Okay, so I get that in Alien, they’re basically space truckers and it makes sense that their crew isn’t the crackerjack USS Enterprise crew of the fleet. But this was a first contact mission deemed extremely important by Mr. Weyland himself. And this is the crew they assemble?
All of them are retarded to the last man. The captain is particularly perplexing because he doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything. I can’t remember the dialog - but there were scenes when the 2 guys were trapped in the pyramid during the storm where the captain actually rolls his eyes while on the comms with them and just tries to blow them off - when they are legitimately concerned about their very survival. Then they leave the bridge unmanned for extended periods.
Their procedures showed an amazing lack of concern about contamination in either direction. “Oh, the air here is breathable, let’s pop off our helmets, nevermind exposing ourselves to a billion alien microbes our immune system has never encountered”. Or the infected scientist “Hmm, alien planet… exposure to alien life forms… my eyes are… OH CRAP SOMETHING JUST DUG INTO MY EYE… I… should totally keep quiet about this. Real men don’t let on that they’re having medical issues”
Humanity’s potential first contact, possibly the biggest mission any human has undertaken, and they apparently get a bunch of drunk day laborers from the local home depot parking lot to run the show.
And… why would the aliens seed our planet with images of a solar system that lead to … a sparsely populated bioweapons manufacturing planet?
These people also have one hell of a fine command structure going. You’ve got one guy who’s called “the captain”. But then you’ve got Ms. Vickers, who is apparently actually in charge. But then Heavily-Made-Up Guy Pearce says the two (possibly crackpot) scientists are in charge! (Which doesn’t keep Ms. Vickers from telling them they’re just a couple of employees.) Oh, and Heavily-Made-Up Guy Pearce isn’t really dead after all and has stowed away, so I guess he’s in charge.
The smoking thing - well, it’s silly, but it is an established feature of space travel in this universe. And the Christmas tree at least helped both flesh out a character (to the extent that is done at all in the film) and underlined one of the main themes: should we try to find out Why We Are Here. The captain puts up a Christmas tree because of what it does for the humans on the ship, not out of devotion. Later, (the religious) Shaw is becoming more and more obsessed, not with studying the BBGs, but with cross-examining them. Her whole purpose is to find out the Ultimate Answer. I view the captain as already assuming that it’s 42, and we should go about our business of being humans and wringing our own meaning out of life.
This dovetails with David’s conversation with Holloway, and to some extent with Vicker’s conversation with Weyland. If they’d spent just a little more time and effort one working out the script, this could have been an exciting, engaging sci-fi story, where the adventure allows exploration of big questions. But it was just too disorganized to pull that off.
And yeah, WTF with the whole Weyland plot? I too assumed we’d see him youthified at some point, because there is no other excuse for that crapass, suspension-of-disbelief-impairing makeup job. (I kept thinking they desperately needed to get the makeup artist from Doctor Who in there.) But no. Then Charlize Theron does a perfectly expert job of indicating that this must be her father/grandfather, whom she is closely emotionally connected to, only to have to say perhaps the stupidest, most hackneyed line in the movie: " Yes . . . Father."
I liked it overall, but I agree with the criticisms in this thread. Clunky dialogue in spots, bizarre reactions to events, and rampant idiocy. Idris Elba was mostly wasted, and some of the crew didn’t even speak during the movie.
I did like that our Aryan superman ancestor was basically just another scary monster. And the idea of humans (or super-humans) playing god is an old one, but it’s never been done on this scale, with the implication that the Engineers may have seeded countless worlds with horrible monsters.
I’m with everyone else who was really mystified by the choice of Guy Pearce to play the 100-year-old guy.
I did just run across this, from the movie promotional materials: Sir Peter Weyland’s 2023 TED Talk. (Featuring Guy Pearce sans old-person makeup.)
I can’t believe they would get him just so he could do a little promo video like this, though, so my guess is that we’ll see a young Weyland in the next movie.
Idiocy among characters hurts the movie (yeah, lets all take off our helmets in an alien tomb), but what made it so bad in my opinion was that major plot points didn’t make sense or weren’t sufficiently explained.
Why does the old guy go through all the trouble of pretending to be dead?
Why does the android infect what’s his name?
How does the android know that doing what he does will infect him?
In fact, how does the android know so much about the aliens and their planet?
Why does the big bashing alien get so angry when he wakes up?
Why does the big bashing alien want to kill scientist girl so badly?
Why do the aliens want us to find them?
And, (since the whole movie seemed to rest on this) why did the Aliens create us and why did they want to subsequently kill us?
And, after you’ve acted incredibly stupidly (walking around without your helmet on an alien world, touching things, etc.), wouldn’t you be just a little concerned when you look in the mirror and see a f**%$^ worm crawling around in your eye? Wouldn’t that be something you might, say, mention to somebody??
I know the AvP movies are not canon but this is one possibility:
– Weyland secretly has found evidence that there are alien-like aliens on that planet from their previous occurences on Earth.
– He PRETENDS to be all about the joy of discovery, while secretly giving orders much similar to that from Aliens, i.e. secretly infect people and bring them back. He thinks that his separate capsule will protect him. Perhaps while old he is also not quite as terminal as he lets on either.
Some more examples of characters acting like idiots, which I don’t think have been mentioned:
The guy who runs the mapping probes gets lost on his way out?!
