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

I can't say much for Scott, but for James Cameron, it was somewhere between T2 and True Lies

the artless boring assholes burst from their chests during dinner

i wonder if there was an exact turning point when ridley scott and james cameron became artless boring assholes or if the transition was so gradual that they were able to watch it happen with weary amusement

With Scott, I'd place it right after Thelma & Louise: 1492, White Squall, and G.I. Jane is an embarrassing run.

^^^

T&L itself is a little embarassing but it has a lot to recommend it. it is, at least, INTERESTING

Cameron executes his own banal ideas near-flawlessly. He still understands the underpinnings of a big-budget popcorn movie. Scott hasn't written a script since film school in 1965, and hasn't worked against budget/SFX limitations, or with great scriptwriters, for a couple decades.

Say what you will about Avatar, but if you can accept the premise and Cameron script touchstones like the crescendo of false endings, its really well made and paced throughout.

Scott hasn't written a script since film school in 1965, and hasn't worked against budget/SFX limitations, or with great scriptwriters, for a couple decades.

^^u&k

Cameron also has the rather amusing qualifier of becoming a mad deep-sea billionaire

The dif. between Scott and Cameron is that Scott is an intellectual (art school!) and Cameron defiantly anti-intellectual (drop out, former truck driver, self-taught). I don't mean necessarily that intellectual=good, but that Scott has always had very interesting things to say about even his least interesting films - he's engaged - whereas Cameron has always fixated on the tech over intelligence. One outcome of that disparity is that Cameron has always wielded his success as a big hubris-y fuck you to detractors, whereas Ridley has parlayed his success into any number of journeyman distractions. All Cameron films share a certain DNA - thematically, structurally, in the script - but aside from a technical proficiency Scott has been all over the place. Cameron is also more of a auteur/egoist, and consistent. Scott, from what I understand, recognizes the value of collaboration, even though in his case it's resulted in a bunch of shitty movies.

Just riffing here. Each has been responsible for a few of my favorite films of all time, as well as a few of my absolute least.

i think the intellectual/anti-intellectual thing might be more about their personae than about who they actually are

Scott has always had very interesting things to say about even his least interesting films - he's engaged

Agreed. I believe I stuck up for American Gangster and Kingdom of Heaven somewhere else here. Neither are essential viewing, but at least it feels like he gave a shit about them.

Grumblings from around the web suggest that there is a chunk cut from the flick before theatrical release.

What I'm wondering is: would more of this movie actually be a good thing? Could you really smooth out all the faults by adding in missing bits, assuming they were even shot?

I really do believe the movie would have been much better with an extra 20 or so minutes of Fassbinder at the beginning. They could have covered a lot of missed ground in a really subtle way.

xpost Both are ace technicians, regardless, but at least going by his commentary tracks (and from friends who have worked with him), Scott doesn't ever seem like a hothead doofus. That's perhaps why he's able to adapt to so many different things (crap projects or not). But Cameron espouses a proto-Bay like arrogance tempered by, I guess, undeniable results. He couldn't do anything other than what he does if he tried, which is why the farther he moves away from what he does best- focusing on actual words, say, rather than battles or explosions - the worse his movies are.

xposting myself: I was shocked when I saw the run time was only a hair over 2 hours. In this day and age, I was expecting at least 2.5 for a project of his magnitude.

Armond smackdown!

So I still haven't seen this, though I will, but in re the music...

I got the score CD and have listened to it 3 or 4 times. There are two composers on this thing: Marc Streitenfeld and Harry Gregson-Williams. HGW was hired to write the broad sort of golden age sounding 'Prometheus Theme', which in the film, I gather, is tracked and retracked all over the damn place to the point of absurdity. Streitenfeld did the synth-heavy brooding sound designy bits (and it's in one of his cues that the Goldsmith quote plays).

