PROMETHEUS UNMARKED SPOILER THREAD!

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Scott said the title of the movie was Paradise, eventually changed to Prometheus.

Scott said Paradise had to be a disturbing place. Said fallen angels were the ones doing all the cool stuff, having sex and partying and all (figuratively). He implied that paradise is not a nice place to be, and is very different from the jockeys themselves.

God = Xenomorphs.
Paradise = Xenomorphs' planet.
Angels = Space Jockeys.
Fallen Angels = Space Jockeys after they fucked up God's plan, gave mankind starmap and such.
Xenomorphs sent Jesus (lol) to try and put mankind back on track to be submissive to God (indirectly preparing them to accept their role in God's great plan, one day). Mankind rejected Jesus, hence rejected the Xenomorphs. Mankind is fucked in the eyes of the Xenomorphs. Must be wiped out. Space Jockeys prepare to do so, but something happens, and they fail.

It really depends on which myth Scott uses. The Angels (jockeys) could have also rebelled against the Xenomorphs upon finding that God had a greater plan for mankind. Hence the Angels get attacked by God (Xenomorphs) as they attempted to go wipe out mankind. The one that survives and gets waken up tries to resume his attempt to sabotage God's (Xenomorph)'s plan.

Shaw will meet God in the second movie, but it will be a Xenomorph:p
 
Assuming you can approach the speed of light you can definitely get to another planet in 2 years of subjective time (much longer in other time frames though). The movies are a bit mum on whether that's how they do what they do, but it is plausible even without a warp drive.

And all stories with FTL travel are not inherently 'fun rides'. That's just nonsense. Every SF story has conceits.
Personally I'd have preferred the story to have been based in our solar system. But Alien had already created interstellar travel.
And I didn't mean 'fun ride' as in a roller coaster, rather then as an 'enjoyable romp'. That's how I viewed the film. I liked the film and plan on getting the Blu-ray. I just don't like my Sci-Fi to be too conceited!
 
Scott said the title of the movie was Paradise, eventually changed to Prometheus.

Scott said Paradise had to be a disturbing place. Said fallen angels were the ones doing all the cool stuff, having sex and partying and all (figuratively). He implied that paradise is not a nice place to be, and is very different from the jockeys themselves.

God = Xenomorphs.
Paradise = Xenomorphs' planet.
Angels = Space Jockeys.
Fallen Angels = Space Jockeys after they fucked up God's plan, gave mankind starmap and such.
Xenomorphs sent Jesus (lol) to try and put mankind back on track to be submissive to God (indirectly preparing them to accept their role in God's great plan, one day). Mankind rejected Jesus, hence rejected the Xenomorphs. Mankind is fucked in the eyes of the Xenomorphs. Must be wiped out. Space Jockeys prepare to do so, but something happens, and they fail.

It really depends on which myth Scott uses. The Angels (jockeys) could have also rebelled against the Xenomorphs upon finding that God had a greater plan for mankind. Hence the Angels get attacked by God (Xenomorphs) as they attempted to go wipe out mankind. The one that survives and gets waken up tries to resume his attempt to sabotage God's (Xenomorph)'s plan.

Shaw will meet God in the second movie, but it will be a Xenomorph:p

Can you please make a movie :\ I want to see this one. If this is how it wraps, it will be damn incredible. However, I feel like we will be here again in a few years coming up with even more excuses..

Ill paypal you 5 dollars to get started. I do visual effects, so I think we are half way there.

So can somebody clue me in on why the Alien at the end had a nice set of pearly whites up top, but none on the bottom? I expect a certain commitment to my continuity and this is an outrageous change.

Was an early alien, so maybe its not what we know/are used to as proper alien.
 
So can somebody clue me in on why the Alien at the end had a nice set of pearly whites up top, but none on the bottom? I expect a certain commitment to my continuity and this is an outrageous change.
 
I think it would have been far more interesting to more sharply contrast Shaw's faith and search for humanity's creators with David's lack of faith and (possible) desire to be a creator. Shaw and David were the most interesting characters in the film. It would have been better to just cut out Vickers/Weylan in favor of more time with them and some of the crewmen.

The point being made wasn't that the air quality was bad, it was that there may be foreign entities (i.e. Disease) floating around that anyone could catch. A good real world example would be the settling of the new world in which disease was introduced to the settlers by the natives. Similiar situations, but there were less helmets back in the day.

I just hated how childishly Holloway acted in that scene. You'd think he'd want to be careful even if David confirmed that the air was clean. It never screws them over really, but it hurts characterization. How can I take them seriously when they ignore basic protocols?
 
