FX Alien: Earth

[pengbuzz]

On 7/23/2023 at 3:40 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It's hard to get invested in the fates of a bunch of characters who are seemingly doing everything possible to become a xenomorph's lunch.

Well, they could always try introducing the Aliens to fast food; look what it did for the Predator:

 

 

Edited August 16, 2023 by pengbuzz

[Thom]

On 7/24/2023 at 12:49 AM, technoblue said:

Agree to disagree on that last part, but my bias has been and will always be pro-writer.

As for the prequel films themselves, they do deserve all the constructive criticism they receive. In addition to what Seto noted already, I thought Prometheus went astray by turning David into the main monster if you will. 

Mind you, I don’t mind having ancillary villains in an Alien film. Ash was a good one. So was Burke. It’s just that David’s errant behavior wasn’t as nuanced to me. I was also bummed that Noomi Rapace was only in the first film. Almost all of her shot scenes in Covenant were cut, and those scenes ended up explaining quite a bit.

So to bring this back on topic, I hope the new series brings back some consistency because I do think that has been missing.

Having never watched Prom and Cov (basically because nothing past Aliens really exists...) apparently there was a whole dialogue scene with the Engineer at the end of Prom that explained pretty much everything - and it was cut. Probably because a scene like Theron trying to outrun a massive rolling donut was more important than the story line, I guess...

 

 

 

Edited August 16, 2023 by Thom

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Well, they could always try introducing the Aliens to fast food; look what it did for the Predator:

Dude looks like he's going to (in clicks) ask us if we know de wae...

Still, I guess a xenomorph's definition of "fast food" is "former track and field star"... which is much less fattening.

 

3 minutes ago, Thom said:

(basically because nothing past Aliens really exists...)

Yes. 👍👍

 

3 minutes ago, Thom said:

Having never watched Prom and Cov apparently there was a whole dialogue scene with the Engineer at the end of Prom that explained pretty much everything - and it was cut. Probably because the action scenes were more important than the story line, I guess...

From what I've seen and read, a bunch of scenes and expository dialogue were cut from Prometheus that would have explained many of the final film's unclear areas.

That said, the film is absolutely 10,000% better off without it.  What we "missed" was a series of exposition dumps of Engineer history and religious philosophy that would've killed the film's pacing more comprehensively than the black goo it explained was killing the protagonists.  It was incredibly stupid in and of itself and really didn't mesh with the story as a whole narratively or thematically... especially once Engineer Jesus (figurative) and Engineer Jesus (literal) got involved in the explanation.  It didn't really explain the xenomorphs, but it did at least explain the Deacon from the end of the film.

[pengbuzz]

20 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Dude looks like he's going to (in clicks) ask us if we know de wae...

Still, I guess a xenomorph's definition of "fast food" is "former track and field star"... which is much less fattening.

Right?

20 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

From what I've seen and read, a bunch of scenes and expository dialogue were cut from Prometheus that would have explained many of the final film's unclear areas.

That said, the film is absolutely 10,000% better off without it.  What we "missed" was a series of exposition dumps of Engineer history and religious philosophy that would've killed the film's pacing more comprehensively than the black goo it explained was killing the protagonists.  It was incredibly stupid in and of itself and really didn't mesh with the story as a whole narratively or thematically... especially once Engineer Jesus (figurative) and Engineer Jesus (literal) got involved in the explanation.  It didn't really explain the xenomorphs, but it did at least explain the Deacon from the end of the film.

Maybe they should have saved all that for an animated movie/ series about the Engineer's society or something...

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Maybe they should have saved all that for an animated movie/ series about the Engineer's society or something...

Nah... it really should just never have been written.  The same could be said for both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, given that the two of them are basically a Canto Bight-style plot tumor on the flank of the Alien franchise that doesn't really have anything to do with anything.

Considering that they were an expensive failure, and that the cut material would be much more at home in a bad Star Trek licensed novel than a horror movie, it and the film it was written for will both hopefully be ignored entirely by this new series.

 

Spoiler

Would YOU really want to have your horror movie stop dead for fifteen minutes to explain that the monster has no dick?

And that's not a joke, by the way... that was actually something fundamentally important to the cut explanation of the history and motives of the Engineers.

 

[pengbuzz]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

  Hide contents

Would YOU really want to have your horror movie stop dead for fifteen minutes to explain that the monster has no dick?

And that's not a joke, by the way... that was actually something fundamentally important to the cut explanation of the history and motives of the Engineers.

 

Seto...you know better than to bring politics into this discussion!