On CD, where you hear the grandiose bit in three Gregson-Williams tracks surrounded by the dark textural Streitenfeld shit, it's pretty damn enjoyable. I hadn't listened to any of Streitenfeld's film music before; I guess he's Scott's usual sound editor? Anyway, liked the Prometheus album enough to download his score for that Liam Neeson on ice movie The Grey...

What I'm wondering is: would more of this movie actually be a good thing? Could you really smooth out all the faults by adding in missing bits, assuming they were even shot?

It's possible. The director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven is 45 minutes longer and re-emphazised much of the story. I never saw the initial theatrical version, but this copy/paste from Wikipedia is interesting:

After the pitching of this film, studio marketing executives took it to be an action-adventure hybrid rather than what Ridley Scott and William Monahan intended it to be: a historical epic examining religious conflict. 20th Century Fox promoted the film as an action movie with heavy elements of romance and, in their advertising campaign, made much of the "From the Director of Gladiator" slogan. When Scott presented the 194-minute version of the film to the studio, they balked at the length. Studio head Tom Rothman ordered the film to be trimmed down to only two hours, as he did not believe that a modern audience would go to see a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute movie. Ultimately, Rothman's decision backfired, as the film gained mixed reviews (with many commenting that the film seemed "incomplete") and severely under-performed at the US box office.

The Director's Cut (DC) has received a distinctly more positive reception from film critics than the theatrical release, with some reviewers suggesting that it is the most substantial Director's Cut of all time and a title to equal any of Scott's other works., offering a much greater insight into the motivations of individual characters. Scott and his crew have all stated that they consider the Director's Cut to be the true version of the film and the theatrical cut more of an action movie trailer for the real film[citation needed]. Alexander Siddig, the Sudanese-born actor who played Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, in particular agitated for the release of an extended cut.

Hmm. Yeah, I've hear his cut of KoH is actually worth seeing, and is kinda bleah otherwise.

Trying to recall which cut I saw on TV during my recent trip home but I assume it was the longer one.

So much for Asimov's laws:

What was David's motivation for "infecting" Holloway with black goop?

Damon Lindelof: I say that the short answer is: That's his programming. In the scene preceding him doing that, he is talking to Weyland (although we don't know it at the time) and he's telling Weyland that this is a bust. That they haven't found anything on this mission other than the stuff in the vials. And Weyland presumably says to him, "Well, what's in the vials?" And David would say, "I'm not entirely sure, we'll have to run some experiments." And Weyland would say, "What would happen if you put it in inside a person?" And David would say, "I don't know, I'll go find out." He doesn't know that he's poisoning Holloway, he asks Holloway, "What would you be willing to do to get the answers to your questions?" Holloway says, "Anything and everything." And that basically overrides whatever ethical programming David is mandated by, [allowing him] to spike his drink.

is it creepy to anyone else that the android is the most interesting character/person in this movie

It's something I haven't seen in science fiction, which is a sense of racism or bigotry towards androids and synthetic life.

stopped reading

so basically this person has not read any science fiction

or seen the first couple alien movies.

But temples and feet and Romans and gods and pandas and plugs and...

Entirely possible/likely that Lindelof hates anything/everything to do with sf/geek culture and is busy destroying it from the inside.

this sort of makes me fear for the new ST movie :(

Waiting for the battle royale when he and Whedon face off.

i wonder if there was an exact turning point when ridley scott and james cameron became artless boring assholes or if the transition was so gradual that they were able to watch it happen with weary amusement

― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Monday, June 11, 2012 10:27 AM (3 hours ago)

in scott's case, i suspect that it was so gradual that he still isn't aware that anything has changed

and sanpaku OTM re: avatar. the story told may be simplistic, predictable and derivative, but in terms of the construction of cinematic narrative, cameron's running rings around scott.

"Hey! We don't serve their kind here!"

"What?"

"Your droids. They'll have to wait outside. We don't want them here."

Waiting for the battle royale when he and Whedon face off.

