If the explanation wasn’t in the movie it’s pointless to fanwank.
Fact is taken on its own the film didn’t deliver.
Regardless of what reviewers thought about (now regarded as classics) like Blade Runner or Alien on their initial release, I don’t think we’re comparing apples and apples here.
There’s nothing in Alien, for example, that falls outside reasonable conventions of the genre (ie In The Future, there’s faster than light travel and cryostasis) or requires unreasonable fanwankery to work with (The average viewer, I would suggest, reasonably assume the Alien got into the stores and ate food there at some point between its chest-bursting and subsequent reappearance, assuming said viewer noticed or cared).
Even Blade Runner’s flying cars, interplanetary travel, and androids indistinguishable from humans are still “acceptable” conventions of nearish future sci-fi. Viewers don’t think “That’s not right, what’s this nonsense about flying cars and Uncanny Valley spanning robots?”
Prometheus is full of things which just don’t make sense without nearly pornographic levels of fanwankery. The problem people have isn’t FTL travel/Medipods/Dream-watching helmets, it’s that no-one observes basic quarantine measures, major incidents (like drugging someone and trying to stuff them into stasis) are almost immediately forgotten about and moved on from, half the crew just vanish, and at the end of the film the protaganist decides to fly to the Engineer’s home planet despite having no evidence it will achieve anything except get her (and possibly the rest of Earth) killed.
It’s spelled Willem Dafoe.
:smack:
This can be fanwanked away. You see, Mel is on such good terms with pre-Vatican II God that he actually got Jesus to come back to Earth as Jim Caviezel just to star in “Passion” as himself. Thus, any Jesus role can rightly be referred to as “Jim Caviezel.”
Also, the reason it’s so hard to spell Caviezel is because God hates having his true name written. CVZL is the new tetragrammaton.
Ridley, call me. I’ve got some great ideas for Prometheus II.
I just saw Prometheus last night.
No way I’m wading through all the discussion so far. From what I’ve seen, people have the same general impression I do – the film is incredibly stupid, the actions of the characters make no sense, and the generally positive reviews are a curious anomaly. The film looks damned good, with great CGI and effective use of 3D, but that doesn’t save it.
Observations: 1.) With not only Ridley Scot, but Giler and Hill returning from the original Alien, we shouldn’t be surprised that they not only kept the look and background (crediting the uninvolved H.R. Giger and Dan O’Bannon), but that they ended up with an undoubted prequel to Alien (as we all expected, though they were cagey)
2.) they finally got an excuse to use not only Giger’s sketches for unused Alien ideas – the hieroglyphs, the catacombs, the carvings of Aliens – they also used some of his sketvches from Dune (the “pyramid”) and some of the pre-Giger ideas for Alien.
3.) The Thing beat Prometheus to the “prequel” punch. In both cases, although they struggle mightily to have the one movie end up where the original began, they didn’t get everything right. In the 1982 version of the Thing the Norwegians are shown setting thermite charges to melt the ship out of the ice, and setting fire to it in the process (as in the 1951 film, and the original John Campbell short story). That didn’t happen in the 2011 thing. Similarly, the Space Jockey in Alien was seated in his chair with his chest burst open. Unless the Xenomorph carried him back there and deposited him there before laying all those eggs in the spaceship, this is a glitch. In fact, in the original it’s stated that the Spsace Jockey navigator is actually part of the chair, and that’;s not a removable helmet.
4.) Damn, but Shaw runs around really well for a woman whose stomache has just been stapled. Even with futuristic technology that’s a mean performance.
5.) Just like the little alien in the original Alien, the little octopoid thing removed by “cesarean” manages to grow to impressive size and mass in a enclosed space. You can try to fanwank it, but it was locked in the Sick Bay, not the living quarters.
It’s a different planet. Prometheus was not done on the same planet as Alien.
Really? I thought the planet designation number was the same one they give in Aliens, which is the same one as Alien.
Otherwise, it’s an amazing coincidence that you’ve got two derelict ships of the same design filled with dangerous bioweapon stuff. especially since we’ve been assured that the Engineers tried to keep it all in one place.
Unrelated question – what the hell kept the “worms” in the “tomb” alive all those years until people just happened to walk into their place.
