Rent, house payment, car payment, credit card paymet (to keep it simple, we’ll just say "any debt reduction payment, Okay?), postage, food, beer, clothes, toothpaste, ass-wipe, crayons, paper, tape (Okay- “office/school supplies”), vodka, tequila, tortillas, salsa, potato chips, potatos, tomatos, onions, eggs, speckled eggs, fish eggs, fish food, fish, dog food, porn, carrots, dog toys, kid’s toys, lumber, nails, socks, batterys, gas, oil, greeting cards, tissues, clocks, little powerdery doughnut snacks, barely-legal porn, Volvo cam shims, tires, staples (Oh, damn! Exhausted that already!), cable TV, dish TV, TV dinners, TV operations, TV porn, bricks, karoake CD’s, speaker wire, wicker baskets, glass, glasses, grease, leather, lace, shoes, pants, blankets, carpet, closet doors, chicken wire, chickens, lions, tigers, bears! Oh My! Legal advice, underware, shoelaces, horseradish, pallet rack, chain hoists, tie-downs, brake pads (or shoes), honey, board games, wine, globes, porcelain cat figurines, dog collars, DVD-R’s, cell phone minutes, condoms, paintball guns, radios, matchbox cars, hotwheels cars, legos, medicine, sunglasses, switchplates, tires, german porn, nail clippers, screen doors, ceiling fans, rocks, band-aids, razor blades, chap-stick, jello, de-icer salt, ski tickets, tomato juice, apple juice, coke, RC cola and a moonpie! Dentristry, lawn care, dish soap, ass soap, pit stick, tampons, dental floss, toothpicks, jerky, jerk-off’s, electronics, russian nesting dolls, TAB, Vegimite, rye bread, cat food, tables, rugs, drum sticks, light bulbs, boxes, cans, bottles, sleeves, brussle sprouts, chairs, bullets, chain lube, T shirts, saltines, cheese, cheese-flavored mouse poison, mice, snakes, quail eggs, bat shit, cow shit, japanese eggplants, japanese porn, pneumatic tires, crescent wrenchs, screw drivers (both kinds!), gravel, concrete mixers, pot-stickers, sticky stickers, sticky buns, apple fritters, floppy disks, maps, smoke alarms, bowls, spoons, computer mouses (mice?), telephones, fuses, plumbing snakes, integrated amps, cheese cloth, yeast, oranges, light bulbs (but not those fucked up cork-screw kind that burn out in about a week), diapers, shampoo and toothpicks.
This is really one of those movies you should see on the big screen. I mean, the premise is amazing, but the plot gets a little muddled and there’s not much pay off of the main mysteries. But it’s full of visual awe pretty much throughout. It’s a spectacle that pretty much demands to be seen in IMAX with it’s huge screen and bone shattering bass speakers, and 3D even if you like that sort of thing.
You two must be talking about some other movie entirely.
It’s a different planet entirely.
It’s the same type of ship, but it’s a different ship entirely, and they find a lot of more important stuff before they bother with the ship.
Yes, but not those aliens, and they aren’t being stalked by aliens like the other movies.
Yes.
Yes.
Different ship, different planet. This movie explains a little bit about the alien race that flies that sort of ship, and their relationship to the aliens of the movie title, which can lead one to make some assumptions about the derelict spaceship and space jockey of Alien, but at no time do we see that particular planet or ship or jockey or set of xenomorphs.
Your psychic powers have failed you.
This is what happens when blockbuster films get so bent on phoning in the exposition through dialog. And a decade+ of Michael Bay. Most of the answers are all right there, if you pay attention.
Good grief. I feel like I’m the only one who had an amazing, epic, thrilling and intellectual movie-going experience, then had a blast puzzling all the pieces together.
Far, far more thrilling than that piece of bubblegum called Avengers (and I liked that a lot too… but this is where SF melts your face off… literally).
Anyhow, it’s painfully obvious its only the first part of at least two films. LV-246 was the planet the Nostromo landed on when they received the distress signal. They find the ship. A space jockey, and then all the eggs. They have no idea what it all is or where it came from. Now we’re getting that story. This is the first chapter, and it begins, but doesn’t end on LV-233.
(Also, see it in IMAX. This is by far the best example of 3D. I felt it actually played a role in telling the story, what with all the holographic imagery. In 3-Dimensions, it was downright mesmerizing.)
Doh! I’ve transposed those numbers, It’s LV-426. :smack:
Just got back. Thought about it all the way home.
I liked the first half, then started getting annoyed at the nonchalant and at times idiotic way the characters were reacting to the crazy events happening around them.
There’s a huge-ass humanoid face just sitting there in the middle of this alien planet–there’s your proof right there! Everyone takes that in stride and don’t spare it much thought. They get a hold of a well-preserved alien head. Let’s try to reanimate it! The two redshirts are stuck and have to spend the night in a hollow pyramid that has spines and ribs for structural support. Where do they sleep? In the room with the fucking scary face and goo canisters! There’s some creepy penis creature emerging from the goo; let’s kneel down and play with it! The doctor’s magically pregnant with an alien baby even though she’s infertile. They ignore and tranquilize her. The zombie is just stupid.
