Yep, you’re right. Guess my explanation doesn’t work either.
Anyone want to take another stab at it?
Agreed that the characterization was weak and at points, poorly contrived.
Especially Shaw being infertile, and her whiny “since I can’t create life, you don’t love me!”
That should’ve been handled much more subtly, and foreshadowed far earlier.
The guys who were so fucking freaked out, and decided to bail back to the ship but got lost and stuck, go from mortally terrified, to coaxing the most fucked up looking space-penis like it’s a kitten. No fucking way, these guys would’ve bolted the fuck out of there.
Some other things too. I suppose I like where the story is going, and all my senses ate up the production from top to bottom, but it fails on how humans would react, and not caring about almost all of the crew. There’s no charismatic Ripley here as a driving force for the audience to root for.
But, how Cameron used the first movie to build on top of it, Ridley did the same, to build on the bottom of it.
The entire thing is very, very Damon Lindelof: Faith vs. Science. Ancient hieroglyphic/cryptic findings. The idea that seeking answers to our questions on the origins either only raises more questions, or is ultimately unsatisfying and irrelevant; that the final answer might not be there, once you traverse through all the harrowing layers that might lay ahead of you to find it.
There is no treasure in the chest where the X on the map leads you. I think that’s what this story is ultimately trying to say.
Despite its failings in characterization, I still feel inclined to make an exception on this one. I can’t deny it had me by the balls all the way through.
Shaw’s claim that the Big Bald Guys planned to kill us with the black goo then changed their minds is one of the more bizarre leaps of logic made by the characters in this movie. There was plenty of evidence, including a huge pile of corpses, to indicate that something had gone terribly wrong 2,000 years ago and killed (nearly) all the BBGs in the area. Shaw’s inference that they’d changed their minds about coming back to Earth struck me as rather like finding the wreckage of the Titanic, filled with the skeletons of dead passengers, and saying “Hmm, I wonder why they all decided not to go to New York after all?”
That is some topnotch fanwakery, I like it better than mine, which is that the ancient engineers came to earth and found some promising hominids, then tweaked and prodded their DNA until they had something very much like themselves. My fanwankery stinks because it’s very unlikely that the alien engineers would have DNA anything like ours. Your solution is a lot more elegant than mine because it deals with the biggest problem in the movie, the alien DNA matching the human DNA. If the aliens were bioengineeered from OUR DNA, this problem is solved, after all, chimp DNA is 98% identical to human DNA, it could easily be another 2 percent difference that accounts for BBGs’ giantism and gorilla-like builds. Plus, in the recorded projections, they move and act very much like military types, very task-oriented and efficient.
I agree that Scott is probably headed on a faith vs. science course, that 2000-year-old date for the dead BBG is very, shall we say, indicative. I haven’t read any of the interviews where Scott reveals he’s a scientific illiterate, but if he’s moving in the direction I think he is, he definitely is.
I do have an alternate explanation for the “aliens decide to return” that is more elegant than what I’ve seen so far. I figure the alien installation was set up as a bioweapons installation for Earth-based bioweapons. Then the aliens discovered something on Earth that made them decide the only safe thing to do with the planet is reduce every living thing on Earth to gray goo. But what did they discover? Well, considering that one of the clues that was leaked was that the movie was intended to be based on “At the Mountains of Madness” I’m betting they found some remnants of the Old Ones and realized they wanted no fucking part of dealing with them. Hence, bio-nuking the Earth from orbit. Which does not work, because … insert my explanation about BBG who has figured out Earth is slated to be wiped out and wants no part of it. Ties Lovecraft’s mythos right into the story.
I have independently come to the same conclsion as Mike about the effects of the bioweapon if not its origin. It seems to consistently make its victims more impulsive if not aggressive. The zombie is completely consistent with this, only being stupid because zombies are so cliche.
Scott would not be the first filmmaker/author whose fans came up with a better explanation for his movie than he did.
We are not told it’s identical, we are told that it’s a match, in fact IIRC we are told that the BBG DNA predates out DNA. Which to my mind means maybe 99 percent of human. I think Mikeissceptical’s fanwank explains it away very nicely.
The opening scene is open to a lot of interpretation, which has kinda been what’s fun about it for me.
It was a necessary plot device to explain how the planet was located, and made very little sense other than that, because why would giving very rough astronomical coordinates to cultures that were still in the bronze age (or earlier) make any sense? Also, I dont know that knowing the root-language or Indo-European would give you the vocabulary to speak to a native way back when. Plus the android seemed to have a remarkable command of the BBG’s written symbols. This makes no sense.
I kind of like that stuff was left open ended. Gives ground for speculation, which I’ve enjoyed.
Just can’t agree with this, but it’s OK.
