Space-Jockey skeleton/suit

Good pt Razorrick. I just hope in Prometheus 2 or 3 we could find out what did come out of the SJ in Alien 1 and what happened to it by the time Nostromo got there.

The suit dissapointed me greatly as it removed the Alien nature of the SJ which is so powerful in Alien when they discover it. Also Ash was a far more sinister android than David.

Those little fuckers are THAT strong.

[b]Prometheus[/b] shows us the long awaited Jockey who's species appear in [b]Alien[/b], it's not meant to answer the question what happened to Jockey in [b]Alien[/b] in this instalment and doesn't. Otherwise Prometheus would be an Alien by dissection like (The Thing 2011) prequel, join the dots. You can fill in the gaps yourself what happened to the Jockey in Alien and how it got infected and broke out. We never need to see it. There is no error, confusion or convolution - it's for you to fill in the gaps.

I felt that they could have at the end of the movie just shown this scene.... A Derelict in space heading towards a Gas Giant with 4 moons..... Then go to a scene of the Cargo Bay and show the Eggs and then one Egg start to open. Thats it basically a 1-2 min clip... It would show no Face Hugger, no Pilot, no actual Face Hugging or Chest Bust scene... Also no crash.... nothing. Just a visual clue of a ship that has Eggs on it and we see one open.... this goes with what Ridley had explained what happened, that the Derelict on LV 426 was heading somewhere with a Cargo of Eggs and one got lose and the Pilot had to make a Emergency landing on LV 426 then set off the distress/warning beacon. This would still had left a lot of mystery for those who dont want answers and it would give a few clues to stop those who wanted more answers complaining. This scene would not answer when it happened and where the ship was going or who was the Pilot.

As far as the Xeno Organism well it manages to burn a hole in the Glass of Kanes Helmet, a similar Organism appears to have done the same with the Glass on the sarcophagus. We see how easy the Deacon breaks through the Engineers Chest etc. So i dont see a problem for how these Organisms will be able to break out of a Space Jockey Suit.

As far as the Xeno Organism well it manages to burn a hole in the Glass of Kanes Helmet, a similar Organism appears to have done the same with the Glass on the sarcophagus. We see how easy the Deacon breaks through the Engineers Chest etc. So i dont see a problem for how these Organisms will be able to break out of a Space Jockey Suit.

@Little Incentive - Your post brings a valid point. I saw Alien for three nights in a row last week and paused it on the Space Jockey. Prometheus is just like a puzzle when a person tries hard to attach two mismatched pieces together. The fossil of the jockey does not match whatsoever to the Engineer. It is so obvious. Even with the suit that decayed, it is hard to believe the body suit will disintegrate but the mask will remain intact. I am an educated man so I like some continuity that is proper forward and reverse. Dont ruin the whole series due to nonsense. At least the Thing prequel blended perfectly to the John Carpenter version. Also, I liked it better than Prometheus.

Yeah... it's like Ridley had two stories to tell from two different universes, and in the end he and Lindelof hijacked the ALIEN universe to drive this other concept. The result is an uncomfortably incompatible mish-mosh. But I know Ridley would disagree. He would probably point to the original Xeno Lifecycle Mural and say "See... it's like I said. That's a suit." Here it is: http://www.giger.cz/images/image_Heiroglyphs.jpg But the feeling one gets when seeing ALIEN is that the Jockey is an actual skeleton- besides, we should have seen two elements bent outward from the chest bursting: the Jockey's rib cage and the suit's "external bones" (shell)- no? I mean, he obviously abandoned the suit thing with the final Jockey scene in ALIEN, and now you want to bring it back? This is why the ALIEN universe is so f****d up, no conceptual consistency and it really hurts the franchise because now things have become incoherent.

I don't know what it is necessarily fair to compare the exact look... maybe it is fair to compare the intent of the original SJ to what the new view is. but if you are going to pick at the visual differences i feel that is in the same vain as questioning why the computers in prometheus are so much more advanced than the old console based computer systems in Alien. Their ability, budget and view of the future have shifted slightly so they retcon the look of things so the modern audience isn't laughing. Although i disagree with how clean things were in prometheus because the clean / dirty future is not about how advanced tech but rather about a feel. I think that any redesigns in the look of the SJ are just because they felt they could do better than the original look. You could essentially tell Prometheus with keeping the original SJ look and just have the suit be some bioengineered integrated exoskeleton atop something with Human DNA, it would just look a lot clunkier. Although imagine the intro scene if the elders had stripped the sacrificial engineer of his exoskeleton, him screaming as they tore it from his flesh. He falls to his knees weak and hurt they feed him the potion and at first the audience expects it will heal him, but really it's the final blow of destruction, might have been cooler also would have been more shocking when their DNA matched ours

