Meh. Han Solo made the Kessel run in 12 parsecs. Everybody loves Star Wars.
Well, actually, I had not been planning to base any religions or philosophies on it. Hollywood is known for scientific illiteracy (see “12 parsecs”). I wish it were not so, but getting exercised over this sort of stuff will destroy most SF films for you.
But their [BBG] racial genetics, technology level, and especially culture should have changed during that time, too.
I didn’t assume them to be anti-gravity - they could just be made of an extremely light metal and propel themselves with an air compressor.
Saw it on Saturday, and I agree with a lot of the plot holes/criticisms identified here. I have to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t meant to be a hard-SF film, even though some of the images/allusions (the Kubrickian/2001 connection especially) seemed to aspire to that; the focus was more on exploring the mythic resonance of the ideas, which was intriguing even if not executed very well (and I think cavalorn on LJ, as someone posted earlier, is on the right track as far as what was intended).
I have to say, though, that 1) Fassbender nailed it; and 2) the visuals were peerless. The entire scene in the control center/“map room” was sheer visual poetry, and really captured that sense of wonder-in-discovery; it may be hardcoded into David, but we can all sympathize with it.
I’ll agree that film is 80% amazing. That’s why it’s so frustrating. It had everything it needed to be truly great. A solid director, a wonderful cast, a budget to die for. It just had sloppy, stupid writing. That’s painful. It’s like going to see The Lion King on Broadway and it has the musicians, the props and the splendor, but it ends up being a shitty story about moron aliens and some slap-fighting cretins who come a knockin’.
Are we sure it was the Earth the alien seeded and was he really seeding it? The problem with the film is that it’s trying to be too clever in the ‘you figure it out’ type of storytelling. A few direct answers would have made it a better film.
Instead of seeding DNA, what if the Alien was a ‘human’ volunteer testing a doomsday/plague weapon on another Earth-like planet? That changes the movie for me. Why did the ship just hover, what were they doing? Observing the results of the test.
Yes it appears they are interested in the Earth; not because we are some red-headed stepchildren they created, but because they want to test on a real environment. The Earth was a good test site, with humanoids that closely matched their DNA, what’s not to like?
Maybe they were observing the Earth, waiting for it to reach a certain population level or technology level before the final test and that’s why they visited, to make sure we were thriving. The older civilization art that depicted them could have been providing directions, I say they were warnings. Just like the beacon in Alien was a warning, but the crew was mislead/encouraged to believe it was a distress signal..Shaw was mislead to believe they wanted us to find them.
It doesn’t have to be personal, they don’t have to ‘hate’ us or change their minds(!). We were just going to be their HIV infected monkeys and they screwed up containment and killed themselves…or were killed by someone inside. Perhaps they were meant to be ‘expendable’, like the crew on the Nostromo were.
The problem is we only have Shaw and David to undestand what’s going on. Shaw could be wrong, the puppet of David; David who is certainly untrustworthy. The key to this is what David said to the engineer, but because they are keeping that from us, the story IMO falls apart.
We don’t know what is motivating the Engineer or his people and everyone else’s behaviour makes little sense. What if the Engineer isn’t the bad guy here? How many movies have we seen the anti-hero fly the ship full of bombs/aliens or whatever into space in order to destroy it safely?
Why couldn’t the Engineer have been doing that, but because Shaw doesn’t know what the hell is going on and being manlipulated by and listening to David (who was willing to let her be host to a squid baby) she assumes the worst and once again gives the wrong information.
He has keep it out of their hands for the safety of the Universe. Crap they just rammed his ship and spread the stuff all over the place…he can’t let any of them leave, in case of contamination and goes back to make sure Shaw’s dead. Only this time instead of the hero dying a heroic death and containing threat; he gets killed, the bad girl gets away and probably brings disease and destruction to his world.
There’s too much assumption going on and the purpose of a sequel shouldn’t be to fix plot holes in the previous movie. It should be to continue the story, not explain what should have been explained in the first movie.
What if the Engineer was the Ripley of his crew? What would Ripley had done if she woke up surrounded by people with a cargo hold full of Alien eggs?
YMMV, of course.
It’s pretty implausible that the star map left on earth were a “stay away” warning. The images themselves gave no indicaton of this, and it’s a much safer bet that humans aren’t going to discover that moon amongst millions of other planets and moons in the area simply through obscurity. The idea that you’d make a map to the area as a way of trying to get them not to go there just doesn’t add up. Even if you factor in the “aliens think differently” sort of way - well, we design the markings on our space probes to be interpretable by anyone, and I’d imagine they’d do the same.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. My thought was the maps wasn’t left by the aliens as warning to humans; it was left by us as a warning to future generations of other humans, the same way we leave warnings on radioactive waste.
Beware of these people from here. Do not go ‘there’ if they ask you to. This is where they come from, beware of them.
