April 29, 2024
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
Dave, when are putting up your spoiler review? Interested on your complete take.
So, it was visually stunning and I liked the themes of the story but truly was not engulfed by the overall dissection of those themes via the script. I am fine with some “grey areas” but fundamentally I just had a problem with the fact that the script cheated so much…ie with the spider black ooze character outside of the hanger bay, the engineer’s ship crashing and him knowing where Rapace was immediately after for no reason except so he could attack her etc etc. There were so many moments of convenience that the sum of their parts ended up reducing the impact of the more thoughtful themes.
Where does Nikki get off saying the ad campaign hid secrets? They showed everything. She was also off by 15 million for the weekend. There should be a journalism version of being disbarred.
And by now Nikkis first post is gone or edited…. That’s just how she rolls. Ridiculous.
So what does everyone think of the opening? Why did he sacrifice himself and seed Earth with DNA?
And why did the black goo start to leak when they entered that room? They (humans) seemed to alter everything in that room full or jars, including the mural on the ceiling.
I thought his DNA disintegrated, so I was wondering if he was a criminal exiled to Earth and he decided to drink a grey goo poison rather than hang around and sniff the daisies.
WRT to the Engineer finding Shaw… wasn’t she in the only place she could be? As in, the only place still existing with a breathable human atmosphere — the escape pod.
SamLowry,
The way I remember it, his DNA disintegrated and reformed in the water, which is when the title PROMETHEUS overlapped the new DNA strand shown on the screen.
I’ve thought about him being in exile because his ship is leaving, but I have a hard time imagining he would be given the power to create life if he’s being punished.
Why assume that the planet in the first scene is Earth? Are we certain?
Movies.com: That is our planet, right?
Ridley Scott: “No, it doesn’t have to be. That could be anywhere. That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself.
If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.”
…..So I guess it’s not necessarily Earth.
What a crazy epic movie. I also too want Dave’s spoiler review. I disagree with his first review that an definitive answer to why the engineer’s created us is in the film. It could be and I’ve heard interesting theories about what it could be but it’s not overt in the film. There are miles of subtext in this film.
As for the start I took it to be earth and that the engineer is a willing sacrifice in order to breed new life. Like Monks who burn themselves alive for their beliefs. Whatever magic or mysticism the engineers are into, maybe you need to kill yourself to create. This a simple most likely wrong interpretation and it’s probably wrong but that is what is so good about the movie – you can read so many different meanings in it. That and Fassbenders performance. He owns this movie.
I agree this was a crazy epic movie. I felt uneasy and tense all throughout the film. If you couldn’t get sucked into this movie like Ridley intended, then I can understand not liking it and nitpicking it to death. I thought it was a hardcore sci-fi geekfest. With a lesser director it could have been atrocious.
The Fass steals the show.
This movie wants to be vague just to be vague. You can look for answers and think you find them, but then you have a race of people who obliterate themselves to create life? To kill everyone? Holloway dies before we really get to see how the black goo works. All of it’s just vague and plays into the trope of, “GOD IS AN ASSHOLE”, and while that is fun for Ridley and Damon to play with, wouldn’t it be nice to have more of a reason for god being an asshole outside of being disappointed in David?
You may all disagree but this movie is Ridley trying to pull a Cameron but unlike Cameron, who has spectacle and tells the stories he wants to tell, Sir Ridley has the spectacle down, but the story is completely and utter filled with vagueness, red shirt characters, and things happening without any explanation. It would be nice to care about Vickers, but can you care about a character whose stupid enough to run in the shadow of the thing that killed her? It’s all such a waste.
Why was Guy Pearce in this movie?
I’ve never seen a more useless role for a quality actor.
Choices like this are why i have trouble understanding the ‘genius’ or Ridley Scott.
It was so obviously a younger actor in old man make up. I kept thinking he would be transformed into a young man again, and instead he dies horribly.
weird, weird stuff.
Finally! Someone who thought: come on, two steps to the right, and you won´t be smashed by the stupid ship.
So much is problematic in the film…so many details – so called ‘unaswered questions’ – that to me are nothing more than bad writing (or maybe all will make sense on the notorious RidleyScottian Director´s Cut). Still, I did enjoy watching it, probably will see it again (on 2-D, this time).
The problem with the movie started later, when the beauty and awsoness of its images began to fade, and its central story elements claimed my attention – and their sum simply doesn’t add, not because it’s opened to interpretation, but because it is, as JSPartisan said, vague just for being vague.
(sorry for the poor english).
yeah, i didnt hate it, but there was a lot ‘what the hell’ moments.
How did they know the Engineers wanted to destroy humanity.
What were they waiting for? It was obvious they got their asses kicked on the moon, but did we ever really find out by what? I read a lot where people talked about all the dead engineers having had holes in their chests and were whupped. What were they whupped by? What happened to the whupping things?
What does Weyland think is going to happen?
David gets his head ripped off, the ship crashes horribly and yet his head and body are in the exact same place as when it took off?
So many weird things.
I don’t hate it either. It’s just so, meh. Weyland seemingly wanted to talk to Space Jockey in the hope, in the faintest of hopes, that the Space Jockey would say; “Sure Weyland, I will help you live forever!” Which is just damn foolish. Not as foolish as heading to a hostile part of space in a non-military vessel, but still pretty damn foolish.
That aside, trying to figure out how the Space Jockeys died, requires one to accept that these beings who use a flute to start the navigation system on their ships, which is fucking silly but a great shout out to Super Mario 3, visited their weapons depot with intentions to head to earth, and someone dropped the black goo on something. Which in turn led to an evil creature, that killed most of them. An evil creature or creatures, that after 2000 years, probably left the caves, and went to the other part of the planet.
This also means we have to assume that for some reason, the weapons depot planet LV-223, has been ignored by the Space Jockeys for 2000 years due to them not wanting to destroy a world? Someone really didn’t piss them off in that interim 2000 years?
This also means that not only are our makers, ASSHOLES, but they are STUPID ASSHOLES, who cannot even work around their weapons of mass destruction properly. This movie basically wants you to believe in the Space Jockeys when in actuality, it gives us plenty of reasons to believe they are a bunch of stupid bumbling idiots, that just happen to give their lives for some reason, so we can exist.
Here’s a great list of questions from another board:
1. What was that nasty DNA tea that the opening scene Engineer drank?
2. Was he following orders and sacrificing himself to create life on another planet or had he gone rogue?
3. Did Weyland hire the most idiotic biologist and geologist on purpose? (Seriously, petting the slimy alien snake-thing? Amateur.)
4. Is Vickers really a robot? (Sure, she’s Weyland’s “daughter.” But David is his “son.”)
5. Did David revenge-kill Tom Hardy’s twin? (Or was he simply driven by child-like curiosity?)
6. Why did the black goo turn tattooed Ginger Beard into a Dawn of the Dead-Zac-Snyder zombie?
7. Why was the surgery pod configured only for men? Was it meant for Weyland all along? And if it was so expensive, couldn’t the creators configure it for men and women?
8. Why didn’t Shaw tell anyone she just pulled an alien fetus out of herself (arcade-game style)?
9. What did David say to the Engineer?
10. Was he trying to kill his creator (Weyland)?
11. Is Vickers really dead? (See #4)
12. What exactly is the black goo? (A weapon of mass destruction? An evolutionary accelerator?)
13. And of course, the biggie: Why did the Engineers create humans and now want to destroy them? (Did they begin to feel threatened by their creations? Were they “fixing” the actions of a rogue Engineer? Were they really pissed that humans created nukes — and Jersey Shore?)
Visually speaking, it was the best Imax 3D experience I’ve had. Nice, bright image and hardly any polarization artifacts cropping up from the glasses.
In terms of story, it felt like trying to piece together a dozen separate images from the same jigsaw pile (definitely a textbook case of “two-writeritus” [where’s Jon Sphaits been this entire time?]). Still not sure I caught everything, but this post really helped smooth out the edges for me:
http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1
visually it was amazing. Best 3D image composition ive ever seen.
As someone who usually finds the most beloved recent blockbusters (Inception, Dark Knight, Avengers) a little too ponderous and over-explained, I loved the “cheating” in Prometheus. At no point, aside from the opening and closing moments, do we know more than the characters do.
Plus it’s a 2-hour movie that feels like 80 minutes, which you’ll never get from Nolan or anything Marvel.
So you are contrarian to good films because it’s cute? Wow, someone on the internet whose contrarian? OH MY SPACE JOCKEYS! This movie is not good, you should not even whisper it’s name in comparison to Chris Nolan (unless you want to praise the films visuals which are quite exceptional, even though we’ve seen them time and time again in sci-fi films), and loving it’s cheating is to love a ridiculously written script. A script where, there’s black goo and it does stuff. BRUHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Not that “contrarian” a position. I like those movies, but I had a better time at Prometheus. To me, it’s an example of that old Howard Hawks “three great scenes, no bad scenes” definition of a great movie.
No bad scenes? The worst scene in that entire movie, is Elizabeth Shaw emerging from having a tentacle monster ripped out of her body, newly stapled, walking in on a now very alive Weyland, having his feet cleaned by David. The second worst scene is again, Vickers getting killed because this robot, cannot figure out how to run out of the shadow.
Again, not trying to slam you for liking the movie, maybe being a little snarky, but it’s out of being amazed, that someone could enjoy it given what I see in it. Eye of the beholder situation and the such.
That is a good list of questions anghus. I have to say that despite having many problems with it, I have been thinking about Prometheus ever since I left the theater last night. I don’t think it’s a great movie, but it is a pretty fascinating and spectacular mess. And as others have said it is amazingly beautiful on the big screen. It definitely has bad scenes though.
To me, the engineers are a perfect parallel to the Weyland-Yutani company of the Alien era. They created us to be the perfect delivery system for bio-weapons, just as the company wants to do with Aliens. In that, we mirror our creators in hubris and destructive nature.
The massive parallels in style to 2001 make it clear that’s a point of reference – the cave pictograms, like the monolith on the moon, is essentially a tripwire that tells the higher intelligence we have reached the capacity for space travel, and are ready for their purposes. Once we got to the place they’ve guided us, we become vessels for their bioweapons.
Except the bioweapons pretty clearly had some blowback, wiping out all Engineers but one. So he couldn’t get every human infected single-handedly. Now he heads to Earth to infect people en masse with all the stuff in his ship.
As for their DNA being an exact match for ours – I think they shouldn’t have said “exact,” but imagine we found some functioning neanderthals. Would a company that thought nothing of ethics have any problem testing bioweapons on them, given the likelihood that they could then extrapolate the effects on us?
OK.
The First Titan is a sacrifice. He drinks the Promethean Fire, disintegrates, and creates life on planets that can sustain it. When you look at the starmap David is standing in, we see more than one system.
There are two groups of Titans. Creators, like the first one, and the Destroyer. Remember how we see all the Titans running away, then we find their bodies en masse? The evil Titan killed them by weaponizing Promethean Fire. It’s a variation on the betrayal/bioweapon theme that runs through every Alien film.
The black goo/fire is creative destruction, like the Big Bang. I think it’s supposed to be the dark matter of space, which is the essence of the Big Bang, and the Titans learned how to control it.
We see the fire works in stages. The first Titan sacrifices himself and dissolves because he comes in contact with water. Without water, he burns to nothing.
The jars in the temple are the fire, solidified. They melt back into the goo when it comes in contact with humidity. So the plan was to launch them into the atmosphere of Earth or another water-based planet. The jar does not melt when David has it, because a ship is a controlled atmosphere.
