#No but i do LOVE Prometheus and covenant

[venus0fl0v3]

Rules: Without naming them, post a gif from ten of your favourite films, then tag 10 people to do the same!

Thank you @wishchip106 for tagging me to do this 🙂‍↕️

Im sorry i feel like im cheating by adding xmen movies 🫣 but the first xmen, xmen fc and days of future past are my favs out of all of them.... oh wait and the wolverine movies ahhhh..

OH AND DP AND WV ..... theres so much xmen IM SORRY not

If you couldn't tell im a big fan of Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds, but yk, who isnt. Ermmmmm 10 mutuals? I dont think i can do that 😭 but uhh

Sorry mutuals if you dont want to be tagged in this no pressure to do it i just thought it was fun :]

@eriksdefender @vanodka @caramelc0rgi

[lehnsharrk]

If I had a nickel...

Every time there was a popular franchise...

That featured a mad scientist...

Creating a genetically modified alien creature...

With "its only instinct to destroy..."

And eventually, it making its way to Earth(?)...

...I'd have two nickels

David 8 (Alien franchise) and Jumba Jookiba (Lilo & Stitch)

[t4toro]

[aceofshitposts]

just got back from watching alien romulus. head very full of alien au.

[lehnsharrk]

DAVID 8 IS "BORN" TODAY! 🎉

IT'S HIS BIRTHDAY 🥳

HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOU CRAZY ROBOT 🎂

David Fact

Turned on January 7, 2025 and is 69 years old on the end of the Prometheus Mission January 1, 2094

When he leaves Planet 4 in Alien: Covenant he is 79

Although Weyland Yutani records show he may have been purpose built by Weyland in 2090 personally before the Prometheus mission. In Alien: Covenant his memories from the day he was turned on and chose his name, shows that he may have been the very first one.

[transchrisredfield]

guess i better start playing killer again lol. The Alien is gonna be so fucking cool i cant WAIT!!

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Facts about Greek Myths?

There are a great many figures in Greek myth and they can be hard to keep track of, so here is a quick guide to which is which:

Ajax- Warrior who invented detergent.

Antigone- Funeral enthusiast who invented civil disobedience.

Atlas- First winner of the Olympic strong titan competition.

Bellerophon- Plot point in Mission Impossible 2.

Cerberus- 7 headed dog tragically born with only 3 heads.

Charon- Lead rower for Styx.

Cratus- God of strength, but not THAT god of strength.

Cyclops- Inventor of the monocle.

Daedalus- Inventor of the Labyrinth, and thus of David Bowie.

Dionysus- Drank 24/7 but very responsibly never drove.

Eris- Goddess of fighting with each other.

Eros- God of doing something else with each other.

Euronymous- God of Mayhem.

Fates- Least creatively named destiny gods ever.

Hera- Goddess of marriage yet only Zeus's third wife.

Hylia- Goddess of triangles and disjointed timelines.

Icarus- God of disappointing ones father.

Io- Space captain and epic 3D short film, still not on blu-ray.

Jocasta- Originator of Jo Mama jokes, mother of Oedipus.

Leda- Swan enthusiast and feathery-fandom originator.

Medea- Even worse mom than Jocasta.

Medusa- Inventor of reptile-safe shampoo.

Megaclite- LOL her name is "Megaclite." Pronounced like "Clitty."

Narcissus- Basically Trump.

Odysseus- Sailor who refused to ask for directions.

Orpheus- Inventor of impatiently checking the download bar.

Ouranos- Spelling that could've avoided a lot of planet butt jokes.

Pallas- Inventor of weird looking cats.

Persephone- Pomegranate fan, looked like Monica Bellucci.

Prometheus- Stupid fucking movie, especially for using some of H.R. Giger's original designs then putting them up next to a fucking plain white squid. Also let's make the space jockey a tall guy in a suit. How did Scott think that was a good idea? Fuck that shit and double fuck Covenant for somehow doing even fucking worse.

Rhode- Sea nymph yet not technically an island.

Siren- Inverse groupie.

Sisyphus- Limp Biscuit fan who never stopped rolling.

Tantalus- I'll tell you in a minute...

Thanatos- God of dying as easily as snapping your fingers.

Zeus- When the earth was still flat and the clouds made of fire, and mountains stretched up to the sky, sometimes higher- Folks roamed the earth like big rolling kegs. They had two sets of arms, they had two sets of legs. They had two faces peering out of one giant head so they could watch all around them as they talked and they read. And they never knew nothing of love. It was before the origin of love. There were three sexes then: One that looked like two men glued up back to back, called the children of the sun. Similar in shape and girth were the children of the earth. They looked like two girls rolled up in one. The children of the moon were like a fork shoved on a spoon, they were part sun, part earth- Part daughter, part son. Now the gods grew quite scared of our strength and defiance and Thor said, "I'm gonna kill them all with my hammer, like I killed the giants." And Zeus said, "No, you better let me use my lightening like scissors, like I cut the legs off the whales, and dinosaurs into lizards." Then he grabbed up some bolts and he let out a laugh, and said, "I'll split them right down the middle. Gonna cut them right up in half." And then storm clouds gathered above into great balls of fire, and fire shot down from the sky in bolts like shining blades of a knife and it ripped right through the flesh of the children of the sun and the moon and the earth. If you want the rest, see Hedwig and the Angry Inch cuz this is taking way longer to type than I expected.

