• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

P R O M E T H E U S |OT| Ridley Scott goes back to Building Better Worlds

Status
Not open for further replies.
Yes.

Let's take a look, shall we?

1970s: Duel (Very good), The Sugarland Express (okay) JAWS (Great), Close Encounters (Very good), 1941 (terribad)

1980s: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Great), E.T (Great), Twilight Zone segement (shitty), Temple of Doom (okay), The Color Purple (mediocre), Empire of the Sun (Great), Last Crusade (very good), Always (shitty)

1990s: Hook (good, fuck the haters), Jurassic Park (Very good), Schindler's List (Great), The Lost World (mediocre), Amistad (mediocre), Saving Private Ryan (Great)

This century: A.I (Great), Minority Report (Very good), Catch Me If You Can (Very Good), The Terminal (mediocre), War of the Worlds (Good), Munich (GREAT), Crystal Skull (mediocre), War Horse (mediocre), Tintin (Very good)

Spielberg is easily the most consistent out of all the old timers.

I am so happy you at least thought it was good. I cringe when people say they hated it.
 
Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders, ET, Jurassic Park, and Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan trump everything afterwards. My point still stands. Directors tend to make their best films when they are young.

I predict that the Dark Knight Rises will pale in comparison to The Dark Knight.

AI is not great...god no.

But you do have a point...out of the old timers, Spielberg has held up better than most others.

supernatural_confusedbdy5p.gif


First of all, TDKR hasn't come out yet. Second of all, Christopher Nolan is not old, and it's only been four years between the release of these two films. You think Nolan's skills have degenerated in that amount of time? He's not old.

Man has too much swag

chris_nolan.jpg


Shit, wasn't Ridley Scott like 40 when he made Alien?
 
I actually think War of the Worlds is fantastic outside of the last thirty seconds. But if I said anything more than good, most people would ignore the entire point in that post and start harping on with derisive comments toward WotW.
 
Coppola has fared the worst...how do you go from The Godfather I and II(two of the greatest movies in cinematic history), The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now(not my cup of tea, but considered a classic) to never ever making a decent movie again?
 
Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders, ET, Jurassic Park, and Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan trump everything afterwards. My point still stands. Directors tend to make their best films when they are young.

I predict that the Dark Knight Rises will pale in comparison to The Dark Knight.

AI is not great...god no.

But you do have a point...out of the old timers, Spielberg has held up better than most others.

Munich is Spielberg's most mature film. I often find myself thinking it is a much better film than Schindler's List - one of my all time favourites. But I can never bring myself to actually decide. But Munich is easily one of the best films he's ever made. And Minority Report, A.I and Catch Me If You Can shit all over Jurassic Park imo. And I like Jurassic Park. The story and characters just don't age nearly as well.
 
Coppola has fared the worst...how do you go from The Godfather I and II(two of the greatest movies in cinematic history), The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now(not my cup of tea, but considered a classic) to never ever making a decent movie again?

Coppola is forgiven for everything afterward though because Apocalypse Now drained him of everything he had. Totally worth it.
 
This century: A.I (decent), Minority Report (solid), Catch Me If You Can (bad), The Terminal (bad), War of the Worlds (terrible), Munich (bad), Crystal Skull (terrible), War Horse (haven't watched), Tintin (bad)
 
supernatural_confusedbdy5p.gif


First of all, TDKR hasn't come out yet. Second of all, Christopher Nolan is not old, and it's only been four years between the release of these two films. You think Nolan's skills have degenerated in that amount of time? He's not old.

Man has too much swag

chris_nolan.jpg


Shit, wasn't Ridley Scott like 40 when he made Alien?

You are right. I didn't realize Nolan is only 42...I figured he was in his 50s by now.

I still think DKR will not be nearly as good as TDK and BB, but for other reasons...one being that Nolan's original plan for the movie was scrapped because of Ledger's death....then it seems that he struggled to come up with another antagonist before settling on Bane.
 
Kubrick made his best film in '99. Welles made his best film in '74.

