Escape to the Movies: Prometheus

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

interestingly this was written by someone who worked on Lost. Might explain why the ending goes a bit flat

 

[Giorgos Pardal]

The film was a complete mess of ideas all thrown around that never cared to sort.
**Spoilers** The engineers an advanced space faring race that decided to create life elsewhere had to do it through sacrificing one of them. Pointless and over dramatic. Scientists that have machines that can map areas in minutes making a wrong turn, pathetic cliché. Biologist in the future encounter alien life forms and act like its a kitty. Space Zombies. Scientists who encounter thousands of alien vessels and don't bother to analyse. An actual alien engineer awakening from thousands of years of sleep and acting like he was high on bathing salts. These are few of the ridiculous ideas Riddley Scot had for a hard science horror film. Terrible terrible terrible. Alien films were a mess as well but they had a feature that made you forgive anything Ellen Ripley. The best ever written female protagonist. Prometheus failed to make you care about anyone.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

Alright, you said it explains the space jockey and where the xenomorphs come from and now I HAVE to see this movie.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Based on what I've seen and heard, Prometheus looks like a well-made film that I'm not all that interested in. And it's because I've lost my taste for anything "Aliens".

I might see it for the technical craft work and cinematography, but interested in the plot, I am not.

 

[anthony87]

I still don't know if I'd call it a straight up prequel.

More a spin-off/side story type thing set in the same universe perhaps?

 

[gim73]

I liked the movie-ish...

A couple things kept me from enjoying it. First of all, they go through a bunch of dialogue to tell you that this ENTIRE crew is engineers and scientists (plus an android). Why do none of them BEHAVE as scientists? If nobody had said anything, I would have assumed they were all campers at camp crystal lake. They have pretty much NO self preservation instinct.

"I'm gonna bring this flame-thrower for protection!"
"Hell no, this is a SCIENCE expedition. Just because we are heading into an unknown enviroment doesn't mean that we can't assume that everything is safe and the 'engineers' will welcome us with open arms. After all, we must have been INVITED here by all the ancient peoples of the world."

"Hey, the air is breathable in here."
"Great, time to take off all our helmets, after all, in this alien planet there couldn't possibly be any dormant germs or viruses that will wipe us all out." Everyone else follows suite.

There are more, but you get the picture that nobody who knew crap about science or history had anything to do with this script. Meanwhile two engineers that get creeped out by the single dead alien go back to the ship, get lost on the apparently short trip back, get stuck in the place during a sandstorm, find a bunch of dead bodies, hear about a life reading to the west so they go east, wind up EXACTLY where they were before and have NO problem staying the night there with the creepy black tar stuff oozing out of jars and the white snake things. "hey, that thing looks just like a creepy snake. Maybe we should play with it!" These guys are not drunk, so they should DEFINATELY not act like it. You have to watch the movie to realize JUST HOW STUPID this scene actually is.

Also, Charleze Therone isn't a bad guy. They kinda imply that she's a bit selfish and ambitious, but she's extremely competant, actually has common sense, and is a better character than ANY of the so called engineers, or even the main female lead. I really do consider it criminal in the end for her to get what could be seen as 'come-uppins' death. You know the type. You could probably name about a thousand of them. Tell me, when was the last time you watch a movie where a GOOD character ran away, and just when they start to feel safe: SHARK ATTACK!!!!

Now the aliens/AVP series really only has one flaw that ruins any of the movies. That's when you start to mess with the basics of the alien. Queen lays eggs. eggs become facehuggers and puts critter in host. Critter bursts out of chest and runs off. Critter somehow grows without any need for nutrients and is able to create lairs out of nothing as well. Critter has two mouths and tons of teeth yet most times only wants to knock out the hosts to bring back to be implanted. Oh yeah, and they mostly come at night... mostly...

Once you go away from the formula it gets REALLY stupid. Alien resurection had that stupid alien-human hybrid, and AVP2 had the face-raper. Seriously, the face-raper hospital scene in AVP2 was a new benchmark for terrible.