Edited August 17, 2023 by pengbuzz

[sh9000]

Alien:  Earth teaser.

Edited November 16, 2024 by sh9000

[Big s]

On 8/17/2023 at 10:23 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Nah... it really should just never have been written.  The same could be said for both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, given that the two of them are basically a Canto Bight-style plot tumor on the flank of the Alien franchise that doesn't really have anything to do with anything.

Considering that they were an expensive failure, and that the cut material would be much more at home in a bad Star Trek licensed novel than a horror movie, it and the film it was written for will both hopefully be ignored entirely by this new series.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Would YOU really want to have your horror movie stop dead for fifteen minutes to explain that the monster has no dick?

And that's not a joke, by the way... that was actually something fundamentally important to the cut explanation of the history and motives of the Engineers.

 

Language!

Although I think it would be hilarious if they spent fifteen minutes on why the Alien had a giant one for its head. Maybe it just walks under the queen or something?

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, sh9000 said:

Alien:  Earth teaser.

Remember when teasers were supposed to tease the audience with the content of a show or movie?

This looks like an almost Harmony Gold Convention Tour-level effort... they hastily edited a reflection of Earth onto stock footage of the xenomorph and for three seconds and cut to a title card so basic it probably took the intern who made it longer to find the official franchise font in the Adobe AfterEffects fonts menu than it did to make it.

The real irony is this teaser uses the one thing that likely won't actually be in the show, since it's set 30 years before the Engineer ship is discovered on LV-426 in the original movie.

 

1 hour ago, Big s said:

Language!

English! 🗣️

 

1 hour ago, Big s said:

Although I think it would be hilarious if they spent fifteen minutes on why the Alien had a giant one for its head. Maybe it just walks under the queen or something?

The Engineer who designed it was dwelling perhaps a bit too much on what his species had lost. 🤣

 

[Raikkonen]

On 8/16/2023 at 5:25 PM, Thom said:

Having never watched Prom and Cov (basically because nothing past Aliens really exists...) 

10 points of respect. Not giving into such consumerism is admirable. 

On 8/16/2023 at 6:09 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

From what I've seen and read, a bunch of scenes and expository dialogue were cut from Prometheus that would have explained many of the final film's unclear areas.

This is where the film failed before they even started filming. Good movies relay on the events portrayed by the characters to tell the story and answer any questions. The moment a film needs unrealistic exposition monologues it's doomed. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

This is where the film failed before they even started filming. Good movies relay on the events portrayed by the characters to tell the story and answer any questions. The moment a film needs unrealistic exposition monologues it's doomed. 

Nah... there's nothing wrong with expository dialog up to a point.  If the characters can sum up relevant past events in a minute or two that's usually fine.  It can even be leveraged to build suspense or tension depending on how it's handled.  What was cut from Prometheus in the late draft stage was more like 10-15 minute expository dump, which isn't OK... but "show, don't tell" is not a universal law.

It's also not where Prometheus really failed. 

Spoiler

That failure occured much earlier with the film's conceptual development.  

The studio and the creative team couldn't settle on what the film was or how connected it would be to the Alien franchise.  It was originally billed as an Alien sequel, then the studio announced it as a reboot of Alien, then after backlash it was re-announced as a prequel.  The writing team - particularly Damon Lindelof - apparently didn't understand the meaning of the word "prequel" because they concluded (and this is Lindelof's own words) that:

Quote

"A true prequel should essentially precede the events of the original film, but be about something entirely different, feature different characters, have an entirely different theme, although it takes place in that same world."

And, of course, with such a brilliant and insightful creative at the helm the planned Alien prequel outlined by Ridley Scott and written by Jon Spaihts quickly devolved into the soft launch of a new IP that owed far more to Blade Runner and Erich von Daniken's spectacularly racist pseudoscience tract Chariots of the Gods? (which was also the main inspiration for Stargate) than it ever did to Alien.  That's the point where much of the idiocy that made its way into the final film was also introduced.

The exposition dumps were cut much later in the process, when someone finally pointed out how badly having the reawakened Engineer deliver a fifteen minute sermon in proto-Indo-European about the nature of mortality and morality would break the flow of the movie and how stupid and out of place it would be. 

 

[Thom]

Expositions done right are more than acceptable, especially if they further the story in a way that works into the mystery, in a good way. Obi-wan talking up Luke's dad as a hero while still telling his family history, from a certain point of view, was good exposition. It told one side of his father, hid the other Dark side, and worked to further the story by telling both a truth and a lie at the same time.

 

 

Edited August 19, 2024 by Thom

[sh9000]

New stills.

