There's no director's cut of this coming.
Scott said as much, yes, but it seems he's constantly changing his tune in interviews, so I don't know anymore...
(the criticism the movie is currently getting might make a director's cut more likely than not though)
I just cannot believe that after all the years and finally going through with it, Ridley shot this sad excuse for a script. The movie showed he still has it from a technical perspective, but his judgement of scripts is very suspect.
According to the writers, he had a lot of input on the plot, and I have to say I was a bit taken aback upon reading the guy's recent interviews... I felt they often sounded like incoherent ramblings...
I would like to have been able to read Spaihts' draft before Lindelof got hold of it. Not that I know who is responsible for some of the really bizarre logic, nor do we know if there were scenes cut out that would make things in the film make much more sense, but I would still like to read his "Alien prequel" draft.
Same here.
It's just frustrating because with some really fucking obvious fixes that should have absolutely not went over someone's head like Ridley Scott it could have definitely played ball with Alien, I feel.
Frankly, I never was on board with the idea of a prequel dealing with the Space Jockey(s), and the "ancient aliens created mankind to their image" stuff bothers me (it shits so much over Darwin, you'd better have a solid mythology/excuses to pull it off)... Can't say I'm seeing that one getting anywhere near
Alien, even with a miraculous director's cut. As a movie, it pretends to be a lot more than its predecessor ("hard scifi" dealing with "big ideas"), and I find its foundations far too shaky for that kind of weight.
Anyone bring up the idea that David is in love with Shaw? Only looks at her dreams, only goes out to save her and even impregnates her the only way he can.
Experiments on her boyfriend, too.
But I can't argue he seems
consistently interested in her throughout the movie, so...
David infecting the dude scientist was pointless, him dying would have served no point, same thing with the girl getting pregnant with the alien. In fact David was being WAY too careless overall, manipulating all sorts of crazy biological material, for no apparent reason whatsoever, other than to make us understand that he's dangerous.
Agreed.
I've seen some supporters of the movie get annoyed at people asking why David did that, and
I get that David is curious / was told to "try harder". I do.
... But come the fuck on, you don't haphazardly infect a main member of your expedition with some unknown alien agent, set him loose and sit back. Especially when it's established in the movie that David is interested in his own preservation (in fact, he put it above Weyland's interests when Vickers threatened him, and he put Weyland's interests above the safety of other human beings... recipe for disaster, anyone? who the hell programmed that guy? Asimov am doubly cry).
AICN dude said:
obviously, the goo in the first scene of the film is NOT the same goo that causes all the problems later in the film
If you want that to be "obvious",
don't use black goo in both cases. It's not rocket science.
(that being said, I don't think they're supposed to be separate things... I might even have read something to that effect in a recent interview...)
Pretty sure we would have figured something was wrong if she was magically three months pregnant all of a sudden, no need for the sterile thing.
But we
so needed that "I can't create life" line!
Holy shit at that script, seriously...
No shit.
Either way it went, whether she was his actual daughter (slow-aging or whatever) or a robot, it changed nothing to the story, and now she is flattened dead like a pancake.
I think it's funny how the she ejected from the ship just so she could conveniently land right next to Shaw and then stupidly die. Man, that was really worth it.
the life that was implanted on earth wasn't just humans or else it doesn't explain how we evolved from primates (or at least how our DNA is like 98% identical to theirs). Humans was probably an evolutionary step towards becoming the engineers the final goal and maybe given a few extra million years humans would've evolved to become the engineers.
Makes you wonder why the Engineers go through all that trouble to (
eventually) recreate a DNA nigh identical to theirs instead of simply using cloning...
I do wish they would have had her acknowledge David's treacherous behavior, at least for a brief moment, when she went back to get him. She honestly didn't have a choice in the matter, but Shaw didn't even bat an eye.
Obviously, all the "where's my cross?" stuff was a lot more important.
Big ideas, man.
Dumb question: How was she going to survive with no food or water?
Faith!
Or David unlocking the Interstellarbucks of the alien ship by randomly pushing three buttons, as usual, I guess.
Movie started showing its cracks when the geologist and his buddy randomly get scared and decide to walk back to the ship alone.
I was already shaking my head when the guy explained how they found LV-223.
So those five dots are... stars, right? Okay, I find it a bit hard to swallow that they could determine which stars those were exactly (there's a lot of those in the sky, seriously!), but fine, couldn't quite have ancient paintings be ultra-elaborate, suspension of disbelief, okay.
Then, the guy calls those five dots a "galactic system".
A
what? I mean... I guess those could actually be galaxies instead of stars, yes, but that wouldn't be a very helpful map, now, would it?
Ah, well.
"And that system happens to have a sun."
...
I... I'm going to assume you're saying "sun", in the sense "a star that very closely resembles ours". Not that it helps all that much (even if we were talking about a "galactic system" of five stars, I don't know that the closest one to our Sun would necessarily host the spacefaring alien species you're looking for).
"Orbiting around that sun is what seems to be a planet. And around that planet, a moon capable of sustaining life."
... So the jury is still out over whether or not the planet really is a planet...
but its moon can sustain life. That's some crazy future science you're using, there, guys.
neildegrassetyson.gif
And of course, Shaw then completely fails to explain why she thinks those giant figures in the paintings created mankind.
"That's what I choose to believe."
One hell of a scientific expedition. This should go well.
In Alien 1 when the original crew lands on the planet don't they all agree eventually that whatever beacon they got was a warning to stay away? I got the impression the jockey was part of a race of explorers like humans, got fucked up by the aliens, and on the verge of death left a warning to future explorers.
I'm pretty sure that was the initial idea, but they then decided to move the alien eggs to the Space Jockey's ship (they were to be found in a pyramid structure somewhere else on the planet, originally), making it look like Elephant Man was carrying a lethal cargo.
Still bothers me a bit, as I don't think the "placid" design of the Space Jockey fits very well with this new implied agenda (even if I do think the change helped with the pacing).
Was the planet in Alien 1 the same as the planet they landed on in this?
Nope. It was LV-426 in
Alien, and LV-223 in
Prometheus.