[quarterlifekitty]

Letterboxd: Ghost

this is just a little series I'm starting about characters watching movies, and which movies make them point at the screen and go "look, that's us lol". This ended up MUCH SADDER than I thought it would.

cw: spoilers to the listed movies. graphic description of violence (description of the events within the movies), sort of a dive into Ghost's dark thoughts concerning your relationship.

Frankenhooker (1990)- Ghost does not think you know how completely fucked up and beyond saving he would be if something happened to you. He would lose whatever remains of his ability to discern right from wrong. Which is why he thinks Elizabeth Shelley and Jeffrey Franken are so cute! If you died and there weren't enough pieces to put you back together, he would definitely kill a bunch of hookers to make you a new body. And he likes to think you would do the same for him.

Saw (2004)- The original gay bathroom. Something about the relationship between Lawrence and Adam just gets to him. He would do way more than just saw off his foot if it meant saving you.

The Fly (1986)- Simon sometimes wonders if this relationship is held together by your pity for him. If all this time, you've been watching him lash out and degrade and it fills you with disgust and sympathy, and that's the only reason why you put up with him. He wonders if you're waiting for the day that he doesn't come home. He wonders if his desire for a family with you is born of the desperation for self preservation-- if a child from the two of you is the only way to preserve the piece of him that's still human, to prove that it ever existed once it's stripped from him like everything else. Also, every time he does something for you that requires a lot of raw strength he totally says "could a sick man do this?". He knows it's not a direct quote but it's close enough.

Prometheus (2012)- David 8 and Elizabeth Shaw. He feels like sometimes you're the only one outside the taskforce who sees him as a person. He's spent his entire life being used by people who see him as a machine. Sometimes, when he's feeling despondent and selfish, he feels like he would gladly poison the entire world so that you were the only ones left. And no, he never got around to watching Alien Covenant, so he doesn't know that David cuts off Shaw's head and did genetic experiments on it and keeps it as some sort of flayed souvenir in his study. Don't tell him.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)- Besides the obvious connection to the title, sometimes Ghost feels like your love wasn't meant to be. That he's holding you back. That you met at the wrong time, in the wrong lifetime, maybe. That maybe you could be happy together for real in your next lives. That it would be best if he left you be.

What I'm saying is that he does cry when you watch movies occasionally. Very rarely, he hastens to point out.

[valtsv]

PLEASE elaborate on “davidelizabeth in alien covenant if i wrote it” they squandered her potential so bad !

okay so first all i have already talked about how i feel that covenant should have built on the sticky psychosexual gothic horror tension between david and shaw and developed it into a toxic codependent dynamic (that predictably ends poorly due to their fundamentally opposing ideological stances as well as one-sided obsession on david's side), so i'm going to attach that rather than rehash it.

but honestly if i'd written covenant i would have had elizabeth survive david long enough to establish herself on the engineer planet in hiding from him (following a "breakup" caused by his act of genocide), and have the arrival of the colonists in covenant be the catalyst that forces them to confront each other again and finish what they started. i'm not entirely certain of the specifics, but i think there's a lot you could do with the central themes of alien as a cosmic/existential horror (a story about horrifying revelations, terrible change and progress/evolution that is unrecognisable as anything but nightmarish to the human minds bearing witness), a body horror narrative focused on sexual assault, pregnancy and childbirth/parenthood, and an examination of extraterrestrial horror as this colonial mindset - the fear of being violently replaced by something that deems itself better than you and works ruthlessly to eradicate you from your places of safety which it has taken for its own - as well as the more prometheus-specific themes of parental trauma and religion (mostly christianity) by making the core conflict between david and his xenomorphs and elizabeth and humanity, like a sort of fucked up retelling of adam and eve in the garden of eden.

to tie up loose ends, since prometheus and covenant are meant to be prequels to the original alien films, i'd probably have elizabeth succeed in being the final girl (a parallel to ripley in the original franchise) but tragically go into self-imposed exile/die alone in an attempt to prevent the xenomorphs from being stumbled across by future explorers and becoming a threat again, as well as possibly out of some warped sense of guilt, both for having allowed herself to ever love david and believe him capable of change, and for failing to save him ("save" very much in the biblical sense, as in persuade him to share her point of view and abandon his descent down a dark path). needless to say, she doesn't succeed, making her "victory" all the more phyrric.

