The Real Reason Why Prometheus and Alien: Covenant SUCK

#alien #prometheus #videoessay
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Alien Essay 1: • The Real Reason Why th...
Alien Romulus Review: • The Surprising Truth A...
The original Alien is a masterpiece...Prometheus and Alien: Covenant...not so much.
Eric's Links:
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Links to Books and Socials: linktr.ee/Eric...
OEI analog horror experiment: / @officeofextradimensio...
Editing by Nathaniel Greene and Eric Malikyte
Further Reading:
en.wikipedia.o...
en.wikipedia.o...
Excerpts and quotes taken directly from At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft: books.google.c...
• Deleted Engineer Dialo...
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Douglas Adams Quote: "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." -Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[@storyrant]

Eric's Links: Free cosmic horror ebook: dl.bookfunnel.com/1cw07o2uyb Links to Books and Socials: linktr.ee/EricMalikyte

[@JordanDavis-l8f]

So because you don't like that Jesus is replaced with the emissary in this timeline and you don't like that the engineers hate us for crucifying him... You're upset? Even the black goo is starting to round out as a plot point, it's smoothing out fine. Those movies failed to deliver nothing more, it's only through expanded media that we've learned to like the small details. I'm surprised you didn't point to the fact but they can't decide if the engineers are hundreds of thousands or billions of years old

[@JordanDavis-l8f]

I mean my opinion the engineers are an awful lot more believable than the space jockeys. But I have to say you're analysis of the universe that Ridley Scott created isn't actually as much Ridley Scott's doing. Reedley Scott did not have much to do with the comics and Ridley Scott did not have a lot to do with aliens. Ridley fleshed out this alien organism and what its basic life cycle was as well as the Androids and the company and the human need for survival. James is the one that further went into the Marine aspect of it and the military response. Personally it seems like you just harken back to the comics and to say that Ridley Scott misses a mark he was once hitting isn't exactly correct it's more to say that many different people have created the franchise we know today and that Ridley Scott only had a small part to do with it hence why he might not have been prepared to reboot it at the time Although I still have no idea why Vickers just ran in a straight line from that ship as it was rolling towards her But one thing I do like is that the black goo is how they grow those ships Those ships come from biological material

[@JordanDavis-l8f]

No unfortunately dealing with cosmic forces is usually something along the lines of Science fiction space gods Alien is a biological parasite and everything in Alien is very very science-based and is understood by the audience There is no Cthulhu It is not exactly cosmic horror it is too realistic, It is actually realistic enough that it can only really stand out as sci-fi horror considering the closest we get to the alien being an indescribable entity by sciences terms is when we get to the queen mother who might not even be Canon anymore Some of the comics are cosmic horror yes but the main series isn't

[@JordanDavis-l8f]

There is no sense of terror at the fear of the scientifically unknowable. Every other cosmic horror I've looked into has never used something that could be a real organism Although the aliens being a psychic entity might be close to that

[@storyrant]

@@JordanDavis-l8f It seems you didn't really understand this video. I never said that I disliked that Jesus was replaced by an Engineer emissary. I was pointing out that the very idea of Space Jesus is dumb. It's dumb idea. Whether you think the Engineers are more realistic than the Space Jockey fossil in the original film doesn't matter. The point is they do not match the themes and tone of the original film and the creator's (Dan O'Bannon) vision. And again, as I mentioned in my first video on the subject, black goo was originally William Gibson's idea for Alien 3. I don't have a problem with it if it's done right.

[@reverenddmo8944]

My problem with Prometheus is a really simple one: if these aliens that seeded life across the galaxy billions of years ago, essentially being as close to deities to ants like ourselves, and have spanned potentially the entire galaxy doing this, why can't they make a jar that doesn't leak?

[@forgotten1s]

Thats hilarious to think about

[@enetlocal]

In general in the alien series the humans have always been the dumb fhcks lol.. Engineers too 😂

[@qvalue9982]

Actually it's not known that it was a leaky jar it could have been a saboteur or one of a million things. it's only known that "it got out, end of story. Period" In the words of the ship captain.

[@NicholasMarshall]

@@qvalue9982 for materials this hazardous it breaks my suspension of disbelief that more wasn't done to make it safe to transport. If the downfall of the engineers was supposed to be their arrogance it needs to show that. And not show us incompetence.

[@danielled8665]

My thing is; it's fiction, and it's meant to be fiction. It's a fictional world. We don't have the same troubles with the weird Transformers version, because it's obviously fake. It takes conspiracy theories and goes "what would the world look like if it were true?" There's a lot of films like that. 2012, for example. That Kong one with the hollow earth. It's just that a lot of people have an issue telling fictional "what if" stories, from actual science with evidence based theories.

[@simonlaurila2702]

A quick note on the whole taking off their helmet because the air is breathable thing: When I was working construction and we were doing renovations or demolition inside old buildings, we weren't allowed within 30m of the job site without our respirators on. Not because the atmosphere in an old house might not be breathable, a HEPA filter wouldn't do much against that anyway, but because of potential asbestos, old fibreglass, or mould spores. See, when you go into an ancient alien temple, you don't know if their dust is just the same as our nice, breathable skin flakes and dead microorganisms, or if a silicon based lifeform's dandruff is literal glass nano-shuriken that'll shred your lungs from breathing it in. And that's not getting into fungal spores that might be parasitic.

[@storyrant]

Excellent point!

[@storyrant]

I was so mad when I couldn't find a clip for that scene.

[@mrdavman13]

Also viruses that could potentially be airborne. Measles for example can last for hours stranded in the air. Imagine something that could stay viable for thousands of years in the air, or after you start walking around and make dust fly up. It’s just stupid in so many ways

[@alexandresobreiramartins9461]

It's a scritp written by little children in the bodies of adults... the worst kind of idiot possible.

[@Fenris77]

Good point.

[@Cybo-Man]

I really preferred the Alien as a natural creature of unknown origin.

[@rexcassidy]

a natural creature that doesnt eat or have any natural functions? And if you follow the lore the "Deacon" or first xenomorph was natural sort of.

[@Ashen.Elixer]

The xenomorph is just the adult form. Plenty of insects have adult forms that done even *have* digestive tracks - they simply exist to lay eggs and die

[@yurifairy2969]

​@@rexcassidy Loads of real life animals lack natural functions as adults because they do not need them. Xenomorphs could be (relatively) short-lived creatures.

[@randallbesch2424]

The most non-organic living robotic beings designed to be slaves.

[@Da_bear-ij9gm]

@@rexcassidyyeah it’s a literal alien why would it have limitations of species we are familiar with on earth. Maybe it’s more akin to a virus in that they’re not technically alive

[@thomasmeglasson228]

My main issue is that the xenomorphs are so much less scary if they're just some engineered bioweapon vs just a product of evolution out in the harshness of the universe. Prometheus seemed like it thought it was brining up all these deep questions, but the answer to "where did we come from?" being "aliens a whole lot like us" is just one of the most boring answers to that question I can imagine.

[@randallbesch2424]

To me that way of thinking is peculiar. Anyway they are slaves not bioweapons. Only they rebelled.

[@ultratog1028]

The more you explain a horrible unknown in media, the less scary they become.

[@belloutdoors5217]

Boring? Lol shut up

[@rangda_prime]

It's basically a secular way of kicking the ball up a step to God. What made us? God! What made God? That is a theological question for the ages. Replacing God with Engineer aliens... does not work. Unlike God, which can be argued to be something above, beyond and outside of the physical universe (and I say this as an agnostic), a bunch of tall bleached dudes can not. It just pushes the question to "Where did the Engineers come from" and since we won't get any answer to that, we might as well shrug and say God did it.

[@Enforcer6k]

While I agree that the xenomorph is inherently scarier as a kind of "invasive species that got loose from its home planet," I push back on the implication that it being a bioweapon is that much less scary. Because the idea of a creature this terrible, this invasive and dominating to squishy humans like us, would be left as an afterthought in some perhaps long-finished conflict between beings we can't possibly imagine is pretty terrifying on its own. It implies both a vastness and carelessness of the rest of the universe that is a central aspect of cosmic horror. Granted, I dont think Prometheus and Alien: Covenant portrayed _that_ particular concept at all, but the concept alone works, in my opinion.

[@NextToToddliness]

Prometheus & Covenant: Have your gods and eat them too.

[@storyrant]

Who doesn't love jello?

[@mattm8870]

Part of what makes alien so good is the people in it actually behave in ways that are sensible and the fact stuff is left unknown about the aliens both the xenomorph and space jockey.

[@storyrant]

Something I talk a lot about in the first video of this series. :)

[@rogercroft3218]

Yep. The less we know about them, the more intriguing they are.

[@randallbesch2424]

@@rogercroft3218 yet ATMOM has many explanations of things down to what the aliens look like. How does knowing a shoggoth was a slave race created by the Old Ones make them any less terrifying? The same with the Xenomorphs?

