[Unscripted, just for patrons] Alien Covenant is Good, Actually

Hegelian: Covenant

Parahelix

Absolutely, wonderful point. Environmentalism, Technology destruction and an awareness of the impact Humans make on our or other worlds, was a major context in the first movie. It is a great poetic circle to reflect the consequences of "colonialism in space" back to a public still supporting our planet-wide destruction and consumption.

Yeah, I remember that story. Great stuff.

Keef Baker

Also, tangent about robots lying. One of my favorite Asimov stories is about a robot learns about emotional pain. Then because one of his laws of robotics is robots can't harm a human or allow a human to come to harm through inaction, the robot proceeds to tell everyone in the lab whatever they want to hear so that their feelings won't be hurt.

Kel McDonald

I basically went and watched Promethus and Covenant because of this video. And I think its interesting that David is raised/serves a billionaire capitalist his whole existence, so when he tries to make "a perfect creature" it's a creature than can only consume.

Kel McDonald

I wanted to give a Patreon feedback. I treated this video like a podcast, listening while crafting, which means I enjoy the discussion about a favorite Movie series and meaning_on board. However there was an insane amount of ads, which required me to engage constantly with the screen. As Patreon is used for extra content to make us feel like special humans, linking to a Youtube video that had that many Ads, well...no bueno. Loved it...you could rant anyway and I'd listen.

Damn that is a hot take. Like, I have to hold myself back from that take. I think Aliens is one of the best movies ever made, within the top 5 Sci fi movies, and holds up incredibly well. It is up there with T-2. Aliens 3 is good. I haven't seen the more recent ones.

Benedict Holland

Having a look into this today

Sophia is pretty sure JFK's head just kinda did that

I hated Promethus, and haven't seen Covenant as a result. The thing is, I liked a lot of the ideas of Promethus, and I actually loved the first 30 minutes or so of the film. But I felt it descended into silliness that just got worse and worse as the film went on. My problem with it is less conceptual and more about execution.

Penny Sullivan

Thank you for this. While not a Prometheus fan (well not a fan of the non-David scenes), I have found my love of Covenent to be a rare fandom candle burning in the darkness. It's one of the rare times a prequel retro-con (how the Aliens were created) actually had effect on me as it is a reveal of character as opposed to a shock story reveal. It makes sense to me that someone so cold as him would make a creature so "perfect, " as Ash called it. I wish Scott could get the money to round out his David trilogy though I am holding no breath.

Tom Tanuki is an anti-fascist organiser in Australia who founded the organisation "Yelling at Racist Dogs" - who do exactly what you imagine they do. He's very online and it would be great to see an interview with him

I do not think there is a power on Earth capable of making me not hate Prometheus. I really, really, *really* HATE Prometheus with a fiery passion I don't even apply to films that are completely inept or, in many ways, even more harmful in terms of messaging or content. I'm not a very good film critic so all I can say is that, as a biologist and someone who got involved in the christian conservative/reactionary backlash against biology in the early aughts Prometheus is a film that takes an explicit christian creationism lens to its foundational biology. Like, its premise is fundamentally, fractally wrong in a way that gainsays not even future projections of the knowledge but our current knowledge in the field, and by implication through its rhetoric and story beats took the side of the forces of reaction (Dover v. Kitzmiller was less than a decade old at the time). The actual scientists in the movie are presented as morons, while the whole thing is framed as a test of faith for the 'I choose to believe' protagonist. The engineers either caused biogenesis through panspermia around 4 billion years ago, at which point I'd say their R&D department needs a better time schedule if they were expecting to get anything useful out of the project, or they somehow broke every known law of biology and created humans, and *only* humans, around a million years ago. There's really no other way to read it, well, beyond the whole thing being an allegory or something. Gah. Sorry for ranting, but that film is a sore spot. It's just wrong. Fundamentally wrong, and wrong in a way that misinformed people about evolutionary biology, a field I've spent two decades studying and am somewhat fond of. I will absolutely agree that Alien 3 was in many ways better than Aliens however. Spicy take, but I support it.

Anonymous Unknown

This was fun, thank you. Hype for all the upcoming stuff!

Composite

aw, sweet

Spectra