At the back of the temple, behind the head, we see an Alien form in a modified Giger painting.
http://media.photobucket.com/image/giger%20tarot/legionlucifago/Giger.jpg
It’s an altar with a green meteor. That is the primordial essence of the Alien. The Titans, or at least the Evil Titan, knows what it can do as he infected his brothers.
It transforms DNA, like a cancer, until the body explodes. Again, notice how the first Titan disintegrated into the water, and when we see the mound of Titans in the temple, all had massive holes, predominantly head eruptions.
So the the black fire was solidified with the Alien DNA at the center. Otherwise, if you just dropped the jars, every person who disintegrates near water could restart the life cycle. This way, the Alien DNA corrupts the Promethean Fire to destroy life by stopping the disintegration/regeneration process. We see this when Fifield, accidentally swallows the liquified jar with Alien DNA. His crab stance, when he approaches the ship, is an Alien position from the first two films. So Fifield is the result of what happens when the fire is weaponized by Alien DNA.
Now, with Milburn, another variation. When the crew enters the temple, worms have come to live in the soil because the ship possess atmospheric levels. By exposing the temple, the jars melt and the Alien DNA transmutates with the worms, which is what killed Milburn.
With Holloway, it’s different because he ingested only the Alien DNA via David spiking his drink. Holloway doesn’t explode like the Titans because that is due to the Promethean Fire. Instead, the Alien DNA is trying to take him over, which is what we see in his eyes; a recombination at the cellular level.
When Holloway knocks up Shaw, her DNA is 100% human. So what she gives birth to, is the Alien DNA made flesh, watering down the Alien DNA to about 25%, to 75% human, instead of becoming a nucleic cancer.
So the Aliens are literally anti-humans, in every sense.
As for the message, excuse the pun, but it’s Lost – In Space. Is this all science, or is there something more to man. The Engineers are us, just further down the path. So something made them, too, which is the hierarchy of the Prometheus story. It’s actually a very spiritual, borderline religious story, which was funny because I ended up sitting next to some dude in a “Youth Against Christ” shirt. He must have been disappointed.
As for Vickers and David, it’s Blade Runner. David is Roy Batty. Where was he sent? To the recesses of space to do things humans cannot. What did David want to be? Free from his creator, to live. Vickers is Rachael, the perfect android who doesn’t know it. From the moment Ridley signed onto Blade Runner 2, I knew it had something to do with Prometheus. I don’t know what he’ll use, probably Pearce, but we’re going to see that connection play out.
I did have a problem with Shaw basically having a cesarean and then immediately afterwards having the ability to run, jump, lift heavy things, fight, etc. I assume that humans still need abdominal muscles to do these basic things and it didn’t seem like the surgery pod magically fixed this.
I’m amazed that Ridley Scott made such a poor casting choice for Holloway. I saw a review that referred to him as “Abercrombie” and I agree totally. He was Tom Hardy without the charisma.
Martin S, you put more thought into this than Sir Ridley wanted, because the first Space Jockey we see originally had a robbed figure give him the goo. When Damon got on board, he asked Sir Ridley if he wanted more explanation in the script, and Sir Ridley basically said, “No”, and that leaves us with the vague mess that does not clearly differentiate one space jockey from another.
Holloway was one part Matthew Fox on Lost, one part Shane from Walking Dead.
A number scenes and characters have parallels to Lost.
I did find the Sulu/Chekov reference stupid-funny. Also, when the Engineer is first found in the capsule with the mask, my first thought was “Holy shit, Bane made humanity”.
JS – IIRC, it’s just one Engineer. He disrobes.
Ridley is not big on direct answers. All we know about Alien started with Cameron, since Scott didn’t explain shit in the first one. Same thing with Blade Runner. It’s infamous history is based upon how he resisted the Decker Narration because he didn’t want the clarity.
The spiritual aspect shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to Ridley. He’s talked about it a lot. His recent interview with Esquire is pretty interesting. And Logan Marshall-Green is the weakest link. Not wise casting at all.
Paul – IMO, I think their was a pre-consensus that Prometheus was going to shit all over faith, and Ridley didn’t do it. By making the one with faith the sole survivor, and making it apart of the declarative conversation at the end, he did the opposite.
This movie illustrates the perfect split between those who want discrete specifics and those who are happiest with ambiguity and seeking answers on their own.
It’s not a perfect movie by any stretch. I thought there were some very silly/absurd moments in it. But on that list of questions that Anghus posted, I find 75-80% of them incidental at best. The movie’s better *because* it’s not bothering to be deadingly literal and answering them.
Here are my two cents on answering them:
“1. What was that nasty DNA tea that the opening scene Engineer drank?”
The same stuff that Holloway drank. Who knows what it would’ve ultimately done to him, but the only important thing is the end result it did to the Engineer — breaking him down into basic biological components and seeding the planet he was on.
“2. Was he following orders and sacrificing himself to create life on another planet or had he gone rogue?”
Who knows? It’s pretty interesting to posit either case, but it’s not that germane to the basic sense of this story. It’s just a flash of pre-history.
“3. Did Weyland hire the most idiotic biologist and geologist on purpose? (Seriously, petting the slimy alien snake-thing? Amateur.)”
Ha! That was silly — but fun. A typical “don’t open the door!” moment. But really, is it any sillier than Brett wandering off on his own to find the cat, and then just hanging out and letting water fall all over his face….. while hunting something he ALREADY knows is a terrifying murderous beast?
“4. Is Vickers really a robot? (Sure, she’s Weyland’s “daughter.” But David is his “son.”)”
We’re given no indication either way. Does it matter? She’s crushed by the ship. End of story.
“5. Did David revenge-kill Tom Hardy’s twin? (Or was he simply driven by child-like curiosity?)”
I don’t think it was revenge. Neither do I think it was simple curiosity. I think he was driven by Weyland’s directive to “do more”, to find a way. Regardless, I think the ambiguity around most of his actions is one of the movie’s strengths.
“6. Why did the black goo turn tattooed Ginger Beard into a Dawn of the Dead-Zac-Snyder zombie?”
This was another silly and fairly random moment. Again, the only possible way to justify it is that the Engineers have a variety of bio-weapons, and Ginger Beard was infected by something entirely different than the others. But really, it’s just kinda silly.
“7. Why was the surgery pod configured only for men? Was it meant for Weyland all along? And if it was so expensive, couldn’t the creators configure it for men and women?”
It was for Weyland, who — it’s fairly clear — has a gigantic ego and doesn’t particularly care about whether something is functional for anyone but him. After all, he commissioned this entire mission for the sole purpose of cheating death. I don’t think it was a mass-market item at all.
“8. Why didn’t Shaw tell anyone she just pulled an alien fetus out of herself (arcade-game style)?”
This is one of the spots where I felt the movie rushed through moments that needed a few more beats to really hit all angles.
“9. What did David say to the Engineer?”
Who knows? Again, ambiguity is a fun thing. I’d say whatever your reading of David is determines what you think he said.
“10. Was he trying to kill his creator (Weyland)?”
Quite possibly. In fact, IMO it’s possible he was trying to kill all of them. He did say “who doesn’t want to kill their parents?” which very directly points at Weyland but could also mean all humanity.
“11. Is Vickers really dead? (See #4)”
What the hell? Of course she’s dead, she was crushed by a million tons of falling ship. Why wouldn’t she be dead, and what on earth would cause anyone to think that?
“12. What exactly is the black goo? (A weapon of mass destruction? An evolutionary accelerator?)”
All of the above?
“13. And of course, the biggie: Why did the Engineers create humans and now want to destroy them? (Did they begin to feel threatened by their creations? Were they “fixing” the actions of a rogue Engineer? Were they really pissed that humans created nukes — and Jersey Shore?)”
This is another case where I think all sorts of fun can be had exploring possibilities. My gut sense is that, like we can occasionally do with our own creations, they tired of us and decided to do something else. But there are plenty of other options. IMO, creators vs their creations is the basic core of the movie: Engineers/humans, Weyland/David, (Weyland/Vickers? less developed but still there), Shaw/God, Engineers/Xenomorphs, etc.
I agree with JS and anghus completely. This movie is being vague for the sake of being vague and AMBIGUOUS when it’s really just kind of a mess. I have nothing against Lindelof and I loved LOST but I also don’t think he’s this really spectacular writer with any special gifts. Look at his IMDB….it’s extremely NOT impressive writing wise. But hey, the guy wrote LOST so he earned stuff like this.
What was up with the out-of-nowhere “do you wanna get laid” scene between Elba and Theron? It like…came out of nowhere with zero sexual tension built up, it happens through exposition and serves zero purpose in the film. Just….lame.
That being said….it’s just a bad movie. I checked my ALIEN expectations at the door but they had the most lame callbacks to ALIEN imaginable. Charlize actually NOT letting a contaminated person back on board and other pointless nods to the original were grating. My other issue was just how forgettable it was. Me and a buddy saw it Saturday then reconvened later that night for beers and literally had nothing to say about it.
I did love the visuals and am tempted to see it in IMAX 3D but then again….ehhhhh. I certainly didn’t hate the movie but it was kind of a waste of potential.
You know, i kind of like the movie just because it forces a discussion. For that reason alone i can justify its existence.
And i suppose unanswered questions are what fuels the conversation.
“Were they really pissed that humans created nukes — and Jersey Shore?”
They were all loaded up and ready to head for Earth when something got out and wiped out everyone but the pilot, who was in stasis for 2000 years, IIRC. So, as I stated in the other thread, the engineers decided to wipe out humanity when Jesus was still walking on water.
And all this discussion of “black goo” and not one person brought up The X-Files? WTF.
As to the question about the humanity of Vickers–she was in suspension, remember? (like you could forget those hot, hot, hot pushups). David was not in suspension, because he’s a robot.
5. Did David revenge-kill Tom Hardy’s twin? (Or was he simply driven by child-like curiosity?)
My take was that David was just following his programming to serve humans to give them what they want. Holloway most wanted to know what The Engineers wanted with humans. He asked Holloway at the pool table how far would he go to get the answer and he replied that he would go as far as it took, so David gave him the answer.
I never had that impression or expected that martin. Ridley spoke ill of organized religion but not faith (that I’ve seen anyway). I expected him to ponder faith and where we come from, but I never thought he would belittle faith.
And isn’t it possible to want a balance of specifics and ambiguity? Must one pick between the two?
By the way, though http://digitaldigging.net/prometheus-an-archaeological-perspective/ is hilarious, the best line may be from the comments: “This film is is a case study on how NOT to fund, plan, staff and conduct extraterrestrial expeditions.”
…although it may have been beat by “When his name is called, he instantly throws the sieve to the ground, and pounds up the hill to the cave. Because, as we all know, archaeology can be extraordinarily hard to catch.”
Just so un-invested in this movie…weak script, 1-dimensional characters, one-note acting…Fassbender best thing in it…terrible make-up, Guy Pearce looked like Billy Crystal in Princess Bride. Cheesy production design…only thing that was cool was the alien dude…jump-scares and not much else…makes us question our origin? Hardly, there was really no poetry or metaphor…very disappointing!
Considering that Weyland was already middle-aged when he gave his TED-talk in 2023, what do you think he would look like seventy years later?
In other words, the Weyland we see in Prometheus is somewhere between 110 and 125 years old.
I think it’s pretty obvious Guy Pearce was cast for the potential sequels and not for the old man getup he had to wear in this one. I’d guess that he’ll be a younger man in some part of the sequel if there ever happens to be one.