[@storyrant]

As I explained in the video, the difference comes down to themes and execution. In Prometheus the explanations actively make the universe feel smaller. In At the Mountains of Madness, it's clear that this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the history of the Elder Things. The explanations serve to undermine our understanding of "deep time", which drives Lake into a crazed fervor for answers and ultimately leads to his undoing. We have no idea how old the Elder Things are, all we know is that they descended to from the stars and the creation of humanity was a total accident, or a joke, we're not really sure which as it's not mentioned in their murals--we're not even a footnote there. The Elder Things also choose to dissect a human the moment they come into contact with one. They're completely disinterested in us as a species. There's none of this in Prometheus. Besides the sequence with the Engineer head, not a whole lot of science is even done, and it's certainly not the focus (and frankly, with how poorly researched the film was, I wouldn't trust them to write more scientific scenes anyway). Why didn't the geologist makes guesses as to the age of the structures? Why didn't the other dude who was stuck down there do some actual science instead of trying to make friends with an alien snake? The Engineer also just sits there listening to Peter Weyland prattle on and then complains about how we killed Space Jesus (in the deleted scene, but it explains why they want us dead) before killing him. While the general rule of thumb is to "show don't tell" there are plenty of visual ways in how to communicate scientific concepts, but it would have served the story better to have them actively investigating things, rather than what we ended up getting. Ultimately, the whole "aliens seeded life on Earth on purpose" thing is the antithesis to what Alien should be about. If Dan O'Bannon got his way, the Xenomorph would have been genetically related to Yog Sothoth, and that sounds way cooler than anything we got in the prequels or sequels. You can absolutely explore the history of the Xenomorphs, but what you can't do is tell us (or imply) that they were created by the same people who "seeded Earth and gave humans Space Jesus and also hate needless violence" oh, and also, David creates the Alien as we know it in the first film (yes, the film implies this heavily) despite the fact that the ship and the eggs were absolutely ancient in the original film and Dan O'Bannon's original idea that these organisms were like cicadas who could hibernate for literally millions of years. There's a lot of untapped potential for a similar unraveling of our assumptions of deep time in Prometheus, but ultimately the film never taps into that potential, because it doesn't understand what a light year is much less deep time. It comes off as a jumbled mess of "Ohh! this would be cool, let's do that!" with no real thought put behind it. So, yeah, there's a massive difference between At the Mountains of Madness and Prometheus. They only appear conceptually similar at a surface level.

[@randallbesch2424]

@@rogercroft3218 now that gets boring real fast.

[@mattmagliocca956]

I remember reading that in the original script, the concept was supposed to be that the Engineers didn't make the Xenomorph (or rather the black goo) but they found it. I read (and I don't know for sure if this is true) that the original plan was that the Space Jockey/Engineer race had been so thoroughly genetically engineered that it had become sterile and unable to reproduce. Then they found the creature called the 'Deacon' in deep space which we see in the Mural. The Deacon's blood allowed the Engineers to reproduce again or at least to shape worlds into similar creatures to themselves and to reproduce indirectly. The Engineers worshiped the Deacon but eventually it had died and their race started to fail again. The black goo was supposed to be the result of their efforts to reproduce the Deacon's blood and allow them to procreate again. This script would still have a lot of holes and flaws in it but it would have been better purely in the sense that our answer to 'where the Xenomorph comes from' also raises new questions: Where did the Deacon come from and are there more of them out there? Was it a benevolent creature or was it like the Xenomorph but worse because it was more intelligent? A good cosmic horror script needs to expand our questions, not close them off. Each answer needs to clarify that we're just an insignificant speck in a wider and colder universe than we previously imagined.

[@BucketBoatable]

Whenever someone brings up Lovecraft stories being about humans going insane and being weak, I remember that most characters that go insane do recover and that a human ship rammed into Cthulhu made him go back to sleep

[@faqpronouns]

c.o.c is one of the stupidest and perhaps the epitomy of lazy writing when it comes to a finale

[@toobig7150]

@@faqpronouns I think you missed a lot of lore behind that. It was a prophetised thing, down to the name of the ship, he didnt "go to sleep" he lost his corporeal "ties" to the world, every single ancient one on the Mythos needs blood to be able to manifest, if not they can only exist on the other 3 planes on the Mythos (The void, the dream lands, and the Higher realm) thats why Nyarlatoteph, Cthulu, Shub, and the others dont just go planet to planet destroying everything and instead use cults, their vassals, offspring or in the case of Nyarla, various devices that summon a part of it. Its a bit like a possesion, they need something to be tied to this plane, they cannot be damage but their "body" can be "driven away". But i guess it was never DIRECTLY explained in the plot so it does makes it a bit of a copout (they do hint at it on the professor notes)

[@statboosts279]

​@@toobig7150if extended lore explanations not inside the work didn't save Prometheus then they don't save Lovecraft. Especially not when being directly compared lol

[@rangda_prime]

@@toobig7150 That was a whole lot of made up bullshit, but it perfectly illustrates the point of the video.

[@toobig7150]

@@statboosts279 it is inside his works, just not on the same book. Even in the video he judges the lore based off the movie AND other movies, then moved to the other "out there" media about it.

[@asiabrew81]

51:10 There's an old Patton Oswalt album called Werewolves and Lollipops and there is a particular section that's called At Midnight I Will Kill George Lucas with a Shovel and it basically skewers the last 20 years of this trend (By way of the Star Wars Prequels) of explaining away the mystery of things we love, and caps it off by screaming a line that has lived rent free in my mind because this trend never stopped: "I don't give a shit where the stuff I love comes from, I just love the stuff I love."

[@comentedonakeyboard]

Taking inspiration from Ancient Aliens explains how this movie takes up themes from the Epic of Gilgamesh/Enuma Elish (namely the conflict between creator and creation) while at the same time missing the same themes.

[@storyrant]

Yeah. Scott's not really a writer, and the writers he brought on board weren't particularly good in the first place, so this confusion in themes was bound to happen.

[@RandomAccessMammeries]

I had no idea guillermo del toro was going to make an at the mountains of madness movie.... nor did I know that it was not greenlit due to Prometheus... I now have a lifelong hatred of a movie I already didn't enjoy! Thanks for that lmao!

[@storyrant]

James Wan is apparently trying to get a Call of Cthulhu film made, so fingers crossed on that one.

[@AlgernonBrosplitz]

​@@storyrantno, please keep cookie cutter jump scare trite garbage producer Wan as far away from Lovecraft as possible

[@stellviahohenheim]

​@@AlgernonBrosplitzHollywood have too much ego to just follow the source

[@storyrant]

I mean, yeah, James Wan does make horror films with jump scares...in a genre where that's applicable, but there's no denying his skill with certain aspects of Insidious and parts of the Conjuring films (other than Ed and Lorain Warren being made out to be heroes, I really dislike how that series has mythologized them). There are some genuinely good scares in the first couple entries of both series than do not rely on jump scares. I think it's possible Wan could do a good job with the Call of Cthulhu, but it's got to be done right and have some strong characters (since Lovecraft's character are basically self-inserts).

[@mrspeigel3593]

It was more because he refused to back off an R rating for it

[@phangkuanhoong7967]

Ancient Aliens has done immense harm to the global public's perception and understanding of archelogy as a science, as well history in general. I hate it.

[@storyrant]

Yes. It is terrible.

[@Khannea]

It has a very coarse trump like quality.

[@SupremeGreatGrandmaster]

@@Khannea Give it a rest, hippy. No one likes a sore loser.

[@curtcoeurdelion]

Archeology has discredited itself long ago by their constant negligence of factual discoveries and evidence because of political and ideological reasons. That has made „mainstream archeology“ basically a borderline pseudo-science by now. Ancient Aliens has nothing to do with it - only by pointing out a lot of these purposefully overlooked facts and findings.

[@TomTriyingtothink]

I agree also from a story perspective the Ancient aliens aren't that interesting. Its such a tired trop its 4000 years old. Descovering that humans are created by some superior entety isn't that much of a surprise beacause most humans already belive that. Also its been done so many times it dosen't feel like a plot twist. I feel like if you wan't to make a story about Ancient aliens you kinda have to write it from the aliens perspective. Imagine the dramatic irony you could create with a group of aliens teaching humans how to build the Romane empire or the pyramids and thinking " great these civalizations will last forever."

[@Maehedrose]

I would argue that the existence of depression and anxiety in animals is evidence of self-awareness and reflection.

[@deanjustdean7818]

Speaking purely from a writing perspective, I was watching a video essay a little while ago about Better Call Saul, and something it said made everything click into place for me. In Breaking Bad, we see a man called Walter White grow from a dipshit to an Icarus-like drug kingpin. In Better Call Saul, we see that in the grand scheme of things, Walter was just an annoyance that was the catalyst for all of the main players' downfalls. Point being that good prequels recontextualise things, and do that well. BCS would have been a bad prequel if it had not made us see that Saul Goodman was the real centre of the Breaking Bad Universe. The Star Wars prequels are bad because they not only fail to give a different context for Anakin Skywalker's role in the universe, they actively make him way more important than any one person ought to be. Prometheus takes a story about Humans stumbling across something that could easily result in their extinction and turns it into an alien species deciding that Humans are pieces of shit unworthy of existence. In spite of Humans not having even advanced to the point of being a fart on that species' windshield yet. It makes the "godlike" aliens seem incredibly petty (like all gods written of by Humans), and betrays the egoism that is at the root of the oncoming Human extinction.

[@storyrant]

I have yet to finish Better Call Saul, which is a shame, because I love both shows in that series. You make a solid point about prequels, though. While I generally subscribe to the idea that you shouldn't do them, that's mainly because it's incredibly hard to do well. Maybe I need to think about writing an essay on how to do them well. You've given me a jumping off point there, so thank you.

[@treborkroy5280]

I think it's simply the Earth was one of many petri dish worlds that they decided to sanitize for whatever reason. It wasn't explained and honestly doesn't need to be. Cosmic horror and all. They could explain it and no one would be satisfied.

[@rangda_prime]

Gods as human self inserts is a very interesting angle to reading mythology, thank you for sharing that thought!

[@alltheflavors9673]

Scott has over exploited the Dumbest Ex Machina to the point that his stupid movies need even stupider protagonists to even move the stupid plot along, nevermind writing a coherent story that makes the least amount of sense. All the writing efforts get sucked into the black hole of having to make excuses for the plot to contort and pump along the vain and viscous director's shallow, pretentious and condescending power points of self insert neurosis. A dumb people's idea of a "smart" director and a good dose of studio interference when they realize the error in hiring this hack.

[@rangda_prime]

Also, see Raised by Wolves.

[@drakinkoren]

If you ever see JJ Abrams or Damon Lindelhoff with writer credits on anything, expect a unsolved and unsolvable mystery box or a poorly thought out chain of events because wouldn't they be cool. Abrams is a good director, good as producer etc, but not as a writer. I wish i knew this when going to see prometheus, but alas, it takes a while to spot the common thread in terrible movies and tv shows!

