Prometheus Discussion (spoilers)

Cafe Society
21

i noticed a few things:

for as opaque as the film is, there’s very little said, done or shown that doesn’t have a plot point or meaningful input.

so when Shaw, talking on her note recorder thing, says “she can’t help but wonder if there was some kind of outbreak here…” it makes me wonder if maybe an Engineer was infected by the goop and went berzerker like the humans did.

this falls apart on its own, tho, as it would appear the goop makes them disintegrate, not become violent.

and i guess i forgot about the head–it was infected, by the goo, but it just made the head explode (is this the same reaction as the first Engineer from the opening scene?) is that why the pile of the bodies all had holes in their heads, “as if exploding outward?”

i still can’t come up with a plausible thing for them to be running from.
consensus is Shaw’s “baby” was the first facehugger EVER, and that protoalien “deacon” was the FIRST alien xenomorph ever.

so i just don’t get it. what they were running from.
it seems like a really important bit.

a few more things:

why wasn’t the Engineer’s head decayed? it wasn’t mummified, there was TONS of moisture in the chamber, and you even seen worms crawling about. how could it have survived 2000 years (and never mind that’s not how carbon dating works and it was bullshit she could just hold a deal up to it and check it).
i also don’t understand why David had to “learn” anything. lessons? tutors? he is a living computer. downloaded. done.

i don’t think vickers was a droid. i actually do not think anyone would have surmised that without the line in the film. i think the line was just the pilot’s way to bulldog her into some action.

i do think the “male calibrated” medical pod was just a two-fold “reveal” for Weyland and suspense point for “OMG it can’t fix her.” it, apparently, didn’t matter, as it just did the surgery basically exactly how she needed. calibration be damned.

finally, i do not understand why these Engineers would have left glyphs on earth directing humans to their R&D weapons cache/facility on some moon outpost. it’s not their homeworld, they planned to come to earth to (apparently) destroy it, so why would they leave a map guiding us there?

i think the fact the first scene Engineer is dressed so different matters. he seems more like a cleric, more ritualistic and godlike. i also think it matters that the UFO overhead in that scene was not the derelict horseshoe shaped Engineer ships. it’s an at-this-point unknown oval shaped ship. probably that means something.

i think everything was carefully exposed. i do not think there were many misdirects or superfluous information given. for that reason, i don’t buy into the idea Vickers was a droid. it adds nothing to the story-line and would be arbitrary anyway. that seems pretty wildly out of place. even lying about Ash being a droid in Aliens was set-up for a reveal. in this case, Vickers just dies.

i think her attitude is a plot-point but wasn’t clearly conveyed.

22

None of those are really plot holes. Ash, the android in the original Alien film, was placed on the ship as a sleeper agent for the corporation - no one on board was supposed to know he wasn’t human. If he didn’t eat or sleep, that would be a pretty big tip-off that he wasn’t human. Besides, when you cut one of those things open, they aren’t filled with wires and gears, but with weird bulbous things, and milky fluid. They’re built to closely mimic human life: it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the require occasional downtime (sleep) and nutrients to allow their body to function properly. The connection between the facehugger and the chestburster were pretty self-explanatory in the first film, and the creature had run of the ship for some time before it showed up full-grown. There’s a deleted scene where they find out that it broke into a store room and gorged itself on supplies, but they rightly decided that they didn’t need to spell that out explicitly in the film, and cut it.

The beacon was sent by the crashed ship. Who built the ship, and where they got the eggs, is not explained in the film, obviously, but that’s not a plot hole, that’s just unexplained (and, at the end of the day, extraneous) backstory.

Alien is a much more coherent film than Prometheus. People who saw it when it first came out understood it fine, without the addition of the sequels - none of which (prior to Prometheus) answered any of the questions you just asked anyway.

23

Something that bugs me is how the alien humanoids supposedly “seeded” Earth with DNA, presumably a few billion years ago, yet the disaster on Prometheus was supposedly only a few thousand years ago. The timeframe doesn’t make sense - either the alien humanoids are cockroach-like (indeed cockroach-better by an order of magnitude) in their genetic stability, or the filmmakers have no real idea how long ago life arose on Earth.

24

It isn’t even backstory it goes back further than that, the ship is explicitly supposed to be mysterious. You can’t criticize a film maker for intentionally mysterious content.
The navigator and the ship are intentionally WTF, remember the crew marvelling over the organic nature of the ship? Remember them shocked that it appeared the pilot was growing out of the ship?

I loved that part of Alien, thats how I think first contact will go if it ever happens total WTF?