This film and the thread dissapoint me. I think Scott - at 75 - is desperate to believe in "stupid design" rather than Darwinian evoluton. I had always liked Alien bc it left the Qs open - and I hate Aliens and the Queen idea. So here is my take; A returning mining ship on an alternate course picks up the warning (by the SJ in the derelict). After decoding back home the corporation decides to reroute the returning Nostromo. Wat they discover is an extremely ancient ship with an extremely (1million years perhaps) old SJ alien in his chair. The SJ are not related to humans but are forerunners of our own exploration - a very long time ago; before human civilization) the SJ race exploring - comes across the Xenomorphs. Taking a sample on boord they are over-run and crash and send a message of warning - as lambert says "wonder wat happened to the rest of the crew" as they are about to face a similar fate- this is to say that the SJ are not nasty but just an earlier civilization that can build using biotechnology. The warning is for them but they may no longer exist and the exoskeleton is NOT a suit. Why this general idea appeals is that this is the first human alien encounter and the Xenomorphs are just predatory creatures who - as shown in Alien Directors cut - reproduce by using captured beings to form eggs. 1. SJs are not Humans 2. The derelict is not a bio-wepon store but the result of a scientific exploration gone awry - the awe of seeing the derelict the first time was intense. 3. Alien is not a slasher in Space. w/o the first half it wouldnt be so great a film. Just my thoughts but prometheus killed the speculation that made Alien so good.

BTW Scott has money to fund a space voyage; I sometimes find it distasteful when people make more money than they can ever spend in 20 lifetimes.

they showed when it blasted it killed it self that what I thought!

Ridley had to make it a suit instead of a lifeform growing out of the chair..which we all know it is...so the Engineer could get into the chair to fly the juggernaut so that Shaw could also to get into the chair of another ship and fly out of there...its a clumsy barely workable device that I don't wanna buy...but there it is, nothing can be done about it now....unless.. There is a way for Ridley to get out of this discontinuity mess and there is a hint of it in Prometheus...but I doubt Ridley will depict it..I think in his mind, he's moved on from the subject.

If he's even interested in doing another movie, think Ridley can go in one two directions: 1 - He can go in a direct-line 'Alien' prequel direction 2 - He can do an Engineer's prequel direction [i]or:[/i] 3 - He can do them both Maybe. due to using Guy Pierce's Peter Weyland as an old man, means they might want to use him as a young man in a pre-prequel.... And some more speculation...as for the discrepancies in Space-Jockey skeleton / suit-exo-skeleton argument, maybe the Engineers in 'Prometheu's [i]aren't[/i] the Top-of-The-Food-Chain and they serve more advanced, physically larger beings that resemble the origibnal Space-Jockey in 'Alien'. That's one way they could tie-up that mystery.

Little Incentive That's what I was thinking about the Jockey suit...Ridley has some wiggle room to do that or show us a mutated(like Fifield) Engineer that is purpose-built or designed to be a pilot and nothing more. He's already shown us 2 variations of Engineers, one that seems designed solely to be a life source and another with a flight suit as part of his anatomy, permitting mobility as both a pilot and ambulatory individual. Nothing bothers my sense of continuity more than this issue and I find it amusing that Scott himself goofed at a French press event and called it a skeleton instead of a suit.

The suit issue bothers me even more than the Deckard Replicant farce...at least Ford is around to shoot that down.

IMO, I don't care what the director of a film says in an interview: if the story has to be explained in a different medium and not in the film itself, then it is a flawed film. I know Ridley Scott is a big admirer of Stanley Kubrick's [b]'2001: A Space Odyssey'[/b], a film that at that time had to be explained before and after watching it, but 'Prometheus' is no '2001', a glorious epic metaphysical art film, instead is just an 'above-average-style-sci-fi summer film. The derelict ship falls to the ground looking [i]exactly[/i] like the one in [b]'Alien'[/b]. Since the other ships are still buried in the ground, it is safe to asume IS the same ship, and Scott had a George Lucas moment of filmmaking insanity. The creatures got free and infested the ship? What creatures? Before the humans got there there was only black substance in those cannisters and harmless soil worms. So we will have to speculate that someone repeated the same mistakes of the Prometheus crew in one of the other ships? BTW that final stupid looking alien at the end looks like a baby Alien queen with horse teeth - some of the audience laughed at that To conclude, I remember reading a terrific 1979 article in the long defunct magazine "Fantastic Films" titled "Alien Dissected" in which the writer extrapolated into every image and sequence of the film to understand better the alien xenomorph and explain why things were the way they were. Some of his ideas were completely off and the sequels didn't lived up to those theories, but two of his main ideas were accepted by later filmmakers and eventually made it into the films (the Alien life cycle, including the existence of a Queen and the then only hinted crooked Weyland industries sinister intentions). I guess at the end of the day, you just to have to go [i]"It's only a movie[/i]".

For the billioneth time... The Engineer craft on LV-426 was forced to land there THOUSANDS of years ago. This is even hinted at in Alien by the decay of the dead Engineers suit. The Engineer craft in Prometheus IS NOT the same ship!

^ what @ Snorlklebottom said, please review director's commentary ( ALIEN 30th Anniversary Edition ), this should also dispel any myth's that a queen was responsible for the egg's or spores in the cargo hold .

The Space Jockey in Alien isn't an Engineer in a biosuit. It's what the Engineers based their biotech on. Just guessing, of course.

