Not 5, no. 3, yes.
Not that I agree with them, and given the date the criticism was posted, I’m inclined to think they’re the “anti-trend” sort of people.
And yet, the great majority of moviegoers rating the film have come away impressed. All except a few Comic Book Guys, I guess.
So Titanic must be the best movie ever, right?
Well, that’s not fair, Titanic is way, way fucking better than Prometheus.
No, it only has a 7.5 rating.
IMDB ratings tend to be higher early on, as the people who are really enthusiastic and likely to be fans of the movies see it and rate it. They’ll tend to sag after. I’m surprised it’s doing as well as it is with 40k votes though.
But more people liked it than liked Prometheus.
In any case, your devotion to your shitty movie is laudable. If you embrace mediocrity, may I suggest the films of Michael Bay and the writings of Michael Chrichton.
That’s really the criteria that you want to use?
I’d like to see you get started on Ash’s explanation of “microchanges in air density.” Maybe I’m showing my inner dork here, but two scenes later, Ripley detects movement through a door, and mutters “micro changes in air density, my ass.” It’s not a plot hole, Ash was lying to them. It’s a really masterful bit of acting by Ian Holm when he explains how the motion detector “works.” Slight tilt of the head, slight pause, slight hint of contempt that he has to explain himself.
I don’t get the point you’re trying to make by dismissing our claims as “comic book guys.” When I explained my concerns about the film, I gave it a 7 out of 10, and lamented that it was serviceable, not amazing as I expected. Your link predominantly gives it an 8. I don’t get how a 1-point difference is enough to offend you. I haven’t been demeaning your opinion, and you don’t have to demean mine.
I walked out of the theater yesterday moderately ok with the spectacle of it.
24 hours of time to think about it have not been kind to it.
I laughed. 
Sorry if this is a duplicate as I’ve only skimmed through the thread, but this seemed to capture the tone of the writing pretty well.
I don’t know why you keep telling me about Alien; I didn’t ask about it.
I don’t see “stupid” anywhere in that synopsis of reviews of Blade Runner.
Brilliant! Totally made me Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there! And that only focuses on a couple of the major plot holes, not all of them!
I always go to see sci-fi movies that a sufficient number of Dopers are excited about, so I saw Prometheus tonight. Yeah, gotta agree with the general feeling of irritation here.
It was less the big-unresolved-mysteries in the plot and more the accumulation-of-implausible-little-things that I found frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying. And no, I’m not a “Comic Book Guy” sci-fi obsessive who passionately nitpicks unimportant details: I had no problem enjoying John Carter of Mars and Avengers and Men in Black 3 on recent Doper recommendations, but the “wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense” moments in Prometheus were too much for me.
Just a few that I don’t think have been mentioned in detail so far:
- About those pictograms: No, dooface, it isn’t plausible for the ancient cultures you mention as having examples of the pictograms to include “Sumerian”, “Babylonian”, and “Mesopotamian”. Mesopotamia is a region whose history includes the specific cultures or culture clusters of Sumerians and Babylonians.
You can speak of “Mesopotamians” or “Sumerians and Babylonians”, but not all three as though they were three distinct peoples. Just like you can’t sensibly speak of “Norwegians, Swedes and Scandinavians”.
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Also, when were those pictograms supposedly created? The Skye one that the archaeologists discovered was stated to be 35000 years old, and hence derived from a preliterate civilization. But the ancient Egyptian/Sumerian/Babylonian artifacts would be only about three to four thousand years old, and appeared to include some writing in the writing systems of the various cultures. So why not actually try reading what they said in order to interpret them?
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A pattern of about seven dots in an ancient pictogram provided sufficiently accurate interstellar coordinates to find the place you’re looking for? Bull and shit.
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Isn’t anybody bothering to keep track of the numbers? If the “stardate” screen shows the ship’s distance from Earth as on the order of 10^12 or one trillion kilometers, then why does Vickers later say that she’s “half a billion miles” from every man on Earth? I can’t believe that somebody actually doing interstellar space travel would make that kind of mistake. It’s literally like driving across the North American continent and then sighing that home is nearly a whole two miles away.
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Why the hell is your harness-mounted weapon of choice a candy-ass flamethrower that merely incinerates people slowly? A target less resigned to his fate than Holloway would have had the time and probably the mobility to run at the shooter and engulf him/her in flames too before dying.
