Quote from: Huggs on Apr 11, 2018, 10:01:51 PM
Regardless of where the prequels head from here, I hope they begin to lean more towards science, and less on philosophy.
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Scott has some really interesting "scientific" thoughts, and some other embarrassing ones too.
For example: I'm sure I recall Scott saying of the xeno's transparent dome, as designed by Giger, great but WTF with the human skull in there? His simple solution was to have the creature team overspray it with semi-transparent paint around the edges to disguise what's inside. Why didn't he like the skull? Well, scientifically speaking, why would an alien species have a human body part? Hence (speculation here), I think one of his inspirations for Prometheus was to answer this 1 question which had been nagging away in his brain for 30 years.
OTOH, one of the writers must surely have said to him re: the Engineer ancestry to humans; So what, are we just going to ignore 1,000,000 years of human evolution and fossil records, then? But in this case the obvious lack of scientific rigour didn't bother him.
As for Shaw's line about believing in God because she chooses to believe; and asking, if the Engineers created Man then who created them? I think Scott thought he was getting into some deep, meaningful philosophy but it really comes across as rather twee, once-over-lightly schoolboy stuff.
I know what you mean about the depiction of technology that went into the film's design. I got a big thrill out of Ron Cobb's stuff especially. The layout and construction of the escape shuttle, the autodoc in the medbay, the doodads and gadgetry required to obtain a passcard to get into Muther's computer room. Only 2001 had gone to this level of detail.
Also, I like the way Scott chose to follow 2001's lead in terms of spaceflight. Notice how the Nostromo departs the refinery after detaching from the "claw". The engine nozzles fire up in a brief burn and then the ship goes back to coasting -
just the way real spacecraft manoeuvre. This is not what you see in most sci-fi these days (including Prometheus). Nowadays, when a spaceship has forward velocity its engines are depicted on and lit up (Star Wars style).
And I'm sure there are some throw-away lines on the bridge while landing and later on when taking off (as part of the crew chatter). "Hold on people, inertial damping's coming off, there could be a little bump", "artificial gravity engaged" or something like that. I think we can thank O'Bannon for these bits of detail.
These kinds of things gave Alien '79 a science-fictional style that's still a bit unique to this day.
TC