But then, towards the end–starting with the scene where the bald alien wakes up and kicks their asses and culminating in the epic moment when Shaw says screw going home, take me onward!–I felt the undeniable rush of experiencing something awesome, flaws and all.
I decided I like the movie. There’s an interesting story going on here. It made me think about how dangerous and resilient life is; it’s the perfect weapon.
I heard Scott on a BBC interview say there are at least two more movies before they get to the events of Alien. Can’t wait.
That is a hell of a lot of toothpicks, my last package cost me forty nine cents for 100 toothpicks.
Building the Eifle Tower are we?
I enjoyed the movie but found a lot of it inconsistent and a lot of the characters’ actions illogical or flat-out stupid.
There were supposed to be 17 crew on the ship, but it didn’t seem like they were all accounted for at the end - there were numerous characters who just seemed to vanish.
Why on Earth did they get Guy Pearce to play a (not very well made-up, IMHO) centenarian? He’s only in the movie for maybe 5 minutes and there’s nothing (again IMHO) especially significant about his character that requires the acting skills or gravitas of someone like Mr Pearce.
Having David the cyborg being a huge Lawrence of Arabia fan was a nice touch, though.
Thank god I’m not the only one. I came home from seeing it yesterday and after going on line to see what others thought, I was stunned to find it had largely positive reviews.
I thought the philosophical/theological element was positively idiotic. Are the aliens supposed to have seeded life on Earth or specificaly human life? The latter is obviously even more moronic, but it seems to be whats implied. Scott is so ill-informed on the subject that it’s possible he doesn’t see a distinction. The Alien DNA ‘matches’ Human DNA. Are they instead suggesting that the engineers seeded life and then directed evolution since in order to create human life? That’s a pretty long-winded way of creating a clone.
As has already been said, one of the characters asks if we’re ‘just going to throw away 300 years of darwinism’. That isn’t even deemed worthy of an answer.
I thought this movie was a gigantic, embarrasing waste of effort and money. I was actually quite annoyed after seeing it and I honestly thought this would be the overwhelming consensus, but others really seem to have enjoyed it so maybe it’s just not for me.
The visuals were amazing though, there’s no denying that. Think I’d have enjoyed it more with the dialogue muted. And in answer to a previous poster, yes, I do think that this movie had little or no artistic merit beyond the visuals and some (not all) of the performances. Why do I think that? ‘It’s what I choose to believe.’ That’s apparently a satisfactory answer now.
You should have stressed that this was not an exhaustive list. 
A friend of mine described the experience of seeing it as like going out to the fanciest restaurant in the world. Getting the best service, regular drink top-ups, string quartet playing at your table etc. The only down side is that everything on the menu is a beautifully presented turd.
Well as a fan of John Norman, I am experienced in enjoying a work of art for its strengths even if I have little or no respect for its philosophical underpinnings. So Prometheus really worked for me. Same with the Bible, really.
BTW, why is everybody so insistent that the Prometheans CREATED life. Prometheus only brought FIRE to an existing humankind, allowing us to exist. My take on the movie is, Prometheus is the fellow you see in the first scene, who drinks the gray goo and then falls into the water. He wipes out the Promethean military installation, or rather, the gray goo he has seeded the water with destroys it, and thus prevents humans from being wiped out, allowing us to exist. Weyland only THOUGHT the Prometheans had created humanity, or life.
Human & Promethean DNA still matched. We had to come from them.
What disappointed me about this movie is that (for me) it was a solid 7 out of 10. Above average, but I really expected Ridley Scott to knock it out of the park. The biggest issues for me are plot and characterization.
Like I saw some other posters mention, there seemed to be a lot of scenes cut or omitted, and it hurts the movie. Things happen so that future scenes can happen. Some stuff happens that is never mentioned again.
My biggest example of this is the entire “alien embryo” subplot involving Shaw. We learn, abruptly, that she can’t have kids. This comes out of nowhere, leads to the alien impregnation, and then is never mentioned again. It isn’t an integral part of her character - you couldn’t have guessed before or after that she was dealing with any kind of emotional issues resulting from it. It doesn’t affect her characterization. We’re simply told this fact, it’s subverted when she is pregnant, and then forgotten.
Vickers is similar. Her character exists for no discernible purpose. What does she add to the film? She kills Charlie, but that could have been done by the captain. She plot-dumps that Weyland is alive when she visits him, but that could have been done by David. And then she doesn’t do anything until she’s squished by the ship at the end. No dramatic arc (if you exclude the “my father needs to die so I can be the leader!” plotline, which she did nothing to achieve), no tangible affect on the plot, and no dramatic conclusion to her character. She’s just there.
Let’s go back to the alien embryo story. Shaw is pregnant with the beast. David is clearly acting maliciously, doping her up suddenly, refusing to show her the embryo, and so on. She escapes, cuts the embryo out of her, and then (she thinks) kills it. She then stumbles down the hall, finds Weyland out of cryosleep, and doesn’t say a word about it to anyone. Then, despite the terrible, terrible things that have happened (The mohawked geologist turning into a zombie, the glasses guy getting throat-hugged, Charlie turning into whatever he was turning into), follows them back into the pyramid for no good reason. With David. Who she has no reason to trust. Except now she trusts him.