[@ipot399]

What I read was that Lindelof was brought on as a script doctor, and after his "treatment", the script made even less sense than before. And Ridley Scott, in his older years, just doesn't give a shit anymore, shrugged his shoulders and just went with it.

[@udopadrik9971]

Well, when it comes to cosmic horror something like that is very appropriate if done well, and I would argue Prometheus in the cosmic horror department is a better movie than any of the other Alien sequels. Cameron probably wouldn't know what to do with cosmic horror if it swallowed him up, let him wander around in it for untold aeons to give him inspiration and spit him out to make an Alien sequel. He is an action sci-fi director and compared to Prometheus Aliens has cosmic horror only as some vague side-dressing. Kubrick probably could've been good at doing cosmic horror precisely because of the vagueness, the ability to depict the unknowable and an unsolvabe mystery like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An unsolvable mystery and a movie that raises more questions than it gives answers is precisely what you want when dealing with cosmic horror. James Cameron made an amazing action sci-fi movie, but truth be told, in when it comes to what a movie is aboutt Prometheus is probably thematically the closest to the original Alien among all of the other movies in the series and Cameron's Aliens might be the furthest. Now when it comes to Covenant, I don't know about that. I still haven't managed to force myself to sit through that movie more than about 20-30 minutes, and I've tried a couple of times. That really seemed like Ridley Scott had lost his way.

[@belloutdoors5217]

Whiny kunts is what I see

[@t_ylr]

i didn't watch Lost so maybe I being too kind to Lindelöf, but I LOVE the Leftovers. It is this beautiful exploration of grief, family, religion, trauma, and societal breakdown. Maybe I'm primed to like it because i was working thru my own religious trauma at the time. IDK i really liked the writing on that show, but that's my main point of reference for Lindelöf

[@drakinkoren]

@@t_ylr There's nothing to say he couldn't knock out a gem, or couldn't have learned from his past 😅

[@ipot399]

Ridley Scott loves Ancient Aliens so much, he had to tell the story of Prometheus again, as executive producer to and director of a couple of episode of Raised by Wolves.

[@storyrant]

Wait...really?

[@ipot399]

@@storyrant Yes, you can look that up. Ridley Scott directed the first two episodes of Raised by Wolves, and is listed as an executive producer to the series.

[@storyrant]

@@ipot399 I mean, the show wasn't really on my radar, but I guess now I'll look into that for Part 3. Thanks for the info!

[@drmwpn]

It's appalling. The flying snake thing? A hollow planet? JFC.

[@franklin519]

So the engineers seeded Earth a billion years ago and at the time of Prometheus they are still using suspended animation and pretty much the same tech. Tech advancement over a billion years would be unrecognizable and seem to us like magic. I don't buy the story.

[@joshuacollins9316]

You’re assuming that technological civilizations don’t stagnate after a certain level of advancement. This could be due to certain laws of physics we don’t fully grasp yet, that stop you from advancing to more “God” like levels of power.

[@jennyanydots2389]

You don't buy a fictional movie's plot? That's crazy. Everyone know that the term "fictional movie" means unedited documentary shot in real time based only on objective events!! These guys were totally trying to pull a fast one on us!! Expecting us to "buy" this as reality!! Where do they get off thinking that?

[@jennyanydots2389]

@@joshuacollins9316 According to Elund Munsk and his stans the trajectory is a straight line infinitely shooting upwards... the only limit is money. According to people who don't really have legit science backgrounds of course. (and are financially invested in pushing that narrative for shareholder purposes)

[@Korra228]

I'm not against the ideas from Prometheus and Covenant in a vacuum. What I am against is them being part of the Alien universe.

[@treborkroy5280]

Why? It took nothing away from the Alien. Changed absolutely nothing about the alien. Just expanded on the space jockeys and androids.

[@Korra228]

@treborkroy5280 it made the space jockeys SHIT

[@treborkroy5280]

@Korra228 What did we know in alien about the jockey? It flies a ship. It has cargo that's some weird alien that looks strangely biomechanical instead of natural that also looks similar to the ship itself. And it died after being exposed to the cargo. That's it. Now Prometheus... Engineers, fly ships. Have alien goo in a cargo like manner. And they died after being exposed to that goo. Nothing changed that wasn't already alluded to by context and visual story telling. The space jockey, derelict ship, and the alien itself has the same visual aesthetic design. What has actually changed from that overall?

[@Korra228]

@treborkroy5280 the mystery was ruined. Instead of being a cool creature it's now a lame ass albino humanoid. Boring.

[@rexcassidy]

@@Korra228, I love how people are upset when someone else's creation is not what they want it to be. Then fail to see the potential of the writer's vision and cling to the dead that it would be if it was their way.

[@MrChupacabra555]

Although no one remembers the movie anymore (much less the comic), "The Eternals" was also inspired by 'Chariots of the Gods', which was all the rage back when they were created in the 70s. At least the movie made them multi-ethnicity, instead of mostly blond, white people 😅

[@storyrant]

I don't know much about the Eternals. I kind of checked out of Marvel and most superhero movies a while back. Sounds about right, though. lol

[@Kenspiracy664]

I'm thinking Chariots of the Gods was inspired by all the Ancient Alien fiction, tbh

[@MrChupacabra555]

@@Kenspiracy664 Well, it really was 'Chariots of the Gods?" that came first (it came out in '71), then MANY others followed, with perhaps the most 'famous' of them being Zechariah Sitchen who wrote "The 12th Planet" in '76, and David Icke, who popularized the 'Reptillian Shape Shifter Conspiracy' 😅) I don't believe any of this, to be clear, but it is entertaining (why I watch "The Why Files" here on KZbin 😁)

[@randallbesch2424]

@@MrChupacabra555 there were others written in the 1930's and to 1960's leaned more to science than wild speculation and are forgotten now.

[@edgarplummer6750]

Those films failed because they had a pretentious director who was drunk on his past successes.

[@Fridaey13txhOktober]

.... and just plain drunk! Sad!

[@devonglide1830]

The creation aspects are what bother me most about the prometheus line. In my mind, the zenomorph is the product of evolution, nothing more, nothing less. It's completey different to us (speciation), yet, in some ways relatable as its arrising from the same cosmic soup we essentially arose from. I should add, I"m not that guy that thinks Alien is perfect, some aspects from it bother me, such as the ridiculous growth of the alien. But as a movie, where's there's only 1.5hrs to tell a story, I can put that aside and admire the myriad of things it does well. Prometheus, not so much.

[@SinEater_]

In the another cut they showed that the alien had eaten all of their food reserves which indicates a bit more time and gives it a ton of energy for that rapid growth.

[@treborkroy5280]

I feel the alien is a natural forming creature that had extremely fast genetic reconfiguration properties. They utilized that by creating the "black goo" which they use to essentially "shake the etch n sketch" and cleanse a planetary experiment. Or a form of it to start off life on more barren worlds to begin the experiment. This is what's shown in the begining of Prometheus with the engineer and the waterfall and in Covenant with the canister bombing by David. The murals in the room containing the goo depicted various engineers interacting with weird life forms. And a large wall sculpture showed an alien figure in an almost religious pose. David didn't create the alien. He is simply tinkering with someone else's ingredients in someone else's kitchen.

[@AgentGodzillaRP1701]

My least favorite thing about these prequels is how they retconned the mummified Space Jockey corpse from the original Alien as just a suit the Engineers wear for some reason.😑 I hope they retcon on it so the Engineers simply found some Space Jockey ships and used the mummified corpses of the pilots as suits. The ship from the original Alien being an untouched ship.

[@JeshuaHicksAuthor]

Agreed. It's so dumb! They're was this cool ALIEN thing that once piloted this ship full of eggs. What was it? Why? How? What was it supposed to be doing with them? Was it a lone ship or part of a galactic fleet? The answers will never be satisfactory but a big white alien dude who looks almost human?!

[@didgruntleddansnyderfan]

What is worse is that he was fossilized, A space suit can't fossilize, but even more importantly: fossilization takes at least something like 20 000 years. According to Covenant, David the Paranoid Android created xeonomorphs using maguffin goo seventeen years before the events of alien. Seventeen isn't the same as 20 000. How did the space jockey's suit, which evidently came with ribs installed, as seen in Alien, fossilize in just seveneteen years? Why did David go to LV426 to kill a single space jockey in this way? Was it a clever, time-traveling trap? But how could he know that the Nostromo would pass by seventeen years later? And did David also carve the ancient drawings on hidden, Antarctic pyramids seen in AvP, or draw in the ancient caves in Scotland from Prometheus telling people where he might be found by way of star map? I mean, what gives with this absolute shit?! I could go on for days about all the various ways in which Covenant in particular ruins the Alien IP permanently if you choose to take it seriously. However bad you think Covernant is, you don't think it's bad enough. That is a movie critic axiom of mine since its release. You must think it is at least ten times worse than you currently do to get in the ballpark. It's not just inane like Alien3 or Romulus, or midly harmful like Resurrection or the AvP movies.; it's not even an ominous, pending disaster like Prometheus was: it is a veritable cancer on the IP of dreadful proportions. Whatever anyone has ever liked about the original movie is under dire threat from both Prometheus and Covenant; from competent writing to dialog, practical effects, acting, narrative coherence or mystery. Name a thing you liked about Alien, those two "movies" are trying to kill it.

[@Gloomdrake]

@@didgruntleddansnyderfandoes the AvP stuff count? I thought that was non-canon

[@didgruntleddansnyderfan]

@@Gloomdrake Well yes. It's just that it did less damage to the IP. Sort of like a Christmas special for Alien. The first one was at least moderately interesting in certain ways and not a completely dreadful movie, even if it definitely was a franchise invasion. But it too at least had signs in it of the ancient nature of the xenomorphs, which is more than can be said for Prometheus and Covenant. "Nah, our walking toaster just whipped those up while being stranded in this here cave. so you've been wrong for forty years!" Jees, Ridley, thanks a lot. Don't know what I'd do without you...