[vampireunicornofdarkness]

I love Prometheus and Alien Covenant but I do have some issues. One, both of these movies take place BEFORE Alien 1979. Yet somehow they have better and newer technology than ANY of the other alien movies. Also Walter is supposed to be a better model of David and less human. But in Alien 1979 no one has any idea that Ash is an android. He was very human like. Also Ash can be seen constantly drinking milk while David does not.

[lehnsharrk]

The *New* Fassbender Psychopath Scale 😈

*Updated 02/23/2025*

I wanted to expand on the one introduced on the Kelly Clarkson show, below are the Fassy movies I've seen, my general "psychopath" rating for each character and reason why

Disclaimers:

For context I am essentially swapping "psychopath" with "evil," I am in no way trying to tie this to any psychological disorders or do a deep dive into any characters. Just a very surface-level "how nefariously evil is this character?"

These are my opinions, I encourage you to share, comment and make your own ratings. I will also be updating as I watch more of his films.

There *will* be spoilers so if you haven't seen these movies/shows, consider yourself warned!

The scale will also be a 0-5. I'm using 👿 and a zero will be a 👍

Let's go! 🦈

Hunger: Bobby Sands 👍

Movies 🎥

300: Stelios 👍

Dedicated warrior fighting along side his King until the very end. Definitely the most acrobatic and sassiest soldier too. I will give him a pass on the time-appropriate sexist joke just this once.

Only going off the context of the movie, he was on hunger strike for his cause and ended up starving to death. (Not doing a deep dive, don't know too much about the real person or protest).

Eden Lake: Steve 👍

Guy and his girlfriend just trying to escape and survive a gang of murderous teenagers.

Fish Tank: Connor 👿👿👿👿👿

Oh boy, this guy... He grooms and r*pes a child, and then if that wasn't bad enough, she's the daughter of his girlfriend, and if THAT wasn't bad enough, we find out he's got a wife and child he's been keeping this from.

Inglourious Basterds: Lt. Hicox 👍👍

Goes undercover to help defeat the n*zis (helps get a few killed too, even though he dies in the process).

Centurion: Quintus Dias 👍

Just a soldier, trying to survive. (Sorry don't remember much)

Jane Eyre: Mr. Rochester 👿👿👿

Keeps his wife, suffering from mental illness, locked in the walls and keeps it a secret so he doesn't scare off another woman he's trying to marry. Eeek!

X-Men: Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto 👿👿

Erik's anger comes from a place of trauma and his worst fears keep coming to fruition. That being said, he does blindly distrust all humans, betrays Charles multiple times and causes so much unnecessary destruction.

A Dangerous Method: Carl Jung 👿👿

Shame: Brandon Sullivan 👿

Doctor cheats on his wife with his patients, twice. One of his patients was also his subordinate at the time too.

A man suffering with addiction and trauma, plus added guilt when his sister stays over. As much as I want to give him a 👍 he does get pretty aggressive with his sister, who's also suffering from trauma.

Haywire: Paul 👿👿

I wasn't paying attention (he's not in it for that long) but I think he double crossed the main character and shot someone?

Prometheus/Alien Covenant: David 8 👿👿👿

I will defend David with my dying breath but to be honest, he does some horrendous things. Intentionally infecting humans with alien parasites, massacring an entire planet, killing and experimenting on someone he loved? Sorry David, you're getting a 3!

12 Years a Slave: Edwin Epps 👿👿👿👿👿👿

Sadistic slave owner and r*pist, about as evil as it gets (and yes I put an extra 👿).

Frank: Frank 👍

Poor Frank has done no wrong, just wants to make music and wear mask. Also he's definitely being used by his poser friends.

Slow West: Silas Selleck 👿

Starts out tricking the main character so he can find a bounty but has a change of heart.

Macbeth: Macbeth 👿👿👿👿

M*rders the king in his sleep so he can become king, orders Banquo and his son killed (although the son does escape) and burns MacDuff's wife and children at the stake. One evil dude.

Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs 👿👿

Greedy businessman, neglectful father, stole credit from his friend & business partner and also just kinda full of himself.

The Light Between Oceans: Tom Sherbourne 👿

I know he and his wife were heartbroken after their miscarriages but he does technically kidnap a child, keeping her from her grieving mother. He does eventually turn himself in.

Assassin's Creed: Cal/Aguilar 👿

Callum 'the pimp killer' Lynch "avatars" his assassin ancestor Aguilar. (It is about assassins after all, had to give him something).

Song to Song: Cook 👿👿

This movie was hard to follow but I'm giving him a two because he might be a groomer (he met the main character, who he later sleeps with, at 16) and he screwed Ryan Gosling's character out of the copyright to his songs.

Alien Covenant: Walter 1 👍

Don't really think Walter can be evil, he doesn't have the capacity that David does.

Next Goal Wins: Thomas Rongen 👿

Intentionally misgenders and deadnames a character because he's upset at her, later apologizes. Also a bit of a jerk to everyone at the beginning.