[hutch]

Why are all the hallways FILLED WITH PIPES?  There’s SO MANY PIPES. 

[Big s]

14 minutes ago, hutch said:

Why are all the hallways FILLED WITH PIPES?  There’s SO MANY PIPES. 

One’s for water, one’s for coke, one’s for sprite, one’s for Dr Pepper, one’s Fanta, one’s for iced tea, one’s for lemonade, one’s for cherry coke, one’s for Diet Coke, one’s for Coke Zero 

[Hikuro]

2 hours ago, hutch said:

Why are all the hallways FILLED WITH PIPES?  There’s SO MANY PIPES. 

after the first movie, you better hope those are nothing but pipes! 

[electric indigo]

They also come in handy if you need a steam peni$ to pretend to not hear your superior telling you to f*** off.

[sh9000]

 

[TangledThorns]

Another teaser... When can we get a real trailer??

That being said, the hype is building on this new series.

[electric indigo]

Oh yes!

 

[TangledThorns]

oh look, another teaser 😑

[sh9000]

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, electric indigo said:

Oh yes!

 

Teaser trailers are supposed to build anticipation for a release... this is kind of achieving the opposite.

Oh boy, another brief shot of a xenomorph frantically scrambling along the walls and ceiling of a nondescript metal corridor at high speed like we haven't seen exactly that dozens and dozens of times already in practically every title outside the original movie.  Woo... 🙄

After Romulus, my hopes for a return to actual horror are basically nil... this is gonna be another story where a pack of standard horror movie morons do everything possible to get eaten by a dangerous wild animal, like backpackers hiking across a national park in clothes made entirely from raw beef steak.

[TangledThorns]

There are series that sounded dumb on paper but turned out to be excellent and well appreciated after they were released. Could this be one of those series? We shall see.

 

 

[Hikuro]

Again, I had no issues with Romulus, I'm not looking for oscar moving or an emmy or any of that crap. I wanna just sit down, and have a decent time. Cause I'll tell you one thing, it's not Star Wars, and it's not a comicbook DC or Marvel film. And that is already better in my opinion. 

[jvmacross]

51 minutes ago, Hikuro said:

Again, I had no issues with Romulus, I'm not looking for oscar moving or an emmy or any of that crap. I wanna just sit down, and have a decent time. Cause I'll tell you one thing, it's not Star Wars, and it's not a comicbook DC or Marvel film. And that is already better in my opinion. 

With the exception of DC....all of those other IPs belong to Disney....and so does the Alien IP.....cautiously optimistic...I had no issues with Romulus either...actually just watched in on D+ over the weekend....my biggest issue is that I had no reason to subscribe to Hulu....and still don't....will just wait and see how this show is received by fans and critics I guess....

[Hikuro]

Just now, jvmacross said:

With the exception of DC....all of those other IPs belong to Disney....and so does the Alien IP.....cautiously optimistic...I had no issues with Romulus either...actually just watched in on D+ over the weekend....my biggest issue is that I had no reason to subscribe to Hulu....and still don't....will just wait and see how this show is received by fans and critics I guess....

Here's my thing though, We get a Marvel or Star Wars movie or TV series every year, sometimes multiple. In the course of not even 20 years we've had over 30+ marvel movies and a dozen TV shows, Alien has had maybe 9 movies in 46 years. I'd sooner be happy seeing a new alien property over a comic book movie or a used up property like Star Wars at this point. 

[Big s]

14 minutes ago, Hikuro said:

Here's my thing though, We get a Marvel or Star Wars movie or TV series every year, sometimes multiple. In the course of not even 20 years we've had over 30+ marvel movies and a dozen TV shows, Alien has had maybe 9 movies in 46 years. I'd sooner be happy seeing a new alien property over a comic book movie or a used up property like Star Wars at this point. 

Might be kinda fun to have an alien series at least in kinda one and done seasons. Like a story that’s kinda set apart from eachother every season. Just hoping that Disney damage this property any further than it has already been damaged. And also hoping Disney is finally gonna learn from their mistakes and maybe actually give us something to look forward to 

[Hikuro]

1 hour ago, Big s said:

Might be kinda fun to have an alien series at least in kinda one and done seasons. Like a story that’s kinda set apart from eachother every season. Just hoping that Disney damage this property any further than it has already been damaged. And also hoping Disney is finally gonna learn from their mistakes and maybe actually give us something to look forward to 

Truthfully I feel like that's a tall order, with how they handle most streaming shows on their personal platform, many end up being duds with a few decent gems as episodes versus an entire series.

