Ridley Scott's Alien prequels have always been full of creative philosophies and eerie aesthetics.
"Alien: Covenant" still has the same formula and taste as before , including classic scenes such as the chase of the secret room and the destruction of all members, the standard biochemical man, the mass-produced alien, the dark blue environmental tone and the eternal The chill hidden in the silence.
Engineers, humans, cyborgs, and aliens continue the unsolved creator puzzles and human nature of Prometheus.
Many people who haven't watched "Prometheus" should not get the points in "Alien: Covenant".
The huge story structure and the setting of the alien world require the audience to learn a lot of content. After all, the first alien (1979) has been nearly 40 years old.
The charm of the Alien series is not only because of its horror and horror, "Prometheus" and "Alien: Covenant" have raised this series to the height of philosophical speculation, and the whole "Alien" series The world view, the universe view Infinite extension has reinjected vigorous vitality into it.
The art and design of this series of films are particularly "exquisite and unique". If you put aside its horror and thriller film type classification, take the appearance of plot and picture, "Prometheus" and "Covenant" can even be regarded as an art film.
After all, Mr. Lei (director Ridley Scott) is already 80 years old. Maybe people of this age are pursuing the ultimate. His thinking about the depth of the plot is more important than making money.
This time, the chain of "Prometheus" released in 2012 was finally completed by director Ridley Scott. At the same time, the chain between "Prometheus" and "Alien 1" was also completed. Alien evolution chain. It's just that at the same time as the completion, there are many pits left in the movie.
"Alien: Covenant" did not directly connect with the story of "Prometheus" at the beginning, but traced back to the beginning of the creation of the biochemical man David (Michael Fassbender), he and his creator Wei Lun (Prometheus) A hidden dialogue with a strong philosophical color between the boss of the group in Metheus. After this foreshadowing introduction, the film's plot quickly jumps to the "Covenant" spacecraft that is on a cosmic colonization mission 10 years after the "Prometheus" story.
Compared with the life-saving spacecraft "Prometheus", the life-saving spacecraft built for him by the boss of Wayland 10 years ago, the "Covenant" civilian spacecraft that performs the space colonization mission is indeed much simpler and more shabby. , whether it is the interior of the spacecraft or the equipment of the landing personnel, and the contract spacecraft needs to be recharged 8 times during the 7 years of flight to reach the destination, and it is reasonable to turn on the solar sail for charging and encounter a stellar neutron wind accident. It was unpredictable, and at the moment it just received an inexplicable transmission signal of human civilization, and the computer Mother also predicted that the planet was more suitable for colonization and survival than the planet that was originally planned to be colonized.
Therefore, the contract followed the signal to that unknown planet.
But it's actually a dark and dangerous world where two crew members are invaded by flying plant "spores" of unknown creatures on the planet. Alien creatures pierced the body of the crew and completed their "birth". In the crisis, the only inhabitant of this planet is "Biochemical Man" David, and also the only survivor of "Prometheus" , rescued the team and led them to a grave.
Killing and conspiracy.
David used the incoming contract team members as the host of biological experiments, complementing his long-term research on black water, and finally created the mature alien in the alien series.
After a twist at the end of the story, David successfully boarded the colony ship, the Covenant, with his alien embryos and the more than 2,000 human genomes on board.
Start a new story with the background music of "The Gods Step into Havana".
Compared with "Prometheus", "Alien: Covenant" is more terrifying and bloody, and there are a lot of brutal and sharp bloody scenes such as dismembered belly and limbs, because "Prometheus" has basically set the background of the preamble. It's all made clear, so "Alien: Covenant" can directly focus on the dangers encountered by the "Covenant" spacecraft on alien planets, and explain the universal fable about the origin of life in "Prometheus" in a simple way. Give a thorough explanation.
A: We are experimental products and all gods are ruthless
The beginning of the "Prometheus" movie is that the engineer came to the earth a long time ago, and he drank black water by himself, and then his body's genes collapsed and drowned in the running water. The genetic recombination after the body's decomposition finally created human beings. In "Prometheus", a DNA verification strip is used to prove that human beings and "engineers" have the same genetic code. Ridlis Cotter, in the proposition of the origin of human beings, gives us a choice - "human beings" Creations from extraterrestrial civilizations".