Martin S, in the original script, the Space Jockey and a hooded Space Jockey stand there, the one in the hood hands him the Space Jockey the goo, and then what happens in the movie happens. This scene changes because Sir Ridley wanted Damon to make it more vague and ambiguous, like the rest of of the entire fucking movie.
That aside, this; “Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?
Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an ‘our children are misbehaving down there’ scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, ‘Let’s send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.’ Guess what? They crucified him.
That’s right everybody: JESUS TURNS OUT TO BE… SPACE JOCKEY JESUS and we were targeted for destruction because we dare to turn on the… SPACE JOCKEY JESUS, or SJJ for short. The fact that all of this revolves around Jesus and our existence afterwards that leads to Weyland and David, and the Space Jockeys being inept jackasses, is pretty god damn funny.
“As for Vickers and David, it’s Blade Runner. David is Roy Batty. Where was he sent? To the recesses of space to do things humans cannot. What did David want to be? Free from his creator, to live. Vickers is Rachael, the perfect android who doesn’t know it. From the moment Ridley signed onto Blade Runner 2, I knew it had something to do with Prometheus. I don’t know what he’ll use, probably Pearce, but we’re going to see that connection play out.”
Well spotted Martin. Since we all know Ridley is trying get a Blade Runner sequel and some more Prometheus out there, I think it’s a safe assumption that both films might be fused into one.
The subtext is there. David is a synthetic who asks “Doesn’t everyone want to kill their parents?” He could also have said something wrong to the SJ, causing him to violently go after his “father”.
Vickers was in stasis, this is true. However if she is like Rachel from Blade Runner, the perception of her being human would have to be maintained (as Deckard figures out…”you’re talking about memories.” The subterfuge of Vickers’ humanity would be preserved if she went into stasis with all the others.
Also note, she was able to manhandle David fairly well in the corridor. Pretty strong for a human, don’t you think?
I think Ridley is preparing to fuse Alien and Blade Runner together somehow, and that’s pretty cool in my book.
Joe S, it is not obvious because that is not true. David was interfacing with Weyland through his dreams when he was asleep, thus the brief dream helmet conversation. They shot it with regular Guy Pearce and cut it out.
I don’t mind ambiguity in movies, but you better fucking know what the truth of your story is. I’ve seen it twice and from all the Ridley comments, he is sketching out ideas, not telling a coherent story.
There is making the audience do some work to understand what story you’re telling, and there is making them do your work for you. Prometheus is the latter.
Vickers had her own chamber and wasn’t released by David from cryo. Everyone came out of Hypersleep vomiting. Vickers was doing pushups.
There’s an emotional level between Vickers and David, where she’s a step beyond him, but not much. Even when she’s about to be crushed, her response is a command – “no. no.” Not a scream. Her reaction about sex, killing Holloway…the only time she exerts is when Elba tells her he’s crashing the ship.
As for David, he stares resentment at Holloway and Weyland after they make overt slaps at his non-human nature. Later, he triggers both of their deaths. But he saves Shaw, twice. The first time, she thanks him and after he tries to contain the alien impregnation, she doesn’t seek revenge, the common reaction in Alien. He then saves her at the end with a warning, because he wants her to live. So David is conflicted, by his orders from his creator and by his sense of being treated as an equal lifeform.
7. Why was the surgery pod configured only for men? Was it meant for Weyland all along? And if it was so expensive, couldn’t the creators configure it for men and women?
Because it was symbolic of Prometheus, who had his liver ripped out everyday for punishment, combined with the virgin birth. It’s a metaphorical way to explain why in the hell would a chestburster go through your chest, and not just work its way out your throat or ass, since it acts like a tapeworm.
This is one of the murals in the Engineer temple.
http://dejanno.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/prometheus.jpg
…and the whole thing goes down around Christmas.
I’ve read the Ripley interview where he says they considered Christ to be an Engineer, hence the eradication, but that was part of an earlier draft and dropped, not something they shot and cut out.
You cannot start grabbing pieces from revised scripts and saying “OK. That’s the answer”. If it’s not shot, it doesn’t count. Otherwise, Jabba The Hutt is a crew member of the Millennium Falcon.
thespitihunter – Also note, she was able to manhandle David fairly well in the corridor. Pretty strong for a human, don’t you think?
I forgot about that. She does that odd move to his face, instead of just letting go of him.
I just realized something…David sets Weyland and Holloway up to die, because they treated him as inferior. So did the Engineer, and his call to Shaw, lead to the Engineers death.
They are not going to fuse “Blade Runner” and “Prometheus.” They are owned by entirely different entities, and the “Blade Runner” partners are notoriously difficult to deal with. They just barely figured out how to work a deal for the sequel, and they are so bad at communication that it is technically not legal to screen “Blade Runner” in the US right now.
They certainly aren’t going to merge their potential franchise with something Fox owns. Won’t happen. Can’t happen.
Drew – I’m not saying a fusion. I get the IP issue.
Look at the viral work done for Prometheus, and Ridley is going to be open to some unique approaches.
“She was able to manhandle David fairly well in the corridor”…because she’s the daughter of the man who owns the ship they’re in, and the inheritor of the company when he dies. As Weyland property, you’d think he’d obey the Weyland family–the only issue would be interfamily disputes.
He may be, Martin, but Alcon and the “BR” rights holders are a tough crowd, and no matter who he is, they’re going to have him on a leash.
I can’t answer a lot of these questions but I wasn’t remotely engaged enough to really care about the why.
Add me as another who’s not a fan of vague for vague’s sake. It’s nice to see other people’s thoughts but it’s not like there was enough there to come up w/speculation based on what was shown w/out throwing in one’s on projections.
I think the faith thing could have happened a little cleaner, especially in terms of having parallel some present standing beliefs when it comes to religion. Like a big question they were trying to answer was why would they destroy “us” if they created us? Isn’t that like the story of Noah or Apocalypse? How does that not get brought up?
I also thought it was stretch to say they have matching dna so they created humans. I mean Shaw says the same God could have created both. Which is one answer I just thought that w/out knowing they purposefully cloned themselves they wouldn’t know if there wasn’t a third set of alien beings who populated that planet which then populated earth. And even if, there’s no way of knowing they were specifically trying to create humans. What if they get to the home planet and Shaw asks why did you create man only for some alien to say “Did we do that? I just know our forefathers had a really long intergalactic flight, made a pit stop, saw a really attractive monkey and well…we’d been away for a really long time and after we ate some of those mushrooms our minds playing tricks and since we weren’t coming back that way and we all promised not to say anything…we, uh, experienced nature.” Sure I could believe they have a machine that shows one dna predating another set but there’s no way a machine can show they cognitively created another being. I know that was the point of going to the other planet but I’m saying it was a leap for them to assume they’d know the answer.
Visual were really special but I was so disconnected from the film. I also didn’t buy how the crew would try to manipulate each other by questioning each other’s intentions for being on the mission. “Well, you’re just a hired gun. You’re not a real scientist!” BFD! The ship’s first mate may really want to dance on Broadway but only does navigation to pay the bills. Who cares??
And the old man makeup was horrendous.
Was anybody else waiting for another door to drop down and decapitate one of the crew members? I was thinking Indy spring trap waiting to happen.
“I’ve seen it twice and from all the Ridley comments, he is sketching out ideas, not telling a coherent story.”
I’ve asked repeatedly elsewhere, but I’ll give it a go here, too…
When Soderbergh makes a movie that’s elliptical and sort of intentionally half-baked in terms of the delivery of beside-the-point-anyway plot information, no geeks or movie critics really carp. (Well, they kinda did with Haywire, but in general Soderbergh can half-ass details ahoy and no one cares.) When Ridley, or Lindelof, or Abrams, or (to a lesser degree because he’s Captain Literal) Nolan, do something similar, and even more ambitious they’re held to a completely different standard, whereby every geek becomes some AUTHORITY on screewriting.
If this same movie had Guillermo Del Toro’s name on it, or Alfonso Cuaron, or Soderbergh, or Malick, no one would question these INCREDIBLY MUNDANE 1-2-3 story issues.
Is this why you guys really go to movies? As a Plot Point Delivery System? That’s fine in a potboiler or some dorky murder mystery, but with a VISUAL BONANZA, you shouldn’t REMOTELY care about the screenplay.
“Chariots of the Gods, man.”
A Plot Point Delivery System is a good description for Prometheus, actually.
No need to see oneself as an authority on screenwriting to realize something is really off with the scene about an hour in where Rapace’s dbag boyfriend says something like “Anyone can make life” and she responds “What does that make me!” It makes you someone who never had fertility issues in the movie until now, when you need them so you can be ironically impregnated and then abort the fetus in the next 3 scenes. It’s also interesting that someone who’s apparently been trying to conceive for some time and who is obsessed with abandonment issues about gods and their human creations is completely unphased by her own progeny later on: “Oh yeah, I left my alien octopus fetus in the OR,” she might as well say when she lurches around in Theron’s pad.
At this point it becomes a free-for-all of making shit up from scene to scene: e.g. so glad you’re secretly aboard the ship, my cryogenically frozen industrialist FATHER who wants to speak to the deities he must resurrect from cryosleep so they can make him immortal the day before he dies after their first conversation, in translation. I don’t think it’s nitpicking to be blown away by the incoherence of this pile of events after the first hour, which is a slow-burning and pretty effective remake of Alien grafted onto some Big Ideas. There’s nothing wrong with the ideas being hokey, but the back half of the movie is just full of convoluted bullshit — not intentionally half-baked but borderline illiterate.
It’s as good as Alien.
And Rapace is better than Weaver.
Anyway I liked when they blew up the head.
Dude, are you arguing that Shaw should feel maternal about an alien implant that she knows can kill her?
And if we want to complain about vagueness in movies, we have only ourselves to blame. The alternative is exposition, which audiences and studio execs consider a poisonous sedative, or lengthy flashbacks that could at best be described as tangential to the main plot. A five-second scene that looks purty and moves quickly can accomplish so much without making anyone arriving late wonder if they walked into the right theater.
BTW, Angelo, you don’t need to include sex with monkeys–an alien RV dumping its blue water on Earth 4.5 billion years ago would accomplish the same thing. Which is why the sacrifice is rather stupefying–why?
Not arguing that she *should* feel maternal but that they set it up so that she would, like Sarah Polley’s monstrous mom in Splice. My point is the script makes her out to be someone fixated on conceiving and on the ethics of abandoning/destroying your creations/children one moment only to have utterly zero ambivalence about birthing and discarding this species in practically the next scene. Is this supposed to be a joke about how religious pro lifers are only pro-life until they get knocked up under shit circumstances? I’m being glib but I’m also legitimately confused about whether this is supposed to play as irony or if it’s just lazy character development, where the only reason they have the fertility talk is so she can get impregnated in the next scene.
I also don’t think the point is vagueness over exposition but sloppy exposition: that powwow about conceiving, the Weyland scenes, Janek’s sudden revelation that this is a military base — these are all huge blocks of expository dialogue working hard to make sense of the scenes around them.
Alien is a limited-in-scope genre piece just completely blown up by the attention to detail and mood that Ridley Scott lavished upon it, to the degree that it’s lack of background information seems like nuance. It’s a haunted house movie that tricks you into thinking it’s an art film.
Prometheus is substantially more ambitious in scope and had a similar(probably greater) attention to detail, but was more concerned with explicitly stating its ideas than with selling them. It’s an art house movie scripted with event movie heavy-handedness and given a giant budget to realize every thudding particular. Even the less explicit themes are presented in a fairly obvious fashion.