Was I supposed to read that in Jeremy Clarkson’s voice? Because I totally did.
So let me sum up the goo based on thoughts from this thread, paraphrasing direct quotes where applicable:
It’s a black liquid that is ingested by creator aliens in order to kill themselves to seed alien worlds with their DNA so that these creations can later be eradicated, by way of forming accelerated worms that incubate in the eyeballs of super-strength-fast-human-zombies which can change victim’s sex cells so that they implant giant facehuggers into ladybits during sexytimes, then the giant facehuggers grab someone and implant a nearly adult Xenomorph, which presumably can then lay eggs.
Am I missing anything?
I agree it’s stupid. I pointed it out as well. But it’s not a plot hole.
All it would take is a 3-second cut at the end of some scene showing a store-room with boxes of food ripped open, and no one would have to fanwank it away. But it doesn’t require a horrendous leap to figure that the monster, during the time it was loose on the ship, ate something. It’s already been established that it grows very quickly; it gestates in a matter of hours.
It really doesn’t rise to the level of having no quarantine procedures*, or having the mapmaker get lost, or having the main character trust the robot a few scenes after he tried to kill her.
*I mean, come on. Quarantine was a major plot point in the first movie. Presumably the writers of Prometheus have seen it once or twice, right?
Plus, to the extent that rapid growth without obvious food is a plot hole in Aliens it is an equally big plot hole in this. So even with 35 years to think about it, Scott didn’t deal with it.
The face hugger grew from fetus sized to giant squid sized in a couple hours while locked in a small room. One can only assume it eats electricity and anesthetics. And apparently took all of its food with it into Shaw since it grew from sperm sized to fetus sized without, apparently, consuming any part of her.
My list of stupidities (duplicated many times in this thread). Note, I’m not necessarily calling these plot holes, just things that struck me as stupid:
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If they seeded Earth with DNA (though that isn’t certain from the information given), how likely was it we’d evolve to look so similar to the Big Bald Aliens (so similar that a DNA scan shows as a near perfect match)? While at the same time snails evolved from the same DNA? This can be explained away as evolution was not a product of random mutation and that the DNA has a pre-programmed path. But still, snails.
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My wife had abdominal surgery days before watching this. That was the most stupid recovery time ever on TV or film. Magic staples!
3a. Why Guy Pearce in pounds of aging makeup? I assume they originally had a bigger role intended for him, but he stood out like a sore thumb.
3b. Why such horrible aging makeup? Were they trying to make Clint Eastwood feel better about what he did to DiCaprio and Hammer in J. Edgar?
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By studying Earth language evolution you can apparently determine, vocally, the single source language. Linguists would be amazed to learn this. Was this language encoded in our DNA or did they come back later to get us talking?
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When telling Charlize Theron how long she’d been asleep David reported it as X years, Y months, 36 hours, Z minutes.
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If they’d already found 8 artifacts from 8 distinct cultures with the star map, why was it finding a ninth in Scotland that triggered the trip?
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The use of artificial gravity, and interstellar travel being completely unnoteworthy just 80 years from now is a bit hard to swallow, especially since there was apparently zero development in cold weather outerwear in those 80 years.
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The star charts in the ancient ruins all pointed to a “galactic system” which is apparently a star cluster. A star cluster that couldn’t possibly have been seen by acient civilizations from Earth. But the intro graphic tells us they were 3x10^14 km from Earth. That is only about 30 light years. Those would have to be pretty faint stars. Also, Earth based astronomy has apparently improved so much that we can tell that one of those stars has a ringed gas giant and around that gas giant is a single moon and it can support life.
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Conservation of mass and energy in reproduction of life.
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They arrived at the planet, woke up, and set down all within a day. They apparently didn’t do any mapping from orbit (since they were surprised by the giant mountain) and then lucked out to come down right at the military station. This is about as likely as picking a globe of earth and randomly pointing at the handicapped restroom on the third sub-basement at NORAD.
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Once they determined their dome really was an alien structure, nobody ever seemed to say "hey, did you notice there were six more of these structures all in a line? Maybe some aliens are in those too.
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They were all really crappy scientists. No planning, rushing to interact with everything, jumping to conclusions on the flimsiest of evidence.
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The guy responsible for mapping the structure got lost. And didn’t seem embarrassed by it.
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The biologist guy was not in the least intrigued by being told of a ping for life (and runs away) but then treats an unexpected encounter like it was a baby squirrel.
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Why did the Big Bald Aliens simultaneously have such crappy and such amazing holograph technology? You’d think they’d have worked out resolution before installing the projectors in every hallway.
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Three Big Bald Aliens ran into a room with one door. One got beheaded. What happened to the other two inside?
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If the Big Bald Alien in suspended sleep had the mission to immediately head for earth and complete the delivery why did he go to sleep in the first place?