At the conclusion of the film, she seems to trust David completely. David has, directly to her, said that he wants Weyland to die so that he can be free, asks Shaw if everyone wants to kill their father (he’s talking obliquely about humanity here), and does all kinds of shady things right in front of her. So it seems like a no-brainer that she’ll put herself in cryosleep and trust David to take her to the alien’s homeworld, not back to Earth, where David wanted to go.
Things like this happened throughout the film, and it made no sense to me. The zombie-geologist kills, what, six people? The captain seems shaken up about this, but doesn’t really say much about it to Shaw, who has no idea what’s going on. She doesn’t tell him about the embryo, still hanging out in the med bay. Earlier, Charlie didn’t tell anybody he had a bioworm sticking out of his eye. Nobody tells anybody anything in this film, for no obvious reason, which drives me nuts.
And, at the end of the film, I still had so many unresolved questions. Why did Weyland want David to infect a crewmember with the goo? Why did the aliens create us? Why did they want to destroy us? Why, if they changed their minds about killing us, did the remaining alien want to kill us? Why, if they DIDN’T change their minds but just had an accident, did another alien ship not kill us? Why, back when they were happy with us, did they leave us a map to their bioweapons world? Where is the alien standing at the beginning of the movie? Why does he need to destroy himself to create us, if that’s what he was doing? Why were we shown this, if that wasn’t Earth? What was the point of the holograms we see throughout the movie, beyond plot-dumping what happened 35,000 years ago? And so many more.
I’m disappointed that this was just a serviceable (if beautiful) movie, instead of a great one.
OK, here’s my attempt at an explanation which makes sense; Scott, Holloway and Weyland are all completely wrong, everything they say is pure fantasy. Aliens, who had nothing to do with humans and were probably not humanoid, visited Earth several thousand years ago, harvesting humans and other life-forms (eg earthworms) to test various bioweapons on. Perhaps they made multiple visits to Earth over a period of a few thousand years, which would go some way to explaining the star maps found all over the world. They took them to a distant moon and gave them a strain of the bioweapon which resulted in souped-up, hyper-aggressive humans who overpowered them and escaped. One of these super-humans is seen ingesting a different bioweapon, sacrificing himself to kill the engineers. With the engineers dead, surviving super-humans intend to seize their ship and return to Earth in order to take over. However, they too fall victims to the bioweapon. All except the one we see towards the end of the movie.
With this, there would still be unanswered questions, but nothing that a sequel couldn’t resolve. I really don’t think Scott has anything like this in mind though and I strongly suspect that the life/humanity seeded by aliens BS is what he’s driving at. He certainly implies it in interviews.
That sounds like a much better plot than the one we got. I’d watch that.
Sorry, meant to say Shaw, Holloway and Weyland.
Well, we could start with the opening scene, which conveyed so little meaning that we’ve had at least two radically different interpretations of it in this thread. I thinks yours actually makes more sense EC, but apparently the Word of God has it that it was the DNA seeding thing. But 1) this is never revealed in the movie and 2) isn’t even consistent with what we do see in the movie. We’re told, repeatedly, that the Big Bald Guy DNA is identical to human DNA, which wouldn’t be the case if we were distantly descended from them. What we see happening to the BBG’s body in the opening scene also seems a rather unpleasant way to create other life forms that share your DNA. Humans achieve the same result by having sex. Anyway, this opening scene conveys no clear information other than what the BBGs look like and that this black goo is dangerous and will do something to your DNA, and both these things come up again later and would have carried more punch if they hadn’t been revealed at the very beginning.
We learn in the next scene that early humans knew enough about the Big Bald Guys to create art indicating where they came from and that they are Big and Bald. This means that the BBGs either came to Earth and stayed for a while or at least seeded the planet and then came back to check on things, but nothing is ever said about this. We also apparently learned language from them. Quite a bit of time was spent setting up the idea that the robot had worked backwards to find the common root of all human languages and would be able to communicate with the BBGs, but like so much else in this movie this went nowhere.
I don’t care enough about this movie to detail everything that I felt went wrong after the opening scenes, but here’s a summary: The movie repeatedly gestures at Big Philosophical Ideas but doesn’t follow up on them. The early portion seemed to be building up to something a lot more interesting than what we actually got. Things happen for no apparent reason, or happen and then are forgotten. The supposedly intelligent characters behave like total idiots, spending scene after scene doing dangerous things for no reason, failing to react to events that should seem important, and drawing elaborate conclusions (at least some of which we are apparently supposed to accept as correct) based on very little evidence.
Hmmm, this kinda undermines my interpretation. Only seen the movie once. Don’t remember the BBGs themselves being in the early human artwork. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Couldn’t agree more with everything you said though.
They were the ones shown pointing to the stars. Surrounding them are creatures half their size, which I interpreted to be humans.
Here you go, found a picture of it:
