Prometheus (2012)

[BouCoupDinkyDau]

Originally Posted by itsaboutHD

That's a little harsh! I mean, a week maybe...

[Early Memphis]

Originally Posted by itsaboutHD

From dictionary.com
ghetto
noun, plural ghet·tos, ghet·toes.
6. Slang: Often Disparaging and Offensive. noting something that is considered to be unrefined, low-class, cheap, or inferior: Her furniture is so ghetto!

People can choose to view things in a positive or negative way. I tend to choose the former. Except for most of the cast in Prometheus!

Okay, newbie, to admit that something is "Often Disparaging and Offensive" (which was my point exactly) and not see why that's inappropriate and possibly problematic for the site (and you should never disrespect the site) is a problem ... We'll let the Mods sort it out.

[Lentulus Batiatus]

Originally Posted by Darkstream

I never said Prometheus was a "remake" of Alien --- I don't where you got that. Maybe that's where your problem is --- your level of comprehension.


Again, I said the concepts and designs that were done in Alien were re-envisoned and revised for Prometheus. That is a fact. It doesn't matter what the reasons were for the changes or why there were any differences made at all --- that's not what we're debating -- they were still reimagined alterations of the original designs and ideas. Simple as that.


And we're done here. I have nothing more to discuss with the likes of you.

Wow you still can't let it go, can you? You stated your opinion as fact. That is a fact. You posted why your opinion is fact by comparing everything in Prometheus to Alien and because things aren't identical then in your opinion Scott re-imagined everything and that, according to you, is a fact. You can't even make 1 coherent argument because you jump back and fourth.

Prometheus is NOT a re-imagining of Alien. It's a DIFFERENT movie taking place in a DIFFERENT time and place with DIFFERENT people, aliens and costumes. It exists in the same universe as Alien but it is NOT a re-make, re-imagining, re-envisioning or re-whatevethehellyouwanttocallit of Alien. That is unless you can provide proof from Ridley Scott himself that it is as you claim it to be. You can't, and that's the only FACT your posts continue to prove. The rest is just your twisted opinion of what you believe the film to be, which is wrong according to the very man you claim has done what you believe in your opinion to be.

"For all intents and purposes this is very loosely a prequel, very, and then you say “But how did that ship evolve into the first Alien?” Then I would say “Actually he’s one of the group that had gone off and his cargo had gotten out of control,” because he was heading somewhere else and it got out of control and actually he had died in the process and that would be the story there. That ship happened to be a brother to the ship that you see that comes out of the ground at the end. They are roughly of the same period give or take a couple hundred years, right?" - Ridley Scott

http://screenrant.com/prometheus-ali...benk-176223/3/

See how easy it is to provide FACTS rather than ramble on about your (incorrect) opinion? Or just admit you used the term fact improperly?

[crazyBLUE]

If the back & forth bickering does not stop ~ Then I will do something about it.

[Darkstream]

Originally Posted by crazyBLUE

If the back & forth bickering does not stop ~ Then I will do something about it.

Don't worry, I said I was done with him... and I am. He can continue arguing with himself at this point.

[02wikked]

This is one of those movies that polarizes the so called sci-fi fans. I don't know how many people that I have spoken to that keep trying to compare this to Aliens. It just amazes me that people can't accept Prometheus for what it is.

Then again, most of those people also aren't aware that Alien³ or Alien: Resurrection even exists though!

[Edword]

Originally Posted by Lentulus Batiatus

Show me exactly where I disagreed with your opinion. Stop trying to convince me that your opinion is correct. I've never stated otherwise. I asked you to provide back up to your statement of fact. You fail to even comprehend what that means. I could care less if you think Scott changed his mind about this or that.

So I'll sum this up. While you didn't say you disagreed with him you started this whole thing because you were hung up that he didn't provide links to proof of his statement. Sounds like you're more hung up on proof being shown than the actual statement he made. Which is apparent by the last couple pages.

[Darkstream]

Originally Posted by Edword

So I'll sum this up. While you didn't say you disagreed with him you started this whole thing because you were hung up that he didn't provide links to proof of his statement. Sounds like you're more hung up on proof being shown than the actual statement he made. Which is apparent by the last couple pages.

I don't think he really knows what he's arguing about anymore either. Somehow he equates what I said about re-envisioning and revising certain concepts and designs to re-imaging everything into a remake. Which I never said anything of the sort. First he's saying that he wants me to provide proof that what I'm saying is a fact, when the changes are as plain to see if you watch both movies, as the sky is blue; Then he acknowledges those factual changes, but then starts arguing about the reasons they were made, which is totally irrelevant to the fact that they were indeed made... just as I said they were.