My biggest concern is this will be dragged out episodes where nothing much of anything happens and then it gets a rushed third act at the finale and leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth like many of their others. 

At the same time, I find myself thinking, if I don't expect anything, I can't be disappointed. I would like to see a movie or series throw us for a loop, pull something unexpected that will make you go, "aw, damn!" And I've only done that while listening to two alien novels over the last year. 1 was into charybdis when 60% of the book follows a particular character only to be killed suddenly. The other was Enemy of my Enemy which had a good build up, a real good and fun pace for its story with an ending that made me go "WHAT?!" If I could get something even close to those, I'd be giving nod and maybe even a salute. 

[M'Kyuun]

2 hours ago, Big s said:

Might be kinda fun to have an alien series at least in kinda one and done seasons. Like a story that’s kinda set apart from eachother every season. Just hoping that Disney damage this property any further than it has already been damaged. And also hoping Disney is finally gonna learn from their mistakes and maybe actually give us something to look forward to 

If they could do for Alien as a series what they did with Prey for the Predator, at least a single season would be good. Prey captured the essence of the original film very well, and I found it to be the second most enjoyable entry in the franchise. (Sorry Danny Glover.) It was the first sequel of sorts that made me want more.

For me, too, my love of the Alien movies begins with the original film and ends with Aliens. The others let me down in one way or another, mostly for reasons that @Seto Kaiba has so eloquently elucidated. Regarding the new series, the prequel thing has already been done, and putting the Alien on Earth some 30 years prior to the original film's discovery of the species sounds like a recipe for continuity disaster. Given the eponymous critter's unsatiable appetite for dealing out death, and the fact that this will be set in our future, which sets the state of technology beyond our present state, it's a highly dubious prospect that a manmade spaceship could crash back on Earth and not have a plethora of responders and media all over it such that the emergence of such a creature would or could remain either unknown or obfuscated.  For me, that's the first hurdle: make me believe this thing could land undetected in a world saturated by social media. The only ways I could see it happening sufficiently is to have it crash in Antarctica or somewhere in Siberia perhaps near some extremely isolated outpost. And even then, those places have comms, so the challenge is in keeping the fact of this thing's existence unbroadcasted and unknown to the rest of the world, especially Weyland-Yutani, until Dallas and the gang stumble on the derelict ship on LV-426. Supposing though that they make a credible effort towards effective isolation, I think if they follow the formula for '79 Alien , or even Carpenter's The Thing, one of my favorite sci-fi films, they could make a plausibly enjoyable show watching the xenomorph do what it does best to a small, extremely isolated group of people who are totally unprepared for what's coming. Of course, to maintain its continuity with regards to the original film, they're going to have to somehow kill the Alien(s) before the show wraps, and moreover, and harder to believe, not report what has happened to anyone in the outside world. I hope it's well done, certainly better than the majority of the sequels, as this franchise could use a shot in the arm, IMHO.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

There are series that sounded dumb on paper but turned out to be excellent and well appreciated after they were released. Could this be one of those series? We shall see.

There are, but those are few and far between.  Normally when an idea sounds dumb on paper it's because it's dumb in any medium. 😅

There is an outside chance that Alien: Earth could be good... but it's such a long shot even compulsive gamblers wouldn't bet on it.  The best we can realistically hope for is another bland but serviceable splatter story like Alien: Romulus, where a pack of too-dumb-to-live Wey-Yu wagies seemingly do everything in their mortal power to get themselves eaten.  

Well, that and continuity problems.  This whole premise sounds like a buttload of continuity problems.

[Big s]

4 hours ago, M'Kyuun said:

and putting the Alien on Earth some 30 years prior to the original film's discovery of the species sounds like a recipe for continuity disaster. Given the eponymous critter's unsatiable appetite for dealing out death, and the fact that this will be set in our future, which sets the state of technology beyond our present state, it's a highly dubious prospect that a manmade spaceship could crash back on Earth and not have a plethora of responders and media all over it such that the emergence of such a creature would or could remain either unknown or obfuscated.