What I didn't get is the Xeno at the end was clearly an adolescent queen. We can assume she will lay eggs and create facehuggers. Got that. The part I didn't get was why not just say the planet was LV-426. It would have made the bridge between this movie and Alien clearer.
I think it'd be a bit hard to justify Weyland-Yutani leaving the planet alone, or simply sending space truckers in the area and hoping they'd get infected but also manage to make it back with samples...

That being said, there is now a similar issue with LV-223, as of the end of Prometheus... Why wouldn't Weyland Industries go back there ("because some woman left a message telling them no to" hardly is a good answer, naturally)?
Maybe Weyland made it so absolutely nobody back home knew where they were headed, but...
 
I think a lot of the nitpicking is because of how long it took this prequel to come out

No.

and because of the probably needless attempt by Scott to install a mythology behind what was a pretty basic space horror story.

And no. It's simply the result of this film being terrible. It's like a textbook esxample of how not to write or direct a movie.

Furthermore, the prolonged nitpicking is necessary, because there's so many individual elements that don't work or add up.

Lastly, most of the detractors are being thoughtful in their criticism of this film and detailed with their analysis. Would you guys prefer mindless hate instead?
 
What I didn't get is the Xeno at the end was clearly an adolescent queen. We can assume she will lay eggs and create facehuggers. Got that. The part I didn't get was why not just say the planet was LV-426. It would have made the bridge between this movie and Alien clearer.

I do not agree with this.

After this movie, I will think of "Aliens" as the adapted version of the products the Engineers make. I don't think there is a "Queen" until the Aliens have settled someplace independent of the Engineers.

My hunch, anyway.
 
Can you please make a movie :\ I want to see this one. If this is how it wraps, it will be damn incredible. However, I feel like we will be here again in a few years coming up with even more excuses..

Ill paypal you 5 dollars to get started. I do visual effects, so I think we are half way there.

Hehe, I don't know how long it will take for the next movie to be made, but it should be cool regardless. I had fun watching this one, the script was just terrible.

Knowing Scott's "dislike" of religion, especially Christianity, I would really not be surprised if the reason Shaw is religious is to put the whole idea that religion is evil to the forefront in the next movie. For now faith is shown as something she holds onto dearly, as if it was something great, but in the second movie she will see it for what it is and throw it away.

Or find "pure" faith, one outside "religion", or figuratively speaking one that rejects organized religion, by rejecting the Xenomorphs. David would probably side with the Xenos:p
 
That was a judgment call that they did think about. Do you leave a stranded crew to their deaths? You also can grab a second nuclear payload which would have increased their odds and stocked up on supplies. It really was a sound decision for the most part. They just didn't expect a crazed man to be on board, which is a rather reasonable assumption on their part.

I'm gonna start spoilering here now, since this isn't a Sunshine thread:

Shit starts to go wrong the moment they change course. The movie tells us it was a dumb decision pretty much right away. The crazed man is only the last of the problems they encounter. The first is the solar reflector plates misaligning. Sure, they couldn't have known that would be what the fallout of their decision would be but in changing the mission profile they opened themselves up to a whole host of 'unknowns' that just weren't worth it (and on top of the unknowns the mission already had).

Realistically, if it didn't work they'd have been able to go back for Icarus 1 after if failed. Only the sun reactivating would have caused Icarus 1 to be destroyed (not even clear that's the case).

And the crew should have been a non-factor. Their goal was to save the Earth, not to be a rescue mission. Presumably they could have included that contingency in their mission planning since they didn't know the fate of the Icarus 1 when planning the Icarus 2.

I actually think the argument over what to do is pretty telling to it being a completely dumb decision. The entire scene where they're deciding shows how bad and dysfunctionaltheir decision making process has become.

Basically I stand by it being a monumentally stupid decision.
 
I think it would have been far more interesting to more sharply contrast Shaw's faith and search for humanity's creators with David's lack of faith and (possible) desire to be a creator. Shaw and David were the most interesting characters in the film. It would have been better to just cut out Vickers/Weylan in favor of more time with them and some of the crewmen.



I just hated how childishly Holloway acted in that scene. You'd think he'd want to be careful even if David confirmed that the air was clean. It never screws them over really, but it hurts characterization. How can I take them seriously when they ignore basic protocols?

Thinking more about it, you could consider it an act of faith on his part if you really want to examine it that closely. Of course, if he had said something to that degree, then it wouldn't have been an issue. Instead we got a childish scene.
 
It's just the nature of horror movies that people do stupid things. It's almost essential to the formula in that it allows a certain catharsis to be able to say "*I* would do better if it were *me*." I defy you to name a horror (or thriller) film where people don't do stupid shit that runs against common sense.