To clarify...

"Re-envisioning" basically means rethinking and reconcieving an idea (like in the case of the Space Jockey now being thought of as a spacesuit, as opposed to a skeleton or anything else it could have been that was never fully fleshed out in the original film).

"Revising" means making an actual change, even if only on a minor level (like the conceptual or visual changes made to the Space Jockey that are apparent when compared to the earlier version).

"Concepts" are the ideas behind something --what it is and/or how it works.

"Designs" are the visual aspects behind something -- from the preliminary artwork to the final structured appearance.


These are the changes I was speaking of as facts. It doesn't matter what the reasons were behind the changes -- that's not the point -- the fact remains that changes were indeed made. But he continued to argue against my fact, calling it an opinion, because he somehow misconstrued what I had said, turning it all into me saying that Prometheus was a fully reimaged remake of Alien, obviously including, in his mind, the whole movie's story (because that's what a remake usually entails, right?).

I can only shake my head and throw up my arms at this point.




Now, to get back to what was being debated days ago before Lentulus Batiatus joined in...

If someone wanted to argue that the skeleton of the Space Jockey seen in Alien could easily be accepted as a spacesuit, even though it was never originally conceived as one, then that is a valid argument worth having.

[Hypnosifl]

Originally Posted by Darkstream

"Re-envisioning" basically means rethinking and reconcieving an idea (like in the case of the Space Jockey now being thought of as a spacesuit, as opposed to a skeleton or anything else it could have been that was never fully fleshed out in the original film).

I don't think it's out of the question that it could have been a spacesuit in Alien, but clearly the proportions have changed (look at the length of those arms!):



And this larger shot of the Space Jockey shows more clearly that its head was more elongated, especially if you compare with the design of the Engineer helmet here. Perhaps Lentulus just hasn't done a close comparison, but it's obviously not just "opinion" that the designs are different.

Originally Posted by Darkstream

If someone wanted to argue that the skeleton of the Space Jockey seen in Alien could easily be accepted as a spacesuit, even though it was never originally conceived as one, then that is a valid argument worth having.

Why do you say "never originally conceived"? Would you disagree with the point I made earlier that the beings in Giger's mural seem to be an earlier incarnation of what became the Space Jockey, and that the heads do appear to be helmets or gas masks there since they are connected by the tube to some kind of air tank or pack on the back?

[itsaboutHD]

Originally Posted by Darkstream

Now, to get back to what was being debated days ago /...

If someone wanted to argue that the skeleton of the Space Jockey seen in Alien could easily be accepted as a spacesuit, even though it was never originally conceived as one, then that is a valid argument worth having.

There you go: the Jockey's spacesuit was not originally conceived as such. Agreed! As a strong Prometheus supporter (I'm on that side of the fence), I don't think there's any way to argue that Scott or anybody thought, "hmmm, someday I'm going to pull a rabbit [engineer] out of this hat [skeleton/spacesuit]". As for me, I can easily accept the spacesuit concept, and, I think it's a pretty darn good one!

[itsaboutHD]

Originally Posted by Hypnosifl

I don't think it's out of the question that it could have been a spacesuit in Alien, but clearly the proportions have changed (look at the length of those arms!)

I'm willing to accept the idea that there were variations in space suit design, some sporting a more tailored fit.

Originally Posted by Hypnosifl

Why do you say "never originally conceived"? Would you disagree with the point I made earlier that the beings in Giger's mural seem to be an earlier incarnation of what became the Space Jockey, and that the heads do appear to be helmets or gas masks there since they are connected by the tube to some kind of air tank or pack on the back?

And that for me is a real clincher. That tube going from face to a tank like object that appears to hang from his back. Not to say that a being couldn't evolve with such an appendage, but helmet or skull? I'm going with helmet.

[SammymeBlu]

[Darkstream]

Originally Posted by Hypnosifl

Why do you say "never originally conceived"? Would you disagree with the point I made earlier that the beings in Giger's mural seem to be an earlier incarnation of what became the Space Jockey, and that the heads do appear to be helmets or gas masks there since they are connected by the tube to some kind of air tank or pack on the back?

Okay, now that's an interesting way to look at that mural by Giger, because although I've seen that mural many times (it's actually in Giger's Alien design book), I've never thought that those figures were actually Space Jockeys. Though, I didn't necessarily think they were humans either. I just thought they were Giger's own creations -- artistic interpretations of astronauts -- used simply to illustrate the evolutionary stages of the xenomorphic alien through the host of another alien or human being.


