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

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.

That would bring it one step closer to Inception.

Speaking of which, bro asshole scientist really did look exactly like Tom Hardy, didn't he?

I honestly didn't notice his Tom Hardyness at all until other people pointed it out. And while I see it now I don't automatically think it.

lacking those muscles a bit

I thought it was Hardy for the first five minutes. Well confused.

so i just realised that History Channel series "Ancient Aliens" is produced by Prometheus Entertainment and I think it MEANS something.

Yeah: more viral bullshit.

Maybe this whole movie is the ultimate viral ad for something else! We're all dropping through the rabbit hole!

Genuflect upon the Alien, who died for our sins.

http://i46.tinypic.com/2qv5z55.jpg

The alien in the wall was one of the many wtf moments of this movie. Was it supposed to be an in joke?

This scene would have been improved by a booming voice.

http://www.thereelbits.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/prometheus001f-285x280.jpg

"The Gun is Good. The penis is Evil."

Not as good as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/olmec-legends-hidden-temple.jpg

"With your guide, Kirk Fogg!

When smiling Fassbender head was placed in the duffel bag, it was really pretty amazing.

xp lmao thank you for posting that exact legends of the hidden temple pic before i started hastily photoshopping!

Ugh this interview.

There is so much self-satisfaction in this Lindelof interview. He pats himself on the back for "ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the New York Times crossword puzzle does", but in his case he uses ambiguity to paper over gaping plot holes and poorly conceived characters. It's just lazy.

i dunno. maybe the Monday NYT crossword.

What’s rewarding is putting a puzzle together and popping that final piece in, and suddenly you understand -- this actually does connect to the world I know but in unexpected ways.

fuuuuuuck yooooou and fuck anyone who thinks art needs the crap redditbro pondering to connect to the real world

alien + aliens both 'connected' a billion times better than this dreck and damon lindelof is a hack and an idiot

i am angry on the internet

So it was really about embracing something that felt a little bit more original and unexpected.

q: did lindelof add anything to this franchise that was not already in lost

sculpey alien at the end

this was pretty sweet. like that it embraced the nihilism of the other movies. some sympathy for people who thought it was slow. total eyeroll at people who wanted some deeper meaning.

Like the filmmakers, you mean?

Working backwards from that smug Lindelof interview, I see that he is rewriting "World War Z." No doubt the cure for zombies will be ... faith. And hope. And maybe we are the zombies, and they are us, and they have always been here and part of us. And also smoke monsters.

Just saw this and found it totally entertaining. Not sure why a board that champions The Fast and the Furious and Miami Vice: The Movie! is scrutinizing this with such agonizing detail.

because it tries to be something else and doesn't really succeed. we have to make sure it KNOWS ITS GODDAMN PLACE.

Also I liked this movie a lot but it's not a patch on Miami Vice.

I think I went into the theater w/such low expectations based on this thread, I was really surprised. It's beautiful, creepy, scary... I don't know... I think a little suspension of disbelief goes a long way.

Honestly my only enduring beef with this is going to be in the editing/pacing; I thought tons of aspects of the plot/characterization were DUMB but basically admired their refusal to make anything like the creepy suspenseful Alien prequel promised by the trailer, which would have been mediocre but basically acceptable to everybody.... but boy was the pacing of this thing weird. Half the time I was convinced my theater was running the film too fast, particularly in the opening flyover montages.

Second viewing brought a very weird moment into focus -- Shaw and Janek on the bridge after Fifield's attack and death, with Janek talking about it being a military installation and etc. You could tell the scene as filmed was nothing but tense anger and fear, but the music, taking Shaw's note about a chance to meet the Engineers finally happening, busts into that demi-Star Trek hopeful theme. Very jarring.

Was it like Chipmunks & Aliens?

xpost obv

Hahah, I dunno about that, but boy did things seem jumpy and rushed for a film that seemed to want to play up mystery and majesty, there's almost nothing in this movie that's allowed to unfold as opposed to just happen. Less would really have been more here - - - assuming suspense and wonder were desired goals, of which I'm not convinced. But boy is it easy to imagine a slower and more effective horror film out of much of this same stuff, with the screentime devoted to pointless subplots used to just give the existing scenes more space.