The captain, looking at the map late in the movie, exclaims “that’s a ship”. In the next scene he’s in, he’s responding to Noomi, as she’s jumping across the retracting ground plates, that they have to keep the ship from taking off. His response: “what the hell are you talking about”. Uhm. It’s about the ship, cap. The one you just saw in your last scene. There wasn’t much dialog between there and now, just look up a few lines on your script.
Ok, now that someone’s visibly sick, we’re instituting quarantine by flamethrower. But all you other people who’ve been over in the same place wandering around with your helmets off, come on board and mingle!
They’re all just blind to how much David is in control. I think this is actually one of the interesting parts of the movie, but it’s very clumsily handled.
In Alien, Ash parallels the thematic resonance of the Alien. It’s a movie with a hidden horror infiltrating the crew (first literally and biologically, then picking them off one by one). We have no idea he’s there until all of a sudden he goes berserk and tries to kill Ripley.
Prometheus is unabashedly about parents’ sacrifice so that their children may live. It’s the titular myth, it’s what the bald alien guy in the first scene does, and it’s what David is focused on. But from the other side. David holds all the cards. He’s the only one that knows the alien language. He sets things in motion. He misleads characters. He directly infects one guy. Humanity needs to die so that David can come into his own. Which is also a nice parallel with the aliens, which kill as they are born.
I don’t for a second believe any of the things he tells Noomi at the end. Nor should she, since she already knows that he betrayed her once, and probably infected her boyfriend as well. He’s the only one who speaks the bald alien guy language. What did he say? Something for his own purposes.
But what is his motive for doing so? In the past movies, it made sense – after having direct experience with the aliens, it was clear they could be used as a devastating weapon.
But this guy knows nothing about them or their infectious nature, and is nearly dead himself. The stated reason for his interest seems more reasonable to me. And none of this explains why he pretended to be dead.
I assumed they were parasite types like in the past movies, but what was the deal with the human-like creature that went beserk right outside the ship, until it was run over, burnt, and shot to death?
Is there clear evidence that David infected the human on purpose? It is obvious that by pushing the drink on him that this is the route of infection, but perhaps David mixed the drink innocently after all, and it slipped into his drink from his fingers, since he had touched the goo. Or did I miss something more explicit?
Not to mention the two that were so terrified of the tomb/ship that they left early for the ship, treat an actual alien that they find (that they have reason to believe is very dangerous) as some kind of cute little kitten.
And what is with the lack of concern over leaving 2 ship mates stranded overnight in that place??
Thanks jackdavinci. That makes sense about the headless engineer being infected. And I had forgotten about the holo vid that David had watched.
Oh man, a lot of issues didn’t start bothering me until I was thinking about the movie while driving home, but that bothered me while I was watching.
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[li]First no one noticed those two were separated until the Captain asked Shaw where they were when she got back with the others. The geologist was the one who sent out the laser probe things, and at one point I think he seemed to be getting information from the probes and he led the group in the direction towards the pyramid. So why didn’t he have that map information and use it to get back to the ATVs?[/li][li]These two guys were so freaked out by the alien body when they were with the group, but when they were stuck there by themselves they decided to explore that same creepy place by themselves? [/li][li]I would have thought that it would be standard that someone on the ship should be monitoring communications when team members are away from the ship. I was expecting that the Captain would have gotten someone else to stay up and stay on communications when he went to Vicker’s room. Even if no one stayed up, I would have thought there would be recordings of all transmissions from outside members to the ships. So I kept expecting them to listen to the transmissions and hear them being attacked. In the morning the two weren’t responding to any messages, so it seems obvious to listen to any recordings to see if they say where they are so the rescue team knows where to go looking for them.[/li][/ul]
I realize that the filmmakers needed some characters to get separated early so they could be the first attacked, but it seems like there should have been better ways to do it. Maybe have the two inspecting some other part of the cave system and not realize that the others got far away from them and then went back to the ship. The movie is so frustrating because it seems like there are ways to fulfill all the major plot points without the characters having to act like inconsistent idiots to get to those points.
Yeah, I have no idea why he didn’t just openly tell the crew that he hoped to encounter our creators and maybe find a way to prolong his life. I don’t see any reason why anyone would have objected to his presence. To the extent that we learned about why anyone had signed on for this trip it seemed to be either just for the money or for the chance to make great discoveries. And if anyone did have a problem with Weyland coming along, he could have just not hired them and gotten someone else since he was paying for the entire mission.
He is shown sticking his finger in the drink after having a conversation with Charlie where he gets Charlie to say he’d do anything to learn more about the BBGs. It was very clear that the robot spiked the drink deliberately, and that he did so only after getting “permission” of a sort.
In the movie Alien, the crew is sent to investigate what is guessed to be a distress beacon but later it is determined to be a warning to stay away.
Happy go lucky in love archaeologists see a big man pointing toward a constellation and assume it is a message to travel there to meet them, but it could be anything:
“Once you start space travel, stay the fuck away from this place”
“We wanted to terraform this planet to reproduce us, but we got this short, kinda dumb version, and now doom is coming from this place”
“Worship us or something really bad will happen; it comes from this place”
From a health perspective, it may be safer for him to remain in stasis. He’s not going to come out of stasis until he’s sure there’s a good reason.
His presence would potentially be suspicious because the crew is under the impression that their mission is more hands-off and exploratory. It’s clear Weyland would have no problem sacrificing everyone around him in order to “meet his makers”; presumably, he’s hoping they’ll do him a solid and extend his life somehow.
