Forum Topic
Neurion
Veteran MemberMemberOvomorphMay-26-2012 8:44 AMIs anybody else concerned about the physical size differential between the Space Jockey in the original ALIEN and PROMETHEUS’ Engineers…or is it just me?
[IMG]http://i1203.photobucket.com/albums/bb381/jmichinock/space-jockey-in-ridley-scotts-alien.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i1203.photobucket.com/albums/bb381/jmichinock/Space-Jockey-pg-99.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i1203.photobucket.com/albums/bb381/jmichinock/prometheusengineer.jpg[/IMG]
RS did not "back himself into a corner." Idiotic fans might back him into a corner in their own minds with their even more idiotic expectations but that's not his problem.
OK let's be serious. Ridley has a 140 mil. bugdet to make an R-rated Scifi-Horror movie. He doesn't give a shit about size and so on. All he thinks of is make a plus, and scare people. Understand the man, he got to make money and if to do so he have to change some things to make it work. It's all buisness and a bit of passion, and since he's hoping for a sequel to prometheus he got to make compromises.
He will make the sequel and Cameron will rewrite his books to make good scifi, and by the time Avatar 2 comes out it will be the best thing ever. One pushes another to the limit like in the old days, that would be wonderful.
See, his arms are not near as long nor is he as tall...
[img]http://www.prometheus-movie.com/media/prometheusX_screencap4.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i1203.photobucket.com/albums/bb381/jmichinock/Space-Jockey-pg-99.jpg[/img]
I'm wandering whether the size can be explained from the way they breed. My theory for a long time is that Jockeys are parrasites, intelligent ones none the less. But my idea is that they are the little worms you see in Holloway's eye. So they can be different sizes based on what species they infect......
By th way, as a mediocre earner I just imagined what's it like to have a couple of hundreds of million bucks to get a project done, don't you think it's crazy these numbers? I mean, we struggle each day in the area of tens and hundred dollars, and these guys got this numbers and sometimes they get frustrated if it doesnt work out.
I get carried away by this amount of money that is spent nowadays.
All this talk of The Derilict Space Jockey and how he fits into The Chair I just had a thought... What if the Space Jockey from Alien hade been floating around in space as Ripley had done but for many thousands of years, got caught in the planetoids gravitiational pull and smashed down onto the rocky outcropping where we find it in Alien?
@Id Rather... Best explaination yet...and I hope it's NEVER explained in a Prometheus film.
Two chairs in those pictures are not the same chair, so that's not the most accurate of metrics.
In one of the trailers. you can see one of the crew looking down at a very tiny SJ-like figure. Then you have the one attacking Shaw, which is large human sized. Then the holograms in the orrery which are a little bit bigger than that. Then the statues, which look to be similar in size to the jockey in Alien.
This leads me to believe that either that SJs come in different sizes, from smaller human size to giant size; or there are two different races of humanoid on that planet.
I wish people would do a little research before posting.
I do hope there will be continuity between Alien and Prometheus. I will be truly disappointed if Ridley doesn't have a space jockey the same size as in Alien. I'm sure I'm not the only fan that doesn't want some BS about there being two different sizes of space jockey's, or perhaps they grow over a very long period of time as someone has already suggested, how absurd would that be? Also another concern is, I always had hoped we would someday see an "Xeno Planet", a planet of their own, that they come from, not being created by some type of "engineers". Now what kind of place would that be? That would be the story!
@Biehn_Bandit... So you think the Engineers have ships with little cockpits and ships with big cockpits and ships with huge cockpits. All same design but different sizes? I guess that could be the case if all the different sizes of Engineers are of age and have the skill to fly or whatev.
Who knows? Can't wait to find out though!
Scott already explained the size disrepancy, if indirectly. In an interview, he related that he wanted his Engineers to be[i] practical[/i], so 13 ft. tall Sjs were a non-starter. End of story.
You can argue that he [i]should[/i] have gone with all-CGI SJs, but the prosthetics look pretty amazing on screen, and the other actors had the benefit of physical characters to work against on set.
Here is a possible explanation..........Evolution.
The SJ on LV-426 is over a million years old.
The Sjs on LV-223 are current, possibly, pygmy-SJs like we have pygmy-Homo-Sapiens here on Earth.
