Comments (Page 613)

Hive?Forget 1,6,7.Different universe.

Xenomorphs are not insects

Wow, Cerulean Blue, thank you for the kind words. I figured others would enjoy some of the topics if they were half as obsessed as myself. 

BigDave, I think that device on the cathedral dome was intended to be a solar collector. In the leaked script draft Daniels notices it has solar energy panels and asks David if he has power. David says it only gave him some erratic power, but he has tried to keep it going.

The two satellites in the script draft were what generated the energy field/quarantine shield. That is in the ionosphere, so it can't be the same thing we see in the sky over the Engineer city.

Hatton and Hallet talk about it like it IS the same as the satellite shield, so it must have been written differently in the draft of the script they had. The script we have makes no mention of the urns breaking on a shield in the sky. They just drop to the ground and break open.

" Question now would be is it a Viral/Pathogen, a Mutagen, or a Parasite?  I would say it has all 3 Elements."

A mutagen is something that causes changes in genetic material. Mutagens that cause diseases viruses are pathogens, which are parasites, so it is all three.

Great point regarding Dr. Shaw's reward for her time with David 8 VivisectedEngineer. I'm an android relationship optimist.

I just feel like I would be able to redirect some of that energy into something more towards my interests at the expense of the Engineers. We could also ride mountain bikes throughout the spaceship, watch movies, and have language studies. I would feel really good about myself if I was able to beat David 8 at darts.

@Ingeniero - Thank-you for the excellent posts you do!

Thank you IRaptus and BigDave. I first thought Daniels had hit some kind of fluid line firing a machine gun into the bottom of the ship. 

@Ingeniero - Does the Scorpion/Docking Ship not appear to still be hovering & not on the ground?  If it is in fact still hovering, it would be interesting to find out how it is doing it?  It may actually be unmanned & fully automated?

Thank you for the compliment Cerulean Blue. I felt the same way until Ati guided my steps with the sequence of images above.

The camera angle seems stationary with the ship flying toward it with an Engineer in the mountain and when the ship flies by up towards the clouds the angle turns to see another Engineer face.

I'll lighten up the images Ati caught for me. Thank you for your patience Ati.

The sacrificial Engineer comparison.

You are able to see the ship in the valley in the above image daliens (pretty great). I also noticed the "spoke" like structures (above sacrificial Engineer) on the mountain behind the city similar to the temple structures under the dome as well (thanks again Ati for source images).

Walter!

The madman, David-8. Ash is deceptive but the execution could be better lol David not only deceived the Prometheus crew, he deceived the Covenant crew, destroyed the Engineers on their home planet, and created the Xenomorph variant.

@Ingeniero - To me it looks like there is only one face, as the lander in approaching the camera, the face is on the left & to the right of the lander.  As the lander is passing the camera & heading away from us, or the camera view, the face is now at the right of the screen & still to the right of the lander.  The lander is heading out of the shot with the engines flaming towards us as it exits the scene.  Let me know if I am missing something in these shots, as it is hard to see totally clearly in the dark-ish screen grabs on my computer?  I do think the face is of some type of heraldry/worship in significance to the inhabitants?  Good stuff!!

Daniels & (Tee) Simply because Daniels is a badass and there's nothing like watching the back of a beautiful woman ;)

Thank you and welcome chli. Great image of the group of Engineer elders departing from the sacrificial Engineer.

I think you may have nailed it BigDave with the side to side comparisons. Thank you. I used the topic image (your bottom example) in a wide comparison. Pretty good resemblance. 

I'll do another comparison to an enhanced image of the second Engineer face in the mountain (thank you Ati).

IMHO - To James Cameron, Thank-You very much for not making AC, or for that matter, screwing up any other movie in the Alien World!  JUST SAY NO TO ANOTHER ALIEN QUEEN!!!!  ;)

It's a viral pathogenic mutagen, which causes parasites to happen.

chli

Answers to your points :-

1) I thought this notion that Fox was reconsidering its position and the vibe on the net was fragmented was genuine. I therefore respond to the notion of why, with the particular narrative that my view comes from. 

2) A L I E N was clearly a horror and gore movie. Prometheus on the other hand was much more about ideas and retribution if you meddle, it had a sub text. 

