|||||||||SPOILERS||||||||||Prometheus

What didn't you get/like about it, who? ?

 

I think a large % of people have not liked this movie. Mainly because they were all hardcore fans waiting for Ridley Scott to finally get going and explain the mystery of the 'space jockey' from 'Alien'.

 

Well, it didn't look like they were great scientists if in order to create life they had to commit suicide. Which leads to the other question: why? what was the purpose of bringing life on earth that way in the first place?

So that means that in order for another set of soil worms (or other living organism) in the other ships to get in touch with the black substance (a) some other dumb human might need to enter the ship (b) do the exact same mistakes as the Prometheus crew (c) find another "ITS ALIVE!!!" hybernating engineer (d) learn how to 'revive him' (e) this time they should allow the xenomorph facehugger do its job until the engineer meets its doom in the seat and then will turn into a fosil in a spam of...a few years? BTW the ship that got destroyed was Prometheus, NOT the alien ship. It crashed to the ground practically intact and looked exactly like the one in ALIEN once it was on the ground.

His scenes as a young Weyland didn't make any sense if he later appeared as an old fart. They got cut in the editing room, but it just shows the lack of coherence in the plot

This is just speculation. For simple hired pilots they had no problem deciding to die so fast. No phone home, 'Darling, I am going to die now to save mankind, kiss the children for me and tell 'em daddy loved them with all his heart!' They were too eager to believe Elizabeth Shaw's version of her theory of doomsday (btw, how did she knew that our beloved creators now were bloodthirsty evil doers and that the escaping engineer was on a mission of destruction to earth? Yes, earlier Dave grabbed a holographic sphere of earth...one of MANY planets in that astronomical chart. That doesn't mean the engineer was headed our way pissed because we woke him up!)

How you know that? It is not explained in the movie. They just mention that it might be some sort of weapon. Again, the 'creation' of life on earth seemed more like an accident than a act of selfless sacrifice. Until I came to this thread my theory was that the first engineer we see was left behind by the spaceship, exiled to this barren desolated planet, and that he preferred to die instead of living alone in that horrible alien planet and that by pure chance and luck part of his dna mutated and survived (even though it should had perish too by the black substance!)

Where is it? only Dr. Shaws main squeeze was the one turning into a homicidal zombie. The other two guys just died and remained dead.
Nowhere it explains it will react differently, only that it might be a deadly weapon.

What Dave was reading was the crew's dreams. They had not encountered the jerogliphics inside the derelict alien ship yet. There was no way he might learn to decipher its meaning without a 'Rossetta stone-like' alien language translator.

 

Peter Weyland speech deleted from the film.

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I re-watched 'Prometheus' yesterday and then decided to re-watch 'Alien' again for the first time in a while: Damn, that movie is good...still.

But the result is, I'm now, kind of doing a u-turn in my original point-of-view about 'Prometheus' after also re-watching 'Alien'. I'm guessing Ridley Scott had two stories to tell from two different universes, and in the end he and Damon Lindelof hijacked the Alien universe to drive this other concept.
The result is a good movie....as a standalone....but linked to 'Alien' (which it invariably and obviously is and should be) it seems like an uncomfortable, incompatible mish-mosh.
But I know Ridley would disagree. He would probably point to the original Xeno Lifecycle Mural and say "See... it's like I said. That's a suit."
We all know, and can see (as I saw last night) - the space-jockey was clearly a skeleton.

Scott - at 75 - is desperate to believe in "stupid design" rather than Darwinian evoluton. I had always liked 'Alien' because initially, it left the questions open but Ive changed my mind - Im intrigued now.
(BTW, I hate 'Aliens' and the whole 'Queen Alien' idea.)

Ridley stated before he made 'Prometheus' that he was going to answer the origins of the alien, its lifecycle, the space=jockey, the derelict...and then somehow, somewhere along the line, he changed his mind and went off into some other Universe which has result in a flawed-gem, albeit with a lot of questions still unanswered.

There is a way for Ridley to get out of this discontinuity mess and there is a hint of it in 'Prometheus'...but I doubt Ridley will depict it..I think in his mind, he's moved on from the subject.


