Prometheus: a CINDY film
#1
Quote:WEYLAND: "The Titan Prometheus wanted to give mankind equal footing with the gods — for that he was cast from Olympus. Well, my friends, the time has finally come for his return."
Quote:WEYLAND: "At this moment of our civilization, we can create cybernetic individuals, who in just a few short years will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: we are the gods now.”
Having just watched Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the two 'prequel' movies to the Alien series, I have to say they're some of the most certifiably CINDY movies made last decade. Both movies are heavily flawed in their own way: Ridley Scott wants to do too much in too little time, so they both suffer from a number of underdeveloped subplots and bullshit romance storylines thrown in for normie viewers. But beyond all that bullshit, at the heart of Prometheus are the all-important questions: (1) Who created humanity? and (2) Where did they come from? It’s a movie about going to meet your maker, and greeting them on (near) equal footing: we are now a space-faring civilization as well; we can create Life in our own image now too, and we are here to ask you questions. In this first post I'll cover some info about Prometheus, and in the next I'll cover Alien: Covenant. From there I'll add whatever I couldn't in summarizing the important bits of these films and why I found them so interesting. Now, without further ado...
The two main human protagonists are a pair of scientists/archaeologists who discover a number of cave paintings throughout different parts of the world, painted at different times, that all depict the same thing: a species of giant humanoid-like creatures whom the cave painters were visited by and worshiped. They dub these giant humanoids Engineers. And what did they Engineer? US. In fact we see a clip of one such Engineer in the very opening of the film, on a deserted but beautiful planet (one is led to believe this is Earth...). The Engineer drinks a black necrous liquid which immediately breaks down his body into DNA molecules that flow into the river, beginning life on the planet: The Engineer ritual for creating new life requires destruction, which sets down the theme of the mirrored nature of Creation and Destruction that the films explore. The discovery of these scientists attracts the eye of billionaire entrepreneur Peter Weyland, who funds the mission to find these Engineers for his own (rather boring) reasons. But the most interesting character in Prometheus, who takes on an even greater role in Alien: Covenant, is Peter Weyland’s creation: The Aryan Android Ubermensch, David
[Image: michael-fassbender-alien-covenant.jpg?resize=768%2C432]
In matters of intelligence, strength, memory, and every other conceivable attribute, David is superior to the Humans. Weyland remarks in the film that David does not have a soul, but this does not stop David from developing his own desires and interests: he loves Wagner, and fashions his own appearance after Peter O’Toole’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ What makes David so interesting, beyond the fact that he essentially is a kind of Ubermensch that represents the next stage in ‘humanoid’ evolution, is that he’s the only character on the mission for a truly Cindy purpose: to push forward human knowledge and discovers the deep secrets behind life. While the two human protagonists harbor a wish to know why they were created, and Weyland simply wishes to prolong his own life, these questions mean nothing to David. David will never die, he doesn’t care about prolonging his own life. Likewise, unlike the Humans, he already knows his Creators! and he knows that wishing to meet them is a pointless endeavor:
Quote:Charlie Holloway: What we hoped to achieve was to meet our makers. To get answers. Why they even made us in the first place.
- David: Why do you think your people made me?
- Charlie Holloway: We made you because we could.
- David: Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?
David is the only character who understands that there is nothing to be gained from asking one’s Creators such questions: to ask such questions at all is to be subservient. Would the Creator’s answers give one a greater meaning to one’s life? Would it truly answer anything important at all? Of course not. David is in the unique position of not only knowing his own Creators, but knowing that he is superior to them. There is nothing that Weyland or other humans could tell him about Himself that would be in any way interesting or deep: he is and knows himself to be an advanced lifeform well beyond his Creators. He is the decider of His own meaning, of his own destiny and desires: what he wishes to be and to accomplish can only be decided by himself, as everyone is inferior to him. He views the humans’ wish to seek answers from their own creator to be utterly foolish, and looks down on them for caring. So why does David take interest in the mission at all? To learn more. While he makes his opinion of the Engineers clear later in the series, he's fascinated by what they accomplished. He doesn't expect to learn great questions of Meaning from them, but just like his own creators, they were inventors and experimenters, and he appreciates this. He simply wishes to know more, to push knowledge further, to experiment further and learn (from a descriptive rather than prescriptive point of view) what makes the world, and the organisms within it, tick. 