3)Spaihts draft and what happened to it is at the core of the issue here. Someone offers an entertaining script which lead directly to the Jockey incident and its considered to "obvious" scale back the Xeno's make more of the Engineers.  

So once again we come back to a franchise predicated on horror, gore and monsters and Ridley trying to give it some real contextual meaning and not just going with it. John Logan gives us a fantastically simple and well communicated idea in this. 

"Is that what I mean? ... The wonder
of it is this: they created us and
we created myths about them. We
made them into Gods. Then we felt
the need to create the idea of the
soul, so we could be somehow worthy
of them. But they didn’t care about
any of that. They just wanted to
build something, something
efficient and useful, a good
machine".

And its not in the movie !! and to say this is vague is projection its not vague at all its clear as day but for Shaw and David on either end of this debate not to discuss this and not to let it be the beginning of her end .. is a wasted opportunity because we need the third act with yawn - the burster to - blown into space.

So I see this constant push and pull between a thinking persons movie which deals with retribution and punishment and an action horror gore movie end of. 

And because I do not want to repeat myself I think right now I have nothing new to say so will leave it at that.

And...WTH can they not release an English novelization? Again, defying logic.

Dang, the movie should've ended that way. The edits and screenwriting simply did not work as well as it should've. Same for A:C.

Indeed there is a likeness

Interesting notes about the Shield... so this could very well be the case, and i guess it would maybe give us a reason for why the Cathedral Dome has those Devices on top?  I assumed prior to AC that they was some kind of Device that left of a Energy Weapon that simply killed off all Life in the Plaza to Prevent the Black Goo Spreading and so would answer why the Bodies are like Mummified and we dont see any Engineers suffering the effects as shown in Prometheus.

Maybe instead this Technology is what produces the Shield?  The draft mentions like Satellites well something in Space, but we clearly dont see any proof of this in Alien Covenant.

Then again it could be just some kind of Solar Panel to produce Energy needed for the City.

As far as the Black Goo, it can appear at bit confusing and i still stand by that if we look at it as intended by Jon Spaights, then its straight forwards and fits with the whole Engineers Purpose which is Genetic Engineering.

The Sacrificial Goo is thus a Creation Tool, the Question now would be is it a Viral/Pathogen, a Mutagen, or a Parasite?  I would say it has all 3 Elements.

Interesting read and thanks for sharing...  i am not 100% sure its the kind of extra detail i would have liked to had seen in the movie however..  maybe not all of it

Nice Captures

David, most definitely David. 

Seriously!

Perhaps some likeness?

Slightly off topic, but I find it interesting how that script has the xenomorph eggs coming from those fungal egg sacs. David specifically says he nurtured them, somehow adding different DNA to them, to create the xenomorph eggs.

I don't see how this can be canon. In the "Advent" material, David says that the local life forms didn't prove to be "very fruitful" in creating his "Wolf" (the Xenomorph). Then he says that he used Shaw as the main source for the xenomorph, while "tweaking" her mutated DNA, showing that he used various neomorph's DNA in this tweak, possibly using black goo as a catalyst.

The differences from this script are very interesting, in this and other areas.

Thanks, Ati!

Interesting that David used Holloway as a guinea-pig in order to find a way to prolong Sir Peter Weyland's life (and that Sir Peter knew about it and approved it). Therefore, David just followed the orders of his maker. He was made to serve . . .

@ Kethol

Correct, by "later stages" it means later effects within the victim. The goo causes a life form to spawn parasites, tiny insects in the mold's case, which then infect another host, creating our friend the neomorph.

@ Thombach, Blu-ray, standard HD TV. I don't think there's anything more to this scene really. Just drops of black goo falling and hitting.

Drop a bucket of water from the top of a skyscraper...it won't fall straight down, some will blow back up slightly. *Shrugs* maybe our eyes see different things in the same movie.

Ingeniero nice captures! that is a rapid moving scene.

A much darker yellow-orange than the Xeno's of old

For me long haired David looked more akin to Iggy Pop than Kobain, but every one to his own.

