It struck me as just another movie moment where the bad guy finally gets what he wants… and it kills him. Why? Who cares, fuck the bad guy.
Previous examples: Heavy Metal, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Alien: Resurrection…
And here I thought the movie didn’t make sense to me because I got drunk when I watched it.
It’s especially sad when I’m sure a team of devoted fans could rewrite the script, dub in the new dialogue and make sense of it all after the fact.
I think the film works better if you look at it more as a Blade Runner series entry, rather than an Alien one. And Scott actually had some more implicit connections between the two properties, both in the planning stages, and in later supplementary material.
(Also, if you view the Prometheus expedition’s crew as being lead by deluded, unprofessional flakes ‘n’ fools, backed by Mr. Burns)
Both are about created beings, seeking out their Creator for “more life.” But while Roy Batty and his crew were the tragic, rebellious devils, the Prometheus crew represented a more “human,” if not more “god fearing” angle. Seeking out not only life eternal, but answers, meaning…“All he’d wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?”
But, on the other hand, they also overlook one answer close at hand—David, the android. Created “in their own image,” for the purpose…of being a convenient servitor. For all his accomplishments, merely a tool, a type of machine. To be used and discarded when it was no longer a benefit.
So, too, to the awoken Engineer, the beings who roused him aren’t fellow beings, or his species’ “children”…they’re wild, disobedient bioroids. And they’ve learned to build their own creations. They should probably be “Retired,” to be safe.
Prometheus was full of supposedly-smart people doing stoopid things to move the plot along. It just made no sense. Great to look at, though, and never dull.
:: sigh ::
Me, too.
Yeah, it’s sad that the most intelligent and well-thought out thing anyone did in the movie was when Idris Elba talked Charlize Theron into the sack.
Sheepishly raises hand.
That may have actually helped make some sense of it.
This was one scene that I didn’t have trouble understanding. It seemed pretty obvious. The Engineers operate on a whole different ‘cosmic’ level of galactic proportions. Then suddenly some old lab rat dares wake him and has his quaint little robot-rat tell him that because he’s mega-rich he wants ‘…more life, fucker!’.
‘Die puny hu-man! I don’t have time for your silly childishness, I’ve got whole sections of the galaxy to worry about!’ Thus commences the angry, dismissive head-ripping…
That doesn’t really explain why the Engineer goes after the last remaining human on the planet after crashing his ship. He seems to be driven to destroy humans to the extent that he risks his life to do so.
Which reminds me of another question: how did that Alien thing get so big in the med lab? What did it eat?
I didn’t really understand it either. I also walked out with a ton of questions . I felt it was like the movie
Event Horizon, an amazing premise done so poorly. But the premise is so good you watch it anyway and like it anyway.
So I’ve watched this a couple of times now looking for the funny. While i had many of the same question this video is incredibly boring to me. Is this what all their stuff is like? It’s two dopey looking white guys asking questions in the dullest voice. That’s…it? That’s the joke? I’m asking genuinely! 
The usually don’t get so granular with their reviews - the joke is mostly that he’s bombarding Jay with questions that he can’t answer. I suppose you have to be more familiar with their other reviews. Acquired taste I suppose.
What does them being white have to do with anything?
Nothing I guess except there are aspects of white people culture I freely admit don’t really get sometimes.
Because if it didn’t, you would spend too much time asking how the map making geologist with the automatic map making machine gets lost or how the scaredy cat biologist thinks it’s totally safe to pet the freakiest looking penisvagina cobra in the universe.
I also really, really didn’t like the idea that a member of a trillion-dollar, highly trained, space expedition crew would be an individual who would rig a freakin’ bong into his spacesuit (and be so stupid as to use it at such a crucially important moment in the mission). :rolleyes:
Humans behaving illogically is in general not surprising and I don’t have much problem overlooking it in this context.
But that alien thing growing to humongous proportions from air and maybe some water, that I stick at.
Well, enough creepy.scary shit has already gone down to make the biologist piss his space suit and run away for the safety of the ship. So, in that context, treating the scary, creepy, hissing penisvagina cobra that emerged from a pool of black goo like it’s a widdle kitty cat goes well beyond willing suspension of disbelief in my book.
The original script varied quite a lot from what we finally saw, but a lot of the material wasn’t re-shot, so we ended up with a mess.
In the original script, the Engineer had been infected by “something”, possibly the black tar, possibly something connected with it, possibly something the tar was supposed to counteract. To save his life, his crew had placed him into suspended animation. Then his crew got slaughtered.
When Weyland woke him up, it was a death sentence. His ship wasn’t working. he had no one around to treat his infection, and he couldn’t go back into suspended animation.
That did not make him happy.
Then he realised that the humans either had been infected by the same thing that had infected him. So he set out to destroy them all so that they couldn’t spread the infection. When he discovers that some humans had escaped in another spaceship earlier, he sets out to sterilise the Earth. The humans stop him, and leave on another spaceship.
The Alien was supposed to be the last thing that survived on the planet, emerging from the Engineer, who staggers to his chair and sets of the warning beacon. We then see the alien laying eggs in the hold after the heroes have escaped assuming nothing remains.
With rewrites it all became nonsensical. Instead of the planet just being a jumping off point for an extended universe, it was re-written so that Weyland knew about the planet, even though 100 years its existence is unknown. So the planet looks exactly the same, the ship looks exactly the same and has crashed the same way, it is connected to the Aliens, but it is canonically not the same planet. The Engineer attacks, but for no reason, and then sets out to destroy the Earth, even though that’s obviously pointless since humans have spaceflight and have already spread throughout the universe.
The whole thing is an incomprehensible mess, but the original script was much more coherent and actually pretty good from what I’ve seen of it. It tries to explore issues of what it is that separates Gods,Men and Monsters and the distinction between creator, mother and host. It also throws in some interesting abortion/infanticide analogies by looking at whether an individual can justifiably terminate an unwanted lifeform, and whether that changes if the lifeform is intelligent or is just capable of becoming intelligent. You can still see hints of some of those elements in there, and the phallic symbolism of some of the monsters and sets makes a lot more sense with that as the subtext.
But the rewrites just produced a mess.
Thanks, Blake. I didn’t know any of that. I would’ve preferred that movie.
Is there an accessible copy of that early script around anywhere? I’d love to read it.