You think Nolan's skills have degenerated in that amount of time? He's not old.
I think he hasn't made a great movie in over a decade and has wasted all of the potential he showed at the beginning of his career, but whatevs. Why is the new Batman movie like 4 hours long?
 
I actually think War of the Worlds is fantastic outside of the last thirty seconds. But if I said anything more than good, most people would ignore the entire point in that post and start harping on with derisive comments toward WotW.

What, with the son? Can you elaborate on this a bit?


Anyway. I enjoyed it sooo much the first time. The sounds, the tripods, scared the shit out of me. Everything was so well designed too. I actually can't think of anything I hate about it. War of the worlds has had so many terrible adaptations, and this was a very pleasant break.


This century: A.I (decent), Minority Report (solid), Catch Me If You Can (bad), The Terminal (bad), War of the Worlds (terrible), Munich (bad), Crystal Skull (terrible), War Horse (haven't watched), Tintin (bad)

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
 
Munich is Spielberg's most mature film. I often find myself thinking it is a much better film than Schindler's List - one of my all time favourites. But I can never bring myself to actually decide. But Munich is easily one of the best films he's ever made. And Minority Report, A.I and Catch Me If You Can shit all over Jurassic Park imo. And I like Jurassic Park. The story and characters just don't age nearly as well.

Minority Report and AI shit all over Jurassic Park? LOL...

and criticizing JP because of it's story? The movie is a f*ckin blast. It has also stood the test of time pretty well, much better then AI and Minority Report will in 10 years from now.
 
What, with the son? Can you elaborate on this a bit?


Anyway. I enjoyed it sooo much the first time. The sounds, the tripods, scared the shit out of me. Everything was so well designed too. I actually can't think of anything I hate about it. War of the worlds has had so many terrible adaptations, and this was a very pleasant break.

Yeah. I loved WotW except for the reveal with the son being alive. But I'm not a pleb, so it didn't automatically ruin the movie for me. It was a misstep though.
 
Minority Report and AI shit all over Jurassic Park? LOL...

and criticizing JP because of it's story? The movie is a f*ckin blast. It has also stood the test of time pretty well, much better then AI and Minority Report will in 10 years from now.

I'm just guessing, but I suppose you haven't seen Munich, then? You really ought to get on it. Might change your opinion.
 
Kubrick made his best film in '99. Welles made his best film in '74.


I think he hasn't made a great movie in over a decade and has wasted all of the potential he showed at the beginning of his career, but whatevs. Why is the new Batman movie like 4 hours long?

Kubrick's best film is Eyes Wide Shut?

Nolan hasn't made a great movie in over a decade? So you think his only great movie is Memento?

You have...unique opinions. Accept it.

I swear this thread is the twilight zone.
 
I'm just guessing, but I suppose you haven't seen Munich, then? You really ought to get on it. Might change your opinion.

No I haven't, but if Munich is that great, then that just means Spielberg made one great movie in the 2000s. Still doesn't change my stance that his prime was in the 70s and 80s.
 
Agree to disagree. I think Minority Report, A.I and Catch Me If You Can combo before then knocking out WotW and Munich of all things means he's just as good as ever. Tintin was fantastic.

We got Lincoln hitting this year which re-teams him with Tony Kushner (Munich). :D
 
Yeah. I loved WotW except for the reveal with the son being alive. But I'm not a pleb, so it didn't automatically ruin the movie for me. It was a misstep though.

Yeah, i'm sure it was only thrown in to make everything feel a bit more heart warming. Still, an odd choice.



I don't know, there were just so many surreal, scary moments in the film that made me enjoy it. The hill scene is probably at the top, right next to the very first tripod, but then again, maybe it was the plot I enjoyed so much? People say the origin of the Tripods in the ground is unrealistic, but I thought it was so damn clever.