So it suffers in comparison to Alien. The new, convoluted backstory can’t compete with what the audience had visualized to fill the gaps left in the original material. Nothing will stand up to that comparison. People will always prefer their own idea.
It’s the same thing that George Lucas has repeatedly failed to realize.
Pete, I’m not sure who thought Alien was an art film. And while I completely agree with you that they’re two very different movies to compare, Alien was not asking big questions. People have a much easier time filling in their own answers to, “Where is that monster from? than, “Where are we from?”
Prometheus asks big questions from the start and refuses to provide the semblance of an answer, or even an opinion. That’s why haters gon hate.
ALIEN is about survival. And yeah, it’s Art.
So let me get this correct, some disappointed viewers wanted a movie about a search for our creators to have definitive answers? I thought it was great entertainment that made you think afterward. Have I pondered the plot of Avengers since I saw it? Nope. And why is vagueness somehow a bad thing now. It seemed to work for 2001:A Space Odyssey. Then when the 2010 sequel came out (which I liked) critics complained that by revealing answers to the questions posed in 2001 that it was diminishing the magic.
“It’s the same thing that George Lucas has repeatedly failed to realize.”
I like how this is phrased as if the error here is in the filmmakers trying to “replace” the vague and presumed-to-be superior (but in most cases probably not interesting at all) ideas “people” had about backstory for movies they didn’t make. Lucas and Scott (who I don’t even like much as a director overall) are in no way honor-bound to some vague ideas audience members may have concocted about those movies.
That’s not to say there can’t be bad prequels, but Prometheus and the Star Wars prequels to me are examples of strong, interesting prequels, not just offering some boilerplate backstory.
Triple, your story about monkeys reminds me of a news item that popped up twenty years ago when researchers realized AIDS was a monkey disease. Because the popular press had tagged AIDS as a STD everyone assumed that some African chap must’ve had sex with a monkey. The angry African response that utterly failed to improve their image was “We don’t screw monkeys, we eat them!”
The discussion of exposition unfortunately swings between the extremes of Phantom Menace’s “I’m gonna go take a dump and buy some snacks–maybe she’ll be done talking by the time I get back” and The Raid’s title cards like “The Boss” and “The Copy Boy” superimposed over those about to fight. I’d rather see a happy medium like Austin Powers, where we get a briefing that also makes fun of itself. Some of the exposition in Prometheus, however, though brief (“I effin’ like rocks!”) still managed to irk and fail.
The idea that Vickers is an android makes that goofy “get laid” scene make sense, well done folks.
And I’m not screenwriting expert….I just get a sense that the half-baked stuff in PROMETHEUS is simply half-baked and not ambiguous. Or, ambiguous because it’s so half baked. Hasn’t the whole LOST team basically admitted they too were lost and made shit up based on what they had already put out there? This thread is definitely getting me to think more about a movie I found forgettable though. But still, I’m not sure theres’ any there there.
There was some laughably bad dialogue posing as character development.
“I aint here to make friends, im here to make money.”
So youre stuck on a spaceship with 17 people and you declare loudly for everyone ekse to fuck off. Hiw exactly were you picked for this assignment? Did they really need this guy to throw balls into the air and have the computers do all the work. Hell, i could do that job. What did anyone bring to this scenario other than David.
In fact, could Prometheus contain the dumbest and most useless crew in the history of cinema?
“And if we want to complain about vagueness in movies, we have only ourselves to blame. The alternative is exposition,”
Hoo boy. False dichotomy. I’ve seen a LOT of movies that weave in exposition about the characters within the framework of ambiguity. It’s awesome.
The biggest problem with Prometheus is that its big question might be an interesting one, but watching people ask that question is just dull. And it focuses on people who get pouty when they realize an obviously unanswerable question won’t be answered. Dullards.
Yes, Don, the folks at Lost finally admitted they had no plan and were following in the footsteps of Chris Carter. Didn’t help that they were screwed over at the outset by a Disney exec with a thing for Forbidden Planet who thought it would be cool to have an Id monster on the island. He didn’t bother to explain it–that’s the job of the writers, after all–but they didn’t follow up, either. So having one of the brain trust from that show on your team is not a good thing.
But Anghus, if everyone did their job well then no one would’ve screwed up and there’d be no story! They would’ve remained in orbit, exploring and mapping with robots, and no one would’ve gotten anything shoved down their throat…without consent, at least.
And Wester, don’t know if you’re an American but the assumption is that you’re on the team until you prove otherwise, so even bothering to ask “How did life begin?” would strike many as odd since most firmly believe “God did it.” None of them would accept ship-piloting aliens as “God” even if they were our creators, and thus we get the line “But who created them?” Of course we’d never hear the followup “But who created God?”
(uh, we did)
I thought the “I’m here for the money” stuff was a call back to Harry Dean Stanton and his African-American partner in ALIEN who were all about the cash?
From http://digitaldigging.net/prometheus-an-archaeological-perspective/
“The crew is gathered. Two of the chaps at the front are betting that it’s a terraforming expedition. Apparently they don’t know why they’re here either. You’d think they’d shown a little curiosity when, for instance, they were packing and saying goodbye to their loved ones. Or climbing on board the [ship]. Or going into suspended animation. But no.
“Where are you going darling?”
“Ha ha. Fuck knows. I imagine I’ll find out sooner or later. Or not. Who cares?”
“When are you coming back?
“Ha ha. I’m coming back?”
Don, that’s exactly what that scene was, which they’ve tried to do in every ALIEN sequel since – recreate that 70’s working class vibe. And it only worked in ALIEN because of the incredible ensemble and low-key directing. You can’t replace Yaphet and Harry Dean with Stock Future Punk #25.
From http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/ridley-scotts-prometheus-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-20120611?page=2
“While it raises intriguing ideas, they’re mostly underwritten, undefined and undercooked, confusing ambiguity with profundity in a way that’s undeniably reminiscent of the worst of Lindelof’s “Lost” (a show on which Lindelof recently said he had no real desire to explain the mythology of, which certainly carries over).”
There were such starts and stops w/the writing, like the purposefully being left vague in spots and leaps in logic in other points that I kinda got the sense these were development battles lost. “No, I want to do this” “Well, that’s fine but we need to set this up over here.” “No, I don’t want too much explaining. I want the people to figure out what I’m SHOWING.” *Rolls eyes. Thinks about never getting writing work again after getting fired off the Alien Reboot project for being difficult.* “OK.” *Goes back to Starbucks and gets a double shot of chocolate*
I didn’t mind Shaw not having an emotional attachment to the fetus, at the time, although now as I think about it, there probably should been a little more of a post op freak out moment or displaced anger somewhere. I do realize that time was an issue but that point was, excuse the word choice, completely aborted from that moment on. My real issue was how she had major surgery and then sprinting out of there like Usain Bolt seconds later. I realize she shot herself up. I realize things were supposed to heal at an accelerated pace but she was still stapled up, not like she had some fused rejuvenation like what happens to X-men mutants. Shouldn’t she have at least limped out of the O.R.? Hell, how ‘bout losing your balance? She’d zipped up her space suit over her fresh wound and ran around like it was the opening day of spring training. I was thinking forget the origin of man, let’s get that technology back here so we never lose a player to I.R. for the rest of time. Her stamina and physical prowess was Tiger Woods playing the final round of the US Open on one leg, Patrick Roy freezing his shoulder for game 7 against the Leafs, and Mateen Cleaves hopping over his own sprained ankle in the 2000 title game, all rolled into one.
The cut away from Vickers being crushed left some room to think there might have been some left for to survive, sorta like Shaw.
At the time, if seemed hard for me to buy that Shaw would trust David. I could as least see him using her to get reassembled and that’s why he tells her of the other ship but everything else pointed to him being shady. Some good explanations up thread but some of which I don’t remember. I wonder will I remember all of this when it comes on cable??
In the opening, I wasn’t sure the alien knew he was making an ultimate sacrifice. Seems like there would have been more pretense before it. Almost like a religious ritual, as ironic as that sounds, to signify and prepare for his demise. Otherwise if it’s just his bodily DNA, why not lop off a finger or chunk of his calf and toss it in the water? If it was really the water that was needed to incubate life, or at least mix his dna w/life in the water, why wasn’t he standing IN the water when he drank the mix? I know he was standing on the shore but there’s no way he’d know he wouldn’t fall the other way on dry land, right?
Stephanie Zacharek’s review is the last article she wrote for Movieline before getting laid off ( http://movieline.com/2012/06/05/review-prometheus-ridley-scott-alien-spoilers/ ), and she also linked to this fun clip:
http://movieline.com/2012/04/12/thank-prometheus-for-the-most-disgusting-animated-gif-ever/
Not telling the crew where they were going seems plausible to me. If the richest man on Earth went on a mission to contact our creator, you don’t think there’d be mass chaos, protests and violence among Earth’s population? I think the crew is supposed to signify humanity’s failings and how we’re not ready to meet our makers:
– we dull our senses with drugs like the guy smoking pot in his suit
– the world is still filled with wars and violence signified by the guy bringing a gun to meet a god and slapping Shaw in its presence
– want to live forever like Weyland and be gods ourselves by creating androids like David
– having our creations deliberately infect someone with the black goo in the name of science
– being selfish while ignoring generations after us…Weyland holding onto power at the expense of his daughter Vickers who is emotionally stunted having felt no love from her father
– believe in ancient myths/religions like Shaw even though there is evidence of aliens visiting us like the cave drawings of an alien pointing to the 5-star constellation.
However the movie also points out humanity’s good points:
– the biologist being enthralled by the white worm/snake shows humanity’s innocence and our sense of wonder at discovering new life besides our own and his trying to be friends with the rude guy who refuses to shake his hand and even going with him when he leaves the other crew
– the love between Shaw and Charlie and her agony at his being set on fire
– the sacrifice of the Prometheus’ captain and pilots by ramming it into the alien ship to prevent it from reaching Earth
– Shaw’s insistence on still wearing the Christian cross signifying humanity’s aspiration to be better than we are even though meeting a real god in the Engineer alien who disappoints us
– Shaw’s tenacity in having the foetus taken out of her, stopping the alien’s plan to infect Earth and to survive, all despite the pain she is in.
Steve Irwin may have taken some foolish risks with animals, but I suspect he would’ve stayed away from one that bled acid and could force itself down his throat.
It’d be like one of us voluntarily relieving ourselves in a stream full of candiru.
The best thing about PROMETHEUS? H.R. Giger back again in 3D. The beauty of those ship designs are almost tactile. I hope he gets an Oscar. Again.
with a thing for Forbidden Planet…
Which you can see in Prometheus, with Weyland/Prospero, Vickers/Miranda and David/Caliban. It’s not a 1:1 representation, but it’s there with the ship, island, storm, magical “spirits”, cursed “unions” from a loss of virginity…
Did the biologist know that creature would do that? I don’t disagree that the character was stupid, but there was a similar scene in Jurassic Park where the guy who shut down the park tries to play nice with the spitting dinosaur. He acted stupid, but he was also very scared, like the biologist. People do stupid things when they’re scared. It’s easy to scoff at stupid things characters do in movies because we have the luxury of being outside of the action. But like someone said, if no mistakes were made, there would be no movie.
I think the point of the movie was that the whole mission was a mistake, an equivalent of opening up Pandora’s Box. Look what happened to the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The smartest, most logical character in Prometheus awoken the Space Jockey. So yes, everyone was dumb in this one, yet I don’t think it is a dumb movie.