Now Prometheus was NOWHERE NEAR that league of horrible, but it is fitting the one thing that ruins alien movies. Trying to be clever where clever isn't needed. Oh yeah, and being stupid where smart is required.

Yeah, it's worth watching, but don't expect the second coming of aliens. Also, like always, 3D is a worthless gimmick that is wasted in pretty much every movie. Save yourself a headache and just watch it in 2D.

 

[Pipotchi]

No love for Idris Elba? I thought he was pretty good. Sure it had some plot holes and seemed to be missing about 20 minutes of exposition but I really enjoyed it. Between this, the Avengers and The Raid its been a good month or so for cinema.

 

[Endocrom]

Just saw the Wreck-it-Ralph trailor and it just nags at me, those are a LOT of copyrighted characters how is it possible? Did they get permission from all those companies? Who knows, maybe I'm just stuck back when it was a HUGE deal for Disney and Warner Bros. to both have characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Also, does anybody else think Ralph (John C. Reilly) sounds a lot like Steve Butts?

 

[Lunar Templar]

o.0

wait .... wreck it ralph has actual game characters in it ... o.o like one we know, and they look like they should *mind blown*


catchpa: fifth colemn
fuck .... the catchpa is throwing in with nazi's now

 

[whiffleball]

wind up EXACTLY where they were before and have NO problem staying the night there with the creepy black tar stuff oozing out of jars and the white snake things. "hey, that thing looks just like a creepy snake. Maybe we should play with it!" These guys are not drunk, so they should DEFINATELY not act like it. You have to watch the movie to realize JUST HOW STUPID this scene actually is.

Well, technically one of them was high. They made some stupid comment about how he had hooked up some "cigarette" system in his system and then do the "wink wink its not cigarettes routine". The problem with this is that he still has more sense than the other guy who is supposed to be sober.



This movie was terrible. I'll admit that the visuals were nice and the actors themselves seemed to be doing the best with what they were given. But, the script was awful.

Nothing made any sense. The plot felt so disjointed that it was like individual scenes were written with no consideration for how it would flow in a story.

I actually have such a problem with every aspect of this story that I will put the rest of my response in a spoiler tag because I will go through everything.

Spoiler

The movie starts off with a flyover shot of land and though there is no actual indication given, by the end we are left to assume it was Earth. We see one of the "engineer" aliens drink something by a waterfall. He starts to break down first at a cell and then at a genetic level. His corpse falls into a waterfall. This is supposed to signify some sort of ancient creator imagery, but we see that life already exists on the planet, so it's not a true origin. As the beings already human-esque in appearance, I have to wonder what that means about all of our genetic relatives on Earth.

The next scene fast-forwards to the archaeologists (at least I am assuming that is there profession though they give no indication of that after these first scenes). They find cave paintings hinting at aliens meeting primitive man. Shortly later, they explain that they found this "common image" in many other cultures. This might be okay if I didn't know that most, if not all, of the cultures they mentioned would have those images between 5000-8000 years ago and this cave painting was 35000 years old which is a huge discrepancy. I will admit that I might have heard the year wrong but that was what it sounded like to me.

Now we are on the ship flying to the planet. When we get to the planet, we see indications of previous life and civilization and, except for two or three people, no one reacts. This is full confirmation of alien life and no one seems to care.

My ranting is going to get a little disjointed now, because I want to start complaining about the characters.

We have Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland. I assumed that when they case a middle-aged man as an old man that they would eventually do some story element of him de-aging. This never happened, and I was confused because that was Peter's whole motivation throughout the whole movie. He claimed he had "days to live" so he came on this journey to find the aliens in the hopes that they had the technology to save his life. Why, if we have cryo-stasis technology, would he need to personally go and not just wait for the cure to come back to him? Whatever, the fact that the alien just backhands him rather than talking made me laugh.

