Comments (Page 648)

how did david fix his voice?

It might have just bean the way they shot it but it looked like he was almost 10 feet tall to me.

Well, unless the Protomorph had more IT knowledge than me, I suppose you are right and they changed only clothes.

It's a pity though they did it in such a human way.

I like some of JC's output, he's an intelligent movie maker, no doubt, but what a glib comment about not liking movies where the main character(s) gets 'destroyed' in the end. Some of the most memorable stories of all time see their protagonists die in the end. Such stories take the risk of challenging our desire for wish-fulfillment. The Long Good Friday anyone? Night of the Living Dead, Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus? Like Spielberg, JC pulls his punches and story's end. Who can deny that the end of Spielberg's War of the Worlds is a betrayal of the movie's entire reason for being made, as an allegory for the losses and shock of 9-11? But I digress. . . .

if it had not have been for the pace of the movie at the time the egg morphing scene was to be shown then it would have made it into the theatrical release. egg morphing is the original concept by both creator O'Bannon and first director Ridley Scott. but that doesn't mean there cant be a queen in a well established well protected hive, after all, the xeno in alien was alone and was probably starting the process of creating such a hive

Could be tricky using your CPU to lift itself out of its own body! Call me old fashioned, but I'm pretty sure it would stop working as soon as it was pulled from its housing. Poor David would lock up ;-)

I think you'd need a third party to help you do it.

This is James Cameron doing a pretty good job of diplomatically saying, "Wow, A:C sucked."

"I think he is obviously trying to create a greater universe around it and more backstory with the Engineers and so on."

Is that obvious, really? It looks like he abandoned that almost completely. Fuck A:C for not just being a horrible movie, but mainly for ruining everything else Alien.

So any muscular bald human figure is an 'Engineer' now?

Nope. No high nose bridge, a characteristic of all the Engineers.

I think those are just animated statue displays of the current Nexus models in the trailer. That statue is labeled Nexus 8, and he actually looks kind of like the actor who actually plays a nexus 8 in the movie.

By upgraded vehicle I meant a newer body, with the latest technological updates.

Swaping bodies would be more sci-fi for me. I don't say I am right, but I would like to have happened like that.

Hi. Nice to hear from you.

It's not so much that David did not recognise the cottage on the lake. What he didn't know was the detail of Walter's earlier conversation with Daniels in the terraforming bay, where she described her ambition to him. David knew nothing of that ambition, and the game was up when she asked if he would help her to achieve this private dream.

@daliens, I did notice Daniels' pulse monitor racing when I saw it at the cinema. I also made a mental note to check the digital download (which I don't have yet) because the accompanying sound effect did not seem to match the displayed rate. Yeah, I know, maybe I should find better things to worry about.

I love Ridley's attention to detail on the whole. There is a scene in Prometheus on the way to meet the Engineer, where they pass an awesome shiny bronze exoskeleton suit. It must have cost a ton of money to design and manufacture, yet was only on the screen for mere seconds.

How long would it take to mutilate your own robot face? Seconds. If it makes you look like you've been in a real scrape, why not? It's not as if it's going to hurt.

The puncture wound was in the process of healing. A small wound like that might heal in a matter of minutes with the help of android blood. In contrast to Walter's major lacerations.

What upgraded vehicle do you mean? Aside from anything else, David is devious and evil. What better way to get your way than to inveigle your way, unsuspected, into your prey's home, and let them do all the hard work? It was a successful tactic, after all.

There's no discrepancy in the given description. Whilst the movie wasn't a lecture on astrophysics - and nor should it be - it's clear that some kind of nova event was being described. These happen all the time in nature: a powerful stellar event yielding an immediate burst of neutrinos (which travel at light speed), followed by a much slower plasma shockwave (charged particles). There are various ways that novae can be triggered, and they are very very common.

It is completely implausible that David (or anyone in existence, now or in the future) could trigger such an event. The amount of energy involved is literally astronomical. If you converted every gram of the Covenant's mass into pure energy, that wouldn't even tickle the behaviour of a star.

