He had his turn in the autosurgeon.
I wanted to love it, too, but the sheer depth and breadth of Fail when doing one’s own job even under non-stressful/non-emergency situations made me cry.
The helmets I can excuse as them wanting us to see the actors’ faces. The stereotypical characters, the biologist wanting to kiss the alien fangpenis after just previously deriding others for getting involved, the boringness, those I can’t forgive. Also, it has 74% of Rotten Tomatoes. For those of you new to that website, 74% is not a mid C. It really does seem to mean above average. I still wonder if these people are seeing the same film.
This was my biggest problem with the film. No way does any sane person ever take their helmet off in that situation, but since it’s a movie you let it slide so we can see the actor’s faces. However, that suspension of disbelief REQUIRES that they don’t suffer the obvious consequences of taking their helmets off because they do so ONLY for reasons outside of their universe.
This is a huge Star-Trek pet peeve for me. I’m perfectly fine with characters hvaing unprotected explorations of alien environments (Cue standard Kirk/Green Alien Chick joke). But when they repeatedly suffer injury, disease, and death from doing do it starts becoming more ridiculous. Basic decontam, protective suits, and breathers would have stopped several dangerous outbreaks and saved the lives of multiple redshirts.
Same here: If one relatively small mistake, or a mistake made in the haste fo enthusiasm and excitement, has big consequences for the protagonists, A-OK. People tearing off their (pretty comfy-looking) protective gear just so they can get sick for plot convenience? Bad.
Helmets don’t show actors’ faces? Make better helmet props. Do something with more plexiglass or transparent mylar or whatever, put the “solid” pieces of the helmet back past the side of the face and on top of the head.
And that’s barely an excuse anyway - Hugo Weaving spent pretty much the whole of V for Vendetta behind a cheap Guy Fawkes mask and he acted the fuck out of that role and made you sympathize with a character who’s a terrorist. If they can’t get decent reaction shots in a film where people are wearing helmets that merely show most of their face, then they’re having major problems.
The helmets in in Prometheus were transparent so we could see the actors’ faces just find. Even that makes perfect sense in story since the helmets were being used on a planet as opposed to in space.
I’m one of the ones who liked the movie. But that doesn’t mean I think it wasn’t dumb. Oh, I thought the scientists were dumbe rthan a box of rocks. No one, except maybe David, was really likeable. And there are plot holes big enough to drive a truck through.
But I still enjoyed the ride. And that’s all it was, really, a ride. I feel like I have to justify my like for it. 
As I said back on page 1, the more I thought about this movie afterward the less I liked it. I assume some of the favorable reviews were written by people fairly soon after seeing the movie, before they had time to realize how much of it was stupid rather than mysterious or atmospheric.
Rotten Tomatoes also classes reviews as either positive or negative, so some mixed reviews may have been classed as positive. Metacritic, which has a less black-and-white approach, gives Promethetus an overall score of 65 and indicates that about 40% of the critic reviews were mixed. Were I a professional film critic I’d give this movie a mixed review rather than a wholly negative one, because while overall I’d say it’s quite bad and I would not recommend it to a friend, there were things about it that were done well. The movie was visually impressive and Michael Fassbender turned in a strong performance as David.
I watched the film for the first time a few days ago on HBO, what a disaster.
I bought the DVD last week and watched it this last weekend.
I didn’t hate it. There were plot holes. The characters did some stupid stuff. But I don’t get the hate.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned: It seemed to me that even though David pretended not to have emotions, yet he seemed to have facial expressions that indicated he was indeed having emotions. (He seemed to not like being ordered around doing trivial things, for example. He didn’t like to be called “boy”. He seems pleased when Weyland called him “his son”.) Why would he try to hide his emotions? Is he in denial?
