A reassessment of The Films Prometheus and Covenant

[BAYLOR]

I think it owes a huge debt, in almost every way - story, the idea of space truckers / grungy spaceships to O'Bannon's previous movie - Dark Star. If anything Alien is Dark Star but done with an awful lot more technical accomplishment.



Giger most definitely brought something new to the screen both with the Alien and the look of the space jockey's ship.

It also owes a debt to the films like

1. It the Terror from Beyond Space
2. Planet of the Vampires

 

[BAYLOR]

Prometheus isn't awful, but it was deffo a case of Scott being less interested in Alien and more interested in telling his Bladerunner story combined with writing something around his private religious beliefs. Apparently the original script was better than what we got.

There are great bits in it - David was a wonderful character until the end. I could watch him being creepy and doing TE Lawrence impressions all day. But some of the creative choices in the film - the flute, making the space jockey's giant blue humans in suits, the biologist character, the old man makeup, the forced tension between scientists, running and jumping after having stitches etc... were groan inducingly bad.

It did look beautiful in iMax, though.

The biggest crime, imho, is that Guillermo del Toro didn't get to do Mountains of Madness because of Prometheus.

And what an amazing film he would have given us .