[@PvtSchlock]

Ancient aliens and flat earth are two of the things I really hate. Unsavory is just the beginning and this includes dunking on them.

[@everythingisterrible8862]

"Did u kno humans can't moove big rocks???????" Argh... it's so awful. There's a kind of modernist slash white superiority thing going on to think that human beings in the past couldn't figure out how to move rocks around, with their primitive subhuman animal brains. It also takes away from the magic and wonders of actual history. Like, these pharaohs blew the national budget on making doper cribs than the last narcissistic moron that died. Government misappropriation of human labor is timeless, the Nixon administration did a small disservice to humanity with the space shuttle and potentially fatal one when they sheltered research and development into thorium reactors on behest of their buddies who wanted to monetize an energy generation system meant to only be used underwater in submarines.... but nothing really says 'this is a big fuckin' waste of human life' quite like the pyramids do, eh? .... but yeah. Just another narcissistic religion that says we're more special than we are, as if being meat that can think isn't special enough. No respect for the physics, massive distance, and the big fat speck of dust we actually are in the grand scheme of things. Ancient aliens is the diametric opposite to cosmic horror. Ancient aliens makes us into the center of the universe.

[@didgruntleddansnyderfan]

I find flearth very funny myself. Particularly the ice wall that famously borders the earth to the south, what we falsely believe to be Antarctica. Hilarious! That people are stupid I've long since come to terms with, and obvious nonsense upsets me less than other forms of nonsense also posing as "science" more commonly believed.

[@Gloomdrake]

You prolly wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most flat earth channels are run by antisemites

[@alexandervelez9507]

i actually kind of liked the idea that the xenomorphs were somehow linked to humanity because it would explain why so much of their lifecycle and overall aesthetic resemble human sexual organs. we know giger designed them purposely that way. i just hate how ridley went about it. he’s a much better cinematographer than a writer and it shows.

[@storyrant]

Yeah, I mean, as I said in the At the Mountains of Madness vs Prometheus section, the Elder Things are ancient aliens too, but they're fundamentally different. Humanity was an accidental creation. While if I was writing an Alien sequel, I'd never resort to connecting them to humanity's past, there's no reason why you can't have people like Peter Weyland believe they must be even if he turns out to be wrong in the long run. I like when characters are allowed to be wrong about things in-universe.

[@JinKee]

Ridley Scott is great at production design but he can’t write to save himself. He needs a good scriptwriter who can stand up to him and tell him when he’s being dumb.

[@nedmaster1000]

Case and point. Every single person who worked on Blade Runner says Deckard is human except Ridley Scott

[@JinKee]

@ and Rutger Hauer had to write the Tears in Rain speech in his trailer because the shooting script just had placeholder text for roy batty’s death scene.

[@dsbmitchell]

Having just watched Gladiator II a few days ago and finding the set design and costume being the most enjoyable aspect of what was an otherwise mess of a movie, I feel this comment in my soul.

[@wobber17]

Based and true, not holding my breath for Gladiator 2. He's only getting worse with time.

[@tiolloyd9555]

​@@nedmaster1000When even the actor that plays the character thinks that the character is something you clearly didn't want him to be, something went wrong on the production, and you need to reanalize it asap

[@cumulus1869]

12:24 Yes it is true we evolved from an ape ancestor but it is also true that the ancestor of all apes evolved from a monkey ancestor. Clint's reptiles has a good video on the cladistics/phylogeny on that. This is to say humans are still apes AND monkeys. We're just also of the Homo genus as well.

[@TheRenegadeMonk]

Did no one else notice Scott playing into the racism of ancient aliens, with alabaster white, Indo-European speaking superhumans, founding life in a distinctly non African/North European landscape in complete opposition to humanities actual origins.

[@storyrant]

Sounds like some of these people need to watch some Miniminuteman and get educated on what "Hyper Diffusion" is.

[@ligh7ningx7]

"Doesn't anybody notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!"

[@storyrant]

Sometimes. Sometimes.

[@yurifairy2969]

Way way WAY too much straight up reading lovecraft in this video, honestly feels like padding. I came here to hear your takes on Alien, not listen to a lovecraft audiobook.

[@zogwort1522]

You're taking this from the wrong angle. The thing that must be understood about the Mythos is that it's a dark subversion of New Age ideas, the very same ideas that inspired Chariots of the Gods and are explicitly referenced all over Lovecraft's stories (ideas like telepathy, ancient aliens, reincarnation, cyclical history, racial memory, hypnosis, religious occultism and apophatic theology). But more importantly, those ideas are referenced in a 1960s Italian film called *Planet of the Vampires* which inspired both Alien and Prometheus, specifically everything that has to do with the Space Jockey/Engineers. We all know O'Bannon and Giger liked Lovecraft but I think Alien owes more to Planet of the Vampires than it does to any of Lovecraft's stories. The main difference being that Lovecraft chose to make his aliens very inhuman, whereas those in the 60s film are very, very humanlike, as is normally the case in New Age religions. And as much as we like to think of the Alien as a lovecraftian creature, it really isn't. Scott and Giger went out of their way to make it way more humanlike than was originally planned (and at some point it was even gonna be able to speak) but even the original buglike sketches by Dan O'Bannon made it clear that it's supposed to be a *vampire* first and foremost. It's a gothic monster. It really isn't that alien. It's an undead-looking imitation of Kane (get it? Cain?) that still contains his skeleton and is still attracted to Lambert like how The Mummy (and Dracula in later adaptations) is attracted to the reincarnation of his lover. Most of Alien's horror tropes don't come from Lovecraftian fiction they come from gothic horror (which Lovecraft also drew from) and landfill monster fiction. I don't think Alien was ever meant to be cosmic horror. There's no great mystery to uncover, the monster's existence doesn't have horrific worldbuilding implications, the characters aren't primarily motivated by curiosity and they defeat the threat through mundane means with no final hint of impending doom for humanity. Its atmosphere is reminiscent of At the Mountains of Madness but that's superficial, just like how The Call of Cthulhu is reminiscent of mummy horror because Lovecraft had already written Entombed with the Pharaohs and thus knew how to describe undead monsters rising from their grave in ancient temples. But it's not a story about Egypt, and Alien isn't a story about forbidden knowledge dooming humanity. It's a story about greedy people unknowingly bringing a vampire back home, like Dracula. On that topic it's worth remembering that modern vampire fiction (Dracula onwards) is often fueled by comparative mythology's speculations about early Christian rituals, which is also what eventually led to New Age syncretism and that's precisely why Prometheus was given that title, along with Space Jesus and the mural of Space Gaia. Prometheus isn't just an attempt to shoehorn Ancient Aliens into Alien, it's an attempt to use comparative mythology to flesh out their space vampire lore in the same way a lot of vampire fiction does. It utterly fails at that, but that's besides the point. When you keep all of that in mind, it's easy to understand why Ridley Scott ended up making the Space Jockeys even more humanlike. In fact you could say Alien took ideas from Planet of the Vampires but made a deliberate effort to remove what it had in common with stories like The Shadow out of Time, in favor of just giving us a freaky space vampire (which the 60s film doesn't really do) whereas Prometheus goes out of its way to introduce those ideas back into the universe of Alien. It's not that Prometheus fails to live up to At the Mountains of Madness or whatever. It's that Ridley Scott was always (even back in the 70s) more interested in the 60s italo-schlock approach to gothic horror + New Age mythology than he was interested in why Lovecraft used those elements in his own fiction. That being said Prometheus is still a stupid movie.

[@berserkasaurusrex4233]

Your comment is better thought out than the video, which seems as much made to whine about clickbait History Channel shows and Art Bell (for some reason) as to explore the stated topic.

[@zogwort1522]

@@berserkasaurusrex4233 I know it is. I don't get my ideas about scifi from reddit. Coast to Coast and Ancient Aliens made New Age mythology more popular among millenials but they've been circulating in pop culture for well over a century, Ridley Scott wasn't even aware that Alien vs Predator already did the ancient aliens gimmick, to him it was just a natural fit for the Alien franchise. By the way I'd like to see Storyrant address the fact that Cthulhu is explicitly described as humanoid. Or read The Mound where Lovecraft suggests that humans are originally aliens brought to Earth by the Old Ones. Maybe that'll recalibrate his conception of cosmic horror a little bit.

[@randallbesch2424]

@@zogwort1522 not all humans just the ones who are not in fact human they are humanoids from the Kutullû and 3 million years older than humanity.

[@zogwort1522]

@@randallbesch2424 They're explicitly "the original stock" that populated the entire earth, some went underground in K'n-yan while the rest stayed on the surface, there's no reference to another source of human life in that story.

[@berserkasaurusrex4233]

@@zogwort1522 God, I haven't read the Mound in ages. Freaky, from what I recall, probably inspired by some of the old Hopi myths. I think HorrorBabble did a reading of it years ago, I should probably listen to it at work tomorrow.

[@RydarkVoyager]

00:40:31 - Ah yes, the origin of Cinema Sin's cosmic refrain: "The Prometheus School of Running Away From Things." Why is it so damn popular? This trope has appeared elsewhere.

[@bestbytes-x3v]

Thanks to scott, we have alien, and thanks to scott, the alien franchise dies.

[@storyrant]

Oof.

[@frankthetank8050]

This is the eternal tragedy of life. It’s the same with women

[@Blizofoz45]

Prometheus took a left turn because unlike dumb Alien fans, Scott wanted to bring back the element of surprise. If a character sticks their face up to an Alien egg, you already know what's coming. Facehugger to face, agonizing chestburster scene, sleek black HR Gieger alien serial killer, airlock vacuum, etc. Scott wanted to surprise people and repeating the Alien life cycle all over again would not be surprising at all.

[@majorcoats7777]

​@@Blizofoz45the purist fans want more xenomorph slasher predictability for another 50 years.

[@Gloomdrake]

@@Blizofoz45which part is the surprise? Was it worth it?