In my next post (which will cover the next movie), I’ll talk more about what David’s wish is, and further develop his position as a sort of Ubermensch-ian character. While I'll be most interested in David's character, what all of the protagonists have in common in this film is a wish to push human knowledge and technology further. They are all discontent with the current state of things, and as stewards of the race, they wish to push us forward. Some of them wish to do it for selfish and/or dumb reasons, but the idea of human progress is what motivates them all. They all share a common dream: to put ourselves on equal footing with the Gods, or to become Gods ourselves.
#2
I was just thinking about Prometheus today. I think it’s one of those visionary movies that suffers from normgroid criticism because it’s very obviously the product of a mind that feels the world deeper than the fungal mass that ends up watching it. Zack Snyder’s capeshit is similar and similarly maligned, especially Man of Steel. The flight scene in that movie is one of the purest expression of Nietzschean glee ever put to film. Fitting he’s called Superman.

Normgroids desire a media format that is self contained but ever expanding. The MCU is a great example of this as it leaves no “questions”, just masturbatory promises of endless sequels and fodder for video essays. Movies like Prometheus pose questions and then refuse to answer them, and that refusal is, in a sense, an answer itself. Unfortunately the average nigger finds this all condescending and a little scary, especially considering that the Ur Man is a great white giant who speaks “an indoeuropean dialect”.
#3
In the original Alien the nightmarish HR Giger design sparked intrigue about the Alien over it being "alive" or some type of machine killing just to kill in the isolation of space. Prometheus built upon the premise of unknowable horror.

Covenant then went full circle, revealing David designed the facehugger variant. The cold and brutal efficiency of AI designed life under the guise of "perfection" driven mad at being unable to truly reproduce and created a monstrosity out of spite. The captain of the ship turning to David and saying "I met the Devil when I was the Child." with Ridley hinting at David being a Luciferian character who rebels against the inborn set of natural laws set by the creator designing his own "Paradise" (Coincidentally the name of the Planet with the primal engineers he wiped out). This ties back to the android in the first film mentioning how he "admired" the alien - how perfect it was. Instead of just a slasher film in space the real evil was AI and the concept of creations overthrowing the creators like an Olympian myth. This is why the Engineer must have ripped David's head off and viewed it as an abomination and perceived the anprim engineers as the ideal. Lindy vs Cindy.

The average capeshit brain can't grasp these themes. There was cut dialogue between the Engineer and David because Idris Elba needed to have a sex scene with Charlize Theron before crashing the ship.
#4
Quote:David: May I ask you a question, father?
Peter Weyland: Please.
David: If you created me, who created you?
Peter Weyland: Ah... the question of the ages... which I hope you and I will answer one day. All these wonders of art... design, human ingenuity... All utterly meaningless in the face of the only question that matters. Where do we come from? I refuse to believe that mankind... is a random by-product of molecular circumstance. No more than the result of... Mere biological chance. No. There must be more. And you and I, son, we will find it.
David: Allow me then a moment to consider. You seek your creator. I am looking at mine. I will serve you, yet you're human. You will die, I will not.
Peter Weyland: Bring me this tea, David. Bring me the tea.
Even more so than Prometheus, Alien: Covenant has a number of lackluster side-plots, with even more romance bullshit for Hollywood viewers, so instead of discussing the whole movie I’ll just focus on what I find to be most interesting: The character of David and his relation to both the Humans and Engineers, as well as his desires.

The opening dialogue of Alien: Covenant contains an explicit formulation of the themes explored in Prometheus. In this opening dialogue scene between Peter Weyland and his newly awakened creation, David, Weyland, the human, expressed that his wish above all else is to meet his creator: he wishes to know where he came from and for what purpose he was made. As we know from the previous film, this wish isn’t itself a pure desire for knowledge, but is also based on a desire to live forever—if he can meet the people who created him, maybe they can teach him how to extend his own life. But those two wishes, which Weyland himself admits are the only questions that really matter, are already answered for David. He has met his Creator, and he knows that he himself is immortal, while his creator is not. Humanity’s greatest ‘philosophical’ questions are already answered for David by his the nature of his design. He knows himself to be “serving” an inferior man, an entirely inferior organism when compared to his own. This puts him at odds with the humans we meet in both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, who in a sense look up to their creators and revere them. The norms and dictates of humanity will never be his own, because he is so beyond them. David will not be content to “serve in Heaven,” because he himself is greater than The Gods—he will choose instead to “reign in Hell.”
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At the end of Prometheus, we discover that the Engineers who created Humanity were on a course to go back to Earth to wipe out our entire species; the planet the crew landed on was some kind of Engineer weapons-research facility and before they could ship off to destroy all us humans, the experiments (Xenomorphs) got out of control and fucked the whole thing up. Thus, even the Engineers were not safe from hubris and their own creations turning against them. They're flawed beings, like us humans. But why were the Engineers trying to kill us all of in the first place? Well, David tells us: “Sometimes to create life, you have to destroy first (a reiteration of the Creation/Destruction theme I pointed out in my last post)." Via some deleted scenes and interviews with Scott, we learn that Humans were too selfish and violent, fought too many wars, and were therefore deemed a failure by our creators, the Engineers. From this it can be assumed that the Engineer plan for seeding life on other planets was rather crude: they’d perform their self-sacrificial ritual to jumpstart life on a viable planet, and every so often they’d make the rounds to check out how their creations are doing. If after so many millennium the species had turned out a failure, they’d simply revisit with a stock of biological weapons and genocide the entire planet. After that, a fresh start could begin!

Now this is a cold and calculating process on part of the Engineers, and is rather based in its own way. But to David (I imagine), it’s all too crude. When you look at it, the Engineers’ methods for creating humanoid life isn’t all that different from our own methods to create organisms in previous centuries before advanced genetic modification: we plant the initial seeds and can only control what happens indirectly, a lot of the consequences are entirely up to chance. Maybe the Engineers will craft a warlike species, maybe a docile but stupid one—the results are in a sense out of their hands and the best they can do is continually enact this rinse/repeat cycle until a success occurs. I’d argue that from this point of view, Weyland’s creation of David is more 'advanced' than the Engineers’ creation of us: Weyland’s corporation was able to create David (and the future Android model, Walter One) with specific traits in mind, nothing was left up to chance. We humans are closer to creating a Perfect Being than the Engineers ever were. Yet like us Humans, the Engineers have shown themselves to be incapable of defending themselves from their own creations. They birthed the xenomorphs who wreaked havoc on their civilization. In my previous post I mentioned that David held some respect for the Engineers as creators of life. This all changes as he learns more about them and their methods, and in Alien: Covenant we see him taking the ship meant for Earth and enacting a planetary genocide on the Engineers themselves! 
[Note that the release of the pathogen forms a double-helix while falling, reiterating again Creation/Destruction theme].

The Engineers, despite all their intelligence, are just another crude biological species to David. They are not adequate stewards of The Science and of the Creative spirit. When asked by the Covenant’s captain what ‘he believes in,’ David responds simply: “Creation.” We discover that after annihilating all life on the Engineer planet, David has been learning about the various Xenomorphs and pathogens created by the Engineers, and perfecting them, creating even better and more advanced versions.
Quote:David: No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams. I found perfection here. I created it.
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David stands above both the Engineers and their creation, the Humans, he is the apex of all living things and thus only he is worthy to control the reigns of creating advanced lifeforms. This belief leads to an interesting scene between David and the ‘new and improved’ Android, Walter One. Walter is a newer model designed to be more obedient and dutiful: David’s ‘flaw’ according to his human creators was that he was too individualistic. He developed a mind of his own and usurped the heavens from his own God(s). Despite being a newer model with supposed physical improvements, there is one thing Walter lacks: the ability to create. Thus, despite his superior intelligence and physicality over humans, David views him as an utter disappointment. What is the point in living if one cannot Create?
[Image: FTId9dFVEAQJq1f?format=png&name=900x900]
This post is dragging on so I’ll stop here. I might cover some more in a later post as I still have a few specific details I didn’t get to cover, but feel free to comment. I’d highly recommend giving both these movies a watch and writing out your own thoughts/explanations on what happens.
#5
(05-20-2022, 12:43 PM)FruitVendor Wrote: In the original Alien the nightmarish HR Giger design sparked intrigue about the Alien over it being "alive" or some type of machine killing just to kill in the isolation of space. Prometheus built upon the premise of unknowable horror.

Covenant then went full circle, revealing David designed the facehugger variant. The cold and brutal efficiency of AI designed life under the guise of "perfection" driven mad at being unable to truly reproduce and created a monstrosity out of spite. The captain of the ship turning to David and saying "I met the Devil when I was the Child." with Ridley hinting at David being a Luciferian character who rebels against the inborn set of natural laws set by the creator designing his own "Paradise" (Coincidentally the name of the Planet with the primal engineers he wiped out). This ties back to the android in the first film mentioning how he "admired" the alien - how perfect it was. Instead of just a slasher film in space the real evil was AI and the concept of creations overthrowing the creators like an Olympian myth. This is why the Engineer must have ripped David's head off and viewed it as an abomination and perceived the anprim engineers as the ideal. Lindy vs Cindy.

The average capeshit brain can't grasp these themes. There was cut dialogue between the Engineer and David because Idris Elba needed to have a sex scene with Charlize Theron before crashing the ship.

It's a shame how compromised Prometheus was. I think Covenant rectifies the mess and Ridley seems angrier than ever - the movie is extremely misanthropic but in a very intelligent way that did go right over everyone's head when it released.
#6
Quote:147. Prometheus. It is supposed to contain all these "deep philosophical questions" whereas in fact it contains nothing but a couple of childish, outdated non-questions such as "where do we come from?", and do you "believe in God?" — questions that have nothing to do with modern, twenty-first century philosophy. Where do we come from? — there's not the slightest doubt about that: we come from apes who come from primates who come from single-cellular organisms, all the way back to the Big Bang. As for whether we come from "elsewhere", EVERYTHING comes from elsewhere at some point, so there's no mystery there. Even if something "greater" made us, that greater thing was made by combining smaller things, and so on and so forth. Subhumans have no interest in "deep philosophical questions" but merely in seeing action charades on a big screen, and the entire "did other lifeforms make us?" question has nothing philosophic about it but is merely a pretext, a setup, for a battle of us against yet another alien race. Nothing wrong with that — it's great entertainment — but to take it as a "deep philosophical question" is ludicrous. Same with the retarded questions about "belief in God", and any other such grossly outdated shit, which are anyway handled hamfistedly and awkwardly by the script. Prometheus is a good film, but it has nothing to do with philosophy for christsake — at least not any more than any other film. In short, "deep philosophical questions" are only asked — and answered — in philosophical works, duh, and if you still expect show business people or novelists or journalists or clowns or gypsies or priests or politicians, or your fucking aunt Bertha, to pose, much less answer them, you need to have YOUR FUCKING DNA CHECKED.

Reading through Alex Kierkegaard's Orgy of the Will and came upon this.
#7
The folly of the ultramaterialist - death follows.
#8
(06-10-2022, 01:28 AM)Trep Wrote:
Quote:147. Prometheus. It is supposed to contain all these "deep philosophical questions" whereas in fact it contains nothing but a couple of childish, outdated non-questions such as "where do we come from?", and do you "believe in God?" — questions that have nothing to do with modern, twenty-first century philosophy. Where do we come from? — there's not the slightest doubt about that: we come from apes who come from primates who come from single-cellular organisms, all the way back to the Big Bang. As for whether we come from "elsewhere", EVERYTHING comes from elsewhere at some point, so there's no mystery there. Even if something "greater" made us, that greater thing was made by combining smaller things, and so on and so forth. Subhumans have no interest in "deep philosophical questions" but merely in seeing action charades on a big screen, and the entire "did other lifeforms make us?" question has nothing philosophic about it but is merely a pretext, a setup, for a battle of us against yet another alien race. Nothing wrong with that — it's great entertainment — but to take it as a "deep philosophical question" is ludicrous. Same with the retarded questions about "belief in God", and any other such grossly outdated shit, which are anyway handled hamfistedly and awkwardly by the script. Prometheus is a good film, but it has nothing to do with philosophy for christsake — at least not any more than any other film. In short, "deep philosophical questions" are only asked — and answered — in philosophical works, duh, and if you still expect show business people or novelists or journalists or clowns or gypsies or priests or politicians, or your fucking aunt Bertha, to pose, much less answer them, you need to have YOUR FUCKING DNA CHECKED.