TV 📺

Black Bag: George

*coming soon*

A Bear Named Winnie: Lt. Coleburn 👿

He brings a baby bear to a military camp. Also leaves the bear at a zoo, letting her live out her life in a small cage instead of releasing her back to the wild when he had the chance.

William & Mary: Lukasz 👿👿👿

Jumped through the episode to watch the Fassy bits but ew... Guy m*lests the midwife that just delivered he and his girlfriend's baby.

Sherlock Holmes & The Case of the Silk Stocking: Charles Allen 👿👿👿👿👿

Even though it's two characters, I'm rating them the same. One's a child m*lester and murder and one knew about it and did nothing.

The Agency: Martian 👿

He is knowingly putting himself, his daughter, the cia AND his girlfriend at risk all because he can't let his relationship go? (Spoiler: he still can't and ends up going double agent to rescue her).

Here's the original video for context:

Let me know what you think!

Share any suggestions of what movie or show I should watch next.

[tvimagines221b]

Imagine: Being a Young Member of the Covenant, And David Knowing Walter Cares For You.

The sound of Y/N’s footsteps against the ground, graced David’s ears. He had been kneeling beside a piece of stone, in which he had delicately placed a flower. Dr.Shaw’s gravestone. One of the members of the Prometheus, who like many other of the humans who had come to his planet? Died. She wasn’t just another member of the crew. Not just some human. No. To him, she had been something much more. As Y/N took a step closer to David, she softened her expression slightly. A hint of what seemed to be understanding gracing her features. “You loved Dr.Shaw, didn’t you?”

David slowly stood up, turning to face her. “You can say, the feelings I shared for Dr.Shaw are no different from Walter’s.”

Y/N’s mind reeled back to the face of one person. “Daniel’s…”

“Though I suspect, she is not the only human my lesser counterpart has come to care for.” David began to walk towards her, tilting his head slightly. Almost as if studying her.

“What do you mean?” Y/N quizzed.

“I have been observing your interactions with Walter ever since you arrived on this planet.” He clasped his hands together. Resting them behind his back. “The two of you, share quite the connection. A certain trust. Odd for a human and an android.”

“Yeah, I suppose.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Walters not just a member of the crew to me. He’s…my friend.”

A faint amused smile graced David’s lips. “He cares for you.”

“Yeah, I…I guess so.”

[monsteracademia]

yooooo love ur blog!!! thought i'd ask bc i didn't know if there was a way to search: do you have any recommended reading? definitely interested in theory, but also movies/shows/etc that have stood out to you/that you've had fun analyzing in your studies! basically....hi can i have Your Dream Syllabus Reading List

Well hi there! I'm glad you enjoy my blog.

I have my monster theory 101 reading list here in a post that goes into a bit more detail about why those particular readings. But there are definitely some other readings that I personally have really enjoyed and that have been really helpful to me. So here's a list of theory stuff that wasn't included in the 101 reading list;

Undead (A Zombie Oriented Ontology) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood by Sarah Arnold

Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in "Rosemary's Baby" by Lucy Fischer

Monstrous imagination by Marie-Helene Huet

Ex(or)cising the spirit of Japan: Ringu, The Ring and the persistence of Japan by Nicholas Holm

Posthuman Teratology by Patricia MacCormack

Evil Children in Film and Literature by Karen J Renner

Well-Travelled Female Avengers: The Transcultural Potential of Japanese Ghosts by Elisabeth Scherer

The Birth of the Clinic and the Advent of Reproduction: Pregnancy, Pathology and the Medical Gaze in Modernity by J Shaw

There's probably a lot more but these are ones that I remember very clearly and that made a real lasting impression on me.

In terms of fiction texts that stand out to me for their monstrous potential or that I've had a lot of fun analysing in my work;

Ringu (1998) and The Ring (2002)

Splice (2009)

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Let The Right One In (2008)

Brightburn (2019)

Sinister (2012)

The Exorcist (1973)

Resident Evil Biohazard (2017)

Prometheus (2012)

Alien Covenant (2017)

Alien Resurrection (1997)

Like all of the Alien Franchise really but those three in particular. Even if I'm still upset that Alien Romulus came out after the cut off date for texts for my thesis and my supervisor won't let me include it because it is a Masterpiece

Dead Space (especially the recent remake holy shit I love the idea of decay as an extant form of life)

Not technically a movie or a show or any form of traditional media but I highly enjoy and recommend The Mystery Fleshpit National Park also

[cellarspider]

30/30 One last thing.

(Previous) | (Index) | ⛬

⛬

We have come to the end of Prometheus. But depending on how you’re feeling about death of the author right now, it’s not. Not quite yet.

Because Ridley Scott had some things to say after Prometheus came out.

Two months after the movie's release, Ridley Scott gave an interview. Its original home has succumbed to link rot, but it’s still available in a couple places, in the Internet Archive and within the corporate acquisition mass that is Fandango, featuring a weird note of brand revisionism in the relabeling of the interviewer’s affiliation.

