, and I think possibly we saw from earlier photos Covenant crew members next to the burnt 'Pompeii' remains that they are proportionally more human than the white-skinned Engineers (have to double check).

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I still think that the clothing, city layout and technology indicate that the pink-skins are not a highly advanced species, and therefore surely they cannot be mother/elder race to the white-skin Engineers. And the way they are gathered around at the town square, in visible awe, all wearing toga-like robes, reinforces this.

Unless they actually are advanced, space-faring, masters of bio-tech, and the Engineers are their genetically engineered 'offspring', maybe purpose-built to spread their genes through the galaxy, fight wars, etc.

I don't understand...  In what way has Scott retconned the Space Jockey? 

-Windebieste.

Well this complaint comes up with regard to proportions. People have always complained that Prometheus depicting the Space Jockey as a pilot suit for a large humanoid did not match up with the original, which depending on who you asked either looked like a fossilised alien (although you could write this off as the suit having bio-tech which decomposed), or looked like a suit for a creature with a much larger chest cavity and thinner/longer arms.
But for all intents and purposes, it has been retconned and the humanoid proportions of the 'suit shot' in Prometheus are now canon.

The problem is with the scene where they look in the eye and the face of the jockey pilot, and you can see that mouth and tongue open.
You see the head and the body is also totally different, i can relate and understand the people who complain about it, IF this is the end result and only engineer/jockey we will ever see.
http://i63.tinypic.com/4qpovt.jpg

And maybe in the real final ending of his last movie, he will show us this creature, with 10 second screen time, and it will always be a mystery and he will take it into his grave (Ridley)

Well observed. Hadn't seen it in a while - forgot just how staggeringly different it is to the Prometheus 'pilot suit'. Lol. It really is just an alien skeleton, straight up!

[Ultramorph]

Maybe we'll get a proper Jockey one day, but I've accepted that we probably won't.

[Molecules]

Maybe we'll get a proper Jockey one day, but I've accepted that we probably won't.

It's ironic that the whole pretext for these prequels began with a desire to address the keystone of the Alien plot - the mystery of the Space Jockey and the 'why' question. They're doing a very good job of rubbing that out. I think this is a result of what we know - that somewhere along the line Ridley decided to graft his 'Chariots of the Gods'/Von Daniken obsession onto his big return to Alien.

Depending on how it all develops, if there are more films after this, I can imagine the 1979 Alien looking like it came from a different universe altogether. It's already happened I think. So far remembering the prequels doesn't exactly enhance the experience of watching Alien.

[Infected]

I doubt they all engage in dangerous biological experimentation/engineering, their civilization would surely have classes.

these ones look more like elders, rulers or something

So in the Empire magazine still of this Paradise race, we see they are pinkish-skinned, and I think possibly we saw from earlier photos Covenant crew members next to the burnt 'Pompeii' remains that they are proportionally more human than the white-skinned Engineers (have to double check).

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I still think that the clothing, city layout and technology indicate that the pink-skins are not a highly advanced species, and therefore surely they cannot be mother/elder race to the white-skin Engineers. And the way they are gathered around at the town square, in visible awe, all wearing toga-like robes, reinforces this.

Unless they actually are advanced, space-faring, masters of bio-tech, and the Engineers are their genetically engineered 'offspring', maybe purpose-built to spread their genes through the galaxy, fight wars, etc.

I don't understand...  In what way has Scott retconned the Space Jockey? 

-Windebieste.

Well this complaint comes up with regard to proportions. People have always complained that Prometheus depicting the Space Jockey as a pilot suit for a large humanoid did not match up with the original, which depending on who you asked either looked like a fossilised alien (although you could write this off as the suit having bio-tech which decomposed), or looked like a suit for a creature with a much larger chest cavity and thinner/longer arms.
But for all intents and purposes, it has been retconned and the humanoid proportions of the 'suit shot' in Prometheus are now canon.

The problem is with the scene where they look in the eye and the face of the jockey pilot, and you can see that mouth and tongue open.
You see the head and the body is also totally different, i can relate and understand the people who complain about it, IF this is the end result and only engineer/jockey we will ever see.
http://i63.tinypic.com/4qpovt.jpg

And maybe in the real final ending of his last movie, he will show us this creature, with 10 second screen time, and it will always be a mystery and he will take it into his grave (Ridley)

Well observed. Hadn't seen it in a while - forgot just how staggeringly different it is to the Prometheus 'pilot suit'. Lol. It really is just an alien skeleton, straight up!

