Pretty much my take - finally saw it. While Avatar was anchored on a Big Theme, it was a very simplistic one - Nature Good; Industrialized Man Bad. Prometheus has huge themes - Science vs Faith; Sacrifice vs Selfishness; empowering weaker beings with dire consequences, etc - has them depicted in multiple, almost recursive layers, and then tries to make it work with an incredibly spotty script.
It’s like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony where key sections of the orchestra have been replaced with preschoolers - epic themes, gorgeous, complex layers…wait, has the brass section been replaced with kazoos?
Love the ambition, love the visuals, love some performances - but the narrative was jarringly silly and undercuts the ambition too distractingly for me.
Well, i still have to give it a thumbs up. Despite finding numerous flaws with it. I can just SEE what an amazing masterpiece of a film it could have been, and it is so damn frustrating to see it fall short of that.
I would totally listen to Beethoven’s Fifth scored for prescoolers on kazoos.
But yeah, pretty much. I suspect the most annoying thing is that the jarring bits could pretty easily have been avoided, while still having more or less the same movie, with a script re-write.
Reminds me, perhaps not coincidentally, of the annoyance felt during the first Matrix movie, at that wholly unnecessary ‘humans are batteries’ bit. There was at hand much better reasons to keep humans around - maybe to provide some computing power that the machines lacked, or something - but the notion that they needed humans as batteries was so mind-numbingly silly …
Now that would be interesting to me. They’re not our creators, but another attempt at seeding that reached a dead-end and in their jealousy, decided to ‘Able’ us.
The Wachowski brother’s original script had the humans being used as a organic computer, the studio thought it was too confusing so mandated the change to batteries.
Don’t think this has been linked yet. It’s a surprisingly coherent analysis of the movie, giving a strange but plausible theory as to what it’s all about.
According to the above, the Engineers are disappointed with us because we prefer to sacrifice others for our own lives, rather than preferring to sacrifice ourselves for others’ lives. The author of the article actually gives several good reasons from the film for thinking this is what’s going on.
Warning: The guy argues that Jesus was an Engineer. The most direct cause of the Engineers’ anger is that we killed their last ambassador. Lest you ignore the article because of that, note that this is what Ridley Scott has said, his own self, was in a previous draft of the script.
Ok what David said to the engineer has been revealed by a production worker(the language consultant).
He tells the engineer Weyland is an old man and doesn’t want to die, he has come seeking more life.
The movie is starting to make more sense, the engineer basically(assuming he understood a word David said) was religiously/culturally offended and went ape shit.
At that link he makes a lot of the imagery of self sacrifice and guts ripped open.
Two that are actually in the movie (other than the ad hoc abortion):
He says the mural on the ceiling in the pod chamber is an Engineer with his abdomen torn open. Here’s the picture he shares. Is it just me, because I don’t see any sign of abdominal injury there?
Another is at the end he says the Xenomorph bursts from the dead Engineer’s abdomen. My memory (and I’m not sure it is right) is that the last scene had the giant squid on top of the dead Engineer and the Xenomorph burst from that. Am I remembering wrong?
Why would a supposedly advanced and civilized being go ape shit because of one phrase? I mean we’re supposed to be a violent and cruel species, yet most of us are exposed to all degrees of things that offend our sensibilities and seem to refrain from going ape shit.
Now one can of course say that despite their civilization, they were no more than a group of jumped up fundamentalists…I guess i could see the Taliban using a world destroying plague on the ‘unbelievers’.
I guess Shaw can look forward to getting acid tossed into her face and not necessarily from an Engineer.
You are remembering wrong. The Xenomorph was nearly the size of a human and used its crest like a snake’s egg tooth and ripped the Engineer open from groin to neck.
I don’t see it in the mural either. It looks to me like there’s a mutant on the lower left, kneeling before the Engineer, as the Engineer looks down at his creation.
Imagine you you were assigned to a mission to nuke a human colony your world had created, you find out their entire culture is built around rape and torture of children who they amputate the limbs of and keep in dark cages with special rape holes etc etc Maybe you agree maybe not, but the galactic pope has ordered it done and hey you just work there right?
Then one of your own scientists, a crazed fanatic, realizes what you are about to do violates every cultural value your people hold, so he does what seems right to him which is sacrifice his own life to save the human colony. He also sacrifices all your co-workers and you barely make it to safety and then darkness in cryosleep…
When you awake you find a bizarre man/machine acting as translator, he reveals the old rich guy in front of you has a chafed penis and no longer gains pleasure from baby rape. How can he take baby raping to the next level?
I haven’t finished the thread yet, but before I hit the hay, I’d like to offer this theory, which my girlfriend and I discussed while leaving the theatre:
The big bald guys are not aliens at all - they evolved on Earth like we did, as it is dumb to assume some alien “seeded” Earth with human DNA since it blithely ignores the numerous other species who have near-identical or at least significantly similar DNA, from chimpanzees down through all other primates, all other mammals, all other vertebrates, etc… Humans are not nearly different from other species enough to be plausibly viewed as some latter-day addition to the mix.
So the BBGs are actually another human species, closer related to us than Neanderthals, even, and they developed advanced tech while sapiens were still scrabbling around, not having yet managed agriculture. The BBGs decided Earth was a drag, so they bailed, taking all their tech with them. They returned occasionally, enough to see that sapiens were starting to get their act together (as well as make carvings and cave paintings of the BBGs, showing sufficient intellectual development for representative art), and at some point decided the universe was kind of boring and they wanted to retake Earth - though they’d first need something to selectively wipe out those icky sapiens without disturbing the environment overall. Things went haywire, the BBGs were wiped out by their own bioweapons, etc.
The movie is otherwise loaded with plot holes - I just see this as addressing one of the more blatantly science-ignorant ones.
The idea wasn’t that humans alone came from the Engineers, the idea was that all life on Earth came from the Engineers. It’s an intelligent design scenario–they seeded the planet with their DNA, and (I assume) with whatever materials are necessary to get that DNA to guide itself through an evolutionary process back into human form. And they apparently came by and tweaked periodically, as evidenced by their documented visits.
I didn’t hate it, but was seriously underwhelmed. The characters behaving in incredibly stupid ways just got too much. “Hey look at that weird snake thing. I’m gonna stick my face right next too it. Oh no! it attacked! who could have seen this coming!?” Not to mention the captain abandoning the bridge so he could bone Charlize Theron. A few idiot balls in a fast paced movie, and I wouldn’t notice till after the thing was over, that’s fine. But there were so many unreasonably stupid actions and they were all so bone crushingly dumb, it kept taking me out of the movie.
But much worse than that was the nagging sense I got that the writers had no idea what was going on. There was no vision behind the mysteries and unexplained events. They were just a series of cool images thrown at the viewer. In 2001 I didn’t understand everything that was going on, but that movie did a great job of tying all it’s unexplained images into a greater theme, and left me feeling as though I’d watched a coherent whole. Prometheus seemed disjointed and random. Nothing made sense, and the internet explanations are like someone looking at a cloud and seeing a hideous octopus.
I agree with something a poster wrote at the beginning of the thread, though I’ll water it down a little. It’s like going to an elegant restaurant, everything is beautiful and well presented and the menu is nothing but spaghetios and microwaved frozen pizza. Beautifully shot, well acted, doesn’t mean a thing.
I suspect the problem is the screenwriter. Scott is a great director, especially of vast ruined areas, but he needs a good screenwriter. With Blade Runner he had David Peoples, here he was stuck with the guy from Lost.