Now. Let’s begin by saying this: A movie is a movie. The things around a movie are not the movie. This seems obvious, but it’s to say that a single creative work can be viewed entirely free of outside context, and in most cases it’s best to assume that it will. If a director comes out later and tells people what their intent was, then that’s not part of the movie.

…But it can still sit in your brain for years, leaping out to ambush unsuspecting passers-by.

So! This interview. Ohhh, this interview. I’d forgotten most of it, because the final lines of it just knocked the top of my head clean off, so we’ll be discovering bits of this together.

We start from the end of the movie, with the interviewer asking about the openness of the ending to a sequel. Scott, among other things, said:

“I’d love to explore where the hell [Dr. Shaw] goes next and what does she do when she gets there, because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is. Paradise has a connotation of being extremely sinister and ominous.”

This came across well in the movie, though it was festooned with the random bit of organic bigotry from Shaw toward David. A short answer won’t capture everything, so I still have no idea if Scott intended for that to be so brayingly insensitive, this is the guy who was fine with Joel Edgerton as Ramses II. In any case, Paradise might be ominous, but Shaw’s not bringing along ideas that will improve it by any means.

This isn’t really the film we eventually got from Alien: Covenant. Is that bad? Honestly, I don’t know that either. Shaw as a character did not have a lot of depth in this movie. Noomi Rapace ended up playing her hurt very well by the end of it, but if that’s your standard of quality in horror acting, then Josh Stewart’s leading role in the grungy Saw-adjacent movie The Collector (2009) will serve you well.

I think they could have built something out of her character, but they didn’t. David is definitely the stand-out character from Prometheus, and they do at least focus on him quite a lot. But I’ve yet to watch Covenant, partly because the structure of it does not interest me. Also, because I’ve heard about what David does when he shows up on the new planet, and bad things happening to crowds are one thing that can make my brain wig out something awful.

Speaking of the Engineers, Scott speaks about their character:

“they’re such aggressive f**kers … and who wouldn’t describe them that way, considering their brilliance in making dreadful devices and weapons that would make our chemical warfare look ridiculous? So I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see actually is not so nice, and is certainly not God.” 

Again, we find ourselves at the casual gnosticism of the movie, in which the Engineers are kind of the demiurge in this context. Some christian-influenced people assume that if there is a true god, it must be omnibenevolent, and find the violent and threatening behavior depicted in the Old Testament to be at odds with their understanding of divinity. A lack of benevolence is seen as a sign that the figure depicted must be something else, something that may think that it is a god, but it is not truly, regardless of its role as a creator. Hence, the gnostic idea of the demiurge.

But Scott also seems to confirm my suspicion that he’s not aware he’s recreating gnostic cosmogony through Prometheus, because he doesn’t reach for any of the older sources or the language around him. He instead invokes a rather surface reading of Paradise Lost:

“ In a funny kind of way, if you look at the Engineers, they’re tall and elegant … they are dark angels. If you look at [John Milton’s] Paradise Lost, the guys who have the best time in the story are the dark angels, not God. He goes to all the best nightclubs, he’s better looking, and he gets all of the birds. [Laughs]”

Setting aside the fact that Paradise Lost ends with all the fallen angels having a bad time because God’s turned them into snakes, I will give Scott the tiniest bit of credit, there’s a bit of my brain that saw this in the first scene and thought “that is a strong start”:

Scott eventually continues on the Engineers, and the sacrifice scene at the start:

“That could be anywhere. That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself.  If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.”

Scott is misremembering some things here, which is understandable given the off-the-cuff nature of the remark, but it’s still worth correcting. This is a misattribution of Aztec rituals that would involve the sacrifice of a “teixiptla” representative of a god (such as Xipe Totec, Tezcatlipoca, etc). The Inca didn’t carry out this ritual–they did engage in a human sacrifice ritual called qhapaq hucha, but its form and function was not the same. The Classical Maya also engaged in different human sacrifice rituals, but there was also an emphasis on non-fatal self-administered bloodletting–Maya nobility in particular were often depicted shedding their own blood for this purpose, because noble blood had divine qualities.

This also, to my memory, conflates stories of european human sacrifice rituals, where crop failures are sometimes linked to the sacrifice of kings, such as Dómaldr in the Ynglinga saga, and noted in the placement and treatment of certain bog bodies. The Aztecs did sacrifice to the god Tláloc for crop for good harvests, but the rituals involved were quite different.

It should be noted, of course, that Tláloc was later syncretized with the Christian god during the Spanish conquest, likely as a result of conceptually linking Tláloc’s sacrifices to the demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac. And, y’know, that conquest was concurrent with the Spanish Inquisition, and the wider religious belief that a heretical witch army was being organized by Satan to stand against God to forestall the Second Coming of Christ, with crop failures being the most feared result of their rituals.

I’ve added all these details not because I want to say Scott is bad for misattributing this stuff, people make mistakes. I have several hours’ access to the internet, Scott did not. However, it is worth noting: How we frame an idea can say a lot about how we conceive of it. Variations on these behaviors are found throughout history, and across cultures. Sacrifices and martyrs are powerful symbols still invoked in western culture today. There’s a potential wandering back and forth between appreciation and exoticization that Scott’s engaging in.

Then Scott says something that made me get up from my chair to find a book to shake at my computer.

“I always think about how often we attribute what has happened to either our invention or memory. A lot of ideas evolve from past histories, but when you look so far back, you wonder, Really? Is there really a connection there?”

Yes.

Yes there is. Ancient peoples weren’t stupid. Ancient peoples didn’t even necessarily have less information to work with than any one modern human, they just had different information that kept them alive and finding solutions to their problems, be it “I need to find food” or “how do I meaningfully participate in my culture’s artistic and governmental traditions, and should they even be followed at all?”

If you want a great and thorough examination of that, check out the book I gesticulated with.

Highly recommended. Graeber was an anthropologist and Wengrow is an archaeologist, and the two of them together are a force to be reckoned with. There are definitely subjects covered in this book that I’ve seen from different angles before, and I feel like their interpretation pulls in more context than I’d gotten previously. Especially pertinent to this, the first part of The Dawn of Everything is spent examining the origins of modern western thought on “primitive” cultures and their character and capacity, and then digging into what evidence we actually have on the subject.

But the movie does not, fundamentally, engage with cultures outside of westernized, christian thinking. Not to any serious extent, anyway. It has a certain worldview, and that’s fine. That can be explored intelligently, although we’ve seen that I think it squanders that chance. It’s fundamentally a christian-centric movie.

And despite Scott’s protestations in the interview that they toned it down, quite a few readers have already guessed how far Scott originally intended to go on that.

“But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Lets’ send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.” Guess what? They crucified him.”

Yes. Jesus of Nazareth was actually Jesus of Space.

This is why the movie says the Engineer corpse died about 2000 years ago. This is why they decided to destroy humanity. 

Presumably the original quote on the cross was “Father, forgive them, for they know not that we’ve got deadly black goo.” Engineer 23:34, I guess.

Now that the screams in the audience have hopefully settled down, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.

Alright. So, this is bad. Let’s break down why, beyond the obvious questions about “why does nobody ever draw Jesus as bald, huge, and ripped.” Fans have already tackled that–there’s a fake script circulating that has a decent interpretation of this. In their version, a human kid got zwooped up to be taught the ways of the Engineers, and sent back as an emissary. Why? Dunno. Also apparently the gospels that mention Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt with the baby Jesus were off the mark by a few lightyears.

No matter the details, this whole premise is laughable to christians, because “what if Jesus was an alien” is the sort of thing that twelve year olds come up with. It’s offensive if it’s taken seriously, because it says their literal god was actually a mortal critter from outer space. Ha! Your god is not all-powerful, or all-good. He’s not even All-Might.

But you know what’s almost worse? It implies that, sure, Christianity isn’t the inspired word of a deity. It also implies some level of exclusive factual accuracy to Jesus’ teachings, not shared with other religions. Jesus was a celestial emissary, endowed with the teachings that could save humanity, and his death doomed the Earth to the Last Judgment.

The Torah is insufficient, and all Rabbinic literature was produced following the rejection of the true way to salvation. The enlightenment of the Buddha counted for nothing, the Dao is not the way, Vishnu cannot defend or restore dharma, the Prophet Muhammad is only so valid as his acknowledgment of the Prophet Īsā ibn Maryam. 

All other faiths are superfluous under this premise. If people had just listened to Jesus and accepted him as their savior, everything would’ve been fine!

This is the one point of alien contact with western canon in the entire setting, after the deep prehistory of Skye. Every other literate culture that was contacted got the Engineers’ message wrong. Or they didn’t listen. Only christians got it right.

That’s incalculably bad. That’s not even counting the fact that the wall o’ artifacts that Shaw and Holloway presented included a notable oversight: the only two artifacts further from Europe than the Middle East are chronologically impossible, based on the movie’s own timeline. It implies the rest of the world was thrown in as an afterthought.

This whole Jesus thing is a piece, a big, jagged piece of why this movie drives me so far up the wall that I’m now residing on the ceiling. It’s not, as far as I can tell, actively malicious. It’s just dumb. It wasn’t thought through the way it should’ve been. If they wanted to do a movie like this, they should’ve gone all-in. Really dig into the implications of what they’ve done. 

And the movie seems wholly ignorant of it. There are basic questions presented to the audience, but there’s no deeper consideration that could make this respectful to anybody.

So, what are we left with?

A mess. A beautiful, stunted, confused mess that was poorly served by its script and lack of conviction.

The movie turned away from asking big questions, and focused instead on traditional horror. A genre that works best with good characterization to drive audience investment, but then it cut out most of the characterization, and what it left was scattershot. It gave us a flashback of Shaw’s childhood before we’d even really met her to understand why it was meaningful for her. The movie then failed to add any emotional weight to her.