Prometheus planet was LV-223. Alien and Aliens planet was LV-426. As for the same design ships, IIRC, it was mentioned that they were all over the planet. We’ve only seen one of them.
I think it was postulated that the black goo tends to react towards organic lifeforms - when it comes into contact with one it starts the reaction, so to speak.
I haven’t given my opinion on the flick (I tend to lurk here), but I thought it was fantastic. Was there ridiculous character decisions and some plot holes? Yes. However, I think the strengths of the film overshadow those flaws. My favorite sci-fi book is Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, and the exploration part of the film called back to my experiences in reading that book. I thought the cinematography was beautiful and felt a sense of awe and wonder in the exploration of this installation. I appreciated the slow moving plot - more and more was revealed gradually as the it became more and more dangerous for the crew. And I liked that it didn’t answer everything. I thought the movie was beautiful and entertaining and somewhat thought provoking. I can understand why some didn’t like it, but I found it brilliant.
When were we assured of this?
The worms are alive pre-goo. We see them in David’s footstep, before people get to the vases.
It still seems too coincidental that we get a alkien chest-burster from an Engineer and a derelict ship i n this case. How many similar cases could there have been? Plus, the issue of the Navigator/Space Jockey as part of the chair vs. Humanoid helmet-wearing non-chair-bound navigators. It seems much more likely to me that thyey decided to simply ignore the differences because only real geeks would notice, or care. And then didn’t care about the number difference in the planets, the same way Arthur Conan Doyle frequently changed the names of characters, apparently without going back to check his original story. The ending of this film simply shouts out that it explains the situation at the beginning of Alien. Otherwise, why bother with all the folderol about the crashed ship and the chest-burster? Everything would;ve been wrapped up as tidily if the Prometheus simply destroyed the alien ship utterly – but no, it has to be in exactly the same orientation we saw it in at the beginning of Alien.
By the way – we weren’t told that they were “all over the planet”. Until they mapped the ship, they didn’t even realize that there was even one ship there, underground. We only have David’s word for it that there are other ships – and not even that they’re identical to this one. The one we see taking off at the end, I’ll grant, does seem similar to this ship, though.
You’ll note he steps into the goo and they start wiggling after he steps. Also the place where they were was sealed off for how many years. Just the addition of their presense in this seeming vaccuum may have done it.
I am pretty sure that’s why Scott and co. were so adamant that this isn’t a direct prequal to Alien. Because while it is in the same universe (they used that term IIRC), it isn’t the same planet. After all, the Space Jockey in Alien didn’t seem to have a xenomorph fully grown come out of him (look at the end of Prometheus, the Engineer is basically split neck to groin) but instead a chestburster - that ship may have had a different evolutionary path of their bio-weapons.
Add the two together and I think we can trust David’s word on this aspect.
Yeah, but didn’t the two lost crewmen find scores of Engineers with chestburster holes in them? That scene resembled the ones we usually see when a hive of aliens establishes themselves…bodies pasted to walls with holes in their chests. Imagine after a thousand years and the paste dissolves, you would just find bodies laying on top of one another.
I have seen this, and maybe my expectations from the exceptional trailer were too high, but i found myself overall very underwhelmed by the film. I don’t even know if i want to see it again, and i can’t say that about Alien or Aliens, which i have seen hundreds of times.
My thoughts…someone else posted the theory that the BBA in the beginning is actually on the installation planet, and that makes sense. It is not clear at all in the film. I was ultimately annoyed at the BBA burning desire to destroy mankind, with not even a whiff of explanation.
So, someone please correct me here, but the ship that crashes at the end is NOT the same one from Alien? There is no chestburst jockey in the gun. There is no queen to lay eggs, and the planet looks very different.
On a purely functional level, i thought the movie looked good. But i was not drawn into it, and aside from the android David, i did not like any of the characters. Some scenes seemed absolutely useless, like the captain and Theron talking about getting laid. Why? I did not find the movie scary in the least, so i can’t tell if that was Scotts intention or not, or a big misstep.
The best and most memorable scene, to me, was the emergency C-section, that was well done and tense. As to WHY it grew so big after being supposedly killed…who knows. I guess all those life forms grow quickly.