Jeez, it’s 2094 or whenever, you’ve got FTL space travel and auto-surgery medi-pods, I expect to see some kind of shoulder-mount gun that actually vaporizes the critter you point it at, or at least blasts a hole in it that you could put a basketball through.
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Speaking of your equipment: What’s with those helmets that were apparently tough enough to withstand full-body impacts generated by 200 kph winds but start shattering like sugar brittle when zombie-creature punches people? Sure, okay, I get that he hits hard enough to kill someone inside a suit, but I simply don’t buy it that the material of these space helmets shatters like windshield glass. (And knocking somebody’s helmet off their head? Really?)
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Oh, by the way, if you’re really reconstructing a hypothesized alien-derived pan-human proto-language, studying “Indo-European” languages or even Proto-Indo-European isn’t enough. The world’s other language families like Semitic and Finno-Ugaric and Sino-Tibetan are not derived from Indo-European, so Indo-European of some sort—even Very Old Bald Alien Pre-Proto-Indo-European—can’t be the sole source of human language.
Having seen the movie, it succeeded in a lot of ways, and in terms of the basic litmus test of choosing to see it, I’m glad I saw it in the theater in IMAX 3D and I’d like to see it again because it was a fun experience.
That said, this was a motion ride adventure. And a really good one. But it wasn’t really a good cinematic story.
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, and maybe there is a background explanation that makes comprehensive sense, but it gives off the appearance of being a bunch of really cool scenes tied together very loosely by a base plot/theme.
Which is fine for a motion adventure ride, and done very well in that respect. But doesn’t work dramatically as a compelling story.
Because Lawrence of Arabia is one of the greatest films…
… In The World.
Seriously though, it was just a nice, quirky touch that an android, wanting to learn about being human, was taking tips from a David Maclean film about someone who was, well, more than a little odd in real life - even if he did achieve great things.
Let me stress I didn’t hate Prometheus. But the plot flaws already mentioned (Starting from “Were these guys really the best they could do for an interstellar expedition?” and going from there) really are significant, IMHO. And not the sort of plot holes that can be overlooked as artistic licence or the sort of thing you’d expect in a generic action movie.
If you’re going to try and pretend your movie is tackling Worthy Matters and Weighty Questions, you can’t expect people to overlook things like, well, pretty much everything that’s been pointed out over the previous five pages or so.
Figuratively.
It’s called “hyperbole”. Vicker’s isn’t giving navigational directions. She’s complaining she a “bazillion” miles away.
Here’s something that bothered me that no one has mentioned yet. They demonstrate several futuristic technologies:
-Anti-gravity survey balls
-Dream monitoring tech
-Severed head electro stimulation technology
What bothers me is when you introduce a futuristic technology in a film, I now expect that culture would have used that technology in more than one or two use cases. For example, if you have anti-gravity survey balls (and artificial gravity in the ship), I would expect you would also have anti gravity illumination devices. Maybe even larger anti-grav vehicles. All sorts of useful shit. Instead they are bopping around in dune buggies.
Same thing with David reading Dr DragonTatoo’s dreams in statis. If you have that sort of brain-computer interface technology, why would you not have more practical use cases?
LIke, I don’t know. Maybe some sort of brain interfacing anti-gravity drone you can send out into an alien pyramid to check shit out before you go meet a bunch of alien creatures?
I enjoyed the movie while watching it. But I came away feeling unsatisfied. Plot holes, nitpicks, what have you, I just felt like it was incomplete. I just would have liked a little more resolution to the major plot points.
You bring up an interesting point about wanting more resolution to the major plot points. The central question of the film was “who made us, and why?” That question is kicked off by showing an alien seeding (probably the) Earth. It leads Shaw to the ruins where she discovers the star map. It’s what leads her (and the Prometheus) to the planet. After the entire plot of the movie, it’s what drives Shaw onward in search of more answers: who made us, and why?
And I think it’s a serious cop-out that the movie never answers that, shuffling the question off to a sequel.
Sure, plenty of other junk happened, and not everyone in the film had the same goals as Shaw. But Shaw is our viewpoint, our protagonist, and her questions are our questions. It’s these basic filmmaking 101 issues that bother me so much.