I can accept the idea that we are alone with the aliens and maybe some remnant of the Engineers. What I really don't want to accept is that the xenomorph social organization is frozen at the level of the hive. By making them little more than giant space bees, alot of what makes them truly alien is removed, as they are simply a larger variant of the ants that you see in your backyard everyday (and ants can be just as ruthless as how xenomorphs are portrayed). The egg morphing idea in the first film (and which was planned in the third) is far more unique and somewhat makes the aliens scarier as there would be fewer numbers of them, forcing them to become craftier and act in a more intelligent manner. However excellent Aliens was, the 'locust swarm' model that we saw was just not as terrifying as what the first film gave us. Now I can accept it as one variant of xenomorphs, but Ridley Scott had a far more profound vision with his concept of the alien reproducing once in its life and each succeeding generation being more advanced than the last. Now that is something truly
alien and which could theoretically lead to a creature that could do far more than just cut the power. Don't get me wrong, I don't want some uber-beast with ridiculous powers but if you look at some of the Giger's art, there are hints at designs of creatures that are just as alien and amoral as what we've seen in the movies but which seem to be far more sophisticated. You don't need all of the techno hives and such that I mentioned, just a singular being that is as far removed from humanity as possible, yet in its own inconceivable manner makes Stephen Hawking look like brain dead slug.
Quote from: [CANCERBLACK] on Mar 15, 2015, 06:11:36 PM
I like the idea that we're alone (with the Alien).
The Engineers are our predecessors. That was always the case on some level (and in fact was the point of including the derelict in Alien) but is now very literal. Although placing them as being active as recently as two millennia ago isn't to my taste, I don't hate the ancient aliens thing on principle and I can handle them not just being the guys who got wiped out by the Alien before us but also our creators - I still like them best as an extinct race though, and any ones surviving in stasis should be super rare.
I can see where you're coming from, though I think that the Engineers have too much potential to simply be a legacy species. Instead, why not make them, as I postulated earlier, the slaves of their weapons? Have their homeworld be utterly transformed into a Giger-like mess with Shaw and David having to ensure that it never spreads (though David's loyalty is quite suspect at this point). If Prometheus became a trilogy or longer, a central theme could be the very essence of what it means to be human vs. the very essence of what it means to be alien. As Ridley himself has said, the series will be increasingly removed from the traditional Alien series, so the sky is the limit. It of course has to be mainstream and action packed enough for the audience to understand and enjoy what's happening, but why not turn this into a deep space psychological epic? In the end, the Engineers and everything else surrounding them could be destroyed (minus maybe a few remnants of them or their weapons escaping in the farthest ends of the universe), with the link to the Blomkamp's films that is being rumored being that, besides humans. the xenomorphs are the only notable legacy of the Engineers. It would be the ultimate tragedy and morality tale; the final legacy of a once great civilization who conquered the stars and who created humanity being the unleashing of an alien species that only lives for destruction.
QuoteThe Alien, as I see it, is rogue genetic material with a "sentience" (but not sapience) handed down through generational memory (possibly in a literal sense, see A:R). It's the Lovecraftian crawling chaos that could be in any dark corner of space, just waiting. I'm very much a fan of the concept that outbreaks of the Alien as we know it burn out fairly quickly as they deplete hosts, but that through some sort of handwavium, eggs can survive indefinitely. So there's eggs, Engineer ruins containing modified strains or other applications of the Alien genetics, and who knows what else, scattered throughout space.
Which leads to us, alone in the dark with the Alien, which is just silently waiting out there amongst the stars.
I like this idea, especially the concept of generational memory (though this should be used with care). And who says that only eggs can survive for a long period of time? The xenomorph's bony structure could mean that they are far more efficient when it comes to taking in nutrients and can possible survive for periods of time possibly as long as the eggs (Ridley's idea ironically was the opposite; that the alien would die only a couple of days after being born, as its adulthood was not much longer than its childhood, and that it was 'perpetually dying'). And I do also like the idea of other strains being present, maybe some far more inconceivable than what we've already seen.
On the point of humans being alone with the aliens, we actually know that this is not true. If it was, Hudson would not have flippantly referred to 'bug hunts' in the second movie. Granted, it is heavily suggested that none of those other species come close to xenomorphs in terms of how dangerous they are. What these things are, we may never know, and I don't want the Alien universe to become a zoo (ideally, any other aliens we find might be mundane so as to not take the spotlight from the xenomorphs). Yet as I said before, the alien ability to mimic the physical characteristics of a host hints at the fact that aliens have been interacting with diverse segments of the universe for long periods of time, quite possibly longer than humans have been around or maybe even the Earth itself, as such an advanced ability would take a tremendous amount of time to be perfected. Now maybe all these species are dead, who knows. It is a compelling concept to have the universe outside of Earth be one gigantic tomb scattered with hibernating alien eggs and other related monstrosities.
One thing I would like to see is a return of the original Alien catch phrase "A word of warning..." It's so subtle yet hints at something unbelievably dangerous: