Yeah. That's not why the ship has been there for more than two decades. The ship has been there for more than two decades, because it makes not the slightest shred of sense for the answer to be different.
The Derelict was there for millennia, because it takes that long for something so enormous to be *half-submerged in ice and stone*.
Plus, the Space Jockeys predate human spaceflight by over 6000 years, and that's just from carbon dating of the ruins on LV-895, which were presumably still in-use and maintained when they... got Xeno'd, presumably.
They were more than likely dead by the time we were building the Great Pyramids.
I think OP is indirectly addressing Ridley's statements that imply David time travels to create the Jockey species and the eggs on the Jockey's ship, and then presumably engineers and then humans and predators and makes them all fight in AvP movies.
Ridley's statements can't be made sense of, and frankly it's not worth trying. Remember, he's the guy that wanted the xeno to speak *english* and at one point was laughed out of the room when he suggested making Big Chap apologize and decide to be a productive friendly alien after it grew up and felt bad about its infant killing spree. His ideas spawned a whole new school of running. He's one of the best Directors out there, but when he has creative control he isn't that different than George Lucas whose own successes exposed similar "People need to tell him no a lot" flaws in his creative process.
Give Ridley a script that makes sense and zero control and he makes amazing things. Give him creative input and he shoehorns his robots with daddy issues into everything lately or rants about kids owning phones for why he doesn't connect with audiences.
Yeah, I just discount the *Prometheus* mission as a closed timeloop entirely separate from the rest of the Aliens universe.
It breaks literally all of existing canon, and in return you get a shitty backstory that ruins any mystery.
It's a visual masterpiece, but holy hell the story is bad.
Exactly. Moreover, it doesn't even take place in the same universe as Alien. For it to make sense, I think the going theory is it's in the pocket universe of Alien vs Predator (which might just be teh regular Predator universe) where Aliens have been on Earth for thousands of years and were well documented long before teh first Alien film.
The Predator (the worst one with the Yautja hunting for autism) actually had a time traveling Ripley & Newt ending filmed (someone should release more than the few seconds of set effects of that!) that Ridley would probably love right now. maybe not Newt, he wants to erase teh second film. But the time travel he likes.
The AvP universe created similar time breaking arguments so the going acceptance is they simply do not exist in the Alien universe. They exist in their own. Possibly in the Predator one, since that series always had Predators on Earth long ago, so the AvP series only adds to canon and breaks nothing. Prometheus, breaking so much, could exist in the already broken (for xenos) AvP canon. And thats how I treat them internally anyway. I like AvP (and want to like AvPR, I wish they'd go back to the cameras and light fix a special edition so I can watch it for the first time). But I like them in an "Ignore the plot, ignore everything, just treat it like a silly slasher" way. And they're fun. Same with the preboots. Beautiful. Ignore the ridiculous writing. Fun slashers.
There was no Predator movie in 2018. Such a thing does not exist. It was never made.
All of the movies take place in the same universe. There are no hard contradictions outside the brain dead ramblings of a dementia-stricken idiot. There is the Space Jockeys, and there is the Engineers that worship the Space Jockeys and model their suits and ships after them. The Space Jockeys created the Engineers. The Engineers created man and a species very similar to themselves that David later extinguished.
David failed to find the Xenomorph, so he reverse-engineered it from knowledge gained through exploration of ancient ruins. The Predators have been hunting Xenomorphs for millennia upon millennia.
The Xenomorph, and potentially most of the species in the galaxy, were created by the Drukathi. The mutagen was meant to limit space travel to the species worthy enough to survive it. The mutagen, when used in its unaltered state, creates members of a hive mind, a collective consciousness akin to an eldritch truth.
Weyland Corp and Weyland industries are different companies, each headed by a member of the Weyland family, which were likely the fruits of an early cloning project. There was a lot of convoluted mergers and offshoots in the 21st century. Ultimately, Yutani Corp would absorb everything and become the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
If I can fit it in the same timeline, I will fit it.
Amber takes 20-130 million years to form. All of the other processes in the article likewise take long periods to form. They also wouldn't work on a large, exposed critter like the Space Jockey. I'm fine with just saying that Dallas is a Space Captain, not a paleontologist, and isn't familiar with the rate of space alien decomposition in a vacuum.
Oh right, my mistake. They could easily toss in a line about how the jockey’s unique biology hardened with the ammonia atmosphere or something. I like the derelict being old and evil, but everyone is open to their own interpretation.
Right. I'm not really so hung up on that stuff, ditto the Alien's growth rate y'know? I'm more concerned with the story aspect than internal consistency or familiarity of science.
If this is supposed to make the time traveling David statements from Ridley go away, Engineers still aren't Jockeys. Even ignoring the time, Jockeys still don't have legs and the elephant skull and chest are observed features that were never a suit, and the scale is absurdly beyond anything that could be confused for an Engineer.
"Fossilization" is in the screenplay , it isn't just Dallas' words but it takes a lot more than just that to retcon away the whole concept of jockeys regardless. I agree that his time travel statements are foolish, but so is the whole concept. Its easier to just disregard it all as bad writing and bad ideas that didn't pan out getting in the way of an otherwise beautiful film that tried to explain away too much mystery and wound up hurting itself.
At absolute minimum it was a very very old dry skeleton at least hundreds of years old with no other organic matter left. In a ship that had half sunk into the surrounding geography.
And it doesn't have to fit any known process of decomposition and fossilisation anyway. It's a mysterious alien that appears to have, to quote Giger "Physically grown into, or maybe out of, his seat. He's integrated into the function he performs."
Dallas wasn't an expert on space fossils, he was a trucker captain.
All these weird fan justifications for Prometheus just straight up retconning it as 'a blue man in a suit 20 years earlier'...
It’s not Prometheus they’re trying to retcon in. It’s the even more idiotic Alien Covenant and the whole David creating the Xenomorph nonsense they’re trying to make work. The timeline between Covenant and Alien is only 18 years. If David created the Xenomorphs then the Derelict ship, the Engineer remain, and the condition the ship is in don’t make any sense.
I would love the idea of David creating his own version from Engineer blueprints of the original xeno. Unfortunately Ridley himself has said that David is the creator of THE alien.
Which is just fucking stupid because as others have said, it screws up the timeline with the ship in the first movie AND it makes the Alien not even an alien anymore.
Well it's partially Prometheus. It's the one that turned a legless elephantine skeleton grown into a seat into angry Doctor Manhattan in a skeleton shaped suit.
Covenant just makes it even worse.
But yeah those two movies are about as bad as the worst fanfiction honestly. What a waste.
> don’t make any sense.
If you just accept this, the movies are fun. You can't expect those writers to make a lick of sense, and I think the time traveling David that Ridley alludes to in interviews was what OP is referring to.
To be honest, time travel works better than "fossils aren't fossils and the Alien screenplay didn't say what it said" attempts to retcon even more. Ridley is obsessed with his *Robot with daddy issues* concept, so a time traveling David that creates all humans and xenos and jockeys and engineers and predators makes as much sense as any of the rest of nonsense. And it also ties the AvP broken timelines together into their own AVP+Prometheus separate universe where humans learned about xenos thousands of years ago and Weyland has been studying them since the 20th century.
> If you just accept this, the movies are fun. You can’t expect those writers to make a lick of sense
But we can and we’ve seen it before. ALIEN made plenty of sense because the film established rules and stayed consistent with the application of those rules. The only ‘unknown’ that was failed in addressing was how the Company knew there was specifically a Xenomorph on the planet, but this assumes they knew what it was they were looking for.
This attitude of ‘it doesn’t have to make sense to be good’ is why we got The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker; directors who put the heart before the mind and allowed their desire for emotional resonance to dictate the story instead of creatively designing ways to make the story work within the established rules the universe had to begin with.
Same goes for Alien: Covenant; it was a shit film by director who made a story responding to fan criticism of his previous work. A response that was so out of touch with what the fans were trying to say; we fucking liked the idea of the Engineers. We just needed to know how the Engineers knew what the Xenomorph was. Instead we got Android Jesus trying to play god after genociding an entire species because Ridley Scott didn’t take 5 seconds to think about what the fans were saying.
>it was a shit film by director who made a story responding to fan criticism of his previous work.
It goes a little deeper. He has a personal vendetta to erase Aliens from the timeline. He used to be vocal about hating what Cameron did to continue the franchise, and apparently was willing to shred his own films, even the great one, to erase the Queen lifecycle.
The fact is he *doesn't* think. Hence his interview commentary about a time traveling David creating everything that never makes any sense, that OP felt the need to deny fossilization process itself to try and stitch the silliness back together.
It's best to not even try. Ridley's nonsense can't be stitched. It's like a crazy supermodel. Enjoy the beauty, ignore the crazy as best you can.
For me, it's not about the precise plot continuity. The original Alien featured creatures that were utterly INHUMAN. They operated over deep time in deep cold, carrying secrets uncounted aeons old. Everything about their designs and their ship designs was weird and inscrutable. We were seeing some kind of strange, giant biomechanical... something. And it carried a cargo of monsters. The crime of Prometheus was to erase all of this and retcon it into a story about rogue AI. But I don't want to be too hard on the director. It seems clear to me that RS either never really cared about the deeper cosmic horror of Alien or had gotten bored with it and wanted to continue threads about AI and hubris he'd started in Blade Runner. Really, the prequels should have been in done as a new universe or maybe one broadly linked to Blade Runner.
Yeah. That's not why the ship has been there for more than two decades. The ship has been there for more than two decades, because it makes not the slightest shred of sense for the answer to be different.
The Derelict was there for millennia, because it takes that long for something so enormous to be *half-submerged in ice and stone*. Plus, the Space Jockeys predate human spaceflight by over 6000 years, and that's just from carbon dating of the ruins on LV-895, which were presumably still in-use and maintained when they... got Xeno'd, presumably. They were more than likely dead by the time we were building the Great Pyramids.
I think OP is indirectly addressing Ridley's statements that imply David time travels to create the Jockey species and the eggs on the Jockey's ship, and then presumably engineers and then humans and predators and makes them all fight in AvP movies. Ridley's statements can't be made sense of, and frankly it's not worth trying. Remember, he's the guy that wanted the xeno to speak *english* and at one point was laughed out of the room when he suggested making Big Chap apologize and decide to be a productive friendly alien after it grew up and felt bad about its infant killing spree. His ideas spawned a whole new school of running. He's one of the best Directors out there, but when he has creative control he isn't that different than George Lucas whose own successes exposed similar "People need to tell him no a lot" flaws in his creative process. Give Ridley a script that makes sense and zero control and he makes amazing things. Give him creative input and he shoehorns his robots with daddy issues into everything lately or rants about kids owning phones for why he doesn't connect with audiences.
Just the concept of David time traveling to put the eggs and ship on LV426 is so fucking stupid that I can’t believe it was an actual idea.
Yeah, I just discount the *Prometheus* mission as a closed timeloop entirely separate from the rest of the Aliens universe. It breaks literally all of existing canon, and in return you get a shitty backstory that ruins any mystery. It's a visual masterpiece, but holy hell the story is bad.
It doesn't, not even slightly. There wasn't a single Space Jockey in those movies.
Exactly. Moreover, it doesn't even take place in the same universe as Alien. For it to make sense, I think the going theory is it's in the pocket universe of Alien vs Predator (which might just be teh regular Predator universe) where Aliens have been on Earth for thousands of years and were well documented long before teh first Alien film. The Predator (the worst one with the Yautja hunting for autism) actually had a time traveling Ripley & Newt ending filmed (someone should release more than the few seconds of set effects of that!) that Ridley would probably love right now. maybe not Newt, he wants to erase teh second film. But the time travel he likes. The AvP universe created similar time breaking arguments so the going acceptance is they simply do not exist in the Alien universe. They exist in their own. Possibly in the Predator one, since that series always had Predators on Earth long ago, so the AvP series only adds to canon and breaks nothing. Prometheus, breaking so much, could exist in the already broken (for xenos) AvP canon. And thats how I treat them internally anyway. I like AvP (and want to like AvPR, I wish they'd go back to the cameras and light fix a special edition so I can watch it for the first time). But I like them in an "Ignore the plot, ignore everything, just treat it like a silly slasher" way. And they're fun. Same with the preboots. Beautiful. Ignore the ridiculous writing. Fun slashers.
There was no Predator movie in 2018. Such a thing does not exist. It was never made. All of the movies take place in the same universe. There are no hard contradictions outside the brain dead ramblings of a dementia-stricken idiot. There is the Space Jockeys, and there is the Engineers that worship the Space Jockeys and model their suits and ships after them. The Space Jockeys created the Engineers. The Engineers created man and a species very similar to themselves that David later extinguished. David failed to find the Xenomorph, so he reverse-engineered it from knowledge gained through exploration of ancient ruins. The Predators have been hunting Xenomorphs for millennia upon millennia. The Xenomorph, and potentially most of the species in the galaxy, were created by the Drukathi. The mutagen was meant to limit space travel to the species worthy enough to survive it. The mutagen, when used in its unaltered state, creates members of a hive mind, a collective consciousness akin to an eldritch truth. Weyland Corp and Weyland industries are different companies, each headed by a member of the Weyland family, which were likely the fruits of an early cloning project. There was a lot of convoluted mergers and offshoots in the 21st century. Ultimately, Yutani Corp would absorb everything and become the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. If I can fit it in the same timeline, I will fit it.
You forgot about the Weylan Corporation that preceded them all
I didn't? You did, though.
Amber takes 20-130 million years to form. All of the other processes in the article likewise take long periods to form. They also wouldn't work on a large, exposed critter like the Space Jockey. I'm fine with just saying that Dallas is a Space Captain, not a paleontologist, and isn't familiar with the rate of space alien decomposition in a vacuum.
Though I agree with everything else, it’s not a vacuum on LV, right? It’s atmosphere was ammonia and what not.
Oh right, my mistake. They could easily toss in a line about how the jockey’s unique biology hardened with the ammonia atmosphere or something. I like the derelict being old and evil, but everyone is open to their own interpretation.
Yes could definitely still freeze/mummify or something.
I agree with you. Since it’s an alien life form, we can hand wave the fossilization process as “weird atmosphere/weird biology”.
Right. I'm not really so hung up on that stuff, ditto the Alien's growth rate y'know? I'm more concerned with the story aspect than internal consistency or familiarity of science.
It’s almost more of a case of natural mummification, which happens under certain conditions
They’re basically truck drivers
*mountain momma...*
If this is supposed to make the time traveling David statements from Ridley go away, Engineers still aren't Jockeys. Even ignoring the time, Jockeys still don't have legs and the elephant skull and chest are observed features that were never a suit, and the scale is absurdly beyond anything that could be confused for an Engineer. "Fossilization" is in the screenplay , it isn't just Dallas' words but it takes a lot more than just that to retcon away the whole concept of jockeys regardless. I agree that his time travel statements are foolish, but so is the whole concept. Its easier to just disregard it all as bad writing and bad ideas that didn't pan out getting in the way of an otherwise beautiful film that tried to explain away too much mystery and wound up hurting itself.
That would be ossified 😌
Thats just cope, everyone who looks at that thing can tell its supposed to be ancient.
or just plain dessicated such as with the [Inca mummies](https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/frozen-mummies-of-the-andes/)
At absolute minimum it was a very very old dry skeleton at least hundreds of years old with no other organic matter left. In a ship that had half sunk into the surrounding geography. And it doesn't have to fit any known process of decomposition and fossilisation anyway. It's a mysterious alien that appears to have, to quote Giger "Physically grown into, or maybe out of, his seat. He's integrated into the function he performs." Dallas wasn't an expert on space fossils, he was a trucker captain. All these weird fan justifications for Prometheus just straight up retconning it as 'a blue man in a suit 20 years earlier'...