Quote: [b]snorkelbottom[/b] [size=50]For the billioneth time... 1 - The Engineer craft on LV-426 was forced to land there THOUSANDS of years ago. 2 - This is even hinted at in Alien by the decay of the dead Engineers suit. [/size] 1 - Speculation. 2 - Skeleton.

@ Little Incentive 1. Actually stated by Ridley scott just before the release of Prometheus, and shown in Alien, and shown by the vast difference in the interior designs of the ships. 2. In Prometheus it is shown very clearly that what we saw in Alien was not a skeleton but the remains of a bio-mechanical suit. Furthermore, Ridley Scott confirmed this before the release of Prometheus.

I don't think the suit necessarily has to be any stronger than skin and muscle. To me, it looks organic (I imagine a texture and rigidity similar to octopus sushi). If that's the case, a chestburster shouldn't have any more difficulty chewing through it than it would one of our rib cages.

@Tathel The Prometheus is like a PS3: It had 3D imaging, Auto-surgery capsule, and all these bells and whistles. Years and years in the future the Nostromo is like an Atari: You had to use keyboards "A keyboard, how quaint" The reason I came up for this is because it was Weylands personal ship and it had the most advanced tech money could buy at the time, maybe even prototype stuff. The Nostromo was just an outdated piece of crap tub boat that still managed to function.

Isn't it ironic that Ridley actually did go back to the original Giger designs/concepts for this film (as many fans wanted) and yet when he did so he got bashed for it: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/535/engineersuit.jpg/ Sure the original xeno lifecycle mural is not completely in the film (just the portion you see in LostHive's avatar) but Ridley can always go back and say that he [i]was[/i] sticking to canon because as you can see from link that is clearly a suit in both images. I agree it doesn't alleviate the disappointment that the SJ turned out to be "human" in Prometheus, but this nonetheless gives Scott a lot of wiggle room to explain it all away. Speculated on in this forum (and hinted at in the pic), there may be a third race in play here and that can make for a very interesting story for the sequel(s). If we take what Cry Havoc said: "The Space Jockey in Alien isn't an Engineer in a biosuit. It's what the Engineers based their biotech on. Just guessing, of course." Then Scott could cleverly salvage the original SJ concept by simply making that pilot another alien race altogether. I mean, the Derelict is ancient, right? What if the Engineers found it, and incorporated it's technologies- including the bioweapon? Or what if we are dealing with a multi-race society? At the top of the totem pole we have these big-banana-brained, 20 foot tall creatures who have an engineering class of humanoid workers. Just speculating of course, with the intent of how can can satisfy the true fans in the sequel while retaining the newer elements that Prometheus brought into play. Thoughts?

We have yet to get through two more films if Ridleys cryptic comments at the Leicester Square premier in London for Prometheus was to be believed. He said you need to two more films before you get to Alien when he was asked directly whether or not Prometheus was indeed a prequel or not to Alien. He gave an answer, cryptic in its nature yet dramatically revealing in some ways to if you are to take that comment at its face value. I hope there is something in it. I also hope that during this develepmental intrim between these alleged two more films and that of alien more connecting the dots will have happend, in particular, I would be bold to maintain somehow that the Derilict Space Jockey in some ways is seperate and therefore removed from being directly connected as a Humanoid, human looking creature. I would like to see some grand reveal in the same vein as Darth Vader confirming to Luke Skywalker that he was Luke's father and perhaps these beings are seperate yet still related in some way due to their technology for some reason. I'm not presuming that the Derilict Space Jockey was going to reveal 'himself' as the Engineer's father! No, but I would like to see the Prometheus/Alien universe be scattered with many other alien lifeforms only its not all benign but a cross-section of sinister beings in existence, some that have yet to encounter the other in the developing mythology of both the franchises.

@Cry Havoc I agree with you, the Space Jockey is something else, something in that ballpark and it may be an advancement by the Engineers...being able to leave the confines of the chair and the ship itself. The design of the Engineers ships in both Alien and Prometheus are in marked contrast to the saucer in the seeding sequence in Prometheus, that has intrigued me as well.

The saucer could either be a ceremonial Air Force One type configuration, and a royal class of ship/craft. It could be a far older model and their technology of space faring transportation vehilces as advanced in leaps and bounds. The third is both that saucer shape configuration of ship and that of the Juggernaught-Derilict space crafts co-exist and still do to this day in the timeline of the galaxy and of their race we just need to find where they are or may be hidden as we have already uncovered where two Juggernaughts and possibly three more may be on LV 223. We just need to find where the grand Saucer may have been hidden if it still even exists and was not destroyed for what ever reason during traveling through space and we only have the Juggernaughts left over but there may yet be more saucer shaped craft scattered throughout the galaxy on other worlds, even this one, we just need to know where to look to find them. It's possible that they can travel near faster than light speeds and they get to where they want to go in half or a quater of the time then it would otherwise take by conventionally chugging through the depths of space to get where they want to go. Not much reconfiguration needs to be done to them depending upon how many times they are used and subjected to the rigors of inter-stellar space travelling and carring experimental cargo's in the process. One other possibility is that they havegradually perfected the curved oval-like shape from and entire saucer shape gradually, over time, into a slekker two pronged configuration.