The thing about the mural is that it was designed based on Dan O'Bannon's notes given to Giger and it was never actually shown in the movie. Does this mean that it's irrelevant and that those beings couldn't be early concepts of the Space Jockeys? Absolutely not -- there may actually be some validity to what you are saying. Even if Dan O'Bannon or Ridley Scott, or whoever it was that came up with the Space Jockey, had never thought about it actually being a spacesuit, the idea could very well have started with Giger taking the liberty of depicting it as such within this mural.

Now (and for those keeping track, make note that this is only my opinion here, and not fact), I still do believe that despite Giger's mural depictions of the astronaut beings possibly being Space Jockeys in spacesuits, that the concept of the suit was still not used as the basis of the Space Jockey we actually see in Alien, but could have possibly been an idea Ridley Scott went back to when making Prometheus.

I really do not buy that the fossilized Space Jockey we see in Alien was ever conceived as a suit. But I accept that revision made from Alien to Prometheus as something Ridley Scott later decided to do with it. It's just that it is an obvious contradiction from what we originally saw, what was hinted at, what we all believed, and what was later explored in the extended Alien universe by other writers (not that the Aliens comic books actually count for much). The fact remains that the design was redone to accommodate that conceptual change and that's the direction Ridley decided to take it with Prometheus. I just wish he had put as much thought and effort into the human characters.

Originally Posted by itsaboutHD

There you go: the Jockey's spacesuit was not originally conceived as such. Agreed! As a strong Prometheus supporter (I'm on that side of the fence), I don't think there's any way to argue that Scott or anybody thought, "hmmm, someday I'm going to pull a rabbit [engineer] out of this hat [skeleton/spacesuit]". As for me, I can easily accept the spacesuit concept, and, I think it's a pretty darn good one!

That's exactly what it is... an acceptance... but it's just not something that was done very convincingly.

[Hypnosifl]

I just found a great series of posts at http://alienseries.wordpress.com/tag/space-jockey/ which explains how they came up with the Space Jockey in Alien, and it seems that I was wrong that Giger's mural shows an early version of the Space Jockey race, see this post in particular:

http://alienseries.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/the-pilot/

The post explains that the Space Jockeys were supposed to be from a different race than the one that made the giant pyramid where the facehugger eggs were originally going to be housed, so if Giger's mural was meant to be found in the pyramid it can't depict the same race as the Space Jockeys. And apparently, Ridley Scott found the following piece in Giger's Necronomicon that he asked Giger to work off of when designing the Space Jockey, so this is the real origin:

None of these concepts were taken too seriously by Ridley Scott, who commissioned HR Giger to design the Space Jockey, using one of Giger’s Necronomicon paintings as a launching pad for the final creature.



“From the script I knew he was huge and had a hole in his chest, but that was all. Ridley suggested another one of my Necronom creatures as a guide. They don’t look much alike now, but it was a starting point; and the Space Jockey kind of grew up from there in bits and pieces. The creature we finally ended up building is biomechanical to the extent that he has physically grown into, or maybe even out of, his seat – he’s integrated totally into the function he performs.”
~ HR Giger, Cinefex, 1979.

There are also a few posts which have quotes showing that the Space Jockey was originally conceived as a "skeleton" of some kind, like this one:

On July 4th 1978 Giger, now firmly entrenched in the film’s production, received another call from the producer’s office. “Another change,” he wrote in his diary, “They want the skeleton of the alien Space Jockey to lie in the cockpit again.”

And this one:

“The giant [in Alien] was conceived as a skeleton,” Ridley Scott admitted. “I kept staring at the skeleton … then I thought, twenty, thirty, actually twenty six years on, ‘what if this is not a skeleton, but we only see it as a skeleton because of our own indoctrination?’ and I thought, ‘what happens if it’s another form of protection, or a suit? If it’s a suit, then what’s inside the suit?’”

“It could be a degraded suit,” Scott says in Prometheus: The Art of the Film. “It’s only you saying that because you think you’re looking at bone structure and a ribcage. Why isn’t that a suit? It’s been lying there disintegrating for two or three thousand years in deep cold; that could be a suit. The suit works great as a kind of organic, very sophisticated spacesuit.”