All the human ruins in the "Prometheus" movie point to a planet, but that planet is an experimental base for engineers.
Director Ridley Scott tells us that the emergence of humans is not the product of Darwinian evolution as we think, full of mysterious and noble purposes, maybe just an experiment, just because, more advanced civilizations they can Doing this is like creating robots, creating cloned sheep.
That's all.
All human beings are proud of the dignity of life and all civilizations, perhaps just an experiment by a huge designer or creator. After the experiment is completed, the higher civilization that did the experiment will come back to erase the traces and influences of this experiment.
And that's what Prometheus is about.
Why did the creator destroy human beings?
Maybe just because of humans themselves.
Western culture and religion attach great importance to the concept of "creator" and "creator", and science is actually a product dominated by the development of religion.
The black forest principle in the three-body is very clear, but the three-body is the exploration of outer space, while "Prometheus" and "Alien: Contract" are to search from the source, any civilization is the first to survive, when you find that you are doing experiments If something has the opportunity or ability to threaten itself, will it not stop this kind of situation from happening? Therefore, the creator chooses to destroy this civilization. In the final analysis, it is a survival instinct. When an intelligent life form has self-awareness, it means that it is out of control, and if it is not controlled, it may cause danger.
And eliminating the possibility of danger is a choice.
Throughout the history of human development, human civilization has shown strong aggressiveness. The corpse of the engineer in "Pu" says that the engineer died 2,000 years ago, just at the beginning of the AD. Perhaps the story of Jesus mentioned by religion is the engineer's body. , Engineers may have discovered the aggressiveness and harm of human beings, which are intelligent creatures, and decided to eliminate human beings.
B: Complete the evolutionary chain of aliens
Ridley Scott's goal is to start a new series based on the alien world after the "Alien" series. Therefore, the format and amount of information of the first "Pu" in the prequel are very large, and too many questions have been formed, and the length of a single Prometheus film cannot fully answer. So when filming "Prometheus", Ridley Scott said that "Pu" is not a prequel to "Alien", but a new starting point before the "Alien" story timeline. " and "Prometheus" 2 movies, there are at least 3 more movies, and this year's "Covenant" is just one of them.
Elizabeth Sean finally went to find the home planet of the engineer. What is the follow-up story?
In the "Contract" movie, Dr. Sean is dead, and in the short film of the "Contract", it is explained that Sean and David communicated with each other and understood each other during the time when they went to the engineer's home planet. rely.
Short story after "Prometheus"
In the movie, when the members of the Covenant arrive at the homeworld of the Engineer, they find wheat.
A crew member said that the wheat was originally cultivated by humans, but had not been maintained for a long time, suggesting that it should have been grown by humans.
It can be seen that Sean has lived on this planet for a while.
In the movie, David released black water bombs to attack the engineer group, and his motives for killing Sean and transforming aliens have not been answered for the time being, but we can guess through "Contract".
What is the source of the alien?
Keywords: black water
Alien is an alien creature with its own system, with its unique life characteristics and behavioral laws, but where does the alien come from? What does it have to do with humans? The opening chapter of "Alien" states that the alien egg and the alien are a perfect DNA-eating organism.
When humans found the engineer base planet based on the ruins, that planet is actually a laboratory. We feel that the plot is understandable. The experimental goal of this planet is evolution, the evolution of the gene chain.
The engineers in "Pu" devoured the black water to evolve into humans, which may be based on the function of black water. Aliens and humans may both be the evolutionary products of black water, and it may be that black water, a substance that can catalyze evolution, may come from Alien.
Its properties are an organic liquid, which is explained in the movie, and it also has the infectious power of this organism.
Blackwater-style virus organisms can infect different organisms, and evolve different variants based on the genetic information and DNA of the organisms themselves. It is more like a genetically simpler, superior, and advanced life weapon, invading, absorbing, and evolving. In "Prometheus", the black water infected earthworms formed a king cobra-shaped allomorph, and the abnormal shape generated by the embryo infection of humans after mating has a different octopus shape, different evolution lines, and different infection methods, which will bring different evolutionary outcomes.