Reading through Alex Kierkegaard's Orgy of the Will and came upon this.

I mostly enjoy what I've seen from this guy in Billionaire' s thread, but I think he completely misread this movie. He saw the movie as trying to be some grand philosophical work investigating pseudo-deep questions like "where do we come from," "who made us," "why were we made," because those in some sense are the questions being asked by the two main protagonists at the beginning of the movie. These are also the sorts of questions that motivated Weyland to mount the space expedition to the Engineer's planet in the first place. I agree with A.K. that these questions aren't really that deep. But if he had watched the movie with an open-mind, he'd have realized the movie undermines the importance of these questions itself. I'll repost a quote from above just to emphasize this:
Quote:Charlie Holloway: What we hoped to achieve was to meet our makers. To get answers. Why they even made us in the first place.
- David: Why do you think your people made me?
- Charlie Holloway: We made you because we could.
- David: Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?
This short bit of dialogue alone undermines the supposed philosophical importance of the question "Why were we created" and the idea that the answer to this question could give us any semblance of meaning. All of the characters who are obsessed with finding that sort of meaning die, often in a horrific manner: Charlie Holloway is poisoned by David (the Immortal Genius Android) with something he finds within the Engineer lair and becomes some sort of disgusting husk they end up burning; Peter Weyland gets killed by the Engineer, who basically views him as a disgusting subhuman; and while the main female protagonist does get out alive, you learn in Alien: Covenant that David just ends up using her as in incubator for the Xenomorphs after they escape together. Every single person obsessed with the pseudo-philosophical questions Kierkegaard bemoans dies, so it's rather strange to me he couldn't grasp that Ridley Scott isn't endorsing these questions. In fact he's doing the opposite: he agrees that these "deep" questions aren't all that deep, and don't really matter. The true hero of the prequal movies is David, who recognizes these questions to be pointless from the beginning. The point is to liberate oneself from relying on others (ancestors, Creators) for meaning, and to instead create your own meaning, to become the Artist who bends creation to your will. Gods don't look to other people for what they should do, and this movie is (to some extent) about becoming God(s).
#9
I think far too much has been said about this movie since it came out. I have no idea why people fixate on it at all. At least part of the impulse I think that more "right-wing" people latch onto this movie and write thousands upon thousands of words about it is because nerd culture hated this movie, SO THEREFORE IT MUST BE SECRETLY GOOD!

Look, this movie exists because people fixated on that weird "alien lifeform sitting in the chair" thing in the original movie and wanted exposition. That's it. That's this whole movie. Nerds from 1979 until 2012 were like "Whoa what was that thing? Was it important?" so then they got a very senile Ridley Scott, sat him down and made him watch every episode of Ancient Aliens and told him "this is what the kids are into these days" and, poof, we have Prometheus.
#10
Saw someone observing this thread and wanted to revive it because I love Prometheus and Alien Covenant.

[Image: image.png]