Yes and yes and yes. Biggest problem with the movie. Taking your helmet off without knowing what kind of biological agents are out there? Staggeringly stupid for a regular space guy, much less a scientist. How did they figure out where the aliens were coming or going? How did the female lead know that if the spaceship got away, Earth would be destroyed, based on the info she had? Can’t defend all the stuff of that nature.
But my fanwank explains it all much more neatly. One BBG sabotaged the project to destroy Earth, causing the huge pile of corpses. They didn’t change their minds at all, in fact, the BBG who was revived was completely on the program as soon as he realized what was going on. I guess he was one of the “better late than never” crowd.
Here’s an interesting take on the movie.
I’ll admit that the “Chest-buster-as-Jesus-on-the-cross-speared-by-the-Romans” went right by me.
Just got back from seeing it and I am mightily disappointed. I guess I would put this movie with The Fountain and *Silent Hill *on my shelf of “movies that should be looked at, but not watched,” if you know what I mean. Ultimately, it suffers from really bad writing, and no amount of eye candy can save it. And forget about the Big Philosophical Ideas - much like a wooden leg must first be a wooden leg before it can be a symbol, I think a story must first function as a story, before being an effective philosophical reflection. The people were so stupid and inscrutable, acting in ways no humans ever would, that any attempted navel-gazing had no structure to support it.
The characters cycled through suicidally dumb, doing things because It’s In The Script, and having no reaction whatsoever to events that would astonish, traumatize, entrance, and terrify actual people. I just couldn’t get over that to be sucked in to the story.
I can’t decide if I should be annoyed or amused by the kludged cesarean via Magic Claw machine, which miraculously healed in ten minutes flat, allowing the character to run, jump, fight aliens, and finally lower a man’s body using only herself as a counterweight and then rappel down after it. There’s suspension of disbelief and then there’s just silliness.
Also, why do people in movies never run to the fucking side out of the path of the oncoming inanimate object? Grr.
(Also also, I think it’s high time Ridley Scott got some therapy about his persistent fear of being orally raped and impregnated by an alien penis-vagina.)
That’s pretty much exactly the sort of interpretation I don’t like. Just another Bible story.
He lost me when he was like, “Look at this picture of an Engineer with his abdomen burst open that supports my thesis,” and the image shows (as far as I can tell) a completely intact Engineer. Talk about reaching!
Thank you very much EC. 
Can’t really call it a fanwank though as I’m definately not a fan. Hater-bation maybe? Liked your take on it too.
How is it a match if it isn’t the same? We’re even shown, twice, a graph of the BBG DNA compared with a graph of human DNA and they line up perfectly. While it would certainly make more sense for BBG and human DNA to not be identical, this isn’t what the movie tells us. And even if we had been told the BBG DNA was 1% off from human DNA, that still wouldn’t make much sense. Either all life on Earth is descended from the BBGs, in which case it seems pretty unlikely that billions of years of evolution led to an organism that’s only 1% off from the original DNA source, or humans are 99% unrelated to other life on Earth, which also seems pretty unlikely as our DNA is also very similar to other Earth species.
There is a line early on about how maybe everything we know about evolution is wrong, but if this movie’s premise requires us to reject evolution then I think that deserves more than a throwaway line.
In the real world it wouldn’t, but in the movie it would have made at least as much sense as anything else and I was prepared to accept it. I also would have been fine with it turning out that communicating with the BBGs was harder than had been expected and the robot had been overestimating his abilities when he said he thought he could talk to the BBGs. Instead we don’t even learn whether the surviving BBG understood the robot or not, so all the language stuff was just a waste of screen time.
The helmet thing made me really angry. Even if we totally ignore the risk of alien bacteria, viruses, etc., or the potential contamination of this alien ecosystem with Earth germs, it’s a bad idea to go poking around in an unfamiliar cave/ancient structure without something to protect your head from falling debris!
I don’t see how this explains why Shaw thought the BBGs changed their minds, which is the specific point I was addressing. She says, IIRC more than once, that the aliens had intended to destroy us but then changed their minds, but I can see no reason why she’d think this. There was a literal pile of evidence indicating that something terrible happened and killed the BBGs before they could take off for Earth.
In order for the movie to make any sense at all, (and I maintain that it doesn’t) I think we have to assume that Shaw is wrong about absolutely everything and is a total crackpot. If you accept that, the only question is why anyone listens to her in the first place.
As it happens, I think she’s supposed to be at least partially vindicated, which is the main reason I think the whole thing is just absurd. Sure some artistic license is permissable in Sci-fi, but only up to a point surely. Time travel, warp speed etc might be OK, but I doubt anyone would accept say a flat Earth as an essential feature of the plot. If you throw the science away completely, it’s not sci-fi any more, it’s fantasy set in space.