David asked Dr. Holloway “Why did humans create me?” in an important scene in the mess hall. Holloway’s answer was “Because we could.” (David found that answer disappointing. I sensed that David was disappointed with humans overall.) I don’t understand that answer though. David, in some ways, is “better”. He’s smarter, stronger, doesn’t get sick or age, doesn’t need to eat, etc. David is much more than the “mother” AI in Alien. A lot of work went in to making him appear (and act) human… It seems to me a ‘better’ answer is “we sought to make an improved or idealised version of ourselves”.
So what’s your take on the crab-walking bounce-around-like-a-spider-monkey-on-meth guy?
And, if while you’re composing your reply to Bryan Ekers’ question, an almost-naked girl runs into your room covered in blood and sweat, gasping and terrified, will you generally ignore her?
You are the personal servants of Peter motherfucking Weyland to the point that you do not balk at being frozen for two years, stowing away to a secret location, so that kind of nonsense has to be par for the course. He’s like Howard Hughes on crank. You don’t ask why he doesn’t want chocolate chips on the cookies’ edge, so keep washing his bunions.
Were I Weyland, I would want my personal servants to assume that someone looking like that might damned well be a threat to me in some fashion, and to at least pay more attention to Crazy Half-Dead Blood-Covered Lady.
If I could ‘like’ this post, I would have. 
I don’t understand the question. How is spidermonkeyman any more ridiculous the worms in the repository mutating overnight?
I wouldn’t. However, I don’t know what David told everyone else. I don’t believe that no one but David knew Shaw was put in Medbay. David had time to construct some plausible story to explain why Shaw was SIQ (“Sick in Quarters”). Maybe he could say she hurt herself, but is a danger to no one else. I dunno.
What I find interesting is just how much is left unsaid by the director and script in this movie, and how much was (apparently) by visual clue or inference only. I miss a lot of stuff, because I am a rather “straight forward” kind of thinker. I don’t routinely go parsing peoples statements, trying to read between the lines (except for politicians). I missed a lot of stuff other people picked up on in this film.
Has anyone here ever heard of Fiasco? It’s a role-playing game where you start off by rolling a bunch of dice to generate a random list of people, places, and things. Then, the players take turns making up a story that incorporates all of those elements. Trying to make sense of Prometheus feels a lot like playing Fiasco. There’s a lot of cool elements jumbled together with no real connection to each other, and the audience has to figure out ways to get them to fit together.
Which is probably why I like the movie, even though I recognize that it fails on virtually every level save the purely visual.
I think, to a certain extent, Scott actually intended that. I think he was going for something like he did in Bladerunner, where character motivations are deliberately underplayed, forcing the audience to invest itself in figuring out why the characters are doing what they’re doing. When done well, it can be brilliant. I think Scott missed the mark with Prometheus - while it is possible to construct a narrative using the events of the movie that makes sense without necessarily contradicting anything shown in the movie, it requires a staggering number of assumptions - to the extent that it says more about the creativity of the person interpreting the movie than it does about the guy who made it.
For example, there’s a scene where you find out that the punked-out map making guy has rewired his space suit to blow smoke in his face - what kind of smoke isn’t specific, except that it’s definitely not tobacco. Is that just a throw-away character gag, showing how rebellious and wacky he is? Or is it meant to explain why he’s so bad at his job? Similarly, there’s a scene at the beginning where it’s mentioned that Shaw and her boyfriend are regarded as cranks by mainstream archaeologists. Is that a standard “misunderstood genius” trope? Or is it meant to explain why they’d do something as stupid as take their helmets off once they’re inside the alien complex? It’s mentioned that Weyland has largely lost control of the company he created, at least in part because of his obsession with finding aliens. Is that “visionary industrialist stymied by small-minded bureaucrats”? Or “crazy old man prevented from running business into the ground?” Is this a bad movie about allegedly smart people, or a good movie about idiots in space? I’m honestly not sure which one it’s supposed to be - but the movie works a lot better if you go into it with the second assumption.
It could be both: A bad movie about idiots in space.
It’s Gilligan’s Island in space.