We have Charlize Theron as Meredith Vickers. She keeps claiming she's in charge. She's not the captain, but appears to work for the Weyland Corporation. As the movie progresses, we have one scene between her and Peter where she calls him father. There were several scenes that made it seem like she might have been an android as well. This also never happened. So, I'm left with the assumption that she was just actually his daughter. She made some comment about staying and fighting with the board of directors about who was in charge while Peter was off searching for the fountain of you. So why did she come? There didn't seem to be any actual gain for her character to come. The only possibility was to help/protect her father, but I would have dismissed this completely based on how she behaved throughout most of the movie except that during the one scene with Peter she rubbed her face on his hand. That sounds weird to write, but it is kind of a kid thing.

Now, this next character I'm basing name and actor off of IMDB cause I cant remember the character's name and the actor was heavily done up, so my guess might be off. Rafe Spall is introduced as the heavily tatooed Millburn. He's the one who wants to bring a weapon along, so I am assuming he is some sort of soldier or security. They get to the alien structure and he has some weird spheres that float around and scan the cave. I'm okay with this so far. When they discover the alien corpse, he starts to freak out. Suddenly, he claims he's the Geologist. WHAT!? He looks like a thug and he's been aggressive towards the biologist the whole time. I assumed it was because of the whole jock vs nerd mentality that is usually shown between soldiers and scientists, but that apparently isn't the case.

Logan Marshall-Green is Charlie Halloway. He is one of the architects. Throughout the first couple scenes he acts like, in his own words, "a kid at Christmas". He's the one that, when they find out the air in the structure is breathable takes his helmet off. I figured then he was just retarded, but then everyone else did it so I can only assume that stupidity is contagious. They find a room that he claims is "a tomb". Suddenly he starts developing mood swings. He's binge drinking on the ship, lashing out at people, and whining because there weren't any live aliens. Manic-depressive much?

Going off on a tangent here. Why does everyone suddenly assume that all the aliens are dead. You've landed on a planet and gone into one structure smaller than Disney World. Also, they just sort of landed on the planet. They didn't attempt to scan it for structures or anything and they just happened to land next to the only structures on the planet? That's convenient. But even assuming that they knew those structures were the only ones, why weren't there any other ruins. This was a space travelling civilization, so they could easily just be on another planet.

I've grown tired of thinking about this movie, so I'm ending my rant here for now.

 

[jFr[e]ak93]

As someone who never saw the original Alien. Can I watch this and enjoy it? Will I still enjoy Alien after watching Prometheus?

OT I still say it looks stunning if nothing else. I know graphics are over rated, but this looks legit! As for plot... there seems to be a Phantom Menace thing going on.

 

[DeaDRabbiT]

... actually i did not know it was an alien prequel.

Yeah, me neither, but now it all makes sense... and now I'm still not gonna see it anyway.

No offense, but how does anyone seeing a trailer including the space jockey, or even the derelict ship, not know it's an alien prequel?

*******************SPOILERS****************************

Only major beef I had with this film was the stupid mutated rage monster that showed up outside the Prometheus airlock. It seemed entirely unnecessary and a bit of a cop-out if I'm being perfectly honest here. I suppose the idea was that the black goop that is coming out of the urns is what turned the earthworms into those bigger worm aliens (I guess like an evolutionary catalyst) and that is what got all over the geologists helmet, but why on earth would it simply just enlarge the size of his head and give him the ability to breathe the outside atmosphere?

I still find myself confused though haha. The whole idea that the engineers came to Earth long before, left one of theirs behind to drink the goop, and in essence become the genetic seed to produce life on earth, was really interesting, but I still don't understand why they would want to go back and destroy it. So in the end we discover the answer to the fictional beginnings of humankind, but Ridley leaves us with a bigger question as to why the engineers wished to terminate us.

***********************END SPOILERS********************

Loved this movie though. I don't see to much else being gleaned from a repeated theater viewing, but I'm pretty excited for an extended directors cut in the near future.

GO SEE THIS!

 

[Eri]

People misusing the word "hype."

Hundreds of thousands of people this weekend are gonna go see the movie Prometheus this weekend. For the past year and change, we've been inundated with teasers, viral videos, trailers, fancy Comic-Con presentations, and more marketing material for that film than any I can think of in recent memory. That's all "hype." And, without question, you're going to hear a lot of folks shambling from their local multiplex saying the same thing:

"Well, that was overhyped."