So the genre justifies monumentally stupid, unrelatable, even out-of-character decisions?

Furthermore, even if we accept that premise, does that justify the frequency or the magnitude of most of the stupid decisions in this film? I think Prometheus goes above and beyond the call of dumb genre conventions.
 
Does anyone have a link to the leaked details of the original Spaihts version?

If this movie goes down in flames (which it seems it might), he's the one with the biggest bone to pick considering he pitched a straight-forward Alien prequel that eventually got Lindelofed into this.
 
I can't bother to read this entire thread, but I assume someone else has observed how greatly out of place the score was?
I thought it was particularly noticeable in two scenes: the 3D map sequence (how the bombastic music just abruptly stopped when the holograms disappeared... sounded almost comical), and the last conversation between Shaw and Janek.


I think Prometheus goes above and beyond the call of dumb genre conventions.
Definitely.
 
I can't bother to read this entire thread, but I assume someone else has observed how greatly out of place the score was?

It never bothered me personally. I'm pretty ambivalent on the score.

Thinking more about it, you could consider it an act of faith on his part if you really want to examine it that closely. Of course, if he had said something to that degree, then it wouldn't have been an issue. Instead we got a childish scene.

Agreed. The "faith" angle could have mitigated how ridiculous some of his behavior was if they had used it.
 
So the genre justifies monumentally stupid, unrelatable, even out-of-character decisions?

Furthermore, even if we accept that premise, does that justify the frequency or the magnitude of most of the stupid decisions in this film? I think Prometheus goes above and beyond the call of dumb genre conventions.

No, but there's a particular class of complaint that seems to come up only when you basically already hate something. This is one of them. People watch countless horror movies where people make bad decisions and completely gloss over them because they like the movie. If they don't like it for some other (valid or not) reason, then the nails come out and it's all about niggly little things like Person X did Stupid Thing Y in Scene N.
 
The "faith" angle could have mitigated how ridiculous some of his behavior was if they had used it.
Yep. As it is, the guy basically acted as the annoying "EXTREEEEME scientist" type, as someone noted earlier. Can't say I'm too fond of that one.
 
People watch countless horror movies where people make bad decisions and completely gloss over them because they like the movie.
As far as I'm concerned, it mostly depends on the ambitions/pretensions of the movie, what it set out to accomplish.
A movie that takes itself as seriously as Prometheus does, that is advertised as "intelligent, hard scifi" dealing with "big ideas", shouldn't have shit like that. And should be criticized for it when it does.
 
I can't bother to read this entire thread, but I assume someone else has observed how greatly out of place the score was?

They should have just used the Benny Hill theme; it would have been far more appropriate when those two idiots get killed by the xenocobra.
 
As far as I'm concerned, it mostly depends on the ambitions/prentensions of the movie, what it set out to accomplish.
A movie that takes itself as seriously as Prometheus does, that is advertised as "intelligent, hard scifi" dealing with "big ideas", shouldn't have shit like that. And should be criticized for it when it does.

Is there some reason people think Prometheus was trying to be *hard* SF? I don't see it, in intent or in action, but I admit I don't read all the interviews with Ridley Scott like a lot of people around here.
 
Dealing with big ideas doesn't make something hard SF. Hard SF is rigorous and science-focused. Soft SF is usually focused on more sociological issues and is generally not rigorous. The grand themes of Prometheus lie largely in sociological issues rather than those of physics or mathematics or even biology (the biology is focused on, but is largely simplistic).

It doesn't matter how the Engineers make the goop or xenomorphs, but it matters that they do. And it matters to our characters in a personal, not scientific, way.

Writers can be wrong about their own work. I think Lindelof is in this case. Or at least he's using a definition that's rather uncommon (and it's pretty immediately apparent why, given all the obvious criticisms you can make of it as hard sf).
 
I wish they hadn't made the Black Ooze so complicated, or at least clarified what it was/how it worked better in this film.

Have a scene where David analyzes it instead of just play with it. I don't need a scene as exposition heavy as The Thing where the computer is able to tell how fast the the Thing will take over the Earth; just something that clarifies whether there are different types of ooze, or why it effects different things in different ways.


Maybe it's a symptom of this movie moving way too fast. I think it could have worked a lot better spread over a few weeks. It would give the archeologists time to decipher the writing/paintings and it would give David time to run secret experiments on the ooze; building up the tension when he finally does dose the guy.