VivisectedEngineer solid!! You know Hicks will always have your back. His quiet confidence and level-head would keep you calm and re-assured during a firefight. A true leader to follow to hell and back.

cuponator3000 great choice! Both of them are bad-ass and good in a firefight. Fearless and barn-storming you know they have the balls to waltz on into a xeno alive and make it back out alive again. They both showed tactical awareness and adaptability  

Sorry you all, but this was a pretty low budget movie. It was not produced by Netflix, they only stepped in as distributor in countries where was not already bought for cinema shows.

It was almost entirely filmed in Bucharest (with a few scene in the port of Constanta), Romania. I was very interesting how even communist buildings were made "dystonian" using cgi. The vehicles and equipment looked not very convincing but i get the budget limitations. Do you know how many cheap action movies are produced in my country? Many pieces of s*** with undeads like Van Dame, Seagal or the like. For example http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5470222/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_5

And I bet Rapace was cheaper to hire than Close and Defoe (combined). Further more she appeared in The Rupture, which for all intents and proposes was a straight to video movie. And the script writers were, sorry for hurting any one, more or less amateurs.

It was very ironic from someone in Romania where abortions were illegal (and were done illegally in shitty conditions) in the '70s and '80s to see that after 100 years births would be done in the same conditions. Ok that was not intentional and this takes place in an unspecified future.

I was found ironic that in this one that did not kill the Cooper haired one. 

Taking all of this into account for me this was a solid 4 out of 5

And as somebody noticed some time ago, the docking ship crash landed on the valley beyond the engineers 'city. It can be seen in one of Ati's screenshots.

The reasons you saw weaknesses were where I saw strengths. It is an overcrowded dystopian world. Overpopulation was shown and it is tough to have a futuristic or modern infrastructure when the populace is struggling to feed itself and survive imo.

If not seen, I would respectfully recommend 1984, Equilibrium and Soilent Green

Regular Parrot, welcome back :)

Your post reminded me of something someone said somewhere in the forum recently which was basically: 

Ridley and the writers took a pretty big risk having the villain win outright. Once David was revealed to the crew for the first time, everything went downhill and never came back up.

In America, for example, we like our happy endings! Not everyone per say, but that is how the statstics have pointed throughout film history they continue to do so. In a film analysis class last year we watched a film (I can't remember the name unfortunately. It's pretty well-known, although old) and the heroes died and evil won out! We were all devastated (it was an intense story and a tough note to end on). The Professor said, "Well, it's French."

I am pretty sure most countries that these tentpole films release in prefer the happier endings too, so yeah. It's a risk on the creative teams' part, but one I enjoy and respect!

Thombach, I thought the same thing when I saw that description of the mote from the script. The shape-change thing must have been an early idea of what they were supposed to look like.

The fact that the pathogen alone was able to move and form rough shapes on top of the leaking urns in Prometheus does give some clue as to how the black particles are able to fly and swarm in the Covenant urn-drop scene. They move incredibly fast though. It was like a swarm of locusts or bees they way they were attacking and coating the Engineers in a few of those shots.

David also says the later stages of the pathogen produced the insects, so the swarming things were definitely not those. I know you did not say that. Just pointing it out. "The original black liquid turned to lethal particles when exposed to air. Later stages produced parasites and invasive insects. From their eggs came, well..."

dk, whoop there it is!

One thing I noticed about this film is that the locations and sets were boring. I forget what year it is set in, but it seems pretty far into the future do to some of the technology, but it looks as if it is all present day locations. It doesn't have to be friggin Bladerunner desgin wise, but come on, man! Maybe that comes with limited special effetcs budgets (building a city digitally, or changing it, is expensive) AND I suppose the goal was to show that the planet was just packed FULL, so there wasn't room to futurize everything. Either way, I think it hurt the movie. 

With everything in mind, I would say 2.5/5 for me. The high points being Noomi Rapace, the concept (although it isn't realized fully), and soem good action pieces. 

I am going to go a little wild and choose Johner and Kristie! Kristie is badass as a second or third in command, but takes control of situations well while still playing nice with others! Plus, he seems pretty damn loyal.

Johner is a DICK... But he is a certified badass who isn't really afraid to actually take anything on. He voices plenty of concern, but he will still fight. 

Not sure who the sidekick is in this scenario... Kristie since he is listed second? I think of him as the leader in that pair, so I am making an executive decision and will make my myself Johner, the wingman!

Simply put: David.