And I sort of detest that. For one specific reason:

"Hype" has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the film itself. "Hype" is a product of marketing. It's advertising. When you say "that was overhyped," basically what you're saying is, "they spent too much money marketing this thing."Under every criteria of criticism, that is exceptionally poor criticism.

This isn't the whole article but a very good start, and I'd recommend anyone else read the rest below. It has to do with, not really the movie in general, but why saying things are "overhyped" is stupid.

Spoiler

"But Brian! -Inserthing- obviously didn't have a huge advertising budget! He's probably just talking about the constant badgering and word-of-mouth from his fellow film-watching friends! Who most likely built -Inserthing- up to be this game-changing series of exceptional emotional depth! And it wasn't! That's certainly a valid point, wouldn't you say?" Not really. Because unless you're telling those same people who told you how great -Inserthing- was that you thought it was "overhyped," again it has no real meaning. "This show wasn't as good as my friends said it was" is pretty lousy criticism. I don't know who these "people" are, and I certainly don't know about their opinions of -Inserthing-. Nor do I care.

Basically, I'm against it because the word "hype" has everything to do with the periphery of something, and yet, nothing whatsoever to do with that Thing itself. A film, a show, a book, or anything else should live and die on its own strengths and weaknesses. I don't hate the Transformers movies because they're "overhyped," I hate them because they're idiotic, poorly-written movies. The Dark Knight Rises probably isn't "the biggest movie since the Silent Era," if Christopher Nolan is to be believed - but that one sentence he said should have NO bearing on the quality of the movie. The quality of the movie will speak for itself just fine, thanks.

For me to say what I think the "most overhyped anime ever" is would imply that I merely didn't think a show was "as good as everyone said it was," and yet it would really imply nothing. I hear all the time that Evangelion is "overhyped," but that's irrelevant. Evangelion is basically Required Viewing at this point - whether you love it or you hate it, it's important to see it in order to understand the impact that it has had on anime in the intervening 15 years. I mean, if you were to put a gun to my head, I suppose I would say that I don't think Macross: Do You Remember Love? is as sacred of an anime artifact as many anime fans suppose it to be, BUT THAT IS AGAIN IRRELEVANT. I don't hate the movie. I think it's a fun bit of anime blockbuster distraction with lots of brilliant, colorful animated violence in service of a dopey script.

And, I mean, look, I get it - we all want to react to the common consensus on a lot of things. We all like to stand out from the crowd every once in a while in order to maintain our individuality in an era where our likes and dislikes are being sold to Facebook for marketing reasons TO CREATE MORE HYPE FOR THINGS. But, to reiterate for the umpteenth time, that says something about *YOU*, and *NOT* the thing itself. Yet regardless of how much space I waste here on my column, I realize that we live in an era of immediate social media and part of the way that we consume media today is by discussing it with our friends, and of course "hype" in relation to said media is going to dominate much of the discussion. Because, and I'm not blowing the doors off with this revelation, that discussion is part of the "hype" itself.

So why am I so worked up about this? Because at some point, this stuff is supposed to be art. There are artistic qualities to even the most commercially-minded of movies and TV shows. And the same is true for anime. There's characters. There's a story. What makes this "art" exemplary, mediocre, or outright terrible is based on our *OWN* reactions to it - and not anyone else's. If you're writing a review of an anime series or a movie on your blog, and you flat-out state "I thought this was a little bit overhyped" I stop reading. Because I don't care what you think about what other people think about it. I came to your blog or what-have-you to find out what *YOU* think about THE THING ITSELF. Did it move you? Did it make you laugh? Did you notice anything incongruous or strange? Did it make you feel funny? Did it make you sneeze and give you venereal disease? That's what I want to read and hear about.

By the way I understand the irony here of explaining that I like reading honest reviews, which typically fall under the "hype" distinction, while angrily decrying discussion of hype itself. But it's okay because when I read an honest review or a sincere critique of something, I'm not reading hype about more hype - I'm reading hype about someone's real and emotional response to a work of commercial art!