Saw this today

- my first and lasting thought throughout the whole movie, no matter what I made of the 'meat' of it, was how GREAT it is to see a sci-fi flick that looks like this on the big screen. I can't think of the last time I felt that exhilarated

- the first half of the movie had the right notes of suspense, and I thought Fassbender's character was fascinating. (Loved that when everyone was say 'now don't touch anything' he'd just wander round like a 5 year old plonking his hands in stuff, opening pods and yknow, whatever)

- the 2nd half of the movie felt like it was missing huge chunks of plot, and the characters just became so watered down that I lost the heart of the story somewhere, I felt. Like, it was actioning its way to an ending but Shaw's not really Ripley-ing it up and Charlize Theron's kinda not a baddie anymore and Fassbender falls apart literally...it felt like half a movie to me. I think that's the most frustrating thing to me was that it wasn't BAD, but it wasn't GREAT. It was kinda boring, but in ways where you could almost see how good it could have been. Then again, I'm a little bit glad that it wasn't as crap as I'm afraid it would be.

- TOO MUCH BLOODY MUSIC. If they had dialed down the score to half, that alone would have made it a better filmed. It was SO telegraphed. Like, not quite Glory levels of heartstring tugging but it got really annoying really quickly.

- I would like to watch it again when it's released on bluray, because goddamn it was a gorgeous looking movie

- The one good thing to come out of it is that it sent me straight to my dvd collection to rewatch Alien. Goddammit how great is that fucking movie. BALLS TO THE WALL greatest ever.

for fun & contrast, go back & watch Aliens and count how many scenes _don't_ have music, especially the hyper tense ones near the end.

EXACTLY.

So much silence, it makes it sooooooooo much scarier.

I also really love how he tricked you with the camera angles, like shooting really low so you're not sure if you're looking from the alien's POV or if that's just where the camera is. He really makes you second guess yourself. It's like the movie's got a mind of its own, it zigs when you think it is going to zag...it really makes you work for the scares. I forgot how clever he was about that stuff.

Everybody otm re: the music. I wish they could have just used the original Jerry Goldsmith score and left it at that.

Scans of concept art & unused designs from the film's art book:

http://www.avpgalaxy.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=lastup&cat=-302

(in french)

xp there were some nods to Goldsmith's score, like when Guy "Hologram" Pearce appears to give his opening convocation.

Here are some SMS messages between Dr. Shaw and the Engineers that might explain things better. (My favorite: "All will be revealed in James Cameron's PROMETHEUSES.")

xposting The reason this movie (which I didn't hate) makes for such an easy target is that it explicitly claims to be tackling Big Questions while simultaneously jamming in mythology from the earlier Alien movies. It's not a matter of suspension of disbelief - that's a given - it's a fundamental matter of poor storytelling and failing to adequately explain itself to justify all the extraneous theology and whatnot that, reading between the lines, Lindelof clearly added to the script, which began as a more traditional alien film but mutated (heh) into something else, yet which still fails to seal the deal on its own terms (see: Ridley et al. pussing out on the Jesus stuff). This is not an amorphous, enigmatic mood cloud like "Tree of Life," or even "2001." This is a movie that is clearly missing large gaps of narrative, for whatever reason, which is a different, messier, more disappointing sort of creature.

Speaking of which, they clearly leave in a reference to something that happened 2000 years ago, and this takes place on Christmas, and all that stuff. I bet the movie used to be much longer and more Jesus-y, but it was cut to shreds to fit a slightly different mold. Perhaps we will get the theological cut in the future, one that also restores the scene where the stupid geologist and map guy clearly get high together before meeting their makers (as such).

Oh, and yeah, this movie at its best is nowhere near as good as "Miami Vice." It's probably about as good as "Fast and the Furious," or one of its sequels, but I've never seen them. They're the ones about Jesus coming back to earth as a drag racer or something, right?

i watched alien t'other night and at one point about 20 mins in there's some sort of countdown and all you hear is "mark, 12, 11". obv cuz of all the jesus stuff in this one i had to investigate:

"This was the Lord's doing , and it is marvellous in our eyes?"

DO YOU SEE

i had the same reaction to this as i had with tron legacy. total letdown but glad i saw it at the imax because the production/fx/sound/3d is really incredible

i don't have much new to add to the general consensus: looked amazing, was a total mess plot-wise. the outer space/planets sfx were particularly impressive.

so at the end, noomi is going off to find the engineers' planet. but what is she going to eat/drink for the entire time she's on the ship? she grabbed like three cans of food when she was in the escape pod.

has there been any discussion of the opening scene and what it means? i was wondering if the implication was that the engineers created humanity by accident - the one engineer kills himself, he disintegrates into the water, but we see his dna streams mutating and floating around - maybe this was the beginning of life/evolution on earth?

Opening scene was what happens when you have one too many Jaegarbombs.

i did like fassbender

charlize theron/idris elba hookup scene was so embarrassing and awful