[Darkstream]

Originally Posted by Hypnosifl

I just found a great series of posts at http://alienseries.wordpress.com/tag/space-jockey/ which explains how they came up with the Space Jockey in Alien, and it seems that I was wrong that Giger's mural shows an early version of the Space Jockey race, see this post in particular:

http://alienseries.wordpress.com/tag/space-jockey/

The post explains that the Space Jockeys were supposed to be from a different race than the one that made the giant pyramid where the facehugger eggs were originally going to be housed, so if Giger's mural was meant to be found in the pyramid it can't depict the same race as the Space Jockeys. And apparently, Ridley Scott found the following piece in Giger's Necronomicon that he asked Giger to work off of when designing the Space Jockey, so this is the real origin:

There are also a few posts which have quotes showing that the Space Jockey was originally conceived as a "skeleton" of some kind, like this one:

And this one:

Great find! Those quotes about the Space Jockey originally being conceived as a skeleton, and then later "reversed engineered" to be a spacesuit, basically confirm what I already knew and have been saying all along. I think anyone looking at the two movies and comparing them should be able to see the difference is obvious, but it is nice to know it's stated somewhere, considering some people need that sort of confirmation. Thanks for sharing that.

I'm thinking maybe I should finally buy Prometheus on blu-ray, just so I can watch the extras. It's funny how the behind-the-scenes stuff is so much more interesting than the actual movie. As a huge fan of Giger, I'm really curious what his final thoughts on the film are.

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Darkstream

Great find! Those quotes about the Space Jockey originally being conceived as a skeleton, and then later "reversed engineered" to be a spacesuit, basically confirm what I already knew and have been saying all along. I think anyone looking at the two movies and comparing them should be able to see the difference is obvious, but it is nice to know it's stated somewhere, considering some people need that sort of confirmation. Thanks for sharing that.

I'm thinking maybe I should finally buy Prometheus on blu-ray, just so I can watch the extras. It's funny how the behind-the-scenes stuff is so much more interesting than the actual movie. As a huge fan of Giger, I'm really curious what his final thoughts on the film are.

Just make sure you get the 3D set so you get the very worthwhile documentary.

[Darkstream]

Originally Posted by HD Goofnut

Just make sure you get the 3D set so you get the very worthwhile documentary.

Thanks for the tip.

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Darkstream

Thanks for the tip.

No problem.

[mar3o]

“From the script I knew he was huge and had a hole in his chest, but that was all. Ridley suggested another one of my Necronom creatures as a guide. They don’t look much alike now, but it was a starting point; and the Space Jockey kind of grew up from there in bits and pieces. The creature we finally ended up building is biomechanical to the extent that he has physically grown into, or maybe even out of, his seat – he’s integrated totally into the function he performs.”

"On July 4th 1978 Giger, now firmly entrenched in the film’s production, received another call from the producer’s office. “Another change,” he wrote in his diary, “They want the skeleton of the alien Space Jockey to lie in the cockpit again.”

Gee...that sounds exactly like what I said days ago, and I have never read that before:

"No matter how you look at it, I don't see how anybody could come to the conclusion that it was a decomposed spacesuit we were looking at in Alien...As you pointed out, it's difficult to tell where the Space Jockey's remains end and the chair begins. It's sort of "merged" together, as if he grew into or was formed as part of the chair itself. That's classic Giger. Tons of his artwork depict that bizarre merging of flesh and machine. That's what made the Space Jockey so totally creepy and alien. It was almost as if the Space Jockey and the chair was a single, alien object, with the operator literally merged into the chair. It was unlike any form of life as we understand it, and that's what made the whole concept so frightening to so many viewers."

Maybe this will at least put to end some of the silly arguing over if Ridley Scott changed the design of the Space Jockey for Prometheus. Obviously he did. We didn't need that quote above by Giger to prove it, but there it is just to solidify it. The Space Jockey was always meant to be merged with the chair somehow - exactly the kind of thing Giger is famous for depicting in his artwork. That's what was so frightening about Alien - not only the Alien was scary - everything was in Alien. Even the mysterious Space Jockey was frightening because we had no idea what kind of bizarre creature it was.

[Oblivion138]

My two cents: The whole point of the original Space Jockey design was that you couldn't tell what was organic and what was technology...that it was fused/indistinguishable. Prometheus didn't so much change what was what (as we weren't intended to know from the design we were given in Alien), so much as decide what was what, and make it clear.

And for what it's worth, that "trunk" always looked like a flight helmet to me.



And since the Jockey was presumably piloting the Derelict craft, I'd pretty much always assumed that it was a helmet.