I finally saw it today and thought it alternately genius and confounding. When Shaw, post-Caesarean, finds David, and he doesn’t say “Oh I thought you were alien-pregnant and in stasis, what’s up with that” and she doesn’t say “Holy shitballs I just had a squid baby taken out of me what the fucking fuck” I had a spontaneous flashback to the classic Lost takedown:
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.co.uk/2005/04/lost-you-uncurious-motherfckers.html
Also, the captain’s “Yeah, you guys are trapped in an alien ship full of alien corpses, no big, I’m going to sleep” was ridiculous.
Also, LexG is 100% right at 11:05, 100% wrong at 11:49.
i’m reading the most recent posts on in this thread while having a drink and Guy Pearce walks right past me. It was wonderfully surreal.
And i have nothing against Rapace. I don’t think she was terrible. But with her tiny frame running around in that spacesuit and those faces she was making the final third of the film, it felt like i was watching Rhea Perlman.
My biggest problem was Vickers’ death. it was so stupid, and so late in the movie for a stupid death, that I keep thinking she’s not dead. A giant ship could have severtal grooves or creases she could have fit in, she could have roilled to the left at the last second and we didn’t see it, and then she hung back and followed Shaw without telling her…?
My second biggest problem was the way her Caesarian is shrugged off. Granted, she had some drugs in her, but she was stapled shut. She exerts herself like that, those seams are going to split.
A lot of this felt like they were setting up Prometheus 2.
http://enchantedmitten.blogspot.ca/2003/12/reading-previous-entries-in-this-series.html
This is a pretty hilarious take on Prometheus. An imaginary conversation between Elizabeth Shaw and the Engineer.
I’d think that a biologist first encountering an alien creature (we don’t know if humanity has ever met an alien species) would be curious about it and might even touch it. Of course, when it starts to hiss, that’d be a good sign not to continue. But this character is very friendly where he tries to shake hands and be friends with the rude geologist and even goes with him when he leaves the other crew so his action is not totally unexpected.
As for Shaw’s being able to walk around after the c-section, don’t you think pain medecine will be much more advanced in another 80 years? She is still in pain the remainder of the film so I have no problem with her recuperation.
The crew not mentioning her abortion might seem odd, but when she returns they are all are fussing over their sick and very rich benefactor who has awakened from cryo sleep, is near death and is about to meet the creator. So, they obviously were told to forget about Shaw. Plus I doubt they knew she had an alien squid inside her, and how were they to know she had aborted it?
The captain was unable to retrieve the two lost crew because of the storm and they were in a place with breathable air and it had been scanned and found to have no life-forms. Only when the black goo started to melt and came in contact with the worms did they become in danger and he couldn’t have foreseen that.
If Scott is going to fuse his Alien and Blade Runner ideas into the next film, then Vickers (as an android) would have no problem surviving the crash.
And Drew, I’m not talking about a fusion between two combatant production companies or studios. It won’t be a bridge between the two franchises a la Alien V Predator or some crap like that.
We may be surprised to see similar Blade Runner characters show up in the next one, a stealth fusion if you will. (Such as Ray Nicolette showing up in Jackie Brown and Out Of Sight)
Even if it doesn’t happen, it stimulates the mind and the coincidences between Batty/David and Vickers/Rachel are verrrry similar.
Even if Vickers did survive, and she managed to dig herself out from under the ship, what’s she going to do? She didn’t know there were other ships, and even if she did she didn’t have David’s learned expertise that would allow her to pilot it. So she’d just sit there and wait, I guess, and hope that someone else rediscovers the planet.
My opinion: She’s dead, since any other option seems pointless.
“when she returns they are all are fussing over their sick and very rich benefactor who has awakened from cryo sleep, is near death and is about to meet the creator. So, they obviously were told to forget about Shaw.”
The crew would’ve been so blown away by the surprise appearance of Wayland (who was essentially playing Steve Jobs) that they didn’t need to be told to forget about Shaw. They simply didn’t care because…PETER WAYLAND!!!
I will be that guy because it needs to be stated. All of us have put more thought into this movie then the director and the screenwriter. It’s great that the vagueness leads to these sorts of discussion, but wouldn’t it be greater if the film took a stand, and the discussion we could have had if it did?
It’s obvious there’s a lot of discussions spawned from Prometheus. I think it’ll take some time for the black goo to settle and people can decide whether all the lingering questions and dangling threads were deft filmmaking or creative corner cutting.
I had a great conversation last night with some regular film fans who don’t spend all their time online. When i told them it was written ‘By one of the Lost guys’ there was a lot of nodding and ‘ohhhhh that makes sense’ moments.
That spawned a lot of Lost talk where people were constantly left with unresolved questions, and the most prevalent thought that kept coming back was that Lost had compelling characters and six seasons to flesh things out. You didn’t mind some of the unexplained phenomenons because you had a large cast and 22 44 minute episodes a year of constantly overlapping intrigue.
Prometheus is the same basic concept crammed into 2 hours. A large group of travellers to an unknown place with big mysteries that never completely materialize.
And the criticisms of Prometheus revolve around two major issues
1. unresolved questions
2. a lack of compelling characters (with the exception of Fassbender unanimously and a few kudos for Theron and Rapace.)
Had the characters been more interesting or developed would it have excused the plot holes?
The lesson here for Lindeloff seems to be that people are forgiving of unanswered questions and dangling plot threads on a long form, serialized show with a large cast of actors given ample time to develop characters.
In a 2 hour movie, not so much.
Anghus, I heard plenty of bitching near the end of Lost’s run where people were saying “They have X hours of showtime to go, so they have plenty of time to explain mysteries A, B, C…” but they never did. I was never a Lostie and never hung out on boards like this to hash out every scrap of info, but I got the impression that analytical folks like us were incensed by the lack of resolution. There was no plan tho the creators pretended there was, so as someone else wrote the show was merely an experiment to see what was minimally required to keep folks tuning in week after week to watch commercials.
For comparison, movie serials that had cliffhanger endings were immensely popular in the ’30s and ’40s, yet when stitched together into a feature-length film how many were still able to draw an audience? I can’t name any that withstood the test of time. Fifty years from now, this is how Lost will be remembered.
I agree that two hours is plenty of time to resolve your issues and tie off dangling threads. It is inexcusable to end a flick like SWatH so abruptly because the makers assumed a sequel would be greenlit, and Scott pulled the same trick with Prometheus. Despite that expected sequel, as well as the promise of twenty minutes of extra material on the BluRay, I get the feeling that many of Prometheus’ questions will remain unanswered.
(Anyone who wondered how a post-cesarean Shaw could still run and jump will very likely stare in dumbfounded awe when she fights off the pilot with that axe she picked up.)
TV and film writing are different beasts. TV is based on serializing events. Prometheus has a weak script with tv level obviousness. .
They are different beasts, Wilder… but I think this script has taken a lot of unfair shit because of the name on it, not a serious analysis of what is in the script.
Based on Lindelof’s own comments, when he came aboard there was already a script very Alienish in feel, but apparently his job was to rearrange or strip things out (like the priest who gave the cup of grey goo to the sacrificial engineer) and simplify, which he did in spades.
It was also his idea to come up with all sorts of alien variations (many of which make no sense) rather than the strict egg/facehugger/chest-burster/xenomorph path.
http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2012/06/interview-prometheus-screenwriter-damon-lindelof
And “Some of these questions we wanted to answer directly and some of these questions we didn’t want to answer directly, which sets you up for a certain level of frustration and disappointment that I am well familiar with, but I’ll take it any day of the week because I also feel like it forces you to fire your own imagination.”
As well as “I will say that the theory that is formed by Shaw by the end of the movie—that the black goo is some sort of weapon and it is headed towards earth and if it gets there the result is going to be terrible—[is] based on the information that she has in the movie, but that’s not necessarily the correct deduction for her to make. The audience is privy to pieces of the story that Shaw is not.”
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/fact-vs-fiction/prometheus-unbound-write-damon-lindelof-on-the-non-prequel-alien-prequel-9514210?click=pm_latest
So what was Shaw supposedly wrong about–the black goo isn’t a destructive weapon, or the ship wasn’t heading to Earth, or the result isn’t going to be terrible? It looked to me like the ship was heading toward Earth and the result sure seemed terrible, so is he saying that the black goo isn’t a weapon? Is it meant to push a critter up the evolutionary ladder, even if the result is a predatory killing machine?
I dont think its unfair at all. I watched the reaction of a half dozen people who had no idea who he was and complained about a lack of answers and nowhere plot points as i told them the connection between Lost and Prometheus. There was a lot of clicking going on.
I havent read the script. I only know what is and more importantly what isnt in the movie. Whether its Lindeloff or Scott there is a wide perception that theres a lot left out and unresolved in Prometheus.
The only question that remains is how intentional it was.
Lindeloff says flat out he stripped away a lot from the script which made things more ambiguous. Isnt it safe to say that Lindeloff has a history of ambiguity in his work?
And so does Scott. Do we need to rehash the fourteen hundred Blade Runner cuts and Scotts assertion that Deckard is a replicant in spite of anything corroborating cinematic evidence other than Scott telling us it is.
I dont want every movie spelled out for me, but at the same time you cant leave out huge chunks of information and claim its there based on almost invisible cues and single lines of expository dialogue.
And again, i didnt even hate Prometheus. I just think its almost an excercise in ambiguity.
Its like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. We dont know whats in it. There are theories and little cues to support theoriez but can you say you know for certain what it is based on the content of the film?
The difference is the question of whats in the briefcase isnt central to the plot or the characters. It merely drives things forward. Prometheus asks big questions which is central to the plot and resolution but are never fully answered or given two second explinations. If your movie raises big questions you might want to provide at least one big answer.
The entire point of Prometheus seemed to be the creation of the first Xenomorph. So what the filmmakers are telling us is that the answers are less important than the chain reaction of events that leads to the creation of an entity that is the backbone of much more compelling films.
Thats why i chuckle about how Prometheus was reworked to be less of an Alien Prequel. The whole film is like an extended version of that scene from Benjamin Button where he describes the chain of events that lead to Cate Blanchetts character being hit by a car. Seemingly pointless moments that add up to something tragic.
Thats what Prometheu is. A series of unfortunate events. These characters exist for no other reason than to drive squid fetus and the eginner to a gullet cramming moment that creates the first semi recognizable xenomorph. Because thats the only thing that carries on after the end of their story.
I suppose it mirrors the bleak tone of the Alien series. At the end of Alien 3 (where the series ends for me), Ripley dies and everything is generally terrible. At the end of Prometheus the characters have gone on this journey for nothing. No questions are answered. They are no better off for their journey.
But please, lets stop pretending that the grand themes and questions asked in Prometheus are nothing more than happenstance to get the squid to facefuck an engineer.
Anghus, the showing I saw was half full and when the credits rolled half of them stayed behind, awaiting an Easter egg that never came (in retrospect, it should’ve been the xenomorph emerging from the engineer). I found it astounding to see so many people hanging around, talking, because everyone usually rushes for the exits the moment the first credit appears.
Since the audience was clearly older than your average crowd (Sunday morning matinee), I don’t think they were conditioned to wait by Marvel, so I’m guessing they were waiting for…more. A clarification, an explanation that might tidy things up because the movie was so ambiguous. And I think we all deserved more than what we got.
If you really wanted to make a standalone film that scene should have been post credits.
If your final image in the film is the ship flying into space to continue the search, then fine. But if your final shot is the birth of the xenomorph, then that seems to infer that what matters is that moment.