Here's an interesting fact for you: what's brighter in your field of view, a hydrogen bomb placed against your eyeball, or our Sun going supernova 150 million kilometres away? The answer is the supernova, by a factor of about a billion, actually. Ridiculously huge amounts of energy is involved in any kind of stellar flare, even those that are not supernovae. Our own Sun, poodling away doing what it does, destroys several millions of tonnes of mass each second, turning that mass into pure energy.

Like most people, I anticipated being scared shitless by Aliens in Prometheus. Didn't turn out that way. BUT... that didn't stop it being a fantastic movie, one I've watched many many times, and doubtless will do many times more. It's also given me endless hours of amusement rebutting spurious complaints made by homeboy reviewers on the internet. Or even down the pub last night, as it happens. My friend declared I was a fanboy and it was rubbish because they couldn't run out of the way of the tumbling spaceship. I declared that he is an idiot and can't use his eyes. Didn't he see the fiery debris raining down on either side? Oh, the joy, there are hundreds more mistakes like this that homeboys make.

Anyway, I rather feel the same way about Covenant. It's a great movie in its own right, and I can't wait to get it on iTunes.

haha, this is what the movie might of been like if James Cameron directed it. XD

really, the only thing that i hated was the completely unnecessary plot twist that vickers was weylands daughter. that was it. 

I thought showing they were related added to the reason why David was cold himself. He says something to Shaw about how doesn't everyone want their parents dead, and when you see how Weyland and Vickers act with each other you can see why David would come to that conclusion and even how it's affected his behavior. 

Ridley Scott put the egg-morphing scene back in the Director's Cut (2003) so that is what counts. "Queen" is just David's ironic name for Daniels, just as he called Shaw his "Eve".

Yog Sothoth fair call, my comment was rather half-arsed :P

However, i offer no evidenced truth, just my idea which would offer a significant and exciting new difference to the classic Xenomorph life-cycle that suits the rapid propagation, gestation period and growth of the Neomorph.

To elaborate: the motes/ spore pods that the Neomorph transmit themselves from allow for a much rapid deployment of neomorph individuals than the singular egg/host trait of the Xeno. Especially if the spores con infect multiple hosts.

If a neomorph was able to spawn spore pods upon its dead body as its primary vector of reproduction it allows the Neomorph to spread like a weed, taking seed wherever it falls until its has established itself in an ecosystem. 

eg if the neomorph is able to infiltrate a base, ship, town, city etc where it dies, it starts a new infestation spot.     

Every time they get a foothold, their prey lose ground as every Neomorph killed potentially breeds even more. 

"In fact, in the original screenplay there were traces of a bygone alien race on the planetoid’s surface – the most notable element being the famous spore pyramid. The characters deduce that the pyramid is a “a pre-technological construction. That slab was engineered by an Iron Age culture at best.” The structure once served as a breeding temple for the planetoid’s primitive  beings, who required three sexes to reproduce: two consensual, and one sacrificial – an incubator to carry the seed.

Unique Race: “In Dan’s original conception the Alien race had three entirely different stages of its life-cycle,” explained Ron Cobb. “First, the egg, which is tended by the third stage adults and housed in a lower chamber of the breeding temple. When ready to hatch, the egg is placed in the middle of a sacrificial stone and a lower animal, the equivalent of an alien cow, is then led on to the stone. Sensing the warmth, the facehugger springs out, attaches itself to the animal and deposits a foetus into the stomach.” At some point in the planetoid’s history, a “cataclysm causes the extermination of the adults … leaving no one to tend and nurture the young. But in a dark lower chamber of the breeding temple a large number of eggs lie dormant, waiting to sense something warm …”

https://alienseries.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/the-alien-planet/

There was no egg laying queen in the original script and I believe Ridley Scott prefers it that way. Kind of egg morphing. 

David took 2 face huggers on Covenant, he has seven years of egg morphing ahead.

I talked about a similar belief I had with Kethnol on this forum and he doesn't want to believe it.  I'll see if I can sum it up here though.

Okay, David hacked W-T Covenant mission files with the help of Mother to change a few numbers that nobody on the Covenant research team would notice.  I am sure most of the team is ran by computers anyways.  Plus, David has Engineer technology on "Paradise", so I wouldn't be surprised if he could figure out how to abuse some of it.

