The engineers are supposed to be the same species as the pilot in Alien 1979.
But on scale alone it makes no sense, watch the size of the pilot in Alien, it is at least twice as tall as the engineers in Prometheus.
Really? Well, maybe it is just a bigger Engineer later, different sizes, like humans are different sizes. OR…maybe it is an elephant species. Who knows. I sort of feel the writers wrote themselves into a corner.
If true, it doesn’t bother me–the Engineers have apparently been around for billions of years.
I ended up siding with the half-in-the-bag guys and their take on Prometheus - if you’re willing to accept that the movie has no answers, that it has no intention of resolving into something tidy (as Lost didn’t), then it might be enjoyable on that level. But if you keep trying to forcibly jigsaw-puzzle it into the Aliens mythos, which had a very blunt, direct, and unsubtle premise (monsters! evil corporate bad guys!), it’ll be an exercise in frustration.
I’m not going to treat Prometheus as an Alien movie - I figure the styles of the two fictional universes are too different. It’d be like trying to fit Heath Ledger’s Joker into the 1960s Batman TV show.
I don’t think the complaints raised in this thread involve trying to jigsaw Prometheus into the Alien mythology.
Character, plot, and writing are our issues, not how well it ties into the other movies.
Well, on those levels, I figure the movie for a failure - too much of a muddled mess of character motivations and ignorance of basic science, but if I was a hardcore Lost fan and more tolerant of that sort of thing, I expect I might feel differently.
I was excited for Prometheus and actually made the effort to see it in theater rather than watch a shitty cam or wait for DVD, I see around one movie a year in theater(I have a toddler so yes it is a pain in the butt). I still did not hate the movie, it was just so dissapointing coming from such a master.
Ridley Scott has made some of my all time favorite films including Blade Runner and Alien, so it felt really bad to be suckered like this.
I will say that I wish the movie had just been an original work, and not tried to tie itself into the Alien/s universe. I probably would have liked it a lot more if it had no relation and was just an original work.
I played hookey from work and caught a matinee this morning. I wish I’d read this thread beforehand, but I didn’t want to spoil myself. Huge disappointment. Worse, it was incredibly boring for long stretches. I eventually distracted myself in the theater playing solitaire on my iPod, it was that boring. Amazing looking film, I’ll give it that. And Fassbender was outstanding. But nothing could save that story, what a mess.
I’d assumed the old guy was also played by Fassbender, i.e. the android was a likeness of his younger self (following a precedent set in Alien 3). When I got home and read the wiki page (in hopes of clarifying some of the hazier aspects of the plot… i.e. “the plot”), I was confused by Guy Pierce’s name in the credits, when I couldn’t remember him at all in the film.
Yeah, but even the bearded guy from half in the bag, who was a hardcore LOST fan, was disappointed in how LOST was handled. He said he kept hoping there would be a big payoff at the end of LOST and there was nothing. He felt jerked around.
He was giving Prometheus the same, “I really hope this leads somewhere…” benefit of the doubt that he gave LOST, but I think he’s hoping in vain.
Yes, and it’s even worse when compared to a series like Alien, which didn’t rely on teases and vagueness. Sure, there was a mysterious “space jockey” in the first film, but the focus wasn’t on him, but on the more immediate problem of his cargo.
Yes, that is what I figured too, due to the bad makeup. I don’t remember the young version (Guy Pierce) but apparently he’s in a lot if viral stuff as the young Weyland. And there’s a site.
Also, in Alien 3, that “Bishop” guy was an android also. He was lying. You can clearly see his ear torn half off in one of the last scenes and he’s still standing there.
If that’s what he meant, well, there’s no reason the Engineer in Prometheus should wind up in the same position as the Space Jockey in Alien, they weren’t even on the same planet as in Alien.
Saw it today. Huge Sci-Fi fan, huge Alien and Aliens fan, low expectations since I’d heard a fair amount of bad buzz about it.
Absolutely wretched.
The characters felt like they were written by someone who’d never actually met a human being before. Their personalities were utterly and completely different from scene to scene – so much so that I thought it might end up being a plot point.
Nothing about the movie made any sort of logical sense whatsoever.
It indulged in some of the stupidest, lazy storytelling cliches: infertile woman becomes pregnant, plot-accelerated gestation, characters who are so stupid even horror movie characters would have laughed at them.
It featured a biologist who feared everything even remotely biological, until the plot called for him to be insanely reckless and stupid with an alarmingly creepy-looking alien worm thing.
They had two crew members in serious danger under constant remote observation, but only if somebody was sitting there watching them, and nobody even bothered to do so. They had video feeds from said crew members but, upon losing contact while not watching them, didn’t even watch the instant replay.
They had an android whose only motivation seemed to be: do whatever it takes to fuck up the mission you’ve dedicated yourself to.
They had an old guy who everyone thought was dead, but who owned the ship and had no reason whatsoever to pretend to be dead. Then they all just went, “huh,” and utterly ignored the revelation of his being onboard.
I am already exhausted with the idea of enumerating the ways in which this movie was terrible. There is just so much ground to cover.
On the other hand…I watched it this afternoon and loved it. Can’t argue with most of the plot holes mentioned in this thread* I just didn’t care while I was watching it. Some, like the biologist trying to play with the obviously hostile goo snake did make me go “wtf?” but I just got over it and got back into the movie.
When I saw the ridiculous old guy makeup my interpretation was that the guy, being incredibly powerful and wealthy, had been kept alive via state of the art medical methods long past the point where ordinary people would have died and that was why he looked so weird.
I definitely got the impression that David had some human emotions. He seemed hurt when reminded that he “didn’t have a soul” was “just” a robot. It seemed as though Shaw’s boyfriend’s ragging on him about being a robot sort of factored into David’s final decision to infect Charlie with the alien DNA.
I will definitely rent it and watch again when it comes out on DVD. Maybe it won’t hold up to a second viewing.
*I made it to page 8 of this thread before skipping to the end.
::looks at the 13 page long thread.::: “I think it’s been covered pretty thoroughly.”
I just watched Alien again last night after not having seen it for a few years. I will say that Prometheus does actually kind of work to explain the company’s behavior. Presumably they went to the planet later and found nothing but a bunch of alien wreckage and a message saying “F-U I’m leaving”. With that in mind having them jump at any potential lead to the architects, even at the cost of a few dumb space truckers, makes a lot more sense. Previous to this I had always figured that the company had just discovered a weird signal and sent off Ash to diverge the mission and investigate. Having them actually know that aliens exist makes their actions a bit more logical.
This is one of my favorite parts of Alien 3, by the way.
So of course for the Blu-ray edition, they digitally added lots of blood and retconned him into truly being the original Bishop. The blu-ray is a much better film than the theatrical release in every way but this one.
Actually, since I was curious, I looked up what the deal with that was. Turns out he was scripted and directed as the real Bishop. Oh well.