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The Death of Charlize Theron was a bad Warner Bros. cartoon. In cartoons, whenever a tree is going to fall on someone the character tries to outrun the length of the tree (say 100 feet) instead of just moving 15 feet perpendicular. Charlize Theron is as dumb as Wile E. Coyote (and Rapace only slightly less so).
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Why in the world would they invent a self-service surgery machine and then “optimize” it only for women. Is memory storage really so hard to find in the space faring future? Maybe if David had been forced to leave his Blu Ray of Lawrence of Arabia at home. And then after that the surgery machine didn’t seem fazed by the presence of decidedly not male organs.
Yeah, I think so. The alien installation is, apparently, a research facility of some kind. Its where they do experiments. Each of those canisters in the room with the giant face was probably a different batch of experimental goo. The one that infects Charley isn’t the same as the one the alien drank in the opening scene, and the super zombie was made by immersing a corpse in a puddle made up of the contents of dozens of different canisters. All of which, incidentally, had been sitting around for two thousand years, and were explicitly malfunctioning - opening the door was causing the murals to rapidly disintegrate, which coincided with the canisters bubbling over.
So, you’re not looking at one lifecycle, there, you’re looking at three distinct events, playing out in unique circumstances. The super zombie, I think, was a malfunction - the result of a mixture of dozens of different strains of goo being applied to a badly damaged corpse. The suicidal alien at the beginning, and what happened to Charley are probably similar, but I suspect were the product of different strains of the goo, engineered to a different specific purpose.
As far as Charley goes, I don’t think getting Shaw pregnant was part of the normal lifecycle of whatever he was turning into. The goo had bonded to his DNA, but it hadn’t started to change him yet. Rather, it was his infected sperm, probably with some genetic material from Shaw’s womb, which continued to mutate under the effects of the black goo, until it turned into a squid monster. Effectively, that’s what you get when you expose a human fetus to the black goo. After impregnating Shaw, Charley continued his own mutation, the ultimate outcome we never get to see, because he’s immolated. I don’t think “have sex with an earth woman” would have figured in the life cycle of either of the resultant creatures.
The pod seems designed to handle even major trauma, which might require extensive stays in the machine - I wouldn’t be surprised if there were food stores in the medical bay. Probably a lot of blood plasma, too. Although that much mass is still a stretch.
Scotland was the one that confirmed the theory for them, not necessarily the most recent - the other artifacts may have turned up after the Scotland dig.
I think some of their systems had degraded more than others. Presumably, the hallway projectors worked better when they were freshly installed, forty thousand years ago.
When he went to sleep, humans were a bunch of bronze age sheepherders. There was less of a rush than when he woke up, and we were on his space ship.
The pods are extremely rare - Shaw says only twelve of them were ever produced. My guess is that they’re highly customized for use by a specific person, and programmed to deal with his specific health issues. The pod on the Prometheus was installed for Weyland’s use, and probably wasn’t set up to deal with any health issues that he wasn’t at risk for.
Your other fifteen complaints are pretty valid, though.
But, in the end, Shaw was able to get it do do exactly what she needed. So what was the point of the whole male/female distinction? Just like the entire movie, it’s sloppy writing. It’s a bunch of events that don’t make sense together.
WAG: Foreshadowing who was in that stasis bed. Medi-pod geared specifically for a male patient but is in Vickers’ “lifeboat” area? She was dismissive of any questions about “her” quarters or the medi-pod? (In other words, it was in the script…)
I would have given it a 6 or 7/10 when I came out of the theater on Saturday, but I’d be down to a 3 or 4 and “do not recommend” after thinking about it and discussing it for a few days, mostly because of this. There was so much that I liked technically about this movie, but it might be the worst script that I’ve seen in the theaters this year. And I saw John Carter this year, among quite a few others. It completely robs the final product of any soul or meaning, and when I put together my Best of 2012 list, I probably won’t even remember that I saw this movie at all.
Hmm…Vickers…male? Hey, love the one you’re with 
ETA, maybe he’s Arcturian.
I’ve been reflecting on the Message of the movie, and I’ve come to the amusing conclusion that it’s basically the same as that of City Slickers.
I thought all the foreshadowing necessary for realizing he was alive was provided when he said he was probably dead.
Cliche Moviewriting 101: If they don’t die on screen they aren’t dead.
They knew the significance when they saw it in the cave so they’d already seen at least some. And I believe they reached the planet 4 years after the discovery? And it took more than 2 years to travel there. Assuming they weren’t just sitting around with a crew and ship waiting to launch immediately that doesn’t leave much time for discovering much more.
But I also won’t claim that everything I thought was stupid at the time actually was. Some may go away with more thought or a second viewing (that it is unlikely to receive). But so far further thought is finding more issues than it is resolving.