He hacks and changes the planet that the Covenant research team found to be the most habitable planet.  It goes from being some planet to being Origae-6.  The reason he chose Origae-6 is because the Covenant mission would have to fly by Planet 4 (the planet David is on).

The reason Planet 4 was picked up on the research is because the Engineers didn't want it to be found.  So, David is hidden in secret as well on Planet 4.

The next thing David changes in the hack is the passive and active phases of a star near to Planet 4.  The significance of this is that the star would be in its active phase when the Covenant mission thinks it will be in a passive phase.  During an active phase, there are man more solar flares occurring than during a passive phase.  So, a large solar flare occurs and it's particle shockwaves damage the Covenant ship.  Basically, it was bound to happen since the nearby star was in an active phase.

Solar flares can be many of times larger than our own suns solar flares, so a large solar flare could catch a nearby ship in it's blast.  During Walter's breakdown of the space event, he describes it as a neutrino burst.  I remember him calling it a stellar flare later as well, which is a solar flare (it's a different name because it's not a flare from our own Sun).  Later in the movie, the few remaining Covenant crew members on the Covenant (while others are on Planet 4) talk about the space event.  I think it was Upworth who called it a "solar flare" (incorrect terminology) when she was talking to Ricks (at least that's how I remember the movie).  Walter, in the novel, calls it a charged particle flare (p.41) among a few other vague descriptions.  It's been awhile since I read it, but I don't remember the book ever calling it a neutrino burst.  So, a charged particle flare sounds like it could be the same as a solar flare.  So, a solar flare is an explosion on the surface of the sun which releases charged particles.  These flares can damage sensitive equipment and since the Covenant wasn't prepared for these kind of events, like Walter says, than it makes sense that the Covenant ship is vulnerable to these type of stellar events.  In space today, special precautions have to be taken because of solar flares from our own sun.

Plus, the Covenant ship was likely flying near star clusters as much as possible to lesson the chance of being to near to supernova explosions.  Still, we don't know for sure since we don't know where the Covenant is in the Milky Way Galaxy.

The reason the crew didn't pick up the Shaw recording is because the ship was still processing the data (it says this in the novel too).  So, when Tennessee was outside the ship, he got a more direct transmission of the data.  The ship would eventually received the data, but who knows when.

I wouldn't be surprised if David did at least know a little about the Covenant mission during Prometheus either since in the novel he seems to know a few things about the Covenant mission and the crew that cannot be explained.  Other members on this forum take them as assumptions made by David, but I don't trust David one bit, so I think he did his research before he even met the crew.  I started a thread because of these questions I had regarding how much David knows according to the novel. Plus, according to me reading the novel, I think he was watching the Covenant crew the whole time, or almost the whole time, when they were on Planet 4 before he interacted with them.

So, I think David just got lucky that there was a huge colonization mission going on while he was on Planet 4, but I think he hacked the mission and set some really convincing bate for the Covenant crew to bite, which they did.

I don't believe that the Covenant flying by Planet 4 in addition to the crew picking up a signal was a coincidence since we know what David was doing on Planet 4 and we know that he needs more hosts for his experiments.  The colony ship is perfect for David, so I just don't believe it's a coincidence.

I probably missed some things, but hopefully that is a good summary.  My questions on this theory will hopefully be answered when I get to rewatch Alien: Covenant.  Hopefully that will be soon too.  Plus, when the new Alien: Covenant Origins book comes out, that could answer a lot of questions too.  I can't wait!

I would prefer to know the eggs as biological weapons, a result of genetical engineering. That would explain the load of the derelict, that too I would prefer not to be connected to David, but from a distant past and part of engineers' mythology.

If egg morphing would be a viable way to perpetuate, living hosts being required, then the aliens would not kill on spot but they would rather grab their prey to a sort of nest. That can eventually lead to a queen, more like a mastermind than an egg sac.

A queen may be appealing to many fans, and that turns the creatures into a sort of civilization that can decide for itself, colonize planets and even rule the Galaxy. That idea was surfacing in Advent video and it was probably hinted at in the first poster of the movie, aliens fighting engineers.