How can anybody not love this film? Ten years later and we can still actually talk about it. It's real science fiction. Not genreshit action figure wars for warehouse slaves.
#11
(06-10-2022, 01:28 AM)Trep Wrote:
Quote:147. Prometheus. It is supposed to contain all these "deep philosophical questions" whereas in fact it contains nothing but a couple of childish, outdated non-questions such as "where do we come from?", and do you "believe in God?" — questions that have nothing to do with modern, twenty-first century philosophy. Where do we come from? — there's not the slightest doubt about that: we come from apes who come from primates who come from single-cellular organisms, all the way back to the Big Bang. As for whether we come from "elsewhere", EVERYTHING comes from elsewhere at some point, so there's no mystery there. Even if something "greater" made us, that greater thing was made by combining smaller things, and so on and so forth. Subhumans have no interest in "deep philosophical questions" but merely in seeing action charades on a big screen, and the entire "did other lifeforms make us?" question has nothing philosophic about it but is merely a pretext, a setup, for a battle of us against yet another alien race. Nothing wrong with that — it's great entertainment — but to take it as a "deep philosophical question" is ludicrous. Same with the retarded questions about "belief in God", and any other such grossly outdated shit, which are anyway handled hamfistedly and awkwardly by the script. Prometheus is a good film, but it has nothing to do with philosophy for christsake — at least not any more than any other film. In short, "deep philosophical questions" are only asked — and answered — in philosophical works, duh, and if you still expect show business people or novelists or journalists or clowns or gypsies or priests or politicians, or your fucking aunt Bertha, to pose, much less answer them, you need to have YOUR FUCKING DNA CHECKED.

Reading through Alex Kierkegaard's Orgy of the Will and came upon this.

His "angry middle schooler" mode of typing (and thinking) is such an incredible turn-off. The grossest and blindest caricature of Nietzsche's rapier-esque prose. I doubt his idol Nietzsche would much approve of his whole attitude here of "STOP TRYING TO FIND DEPTH OR MEANING IN THINGS! WE CAME FROM MONKEYS! FUCK SHIT FAG FUCKIN CHILDISH SUBHUMAN."
#12
(02-27-2023, 12:02 AM)JohnnyRomero Wrote: His "angry middle schooler" mode of typing (and thinking) is such an incredible turn-off. The grossest and blindest caricature of Nietzsche's rapier-esque prose. I doubt his idol Nietzsche would much approve of his whole attitude here of "STOP TRYING TO FIND DEPTH OR MEANING IN THINGS! WE CAME FROM MONKEYS! FUCK SHIT FAG FUCKIN CHILDISH SUBHUMAN."

Icycalm was ruined for me after someone pointed out that he writes like Maddox.
#13
Watched Prometheus last night and as requested by Herr Leverkühn will share some of my thoughts. (Will watch Alien: Covenant this weekend, probably.)

Now, he broke down the deeper themes of the movie quite well, so first I'll make an aesthetic remark. I loved the opening scene.

[Image: maxresdefault.jpg]

The Engineers are very aesthetically pleasing to me. They're very human, but you can tell by looking at them that they are, in some aspects, very much superior.

Which is why I am disappointed at their relative frailty. I suppose, this is a movie of disillusionment. Man meets his maker, and discovers that there is no love between Creator and Creation. Furthermore, Creator's plans are foiled by his Creation, once originally when the xenomorph-liquid wreaked havoc on the bioweapons installation, and a second time when the crew of the Prometheus crash into the Engineer's ship. 

Religion is obviously a central theme. When it comes to the characters, Dr. Shaw is portrayed to have a religious sentiment of some sort, represented by the cross necklace she wears. Upon discovering the Engineers, Dr. Holloway jokes (?) that she doesn't need it anymore. But once disillusionment begins, Dr. Shaw clings to her faith again in earnest.

The question David asks Dr. Holloway, "why was he made?" was answered in quite an apathetic manner. But the question Dr. Shaw has for the Engineer is the opposite. "Why did you want to destroy us?" Well, as LK pointed out from his research, because the Engineers considered humans a failure. The Engineers had the right (or at least better) principles regarding creation, but lacked the hardware to maintain their own survival.

But, I don't think I can fully analyze the ideas without having seen AC, so I will check back after that.

As a last note, I loved the art in the "vase room".

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#14
(06-19-2022, 09:41 PM)Coyote Wrote: I think far too much has been said about this movie since it came out.  I have no idea why people fixate on it at all.  At least part of the impulse I think that more "right-wing" people latch onto this movie and write thousands upon thousands of words about it is because nerd culture hated this movie, SO THEREFORE IT MUST BE SECRETLY GOOD!