There is a detail in "Pu". In the etchings that appeared twice in close-up in the blackwater storage room of the experimental planet, the complicated floral decorations corroded by the air have highlighted a central point - the upper limbs spread out and the legs close together in a cross shape. An alien-like object with a lowered head.
Maybe engineers have encountered and studied this species a long time ago. How the alien species got black water or reacted with black water, we don't know, maybe the original body of the alien may have existed earlier Organisms, perhaps the birthplace of a higher life form, have infinite possible explanations.
But the destruction of the engineer's experimental base is inseparable from the aliens. We still don't know the original source of the mystery of the alien's life. We still don't know how the alien eggs and mature aliens in Alien 1 came from, at least it was explained in the movie "Contract" .
In "Contract", the blackwater weapon was released to the engineer's home planet by David, and the entire planet was infected and became dead, and the arrival of the contract team gave the weathered blackwater plant spores a way to infect, resulting in A variant of white.
After David cast a black water bottle on the entire engineer planet, the black water infection was integrated into the natural ecology of the engineer's home planet. During the 10 years since the contract team came to this planet, David carried out a lot of work on the creatures of this planet. The research on "alienation" can be seen from the various drawings on the walls of the laboratory and the various biological specimens on display.
David continued to improve by observing the experimental results of black water and different creatures, but before the arrival of the contract team, the planet had no experimental subjects that could be provided to him for experiments, so the team was infected after the contract landed. David was so interested in that white alien, and even wanted to observe and explore this white alien.
Therefore, when the white alien was killed by the acting captain, he brought the captain to his alien egg with anger. The acting captain was his last evolutionary requirement to create an xenomorph mature body, and we finally saw the long-lost mature body xenomorph. , appearing in The Covenant.
Even so, after David guided the acting captain to be invaded by the alien egg-hugging bug, the moment when the alien mature body broke out of his body, David's creator's face was matched with the soundtrack. At that moment, the screen made people feel What I felt was not terror, but solemnity and emotion.
C: David's Awakening
In fact, aside from the alien itself, the absolute protagonists of "Prometheus" and "Alien: Covenant" are the biochemical man David. "Alien: Covenant" not only supplements the pit of "Prometheus", but also improves the behavior motivation of David, the biochemical man.
Before "The Covenant" was released, many people had been discussing the process of David leading Weyler's team to meet the engineer in "Prometheus", and whether that dialogue with the engineer was the reason why the engineer killed the human being, but in Prometheus. After the release of "Covenant", I think David's self-awakening and the change in attitude towards the human species have become irrefutable facts.
In 2025, Wei Lun created the first generation of biochemical human - David.
Everyone should remember that Walter's routine inspection in "The Covenant" is very well-organized and has no other actions, while David not only peeped into Dr. Sean's dreams during his long flying years in "Pu", but also watched "Lawrence of Arabia". ” imitating the hero, the analogy shows David’s difference.
Looking back at the opening of "Contract", David was born sitting in a very simple and narrow white room, and had a conversation with the founder Wei Lun. Looking at the layout of the room, there is a piano on David's right, an oil painting on the left, and Michelangelo's sculpture David behind David.
Welch Allen asked David to play a designated piano piece live, and discussed the philosophy of creation and being created.
The development of artificial intelligence to this day is actually still slow in the field of cognition, but it has already surpassed human beings in the field of empirical computing (Ke Jie cry). It is impossible to write an emotional style.
Therefore, at the beginning of "Contract", Wei Lun asked him what the piano and oil paintings were, and David answered them one by one. What is worth thinking about is that the content of the oil paintings is the nativity of Jesus, and the tune is the ending of the playing. The Gods of Qu walk into Havana.
Perhaps, it is in these details that Ridley Scott echoes the birth of a new era.
At the end of this conversation between David and Weilun, David resisted its creator Weilun with one sentence, saying, "You humans will die, but I won't."
Wei Lun did not continue the conversation, but asked for David to come to him from the piano in the distance, pick up the teapot in his fickleness, and pour him the tea at hand.
Wei Lun told David in this way, I created you, I dominate you, and I can destroy you too.
In fact, a few short dialogues at the beginning of the film are to let the audience know that he is a biochemical person who has independent thinking and keeps raising questions and accumulating meanings. It also sets the tone of David's behavior in the whole film of "Contract".
