(no subject)
So, until yesterday, I had never heard of Prometheus. Not Prometheus the dude, Prometheus the movie. Which, by some act of internet benevolence, I saw completely cold, and thus discovered in-text (by recognizing the ship-design) was set within the Alien universe. (Ridley Scott is the director, and directed the original as well. 33 years ago!)
So apparently the internet faff is to the effect that Scott spent the last several months/years of development denying that it was an Alien sequel, but that is a lie and it is totally an Alien sequel. Or remake; the only way it makes sense in relation to the rest of the series is if it's an alt-universe, or everyone dies at the end before they can warn the rest of the universe. Because, like, Bitey McBite aliens are not exactly Michael Myers, you know? The people who run afoul of them keep on investing a gazillion dollars in interstellar space ventures, and seeing those ventures get blowed up. Generally speaking, people like that clue in after the first time that happens.
(It's kind of a funny hybrid-genre, the alien-on-board horror movie. Because it's a small-scope locked-room horror movie, where all the actors are stuck in a landscape together, with minimal hope of rescue or escape; but it's also a large-scope corporate horror movie, where eventually everyone realizes that their lives are a minimal expense compared to the ship itself, its cargo, and its lethal potential profit.)
Pretty sure the movie is going to turn out to be a remake or AU of the first in the series, i.e. Ship A, of Our Heroes, ends up investigating Ship B, wherein it finds the dead Elephant Face alien in its navigational chair and the thousands and thousands of dormant eggs whence come the Bitey McBite aliens.
(Bitey eggs are like almonds, apparently, able to lie dormant for ages and ages until they hatch in the presence of a suitable environment -- a warm body nearby. Although the comics canon explores the idea that the adult Biteys are a hive mind, there isn't much discussion of whether that hive intentionally orders the eggs to open, or whether it's pure chemical reflex.)
So yeah. The other thing we see in the Prometheus trailer is the Elephant Face ship hovering. It has never been clear whether Biteys are clever enough to navigate or fly a space ship; clearly they took over Elephant Face's ship, but it's not clear how they got on it, and at some point after they got on they crashed it. All other canonical evidence indicates a disinterest in technology, even when it might be useful. They never fly the shuttles themselves; they always tag along on someone else flying it. It's fair to say that as presented, they're pure parasites on other interstellar species.
But that always raised the question for me: how does that parasitism work? In the movies, they don't have to answer that question, because each movie takes place over the course of like 2 days and there isn't time to worry about the long game. (Till the 4th movie, which is... wonky.) The comics posit an interesting solution to parasitism: they posit human cults falling under the sway of the Bitey hive mind, and farming themselves, more or less, as suitable pupal deposit vessels. Because how else would it work? If you use up all the warm bodies, and canonically cannot reproduce/mature without more warm bodies, then you need a mechanism for new warm bodies always becoming available, or else you'll die out. Are the Bitey McBites basically just a bad case of interstellar Ebola? Because if they are, then a bit of isolation (till the adults starve) is the cure. It's only if they have the brains or the biological mechanisms to keep gaining access to new warm bodies that they become an interstellar smallpox.
("Theory of Alien Propagation," a short story by Mark Verheiden -- who wrote almost all of the original run of Aliens comics and has since gone over into genre TV -- lays out some ideas on the native ecosystem of the Biteys. It relies on the idea that the Biteys are not apex predators on their homeworld, or at best are one of a number of apex predators.)
The movies have also never even addressed where Elephant Face comes from. They say it explicitly a couple of times, "derelict spacecraft"; and don't seem surprised that there are alien species alive and able to design/built pilot spacecraft that they themselves don't recognize; and... then mayhem breaks out and nobody remembers Elephant Face. The comics treat this person as some kind of strange, dignified visitor, restrained and preserved in its death agony as a warning (promptly ignored). They show up again, very late in the original comics series, the Elephant Face in the Comma Spaceship, and prove to be more baffling and powerful than anything humans have ever encountered. They clean Earth of the Biteys, but not for us: they claim Earth for themselves, and humans will have to find some other place to live. That the Elephant Faces are terraformers, turning Earth into something inhospitable to humans to satisfy themselves, is the irony on top of the sundae.
(If you're interested, this part is told in the TPB Aliens Earth War, with a couple of interesting codas in a Dark Horse Presents collection that came out a little later. My understanding is that the universe went on to reinvent itself with various stories of aliens as half-controlled weapons on Earth, rather than sources of total devastation. Kind of standard urban-decay fare, I thought, and mostly passed them by.)
Back to the Prometheus trailer: it doesn't appear to take place on LV-426, unless that world has been reimagined. It's not clear that the Bitey aliens are in the same life-cycle form, as the presence or "development" of alien slime seems to imply human manipulation of their reproductive process. We're not to understand that this is anyone answering a distress call, as was true in movie #1, but an expedition in search of something sciencey. Even Stargatey! It is possible the Elephant Faces have Done Something to human development, and here humans are doing the same thing all over again, to their folly. Here's to hoping, anyway. I hope they make the story new, or take it in a different direction.