25

ok, then. no comparison; Prometheus just sucks.

i’m *trying *to give it the benefit of the doubt, here. trying to have the right attitude and all that. as you can tell, it’s been an uphill battle…

ETA: what makes it even worse is that even if we shore up all the plot problems and the story-line, you still are left with the cardboard actors, terrible character development, cheesy music and overall “bad movie” elements.

–and i REALLY hated the music.

26

The tattooed guy? The guy who says “he wasn’t there to make friends” as a cliche, and then carried around a flamethrower, so I naturally assumed he was a mercenary hired because Weyland/the sponsors knew there would be trouble? Then I find out he’s a goddamn geologist? I can suspend my belief; I know that not all archaeologists carry whips and fight Nazis. But he was so over the op.

Umm, have you seen the rest of the movies? And AvP series? The classic:crappy/mediocre ratio is low. Also, if it were merely crappy I could understand. But Rotten Tomatoes has it at 73%! I wonder if we all saw the same movie.

Oh, best thing ever. I just saw a trailer for the DVD. The very first scene they show is the Space Jockey removing his “face” (helmet) and showing the bald guy underneath. I think that their identity was the most anticipated thing about the movie. It’s like showing a Star Wars trailer starting with the father revelation.

27

Another stupid thing–why have Wyland be played by a young guy with old makeup? It was very distracting with no purpose. I kept expecting to see young Wyland in a flashback or something. But instead we just got to see a guy with a latex mask on the whole time.

28

You do see him as a young man in a little episode at the very beginning of the movie. Not all theaters showed this part. Either way, if they ever make a prequel they’ll still have the younger actor.

29

Buried in the other thread, but this review sums it up perfectly for me.

30

The opening scene is not on Earth, it is the “rebel” contaminating the planet the lab is on.

Also the Jockey in stasis went apeshit and killed everyone because Weyland asked him for more life, the Jockey’s entire culture is built around sacrificing your own life so the idea that someone spent all this effort to preserve their own life is culturally offensive to him.

31

Oh, I just pretend that everything after “Aliens” doesn’t exist.

So for me “Prometheus” really murdered the series.

32

not that your distaste is unwarranted, but a few points: the geologist and the guy w the flame thrower were two different people. there were a host of un-named, un developed secondary characters. flame security guy was a different dude. and i am not sure if the identity of the Engineers or their appearance was a big secret, esp. since they are the first thing you see in the film.

i will say that from the previews and what i saw online of them, i expected the CGI and their character design to be lame. but in the film, the CGI is really, really REALLY fluid. and the characters are weird looking but totally buy-in-able.

i watched Avengers then Prometheus, and the CGI in prometheus is so much better than Avengers that it is like comparing the first King Kong to the last.

33

i saw the translation of what David asked (which was something like “this man wants more life, we think you can give it to him. can you?”)

but where did you come up with the rest of all that?

none of it is in the movie, so extrapolating from canon would be impossible.

34

Its from the interviews and background info, read the Ridley Scott interview everyone makes fun of where he says maybe Jesus was a Jockey.

35

holy crap.

“wouldn’t they have done a psychological profile on him? wouldn’t it have shown he was some kind of pussy?”

“is David an expert in things that have never, ever happened?”

i’m glad i’m alone so no one hears how stupid i’m laughing…

36

And how do you know this?

If he didn’t say it in the film, or give you some method of deriving it, then his storytelling is deficient. If you’re inferring it yourself, why should we take your word for it?

37

1.There is an interview with the language consultant where he reveals what David said to the Jockey.

2.There is an interview with Scott where he explains the Jockey’s culture and other background stuff.

I forget where the opening scene not taking place on Earth came from but it was from some production source.

I admit none of this is in the film, but if you take the background info and logically extrapolate from there it does make sense.

38

hm. so for the average movie-goer, he wanted to make everything seem retarded. for those fanboys willing to suss out his interviews and outside-the-film stuff, which would take some investigation to find for anyone, then the film is less retarded.

i don’t think that’s how movies should work…

39

Uh you seem to have me confused with a fanboy, or a fan of the film Prometheus or its production style.

None of the above, I’m not excusing anything I’m just trying to explain things.

40

my comment wasn’t directed at you. actually, i appreciate your input, as it actually adds the most to the conversation so far. what i am saying is it sounds like Scott designed this movie extremely opaque but also not secret. as i said before, there seems to be nothing really superfluous. “i think there was an outbreak,” or “i think this is a military installation” all seem hamfisted and deliberate.

but withholding vital info, like the nature of the Engineers, or various factions, but divulging it in interviews–that’s like expecting us all to be so gungho as if we were all fanboys.