As the movie currently is, it just rushes through everything! Instead of taking ANY time to examine anything they do, they just rush rush rush!
Alien head explodes? Move on!
What's this goo everywhere? Move on and let the creepy robot play with it.
What do these murals represent on the walls? Well, we ARE archeologists and have footage of them to study, but lets philosophize and bone each other instead.
 
It's a bit hard to tell found through google images
Prometheus Alien

I can't see why people hate this thing.

It is so unique, yet still has the traits of the later Aliens. I just don't think this is a queen.


Lol, what if Prometheus 2 opens with that ship flying to lv 426, and somehow this thing got on board with the ship, and that is basically the plot.


Edit: It looks more like a missing link of Xenomorphs. A progenitor of Alien.

Yes. Totally agree.
 
So, I just got back from seeing it a second time. I just couldn't stop thinking about it and didn't want to wait a week to return.

I liked the film a lot the first time through, but had a ton of problems with the film. It's so, so much better the second time through, helped by the fact that I actually understood most of what was happening.

I'm going to answer some of my own questions from the first viewing that we were talking about last night.

Why did the last Engineer in the first holographic recording fall down?

He was infected by the black stuff they were developing there. The guy falls down once while running, but doesn't stumble and fall at the door way. He comes to a stop, falls to his knees, and then falls face down as the door comes down, probably intentionally to kill himself. He does not stumble and fall into the doorway by accident. We see this even more clearly when Shaw is looking at the replay later.

Why did the dude's head explode in the lab?

When he died, the black matter stopped working on him, because it only responds to living material. (See: David.) When the scientists stimulated the brain into acting alive again, the stuff that was on his head started spreading again; it was the same reaction we saw in the first scene of the film.

Why did the Engineers in the control room of the ship not take off and go to Earth 2,000 years ago?

Because the entire damn facility was under quarantine, remember? If you've got doors coming down and sealing so hard they decapitate guys, the freaking launch bay doors are not opening up either. The pilots set the ship's navigation to head to earth, then hopped into cryo to wait until a rescue team came. But none did, probably because they abandoned the facility. They knew not to fuck around with this stuff, that's why they put the research facilities on the middle of nowhere in the first place.

Why did the star map lead there, instead of to the Engineer home world?

If you go with the theory that the Engineers were using Earth as a cultivation of some kind, and that they would "reset", or infect the planet when we got technologically advanced enough to reach out to them, why would you give them your home address? They left the directions to a military facility, which would be plenty equipped to handle any expedition party that would reach out, without endangering the home world. It's like leaving them the address to Guantanamo Bay instead of San Francisco.

Why did the Engineer go nuts on everyone when he woke up?

Because his mission was to bomb Earth before humans developed far enough along to reach them; they'd decided the experiment had gone far enough 2,000 years ago, but they went into lock down due to the quarantine. When he wakes up and finds these guys here, he realizes how long he's been out and that he really needs to go bomb the hell out of Earth, right now.


The place was clearly a weapons research and development facility out in the middle of nowhere, where an outbreak killed all the occupants and a quarantine lock down prevented anyone from leaving. I'm convinced they were developing bioweapons, and specifically the alien strain we've come to know (I refuse to call them xenomorphs). The alien head was carved into the top of the buildings, a mural of them was at the apex of the storage rooms, and the Engineers who didn't get into the safe rooms had 1) their masks broken and 2) their chests burst open. (We see this in the pile of bodies accumulated outside a door when Tweedle Dee and Tweddle Dumb find them.)


None of this makes the stupidity of the biologist who decides to befriend an alien snake, which was clearly hissing and making a threat display, any less stupid. Or make the pack of random background characters more real. Or make the scene where mohawk geologist dude goes nuts on everyone any easier to understand (I still don't get that one).

But the film felt much more cohesive and had a stronger, more clear narrative thrust than I thought it did the first time through. And I still found it absolutely mesmerizing, from a visual and narrative standpoints. Just a great universe being sketched out.

Oh, and the alien born during the last scene. It didn't click with me before, but if that's the chestburster, the grown up is going to be a freaking beast.
 
I can't get over the makeup for Weyland and how fugly awful it was. You'd think that for a film like this they'd have a decent make up artist. I know what they're aiming for but I have never seen even the oldest person looking that.....messed up. I wasn't even sure what I was looking for. What's the point of hiring Guy Pearce only to put him under tons of shitty make up?
 
Dealing with big ideas doesn't make something hard SF.
Agreed (and that might be something you'd want to tell Lindelof), but it's still one of those factors that would make me more critical of lazy writing, characters haphazardly doing stupid shit despite having been established as expert scientists, etc. I'd definitely hold the movie to higher standards than some horror / slasher flick that's basically out to scare the shit out of the audience and little else.
 