Maybe being that tall was not advantageous and that line died out (like when Homo Sapiens wiped out (out competed) Neanderthal and Cro magnons).
Is there a photo that truly depicts the film scale of the model we see in Prometheus? Maybe, when filmed with child actors from behind, similar to what they did in Alien, it's all relative.
In other words, not even worth debating until the film has been viewed.
Regardless, continuity worship kills creativity.
Maybe the Space Jockey is the bio mechanical suit for the engineer. Much like people can hop into a big truck, maybe the engineer hops into the suit which is much larger than himself, his version of an all terrain/environment space suit.
I think people who have watched anime, will understand the concept of a mech suit.
I'm with you man, the size concerns me. To be honest I was gutted when they said it was a suit and not skeletal remains.....Very risky concept - I was so excited about seeing flesh and bones on these 9 foot "alien" creatures. Some dude in a bio-mechanoid suit pisses me off. I am giving them the benefit of the doubt though....
Being that it is a bio-mechanical suit, I would assume that it could meet whatever the user specified.
I was also wondering if anyone ever consider some sort of unintended sporadic evolutionary growth or maybe lethal mutation? Also, what part does the exploded chest of the (Alien) Space Jockey play in Prometheus? I know it's kind of off topic in this thread, but being that the original Xenomorph, or Star Beast, as it were, was more akin to the SJ's form (If I remember right, the Alien was much taller than a human when it stood upright and as quoted by Ash: "an outer layer of protein polysaccharides. Has a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicon, which gives him a prolonged resistance to adverse environmental conditions." and "...Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility." ) I would think that the Xenoform we know and love is offspring of either an Engineer, or someone inside the suit (assuming the aforementioned or if someone were to become a bio-mechanoid on par with the Engineers/SJ without the suit)
Just to expand upon what Asgardian Playboy suggested, the size difference was merely a design choice by Ridley. In order to interact with the human crew more realistically in Prometheus, he had to reduce the size. When ALIEN was made, the Space Jockey was a story-telling device and not meant to interact with the Nostromo crew, so of course they could let their imaginations run a little wilder on the design elements. Ridley also said that CGI is actually very expensive so maybe cost considerations also played into their decisions.
But let me just say that I certainly would have [i]preferred[/i] they kept the original dimensions as depicted in ALIEN. I recently saw Snow White and The Huntsman and there is a scene where the Huntsman fights a large beast in the forest and I thought it looked very realistic. I immediately thought to myself, "Damn it, why couldn't Ridley have done that with Prometheus?" But I guess that to further throw that possibility down the toilet, Ridley is making a genetic connection between the Engineers and humanity, and so given this new element as canon, I suppose making the size difference between them and us too extreme would have been inconsistent to a degree.
Not talking about the helmet thing...
on the Alien pictures imo it is clear that it originally thought as skull of SJ, not his helmet.
we have humans on our planet less than 4 feet tall, and ones that are well over 6 feet tall.
expecting every single being of a species to be the same size seems silly.
i assume the chair and suits may be made for whomever is supposed to be inside them.
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Belladonna,
it's not just SIZE that's different, the whole updated revamped reprocessed thing now looks different, maybe even different growth/manufacturing methods that give a different surface property and functionality, different design basis i.e. less [i]fused to the chair[/i] and more [i]able to accomodate a pilot[/i] - suddenly.
To me, this whole "what is Alien's [i]Space Jockey[/i]" discussion has only shown us HOW THE ENGINEERS BACK-ENGINEERED the Space Jockey organotech Nostromo crew found on LV-426 ... the derelict was a throw back to how these things used to look before they were [i]resistance is futile[/i]'d by the (magpiery) Engineers.
Ridley's basically asking us to, "Forget the original Space Jockey, as if it's no longer canon."
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i didnt notice that they revamped the look of the chair jockey at ALL, thanks for pointing that out......
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The size difference is nothing more than the limitations of what could be presented using actors to portray the engineers. Yes, the Alien SJ is quite a bit larger than the engineer that awakens in stasis. Ridley does his best to exhibit the engineer as very tall, but there were scenes where the limitations are quite glaring. For example, the trilobite attack of the engineer at the end when Shaw is very close to the action clearly reveals an engineer who's much smaller than intended. The actor I believe was close to 7 feet, but these engineers were supposed to be 9 to 10 feet tall, if you were to take the Alien SJ as a source.