The movie failed to give us characters with emotional weight or intelligence. It gave us a single, compelling character in David, driven largely by Michael Fassbender’s delivery and physical performance. It gave us a tactile, carefully constructed setting that was beautiful and often an accomplishment in filmmaking craft, but these spaces remained emotionally empty without a story that gave them meaning. It gave us the potential of something new, and then retreated to imitate the old.

I went into the theater in 2012 looking forward to a good film. I suppose this one has stuck with me more than a good film would have, but its primary value is as a flawed thing to critique, to learn from, and to put tooth marks on when the frustration gets to be too much.

Prometheus got one sort-of sequel in Alien: Covenant (2017), and it seems to have been abandoned. The first trailer for Alien: Romulus just came out the day I’m writing this, and it looks like it’s going to be just a monster movie.

If you want a good, modern Alien, play or watch Alien: Isolation (2014). Apparently its content was recut into a web series in 2019, though I can’t speak to the quality of that. For now, I’m done with the series. I’m not going to be rushing out to see anything new, because I don’t think it’s doing anything new. Prometheus could’ve been a chance to do that, but it failed.

Still. Writing this was fun, I will admit. My weird little obsession with this movie turned into a month and a half of writing and prepping this thing, totaling–Jesus E. Christ, over 82,000 words. I wish it could’ve been about something that hid more intellectual heft or careful thought than Prometheus did, but hey! There’s always next time.

And there will in all likelihood be a next time, as I’ve already started on another document. It won’t be for quite a while, though. This was a lot of fun, but a lot of work as well. I’ll be taking a break, and only releasing more stuff once I have it fully written ahead of time, as opposed to how I handled this one.

Thank you, brave readers, for making it this far. 

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Citations for alt-text rambles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023%E2%80%932024_Sundhn%C3%BAkur_eruptions#Eruptions

https://tubitv.com/movies/314320/the-collector 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dettifoss 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Magliabechiano 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollund_Man 

https://youtu.be/nT2ueyFrVgk 

https://www.deviantart.com/pretty--kittie/art/Prometheus-Engineer-407316113 

https://nebula.tv/videos/hellofutureme-is-netflixs-avatar-any-good 

Overflow Ramble 1

Hey, does anyone else remember Stephen Speilberg’s War of the Worlds (2005)? I saw that in the theater, and I cannot watch that thing again. Yes, I was younger, but the overall content of that movie absolutely shredded my nerves to pieces. Even though I’d grown up knowing the full H G Wells story and reading things like The Tripods book series as a kid, Spielberg managed to make a movie that felt so viscerally unpleasant to me that it gave me nightmares for years.

My main theory is this: You know in movies that the protagonist is almost certainly going to survive what happens, doubly so in War of the Worlds because it was goddamn Tom Cruise. But my brain did not treat Tom Cruise as my viewpoint character. Something in me says “well, I’m not Tom Cruise, I’m one of those other people around him, and they’re all gonna die horribly.” 

This tends to happen with me in disaster films and similar stuff like that. I have to be real certain I want to be there if I watch a kaiju movie, for example. I can do Godzilla (2014), but I’m not so sure about Godzilla Minus One (2023). Shin Godzilla (2016) is off the table.

Horror movies have to hit a balance of giving people a rickety feeling of potential safety they want to preserve, rather than letting them feel too safe or too screwed. Too far either way and you lose people, either to apathy or just pure bad vibes. The paradox of enjoyable horror is that it can’t scare you too much.

Overflow Ramble 2

I personally don’t think the tone of Fede Álvarez’s horror fits with what I’m looking for in an Alien movie. The xenomorph life cycle worked best and most subversively when it was deliberately targeted, to take the sexual/reproductive menace usually placed on female characters in horror and forced it onto a male character instead. Álvarez has historically played that trope straight instead. From a horror perspective, that’s boring to me. The xenomorphs also appear to be aggressive monsters here rather than animals, more like Aliens than Alien. Not my favorite interpretation.

And to be honest, when I saw the trailer, my first thought was “Oh, it’s Sevastopol Station.” The setting looks exactly like Alien: Isolation, and there’s not a chance the movie’s going to outshine Isolation. That game’s only narrative sin was a bit of slow pacing toward the ending. Romulus’ trailer makes me think it’s going to go too far in the other direction.

