She’s the ship’s physician. She was attending Mr Weyland and accompanied them to the alien ship.
Why was the ship’s physician on the first journey to the pyramid, then? Unless this is secretly in the Star Trek universe, that don’t make no kinda sense.
Yup, this was one of the most jarring things in the movie. They set it up as a tense, paranoid, “they’re all out to get me” scenario, topped with the horrifying and desperate surgery, and then afterward she encounters David and the two people she clobbered upside the head with a chunk of metal, who were all boogeymen ten minutes ago, and everyone involved is just like, “Hey, 'sup?”
Like I said before – behavior modification. The toxoplasmosis virus does this in both mice and probably humans in order to get us closer to cats, there’s no reason this goo doesn’t make people more paranoid and/or violent. Same deal with initially causing the biologist to be attracted to the alien, although in that case I’m more inclined to agree that it’s just bad writing. Although the attraction could be the unknown reaction to actually seeing an alien in the flesh versus the fear of the unknown that plagued him before. When you really confront something your actual reaction might be different than the one you think you’ll have especially if it’s a lot less menacing than you thought it was going to be. His awe may have overcome his fear upon seeing the creature’s actual size.
ETA: or he could have deliberately tried to come off as non threatening in order to capture the alien.
To me, it sounds like the majority of complaints stem from misplaced genre explanations. *Prometheus *is a horror film first and last. It has sci-fi trappings, but that is window dressing. Ditto for Scott’s Alien. I’m reading a lot of complaints that would be valid if Prometheus was presented as hard sci-fi, but it’s not even soft sci-fi. That’s all window dressing. *Prometheus *has more in common with all-time great horror films than the great hard or soft sci-fi films.
I can still expect good characterization, and the plot should make sense. And ultimately, I don’t agree with you. Scott is clearly trying to explore some fairly hefty themes, and fell short. It’s not just a horror movie.
You can take any movie with holes in the story line and come up with convoluted explanations that tie things together. It doesn’t make the movie any better. Regardless of what may have originally been intended, the movie as presented was crap.
It fails as a horror film. There is no tension, no suspense, no wondering if or when bad things will happen. It fails utterly as a horror film.
Character’s behaving foolishly or inexplicably is a horror staple, as explained in Scream. Good point on the themes. I didn’t really pay them any mind, as they seemed woefully out of date. If this was 1993, X-Files season one, and I’m a teenager, I would have been all over the themes and implications, but that whole mess just came off as been there/done that for me.
This thread has pretty much convinced me to not see it, at least until the Director’s Cut / Extended version comes out.
Consider what we’ve invented since 1932 - jet engines, nuclear power, integrated circuits, radar, rocketry - and the changes those technologies have wrought.
The horror elements were pretty weak. Cliche, too - the scene where what’s her face is making her way to the seperated medlab, only to look through the window - is there anyone alive that didn’t predict a tentacle was suddenly going to come out of nowhere and hit the window?
For me, there was. David provided that sexless, sterile Kubrickian menace. There were also some great old-school pulpy thrills like the damsel clad in moleskin undies in a creepy surgical/robotic glass tube having to wiggle out under a tentacled creature. That’s right off the cover of an old sensational pulp rag. As for the how and when, that was the tensest part for me, as this is an Alien prequel, so I knew Bad Things are definitely going to happen, but I had no idea how they would play out and what bizarre forms this new brand of body-horror were going to take. The audience I saw it with was stock still and silent, not shifting and sighing and checking the time.
In all the other Alien movies, there’s always a time where the Alien is on the loose somewhere and off-camera. It’s always been possible to assume it found the pantry or something. But this one has been trapped in a medical bay. There’s nothing to eat in there!
Agree. Ridley Scott has now created my three favorite SF movies.
(Haters gonna hate.)
There was blood from the surgery. Yummy, nutritious blood.
And probably quite a bit of fear sweat too. Packed with calories, it is.
