Put me in the camp of those who thought it was a fun movie, in spite of all its glaring faults.
Many of those faults were I think due to lazy scriptwriting, where the writer wanted to move the action from A to B and could see no way to do so sufficiently quickly without the crew behaving foolishly or implausibly.
For example - it makes no sense for Prometheus to simply land somwhere on the planet without a full scan taking a lot of time, and just sort of randomly land right next to the important artifact. But it saves time.
Similarly, it makes no sense for a woman to engage in strenuous action immediately after major abdominal surgery. Nor does it make sense for her to assault the crewmembers taking her to hypersleep, conduct surgery on herself (removing an alien squid-baby), and have neither her nor they even mention this when they all meet up again. If I had a squid-baby removed, I’d be “mentioning” it all over the place!
But again, it saves time - the writers want to move on to the next scene. No time to resolve the “WTF I JUST HAD A SQUIDBABY” thing.
My take: that the filmmakers were more interested in both the big themes (conflict between parent and child, creation and creator) and in creating a visually stunning thrill ride, than in making either the setting or characters sensible. Those who like the movie do so because they find the themes engaging and the thrills exciting. Those who dislike the movie do so because they can’t enjoy the big themes or the thrills when neither the setting nor the characters make any sense. That’s why the film creates so much argument.
Me, I enjoyed it. But I can certainly see why some do not.
Well put. And I can understand shortcuts being made when the movie was already 2 hours long. I wonder if a Director’s Cut will take care of a number of issues that people had with things not being explained properly.
SHUTTLE INTERIOR
Random crew person: Ooh! Look at that surprise mountain so much bigger than Everest.
Other crew person peering through windshield: Over there! Nature doesn’t build in straight lines (except for when it does). Good thing I saw that! Let’s land there.
With
PROMETHEUS INTERIOR
Naked Charlize Theron waking up: How long were we asleep?
David: 2 years, 4 months, **36 hours], 16 minutes, 13.1478 seconds. I finally woke you all because the mapping is complete and some interesting things were found.
Later:
SHUTTLE INTERIOR
Random crew person: Ooh! Look at that mountain; it really is so much bigger than Everest.
Other crew person peering through windshield: Over there! I see the roads the mapping scans picked up!
Heck, so much of the weirdness around David would be explained away if there were even a hint that they’d been in orbit for quite a while before awakening the crew and maybe even that he’d been exploring in preparation for Weyland.
Fair enough. I suspect much of what is glaringly wrong with the script could have been fixed with a creative rewrite or two.
When I was watching the movie, my thought was ‘ok I’m just going to assume that they did all the scanning stuff and found this complex that way, but it’s not mentioned (to save screen time)’. But I agree with you that it could have been worked in like you say.
What is kind frustrating with this movie is that so much of the annoying stuff was unnecessary, or could have been done differently, so as to be less annoying.
I’ve only seen the movie once, and I’m sure I missed some things. Couple of thoughts/questions:
Was the cobra thingy perhaps a xenomorph that had been incubated in one of the worms we saw earlier (and thus took on worm-like characteristics?)
Is the assumption that the engineer at the beginning was seeding Earth as part of some master plan? Because the sense I got while watching the scene was that he had been stranded there by his people, had smuggled the black goo, and was perhaps acting out of spite. But again, that’s based on a single viewing. Need to see the scene again. I think maybe I just thought he looked angry. I could be mis-remembering.
I think the goo turns anything infected with it into a zombie, and anything that mates with the zombie has a facehugger baby. I think the space cobra was a worm facehugger. Note that something flew out of the biologist when his head was disturbed.
It seemed to me like it was an honor to drink the goo. I think his people left him there knowing that he would be the spark that creates a new race. Like someone throwing themselves into a volcano to satisfy a God. He was sacrificing himself to give Earth (presumably) life. I think they left to give him dignity, so they last thing they would see was him standing there bravely, not him choking and falling to pieces.
I’m beginning to believe Prometheus marks an epoch in the history of this entertainment meduim where the ‘dim’ movie-goer outnumbers the more discerning viewer. It’s the only rational explanation as to why the aforementioned schlock garners any praise, whatsoever:
[ul]Visuals: So what? You can get graphics just as shiny in 95% of video games nowadays. To laud a film on this premise is asinine and demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of what constitutes a good film. Star Wars did it better in 1977, and countless other films since.[/ul]
[ul]Acting: Really? Sure, Fassbender’s was a seviceable effort; accentuated, acutely, by the inane material he had to work with. But, even his ‘gay Peter O’Toole’ was bordeline Vaudeville at times. Either way, he alone could not, nor did he, save the abattoir of ham this film carved up.[/ul]
[ul]Character exposition: n/a :rolleyes:[/ul]
[ul]Narrative:Potentially good. But, given a film’s narrative is inextricably tied to its script, the Promethues narrative was good in subtext only.[/ul]
[ul]Script: As alluded to, faeces.[/ul]
[ul]Score: Mediore and forgettable. Nowhere near the calibre of the original Alien films, let alone Vangelis.[/ul]
There is simply no reasoning to buttress Prometheus being a good film; let alone some “masterpiece” of sci-fi cinema (:smack:). One may like the film–fine. Some like McDonald’s and cigarettes; there’s no accounting for taste / intelligence. However, earnestly asserting this film was anything more than base B-schlock, that resembles the more venerable installments of the series in little more than license, and which was wholly concoted to pander to ‘Generation American Pie’, is certifiable delusion.
Something that bugged me but I could not articulate for awhile, the film feels very much like a modern franchise film(much like some of the Marvel movies) in that the audience is just expected to roll with plot holes or missing info with the expectation further films will fill it in. Indeed Ridley Scott has already said he plans at least two sequels, this is a new style of film basically.
Read this thing, guys, it adds some very, very, very helpful interpretations to the film. Prometheus could have been a masterpiece, and that’s what makes me angry. It had the budget and talent and came close, but ended up just annoying me in far too many ways. Personally i think the whole cast sucked in their roles except for Fassbender.
OK, we get it. Some of you don’t like the film. Cool. But now could you stop repeating the same complaints about it long enough for a discussion of the film to happen among the people who do like it?
Piling on with an “I hate it, too!” really isn’t adding to the thread at this point.
ultimately, however, some of the well-thought out explanations in the post above still cannot make up for the films plot holes and glaring script mistakes, and the stupid actions people take (like petting a space cobra).
All joking aside, I don’t think the conversation is as bad as you say. Plenty of people have said they enjoyed the film without getting jumped on. The difference is, they did it without attacking the people who didn’t enjoy the film as much.
In the interest of fairness, I will say I hope the people on my side stop insulting the intelligence of those who did like it. I like Robocop, I have no room to judge anybody else.