I know Anthony will disagree with me 100% on this.

 

I don't care what the director of a film says in an interview: if the story has to be explained in a different medium and not in the film itself, then it is a flawed film. I know Scott is a big admirer of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", a film that at that time had to be explained before and after watching it, but "Prometheus" is no "2001", a glorious epic metaphysical art film, instead is just an average style scifi summer film. The derelict ship falls to the ground looking EXACTLY like the one in ALIEN. Since the other ships are still buried in the ground, it is safe to asume IS the same ship, and Scott had a George Lucas moment of filmmaking insanity.

Yeah, maybe I did fell asleep since the film became so predictable, but if my memory serves me well it was the body of the girl's main squeeze which was left just outside the entrance door ramp after being burned and not the others...or all of them were left outside?

The creatures got free and infested the ship? what creatures? before the humans got there there was only black substance in those cannisters and harmless soil worms. So we will have to speculate that someone repeated the same mistakes of the Prometheus crew in one of the other ships? btw that final stupid looking alien at the end looks like a baby Alien queen with horse teeth.

How in heaven's name was Dave learning the language of the alien engineers when all the info they got was just DRAWINGS of the engineers inside ancient cultures caves & stones, not identical jeroglifics? if so that means that Weyland Industries had made contact with these aliens to get a grasp of their language. BTW Dave got his head rip-out (as it happens to 99.9% of the androids in the Alien universe) by the engineer meaning he failed miserably to communicate effectively. :laugh11:

Lastly,"who cares why they did what they did" and 'who cares if he was or wasn't (headed to earth in a mission of destruction)"? Well, I did. Because this was the moment the movie got ruined for me. My reaction wasn't 'look at those heroes giving their lives to save earth', but instead an incredulous 'BULLSHIT!" This was the easy way to leave questions unanswered by turning the film into another mindless 'lets-save-earth-from-menacing-aliens-by-channelling-japanese-anime-storytelling!' Again, bullshit.

To conclude I extend an olive branch to you and thank you for the interesting debate. I too like these kind of movie discussions. I remember reading a terrific 1979 article in the long defunct magazine "Fantastic Films" titled "ALIEN Dissected" in which the writer extrapolated into every image and sequence of the film to understand better the alien xenomorph and explain why things were the way they were. Some of his ideas were completely off and the sequels didn't lived up to those theories, but two of his main ideas were accepted by later filmmakers and eventually made it into the films (the Alien life cycle, including the existence of a Queen and the then only hinted crooked Weyland industries sinister intentions).

 

I guess at the end of the day, you just to have to go "It's only a movie".

 

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is not garbage. It is Stanley Kubrick's greatest masterpiece and one the best films ever made. Prometheus is just an okay movie that five years from now few will remember it as much as 'Mission To Mars'.

 

yes it is....boring garbage...

 

For the Nintendo short attention span generation it is boring.:notallthere:

 

There's a tremendous amount of in-depth analysis about this movie and the predecssors...bottom line...the film is not stellar. Over-analyzing doesn't hide that fact.

 

Me, every critic, science fiction fans around the world and the American Film Institute disagree. opcorn:

 

I loved it. Thought it was fantastic.

It could have been fleshed out a little better at the end, and Rapace is no Sigourney Weaver, but still it did it's job and looked incredible on the screen.

I'd wager they left a lot on the cutting room floor.

 

I enjoyed it.

Btw Fassbender is learning all the ancient human languages so he can communicate with the alien fella.

 

I went to see it again last night.

 

Yeah, Prometheus actually shits all over the Predator/Alien relationship just by the timeline it presents for the Alien mythology.

 

If the makers of Predator II werent so cute by displaying the skull of a Xenomoprh alien as a trophy in the Predators' spaceship, we wouldnt have such a shitty 'franchise'.

 

Nah, the Alien v Predator comics almost certainly pre-date that film.

 

I believe they are almost simultaneous.

 

joemul is right: that little detail in the background was a small tribute to the first Aliens vs Predator graphic novel which by the way is awesome.

 

why did fassenbender give that poison to the guy?