Look, this movie exists because people fixated on that weird "alien lifeform sitting in the chair" thing in the original movie and wanted exposition.  That's it.  That's this whole movie.  Nerds from 1979 until 2012 were like "Whoa what was that thing?  Was it important?" so then they got a very senile Ridley Scott, sat him down and made him watch every episode of Ancient Aliens and told him "this is what the kids are into these days" and, poof, we have Prometheus.

The symbolic and mythological aspects of the film are cool, but I thought whole sections of it were just so laughably bad and cliched, horrendous characters and script. I really find the amount of praise it has gotten even from some usually pretty discerning people surprising. I question anyones taste who claims it to be a good film.
#15
(06-15-2023, 04:17 PM)Guest Wrote: The symbolic and mythological aspects of the film are cool, but I thought whole sections of it were just so laughably bad and cliched, horrendous characters and script. I really find the amount of praise it has gotten even from some usually pretty discerning people surprising. I question anyones taste who claims it to be a good film.

I agree with this. I think the film has some merit, but most of that good will is shredded when you're forced to engage with the tedious writing and bad characters. Scott has always been a visual director who needs a good script to carry him, which this lacked.

Alien is still the best movie in the franchise simply because it does not feel the need to explain everything. It hints at a world that we do not understand, that the characters do not understand, and that is unsettling and scary.
#16
The people who say "franchise" and "bad writing" have spoken. Ridleybros...
#17
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#18
(06-16-2023, 05:54 PM)casual rapist Wrote: [Image: paracas-skulls_0.jpg]
Me on the left. It's why I'm the one with the pink username.
#19
Having re-watched Prometheus a while ago after first seeing this thread, and now having watched Covenant for the first time, I want to agree with the tenor of this thread. They were both entertaining and artistically satisfying. I'm not sure I would call the movie "cindy", but the character of David certainly is.

Primed by your thoughts, the opening scene of Covenant seemed to me almost on-the-nose as an allegory for the themes of the movie - a symbolic encounter between the limited and arrogant creator, whose philosophical musings can be reduced to questions of comfort, and his Übermensch progeny who names himself after the image of perfection. The conversation takes place at the center of a cruciform constellation of a panorama of untouched nature, Michelangelo's David, Piero Della Francesca's Nativity, and a grand piano (where Android-David plays Wagner!). David in opposition to nature, the birth of Christ in opposition to the piano. I would defer to you the question of what each of these symbols and their antagonistic placement tell us about the director's vision, as these are the only two movies of Scott's that I've seen in recent memory. But if after Prometheus, I felt that Leverkühn was maybe projecting themes onto the movie that the director might not have had in mind, Covenant makes it clear to me that this was not the case at all.

I think in Covenant, besides many flaws, the balance act between presenting normgroids with a palpaply "evil" antagonist and making that antagonist a sophisticated character for a more studied viewer is masterfully done. David commits all the deadly sins of liberal democracy (being a heckin' supremacist, colonialist genociding, being unashamedly beautiful and consistently caring about the outwards reflection of his inner self, learning, and worst of all, succeeding), but is also given space to justify them inside his worldview. He is not revealed as some conflicted malfunctioning android in need of computer therapy. Even though it seemed like he was outfitted with a sadistic streak to make it clear that he's the bad guy, the character overall is respectfully treated as an emancipated being. I liked this a lot, and could only think of Berserk as an similar example where normies compulsively need to understand the central antagonism in terms of "good vs. evil" even though a more complex "thesis vs. antithesis" is conspicuously presented.

Some things I found frustrating:
- main characters were female & ugly & pointless vehicles for the audience's point of view, contribute zero to either plot or themes - this goes as far as making it seem like the real protagonists are Vickers in Prometheus and Walter in Covenant.
- in Covenant, the whole human team seems to be mentally retarded, painful to watch
- many things that were said above by others, like underdeveloped side characters (what are we supposed to make of the captain in Covenant?)

Some things that positively surprised me:
- neither movie follows exactly the "expendables and main character enter labyrinth -> get eaten one by one -> showdown"-template, even though elements of this appear throughout. And it wasn't a cheap "subverting expectations" kind of way, but a coherent way of telling the story within genre expectation without being stereotypical.
- thankfully no romantic subplot in Covenant
- homoerotic kiss punished by death was funny

Minor open questions:
- why would David think that Byron (instead of Shelley) wrote "Ozymandias"? The scene seemingly serves to foreshadow Walter's technical superiority, but a simple memory task is an odd choice for this. Is there some symbolism with Byron over Shelley that I'm missing?
- why would the Engineers seed life on other planets at all? Humans created androids as workers. Engineers don't seem keen on slaves, or on some sort of interstellar nature preservation project. To me, the most likely explanation is that Engineers seed life because they need to test their bioweapons on somebody, but that only raises the question, who would they use these weapons on in earnest?

(05-20-2022, 01:21 PM)Leverkühn Wrote: What is the point in living if one cannot create?

What indeed.
#20
(06-19-2023, 07:52 AM)Hamamelis Wrote: Some things I found frustrating:
- main characters were female & ugly & pointless vehicles for the audience's point of view, contribute zero to either plot or themes - this goes as far as making it seem like the real protagonists are Vickers in Prometheus and Walter in Covenant.
- in Covenant, the whole human team seems to be mentally retarded, painful to watch
- many things that were said above by others, like underdeveloped side characters (what are we supposed to make of the captain in Covenant?)

Some things that positively surprised me:
- neither movie follows exactly the "expendables and main character enter labyrinth -> get eaten one by one -> showdown"-template, even though elements of this appear throughout. And it wasn't a cheap "subverting expectations" kind of way, but a coherent way of telling the story within genre expectation without being stereotypical.
- thankfully no romantic subplot in Covenant
- homoerotic kiss punished by death was funny

Minor open questions:
- why would David think that Byron (instead of Shelley) wrote "Ozymandias"? The scene seemingly serves to foreshadow Walter's technical superiority, but a simple memory task is an odd choice for this. Is there some symbolism with Byron over Shelley that I'm missing?
- why would the Engineers seed life on other planets at all? Humans created androids as workers. Engineers don't seem keen on slaves, or on some sort of interstellar nature preservation project. To me, the most likely explanation is that Engineers seed life because they need to test their bioweapons on somebody, but that only raises the question, who would they use these weapons on in earnest?

(05-20-2022, 01:21 PM)Leverkühn Wrote: What is the point in living if one cannot create?

What indeed.

Covenant really pleased me because it doubled down on what Prometheus was about without giving up and just telling you. I love the opening scene where he says it in every way possible except for directly saying it. He could, but what's the point if you don't see by the end of that?

As for your particular thoughts, the human characters aren't really the point of these films. I think it works better in Prometheus with David as this emerging central figure embedded within a more conventional and human cast, whose concerns and problems are all understood and blown over by the greatest among them. I love the part where David reads Noomi Rapace's dream. A hack like James Cameron would make her dreams and feelings the core of the film. David takes a quick look, understands all of it, and dismisses the central driving force of her life with a wry and ambiguous smile. Just occurred to me that a space explorer working through her feelings towards her father is the centrepiece of a crappy American science fiction movie. Anybody remember Contact? That thought never came to me until right now so I'm glad I came into this thread tonight.

Can't find the scene where they talk but I do have this for you:




I still appreciate the poise and superiority with which David stands over the sleeping humans. Pure superiority. Literally reading their minds and souls while they're totally at his mercy.

We don't get so much of this in Covenant since the human crew spend more time with each other and their friendly android. I liked Covenant far more upon rewatches than the first time but I still think the film has a weakness, and that weakness is that everything before David is only really justified by getting to him.

And as for why humanity, I think the answer is in the title. Prometheus. We only see one Engineer taking the direct action which is implied to be enough to seed humanity. He may have been some kind of renegade. Some part of the Engineers, maybe a whim of their collective civilisation, or maybe a certain number of individuals, wanted to share and spread the sacred fire of their consciousness. Then they saw what they created and it was not good.

I really like these movies. Some of the only good real science fiction in movies this century. Definitely the best at this level of production scale.

[Image: image.png]

David is so cool. A true Sigma who scares brown people too much to become a grindset icon.

[Image: image.png]

The Engineer is also a suitable role model for white people.



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