Did $50 million at the box office this weekend. It’s not just fanboys that liked it.
I don’t think you can say with any credibility that the people who go to see a movie before reviews and word-of-mouth get around are anything but fans. It’s the people who become intrigued after the fans have seen it that mean it’s appealing to a wide audience.
Dude, I’m the king of fanboys. The movie was just shitty. Describe to me the Buff Alien Plan in detail? It’s incoherent gibberish.
It had good production values and quality actors, but they had nothing whatsoever to work with.
I kind of like the idea that the ship is supposed to be crewed by the most incompetent scientists money can buy. Basically, take Howard Hughes and a random selection of the “experts” from a latter day History Channel special and fire them into space. The film does sort of imply that launching the mission was seen as a sort of old man’s folly - perhaps faking his own death was a necessary gambit to get the project approved. Perhaps he cut a deal with his daughter - he fakes his death and sets her up as CEO, she uses her clout to push through the project as her father’s legacy. But since she thinks it’s a bunch of bullshit, she cuts corners where ever she can, including hiring a bunch of bottom-of-the-barrel “scientists” for the crew. And she comes along personally because she wants to make personally sure that the withered old bastard is finally dead.
Alright, I admit I’m reaching for an explanation for a glaring flaw in a film I really enjoyed. But I like the whole ancient aliens/prehistoric civilization genre of fiction, so I’m willing to overlook the fact that every single human being in this film was a fuckin’ moron.
As for the BBG’s plans, my take was that Earth was intended as a weapons test site. If you want to test the efficacy of a planet-killing weapon, you need a planet to test it on. Perhaps they’d been using the Earth for this purpose for billions of years - maybe the die-offs of the dinosaurs were the conclusions of previous experiments. Wiping the slate clean for the next experiment. The BBG’s reaction to the humans was just what you’d expect from someone who’d just learned that a biological experiment had broken containment and was infesting his ship.
The idea that they fund this hugely expensive operation and skimp on the crew costs is pretty ridiculous. This is Weyland’s big project - the thing he’s worked his whole life to acheive - and he’s going to put all his resources towards it. His daughter isn’t going to try to cut costs so she’ll have more when she gets back to Earth because she’s not going to want to ride along on an interstellar mission with incompetants, which just increases the risk she’ll never get home at all.
Plus, we’re talking about a plan to make first contact with aliens - to go to a planet thought to be inhabited - every expert in the world is going to be jumping at the chance to go. They’d probably go for free. No need to hire day laborers to run your crew.
Except that we don’t know that he faked his own death. All we know is that he made a video for the 17 crew members of Prometheus where said that he expected to be dead by the time the watched it (a couple of years after they left Terra).
Nope. Doesn’t fit the facts as presented in the film. She’s on the ship, which was launched while he was still alive. In fact, she pointedly tells him that she came along because she didn’t want to spend her time in the boardroom arguing over who was in charge of the company (either after his death or while he was in cryo, take yer pick).
Nope. We know that the old man hired the crew.
Again, where does everyone get this “weapons” notion from?
Yeah, that was my point. It’s only the nerdy fanboys who are nitpicking the film to death. And because Comic Book Guys are a tiny minority, their bitching is being drowned out by the overwhelmingly positive response.
Dismissing this entire thread as Comic Book Guy nitpicking is obnoxious. There are plenty of valid criticisms such as “the actions of all the characters makes no sense” - these are not trivial, these are fundamental problems with the movie. Dismissing 5 pages of detailed criticism as overly critical minutia is the fanboy behavior here.
She just needs to make sure the ship crew are competent. The scientists are irrelevant, because she doesn’t expect to actually find anything.
That’s presuming that the scientific community thinks that there’s anything to this idea. If this guy is the leading proponent of the Big Bald Guy theory of biogenesis, you’re probably not getting top-tier talent on your two year mission to Wherethefuckarewe IV.
I thought Charlize Theron’s character referred specifically to the people she’d hired when she kicked off the little informational assembly.
Also, the assembly after they wake up seems to be the first time the crew is informed of the whole we’re-looking-for-alien-origins story. So scientists wouldn’t have been leaping at the chance to go on such a mission if the true nature of the mission had been kept under wraps.
5 pages of detailed nitpicking is exactly the sort of thing Comic Book Guys do.
Okay, so if the discussion stopped on page 2, the criticism would be justified, but 5 pages - obviously all criticisms are now rendered null and void?
“They said the planet was X kilometers away, but there’s no solar system that distance from Earth!” is nitpicking.
“Why did Shaw, after having been drugged and turned into a human sample against her will by David, decide to just stroll in and hang out with everyone again like nothing weird had happened? And why did they accept that this girl who seemingly randomly attacked 2 other crew members (randomly from the perspective of the crew members, that is) and ran into the room covered in blood with a fresh surgical scar not draw any attention?”
That sort of thing is not a nitpicking, it’s a “WTF” plothole. There has been almost no nitpicking in this thread. It has been mostly pointing out the rather huge plot holes.
SenorBeef, you could easily have 5 pages of detailed nitpicking about the bad science and plot holes of Alien and Blade Runner, and those films are acknowledged classics. This film is destined to join them, IMO.
Plot holes are nitpicking to you?
Do you think that things like characters acting in completely inexplicable ways, or suddenly learning things not because there’s any reason for the characters to figure them out, but because it simply advances the plot, are simply nits? Are you just ignoring the dozens of posts in this thread with very substantial criticisms of the very story we’re talking about - or are you saying it’s all nitpicking? What would be a valid non-nitpicking criticism of the movie to you?
There are problems in all films. Blade Runner and Alien aren’t stupid, however. This film has *stupid *things happening throughout it.
You must have a completely different definition of “nitpicking” than, oh, most of the rest of the civilized world if you think that all that has been written in this thread is “nitpicking”.
For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the movie and am thinking about seeing it in the theater a second time, and am also enjoying talking about my issues and criticisms of it in this thread.
Things like one of the characters suddenly doing something totally out-of-character and inexplicable (the biologist treating the lizard thing like it’s a cute kitten) are not minor nitpicks. That’s a serious writing flaw.
There were people saying just that about them when they came out. Including a lot of critics.
I remember her singling out some specifically, so perhaps she hired part of the crew and her dad picked out the other part. I’m betting the anthropologists (Shaw and doofus BF) were his choice, as she says something like he was superstitious and wanted a couple of “true believers” along.
Okay, sure. But I’ve seen all three, and I can tell you that of the three, Prometheus feels like it was written by a hack, who just did not give a shit.