Yes they've admitted that was one of the reasons they did it for this film, but go back to those statements and look carefully at the way things are worded. Could it be the only reason?? Could it be functional in more ways than one because the Engineers are not really the true gods, as Shaw hints, or the creators of all life-- and only associated with them. Revealing a little bit about how the mommy and daddy race met and came to be. And each had their form of the bioweapon afterwards.
A new version of them after their reign ended.
A group who conquered them and stole all their technology + started messing around with the Alien genetics.
At times in the past Ridley has said that the lone Space Jockey in Alien was from a benevolent race, even though it was carrying bio-weapons.
I think there's a high degree of sexual dimorphism in the species.
It works the opposite of most species on earth. With the females being the larger of the species-- and much, much larger.
They had complete control of the Elders and Engineers until the Elders found ways to create life without them. Genetically taking out all the female influences from that side of the culture and trying to perfect themselves, but end up with the inability to evolve, or reach a size comparable to the females
However they served the females via the Elders and one Elder led them to steal from and nearly obliterate that female side of their genetics.
I think the Space Jockey in Alien is a Jockette... and some weird reversals in male/female organization will be seen in this series and the species.
On top of that I think the Alien species will not see a Queen, but instead a King emerge...
BUT the original Jockey and Original Queen come back into at the very end to reclaim their spot and set up the old movies.
"A king has his reign and then he dies... it's inevitable"
The female side/ feminine side of the universe will always be true creators of life. Even in slightly hermaphroditic species.
I watched Alien last night on the Tely, and it was first time I've seen it with the deleted footage. There's the best scene with Dallas and Bret cocooned on the wall and the Engineer voice recording, which is nothing like the Engineers in Prometheus. That got me thinking about the differences between our Space Jockey and the Engineers. I believe it is possible that the dude in the Derelict could have once been an Engineer. Dallas said it looked like it grew out of the chair. Which is probably what happened. Perhaps there is an element of Time travel here, and being strapped in like that means your going on one Hell of a ride. We just don't know when or where they are coming from. Then there is the issue of the technology it'self, perhaps they had a little help from some sort of Alien artifical intelligence...there's some sort of change taking place within their bodies like a metamorphosis. It's all good for me. These mysteries are what I love about Ridleys Alien films. They're deep like a greyhole not a Plothole.
If you guys pay attention to one of the concept arts present in that Prometheus art book, you'll see one image in which the Engineer TOWERS over the humans. I mean, he looked at least twice as big as the final design.
So Scott definetely saw it and rejected it, for whatever reason. Perhaps it would be difficult to frame such tall creatures interacting with the humans.
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I think if the Engineers would have remained their original size then the trilobite would had to been even bigger as well. The SJ would have tore the limbs off that squid showned in the movie
Want some candy?
Maybe or maybe not...
You see a Face Huger seems to do the job in Alien Franchise yet is no where near the size of a Human etc... if the Engineers was shown as 15 foot tall i think that Trillobite could still had got to the Engineer, they could have gone and had it spray acid or something to give it the upper hand still.
R.I.P Sox 01/01/2006 - 11/10/2017
Going off the second image from the original post, we can safely assume that the artist/sculpter is approx 6 feet tall. The arm of the SJ looks a little longer than the sculpter (at around 6 and a half to 7 feet long.)
A human beings arm-span equals that of their height, so we can assume that the engineers, therefore the SJ's arm-span equals that of their height.
So, that would mean that the SJ is approx 13-14 feet tall?
As for the engineer inside the suit, at an estimated guess, i would say he is around 12 feet tall.
So, stood side by side, i would come to about his waist and i'm 6 feet 3 inches tall.
That is a HUGE difference compaired to the engineers in Prometheus!
The poster was good though!
Oops! I didn't count the upper torso to get the length of his span. From his arm-pit to his other arm-pit, 4 feet approx?
Add that to the length of his arms at approx 7 feet each. That would make him/the space jockey suit 18 feet tall. WOW!
That would mean that the engineer inside the suit around 16 feet tall. I'd be just above his knees! LOL
The poster was good though!