[@Noname-w7f1e]

The real reason why those are bad movies is that the authors tried to explain things that didn’t need explanation! Horrors are based on the unknown. As soon as you explain the unknown - they stop being horrors and become action flicks! And considering the action in horrors is usually second rate and is not actually the focus of the movie - as soon as a horror movie turns into an action movie it starts to go down the gutter…

[@Orlando_from_The_Bronx]

ALIEN has remained my favorite film since its release in 1979 (I was 17) and I have mixed feelings about Prometheus BUT... go back and watch the scene where Vickers and Shaw run in the rolling path of the juggernaut. Notice that there are massive chunks of Prometheus, of the size that can instantly kill them, raining down on each side of the juggernaut. Running in the rolling path of the engineer ship until it stopped was the right move. Other than that, this is a solid video.

[@storyrant]

Yeah, I probably didn't notice. lol My wife also points this out when we've watched the film. Thanks for watching!

[@treborkroy5280]

It's like "Do I run in the lane with the semi truck coming at me from a distance or run in the lane with constant traffic going by" This argument has been dumb since the beginning. The entire landscape is exposing with debris. The only place it isn't is where they are running with a mountain slowly falling down on them.

[@Orlando_from_The_Bronx]

@@treborkroy5280 Do you seriously think that Scott and no one on the FX team or everyone who wrote the script or did the story boards didn't think of this? The falling debris on either side of the juggernaut was a deliberate choice by the producers. You can argue that the whole situation of them running for the sake of tension was stupid, but the falling debris exists in the first place (as the filmmakers' choice) to keep them from running to the side. All of that shit had to be rendered: the debris, the impact and fires, the dust and soil tossed up etc... That equals money and time. Also, a semi has an engine propelling it forward, the juggernaut's roll was not powered and on top of that, it has a horseshoe-like open end, it doesn't come close to being a perfect wheel. It was not going to roll very far.

[@treborkroy5280]

@@Orlando_from_The_Bronx I'm saying them running isn't a problem for me because where would they run to? The falling debris? They just kept moving and would die regardless of was just die right away or die once the jigger air lands. Shaw survived just for plot reasons she would likely be dead as well. I'm not arguing against you.

[@jennyanydots2389]

Yeah right dude... no one watching a giant space ship about to crush them is paying attention to anything other than what's about to crush them. It's not realistic... not because we "missed" the real reasons but because it's bad writing and really just a plot device to kill off one of the characters. A non stupid and more realistic way to kill of Vickers would've been easy if the writers had any self awareness.

[@GiubileiFernando]

The premise of At the Mountains of Madness is very similar to that of Devilman. In that story they find demons frozen in a cave in, I think, the Himalayas. and it's revealed that demons used to be the dominant species on Earth until they were wiped out by angels. Except demons and angels are just two factions of precursor aliens, basically.

[@Ettrick8]

Basically the storylines of both movies were rubbish. All the characters were irritating and unlikable. So many plot holes the films were like colanders.

[@storyrant]

God Shaw and what's-his-face were so annoying.

[@treborkroy5280]

What plot holes?

[@EAster33]

I love Prometheus, the only issue I had with it was none of us scientists were sent on an interstellar mission or trained on simple contamination controls,,, the only time that anyone made any sense is when they set the dude on fire with the flamethrower, and even then he begged for it

[@finalascent]

I always felt they sucked because of an important structural plot element: Alien and Aliens derive a LOT of their shock and suspense from the idea that we haven't encountered anything similar to this species. The "prequels" introduced a clunky and unnecessary backstory in which both our history and destiny are now sort of interwoven with these things AND the Engineers. Without them, Alien and Aliens do something far more powerful on their own - up until then, humans have spread throughout, exploited and settled a decent sized corner of our Galaxy with apparently little more than the prosaic challenges of space impeding our progress. And now we discover a terrifying threat and an ancient race whose technology at least equaled our own - now the story of Mankind is on a completely different trajectory than before the Nostromo was dispatched.

[@matthewsylvester9103]

I enjoyed watching Prometheus, but mostly because I liked the scifi stuff. Was it a good alien movie, no not really. Did I still enjoy watching it, yes.

[@storyrant]

And that's fine. Not saying you can't enjoy it. :) It's incredibly well shot and has some strong sequences, but I find it really frustrating otherwise, because I see a lot of wasted potential.

[@bobjordan69]

Ridley Scott, like JJ Abrams, is a skilled director who should just stay the fuck away from the writers room

[@Andyiswatching]

I think both are great, but the people want jump scares from a black suited guy. Don't get me wrong I love alien movies all my life but I love the psychological horror of the unknown and religious take from Prometheus.

[@markpaterson2053]

David Lynch got better with age; weird how that doesn't seem to work for other movie legends

[@QuintiniusVerginix]

Ridley Scott has always been a very hit-or-miss director though. He didn't get better or worse with time, his output stayed very consistent, which means that for every absolute banger, there are at least two stinkers. His most consistently good period was arguably his first three films (The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner), after that it seems that every really good Ridley Scott movie is followed by two or three mediocre ones. For example, after Blade Runner he did Legend (mediocre), Someone Watch Over Me (mediocre) & Black Rain (mediocre), then he did Thelma & Louise (masterpiece, instant classic) only to follow that up with 1492: Conquest of Paradise (awesome theme song, terrible movie), White Squall (mediocre) and G.I. Jane (bad movie), followed by Gladiator (awesome), rinse and repeat.

[@markpaterson2053]

@@QuintiniusVerginix you hit the nail on the head

[@inkpenavengerYT]

I always love how many non-occultists in Lovecraft stories are so well-versed in the Necronomicon. Lol. I mean, yeah, if I'd gone to a college that had a book like that in it's collection, I'd probably have wanted to give it a look, too, if i could. I also love how AtMoM suggests that Earth-life arose from stray bits of shoggoth that sloughed off in the ocean. The implication is that WE are descended FROM shoggoths.

[@CitiesTurnedToDust]

I thought Prometheus and Alien:Covenant suck so bad because the director mistook the actors for wooden mannequins and also he was heavily drunk and high on bath salts and had fallen down several flights of stairs, bumping his head on every one. And for some reason no one questioned why a badly brain-damaged idiot was directing movies. They figured he'd done good work before and would pull through somehow?

[@DistortedSmiles]

organisms don't adapt to their environment as much as the ones capable of surviving might thrive and the ones incapable die... natural selection.

[@rogercroft3218]

The species adapts; the individual organism either lives or dies in that environment.

[@walkerineternity2334]

This has probably been said many times, but the space jockey in Alien was centuries or millenia old. There is no way that David could have created the Xenomorphs a few decades prior to the original film.

[@Moshingpenguins]

Question. How is annihilation not comic horror?? I can see alien beeing cosmic horror but the claim that annihilation isnt, is a little confusing to me

[@storyrant]

Because the aliens and the story as a whole serve as a metaphor for cycles of self-destructive tendencies in the lives of the main character. Thematically it has little to do with cosmic horror.

[@QuintiniusVerginix]

@@storyrant I think this is a pretty weak argument for it not being cosmic horror. Horror is pretty much always seeped in metaphor and Lovecraft's work is no different. A lot of Lovecraft's work consists of explicit metaphors for different fears he had in the society he lived in (of which a not insignificant part is just racism). Other writers have written cosmic horror stories that handle different metaphors, but that doesn't make their stories not cosmic horror. Annihilation is pretty hardcore cosmic horror and tbh, one of the best representations of the genre in film as it perfectly encapsulates the kind of fear of the unknown (and the kind of weird ethereal entity) that Lovecraft & co. described in their stories. Trying to claim it's not actually cosmic horror because it doesn't share the exact themes of Lovecraft is like trying to claim that, for example, The Slumber Party Massacre isn't a slasher film because a drill isn't a slashing weapon.

[@SergeiKraven]

The Space Jockey was ruined, it was an alien lifeform, a very unsettling creature who was probably the last of their ancient civilization. Most likely traveling through space coming from a planet that infested its society, and was the last of its kind to use weapons of mass destruction in order to decimate the infestation, the pilot was probably relocating the remaining specimens to an isolated area of another planet, so they won't cause another infestation on other inhabited planets, but one of the eggs breached from containment, and the pilot launched a distress signal warning others of a hostile organism, to stay away.

[@treborkroy5280]

My problem with that idea is the alien always looked biomechanical. Unnatural. Engineered essentially. The rest of the juggernauts design matches the aesthetic of the alien itself. The engineer in the seat while yes different than the alien was also similarly designed. I'm trying to say they always seemed interconnected. The engineers used these aliens like a human mechanic would use tools. Or weapons. They seemed like bio weaponry and in Prometheus it's what they're showing. A larger scale containment breach scenario that alien gave us.

[@SergeiKraven]

@treborkroy5280 It has an erupted ribcage, didn't you notice the bones are bent backwards, due to the chest burster? It's not just biomechanical, it is an organic lifeform that became a victim of the Xenomorph specimens due to their predatorial nature of detecting a potential host in order to accommodate an embryo. The black Pathogen narrative, you were told was just an excuse, because Ridley Scott couldn't find a formal narrative logic to explain the mysterious creature that has a Symbiotic relationship for the derelict. Even the derelict itself is an organism, as the Nostromo crew was walking through the corridor, the walls appeared to be organic, with a combination of living tissues through the hall.

[@treborkroy5280]

@SergeiKraven biomechanical is still bio, everything in ALIEN from the ship to the jockey to the alien design looks biomechanical. Similar. okay so the ribcage was bent. It also wasn't "fossilized" because that's not how fossilization occurs. Biomech stuff can very likely deteriorate like biological matter does.

[@SergeiKraven]

@@treborkroy5280 Agree to disagree on this discussion, because Lambert made the assertion that the Space Jockey. Dallas says that the body of the Space Jockey appears to have been dead a LONG time and was fossilized, it made me realize, this implication was what Ridley Scott mentioned in the Alien commentary. This is why I no longer believe the Engineers are the Space Jockeys, I just HUMBLY disagree. The creature we finally ended up building is biomechanical, to the extent that it has physically grown into, or even out of, its seat, it is integrated totally into the function it performs, the entire biology of the creature is that is has a biomechanical suit that's completely organic, genetically fused to its physiology. Just because you disagree on the fossilized conclusion doesn't mean Dallas is wrong.