I really did not want to see them do the same film over and over again, and it was cool having someone stay true to the style of the original, yet switch up some of the ideas. The movie renewed my faith in remakes, and that faith was borderline dulled by "A nightmare on Elm Street" (2010). Don't get me wrong, there was a lot about that I enjoyed too, but it was so watered down. The most interesting and creative thing was at the end, and what was supposed to be the coolest scene was cut down to like 10 seconds.
 
Just got back. I will be writing a formal letter to the marketing department at FOX if they go ahead with a sequel. There was not one surprise to be had after seeing the trailers. Not one. I thought the movie was fucking awesome save for a couple of really stupid oversights that have already been mentioned, but the trailers left no room for surprises. At all. I usually disagree when people talk about how trailers ruin "everything" in a movie, but no. In this case, absolutely nothing was left for me to discover or figure out.

I'm very upset and disappointed, and it didn't help that I had to piss like a fucking racehorse through half the movie, but these aren't problems that I had with the film itself.
 
Just came back from a midnight showing.

Enjoyed it. I understand why
there was no payoff at the end
but I couldn't help but feel disappointed. I assume that a Director's Cut would fill in some of the blanks, because
the script talks about how the engineers changed their minds
except there was nothing shown that indicated that. Also,
why and how did their weapons turn on them
? And was that last scene basically
promising a Prometheus 2
, because obviously there still seems to be a gap between that and what we saw in Alien.

It was an odd sort of film; light on the horror elements, light on the action elements, very restrained.
 
Major Prometheus Spoilers:
So, uh, this whole thing was an Alien prequel? I liked it though. Can't decide if that ending chepaned it or not. The facehugger abortion scene was intense, man.
 
Major Prometheus Spoilers:
So, uh, this whole thing was an Alien prequel? I liked it though. Can't decide if that ending chepaned it or not.

The ending certainly cheapened it. That was some AvP type shit that stupid reveal. Should have ended with them heading back out into the stars.
 
Back from midnight screening

A resounding "Eh" is what I give the movie.

Also, there were a few boos at the end of the movie, but I could hardly tell if they were serious or not
 
Just got back from a midnight show.

The story is completely unsatisfying. Maybe one or two intense scenes and a bunch of completely unanswered questions (no surprise, given the involvement of Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse).

DO NOT cough up for the 3D tax. See it at a 2D matinee if you must see it. I can't believe I'm out $30 on this film. It's not terrible, but not very good either.
 
So...

Why did David poison the doctor?

It almost seemed like he
knew they'd have sex and create an alien baby that they could put into cryo and bring back to Earth for profit
but that sounds very convoluted, so I dunno? Why did the
weapons turn against the engineers
?
 
I'm not sure what questions you guys felt needed to be answered especially
considering that it clearly set up for more installments
.

I think people just want to say that just because it's the cool thing to do because of Lindelof and Lost. The story didn't end with me asking anything, only
contemplating what's going to come next
but I'm sure the trailers will tell me all about it next time, too.
 
I'm not sure what questions you guys felt needed to be answered especially
considering that it clearly set up for more installments
.

I think people just want to say that just because it's the cool thing to do because of Lindelof and Lost. The story didn't end with me asking anything, only
contemplating what's going to come next
but I'm sure the trailers will tell me all about it next time, too.

Why Shaw didn't warn anybody on board that there was a fucking alien in the med-pod when they're suiting up to head back out. You know, maybe give the Captain a heads up considering he doesn't want foreign bodies on his ship.
 
So is anybody else going through the Alien movie quadrilogy in advance of watching Prometheus, pseudo-prequel or no? I am. Amazon had the Alien Anthology Blu-ray set for $30 last week as a Gold Box deal so I snagged it and now I'm watching the original 4 films in sequence over the weekend to get ready for Prometheus, the vaguely-unrelated not-prequel movie which (finally!) opens tomorrow in the US.

Alien (1979) - original theatrical version

This is the only film I watched as the original theatrical version. Unlike Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's preferred version of the film is the 1979 theatrical version. He was nice enough to humor the undeserving Fox studio execs by re-cutting the film in 2003 for the initial DVD release. The most important added scene to the 2003 version (
the cocoon
) is included on the Blu-ray as a deleted scene.