Whether in "Pu" or "Contract", David is a bionic robot with self-consciousness. Human beings are to him as the creator is to humans. Humans want to find answers, so why not he? His self-awareness is A pursuit of the id, he constantly learns the feelings of human emotions and knowledge, imitating human beings, in order to obtain what he thinks is the "freedom" of the soul, a sense of freedom freed from the hands of the creator human beings, the evolution and development of species , is an evolutionary process from simple to complex, low-level to high-level, when it produces a certain or considerable intelligence, it can slowly create ideas in its survival activities, and the desire for curiosity and exploration emerges, thinking Improve the way of thinking, which in turn creates subjectivity: independent thinking and rational thinking.
In the film "Contract", the follow-up biochemical man Walter once said to David: You are too egoistic, too human-like, which makes human beings uneasy, so the next new model (the biochemical man after David) becomes simple. .
For David, who is intellectually superior but emotionally incapable of belonging, the human who created him is not as perfect as him, and he soon realizes that he may be more perfect than the "creator". The colonization of human aliens, in David's understanding, is the inheritance and continuation of life's struggle, but in David's world view of the universe, all this is in vain, because David, as a biochemical man, can be parallel to time, he The point of curiosity is to explore the mysteries and evolution of life in the universe.
In "Contract", David lured the acting captain to the side of the alien egg, and the face-hugging bug successfully parasitized the acting captain.
The captain woke up and asked David, "What do you believe in?"
David said: "Creation"
Engineers created man, man created David.
Maybe the reason why engineers want to destroy humanity,
It's the same reason you wanted to destroy David when you watched the movie.
In addition, whether it is David or an engineer, the tools they use to destroy human beings are - aliens.
Brain hole guess: Sean's death
Like whether the engineer in the opening credits of "Prometheus" sacrificed himself or was punished, the biggest mystery in "Covenant" is that Sean is dead. The footage revealed in the film has confirmed that Sean is dead. It is unknown whether he died in David's hands, but it must have been used for experimental research by David after his death. The alien egg must be related to Sean's body. Can't get out of the relationship. David is not limited by the setting of human morality. On the one hand, he can experiment with Xiao, and on the other hand, he can love her in the way that David understands.
Biospecimens for David's experiments
Conjecture A: David kills Sean
In "Prometheus", David spied on Sean's dream and killed Sean's husband Holloway. In the end, Sean rescued him and flew to the home planet of engineers with him. In the details of the two films, Both show David's attachment to Sean. Even in "The Covenant," David and Walter talk about the meaning of love, while trying to kiss Walter and Dany, a gesture he also said he tried on Sean.
For biochemical people, love may be an emotion higher than one's self, a state more difficult to achieve than "creation". Facing emotional dependence, David may have done some unconventional moral circumstances for Dr. Sean. Her actions, which may include kissing, may be read sensitively by Sean, prompting her to flee David's side, leading to tragedy.
Everyone should still remember that in "Prometheus", Wei Lun's way of pursuing eternal life is to find an engineer and seek immortality. David may want Sean to be as immortal as her after the tragedy, so the evolutionary infection of aliens may be One way he loves her.
Conjecture B: Sean self-death (sacrifice)
After all, in "Prometheus", after Sean died and was infected, Harroway was "infected", and he also gave birth to an octopus alien. It is difficult to say whether there is any black water remaining in the body, and whether this residue is harmful to her. make an impact.
If, assuming that the Blackwater had an irreversible chronic infection on Sean, then according to David's attachment to her, using the Blackwater weapon to attack the Engineer, looking for various Blackwater-infected organisms and researching how to save Sean would be possible for David will do.
However, there may be a fallacy in guessing David based on the motives of human thinking.
But I still look forward to the next step of Mr. Lei's disclosure. After all, the next one is about the story between "Contract" and "Prometheus".
ps:
"Alien" has always been my favorite series: the whole book of Alien was published, I bought it at the first time, "Contract" was released in Hong Kong, I went to Hong Kong to watch it after getting off the subway at the first time, and rushed back to Shenzhen on the last subway. After all, Mr. Lei is 80 years old, it is really a lifetime series. Before my headline number, I also posted the past and present life of aliens, you can watch it together.
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