They're Remaking 'Alien' -- the 'Prometheus' thread

a lot of people want to see Guy Pearce near death obv

all people in this movie must be hot, so the old geezer needs to be a hot dude in old man makeup

clearly we are the ones who made the engineers in the first place imo

in the future
and then... time travel, lots of it

Personally, I'd like to think of the Engineers - where did the scientist even get the idea that they made us, anyway?

from the script

anyway, ignoring the "well now you can take off that cross" bullshit, the first 2/3 of this are really fine. everything up to and including the c-section is worthy of "alien prequel" status at least in that it presses all the same buttons as alien and does it well enough, is suspenseful, is scary, imo. felt like old times, buncha assholes going to space and getting killed in creative ways.

the rest of the movie is just fucking lindelof

scientists written by a team of writers+producers+director aren't the smartest tbh

surgery scene is the greatest

stop giving him work, he actually does not know how to tell a story without trying to explain the origin of the universe and science vs faith and ugggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh

it's like he's the only one in hollywood who knows he uses all this shit as a crutch/deus ex machina because he has no idea what else to do

xp to myself wrt lindelof

pretty sure every century gets the Boethius it deserves

also fwiw it made sense to me for assbender to contaminate asshole bro boyfriend. he was clearly resentful, but he also spends the whole movie going off and exploring and acting like a child because science is magic. he might as well represent unchecked scientific curiosity. also guessing oldface mcgee gave him secret orders to do whatever he felt necessary to help him.

this was one of the dumbest and most irritating movies i've seen in a long, long time. i went in with what i thought were sensibly reduced expectations, but was still staggered by the towering foolishness on display. nothing anyone did or (apparently) thought made even the slightest bit of sense. the action was pointless and disconnected, a series of seemingly random events brought to hundred million dollar life for no apparent reason. i cannot for the life of me imagine how this thing got made. worse than the third and fourth alien installments, worse than event horizon and far, far worse than avatar. fuck you, ridley scott.

praise from caesar

http://www.nyfcc.com/2012/06/prometheus-reviewed-by-armond-white-for-cityarts/

As I was reading, I thought the highlight might be the way he praises Alien but refuses to give Scott any credit at all for it, but then he builds to this lovely climax:

Just as Wall-E demeaned the spectacular movie-musical romance Hello, Dolly! to the delight of ignorant film geeks, Prometheus plays with our culture’s most profound artistic expressions of human ambition, merely for a series of unpleasant thrills: Noomi Rapace performing an abortion on herself, various decapitations, dispirited ruminations on religion and, finally, Guy Pearce in ludicrous Halloween make-up. It’s a foul repeat, a noxious burp. If you swallow Prometheus, you’ll swallow anything.

also this little gem:

(played by Michael Fassbender who quickly has come to emblematize crap cinema)

the reactions to this have been really violent!

hello dolly will never recover

i'm going to wait until tomorrow to decide how i really feel about this movie (tho i'm already feeling that not-so-good feeling)
right now i'm just being like "it was cool when x happened..." about it. i do know that i don't feel like shuddering spite i felt immediately after watching Alien 4. but maybe i'm a more tolerant person now than i was then. haha no. i just see things more for what they are.

seriously though, remind me to never become a screenwriter

:(

I got the impression from the movie that RoboFass had actually been there before. Like, he knew his way around pretty well, knew just what to press, where to go, what to grab ...

i got the impression that he was supposed to have figured out their spoken and written language by process of reverse-engineering human language. fuck you, ridley scott and whoever wrote this crap.

this is the problem when people try i guess

i hope doctor who is in the next alien/"alien" movie

i got the impression that he was supposed to have figured out their spoken and written language by process of reverse-engineering human language. fuck you, ridley scott and whoever wrote this crap.

― contenderizer, Sunday, June 10, 2012 4:25 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe English.... IS IN OUR DNA

chomsky vs predator

hahaha oh man, windows 7 exists even in the FUTURE

http://i.imgur.com/MJxim.jpg

clickee for big: http://i.imgur.com/MJxim.jpg

you know what else exists 70-something years in the future? clothes you can buy right now at the gap. and a psychotic raver geologist displaced in time from 1995.

the scene where tattooskull and glassesguy are first talking right out of cryosleep = the anti-Alien, which never needed dialogue like "i don't want to be your friend" to let you know everyone on the nostromo hated each other's guts

That's very true. Alien and ALiens--with a minimum of introduction and dialogue, the characters were all believable, and you knew they had pasts. The Prometheus guys were internally inconsistent blanks whose only notable elements (besides stupidity and inconsistency) were the ones I projected onto them from better roles they've had in other films and TV shows.