In retrospect, it's hard to believe this movie spawned an entire franchise of sequel movies, comic books, video games, and 2 spinoff/crossover movies. It eloquently displays Scott's mastery of light and shadow, also seen in Blade Runner. It is always perfectly framed, perfectly paced, and intentionally light on exposition and heavy on atmosphere. It is a fine example of tension-building to only a few key horror sequences, and the opening sequences of the film demonstrate that Scott was a fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's an amazing example of taking a limited budget a really long way. Much like Blade Runner, it displays a mastery of the craft of filmmaking that Scott really got bored of and cast by the wayside in his later directorial career when he was making big-budget brainless dreck like Gladiator.

Ultimately, Alien is basically a trapped-in-a-house-with-a-monster horror flick set in a spaceship instead of a haunted house. To be completely fair to Scott, lesser directors have attempted similar pictures, and when you aren't a fraction of the director that Scott is, you end up with something like Event Horizon instead of what Scott made. It's completely conventional, and yet utterly entertaining. Alien is considerably more than the sum of it's parts, and that is probably the best compliment you can give to a genre picture like this.

If Alien were released today, it would be picked apart by the Internet frame-by-frame, every tiny bit of it would be analyzed to death, and quite frankly I don't know how it would have fared in today's fan environment. In many ways, a movie like Alien simply can't be made anymore, because the movie-going audience has become so jaded, so hyper-critical, and so instantly connected to every other movie-goer on the planet via the Internet. And to be perfectly honest, that's kind of sad in it's own way, because if you pretend that it is 1979 again and you are going to the movie in the local cinema for the first time, I can imagine that the chest-burster scene so famously remade for parody in Spaceballs would have scared you straight out of your mind. Maybe. Who knows, I wasn't even alive in 1979. It seems awfully tame now in 2012, when horror movies have been pushing the boundaries of how much blood and gore you can cram into a frame at once to ridiculous levels. But Scott nailed the essence of what terror was back then in 1979 and the image of the angry toothy erect phallus exploding out of John Hurt's chest is still regarded as iconic, and rightfully so, more than 30 years later.
 
I'm not sure what questions you guys felt needed to be answered especially
considering that it clearly set up for more installments
.

I think people just want to say that just because it's the cool thing to do because of Lindelof and Lost. The story didn't end with me asking anything, only
contemplating what's going to come next
but I'm sure the trailers will tell me all about it next time, too.

ppl are sick of the recent trend of setting up for sequels before they are greenlit.
 
Why Shaw didn't warn anybody on board that there was a fucking alien in the med-pod when they're suiting up to head back out. You know, maybe give the Captain a heads up considering he doesn't want foreign bodies on his ship.

She probably just assumed it was dead. New-born lifeform out of the womb at a state of pregnancy similar to three months with a human fetus getting blasted by decontaminates? My guess is she thought there was no way it survived.

Anyways, just saw it and loooved it.
 
I'm not sure what questions you guys felt needed to be answered especially
considering that it clearly set up for more installments
.

I don't think that there will be a sequel or if there is there shouldn't be.

There aren't answers and it's wholly unsatisfying. I think that's the message of Prometheus.
Human nature always asks why and tries to understand everything but in the end it's just an infinite regress.

Q: "Who creates us?"
A: Engineers.

Q: Who created the engineers?
A: ???

The why question is ultimately more important. Why are we here? We make up our own answer.

If they can create something new and fresh and pose some interesting questions I'm all for it. Otherwise it's best left open to interpretation, IMO.
 
ppl are sick of the recent trend of setting up for sequels before they are greenlit.

oh, I'll leave them to their misery then I suppose. Not an issue for me. But yeah I didn't leave the theater feeling like I was screwed out of any unresolved answers. Movie played out pretty straightforward.
 
Ending spoiler:

So the aliens were created by a tentacle monster mouth-fucking an albino guy

Anyway, I thought the movie was good and Fassbender was excellent. I need to think more about it tomorrow I think
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom