Alien: Covenant

[lsgreg]

So I am really looking forward for Ridley Scott's new Alien film. It is supposed to take place ten years after Prometheus and follows a ship called the Covenant which is the Earth's first deep space colonization vessel. From what I heard, they land on a planet and find David who is the only survivor from the lost Prometheus mission. (Shaw is confirmed to have some footage, but as flashbacks mostly. There is even a rumor that she evolved into a Xenomorph due to David or the black goo exposure). It looks like the special effects will be practical and CGI and has huge sets like Prometheus, but will return more to the claustrophobic/horror roots that the first movie was noted for. Any comments or rumors?

[SlackerinDeNile]

It won't be very good, hopefully it won't be any worse than Prometheus.

[MissKittyFantastico]

I may be wrong (I hope I am) but I'm kind of getting a slasher sequel feel from it - here's another bunch of horny teenagers/blue collar astronauts cluelessly wandering down to Camp Crystal Lake/Random Planet where they'll meander around for forty-five minutes or so talking about themselves before Jason/the Alien shows up to start butchering them one by one. Much as I disliked Prometheus I'm really hoping its themes and driving questions carry over and get more development, just to avoid this being a generic alien-kills-people scenario.

But mainly I'm jaded enough with the series to have gone into flippant mode, and now I'm wondering why people in the Alienverse ever travel into space. I mean, Alien, fair enough, a space truck goes missing, Aliens it's a bit bigger in scope but still Hadley's Hope is a bunch of nobodies on a miserable rock, and it's odds on nobody in the wider universe knew or cared there was anyone on Fiorina before they got wiped out. But secrecy aside Prometheus was a massive and pioneering mission, and Covenant is apparently the first big colonisation effort - is nobody at home wondering what happened to these folks? Is the King of Swamp Castle in charge of extrasolar missions? "We sent a ship to another planet; it got eaten by aliens. So, we sent a second one. That got eaten by aliens. So we sent a third one; that got chased by Predators, shot down by Kilrathi, then eaten by aliens, but the fourth one established a colony!"

[lsgreg]

Well, the consensus is that they will discover that David is behind the strange things on this planet, and that they are indeed on the Engineer's homeworld. David will be the "mad scientist" behind the manipulation of the proto xenomorphs in the trailers. It is also believed that Shaw showed aftereffects from the Proto facehugger birth, or she was injured and David tried to save her using the black goo with horrific results. He was an early version of android and has a full spectrum of human traits and without Waylan to act as his moral compass, he has developed a "god" complex in the past ten years. In contrast, the new Walter model on the Covenant is much less human because most people found the David models to be a little too unnerving. I hope they go into the contrasts of the two models during the movies and hopefully Fassbender can be allowed to develop his characters.

I always viewed the Alien planets as a small area of settled space by the time Aliens came around. The colonial Marines actually reference an alien species that was encountered during their banter, but they are never referenced again in the series. The Waylan/Yutani corp was very interested in the xenomorph species. It was cannon that they knew about the signal from LV-426 and replaced the science officer on the next mining mission with an android and changed their trajectory enough so they would have to investigate the signal. How much they knew was the question.....

[Nessus]

I'm hoping it'll be good, of course, but I'm not expecting it to be.

Part of it is it seems to be veering the series hard back towards the Aliens in a way that feels conspicuously like an over-corrective reaction to the public's reaction to Prometheus. Reading about the production of Prometheus (and how it went wrong), Scott seemed to really want to make it something that wasn't in any way about the Alien, that didn't deal with that part of the Alien universe at all, but the studio kept forcing him to bend it back toward that. That conflict is part of the reason Prometheus was such a mess. Looking at the trailers for "Covenant", it feels like after Prometheus was poorly received, in particular the criticism it's gotten for being confusing in how exactly it connects to the Aliens, Scott just sort of gave up and is going "FINE. You want more of the aliens, here's more fucking aliens.'.

MisKittyFantastico said it looks like a late-entry slasher franchise film, where they're just coasting on the formula, and I'd agree. It looks like they're trying to regain the audience by reassuring them the familiar Aliens are back in center frame... and that's literally all. Just two hours of dangling the alien in front of the audience like keys in front of a baby so they'll forget Prometheus, but without any real meat of it's own underneath.

[Nessus]

The colonial Marines actually reference an alien species that was encountered during their banter, but they are never referenced again in the series.

This as always really weirded me out. There are two lines I've seen presented as references to alien species, neither of which have ever read that way to me at all.

The big one I always see is Hudson's use of the phrase "bug hunt". Everyone but me seems to have interpreted this as a reference to extermination missions against local wildlife. To me it always sounded like a variation of "wild goose chase", i.e a mission to investigate or respond to a potential problem that turns out to be a big nothing waste of time. I felt like this was strongly implied by how Gorman uses the word "xenomorph" and the way the marines reacted to it: they don't appear to have an official term for alien life (or for extermination missions common enough to have a slang name) that the marines would know or Gorman would use. So when he tosses out "xenomorph" they just (rightly) think he pulled the term out of his ass because he's a pretentious tool, and dismiss the mission as a "bug hunt" (i.e. a make-work waste of time), because the idea of encountering alien life is ridiculous. It's like he told told them they were there to investigate Bigfoot sightings.