I couldnt find a bigger picture unfortunately.
But as you look back in the history of comics, a lot of comic drawers/cartoonists, didnt know how to portrait the jockey, some are just laughable as hell.
Ridley really took the easy road in Prometheus with the jockey look, it also makes me wonder, Ridley is a master at filmography and photography, did he choose this road with the jockey so it would be more easy to put realistic on film as it is a tall humanoid looking being and the part could be easily filled with humans and smart camera work.

[Citadel]

A couple of things I want to throw out there, perhaps been discussed before:

Can we determine the possibility that the juggernaut ships, both the very bio-mechanical looking drop ship we come to know from Prometheus and Alien, and the new "mother juggernaut" we're seeing here, can these ships be the result of stolen technology?

The city looks like any other ancient civilisation city, with stone and structures; Rome comes to mind when looking at these pictures, especially given the religious nature of the Engineers. So, what if the ships are stolen technology? Maybe this fits in with the civil war aspect, as well as the difference in how these Engineers seem to look, and the suited/military appearance of the ones we saw in Prometheus. The technology doesn't seem to fit with what we're seeing with the city. I'd expected the home world to look a lot like the architecture of the juggernaut. Obviously not.

Perhaps, 2000 years has evolved (or devolved) the species to look more humanoid? Or, are we seeing just another colony of Engineers as part of a greater, more diverse civilisation, a defect of the civil war? Maybe these ships are leftovers from the war with another breed of Engineer. Maybe they're products of a different race entirely.

Ridley has really opened up so much possibility here. It'd be a shame if he wastes all of this new lore. I wanna know things, damn it.

EDIT: and if there's such a diversity, the Jockey might just be another remnant of the Engineers, something completely different from what we've seen. Bigger and more advanced. Or, we're just gonna have to accept the fact that Ridley wanted to change the size to fit in with this new approach. That's something that'll have to be overlooked, I suppose.

[blane]

why is a guy in tighty whitys holding the magazines in the pictures?

[echobbase79]

I really wish they'd leave the Juggernaut story from the first film alone. I don't won't to know how it got there. But it seems Ridely wants to explain it. I just hope he does it justice when or if the time comes.

[Infected]

A couple of things I want to throw out there, perhaps been discussed before:

Can we determine the possibility that the juggernaut ships, both the very bio-mechanical looking drop ship we come to know from Prometheus and Alien, and the new "mother juggernaut" we're seeing here, can these ships be the result of stolen technology?

The city looks like any other ancient civilisation city, with stone and structures; Rome comes to mind when looking at these pictures, especially given the religious nature of the Engineers. So, what if the ships are stolen technology? Maybe this fits in with the civil war aspect, as well as the difference in how these Engineers seem to look, and the suited/military appearance of the ones we saw in Prometheus. The technology doesn't seem to fit with what we're seeing with the city. I'd expected the home world to look a lot like the architecture of the juggernaut. Obviously not.

Perhaps, 2000 years has evolved (or devolved) the species to look more humanoid? Or, are we seeing just another colony of Engineers as part of a greater, more diverse civilisation, a defect of the civil war? Maybe these ships are leftovers from the war with another breed of Engineer. Maybe they're products of a different race entirely.

Ridley has really opened up so much possibility here. It'd be a shame if he wastes all of this new lore. I wanna know things, damn it.

EDIT: and if there's such a diversity, the Jockey might just be another remnant of the Engineers, something completely different from what we've seen. Bigger and more advanced. Or, we're just gonna have to accept the fact that Ridley wanted to change the size to fit in with this new approach. That's something that'll have to be overlooked, I suppose.

So the scorpion looking vessel could easily be the Derelict, it has the size for 2000 eggs on board.
As it could be piloted by a real jockey. 

[rabidranger]

A couple of things I want to throw out there, perhaps been discussed before:

Can we determine the possibility that the juggernaut ships, both the very bio-mechanical looking drop ship we come to know from Prometheus and Alien, and the new "mother juggernaut" we're seeing here, can these ships be the result of stolen technology?

The city looks like any other ancient civilisation city, with stone and structures; Rome comes to mind when looking at these pictures, especially given the religious nature of the Engineers. So, what if the ships are stolen technology? Maybe this fits in with the civil war aspect, as well as the difference in how these Engineers seem to look, and the suited/military appearance of the ones we saw in Prometheus. The technology doesn't seem to fit with what we're seeing with the city. I'd expected the home world to look a lot like the architecture of the juggernaut. Obviously not.

Perhaps, 2000 years has evolved (or devolved) the species to look more humanoid? Or, are we seeing just another colony of Engineers as part of a greater, more diverse civilisation, a defect of the civil war? Maybe these ships are leftovers from the war with another breed of Engineer. Maybe they're products of a different race entirely.

Ridley has really opened up so much possibility here. It'd be a shame if he wastes all of this new lore. I wanna know things, damn it.

