Prometheus Discussion (spoilers)

Cafe Society
101

Ok I actually rewatched this turd, and some points I missed are making this thing make…well a little more sense.

Ok the intro, is it Earth or not? I don’t think it matters but I do think we are being shown the start of life on Earth period. Odd that you can see some kind of plant life is some shots, maybe the Jockeys did not start life on Earth but started a later form or intervened somehow.

Second is that the Jockeys have been visiting Earth repeatedly for billions or millions of years, and as recently as 30K years ago. They did not just plant the seed, they have been tending the garden all along. Why did they leave behind a map to the bioweapons lab planet?

Conjecture here…rebel Jockey stranded or exiled on Earth? Trying to show future humans who he knows it is likely will develop space flight the truth?

Is the mural depicting the xenomorph/alien actually some kind of warning? Not a mural at all?

I think the biggest unanswered questions are what went wrong at the lab? Random accident? Why have they been seeding and tending planets with life only to have developed the xenomorph to wipe out said life? Running simulations?

102

Oh forgot to add some interesting things about David:

1 He eats and drinks, when no one is around. So yes synthetics do intake nutrients and have some kind of metabolism.

2 He bleaches his hair roots! He has hair that grows?!:eek:

103

Gah I hate the edit timeout, some more things I noticed.

What time period is this movie set in relation to Alien and Aliens? In Prometheus when the crew assembles for briefing, two are discussing it and the one bets the other 100 credits it is a terraforming survey, then the Building Better Worlds slogan appears in the holovid of Weyland.

Huh? In Aliens when Ripley wakes up and is talking to Burke he tells her WY has moved into the terraforming business primarily in the fifty years she has been in cryosleep, he even tells her the new slogan Building Better Worlds. This movie is set AFTER Alien?!

One of the tablets from around the world is only three thousand years old or less.

104

i’ll have you know this is the most i’ve ever talked about ANY movie in my life, and i have seen (and love) A Serious Man. and that movie is so far over my head in every direction that i probably don’t deserve to watch.
i think the timeline in ref to aliens is : "this is not a direct per se nor de facto prequel. (another deus ex machina, if you ask me. it saves anyone from having to write it so it makes sense).

as for the rest, as i pointed out, artists making the opening scene claimed it was to portray the birth of human dna. scott can say it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t matter–it just kind of insinuates jockeys made life in general, but it was obviously written as earth when the guys making it made it.

regardless, i am POSITIVE you, grude, are smarter and more thoughtful than the movie producers anticipated, so your questions are not addressed in the film. (positive of this)>

the mural makes nothing sense. they show a future version of the xeno, something more akin to what we know from Aliens (the jesus pose relief), yet the first protoalien is something simpler than what is in the mural/relief. just doesn’t make sense.

and what was the green crystal thing David walks past? there’s so much crazy, significant looking junk no one ever speaks of or investigates. it was deliberately pointed out as he looks right at it but never mentioned again.

i also caught a lot of the human nuances he portrays, like having to alter his hair style.

and i hope what went wrong is addressed in the next film. as i said before, they couldn’t have been running from an alien xeno since none existed til the end of the film, yet they arted them into their art. make that make sense???

someone said they think the movie is about time travel. that the engineers are us, just a future evolved version (it explains the DNA match and a million other things, such as their immediate disdain for us).

if that is the case, time travel–then it opens a lot of loopholes for the plot to make more sense. it shores up why we had the map to start with, why they left clues to their location, why we exist, who they are, how so many things dont’ add up, etc.

can we talk about A Serious Man now?

105

So, hopefully the prequel sequel will be another prequel? That would explain why Guy Pearce was used for Weyland–the next movie will show him as a young man, trying to protect his “building better worlds” business from the ever-expanding supplier of military technology, the Yutani Corporation. They could also show how Weyland seeks guidance from Tyrell, focusing on their relationship, thus cementing the bridge between the Blade Runner and Alien universes.

106

The biggest plot hole for me is: If the engineers created life on Earth, and then subsequently decided that said life was a mistake and should be wiped out, then why the holy hell did they decide to wipe it out with a compound that mutates life into a much more grotesque, violent, and chaotic form?! I mean seriously, was it that much more difficult to just destroy Earth’s ozone layer, or just replace the black goo with chlorine gas?

107

Maybe they thought they had a way of “guiding” the mutations. (nano-bots? gene splicing viruses? Chemicals?) Said tool suddenly no longer works, and they crap their pants.

Hell, they may view our mutated life forms just as repugnant as we view the face huggers!

/engineer: Eeeeew! Look at all that body hair! And the SMELL!

108

This was actually the thing about this movie that most bothered one of the friends I saw it with. I didn’t even realize what David was doing, I thought he was just styling his hair, but afterward my friend brought it up and wondered 1) why a robot would have to bleach his hair rather than just swapping it out for a different color and 2) why a robot would have hair that grows. IMHO this is one of the smallest mysteries/plot holes in the movie, but it messed with my friend’s suspension of disbelief very early on.

109

“Ah, good ole H2O!”

I just saw this movie last night and boy was it frustrating to think about afterwords. For all the reasons mentioned by everyone else. I’m willing to let some stuff slide just because it’s a movie and all, but there was so much. It also bugged me that a xenomorph is now a hybrid of human, engineer, and giant space squid. What the heckaroonie? 'Scuse my French.

110

Okay, I just watched it and waded through most of the comments but may have missed something posited here.