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[aen-hen-ichaer]

just saw romulus im so so normal about it NO IM NOT. GOD IM NOT IM GNAWING AT THE BARS OF MY ENCLOSURE GAAAUUGH

my thoughts + spoilers under the cut :3

• giger would be so proud of this film. so yonic. so phallic. my god. Every vagina shaped thing gave way to the most sinister form of life. Every penis shaped thing was violently penetrating. Super duper leans into the original underlying themes of SA. got under my skin like crazy

• this film combined all my favourite elements of alien (slow burn immersive horror), aliens (great action) and resurrection (human/xeno hybrid) I literally cannot fault it at all

•the offspring (babymorph as me and my bf dubbed it) BAD BAD SO BAD THROWING UP IN MY MOUTH I was legit shaking and had tears in my eyes I have never been so close to screaming in a cinema. 1000/10 creature design. I knew something horrific and fucked up was gonna happen after the pregnancy reveal but JESUS

• Andy's actor was AMAZZINNNGG. The way he played "regular" Andy vs "evil fuckass weyland-yutani synth" was seamless and perfect and he was my fav character

• Ian Holm's cameo felt...... weird. I generally don't like dead actors being reanimated in cgi anyway even with the consent of the family yadda yadda but... blegh. The cgi felt a little dodgy on his face as well but tbh the glitchy jilted nature of it really added to him being a damaged synth LOL

• references were v cute. might be ott to some but I liked it

•PRACTICAL EFFECTS MY BELOVED. BIG SCARY ASS PUPPETS MY BELOVED. GOO AND SLIME MY BELOVED

• the whole birth scene shook me to my coooorrree. As someone who wants to be pregnant and give birth nothing has gotten so under my skin like that before. The ides of doing your best to nurture what will be your child only for this fucking horror to come out of you.... oh my god......... AND LACTATING THE GOO?? ARE YOU FR????????

• mostly smart characters in this movie which I appreciate! the whole zero g acid blood vortex scene was very funsies

• great score. Calls back to the original but not too much

• PERFECT set design. Felt like watching alien isolation as a movie

• I love that they went back to a more analog clicky buttons/flicky switches aesthetic, the holograms and touchscreens of prometheus and covenant never felt right

• the black goo as an almost intelligent substance is so so fun. It "speeds up evolution" but it's smart enough not to destroy its host outright. The offspring was gestated in an egg sac containing fucking acid BUT it didn't hurt kay (until she birthed it and it no longer needed her)

• also the offspring not growing its xeno tail until it consumed the last of the goo from kay? Very nice touch

• JUST. PREGNANCY AS A GROUNDWORK FOR HORROR. SO UNDERUTILISED. SO EFFECTIVE.

• this films chest burster scene... dare I say....scarier than the original. Watching her ribs crack with the xray machine.... YUCKY

• me and my bf has settled to calling the black goo Promethean Fire. This isn't part of the review I just like that hehe

• when I heard the name Romulus I mentioned to my bf about Romulus and Remus being raised by wolves and I was like "what if this is the start of the crossbreeds like in resurrection?" AND I WAS FUCKING RIGHT BITCH!!!!!!!!!!

•Sound design was excellent, the thumping huge heavy footprints of the xeno felt sososososososo good with the cinema surround sound auugghhg

ANYWAY I FUCKING LOVED THIS MOVIE. If u wanna share any thoughts pls do in insane about this :)

[feral-lore-creature]

ALIEN is a fundamentally matriarchal story

I'm aware that fanboys can be fucking annoying, and that's part of the reason why I was hesitant to get into Alien in the first place. (I also blame Reddit-) But after watching the movies, reading the comics, etc. Alien has become a lot more to me.

@oyaapeach I think you might enjoy this one. :3

The first two movies (Alien and Aliens) are the most obvious. Woman fights off a terrifying organism as the rest of her crew dies around her. The second has said woman go through more trauma with multiple different organisms (of the same species) while she takes care of an equally traumatized child after they had both lost somebody they loved. And Ripley kicks ass the whole time, to boot.

Sadly, Alien 3 doesn't have as strong of a presence as the rest of them do. That also happens to be a movie that focuses less on those narratives. I, personally, don't think that's a coincidence.

Alien: Resurrection is also very obvious. For god's sake, she's the progenitor to the Queen of a cloned variant of the Xenomorph.

Even the XX121 is inherently matriarchal. The Queen herself creates life by destroying it, guiding her underlings as needed. There is no male in the species, and there doesn't need to be. I honestly hope there never is. (I know an Alien King has been rarely involved, seen in an Alien 3 script, kid's toys, and exists as an artificially engineered XX121 variant in one of the comics, but I don't think those count.)

This is where Prometheus and Covenant miss the mark, however. I like both of those movies, and while some criticisms are valid, I feel like people kinda miss the point as to why these two feel so... drab. While, yes, these two movies end in far more tragedy than most of them (Covenant especially-) they're really missing that energy the rest of them had. Prometheus was going in such an interesting direction. I thought the violent cycles of creating life (accidentally or not-) and then hating your creations (and/or your creations hating you) was a very interesting route.

The worst part is that they killed off Elizabeth Shaw in Covenant, which is my main gripe with that movie. She was an interesting, resilient, and curious character I would have loved to see more of.

I think we need to get back to the core of what the story is about. I'm excited for Romulus! I can't wait for it! I almost can't believe it comes out next month. Time really flies.