Out of all the recent news concerning ALIEN:COVENANT (be it a glimpse of young, deformed 'neomorphs', or a bust of an 'adult' deformed head, or the new 'eggs', or the new 'facehugger)...one of the things that I'm most pleased about is the fact that Guy Pearce looks likely to actually appear in the movie without the 'old Weyland' makeup this time around!
For a long time, there was no guarantee that Noomi's character would make any sort of appearance in this follow-up, and the fact that Pearce is back too (however briefly), is great news to me - whether either of them are seen in a 'flashback', or 'holographic recording', or 'memory implant'...or any other scenario even. And the description of 'young' Weyland's possible involvement with 'switching' on 'David 8' at the start of the movie sounds excellent.
While it remains quite a re-watchable movie for me due to certain things,I'll always despair about certain badly-judged moments that litter PROMETHEUS - one of them being the lack of any 'young Weyland' footage being incorporated into the movie to offset the 'old makeup' that Guy Pearce ended up wearing throughout!
I'm so pleased that audiences will finally get a glimpse of Guy's 'younger' self onscreen this time around, considering how good he was in the excellent 'viral clip' that Ridley's son (Luke Scott) filmed.
I've always wished that even some of that footage had been incorporated into the movie in some way (even as a 'flashback' or showing on one of the ship's screens, for instance), as it would have really added some extra gravitas about his character to the proceedings.
Although I have a differently-edited version of my own in mind sometime, I only re-watch agent9's 'Special Edition' version these days...due to it including a lot of the deleted scenes I like - especially the 'young Weyland' TEDTalk sequence to kick things off.
I'm so glad that ALIEN:COVENANT will finally feature Guy as he actually looks...but I'll always stick with a version of the original movie which opens with his monologue included, to juxtapose with his 'older' appearance later on - in fact, while I lay a lot of the blame about certain aspects of PROMETHEUS on Damon Lindelof, it seems that he was instrumental in devising that whole sequence...so thanks for that. And well done Luke Scott. I only wish that the makers had included some of it in the actual movie to begin with.
Here's a good link about what Lindelof had to say about that whole scene -
blog.ted.com/writing-a-tedtalk-from-the-future-q-a-with-damon-lindelof/
oops, that TEDTalk link was wrong, it should have been this -
blog.ted.com/writing-a-tedtalk-from-thefuture-q-a-with-damon-lindelof/
Hmmm, turns out I'd typed that TEDTalk article link correctly the first time - not sure why it won't link directly, so just re-type my first attempt yourselves, if interested.