If they never make another film set in that universe, what would Prometheus be other than a very long flashback to the birth of the creature that terrorizes Ripley for three movies.
The problem, though, is that this isn’t the planet the Nostromo visits. Even Lindelof thought it was so cool that “black goo + human + human + engineer = xenomorph” that he didn’t bother to acknowledge that this little guy is going to die alone. Everyone who could help him reproduce is dead, and for that small contingent who keeps insisting that Vickers is a robot and therefore alive–she won’t be for long because xenomorphs really, really hate robots.
The only way he doesn’t have a sad and lonely ending is if Vickers is human and somehow alive beneath the ship so he can dig her out and stick an egg in her.
Redlettermedia.com reduces Prometheus to ashes with four minutes of questions.
It really is painfully funny in its simplicity and sums up well the befuddlement many experienced.
Man, somebody should parse one of Anghus’ Ja Rule DTVs with the same enraged scrutiny he’s applying to Prometheus.
By criticizing a screenplay, you are suggesting empirically that YOUR movies are better than what Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott can come up with.
Oh gaaad, I can’t stop laughing; here it is for easy viewing: http://redlettermedia.com/
“Why would the Prometheus crew agree to go on a four-year mission when they’re not even briefed about what the mission is until right before the mission starts? What if the mission involved a gang bang?”
Thanks Anghus, +10 internets for you.
(From the comments: “…if you need a fanboy to write a 3 page blog post to explain your movie, then you did something wrong” aaand “was the worst porn I have ever seen!”)
Lex, lex, lex. I know youve done nothing. And i know watching Red Letter Media probably pisses you off because theyve found a way to turn being funny and/or psychotic on the internet into something entertaining and marginally profitable while you bounce from board to board bannings with a kind if Harvey Two Face blend of film intelligence and drunken threats of suicide/jail bait cravings.
To say that me criticizing Prometheus writing implies that im saying my work is better is ludicrous. Just because someone writes a couple of low rent movies and has them produced doesnt mean their criticism is invalid or compared to their own work. Damon Lindeloff is obviously a better writer. That doesnt mean i cant have an opinion.
Just because you threaten to kill yourself on a quarterly basis doesnt preclude you from having an opinion on how other people live their lives, does it?
Just to show that we aren’t the only ones who have a problem with the script, the Half in the Bag review rags on the two elements owned entirely by Lindelof: all the bizarre alien forms that diverge from what we already know of the xenomorph life cycle, and the aggravating ambiguity.
http://thesuperslice.com/2012/06/12/half-in-the-bag-episode-33-prometheus-review-red-letter-media/
Beware, the review is 24 minutes long. (The 4-minute humor video is posted above it.)
One other thing, while we ponder on the vagueness of Prometheus and what it all means, here’s where I thought Prometheus also failed, here’s the description from IMDB:
“A team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.”
I wasn’t terrified once. Nothing made me feel any sense of dread, or any close connection with any character so that when they were in danger or died I would feel a sense of loss. Ponder all the big themes you want, this is still storytelling to an audience, and the constructs of a good story involves not just themes but accessibility, and the thing about the Alien series, is that it was as much or more about the humans. Scott and Cameron did this well. The backstory was another character of the film. Here, it seems that he created just echoes of former characters, relying on our own relationships with the Alien universe to draw and build relationships.
One thing that dawned on me was why were the captain and the other two crew members so gung ho to sacrifice themselves without much coercion or convincing? Again, no character development.
And again, sometimes character development is sacrificed for action beats, but to me there was no tension, no true suspense, no claustrophobia and that sense of impending doom that would be an obvious result of the the new knowledge that presented itself.
Even Lindelof thought it was so cool that “black goo + human + human + engineer = xenomorph” that he didn’t bother to acknowledge that this little guy is going to die alone…
On a symbolic/metaphoric level, I know what they were going for, but this isn’t supposed to be an opera.
There’s a shot in the first trailers, with Shaw on the ground and the Engineer towering above her. It’s all smokey and a callback to the end of Alien. But I don’t remember it happening in the final cut.
So I tend to believe they rewrote the ending on set, which is where a lot of the aberrant decisions seem to reside.
I don’t know why they didn’t keep everything in the Engineer’s Cryo/Control room. Once Idris rams the Derelict, it could have separated, and the scene could have been a mirror of Alien, where the human, (Shaw), was the stowaway on the ships lifeboat.
But the need to show the Alien creation…I’m glad Lindelof likes it.
If the creation of the Alien form takes a number of genetic folds, what in the hell is the representation hanging above the alter?
That’s why I’m inclined to believe Ridley was “asked” to include the Alien in come capacity, even though he said numerous times it was no longer in the mix.
“…why were the captain and the other two crew members so gung ho to sacrifice themselves without much coercion or convincing?”
This is where the blue-collar “I didn’t sign up for this” attitude of Alien flew out the window. Not only should they have objected (I know the Republicans would like to take us back to the 19th century’s view of labor relations, but I don’t believe your boss ever had the power to tell you to die for the company…BTW, I am talking only about suicide here; I’m well aware of the Ludlow Massacre and other instances where bosses murdered their employees, and their wives, and their children), they should have asked “What, the Earth can’t defend itself?”
This is where Lindelof’s association with Star Trek revealed itself. The Prometheus is not the Enterprise–it is not the Earth’s only defender. Does he really expect us to believe an alien spaceship could enter the solar system on a direct heading for Earth and not be approached by dozens, if not hundreds of curious and/or heavily armed spaceships?
All of this discussion reminds me of the reaction (and backlash) against Inception, 2001, and every other movie that was brilliant but didn’t feel the need to explain itself. I’m curious whether some of you just hate ambiguity or you just hate this one movie’s ambiguity.
There’s a difference between inviting the audience to imagine what might have happened offscreen and requiring the audience to write multipage explanations of what’s happening onscreen.
And I’m sorry if you found Inception overly ambiguous–the only question I walked away with was the perfectly logical “Is the whole movie a dream?” Everything that happened onscreen in 2001 made sense, and it only takes one viewing of Memento to realize you need to see it in reverse order for it to make sense.
We’re upset because Ridley Scott hired a writer known for raising questions he won’t answer.
Inception is NOT VAGUE. Other than the ending there is not a single ambiguous thing at all in Inception. It is so plain-faced and obvious, explains itself constantly… only a 3 year old could be confused watching it. Nor is Prometheus really vague or ambiguous. It is just, like Inception, about very dumb people. It waves its ideas so directly around, screams to the cheap seats, ‘WE ARE TALKING ABOUT FAITH AND SCIENCE, OKAY?’ Everything in the movie is 100% on the nose. The only thing it doesn’t explain is why IQs in human beings dropped so sharply between now and when the movie takes place. Or why this special group of morons got shot into space. That would be a good story, the lottery of the future allowing high-functioning idiots a free spaceship ride with a robot.
It sure looks pretty!
“It seems that at least one part of the crew selection procedure took the form of a raffle at an arsehole convention.”
…from the already-mentioned Archaeology review.
Or, better put: “The late Gene Siskel used to talk about the Idiot Plot – a plot that could be resolved in five minutes, were all the characters not complete idiots.” Although in this case it’s a plot that couldn’t even get started unless everyone involved was an idiot.
(If anyone ever gets the chance to buttonhole Lindelof or Scott, I hope you ask “In that scene where Rapace and Theron are trying to run away from that crashing spaceship when all they had to do was run sideways to avoid it, did you really mean to inspire a new generation of male moviegoers to scream ‘Stupid bitches’ at the screen? Because we’ve seen this same scene in slasher movies for over thirty years now and we were hoping it would be put to rest someday.”)
But that’s the thing…whether it made sense or not doesn’t seem to be the point of these movies. I didn’t find Inception overly ambiguous at all and never said anything to that effect. I liked Inception just because it was thrilling to see its ideas play out, even though there were some pretty gaping holes. I didn’t need it to make sense to enjoy it.
Prometheus works because there’s enough onscreen to write the multipage explanation and for it to make sense. Just like Mulholland Drive makes sense, but only after it was explained in a long article. Just like a lot of movies which didn’t make sense to me on the first viewing, but which I liked nonetheless. It’s only later that I find out I liked it because it dealt with issues on a much more symbolic/mythic level. That only increases my enjoyment.
And if you got 2001 on the first viewing then seriously kudos to you sir.
Palmtree, no one here really hates Prometheus, but it’s far from interesting due to all of it’s ambiguity. Inception and 2001 are not all that ambiguous as movies, and they are better movies. Prometheus is intentionally vague and it’s vagueness, pretty much destroys it. Vickers being killed because she runs in the shadow doesn’t help, neither does repelling after a c-section, but comparing a very flawed film like Prometheus to 2001 and Inception, ignores those movies do not use vagueness or ambiguity to seem more important than they actually are.
Twenty-five years ago I would’ve rushed out to buy the novelization of Prometheus where every question would have been answered by some poor hack who looked at an early draft of the screenplay and filled in the blanks with his imagination. 2001 would’ve messed that dynamic up because the movie shows that aliens have been monitoring us for some time now and once we could follow their breadcrumbs we would be rewarded with near-godhood. Clarke’s own book, however, ended with Bowman, as the Starchild, setting off Earth’s orbital weapon platforms to incite global nuclear war and wipe out humanity, so clearly Clarke–unlike Kubrick but like Ridley Scott–thought the aliens who lifted us up decided we had turned out poorly after all and should be exterminated like cockroaches.
I was quite the sci-fi nerd in high school–I read Starlog, after all. Oh, who am I kidding, I never stopped being a sci-fi nerd, it’s just that everyone else jumped on the bandwagon, too, and the stories got stupider to appeal to that wider (stupid) audience.
Did I already mention that Idiocracy was a documentary?
I, for one, hated Prometheus, sorry to say. I liked elements of it, but Shaw and Holloway being these ridiculous naifs…unforgivable. These vague images are an invitation? “It’s what I choose to believe” FUCK YOU. Then Holloway goes to a NEW PLANET, finds the REMAINS of an ancient, spacefaring alien race, and the dude… gets pouty because he can’t talk to them?? GO TO HELL you dumb fuckface.
These are the most unlikable main characters I’ve ever experienced in a film. I haven’t been that excited to see a main character die ever… Theron was such a hero to torch that doofus. I was sad that Shaw kept going.
Event Horizon was better.
There, I said it.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Lindelof or Scott to explain why the engineers left those “vague images” to guide us to their WMD plant. If they wanted us to drop by and help them spread black death around the galaxy, I don’t think the pilot would’ve reacted so negatively to our arrival.
Meanwhile, despite all the tricky plot holes we’ve been trying to backfill here, some idiot at Time asked “But still, at the end of the film, I was plagued by a big question that needed solving…the doctor says that she’d rather use the spaceship to travel to the home world of whatever aliens ruined her life. Where was the ship ultimately heading, in that final shot? It’s anybody’s guess.”
http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/12/prometheus-sequel-final-scene/
By the way, he actually got to interview Lindelof and that was the question he chose to ask. Guess what Lindelof said? Yeah, exactly what was presented in the movie.
I hope the writer, Steven James Snyder, looks good in a Speedo, because when FoxNews and all the other outlets switch to the format shown in Idiocracy, that’s about the only way he’ll get anyone to pay attention to his dumbass ramblings.
something should be said for the computer technology of ALIEN vs PROM …. in PROM all the computer effects look like something 20 years in the future … in ALIEN they had one shot in the entire film that ratchets the film to the 1980s; it’s that shot of a computer screen with the green font that just cries out pre-Mac revisionism ….