Does that make sense? If not, i give up.

 

[maninahat]

Prometheus might as well have been pitched as a remake. It looks like it wants to ask big questions and pursue its own story, but it ends up paying lip service to the Alien franchise so much, it plays out almost exactly the same scenes, beat for beat.

The prequel business is totally pointless. It's like in the The Thing prequel; extrapolating the backstory of the original, that didn't need exploring in the first place. The Space jockey is just a plot device, and there for atmosphere. We are not better off, seeing a two hours examination of it.

Prometheus just feels like a cop-out - like the producers were too afraid to tell an original story, so it resorts to clinging onto the Alien franchise so much, it ceases to tell its own story.

 

[Safaia]

I went to a midnight premiere last and I thought it was pretty solid. It wasn't Blade Runner or Alien by any stretch of the word but I'm glad I went. Fassbender stole every scene that he was in and was my favorite part of the movie hands down.

Spoiler

Someone above mentioned that they assume the planet is dead. Didn't they do a scan while passing over and found no evidence of like? Like someone said 'no one's home' or something like that.

 

[Therumancer]

Errr, well the whole "Ancient Aliens" thing was always fairly mainstream long before "Chariots Of The Gods" and similar works. HP Lovecraft built huge amounts of his Cthulhu mythos off of the idea of ancient aliens of various varieties visiting earth in a distant pre-history. A lot of those "gods" are from space, which is something that a lot of people imitating Lovecraft or cribbing from his work nowadays tend to forget. Indeed, when some of the more current ancient aliens stuff was being used, there were referances to people more or less taking Lovecraft's writing seriously. This is before we even get into Scientology, which has itself has had a lot of it's dogma outed (and usually mocked) for decades now as well, leading to things like lawsuits intended to protect their secrets from publication and distribution via things like BBS systems or now the Internet/World Wide Web.

Despite how it might seem (for those who got through the first bit) my point here isn't to pick, so much as to say that I think that Bob is pretty much right, it's just he's understating how tired the whole thing is. Basically what Ridley Scott did was cast the Aliens more or less in the role of Lovercraft's flying polyps, which today aren't all that obscure despite nerds liking to think so, given that we've even seen South Park (which is about as pop culture as you can get) making Cthulhu cracks and that's just the tip of the Iceberg...

 

[maninahat]

I'm kind of torn between opinions about Prometheus. I enjoyed it as a fiction/horror movie (with a few plot holes) but as an Alien Precursor it was pretty average.

My main problem with the film is that the crew down talk to each other, the part where Shaw "gives birth" via cesarean is mentioned once in a fleeting comment (she was also supposed to be put in Quarantine) and that one line that one throwaway line that was so overly dramatic and had no impact on the story or characters.

Spoiler

...FATHER

I am hoping the movie had to go through massive cuts for the theatrical release, hopefully we will get a directors cut that will have and explain more.

(I also found Noomi Rapace annoying is fuck in this movie and the religion bit could have played with more.)

This too. It was ridiculous how much could have been avoided if all these "genius" scientists thought to let each other know about what is going on.

Spoiler

Rapace and the squid alien in the life boat, or that other guy who had worms in his eyes, for example.

Characters just didn't behave like normal people, and I found it frustrating. Fassbender was good as the creepy, inhumane android, but the effect is diminished when everyone else acts like bland unemotional robots.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

I saw that Wreck-It-Ralph thing, Bob...and like I asked on another forum, since WHEN is Zangief a bad guy?!? Actually...since it's Pixar, which still has some connections to Disney, and it's about video games, I will be VERY disappointed if we don't see a Tron or Kingdom Hearts based cameo.

1. If the Zangief thing is seriously the only gripe you can come up with to bash the movie, then you're trying too hard to find reasons to bash on the movie. Not to say that I think you're bashing the movie, but honestly, I'm getting tired of hearing about Zangief in EVERY discussion about the movie; and some people who bring it up are using it as a reason to say the movie is gonna be bad.

2. It isn't Pixar; Pixar is working on Brave, right now. Wreck-It Ralph is just Disney.