I don't get why the Space Jockey's "invited" them to a secret military institution.

Nitpicker.

Real answer: You're thinking this movie over more than the writer did.

I can't get over the makeup for Weyland and how fugly awful it was. You'd think that for a film like this they'd have a decent make up artist. I know what they're aiming for but I have never seen even the oldest person looking that.....messed up. I wasn't even sure what I was looking for. What's the point of hiring Guy Pearce only to put him under tons of shitty make up?

I still don't understand why it needed to be a younger actor in the first place. Is there a particular dearth of elderly actors in Hollywood these days?
 
It's a bit hard to tell found through google images
Prometheus Alien

Edit: It looks more like a missing link of Xenomorphs. A progenitor of Alien.
I could be wrong but, to me the protruding jaw says queen.
HUxlC.jpg
 
I'm gonna start spoilering here now, since this isn't a Sunshine thread:

Shit starts to go wrong the moment they change course. The movie tells us it was a dumb decision pretty much right away. The crazed man is only the last of the problems they encounter. The first is the solar reflector plates misaligning. Sure, they couldn't have known that would be what the fallout of their decision would be but in changing the mission profile they opened themselves up to a whole host of 'unknowns' that just weren't worth it (and on top of the unknowns the mission already had).

Realistically, if it didn't work they'd have been able to go back for Icarus 1 after if failed. Only the sun reactivating would have caused Icarus 1 to be destroyed (not even clear that's the case).

And the crew should have been a non-factor. Their goal was to save the Earth, not to be a rescue mission. Presumably they could have included that contingency in their mission planning since they didn't know the fate of the Icarus 1 when planning the Icarus 2.

I actually think the argument over what to do is pretty telling to it being a completely dumb decision. The entire scene where they're deciding shows how bad and dysfunctionaltheir decision making process has become.

Basically I stand by it being a monumentally stupid decision.

My understanding is that they couldn't go back and forth at will. If the bomb didn't work, they could still use the solar winds to get back but they couldn't stop at the Icarus and go forward again. Something like once the sails were up for the return trip then that was that. Again a lot of this stuff is in hindsight as we see how bad things get but the initial decision to pick up a spare bomb is sound. The whole thing was highly experimental. There is no way on Earth they could have expected half of the things that happened. My first assumption if I saw the Icarus 1 is that there was mechanical issues, not the rampage of an insane man.

Trying to predict improbable scenarios is something I can't blame a person for if they fail. If that was their only chance to get the second payload then the decision is completely justified in my mind.

I'm just now learning the guy that wrote lost, wrote this movie?

Makes sense doesn't it?
 
I can't get over the makeup for Weyland and how fugly awful it was. You'd think that for a film like this they'd have a decent make up artist. I know what they're aiming for but I have never seen even the oldest person looking that.....messed up. I wasn't even sure what I was looking for. What's the point of hiring Guy Pearce only to put him under tons of shitty make up?

Yeah, I might not have cared if the Alien at the end was bad or not, but Weyland was so fucking terrible. The only reason I can IMAGINE casting him in that role is because of the viral TED talk video they put out pre-launch where he played younger Weyland.

That is the worst goddamn reason I have ever heard to make a decision like that. They don't even show young Weyland in the movie!
 
I can't get over the makeup for Weyland and how fugly awful it was. You'd think that for a film like this they'd have a decent make up artist. I know what they're aiming for but I have never seen even the oldest person looking that.....messed up. I wasn't even sure what I was looking for. What's the point of hiring Guy Pearce only to put him under tons of shitty make up?

Well, he was supposed to be *much* older than he should have been. He's been holding on to life longer than natural by a long shot. They don't say how old he's supposed to be, but I think we're supposed to believe him to be like 120 or something.

Still, should have started with an older actor. Hell, I agree with get Ian Holm to do it. I know that's probably too AVP too, but fuck it. He's a great actor and it would have been a good nod. Or, if not him, you can't tell me Ian McKellan or Patrick Stewart or some other actor not shy of genre films wouldn't have done it.
 
Why did the Engineer go nuts on everyone when he woke up?

Because his mission was to bomb Earth before humans developed far enough along to reach them; they'd decided the experiment had gone far enough 2,000 years ago, but they went into lock down due to the quarantine. When he wakes up and finds these guys here, he realizes how long he's been out and that he really needs to go bomb the hell out of Earth, right now.

Why didn't he Immediately go nuts? Why do you think he didn't... The sense of urgency just wasn't there. He even gently touched davids head.
 
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