Quote from: tmjhur on Feb 22, 2015, 02:45:12 AM
Quote from: Wobblyboddle77 on Feb 22, 2015, 02:34:26 AM
Quote from: Nightmare Asylum on Feb 22, 2015, 02:24:43 AM
They could get away with keeping the Jockey shape from the original if they leave us with the impression that the black goo or some other Engineer biological meddling made him the way he is. If the Engineer flight suit in Prometheus is indeed biomechanical, it would be easy to buy into the suit literally fusing with the body of an Engineer (and perhaps the ship as well, which in and of itself was much more biological than Prometheus' Juggernaut) in order to create the being that we saw in Alien. Perhaps the Jockey and the chair are indeed one in the same, the result of genetic meddling farther beyond what was explored in Prometheus.
This is brilliant and also keeps prometheus and alien in the same universe, whilst letting them have their own stories.
Can't believe Ridley changed that amazingness in the bottom picture into that goofy looking dickhead in the top one. Hope Blomkamp gives us a real giant biomechanical space jockey this time. There are plenty of story ways to make it happen so that Prometheus doesn't have to be totally redundant.
Honestly, the Prometheus revelations are more interesting artistically, and from a story point of view. There are still Lovecraftian elements, but the Lovecraftian fiction genre is so vapid, and to a degree xenophobic. Lovecraft himself was a very staunch racist, someone who also believed in eugenics. The idea of these
foreign things that can't be understood, was an interesting idea at the time, but its been done to death. You can only get away with the tropes central to Lovecraft for so long before you realize you're conception of horror is lazy and relying on the worst and cheapest elements of humanity (fear of the unknown) to provoke a response. This is all subjective, but the best method of bringing horror is to have human experience in it. You don't fear the Alien because it's some outer-space beast you can't reason with, you fear it mostly because of how it reproduces, you get plastered on a wall, your arms and legs cracked, an egg opens up, shoots its seed down into you, and you wake up and a few hours later the single most painful experience of your life occurs, and something bursts through your ribcage and turns your innards into mush. Now, the reason that is horrifying, is because there are relatable aspects (gone over a million times), and not just oooh spooky unknowable space beasts.
There are still Lovecraftian elements, but the Alien series has always had an unsaid background in the occult and perhaps even gnosticism, having the space jockey be human, just furthered those ideas an added layers to the setting that wouldn't be present had you just referred to The Pilot as some lovecraftian space bug. It furthers the potential for horror. Also, seeing as how their tech is biomechanical, if you've ever seen the body of an animal that's rotting, it looks extremely similar and totally unrecognizable and bloated. Considering its fossilized, having its tech turn on itself and decompose, perhaps even consuming the pilot within it, is an explanation that works well enough as to why it looks so different, droopy and bloated.
I really think a ton of people are missing the point as to why the Engineer makes more sense in-universe than just using traditional science fiction and lovecraft-y tropes.