I don't like James Cameron egg laying bug queen. However the idea of biological weapons that get out of control, evolve into a civilization  and turn against their makers is a pleasant fiction.

The engineers must have had a very technological phase. Also, you may argue that even though the environment they live in looks "natural", maybe it is not, since we have proof of their meddling with genetics an biotechnology. Their technology might be so advanced that for a human, it would be indistinguishable from magic. I don't expect Ridley Scott to reveal much more about the Engineers though. All of his remarks about over reliance in technology refer to the advent of sentient AI. 

This link speaks what I think about that video.... kind of.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/e400b31b-d027-42f7-ae8c-2501f7126053

I guess he watched a lot of Titanic out of the movie archives from his local library when he wasn't serving tea to his "father" and creator.  I wouldn't have thought that would have been a favorite of his though.  He seems to be into the intellectual movies and music from watching Prometheus. A:C makes me think the same too.

His flute playing is a little anemic without the orchestra as well.

Also, David is crazy and does not love Shaw.  He only thinks he is because he has seen what humans do when they do love one another.  David is just good programming gone wrong

This is a fake video since I don't think David would be playing wrong notes while playing a song in memory of Shaw (because he doesn't love her).

If you are right why, apart from chopping his left hand, would David slash his face? There was no witness to their fight and last Daniels saw of him, his face was unharmed. Even being hit by the rock he kept his perfect composure.

It was Walter with the cuts on the face, cuts that were not healing instantly as the flute stabbing hole on the neck.

David's puncture from the nail was still not healed at the last moment we see of their fight, the blob of android blood was there.

Why would David not try to steal an upgraded vehicle? It might have worked faster than chopping his arm off, cutting his face, changing the clothes like a human would do because no other options. As we saw earlier in the movie the shutdown and reboot was quite faster than a smartphone needs today for the same.

We don't know yet what the engineers did to their home world but if we go back on LV223 they don't seem very wise. Technologically advanced  yes.

And as others pointed out, the engineers on Planet 4 may be similar to the Amish people, an isolated comunity that is known for simple living, plain dress, and reluctance to adopt many conveniences of modern technology. (Wikipedia) They too may be a colony established some time in the past.

However, their technology evolved in a different way, they don't need so many displays and wires, but they need to know to play the proper tune on the flute to take off.

Hope to see more of the engineers' civilization explored in the next movie. 

I would like to be somehow similar to the one from "A song for Lya" by George R.R. Martin. One of my favorite story.

It was a minor puncture. Healed, where previously there was a minor blob of white android blood.

David was simply maintaining the deceit, for his own very good reasons, by sending his report with a fake accent.

I agree with the sentiment they don't have to be mutually exclusive, but if I had to pick one it would be the Queen

@Andrew1975, "One species (e.g. a human being) cannot be transformed into another species or into something that is part of another species' life-cycle."

it's not widly different in concept to a caterpillar turning into a chrysalis, that then turns into a butterfly. The caterpillar's body parts get broken down to mush, before reassembly into a different form.

Undoubtedly Ridley Scott's.

Andrew1975, egg-morphing and the black goo are like two peas in a pod. Do you also think the black goo should be forgotten?

Ridley.

Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy Aliens, but it's Ridley's vision, even if they are sometimes fumbled while putting them to film, that defines the Alien series. Growing up in the 80's and 90's Aliens was bad-ass and made for great quotes, action sequences, and video games, but as I've grown older my love for it has tarnished.

LMAO

Ambiguous at best. Not saying you are wrong. Maybe it could be something some wish to see. Or a clever RS  troll.

"And, as many others have said, he would have been able to heal if it was Walter's body."

David however had no trace of the nail wound. Was it healed?

 And the fact that David uses Walter's voice to send the final report to Weyland-Yutani makes me prefer the body switch theory. 

Geyahhhh, my ears.

...I admire its clarity...

That's a bit better. Images updated

I understand Scott's approach mentioned above, but the Engineer technology revealed in the movie - namely, the mother ship and other alien ships in the hangar - should have been included in more scenes.

Possible, but so long as that is your "reckon", not the evidenced truth.