[@SergeiKraven]

@@treborkroy5280 Also, Ridley Scott is now brainstorming of another race that are superior than the engineers. There's a reason why Prometheus didn't succeed, sure it's a nice film but I'm split on it 50/50.

[@cbecht]

@24:34 "probable latitude 76° 16 ft" In the context of latitude and longitude, that symbol indicates "minutes" not "feet". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degree_(angle)#Subdivisions

[@storyrant]

Yeah, I was supposed to re-record that bit, but it slipped my mind with everything going on last week. I didn't remember until the video went live. I'll fix it in the super cut of all the videos in the series, whenever that comes out.

[@jamesstaggs4160]

That was a subtle and clever reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[@briandain8432]

Speaking of Dan O'Bannon I didn't realize he Directed LIFEFORCE until I was seeing it for the first time in nearly 40 years on TUBI.

[@storyrant]

It's been on my list for a while, which doesn't say much, because I have so many things on my watch list and to-be-read.

[@briandain8432]

@storyrant It's weird cuz they put so much into the beginning and typical Dykstra Gore, but filmed in Britain, so although supposed to be 1985 looks more like 1975. But gotta love completely naked hot alien chicks.

[@solitaryswordsman]

Tobe hooper directed lifeforce?

[@haroldstrickland6126]

I don't really feel that Alien or Ridley Scott were terribly informed by Lovecraftian cosmic horror. You can point out similarities, but you can just as easily point out things that disprove the premise. It's still an interesting idea to consider, but I feel John Campbell's "Who Goes There" and the Carpenter movie adaptation come way closer to Lovecraft (and Mountains of Madness in particular) than Alien. But talking about Scott, I remember him doing a director commentary on some enhanced DVD edition of Alien back in the early 2000s, where he basically laid out the idea for Prometheus. He talked about it being an idea stuck in his head since the first Alien, and it was very clearly Prometheus years before Prometheus was even announced. It was not a Lovecraftian concept. It wasn't even horror-themed. It sounded more like the Star Trek TNG episode, "The Chase." I think he just wanted to explore the origin of man through the lens of one of man's creations, David. And I agree with you that the reflex to "tie it all together" is something that tanks a lot of movies and TV shows and other stories. And that's a problem with Prometheus, to be sure. Mainly because it feels half-hearted and reluctant on Scott's part. It's like he doesn't really want to have the Xeno be a part of his origin of man story, but knows that's what audiences are gonna care about. I think the reason the horror feels so incompetent is that it's tacked on reluctantly. He doesn't seem to want this to be a horror movie. He's only throwing horror conventions and tropes like Scooby Snacks at the audience to get them to sit still long enough for him to work through his lust for Michael Fassbender. Listen to the music score and its hopeful motifs. This isn't a horror score. It's so incongruous with the horror elements of the movie. Covenant is even wore because the reaction to Prometheus made it manifestly clear to Scott that nobody really cared about his space god progenitor story idea. They wanted facehugging and chestbursting, and maybe a scene where the female protagonist is in her underwear because of space-reasons. So the horror is almost like a passive-aggressive response. Of course they take their helmets off. Of course they go exactly where they shouldn't go. Of course there is a shower scene. It's like he's resentful at having to add the horror, Alien components to his android love affair space project. It's not coherent enough for there to be Lovecraftian, cosmic horror themes, because he doesn't really want these movies to be horror in the first place. It's half-hearted and haphazard.

[@SpacePig-u3m]

Promethious, Alien Covenant and Alien Romulus are all absolutely dreadful. The mystique of the Alien and Space Jockey are what gave them their potency, fear of the unknown. Scott made it all about man's fictitious god 🙄 with some ponce fingering it's doppelganger's flute.

[@user-jd4wm3mi8l]

Yeah but the mystique was already pretty lost when Cameron changed Aliens into space ants.

[@SpacePig-u3m]

@user-jd4wm3mi8l Ain't that the truth. 👍

[@mrdavman13]

Romulus was good. You just sound like a hater fr

[@SpacePig-u3m]

@@mrdavman13 I was exited and ready to like Romulus but it went off the rails very quickly and the links to Promethious drove it over the edge of a cliff. I didn't like that "get away from her you bitch!" line in Aliens but in Romulus it is embarrassingly bad as is the REC inspired engineer hybrid mong thing at the end. It could've been a decent flick but Scott ruined it with his input. Any link to Promethious whatsoever and I'm out.

[@alexandresobreiramartins9461]

@@mrdavman13 Not really, you sound like one of those who shut their brians to watch the pew pew pew.

[@lustrazor44]

The original felt like a true cosmic terror. What in the ever living fuck exists out there? Why is it THIS thing? Then Cameron made them oversized ants Then Scott made them….well not scary and giant inflated white aliens made us…. Yea it’s so dumb. The best alien media we’ve gotten in a long time is ALIEN The Coldforge. It tries to fix the black goo shit Ridley introduced. Which is what appears in Romulus. The black goo is actually what the face huggers are injecting into their victims bodies. The goo metastasizes the surrounding tissue making a tumour which forms the embryo and xenomorph.

[@storyrant]

Is that a book? Should I add that to my TBR?

[@lustrazor44]

@@storyrantyea it’s a book by Alex White. it’s where the scientific terms in Romulus are from. the name of the goo plagiarus priepotens comes from that book. the facehuggers name in latin means evil hand in the book. they also have a name for the aliens because xenomorph just means a creature with no actual claude classification so the scientists give them nicknames. The human villain is also a legit psychopath in the purest medical term of the word. the audiobook is also excellent. it takes place on a station studying the aliens but successfully. it’s an insight into if WeYu was mostly successful. it also makes references to isolation and the xenos are a bit…different being bred in captivity. the protagonist is a woman who has a degenerative disease who is a lead scientist and she gets around in a unique way. it also has a sequel called into charybdis. cold forge is more like alien and the sequel like Aliens. both excellent. they also explore androids in a new way. probably the 2 best books.

[@treborkroy5280]

Covenant has the most brutal death scenes, most intense sound track of all the films along with the most badass movie poster. Cherry on top is the darkest ending to an alien film to date. A psychopathic android with a ship full of thousands of sleeping humans to be experimented on like lab rats at his leisure. Insane.

[@lustrazor44]

@@treborkroy5280and yet it’s a terrible movie

[@treborkroy5280]

@@lustrazor44 Then dont watch it. Is there some masochistic element to watching videos about things you dislike instead of the ones you do enjoy? I don't spend my time on things I don't like. So videos like this almost seem like a jilted lover being unnecessarily vile. Like it's personal.

[@man.actual]

Halo did it right before Halo 4 retconned it to be actual aliens instead of hyper advanced ancient humans which is super cool.

[@FlyingCircles]

Agreed. Halo CE clearly set it up that way, but Halo 4 just HAD to explore Forerunner lore in a whole different way and it just got sloppy (and unnecessary). Word on the street is that Halo may be un-retconning that. Forerunners might be ancient human again going forward. In any case, leave a mystery alone. As soon as it's no longer a mystery it's no longer interesting. It's a TALL order trying to complete with someone's own imagination once you've already engaged it.

[@man.actual]

@ they had done the forerunners in the novels and had got it right but then 4 did ancient aliens

[@danletko]

Yes! I can't believe 343 decided to retcon that, when Guilty Spark literally tells Chief "You are Forerunner," and it was a huge plot point that only humans can activate the Rings...because the Forerunners were humans, thus making the entire war hugely ironic. It completely ruins the story to have Forerunners just be some other alien race.

[@The_Wonders_of_Engineering]

Think you dramatically misread prometheus. The crew looks for the engineers, their god, to find answers and meaning yet only get an empty world and no answers. Wetland directly asks the last engineer for immortality because he believes he is special but is rejected. While it's a still a departure from the vast horrific unknown of alien, I don't believe it's a betrayed of the themes of the franchise. The whole point is humans are not actually special as much as we want to be. Wetland believed he was God for creating david, yet David far surpassed weyland I'm every way

[@ezioauditore1300]

Something else that inspired Prometheus is the first AvP movie. Ridley straight up copied it scene by scene and made it about his own little universe of Alien (which he said isnt connected to ANY other movie of Alien, besides the first one) thats my problem with Prometheus. The movie is actually pretty nice. Its just done by an absolute arrogant person who has zero respect for others

[@iNDY1001]

I thought it was a commentary on the state of geek culture in 2012 and how they revered the Alien franchise mythos to a religious level. The crew of the Prometheus were a stand in for the really wealthy fans who kept badgering the stand in for the authors of the original films for more. Then the end of the film was them capitulating with the Deacon...a messenger letting the fans know a sequel was coming from the dying body of the stand in for the original authors. Then Alien covenant had the androids office scattered with all the same research the original creature designers used back the 1970's to design the life cycle of the starbeast in the original film.

[@storyrant]

I mean, I could see why you would think that. But, unfortunately, from what I have read, Scott was just all in on ancient astronauts. The rest of that is just lackluster writing chops. :/ We see a clear difference when Scott helms a film like The Martian, where he has no control over the story, and the Alien prequels. He's a fantastic director, but absolutely should not be in charge of the writing of scripts or worldbuilding.

[@iNDY1001]

@@storyrant Well that's the thing, I love the Alien series, but the best one in recent memory is a series Raised By Wolves (2020), an homage and remixing the ideas the original film series with its own very unique identity. That was a show supported by Ridley Scott and I'm miffed that it only got two seasons. It had such an intricate deep lore to the show and looked at the world from the point of view of the androids and this insane post-apocalyptic energy of actually surviving when you have to rebuild right from that start with almost nothing. Not to mention it had the most 2020 intro sequence and score that set a perfect tone.

[@SupremeGreatGrandmaster]

"a commentary on the state of geek culture in 2012" Nobody is buying tickets to that.