I seem to be the only person in the world who read that line that way, but it still really seems like the obviously intended interpretation, to the point where I think people are actually deliberately misinterpreting it.

The other one I see mentioned less is Frost's (I think it was frost?) reference to getting "Acturian poontang" on shore leave, with jokes about this involving gender confusion. I always assumed this was referring to a human colony with either cultural differences that made gender signalling seem ambiguous or reversed to an outsider, or some kind of environmental or genetic factor that effects how the locals physical gender developed. Like maybe the Acturia colony had something in the water or whatever than caused an explosion of intersex births, and over several generations their culture adapted to embrace that, but to people from other worlds that made them exotic.

To me the Alien universe has always had the feel of a hard-SF style 'verse in which the Alien and the space Jockey were the only non-terrestrial life of any kind anyone had ever encountered. the interpretations of the above lines as referring to alien life has always seemed like people reaching for anything they can find to Star Trek the place up.

[lsgreg]

"Hey, I sure wouldn't mind getting some more of that Arcturian poontang, remember that time?"
"Yeah, Frost, but the one that you had was male."
"It doesn't matter when it's Arcturian, baby."
―Pvt. Frost and Pvt. Spunkmeyer

The dialog I was referring to in Aliens. The only time it was mentioned in the movies.

[lsgreg]

There are fan theories that Spaceballs takes place in the Alien universe.

[TGLS]

Like maybe the Acturia colony had something in the water or whatever than caused an explosion of intersex births, and over several generations their culture adapted to embrace that, but to people from other worlds that made them exotic.

Could be a colony of transhuman hermaphrodites...

[MissKittyFantastico]

The big one I always see is Hudson's use of the phrase "bug hunt". Everyone but me seems to have interpreted this as a reference to extermination missions against local wildlife. To me it always sounded like a variation of "wild goose chase", i.e a mission to investigate or respond to a potential problem that turns out to be a big nothing waste of time.

I'd tend to go with the usual interpretation - the way Hudson says it, "Is this going to be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?" suggests to me that the distinction is between armed hostiles, and animals that just fight with tooth and claw, and the marines regard the latter as pest control that's beneath the USCM and should just be handled by wildlife patrol or something. The impression I got from 'xenomorph' is that Gorman's using the correct term for an unknown lifeform that he learned at USCM academy, because he's too full of himself to relax and just say 'Yeah, it's probably a bug hunt' (although credit to him, he's right not to be writing off an unknown enemy as easy to kill - but he clearly hasn't really thought of that, he's just doing everything as the book instructs).

The main thing for me is that nobody ever really seems to respond to Ripley with the kind of blanket disbelief you'd expect in a world where extraterrestrial life doesn't (so far as anyone knows) exist - the marines listen to her description, kind of bored-like, and Vasquez just wants to know where to put a bullet in them; Gorman presents her as someone who may know something about what they're going to encounter, not a civilian who's clearly crazy; nobody's amazed when they find the colonists' barricades and the holes burned in the floors, like 'Holy crap, she was telling the truth!', just "Somebody must've bagged one of Ripley's bad guys here; nobody in the W-Y meeting seems that interested in the notion of alien life, they just seem to have trouble with one critter being so dangerous that Ripley had to blow up the ship. He gets told "No indigenous life" like that's just a boring fact, not that woman thinking 'Did Van Leuwen just ask me if aliens exist, and we just forgot to mention it to him?' As well, nobody even seems to care about her describing a derelict non-human spaceship - no-indigeous-life woman didn't even bother remembering it and needed Ripley to spell it out for her again. You'd think if she was telling them, for the first time in (known) human history, she'd found evidence of intelligent alien life, they'd either be "Mobilise the entire science division, and copyright everything!" or just declare her legally insane and stick her in an institution somewhere. The way she's handled - stripped of her license and dumped to make a living driving forklifts (albeit the coolest forklifts ever) - seems very much in line with his the meeting notes in the USCM Technical Manual spell W-Y's attitude out: the Nostromo got some critter onto it, probably like an alien rottweiler or something that was just hungry and tried to bite their legs, and because Ripley et al were incompetent screw-ups they thought it was god's own perfect killing machine and blew most of themselves up trying to 'escape', where any respectable crew would've been able to just scare it into a cabin and lock it in.

I'm not so certain on the notion of intelligent living aliens - the Arcturian thing could go either way (as can they, by the sound of it), but the USCM tech manual refers to plenty of fighting between human forces, so them asking if LV-426 could be a 'stand-up fight' might be expecting the loss of contact to be because another nation put troops down to raid the colony or whatever. The lack of interest in Ripley's description of the Space Jockey ship (yeah I'm being pedantic and not calling them 'Engineers') suggests to me that humanity has at least found evidence of past alien civilisations - even the Jordans on finding the thing seem to view it more as good luck in them getting in first and having the claim on the monetary value of a relatively intact archaeotech find, rather than amazement at the very notion of what they're seeing.