That being said, if an alien race came down to Earth in real life, how would they know what was “art” and what was “warning?” Just because the engineers’ murals looked like art to us humans doesn’t mean it was art. This is a culture that is totally different from ours, we have no idea what the significance of any of the depictions are. We can’t even be sure among our own species separated by vast gaps in time what depictions mean.

What if the Earth is simply another outpost? What if humans were created in order to test out or be the hosts for the bioengineered weapons? What if the engineers weren’t coming to destroy us but to use us for our real purpose? “David” is created to look exactly like a human, but we are smaller and look different from the engineers. Maybe there’s a reason.

I’m not sure about the engineer at the beginning. Either he was left by the receding spaceship on primitive Earth or the outpost that the Prometheus finds, I think. I’m leaning toward the second choice. They left him there, and then came back to reap the results.

Still wondering how the ancient people knew of the engineers’ and drew depictions and why they would show the way to an outpost and not the engineers’ homeworld.

111

This graphic was linked from the official prometheus page on Facebook, posted october 10th with the DVD release.
Imgur

claims that 1-9 hours after inhalation of the black goo “slight dementia” is one of the effects. And yeah all the really stupid stuff did happen after they got back from the tomb after than silica storm. Doesn’t explain their bizarre decision to take their helmets off in the first place.

Is this the studio attempting to fanwank away all the bizarrely stupid things the characters do?

112

More speculation about the planet at the beginning: since the mounds on LV-233 have an atmosphere that supports human life and humans share DNA with the Engineers, they must have a similar biology. The Engineer at the beginning of the movie is not wearing any breathing apparatus, so can we assume it’s not LV-233 since it doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere? Or since he’s about to die anyway, it doesn’t matter? I’m not convinced it’s Earth, but perhaps it is based on this.

113

I finally watched this last night. I didn’t like much about it except maybe some of the sci-fi scenery and David. They could reshoot it and have the entire crew die in their sleep and just let David have the whole adventure.

What a disappointment.

114

For those who have been speculating on the idea that Lindelhof stank up the movie with his script ideas, IO9 has come up with the original, pre-Lindelhof script, and they’ve listed all the changes between the original script and the movie. They make it clear there is no way to tell if the changes were made by Lindelhof or Scott, but it is illuminating to look at the comparison:

Link to the IO9 article

115

i know this thread is dead and no one cares, but i came across a pretty interesting comment in this article.
the comment is the first under the article by chuckrock. his explanation is interesting and he has a few complimentary links (images/charts) to back up his reading on things.
of particular interest: the clear photo of the relief wall showing a protoalien (deacon) coming out of the black goo–but moreso the CLEAR images of the facehuggers clamping down on human/space jockeys in each corner. that indicates they knew what the next gen face huggers looked like.

interestingly, if you go down through the comments, there’s another link showing Giger’s '77 sketches of the first-design facehuggers–the carving on the wall is nearly a 1:1 representation of those concept sketches.

finally, the “goo” chart that is supposed to be a top secret document david had on-hand explains the temperament of the various goo and their purposes. the op claims that chart was supplementary material released by the studio officially–not just some fan-fiction concoction.

i still have a lot of questions, and it doesn’t clear up ALL the issues, but it does help things make a slight amount more sense.

116

I must have posted this in the other Prometheus thread, but I agree with the idea that humans were created just to be a host for “better” or more useful lifeforms. Or as lab animals in general. That’s why we’re so small and defenseless compared to the Enginneers. Just because they created us doesn’t automatically mean that they love us or that we’re some valued asset for the Engineers.

117

HBO is currently showing both Prometheus and Alien. Re-watching Alien highlights how bad Prometheus is. At its core, Alien is a pretty standard slasher movie. It could have easily been terrible, but it’s not. It’s fantastic. Everything makes sense. Even when people make bad decisions, there’s a clear reason for it to happen. Even though I’ve seen Alien many times, I was still watching with suspense.

I tried rewatching Prometheus and I couldn’t do it. Too many inconsistencies that had me confused about what was going on. Rather than wondering what was going to happen next, I was thinking about how illogical everything was.

118

I loved Prometheus when I first saw it, I started a thread here on the Dope advising everyone to see it, but upon reflection, the movie just has too much stupid in it. Real, brutal, in your face stupid that you can’t ignore. People taking off their helmets on alien planets, biologists who aren’t smart enough to avoid dangerous looking alien snakes, even after they’ve been scared by an alien corpse … it’s just one stupid after another. I still feel it’s a visually striking movie that has a very effective creepy feel to it, but to enjoy the movie, I have to turn the sound off and look away when the stupid gets too intense.

There just is no explaining it away. Sigh. I really wanted it to be a pitch-perfect bit of Lovecraftian horror, dammit.

119

Speaking of explaining, and of Lovecraft…

…one thing I’ve often noticed in discussions of Prometheus is that fans of the film will often accuse critics of not having enough imagination to be able to handle all the mystery that the film supposedly provides. The fans accuse the critics of expecting spoon-fed explanations for every question that gets raised.

Personally, I like ambiguity, and I like events and endings that are open to interpretation. I loved the way Lovecraft would leave most of the horror to the reader’s imagination. But in order to do ambiguity well there has to be an underlying logic to the story. And needless to say, the writer or director has to be a competent storyteller.

Prometheus was so completely devoid of logic and competent storytelling, and so full of “the stupid” (as Evil Captor so succinctly puts it) that instead of seeing well-crafted mysteries, I see monkeys randomly flinging shit against a canvas to see what sticks.

120

I remember you advocating for the movie.

<<shudder>>

Glad you’re better now.