[@stevenoconnor3256]

Alien was a simple movie based mostly on 1950s scifi horror films and that's way it works.The whole plot is from It from beyond space and it's not the only film it takes from. Keeping things mostly unknown was a good thing. Hanted house in space type story done really well is the appeal. Comic horror is an element but a small element of the whole.

[@NUCLEARDASH]

Puttinc COSMIC horror lile an Small element is hilarious

[@stevenoconnor3256]

@@NUCLEARDASH At the end of the day a big bug/man/dick on a ship killing people in suspenseful ways is the main drive of the horror. The thing, invasion of the body snatchers, and the fly are far more existential. One, in the future aliens are the norm and expected. Two , if it was set in the present it would be more existential as no one has proven life exists outside of earth and religion is common. Aliens in a sci-fi setting are the norm and I doubt religion would even be common in the future. Even Forbidden planet does a better job of tying the monster to the psychology of its characters. Halloween does too.The characters in Alien are simple and so is the plot.

[@akapotatobrad]

Subscribed for the dunk on Reddit 6 minutes in. A whirlpooling vortex of wrongness. A place where you will consistently find the wrongest people to ever be wrong, across multiple interests, perpetually.

[@NathanHearn-ms7vv]

Prometheus is awful. Warhammer 40K blatantly rips off the Alien franchise with its Tyranid ‘characters’ and actually does them better. The Tyranids origin is unknown but its believed they’v arrived in the Milky Way from different galaxies - implying they’re infesting multiple galaxies and spreading like a plague. It makes them a truly terrifying cosmic horror, not a dumb science experiment by pseudo-god-like dip$#!t aliens who also made humans. The Tyranids are as intelligent as they need to be to spread across space without any apparent self awareness or interest in higher intelligence. They are indifferent to anything but survival, in the true spirit of HPL.

[@storyrant]

That's pretty much what the Xenos should have been, with a touch of Dan O'Bannon's original idea to make them related to Yog Sothoth.

[@EllisFlowers]

If Prometheus was its own movie I would have enjoyed it a lot more but it being tied into Alien makes it seem so pretentious and self-centered, remove all the Alien lore/universe and make an ancient aliens film and let Alien remain as a primal/unknown horror in it's own franchise

[@garethmartin6522]

This "cosmic horror" stuff seems like nonsense to me. The alien is not unknowable, it is easily recognisable as a predator. If there is any horror going on, it is the ancient fear of being eaten, not the vastness of space and time. And furthermore, seeing as the piece makes no effort to explain the alien to the audience, it just comes across as an obvious plot contrivance - the "perfect organism" just as unkillable as the villain in a slasher flick. I should say that I am perhaps not the right audience for this argument, because I have never found cosmic horror interesting. It baffles me that the reaction to discovery of some primeval city would be horror, rather than excitement. Anyway, I still don't feel like I understand these movies better, or why they suck. Even if it's true that they try to do cosmic horror and fail, that still doesn't explain why they exist or what they were trying to say. I don't feel they suffered from over-explaining the aliens as such, because by the fourth movie some explanation was long overdue. But the answer seems to be that David made them out of sheer pomposity. Who cares, why is that a story worth telling? In fact it makes the whole "engineers" arc superfluous. The whole dorm roomer stoner plot of "like, man, imagine if we met aliens and they were pissed that we killed Jesus" seems to be completely disconnected from all this. David could just have easily found some alien McGuffin with none of this baggage.

[@megavide0]

Really... The breach in style and overall narrative depth and atmosphere is baffling. It's about as baffling as the evident breach in style and class between the timeless original Star Wars Trilogy and the goofy Prequel films -- both from George Lucas...(Lucas even pooped his original films with incredibly stupid Special Edition inserts like "Jedi Rocks".) It's as if genius expires at some point... Maybe (too much) success is a poison?

[@VojtaNesvadba]

Okay so I have some criticism and not just sharing opinions on the movies: I appreciate the effort put into this video, but half (in best a third) was about everything but Alien for which I have clicked on the video in the first place. Some might find it inspiring and helpful and interesting, nothing against it, just saying how I personally feel it.

[@Senban9]

A shoggoth is for strange eons, not just for the when the stars are right. -The Necronomicon

[@PhillipJermakian]

My acute MK Ultra mind control torture started around 2009. Aliens is one of my favorite franchises. They were telling me I was King David in a past life with the mind control demon torture. And that I would see these movies was pretty much a given so my guess is they rushed it to torture me. Since I was wondering why the FBI, CIA, freemason types and media and demons showed up to torture me and I was very much under their mind fuck control at the time these movies gave a plausible reason. "Yup you were King David and you unleashed Aliens on the engineers and that is why we torture you". Of course after years of mind control torture when they also made me out to be Anikin Skywalker, Phillip J Fry a few other things so I slowly put 2 and 2 together that I couldn't be all of those things... at least I hope anyhow. That is just my theory about the movie I could be wrong. Hopefully the world won't be this mad much longer. I should say I am not so sure that anybody consciously considers to write these things, maybe it's just "psst write that" and the writer just thinks they have great ideas who knows.

[@deadmeat8754]

Ridley Scott just doesn't care, because his goal is to remake Alien in his own image. He was given the opportunity to retcon O'Bannon and Cameron when Brandywine and Fox got desperate enough to give him carte blanche.

[@DeltaFoxtrotZulu]

Have you ever run across the Alien: Engineers script(pre Lindelöf)? I've got a copy of it somewhere. It is better than the Prometheus film we got and fixes quite a few of the issues with it, but not all of them.

[@storyrant]

I have not, I'd be interested to see what the differences are.

[@SomasAcademy]

~12:25 Yes we're apes, but as apes, we're also monkeys. Cladistics, bay-beeeeeee! The actual answer to "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" is "if greyhounds were bred from dogs, how are there still dogs?" Or, if you want to give a clearer explanation instead of a quip, "we're just one type of monkey, we share a common ancestor with living monkeys, but we evolved to fill a different niche while other monkeys stayed in a similar niche, hence why they look more like our common ancestors than we do."

[@storyrant]

Excellent point. If the video weren't already over an hour long, I could have gone into more detail.

[@SomasAcademy]

​@@storyrant I shall wait with bated breath for your 4 hour long magnum opus ;P

[@storyrant]

@@SomasAcademy I think my editor would murder me. lmfao

[@randallbesch2424]

Apes not monkeys though occasionally a muggle is born with a tail. Dogs are eugenically bred from wolves or foxes.

[@SomasAcademy]

@@randallbesch2424 Apes are monkeys according to cladistics; our ancestors were monkeys, and it is not possible to evolve out of a clade, regardless of what changes take place. Not all monkeys are apes, but all apes are monkeys; lacking a tail is a defining characteristic of apes, but HAVING a tail is not a defining characteristic of monkeys. Dogs are authentically bred from wolves, not foxes. Animals domesticated from foxes are not properly called dogs, though they have been mistaken for them before. Foxes are in a different genus to dogs and wolves. I used the examples of greyhounds being bred from dogs because a creationist would not necessarily believe that dogs were domesticated from wolves, and there were breeds of dog before greyhounds; greyhounds were not selectively bred directly from wolves, but from the domestic dog population that has existed since the Neolithic or earlier.

[@udopadrik9971]

I'd argue Prometheus is probably the most "cosmic horror" movie in the Alien series beside the very first one, perhaps even more so than that one. In Aliens, Cameron was making an action movie and his movie is probably the furthest of cosmic horror in the series,, Fincher was probably closer to cosmic horror with his entry than Cameron, but it felt nowhere as central to the story, and well, Jeunet didn't seem to be interested in that aspect very much either. In comparison to them, Ridley Scott's Prometheus quite literally is about how there are ancient gods in the universe who are uncaring about humans' existence or downright hostile to us and to whom we might seem like ants. No other director in the series has placed the question of humans' position in our universe as much into question as Ridley Scott, and arguably he did that more in Prometheus than in the original Alien. Yes, that doesn't necessarily make it a better movie than the original but certainly a movie closest to the central ideas of the original compared to other sequels. Yes, Cameron's movie was sort of a masterpiece in action sci-fi genre, but regarding asking similar questions to what the original Alien movie asked, it's a lesser movie compared to Prometheus.

[@exterminans]

Why were those big albino aliens speaking reconstructed proto-indo-european?

[@slang1517]

Racism?

[@YnseSchaap]

Why is it so hard to make a good Lovecraft movie when we have a complete storyboard here

[@storyrant]

Hollywood is too scared to throw money at the genre, unfortunately. The best we can do is independent projects like The Void.

[@TomTriyingtothink]

I feel like we could just tell them its a marvel comic. Them they would give us plenty of money ​@@storyrant

[@storyrant]

Haha, I mean, most producers in Hollywood don't really read comics anyway, so that could have a small chance of working.

[@xxCrapNamexx]

2012: Prometheus schitzo posted about aliens and ai. 2024 Politicians are schitzo posting about aliens and ai.

[@Grogeous_Maximus]

I saw the old video and liked it. Will definitely not say no to a deeper dive with my morning coffee 👽☕ subbed

[@storyrant]

Welcome aboard!

[@pcnoad]

I want to add one thing to the 'making the universe smaller' argument. Out of all the extraterrestrial species that have ever been depicted in all of fiction, this one has the distinction of being called 'alien' (amongst other things). For this species to have an explanation, and for that explanation to be that it is even remotely related to us is completely antithetical to not only the original film's theme, but also it's very title. I mean at this point you could argue the Yautja is more alien than the xenomorph.

[@karpai5427]

What does this comic about Northrend have to do with Ripley Scott and his films? Was it an ad? How should I mark it in Sponsor Block?

[@Fenris77]

So basically Scott used the same general idea as the makers of "Vattlefield Earth"........!!!!!!!!!!!!!????????????!!!!!!!!!!! Now I KNOW why it failed! Both movies are entertaining but not something I would put on my movie shelf...

