Comments (Page 606)

Woolson Don't follow charts and what is popular so much. If you like what is charted, fine. There is much more out there if you just want to listen.

 @dk

Its a great song, very edgy, they couldve used this in a trailer focusing on Daniels or maybe the shower scene. Good pick

Woolson when I see your your user name I think of Eric Woolfson, one half of the Alan Parsons Project... they produced some out of this world music

@joylitt

I guess since my generation is so hell bent on nostalgia, maybe some country, hip hop, pop and retro style songs. But i bet its gonna be more trashy EDM and pop music

Woolson Here it is with lyrics. Minimal and effective- sort of how David may be thinking with what he is doing and talking about Weyland too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNrnjyuD4fE

@dk

I gotta get into NIN then

Woolson What kind of music do you really think is on the Billboard Chart in the year 2104?

I like The Day the World Went Away- the music is in a major key, the lyrics tell a dark tale that is ambiguous enough to relate to David. I guess we all have our favorites. 

@joylitt

It would better fit for a movie like Blade Runner 2049 or some sci fi film

@dk

I chose up with the birds because they had a rousing bridge that led to the guitar solo and it sends chills down my spine when i thought about Alien. And i was thinking about Pure Imagination as well, but Midnight mightve been a better choice because of its lyrics and use in other trailers. 

But ironically they have a new song called A L I E N S taking from our beloved Alien sequel lol 

I guess nobody liked "Nature's boy"? That song was such a big give away about how the movie was going to be focused in David.

Found it, although someone could easily expand on it for the whole song. Thanks for the reminder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5qovMo3mdA

Woolson I may have seen it but do not recall. Can you link it?

Someone made a fan made TV spot out of it that's why I brought it up

Timmy the ultramorph Good point- the echo location from the VR video with some tweaks would have been better. Ultimately, I would have been happy to have it un explained.

Timmy the ultramorph Yes in Alien 3 the POV worked better, it served the purpose of generating suspense.

Woolson Pure Imagination sung by Gene Wilder- that is great imo! The music even gets a bit off kilter to add some discomfort.

didn't we alreadt sort of see an alien pov in alien3? it just looked like a completely normal pov. I had always imagined something more like the predators infared but not as bright. something that instead of heat, echolocation. how To create this image i have no idea.

dk Exactly

@joylitt, I stream from iTunes purchases. At home on my Apple TV. At work, when nobody's looking, on my laptop. As a precautionary measure, I also have a portable 2TB hard drive containing my most cherished movies.

A lot of people slag off Apple, but they are pretty good in this respect. For example, all my purchased movies and most apps are available to the rest of my family. So, when my son is abroad at university, he can trawl through my large collection of movies as he likes.

Annoyingly, I have a handful of iTunes movies in my Wish List that are not available in HD in the UK iTunes Store. E.g. Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. I refuse to buy SD movies at DVD resolution because I am used to HD quality, and DVDs look really rough to my eyes now.

I shudder to think about the days when I had a DVD collection. Adverts on those things drove me insane, especially when going back a few years to watch an old movie. You don't get adverts on iTunes movies.

dk what I mean is: the POV is not on the script. The running xeno is. They swapped one thing for the other, I guess to make the whole sequence more of a slow burn suspense. But it misses the mark; as you say it is not worth it. 

@dk @SpaceJOC

Thinking about it, yeah and I'm sorry if I grinded any gears but there was another song by Coldplay  called Midnight that really would've been a good choice. I chose this song because someone used Pure Imagination as a trailer song and it was generally known as a happy innocent song

joylitt Country Roads was an excellent choice. Problem was hardly anyone would have known if not seeing trailers first and being cued by Tennessee to Shaw's mumbling.

hox Nicely put. The more we understand the creature, the less Alien it becomes.

joylitt What you show was not in the movie- agreed. The pic I showed was from the Xeno POV and yes, it seems a bit weird. RS wanted to show something different during that scene considering everything going on and this is what we got.

I think the John Denver song was a lovely choice in the trailers. However, I wish it had been used in a different way in the movie.

I think it is just a filler. There was simply not enough "stuff" or detail in that part of the script. By the way, the xenomorph running like crazy on the corridor was not even included in the film, and that was in the script. I think they swapped one thing for the other.

I agree, it wasn't needed. We shouldn't get to see how the Alien 'thinks' about the world. It would be like creating a movie of bat vision or cuttlefish vision - these creatures sense the world, but in alien ways to ourselves that don't really map with the way we see things.

I understand juxtaposition of dark imagery against a happy sounding song, but I just don't feel it in this case tbh. I might be for NIN The Day the World Went Away but that is just my opinion.

God no, Coldplay are atrocious! 

IRaptus That is part of my attitude and maybe it is a generational thing. I like to have a physical copy. I have noticed that streaming can vary- sometimes I could have an entire season of something or a movie and come back later to watch and things are gone due to what seem to be contractual agreements and such.

I normally stream but for something I really love like Alien films etc Ill go and buy a physical copy :)

chili

This idea that you judge the film or bracket it according to how much blood or gore is in the movie is to miss the point. I attended a performance of Titus Andronicus yesterday evening and it was a riveting examination of violence driven by feuds and how we loss our humanity the deeper in we go. Death and blood was everywhere but it was driven by a narrative which explained the who what why.