IIRC, it was either Scott or Lindelof who explained the difference by pointing out that the Prometheus was a state-of-the-art science vessel–tricked out with all the latest gear–while the Nostromo was a tugboat, essentially, stripped down to the bare essentials.
If all you need to run a tugboat is an Apple IIe, then that’s all you’ll get. Just because you can hook an iPod to a jackhammer doesn’t mean you should.
Cripes, this interview was tabbed on my browser all day and I just got to it:
Vickers. Yes, she does look like David. Yes, this was intentional. What better way to piss off your daughter than to build the male equivalent of her? But enough about daddy issues […] allow me to answer your question. Is she a robot?
She is not.
But did Vickers somehow survive being smushed by the gigantic rolling horseshoe that was the derelict ship? Could her scantily-clad push-up training have saved her in that final moment of crushitude? And more importantly, WHY DIDN’T SHE JUST RUN ZIG-ZAGGY OR SIDEWAYS TO AVOID IT?!?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, Josh. I’m just the writer.
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1687022/prometheus-secrets-damon-lindelof.jhtml
If the only way to find out if a character was a robot or not is to ask the writer, then you did something wrong. Can’t wait for an annotated version of the movie; should it be like Pop-Up Video?
of all the sci fiers from the early ’80s … Saturn 3 is the film that looks, techno wise and design wise, as if it was made last week
That MTV exchange confirms Lindelof fucked a lot of things up.
Wow. If he’s willing to flat-out say Vickers was not a replicant, then the “get laid” scene was tacked on because they knew she was written/acting exactly like an android, and Damon’s answer was “Well, if I go meta and acknowledge what the audience is thinking and people know androids do not have sex”…
…except for Blade Runner, and AI, and Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica, and etc…
How, after watching the movie, does Lindelof not answer “I don’t know anymore. I didn’t write her with that intent, but Ridley made some choices that has left me wondering if she was”.
It really is incredibly fucked up for this guy to say “no”, because it lays bare he’s a decent idea man, but shitty-horrible in execution.
This is before we get to the “goalposts” reply, because it’s even fucking scarier to realize Lindelof thinks he provided any form of an answer in some expository meanderings.
That contradicts the entire approach; that the audience is aware of things the characters are not. Because if they can guess the truth, then what’s the point of showing us anything else from an omniscient perspective? The entire opening scene with the Engineers contradicts every other action we see later on. So, it’s pointless.
The story should have started then, like Alien, on the ship, making our POV the crewmembers. It could have added an element of suspense as to who survives.
Sad, but it sounds like Ridley wanted to explore the Engineer concept and Damon wanted to write about robots, and everything else was secondary.
What I liked–and most appreciated–about “Prometheus” was that, along with “Dark Shadows,” it’s the only summer tentpole this season where you actually got the sense there was a director (a real director, not just a traffic cop) in charge.
Call it a “vision thing” if you like, but it truly makes a difference when so many of today’s vaunted blockbusters are either clumsily (“The Avengers”) or lazily (“MIB3”) directed.
One of those interviews mentioned “Ridleygrams”, of which there are a ton if you search the internet. It’s obvious he has an art background because he’s constantly drawing, whether designs or storyboards or reaction shots, and clearly in charge of every aspect of the film (One article mentioned he wanted the engineers to look like Greek statues, so the art department papered the walls with pictures of Greek statues). I was also impressed that real sets were built, with some pieces extending over thirty feet high, when so many directors are happy to shoot everything in front of a green screen.
The troubled shoot of World War Z, on the other hand, would’ve benefited from a clumsy or lazy director. Word is that he’s in way over his head and letting everyone else–from the actors to the art director–make all the decisions. He has no power, no authority, and no idea of what’s going on.
Does this mean studios are so afraid of handing eight-digit paychecks to decent directors that they’ll throw $170 mil at anyone willing to work for peanuts?
Does this mean studios are so afraid of handing eight-digit paychecks to decent directors that they’ll throw $170 mil at anyone willing to work for peanuts?
Blame Marvel.
Forster is on board WWZ because Pitt wanted him, not the studio, he helmed the last bond film which did quite well, and given his previous work’s preoccupation with death might have been uniquely suited for the project.
But it sounds like it wasn’t just lack of a director, but lack of a producer that can keep everything in line thats hurting the project. So its not only that they are giving these monster projects to directors without a lot of big budget experience, its that they don’t have anyone overseeing them to make sure the project doesn’t go off the rails.
I find it bizarre why someone would say there’s no purpose to the movie. We find out that we have the same dna as the Engineers and that the xenomorphs are created by the black goo plus humans and creators. And 2001 wasn’t ambiguous?…was there an director’s cut I didn’t watch? It doesn’t make for a bad movie that everything isn’t explained. I loved 2001 and Mulholland Drive.
As for Holloway being depressed and shutting down, wouldn’t you be if you are religious, have come light years to meet your makers and find they are dead?
Also, the awakened Engineer didn’t just attack everyone right off the bat. So, it isn’t a refutiation of the cave paintings as an invitation to humanity. It was only after David speaking to the Engineer that the Engineer went nuts. Being confronted by an artificial person probably telling him that Weyland wanted to live forever is likely an affront to a race that sacrifices their lives to seed life on a barren planet.
People running in a straight line away from danger might be dumb but after enduring trauma (barely escaping being shot out of an escape pod and having your spaceship explode) and being in a panic, people do dumb things. Other movies have done the same thing…for example, in Spielber’s War Of The Worlds, people run away down the middle of the street instead of finding cover and using side alleys to flee. If humanity were perfect and we didn’t make mistakes, it’d make for a pretty boring movie. Are we really ready as a species to meet our makers? We still have too many flaws.
“Also, the awakened Engineer didn’t just attack everyone right off the bat. So, it isn’t a refutiation of the cave paintings as an invitation to humanity. It was only after David speaking to the Engineer that the Engineer went nuts. Being confronted by an artificial person probably telling him that Weyland wanted to live forever is likely an affront to a race that sacrifices their lives to seed life on a barren planet.”
That explanation is a leap that you are making. And it’s why people are pissed off with this movie, including people who can handle ambiguity. It’s like Lost, where everyone was fine with you raising questions, but at some point you need to provide some answers, and not just more questions. That scene was a pretty pivotal scene, and it made it no better than you did not know what the engineer was told.
Additionally, why did Weyland, who could walk with the help of those braces require an audience and was asking whether Shaw was coming. Only David knew his plan, so why bother having others there when David would have to whisper his request.
“People running in a straight line away from danger might be dumb but after enduring trauma (barely escaping being shot out of an escape pod and having your spaceship explode) and being in a panic, people do dumb things. Other movies have done the same thing…for example, in Spielber’s War Of The Worlds, people run away down the middle of the street instead of finding cover and using side alleys to flee. If humanity were perfect and we didn’t make mistakes, it’d make for a pretty boring movie. Are we really ready as a species to meet our makers? We still have too many flaws.”
WotW was to me a completely different scenario where the people were completely taken by surprise and was running from an an attack by an alien that was targeting them. Additionally, it was several hundred people crammed into a street, so many died, and many got away.
They had already established that Vickers could handle trauma in her establishing scene when she came out of sleep and was in better shape than the rest of the crew. Additionally, it was a big ass piece of metal falling slowly toward them, floating almost. You do a disservice to the ‘intelligent’ character you created by having them die in such a stupid manner. If this was supposed to be the more cerebral Alien, couldn’t you have them be outsmarted by the Engineers instead of just having them tossed aside and smacked around?
Spielberg’s War of the Worlds blew!
The problem with the running-from-the-spaceship scene is that it’s a staple of bad slasher films. If you’re on foot and the baddie’s in a car, how do you try to get away? You run down the road, act surprised when headlights come up behind you, then turn into the lights, put your hands up defensively, scream, and get run over. It’s so prevalent, so hackneyed, that bad filmmakers feel obligated to throw it in.
My new question, though, is why Weyland suddenly became the bad guy for expressing a desire to live forever? Let’s put it this way: How many people DON’T want to live forever? If you had an opportunity to live century after century with no fear of disease or aging, how many would say “No thanks, I’d rather die decrepit, demented and diseased fifty years from now.”
im with you bulldog. even an ounce of wit against the engineers would have been so much more rewarding. outsmarting our creators, now that would be excellent and man would it piss them off.
instead we get the Looney Toones ending where Roadrunner Shaw causes Wile E Coyote Engineer to stumble into an idiotic demise.
Wait, that feels insulting. Roadrunner cartoons make far more sense than Prometheus.
Using wit to defeat the engineer requires wit on the part of the creative team. Unfortunately, they were preoccupied with a) creating nifty imagery, b) inserting action sequences every 15 pages because they can’t use naked boobs, and c) tossing out mysteries they have no interest in solving.
Not long before Sly, Arnold and Bruce dominated our summers, one critic said “Action is a plot substitute.” These days, if you strip out the action you just might discover there is no plot.
Shedding a tear for the boobs we’re missing out on every 15 pages.
Yep, that was a shout-out to Roger Corman. Wonder how he would’ve handled the movie.
I keep thinking if you put out the exact same movie with the words Directed by Paul WS Anderson at the end people would have been lining up to bludgeon this filn to death and there would have been no defense of the complete abandonment of sense that exists in this film.
Wouldn’t outsmarting our engineers change the point of the movie?
I know it’s annoying to have movies which show human beings as somewhat stupid and unprepared for challenges and ridiculous and unheroic. But if this were an art house movie we’d be applauding its realism and insight. Seriously, isn’t the point of the movie how primitive humans are compared to our creators?
http://d1oi7t5trwfj5d.cloudfront.net/01/76b580b66311e19f68123138165f92/file/engineer-prometheus.jpg
That’s for Martin S. See? They even filmed it, but the older Engineer got phased out.
Palmtree, these are scientists. If these people are shown to lack empirical thinking, then the rest of the people in that universe have to be really stupid. Seriously, just look at the ship going into the Engineer’s ship. This makes no sense based on the tech the Prometheus should have. All the pilots should have been able to get in the liferaft, and let the ship fly into the Engineer ship on auto-pilot. Why does this not happen?
This does not happen because the only characters who have any importance in this movie are Shaw and David. Everything that happens in that movie, to every character, happens to get to a point where Shaw and her head, head to the Engineer’s planet. No one matters, their decisions, even if they are stupid, do not matter. They are just red shirts, waiting to get killed off, so we can get to the end game of the movie, and set-up the sequel. It’s all a big whoopidy doo in a slick spectacle coating.
“In what should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, director Ridley Scott has revealed his intention to deliver “twenty minutes” of extra footage from Prometheus on the upcoming DVD and Blu-Ray release, either in the form of an extended ‘director’s’ cut or an assemblage of deleted scenes.”
“It’s all a big whoopidy doo in a slick spectacle coating.”
this can explain reality tv stars like Kim Kardashian.
JS – I didn’t question that. I said they didn’t shoot Space Jesus. But, at this point, I don’t know what’s going to be on the disc.
That shot does fit with what I wrote recently about Lindelof; the ending now negates the opening.
For me, it’s as if someone pulled on a story string, most likely Lindelof, and didn’t have the scope to see what the effect was going to be. Ridley, for the first time in his career, was sold on the idea of building a trilogy instead of a stand alone, and the first film paid for it.
Consider the idea of an Old Engineer. If we saw him, that tells us instantly they’re not god, or gods, of any kind, but just another alien species. Age makes something mortal. All of the conversations that come later on then, would be meaningless. From all accounts, the opening is part of the original scripts and the character scenes are Lindelof’s work. It becomes a ripple effect.
I don’t know if the 20+ minutes will help. If I had to bet, we’re going to see a totally new cut.
Anghus – I keep thinking if you put out the exact same movie with the words Directed by Paul WS Anderson…
It’s called Event Horizon, and it got an almost identical reaction.
JS, absolutely. Very astute breakdown of the lack of care that casts a shadow on this story. 17 people go on an unprecedented interstellar journey together, and they don’t get familiar with each other first? There’s no desire for the company to protect its trillion-dollar and existential investment by carefully vetting and selecting a cohesive group? A full third of them have no names or even identities. What are “mercenary 1-3” doing on this spaceship? Mercenaries? It’s nonsensical! And absolutely the opposite of Alien, where any of those characters could have, had the events unfolded differently, been the lead. That’s greatness.
one of the questions from redlettermedia.com
Wouldn’t they have given a psychological assessment to the crew before taking them on the mission? I have to take a psychological assessment when i apply for a job at target.
I agree with Anghus:
Had the characters been more interesting or developed would it have excused the plot holes?
To me, yes. Everything starts with characters you give a crap about. I appreciate that you guys have put A LOT of thought into this movie and I thank you for it. I did my post mortem with my friend after watching it, but without a connection to any character (with the possible, ironic exception of David), why spend the time? I was never a Brechtian.
For scientists, they really didn’t seem to give a crap about any of the amazing things they were discovering. While Idris was just the Captain, you’d think he’d tell someone that there was foreign biological life signs out there. First time on a planet, you might not want to take off your helmet until you examine the quality of the air (pretty sure there’s still airborne diseases in the future). There’s more character development in a QT movie and you all know how I feel about QT.
i haven’t seen this movie and yet i don’t care if the movie is spoiled or not
it seems this is like 6 different episodes of Star Trek : TNG put together but with better computer graphics.
also every year – scifi geeks get new versions of space travel movies that are just avove what tv series can offer.
Prometheus and John Carter – better if they made 13 episodes for HBO ? they would explain more stuff.
HBO would be able to afford 100 million each for both –
more episodes – same actors – more awards – more subscribers for HBO ..with both films they had super crazy budgets and it takes a long time to make money back – put it on tv – sell it to international markets – maybe
faster time making money back.
so 13 hours of Prometheus on tv – good idea or what ?
they are still playing Stargate tv series … all about crazy space aliens.
Doubt Vickers was an android, she wouldn’t have the sibling rivalry thing going on in the corrider when she confronts David. She’s cold, but there is real emotion there. It has to hurt when her father’s hologram calls David ‘The closest thing he has to a son.’
And i glad the red letter guys brought up the DNA thing. If it created all life on the planet everything would have the same DNA, from plants to fish to birds to mammals. Unless everything else was some sort of offshoot while evolution worked its slow slow magic and eventually the human race would become all tall and swedish like its creators. Is it possible that the Engineers were sort of mirror terraforming where instead of creating a suitable environment for life, they find a suitable environment and create life?
“Consider the idea of an Old Engineer. If we saw him, that tells us instantly they’re not god, or gods, of any kind, but just another alien species. Age makes something mortal. All of the conversations that come later on then, would be meaningless.”
On top of that, I already saw one of these dead in 1979.
There was never a chance that they were Gods. The notion that they could provide meaning to the existence of humanity is laughable. There is no meaning to the existence of humanity but what people do with it. I thought everyone figured that out when they were 19.
Yes, there are flaws in setting up a team that can’t work together. Yes, the characters could have displayed more…well, character.
But isn’t it just a little refreshing to see a big budget movie where people didn’t know exactly what to do in incredible situations where they’ve never dreamed of being in…the way 99% would act basically.
Scientists are smart, but at what kind of intelligence? Not necessarily movement-wise and not necessarily in terms of military tactics. People with mostly great book educations don’t just start kicking ass and outwitting opponents…and those that do are a Hollywood cliche. That’s my only point.
I am glad you love the movie palmtree, but it’s not refreshing to watch a movie where all the characters act like idiots, have sinister motives, or somehow exit a c-section ready for repelling!
It’s also not refreshing to watch a movie where we apparently have smart people, who make stupid decisions. The biologist with the goo snake, the scanning the caves AS YOU ARE EXPLORING THEM, and the sheer lunacy of an auto-doc that only is set to care for an old man. Whose only ailments seems to be, he’s old as fucking dirt, and has bunions!
It’s also not refreshing to watch a movie with the crew of a ship, that lack the ability to put two and two together, when they were sent out to find alien life. These are not 99 percent of people. These are people who signed up and have been paid for, going into space, to sleep for two years, and to awake outside of an ALIEN PLANET! If these people can’t pull it together, then who can in that universe?
Finally, who they are, doesn’t really matter,because NONE OF THEM, absolutely NONE OF THEM, are important to the story. The only characters that matter in this story are David and Elizabeth Shaw. Everyone else is there to add to the body count like the loading dock crew. Who are killed off, one by one, by a worm controlled zombie dude to clear the way for everyone else to die!
Once you have people cleared out in any film like that, you’ve gone over into the realm of ridiculousness. Prometheus, for all of it’s beauty and vagueness, is nothing more goofy set-up for what could be a much better sequel. Seriously, Shaw and David, dealing with Engineers and God, is a lot more interesting than the bullshit Prometheus dishes out.
A lot of points mentioned are based on someone during development trying to wedge in callbacks to Alien and Aliens.
For example, it’s possible for the crew to not know each other, or not know the mission. For it to be both, you need a scenario like Ronin, but even then, the crew all had the common denominator of being ex-Special Ops, which created a baseline to work from.
So in Alien/Aliens you had crews all too familiar with each other, but oblivious to the mission. Someone decided to flip that, but without an LCD, you open the character decisions up to massive scrutiny. If they were all Weyland employees, from different divisions, you have a starting point and remove a few questions.
Can anyone provide insight into why David proceeded to contaminate a human with the black goo? Is there a definitive motivation or catalyst that is clearly written into the script that I’m overlooking?
David’s gotten the instruction from Weyland, “Try harder.” It’s an experiment David is doing. It appears to make no sense because we don’t really see him doing an exhaustive amount of experimentation prior to that. Also it’s a big leap to think, hm, this black goo SHOULD go into a person. It’s, apparently, the only way to try harder at that point from David’s perspective, but it certainly doesn’t “read” that way. It’s also a ridiculous logical leap to think, these elephant heads created us, therefore this black goo must be beneficial. It also would have helped if we understood why Weyland would want David to do anything at that point (though it was pretty clear or obvious to me that Weyland was the one David’s sneakily talking to… economy of characters, the expensive surgical device, etc.).
I guess one can also lean on the “company” stuff from the first films, what with the “crew expendable” and Burke and what-not. But “the Company” is not really set up as this oligarchic asshole business in Prometheus.
There is no mission in “Alien.” They are blue collar workers that get diverted from their job by a distress call.
Like “Aliens,” the Prometheus crew actively puts themselves in potential harms way. The soldiers have rank that allow you to figure out roles. There needed to be some reason why these people were picked, but the truth is they were nothing but red shirts and that was the end of that. NONE of the scientists are even competent at their jobs, let alone exceptional. We have the geologist (mapping the way) get lost. We have a biologist who apparently doesn’t understand that not all creatures are puppies. If there is a medical officer, we aren’t introduced to them. And apparently, just getting to the planet is enough for the archaeologists because they show zero interest in any findings after a cursory glance.
Has this not opened in New Zealand yet? I thought we would have heard from Leah by now. Given her enthusiam for all things Alien I’m interested in her take.
I thought David put the black goo in dude’s drink out of revenge for him belittling him for not being human. Now, was David actually “hurt” by these comments? Maybe not but he knows he’s taking a swipe at him and David’s also able to teach him a lesson.
There could have been more going on, like orders from the old man. But then, it becomes more of a Wild Wild West type of kill. Why wait til that point to do him in? Idk, seems like even more questions to be opened up. And I’m not talking the good, contemplative kind re: subject matter but what was convenience taken by the writers, type of questions.
All fair points, JS. But as far as prequels go, Prometheus doesn’t completely destroy the goodness of its original. Which is something to be thankful for.
And also yes, agreed, the sequel(s) will show us if this vaguery was worth it.
Hendhogan – There is no mission in “Alien.” They are blue collar workers that get diverted from their job by a distress call.
Mother relays to Ash a directive by the company; return with the alien in some form. No one else was made aware of the new mission, because they were bait. This was the subplot Walter Hill added.
“Crew Expendable”
One of the great moments of 70’s corporate paranoia.
You’d think that maybe a shipful of those awesomely smart droids who can survive without oxygen would be better than a ragtag crew of ill potential.
“Has this not opened in New Zealand yet? I thought we would have heard from Leah by now. Given her enthusiam for all things Alien I’m interested in her take.”
I’d imagine she’s probably neck-deep in Hobbit right now.
Speaking of NZ, I should probably see what Vincent Ward thinks – he’s been keen to get back into the Alien franchise ever since they butchered his script for Aliens 3.
With all the questions raised about this movie, it’s not surprising that the one asked the least is “How did the Prometheus travel to a distant spot in the galaxy in just two years?” because SF fans are too willing to accept any BS explanation. This time we didn’t even get an explanation but we still said “Okay!”
We’re like every ambitious kid born out in the sticks, so desperate to get to the Big City, to wherever it is that things are happening, that we’ll do anything to get there.
You’d think that maybe a shipful of those awesomely smart droids who can survive without oxygen would be better than a ragtag crew of ill potential.
You know, that was the real problem I had with David. He was so advanced, why would you need anyone else?
It’s why I thought Vickers had to be a replicant. As another play on the master-servant theme, if the androids were secretly running the entire operation, it would have upended the paradigm in a few contexts.
A.I. popped into my head today, and with Prometheus in the back of my mind I imagined the ending from the robots’ point of view. They must have been so excited to dig up David (ahem), a direct link to their creators, only to discover that he’s a nutter, so obsessed with a human who once owned him that he would sacrifice his existence to spend a day with her clone.
Must’ve been rather disappointing for them.
Not as much as it was for the audience.
It’s a black-tie version of THE GREEN SLIME. The End.
“The Japanese version…was intended for Toei’s seasonal kiddie matinée series, Toei Chibiko Matsuri (Toei Children’s Festival)”
So the Japanese considered, “one-eyed, tentacled monsters […] sprouting […] from their blood” a kiddie flick? Is the proper response to this “WTF?” or “That explains so much”?
So has everybody already seen this:
http://thebioscopist.com/2012/06/20/the-linguistics-of-prometheus-what-david-says-to-the-engineer/
They tracked down the linguist who appears in the film, the guy who told Fassbender what to say. He replied
“A serviceable translation into English is:
“‘This man is here because he does not want to die. He believes you can give him more life.’”
(This came after an intense session on 4chan were linguistics nerds tried to decipher what David said; it has since been deleted.)
There’s more here, including Lindelof saying there were subtitles but Scott yanked them out, and the original conversation was longer. Perhaps it will appear on the Blu-Ray.
(I like this comment from a linguist: “the use of [Proto-Indo European, PIE] in this film can’t be taken seriously at all. I doubt that even modern pronunciations of Latin would be all that intelligible to Romans. So, I agree entirely: this film claiming to use “PIE” is fictional. But, well, it is fictional. Just like space travel, aliens and all that. I don’t really have a problem with it in that sense.”)