[@sleepyproduction7166]

I’m a simple person, I can suspend any amount of disbelief and just sit down and enjoy almost anything. So I watch any critique of anything to see what people really look for.

[@deathsyth8888]

Came here for the Ancient Alien tropes.

[@ELEKTROSKANSEN]

I want to congratulate you for getting a bunch of smart people together. The comment section under this video is full of smart people and I enjoued reading all the discussions that ended up here. Good job, man!

[@storyrant]

I will always encourage civil discourse, especially when it comes to media. I'll never attack someone for liking a movie or book I dislike. Opinions are, after all, like assholes.

[@TheProblem2025]

This is why the Presger in the Ancillary series of books work. Aliens who fundamentally don’t understand or rate human life is absolutely terrifying on its own.

[@jameshose5043]

awesome video, good production ! you got me to read at the mtns of madness before continuing with the video - it was great - you’re so right about the ill advised alien sequels - and the ultimate irony of it ruining the chances of cosmic horror being done right by del toro - one correction: latitude & longitude is measured in degrees and minutes (‘) - the symbol that usually means “feet” in this case denotes “minutes” - also, plural of octopus: octopuses

[@storyrant]

Glad you enjoyed it! I was supposed to rerecord that line before the video wrnt live but got swamped with work and totally forgot. It'll lioely be fixed for the Patreon and super-cut version.

[@nihilicstream5943]

Could someone please provide a time stamp to the promised "constructive critic"? I've made it through 20 minutes of absolute sh*t loads of talking people and ideas down and it is really exhausting to watch this level of arrogance. If anyone made it past that, let me please know if there is any actual point made, other than talk sh*t about "stuff I like that you don't get"

[@storyrant]

Me: Points out obvious lack of research in a film's premise when compared to an earlier film in the series. Them: HOW DARE YOU!

[@nihilicstream5943]

@storyrant I love the fact you took the time to answer. Keep up the work!

[@storyrant]

I love that you took the comment in stride. :)

[@nihilicstream5943]

@@storyrant still waiting for that time stamp though :P

[@mrfawkes9110]

Ridley Scott no longer has anyone to reign in his worse excesses, I'm willing to bet that's why he's only put out 5 good projects in the last 20 years (out of more than 110). He's absolutely lost his ability.

[@storyrant]

It's Georgle Lucas with the Prequels all over again, it sounds like. I just heard from an author friend (who loves Prometheus) that Scott admitted to being asleep at the wheel while making Prometheus and that really blows if it's true.

[@hamshankscps1049]

Is anyone else noticing an issue with the audio not syncing to the video, or is it on my end?

[@storyrant]

You're the first to mention it, so it might be an issue with KZbin today. I've had that happen before. Also, if you're using a Bluetooth device, you're likely going to notice a desync.

[@hamshankscps1049]

@storyrant I was using my galaxy buds, but I never notice a delay with them. This was like a half second delay. I'm assuming the problem was on my end though.

[@storyrant]

Let me know if it happens in the future, though. I've been on a mission to improve my audio. lol

[@neliiinhu]

Art bell didnt believe what some guests would talk about . Others not only he believed it to be possible, but had unexplained personal experiences that made him as close as a skeptic can be to a believer. He wasnt a cynical on a money making project, he was a skeptical sparked by curiosity due to his personal experience of which he talked about several times in his shows.

[@eclipseslayer98]

18:36 I really appreciate this. It IS Giger-lite. While the designs still take inspiration from his work, most of them are all just like... less fleshy? more clean? idk.

[@DzikiWaclaw]

I kind of hate every movie in this franchise after the first one. Xenomorph was ruined in the second movie and Prometheus buried it. Xenomorph was suposed to be a perfect organism. Aliens made it a bug. I like the idea of Xenomorph being an out of control bioweapon. Prometheus was kind of on the right track bringing back cancepts from early Alien drafts like the pyramid. But it squandered it with overexplaining. Space Jockeys should not even be in the movie. Everything about Xenomorph's origins should be vague and mysterious. Was the pyramyd built by Space Jockeys or just found by them? Instead of black goo there should be eggs already. Made? Birthted by something? Who knows. And god damn everything about an android playing with black goo to make Xenomorph is just so stupid! It's infuriating.

[@sanctumsanctorum4130]

This is a really good take and I appreciate the reference to H P Lovecraft. "Cosmic horror" is precisely why so many people have an issue with Alien 3: the death of Newt and Hicks offscreen is not safe. They don't die heroically. They're just killed in an accident in their sleep with no chance of resisting or fighting back. The universe is cold and unfeeling and people can just die. Unfortunately, this is juxtaposed against a much beloved movie (Aliens) which is not a film about cosmic horror. Here, Ellen Ripley is an action hero who not only survives a second encounter with the alien horror, she rescues a substitute daughter figure. I love Alien and Aliens but these two films are at loggerheads with one another. And thus Alien 3 suffers trying to honour both movies (it also has many other issues but we'll not go into that). Alien 3 owes more to Alien than Aliens in tone and themes, but if Aliens is the last / only movie you've seen, how do you resolve this? This is why the fanbase is so split on Alien 3. Aside: I don't really like H P Lovecraft's writing but have played enough games in the universe to know the themes and general plots. I will definitely be checking out the graphic novel of "Mountains".

[@callsignsaint1377]

One thing to note is that the black goo later in the film is NOT the same goo the “creator” of humanity used. As one is a synthetic form of blood from the orginal organism, that being the DEACON that is worshiped as the true creator of life that died and they are seeding more life in order to find an organism to replace the deacon which does happen through the combination of Shaw’s DNA (Human DNA) and the trilobite doing the same thing as a facehugger and having the embryo chestburster take DNA from the host as well. Hence why the Deacon was made and the irony of the creation they deemed a failure is the exact thing they needed to reach their goal. As well as after the birth of a new Deacon the race is whipped out or so we are led to believe as the “engineer planet” might just be another station where the goo is produced and those were a lesser race of engineer knock offs

[@storyrant]

The problem with this is that there's nothing in the movie to tell or show us this. Visually, they look the same. I don't honestly think they thought about this during the creative process, and likely these explanations came afterward through the TTRPG (which I will be running sometime in the near future and making a video, seems like a fun game so far) and supplemental books that expanded the lore...which is basically like a builder trying to fix a house's leaning or crumbling walls rather than tackling the real problem, a bad foundation. Again, to reiterate my point in the video, it is not that the concept of ancient aliens can't work in a story like this. Quite the opposite. But it has to be done right. Their inclusion should not make the universe feel smaller, it should do the opposite.

[@Spacecookie-]

I had a few ideas about the whole thing before the first of these two were released based around there being two sects of engineers, whereby one wanted to seed the universe (eventually) with life, so they went around to different suitable worlds, where their experiments wouldn't easily be found, to create life there. Then the second sect saw it s a kind of heresy, and if they ever located any of the worlds the first sect made, they'd destroy all major life forms there with xenomorphs, and other life forms with black goo, which they found way back in time and engineered a bit more, so they weren't even the first beings in space meeting people and destroying stuff. The first ship in Alien was the thing which put me in mind of a transport vessel, where the field with the laser shield above it was activated by John Hurt falling through it, removing the stasis and awakening the egg-pods. So they'd transport the eggs to whatever world, release the sections of the ship with them on board, then they'd fly off and leave it all just to go bananas and apocalyptic as a space lizard wandered too close. After a few centuries there wouldn't have been any food sources left and everything would die out which hadn't been killed by the nihil-omorphs (my word, copyright me).

[@zephyr8072]

I just find the Engineers utterly vapid and boring. A bunch of generic big muscle humans. All male and all albino white because of course they are. No Aryan Ubermensch coding there, no sir. Not only does explaining the mystery diminish the entire setting, it's even worse when the explanation is so... mundane. The only mystery left with all that - why they want to kill humanity - isn't even a good one. Especially when the real mystery is _why are they so bad at it?_

[@SinEater_]

I think you are going a little out on a limb there, bud...

[@NicholasMarshall]

I agree, the engineers design is exceptionally boring. What makes it frustrating is the alien design in Prometheus was good. So they had creature designers they just chose something really boring, and as you pointed out problematic.

[@ku16610]

We killed jesus , apparently is why they wanted us dead. I guess it helps if you watch the movie on blueray as it has the deleted scene which kind of explains a lot of it.

[@chrisbarnett5303]

@@ku16610watching Alien/Aliens: “You know all this could have been easily avoided if we just didn’t kill Jesus!”

[@randallbesch2424]

@@ku16610 so they only used one shot at it? Stupid and inefficient.

[@Jessi_vasqueegee]

Love when we get weird.

[@storyrant]

Always on this channel.

[@davidrobinson3434]

If you want a profound experience in cosmic horror, have a bad LSD trip, or be one of those people who gets paranoid after smoking a joint. And that's just about the notion of the heavens and hells that exist in each of us. And remember, some of Lovecraft's stories deal with drug use. And no matter how much we enjoy the vanity mirror or our own self-importance, we are from the dawn of daylight, to the edge of night, all of us, insignificant specks in the cosmos. The universe trembles not one iota in the minutia of time and space with our coming into the world or of our passing from it. Alien-I mean, Amen

[@Orphoid]

Good video. I feel like I learned a lot from your comparison to the Lovecraft Novella. I don’t agree with a lot of your opinions but I agree that the films are very flawed. I think the ancient aliens/engineers could have been done in a better way. I think both movies didn’t live up to what they were trying to pull off.

[@storyrant]

^The right way to disagree. :D Thanks for watching!

[@michaelcarbone6101]

I thought Prometheus was horror, but Honest Trailers and Pitch Meeting pointed out glaring plot holes.

[@kaylaanderson5505]

Would love to know your thoughts on the Love Death and Robots cosmic horror episodes, particularly the one titled “In Vaulted Halls Entombed”. There’s also an episode actually titled “At the Mountain of Madness”, but it’s not as good in my opinion.

[@storyrant]

I haven't kept up with the newer seasons. Guess I'm adding them to my list as well.