As in the post above, i did find some incredibly stupid things were done, like even imagining removing your helmet in alien atmosphere. Playing with creepy alien tentacles. Why? And why they had to cast Guy Pearce in old man makeup that painfully looked like old man makeup…i can’t tell you how much that annoys me. It just comes across as a younger man trying to “act” like an older man. I really don’t see why they didn’t just cast an older actor and slap some latex on him.
And the zombified archaeologist? again, why? he was burned up. again, if this had been expounded on or cleared up or followed through logically, it would make more sense. It looks like they left a lot of questions for sequels to answer.
Bottom line…i think if the script had been tighter, and some different casting decisions, and a few more questions answered, this could have been a classic film that just barely somehow misses the mark. Which was disappointing.
That not why anything – I suspect that they simply don’t want to be seen as “simply making a prequel” – although that’s precisely what they did. For whatever reason, they made the actions of making a prequel without slavishly duplicating them. But, as I note, the situation is set up to virtually produce the same situation as at the beginning of Alien. Otherwise the gyrations – crashed ship, dead pilot with burst chest, alien eggs al over the place – don’t really make much sense. They could’ve ended the film without any of that and still have satisfactorily wrapped up as much as they did. They could even have had the virtually obligatory “last gasp of the threat” without having the pilot fall prey to a chest-burster. Why do it, unless you’re making a prequel?
And if this sort of thing happens more than once, I’m not surprised the Engineers are all dead. Jerks.
By the way, I have to register my extreme displeasure at a film that sets up a question as important as “why did these guys create humanity? and why did they then try to destroy us?” and then doesn’t even try to answer it. “You’re a robot and I’m a human” doesn’t begin to cover it.
I know why the Krel died, dammit!
As stated, they wanted to do the movie in the Alien universe but not a direct prequal. So, obviously, a lot of it is going to be the same. FWIW, there weren’t Alien eggs all over the place in Prometheus. Those cannisters looked similar in shape, but definitely weren’t the same. It seemed quite obvious (at least to me) that they were telling a story of a similar ship as in the first Alien movie, but not the exact same one.
shrug - that’s one of the reasons I liked it. It doesn’t try to answer the question and lets people think on the question. I understand why people don’t like that, but I also don’t think it’s because of sloppy writing, because as you say, it doesn’t try to really answer it - and that’s the reason Shaw goes off for the Engineers’ home planet rather than back to Earth. To get that answer.
I am going on the assumption that the crashed ship at the end of Prometheus is not the crashed ship at the beginning of Alien. The odds of having two identical crashed ships is unlikely…but if they really plan to squeeze two more sequels out of this then maybe they have something more logical planned.
And it bothers me as well that they cannot even offer a hint as to why the BBA wanted to destroy mankind. Makes me feel like the damn writers don’t even know. They had this big grand idea but couldn’t follow through to the end. Why or how make us, and then why fashion this convoluted method to disintegrate our DNA to create a different lifeform?
And then back to the world-wide star map thing…it points to a military installation? So at some point the BBA gave early humans a map to a world that was not their home world. Maybe this will make more sense in a sequel.
This one’s a pet peeve, but I’m constantly annoyed by Ancient Machinery that Still Works perfectly. I have tools only a couple of years old immobilized by rust in my garage. You’d think that 35,000 underground spaceship doors would at least groan a little when opening. Even if the aliens used magic stasis-field stored and lubricated gears for that Emperor Zur gateway, you’d think that 350 centuries of accumulated geology would do more than just heap some dirt on top.
And, yes, this bothered me in the Indiana Jones flicks, and the Goonies, and The Mummy, et al ad nauseum.
At least in Forbidden Planet you know that the machines were supposed to be continually keeping themselves up and lubricating and replacing worn parts.
Preach!! It wouldn’t even take that much effort in these movies to have the doors simply make more noise or something.
Surely you’re looking forward to Scott’s next film, Murder On Snollygoster Street, where police investigate a brutal killing, but don’t bother finding out who did it or why.
I agree with this. Too, too many plot holes, and now we have maybe 2-3 years to determine if the writers just F-ed up or actually knew what they were doing. Honestly, the scope and majesty of this movie was too grand to just throw it away to some hackneyed guesses and unanswered questions.