Yeah, that was really bad. IIRC the space truckers from the Nostromo had enough sense to keep their helmets on the entire time they were outside the ship, but then again that may have just because the atmosphere was breathable. Even weirder was David wearing a helmet. At first it seems to make sense since it makes him easier to decontaminate, but they clearly don’t care about airbourne pathogens anyway.
They ask him about that and he basically said he preferred to pretend to be human. I wonder if this is explained by Weyland having suspicions about the possible biohazards and just playing it safe, because otherwise it’s a pretty lame excuse.
When she decides to head for the Big Bald Guy home planet at the end it did seem like we were supposed to find this inspiring or something, although I was thinking “This is literally the worst idea any human being has ever had.” There was no reason for her to believe that the BBGs had changed their minds about dumping the black goo on Earth, and the only living BBG she’d encountered wasn’t exactly happy to see her. If there is a different BBG home planet and if any BBGs are still living there, both pretty big “ifs”, then why go all the way there to remind them that they’d failed to destroy us 2,000 years ago?
The only coherent reason I could come up with for the BBGs to go to the trouble of creating a race of people that shared their DNA, leave us alone for a while, and then go back and dump black goo on us, was that they wanted to use the black goo to create monsters but didn’t want to use themselves as the hosts. I don’t think this was the intended explanation, because again we were apparently not supposed to be horrified by Shaw’s decision to seek out the BBG home planet, but the movie failed to give us any real reason to believe that there was any chance at all that the BBGs would be friendly.
I don’t know that Prometheus’s stupid plot and stupid characters are any worse than those in the average big summer action movie, but the big Alien fans in our group were expecting a lot more than that and were very disappointed. When we talked about the movie afterward I was actually a lot less down on it than they were.
IIRC he actually said he acted as human as possible because this made humans more comfortable around him, and that not wearing a helmet would only be an unsettling reminder that he wasn’t human (or even really alive) and didn’t breath.
This was my thought too. It seemed likely that the Engineers (assuming they hadn’t died out) wouldn’t be especially pleased to see Shaw, and having realised their descendents had now evolved to the point of interstellar spaceflight and constructing androids nearly indistinguishable from humans, might actually see them as a serious threat and decide to come back and finish the job.
For all anyone knows, the Engineers on the home planet had assumed the mission was a success and the crew lost in the process (the opening sequence seems to indicate they weren’t above effectively mounting suicide missions), which is why they hadn’t mounted follow-up expeditions.
It still seems to me there are Prometheus crew possibly alive on the planet - the Engineer tears David’s head off, but just swats everyone else out of the way and then climbs into the pilot’s seat. It strikes me as quite likely that at least one of the people in that last away party (the Scottish Doctor, for example, or the security guy) could have come to and quietly crawled away to safety while the Engineer was doing his astronavigational pre-flight.
The Zombie Geologist had the same thing - swats a few people out of the way and throws them into stuff (not necessarily life-threatening injuries when said people are in protective space suits) before finally being taken out.
The geologist’s freak-out annoyed me to; despite his love of rocks, surely it must have occured to him that extraterrestrials would be involved somewhere? And the biologist describing the alien goo-snake as “Beautiful” was patently silly given that A) it wasn’t and B) the circumstances suggested any life forms in the area were probably hostile.
I felt sorry for Vickers (who, it was pretty strongly implied, was also a robot) - she didn’t strike me as being evil or even particularly nasty. There was no reason at all, IMHO, for her to have been (allegedly) crushed by spaceship wreckage at the end. Ditto the Prometheus’ pilot and first officer, who declined the chance to escape because… why, exactly? (“You’re a shit pilot, Captain!” was clearly a joke)
Also, Shaw’s final message to Earth struck me as being so vague that if I received that, the first thing I’d be doing is organising either an unmanned probe or a detachment of Space Marines to go and find out what the hell she was talking about.
Saw it earlier today.
What waste of my money.
Pretty much agree with the sentiment that the writing was terrible, the characters NEVER acted in a believable way (starting much earlier than this and getting progressively worse - but Charlie brooding that they didn’t get to talk to aliens… Dude, you just discovered that there ARE aliens. The f?), and the movie might have started out with some slight promise of tackling some interesting questions, and exploring them, but instead quickly turned into some brain-dead, blair Witch project nonsense.
And seriously? The scene with the ship crashing. What a frigging cliche, straight out fo a cartoon show. Seriously, no one though to run to the SIDE instead of trying to outrun a crashing 50 story structure??
From fairly early in the beginning I was very dubious of where the film was going.
How could they locate a moon, and know it might possibly hold life by looking at some squiggly drawings on a wall?
And the year is 2090 something… so in like 80 years we’ll have created advanced artificial intelligence, advanced android technology, AND faster than light travel?
::sigh:: Ok, whatever, stupid but I can overlook some of it if the film had any sort of worthwhile story to tell… but it didn’t. Worst of all, it made you think it did, then it turned around and f’ed you in the @ss.