I mean, biologist who refuses to look at the first-ever (dead, unthreatening) alien body ever encountered and prefers to run away, but then cheerfully messes with obviously threatening snake thing after spending a paranoid night in a tomb? But I kind of liked him a bit because Rafe Spall was so odd and good in 'The Shadow Line'.

>sigh<

The one attempt to give a character some sort of a past--Noomi--they fuck up her accent and make the past boring

I think it'd be pretty ironic if this movie is sort of a mess not because of the religious stuff stuck in but because there was a bunch of religious stuff taken out.

haha otm

scott saying they didn't want to go there explicitly cuz it was "too on the nose", what a wuss. BE ON THE NOSE THAT'S THE POINT

though tbh playing up the jesus stuff would have just made it a disaster in a different kind of way

Prometheus is actually Star Trek V.

http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/prometheus-basically-star-trek-proof.html

Omg two sci-fi films share some of the same generic tropes, who'da thunk it?

They land on a barren stretch of land! Instead of Idk in the middle of a forest or on a mountain peak.

Ultrahack Scott reveals himself as little more than a production-design freak

Armond otm tbh.

Armond can't go one paragraph deep without trolling:

"Even the 1979 original (the best, seconded by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection)…"

And:

"The original film almost passes for art due to producer Walter Hill’s efficient adherence to genre storytelling …"

Dan O'Bannon spins in his grave. Hill's contributions to the screenplay were trivial at best, the only notable one being making Ash into a robot.

I think he gave the script a decent shave and haircut at the very least.

Something else weird: I got the impression that bio rave map dude had passed his respirator through a bong. That it in itself is not weird; so he was hot-boxing in his suit, fine. But then the bio idiot asks him about it (response: "Yeah, it's tobacco, ha ha" wink), end scene, and the next scene back with them they're both acting like total giggling idiots around snake tentacle alien monster. I have a feeling there's a cut gag with bio idiot huffing some of that smoke and getting high, which would explain their behavior (in movie world, at least). I bet at the last minute they decided to cut out the Cheech and Chong routineto heighten the "suspense" and "scares," which of course there are none of.

For fun: O'Bannon script: http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_early.html

Hill script: http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_shooting.html

Meanwhile, saw it again last night, IMAX 3D again, actually enjoyed it even more! Likely because since I knew when unavoidably foolish moments were coming I shrugged past 'em; in the meantime I was checking out various design details as I could in greater depth.

Am I right that there is no date stamp for the alien at the beginning? And how many years pass between the discovery of the cave paintings and the arrival of the ship?

no date stamp, no geotag

Huh, I thought (though I'm not going to be rushing back to find out) that the establishing shots over the salt plains or whatever in the opening scene were the same as those used when the Prometheus was coming in to land.

Lindelof: Originally in the draft there’s a scene in the movie where we see David with his headset on and he’s talking to someone, and we don’t know who it is, and he gets confronted by Vickers [Charlize Theron]. There’s a scene in the script that we decided not to shoot, where we see the inside of that dream, and basically David takes a jet ski out with a beautiful woman in a bikini, to a yacht, and on the yacht is Weyland – played by Guy, without old-age make-up: this is his dream. They have a scene together and in it David says, “The engineers are dead, they’re all gone, mission failure,” and Weyland says, “Go back and try harder.” We rewrote it so that we were going to play Weyland’s identity closed, give the audience a sense that David was talking to someone on the ship but not view them.

But we had already shot the scenes with Guy in the old-age make-up. So we were like, "Are people are going to wonder why we cast Guy Pearce to play an old man, unless we represent him as Guy Pearce?"

still wondering over here

this movie was pretty awesome... thought the last 20 or 30 mins were mildly disappointing, but the rest of it was kinda incredible

It was a kind of incredible, yes.

Would like to see a Prometheus featuring a robot jetskiing with bikini babes tbh.