I kinda forgot when this was taking place. It’s definitely gonna be a possible major problem, but there’s a few slim ways it could still work. Earth at that point depending on how much it sticks to some of the oddball things from what Ridley Scott has led us to believe has kinda gone to💩. If there are the connections he’s kinda said with Prometheus or even more wildly with Blade Runner some places are either highly polluted and overcrowded while others could be more desolate. Not sure if this project will touch on those connections he’s made though.
But there’s always the possibility of a simpler explanation not tying in his connections and it just being that a random ship from earth somehow unknowingly picked up one of these before crashing on earth. it could basically end up with an odd predator type situation where the team going to find out what happened to the wreckage ends up killed off one after another and by the end having to completely destroy the alien or aliens. If they throw in the usual sci fi excuse of communications are down in the area, then there may end up total lack of proof other than testimony of a lone survivor, if there even is a lone survivor 

[M'Kyuun]

On 1/27/2025 at 11:46 PM, Big s said:

I kinda forgot when this was taking place. It’s definitely gonna be a possible major problem, but there’s a few slim ways it could still work. Earth at that point depending on how much it sticks to some of the oddball things from what Ridley Scott has led us to believe has kinda gone to💩. If there are the connections he’s kinda said with Prometheus or even more wildly with Blade Runner some places are either highly polluted and overcrowded while others could be more desolate. Not sure if this project will touch on those connections he’s made though.
But there’s always the possibility of a simpler explanation not tying in his connections and it just being that a random ship from earth somehow unknowingly picked up one of these before crashing on earth. it could basically end up with an odd predator type situation where the team going to find out what happened to the wreckage ends up killed off one after another and by the end having to completely destroy the alien or aliens. If they throw in the usual sci fi excuse of communications are down in the area, then there may end up total lack of proof other than testimony of a lone survivor, if there even is a lone survivor 

Oh my, I really, really hope they don't try to tie this into the Blade Runner universe; Scott has enough trouble keeping his own Alien universe in check let alone tying it to a completely unrelated one. However, considering for the sake of consideration that the ship is in fact detected sans the swarming of media, and a small recovery team is sent in, and all of them persish, including the xenomorph, in such a way as to leave no remains to be found and studied, lest the whole timeline be disrupted, I see few other ways of positing a story that doesn't upend the previous continuity. Unless, they try to say Weyland-Yutani did recover some remains, have it in their lab for 30 years or so, and somehow draw a correlation between the derelict ship's signal thus sending the Nostromo to their fate. That narrative, however, contrasts with the incredulous response by the company's people to Ripley's report at the beginning of Aliens where they explicitly mention that nothing of the sort has ever been recorded prior despite having colonized numerous worlds.

However the showrunners approach it, I just hope they don't destroy the continuity. I'd like to enjoy the show and I hope it's done well.

[Big s]

3 hours ago, M'Kyuun said:

Oh my, I really, really hope they don't try to tie this into the Blade Runner universe

Scott has said several times that alien and Blade Runner are in the same universe. I think it’s getting too complicated to tie the two together though at this point. It had more to do with the conversations about the androids in the movies. That the androids being too organic and emotional in Blade Runner being too much of a control problem, leading to a more mechanical type and eventually into something more easy to control in alien, rather than the emotional wreck of type in Prometheus.
Nothing concrete has ever been on screen though from my understanding and at this point probably never will, but if something as chaotic as AVP can happen, I guess anything can

[M'Kyuun]

7 hours ago, Big s said:

Scott has said several times that alien and Blade Runner are in the same universe. I think it’s getting too complicated to tie the two together though at this point. It had more to do with the conversations about the androids in the movies. That the androids being too organic and emotional in Blade Runner being too much of a control problem, leading to a more mechanical type and eventually into something more easy to control in alien, rather than the emotional wreck of type in Prometheus.
Nothing concrete has ever been on screen though from my understanding and at this point probably never will, but if something as chaotic as AVP can happen, I guess anything can

Well, I doubt Phil Dick had Alien in mind when he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in 1968. Likewise, I doubt that Dan O'Bannon had Dick's pivotal work in mind when writing Alien in the late 70s. Ridley Scott can conflate the two properties all day, but any crossover is purely his work and not the work of the originators. I feel the same way about Alien and the Predator; no matter how much Hollywood and the fans want to see the two enmeshed, at the end of the day, they're separate stand-alone properties that were artificially brought together. Judging by what's been done with those enmeshed films, I'll take mine separate, thanks. 

I enjoy the Blade Runner universe; I thought Blade Runner: Black Lotus was well done, as well as 2045. I'm happy with their expanding the universe with additional stories, however I don't feel that it needs to be combined or crossed with anything else to make it better. Honoring Dick's paranoia and mistrust of government and technology, his questioning of humanity and sentience as it pertains to artificial life, and whether that life has the right to exist or be free to live as it desires are all fundamental elements of Blade Runner, and those elements should be focal points in any Blade Runner media. Mixing it with Alien, I think the philosophical element would be lost amidst all the screaming, running, hiding, shooting, and dying.