I mean, I hope this Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the only named character in the trailer, is a protagonist worthy of Ripley. That's not really negotiable.
This entry was originally posted at http://vehemently.dreamwidth.org/26272.html. Comment wherever you like.
So apparently the internet faff is to the effect that Scott spent the last several months/years of development denying that it was an Alien sequel, but that is a lie and it is totally an Alien sequel. Or remake; the only way it makes sense in relation to the rest of the series is if it's an alt-universe, or everyone dies at the end before they can warn the rest of the universe. Because, like, Bitey McBite aliens are not exactly Michael Myers, you know? The people who run afoul of them keep on investing a gazillion dollars in interstellar space ventures, and seeing those ventures get blowed up. Generally speaking, people like that clue in after the first time that happens.
(It's kind of a funny hybrid-genre, the alien-on-board horror movie. Because it's a small-scope locked-room horror movie, where all the actors are stuck in a landscape together, with minimal hope of rescue or escape; but it's also a large-scope corporate horror movie, where eventually everyone realizes that their lives are a minimal expense compared to the ship itself, its cargo, and its lethal potential profit.)
Pretty sure the movie is going to turn out to be a remake or AU of the first in the series, i.e. Ship A, of Our Heroes, ends up investigating Ship B, wherein it finds the dead Elephant Face alien in its navigational chair and the thousands and thousands of dormant eggs whence come the Bitey McBite aliens.
(Bitey eggs are like almonds, apparently, able to lie dormant for ages and ages until they hatch in the presence of a suitable environment -- a warm body nearby. Although the comics canon explores the idea that the adult Biteys are a hive mind, there isn't much discussion of whether that hive intentionally orders the eggs to open, or whether it's pure chemical reflex.)
So yeah. The other thing we see in the Prometheus trailer is the Elephant Face ship hovering. It has never been clear whether Biteys are clever enough to navigate or fly a space ship; clearly they took over Elephant Face's ship, but it's not clear how they got on it, and at some point after they got on they crashed it. All other canonical evidence indicates a disinterest in technology, even when it might be useful. They never fly the shuttles themselves; they always tag along on someone else flying it. It's fair to say that as presented, they're pure parasites on other interstellar species.
But that always raised the question for me: how does that parasitism work? In the movies, they don't have to answer that question, because each movie takes place over the course of like 2 days and there isn't time to worry about the long game. (Till the 4th movie, which is... wonky.) The comics posit an interesting solution to parasitism: they posit human cults falling under the sway of the Bitey hive mind, and farming themselves, more or less, as suitable pupal deposit vessels. Because how else would it work? If you use up all the warm bodies, and canonically cannot reproduce/mature without more warm bodies, then you need a mechanism for new warm bodies always becoming available, or else you'll die out. Are the Bitey McBites basically just a bad case of interstellar Ebola? Because if they are, then a bit of isolation (till the adults starve) is the cure. It's only if they have the brains or the biological mechanisms to keep gaining access to new warm bodies that they become an interstellar smallpox.
("Theory of Alien Propagation," a short story by Mark Verheiden -- who wrote almost all of the original run of Aliens comics and has since gone over into genre TV -- lays out some ideas on the native ecosystem of the Biteys. It relies on the idea that the Biteys are not apex predators on their homeworld, or at best are one of a number of apex predators.)
The movies have also never even addressed where Elephant Face comes from. They say it explicitly a couple of times, "derelict spacecraft"; and don't seem surprised that there are alien species alive and able to design/built pilot spacecraft that they themselves don't recognize; and... then mayhem breaks out and nobody remembers Elephant Face. The comics treat this person as some kind of strange, dignified visitor, restrained and preserved in its death agony as a warning (promptly ignored). They show up again, very late in the original comics series, the Elephant Face in the Comma Spaceship, and prove to be more baffling and powerful than anything humans have ever encountered. They clean Earth of the Biteys, but not for us: they claim Earth for themselves, and humans will have to find some other place to live. That the Elephant Faces are terraformers, turning Earth into something inhospitable to humans to satisfy themselves, is the irony on top of the sundae.
(If you're interested, this part is told in the TPB Aliens Earth War, with a couple of interesting codas in a Dark Horse Presents collection that came out a little later. My understanding is that the universe went on to reinvent itself with various stories of aliens as half-controlled weapons on Earth, rather than sources of total devastation. Kind of standard urban-decay fare, I thought, and mostly passed them by.)
Back to the Prometheus trailer: it doesn't appear to take place on LV-426, unless that world has been reimagined. It's not clear that the Bitey aliens are in the same life-cycle form, as the presence or "development" of alien slime seems to imply human manipulation of their reproductive process. We're not to understand that this is anyone answering a distress call, as was true in movie #1, but an expedition in search of something sciencey. Even Stargatey! It is possible the Elephant Faces have Done Something to human development, and here humans are doing the same thing all over again, to their folly. Here's to hoping, anyway. I hope they make the story new, or take it in a different direction.
I mean, I hope this Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the only named character in the trailer, is a protagonist worthy of Ripley. That's not really negotiable.
This entry was originally posted at http://vehemently.dreamwidth.org/26272.html. Comment wherever you like.