EDIT: and if there's such a diversity, the Jockey might just be another remnant of the Engineers, something completely different from what we've seen. Bigger and more advanced. Or, we're just gonna have to accept the fact that Ridley wanted to change the size to fit in with this new approach. That's something that'll have to be overlooked, I suppose.

The juxtaposition between highly advanced technology and a more primitive cultural aesthetic is a pretty common trope in science fiction.  I'm thinking of the Vulcans/Romulans in Star Trek.

[Valaquen]

It's an interesting idea that the Engineers, whoever they really are, have all manner of 'cadet-races' throughout the universe who become genetically modified to bring themselves closer to the Engineer-Ideal. Just as in Kubrick's 2001, where humanity has to jump through several hoops (or phases of history and progress) to reach the Star Child phase of evolution. We might not get to see the real Engineers (exemplified in my mind by Giger's Space Jockey and biomechanical aesthetic) until another movie or two down the line. Maybe that's why the Aliens in this movie aren't biomechanical yet; they haven't been influenced or 'touched' by the real Engineers yet.

Just throwing stuff at the wall here.

[Citadel]

It's an interesting idea that the Engineers, whoever they really are, have all manner of 'cadet-races' throughout the universe who become genetically modified to bring themselves closer to the Engineer-Ideal. Just as in Kubrick's 2001, where humanity has to jump through several hoops (or phases of history and progress) to reach the Star Child phase of evolution. We might not get to see the real Engineers (exemplified in my mind by Giger's Space Jockey and biomechanical aesthetic) until another movie or two down the line. Maybe that's why the Aliens in this movie aren't biomechanical yet; they haven't been influenced or 'touched' by the real Engineers yet.

Just throwing stuff at the wall here.

I've no idea if it's been proven false yet, or simply that no one knows, but don't you think David's

Spoiler

input into creating the bio form of Xeno is the result of his tinkering with AI technology and the Alien? An extension of what the Engineers were doing with the goo, but on a more advanced scale?

[close]

I remember reading somewhere that Ridley was just throwing money at Giger to create bigger and bigger designs in Alien, though he did struggle to get that extra financing. Something along those lines, anyway. Even by today's standards, Scott's reasoning for the size difference may be that it's simply not realistic to assume the gigantic size of the Jockey in contrast with humans? The Engineer is more plausible, but then again, why should it be? It really depends how you look at it. There's some who'll come to accept that the "suit" in Prometheus is the true size of the Jockey from Alien, and there's some who'll never come to accept the difference because it rubs out the marvellous work in Alien. I'm kind of indifferent about it; I'm just waiting to see how Covenant pans out, and if the theory of multiple Engineer races is a true one. A more advanced Engineer race, bigger in size, tied into Alien would be the perfect way to flesh out these prequels, maybe two movies down the line. It'd be satisfying for fans of the Jockey's design and size, and it'd surely satisfy fans of the Engineer's and their doings in Prometheus onwards.

[rabidranger]

I'm not sure Scott cares to explain away the size issue with the Space Jockey from Alien. That said, maybe that was the result of a mutation or a different class of Engineer than we have seen so far (a "god").

[zoidy]

Let's face it, people - the engineer in Prometheus is supposed to be the same as the pilot in Alien. Sure, it's not what Ridley was thinking in 1979, but he wasn't thinking this far ahead. In practical terms, it made sense to do what was done in Prometheus.

That's not to say Ridley wouldn't do something different in future films, adding another species. Doubtful, but it could happen. But looking at Alien in 1979 and Prometheus and Covenant as a cohesive well thought out plan is silly. He makes movies, and he will rewrite anything he thinks will work in any future film he makes, the supposed cannon or wishes of people on the internet are irrelevant.

What's relevant is what he wants to make, what he is allowed to make, and if the average moviegoer (not us) will pay to go and see it.

[echobbase79]

Let's face it, people - the engineer in Prometheus is supposed to be the same as the pilot in Alien. Sure, it's not what Ridley was thinking in 1979, but he wasn't thinking this far ahead. In practical terms, it made sense to do what was done in Prometheus.

That's not to say Ridley wouldn't do something different in future films, adding another species. Doubtful, but it could happen. But looking at Alien in 1979 and Prometheus and Covenant as a cohesive well thought out plan is silly. He makes movies, and he will rewrite anything he thinks will work in any future film he makes, the supposed cannon or wishes of people on the internet are irrelevant.

What's relevant is what he wants to make, what he is allowed to make, and if the average moviegoer (not us) will pay to go and see it.

I don't have a problem with that. I just don't really care to know the story of that particular Engineer and why it crashed on LV-246.