If it was meant to be just a horror film then they certainly wasted a lot of time on [mishandling] the science fiction elements while failing to be particularly scary. And I say this as someone who’s kind of a wimp when it comes to horror movies. Watching some idiot get killed because he keeps poking at a snake isn’t scary. That’s Darwin Awards material.
Alien is much scarier, and I’d say a big part of that is because the characters in Alien react reasonably, or at least understandably, to the dangerous situation they’re in…and most of them wind up being killed horribly anyway.
I agree. It’s one thing to leave an element of mystery in a story, and another to throw together a story that’s full of holes where people keep doing things that don’t make sense. If the characters behave in a way that is so inconsistent and utterly boneheaded that one of the defenders of the movie has to resort to arguing that maybe they’re under the influence of a mind-altering substance then I feel safe in saying that we’re dealing with a badly written movie. Reading all these different attempts to explain or justify what happens in the movie has actually made me think even less of it than I did right after I saw it. Which is a shame, because a lot of talent clearly went into this project – I’d say pretty much everything but the writing (and maybe the score) was quite good.
Enjoyed it, had fun. I really wish they’d spent more time shoring up the script. I can’t think of a single memorable line at all. Probably something from Idris Elba, but I’m drawing a blank.
Oh yeah - when he asked Charlize Theron if she was a robot, but I only remember that b/c I totally thought she was.
Shit, that thing’s lucky if she lost a pint in the process. I will say one thing for the future - goddamn, those drugs are awesome. A couple days after laparoscopic surgery that put 3 slits maybe an inch long at most in my lower abdomen, and if I so much as coughed, it felt like I was going to lose my vital organs. She puts a slash across her entire abdomen, gets it surgi-stapled closed, and after maybe a half-dozen hits off that advanced epi-pen-thing, she can get around looking like she’s got a bad hangover. Even a gun butt straight to her abdomen and doing major “pulling yourself up a cliff” moves just had her yelling more quietly than your average female tennis pro.
I did at least expect a few more “WTF?!” reactions from people. I understand that if the dying Mr. Weyland is in the room, he’s everybody’s priority, but I’d think a bloody, nearly naked, insane-looking crew member would at least rank as a potential threat, rather than ranking somewhere on the level of someone coming to take everyone’s lunch orders.
At least with the other crew, she could’ve said “David’s “solution” to my being infested by an alien was to put me in cryosleep; I disagreed and couldn’t take the chance that you didn’t agree.” (Better yet, she wakes before they show up and sneaks to the bio-pod.) Or even better, to preserve the original scene, show a scene with a couple crew members with guns finding her in the bio-pod right at the end when she’s getting the alien thing pulled out and closing up the wound. They freak and stand there slack-jawed as she crawls out, closes the pod, and they all sigh in relief as the “decontamination” procedure starts, leaving the room.
I understand this is supposed to be a horror film. (There’s no science in it, so horror is the other option.) Why is it then that scientists and other professionals make the worst possible decisions in matters related to their fields during even non-stress moments?! The geologist with mapping bots (and communicates with them) gets lost trying to walk out before anything that bad happens, but the rest of the crew has to grab their discoveries and evacuate in the face of a storm, and they get out no problem? No one communicates with home base about the two returning early. The two who have to return spend longer lost inside than it would have taken for them to walk back and they don’t ask for a pointer to get out. The doc doesn’t mask/goggle up for the head examination, and her first choice is to zap the thing? And so on. These fuckers deserved to die.
And let me just add - I did not hate the movie. It was gorgeous, had great special effects, I loved what it added to the history/“mythology” of the series.
I was very disappointed that they wrote in such a dumb-acting cast. I believe you could have ended up at the same point at the end of the film with smart people who did their best and were in over their heads against the viciousness and strength of their opposition. They should have been; why else would Scott have named the ship “Prometheus”? Fuck with gods and you get chained to a rock and your liver torn out daily for eternity. This film leaves you thinking that the gods were lucky to have bumbling fools show up.
I’d say that just proves that Comic Book Guy nitpickers are a tiny minority. 