A L I E N only offered the what, in a completely innovative way. You cannot do that again. When Riders said nobody asked the question about the Jockey and more recently the who and why he was, as a man who understands story, stepping outside of a fan base that is pre occupied by the texture and mechanics being repeated endlessly and looking at the why and who.

To answer those questions in a really engaging and interesting way is much more important than how much blood and gore is in. My understanding of the reaction to Prometheus is it wasn't scary enough on that calibration. I thought the high tech smugness and lazy thinking driven by a deluded billionaire felt very on point and to interact with the Alien Pathogen and all it represented was utterly chilling.       

So I am not really interested in what you call it. I do accept anything to do with the ALIEN franchise is dark but unless we get behind Ash's remarks in an authoritative way I am not interested. When I consider the threads started here a handful zoom in on the subtext, on AVP Galaxy 48% polled want Ripley and the Queen back.

Curiously I believe Ridley knows where he wants to go but the fan base and test screenings and feedback drag him back to the tick sci fi blood and gore and leave all that "thinking bullshit" out.

There isn't a big segment of the audience that wants someone to answer Ash's observations and Ridley judged that making the answer character centred (David) rather than philosophically centred (Punishment for Paradise Lost) was more relatable but what he also forgot is that fan bases tend to be very conservative and obsessed by literalness which is kind of funny when probably the real science of space flight and pathogen behaviour is completely out to lunch in these films. I am also sensing that the suspension I witnessed last night is receding with the modern generation who want all their helmet protocols etc (why not just assume these people have done their stuff and follow the story).

Prometheus posed questions and hinted at answers, unless you parse all the Covenant elements very closely those answers are missing from the core story and even when you parse most of it is based on an unreliable narrator. The analogy I would draw is we are taking a journey through fog where we can only just see whats in front of us but have no idea of what we are actually travelling through. The get out is, well we will get our answers next time. We have had two movies over 5 years and this thread was begun with a script which gave us some clear cut answers, John knew what he was doing though he would still have got a reaction on Shaw with that script. Her healing David, what he found and their fall out and her being overcome should have been in the movie as the great revelation and could have been riveting and the popcorn munching on blood and gore without context  audience would have got their third act.  

I have watched the recent Star Wars movies they actually pass off a really neat trick its a very simple space opera with the vestiges of profundity but actually because that profundity is skin deep it never distracts from what it really is, Saturday Morning cinema presented expensively. The franchise never faces the challenges that this prequel sequence has because the latter really has tried to offer something thoughtful in a tentpole context.    

I have read a couple of reviews here which completely contradict each other (we got our answers it was great, I really looked hard at Prometheus and feel I got no answers). That only goes to show it depends what questions you are asking. Many of the debates here are how we calibrate our expectations. Several people who were involved in the discussions here in 2015 and our speculations have concluded the ideas we came up with were a damn sight more interesting than what we got and consider Covenant very poor, thats the polite view. We can try and answer what the audience want until the cows come home but what is clear is if you start reacting to audience and designing a film based on focused groups and who shouts the loudest.....your lost.    

John was clearly given a brief to write an Alien Prequel movie which would use an absolute minimum of the narrative investment of Prometheus. As Wayne Haag said David is the straight line from Prometheus. Once they began tampering with the connectivity and layering in more of Prometheus particularly Shaw they clearly as Pietro alluded could not make their mind what to put in or leave out they shot 12 minutes and then left all of it out in the second test screening and then just the briefest segment the bombing for the next screening. Thats the kind of thing that happens when you lose the original vision. The best example I know of that is the Hobbit Duology shot over 266 days with a two film script and then recast as a Trilogy with a 13 week pick up session to refashion, what happens your key themes and crescendos are subverted and you add elements which subvert the original vision which itself was recast when the original director resigned.  

The only way they have managed to refashion the Prometheus investment into an Alien Prefix movie is give the story to a robot who will do anything say anything be anything. Last night the characters in Titus Andronicus did appalling things but it all meant something there was a progression a reason, with David replacing the Alien as the antagonist he needs to be more than Ash's view of the Biomechanoid horror (unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality).if you want to stop the films simply being generic sci fi blood and gore.  

Take this for what it is worth. A quote from Jello Biafra- "The dumbest buy the mostest, that's the name of the game."

Timmy the ultramorph haha nice work! Not childish at all

its "in the interest of fairness" & "exposing the masses to material outside the Top 40 pop culture"....that's how I see it anyway XD

I was about to give Sanity (Australian retail chain) a good wrap for nicely displaying Covenant so prominently in store when i bought in on Day 0, but I see they have fallen for the Guardian of the Galaxy white washing as well :(  

joylitt That is my fear. I once had more than 300 CDs on an external HD so I could dump on an MP3 player. The problem was I did it all with Vista. I later upgraded to Win 7, plugged in the HD and everything started to reconfigure and delete automatically. All I could do was sit and watch.

dk Be careful with that. Because if you damage your hard drive everything will be gone at once. If I ever do that again I would probably try solid state hard drives because the regular ones are not forever.

hox I am about where you are. I have more than 400 dvds and blue rays and most are stored away but take up a good amount of real estate. I wonder if it is possible to put at least dvds on an external hard drive.

hox Where do you store the media.

I stream, for a few reasons.

1. I have about 600 movies and 50 TV series. This would take up a huge amount of space in my relatively small house.

2. It's really easy to find what you're looking for.

3. They never get lost.

I'm sure it is. I really don't worry much about that because I have another drive installed that plays blu ray, cd and even the defunct HD DVDs.