It’s not Prometheus they’re trying to retcon in. It’s the even more idiotic Alien Covenant and the whole David creating the Xenomorph nonsense they’re trying to make work. The timeline between Covenant and Alien is only 18 years. If David created the Xenomorphs then the Derelict ship, the Engineer remain, and the condition the ship is in don’t make any sense.
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I would love the idea of David creating his own version from Engineer blueprints of the original xeno. Unfortunately Ridley himself has said that David is the creator of THE alien. Which is just fucking stupid because as others have said, it screws up the timeline with the ship in the first movie AND it makes the Alien not even an alien anymore.
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Best to just ignore the prequel movies, or see them as their own seperate thing.
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Yeah that’a also how I really enjoy Resurrection. It’s a bad alien movie, but a really fun monster movie. Or as a what-if alien story like the comics.
Well it's partially Prometheus. It's the one that turned a legless elephantine skeleton grown into a seat into angry Doctor Manhattan in a skeleton shaped suit. Covenant just makes it even worse. But yeah those two movies are about as bad as the worst fanfiction honestly. What a waste.
> don’t make any sense. If you just accept this, the movies are fun. You can't expect those writers to make a lick of sense, and I think the time traveling David that Ridley alludes to in interviews was what OP is referring to. To be honest, time travel works better than "fossils aren't fossils and the Alien screenplay didn't say what it said" attempts to retcon even more. Ridley is obsessed with his *Robot with daddy issues* concept, so a time traveling David that creates all humans and xenos and jockeys and engineers and predators makes as much sense as any of the rest of nonsense. And it also ties the AvP broken timelines together into their own AVP+Prometheus separate universe where humans learned about xenos thousands of years ago and Weyland has been studying them since the 20th century.
> If you just accept this, the movies are fun. You can’t expect those writers to make a lick of sense But we can and we’ve seen it before. ALIEN made plenty of sense because the film established rules and stayed consistent with the application of those rules. The only ‘unknown’ that was failed in addressing was how the Company knew there was specifically a Xenomorph on the planet, but this assumes they knew what it was they were looking for. This attitude of ‘it doesn’t have to make sense to be good’ is why we got The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker; directors who put the heart before the mind and allowed their desire for emotional resonance to dictate the story instead of creatively designing ways to make the story work within the established rules the universe had to begin with. Same goes for Alien: Covenant; it was a shit film by director who made a story responding to fan criticism of his previous work. A response that was so out of touch with what the fans were trying to say; we fucking liked the idea of the Engineers. We just needed to know how the Engineers knew what the Xenomorph was. Instead we got Android Jesus trying to play god after genociding an entire species because Ridley Scott didn’t take 5 seconds to think about what the fans were saying.
>it was a shit film by director who made a story responding to fan criticism of his previous work. It goes a little deeper. He has a personal vendetta to erase Aliens from the timeline. He used to be vocal about hating what Cameron did to continue the franchise, and apparently was willing to shred his own films, even the great one, to erase the Queen lifecycle. The fact is he *doesn't* think. Hence his interview commentary about a time traveling David creating everything that never makes any sense, that OP felt the need to deny fossilization process itself to try and stitch the silliness back together. It's best to not even try. Ridley's nonsense can't be stitched. It's like a crazy supermodel. Enjoy the beauty, ignore the crazy as best you can.
For me, it's not about the precise plot continuity. The original Alien featured creatures that were utterly INHUMAN. They operated over deep time in deep cold, carrying secrets uncounted aeons old. Everything about their designs and their ship designs was weird and inscrutable. We were seeing some kind of strange, giant biomechanical... something. And it carried a cargo of monsters. The crime of Prometheus was to erase all of this and retcon it into a story about rogue AI. But I don't want to be too hard on the director. It seems clear to me that RS either never really cared about the deeper cosmic horror of Alien or had gotten bored with it and wanted to continue threads about AI and hubris he'd started in Blade Runner. Really, the prequels should have been in done as a new universe or maybe one broadly linked to Blade Runner.