Eh, in this fight I think I liked Whedon's "Alien" worse.

haha i just ranted a bit on the phone to my dad about this movie
but my dad is to blame for most of what i learned and loved about movies in my formative years, so this is par for the course

is it creepy to anyone else that the android is the most interesting character/person in this movie

No. See also 2001, Blade Runner

Short Circuit

Heartbeeps

ah, good point
i only think it's creepy because everyone else is so boring
xps

Ridley now officially promising 20 minutes more added (in some way) for eventually DVD release:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/ridley-scott-says-there-will-be-an-extended-cut-of-prometheus-on-dvd-blu-ray-that-runs-20-minutes-longer-20120611#

the more shit you eat, the better it tastes!

boo. i want it cut down to 30 minutes of gore, space porn and pushups.

Dramatically, I’m about putting bums on seats. For me to separate my idea of commerce from art—I’d be a fool. You can’t do that. I wouldn’t be allowed to do the films I do. So I’m very user friendly as far as the studios are concerned. To a certain extent, I’m a businessman. I’m aware that’s what I have to do. It’s my job.

Also, the more I think about it, the weirder it is that all their assumptions about the engineers come from the fact they they went into the very first building they saw and never looked elsewhere--even though we saw a whole string of buildings, and never looked anywhere else on the planet. It's like an alien landing in Birmingham, looking at a closed-up newsagents, shrugging and leaving.

How conveeeeeenient.

Bait and switch if you ask me

I liked this film - I guess I managed to ignore the slightly sketchy stuff. The thing that struck me the most is how clearly it illustrates how people's interaction with computers has changed in the last thirty years or so. In Prometheus (apparently before Alien), computers are everywhere for people to call up at any point they like and do pretty much anything with. In Alien, the spaceship appears to be entirely controlled by what looks a bit like an Apple 2, and only whoever's in charge has any access to it as it's stored in locked room, surrounded by mysterious blinking lights.

the more I think about it, the weirder it is that all their assumptions about the engineers come from the fact they they went into the very first building they saw and never looked elsewhere--even though we saw a whole string of buildings, and never looked anywhere else on the planet. It's like an alien landing in Birmingham, looking at a closed-up newsagents, shrugging and leaving.

― seven league bootie (James Morrison), Monday, June 11, 2012 3:43 PM (1 minute ago)

^ OTM. they decide that the "engineers" are gone forever simply because they don't find a live one in the first building they enter? are you fucking kidding me?

and that's really only the tip of the iceberg. they thoughtlessly expose themselves to all sorts of contaminants, they don't follow even the most basic archaeological protocols, they have no biological decontamination procedure (something that alien handled very effectively), they constantly leap to wild conclusions and take suicidal risks on the flimsiest evidence, their interpersonal relationships are absurd, and they seem to have no understanding of either spirituality or science.

the things the people in this movie do - motivated, more often than not, by a "faith" that just appears out of nowhere and tells them how to act and think - are completely ludicrous. the behavior on display is not that of typical, dimwit horror movie victims. it's much, much less comprehensible. in terms of character motivation, this movie reminded me of art experiments like possession than ordinary or even bad cinematic drama. i honestly had to believe that every single character in the film had simply gone insane.

It's something I haven't seen in science fiction, which is a sense of racism or bigotry towards androids and synthetic life

This is just astonishing. Virtually every single film with a robot in deals with it! The original alienses and star wars as already mentioned, blade runner, AI. I Robot ffs!

OTM. Capek's R.U.R. which CREATED the friggen word "robot" is about bigotry towards/exploitation of robots.

honestly had to believe that every single character in the film had simply gone insane.

^ this is actually a semi-satisfactory explanation for what happens in the film: crazy, minor-league archaologist couple find and decode cave paintings. they convince crazy rich guy that they have found the creator. being crazy and super old, he decides to fund a trip to a distant star in hopes of finding god and making god make him less old. he hires a crew of unskilled and mentally challenged "scientists" to use as test subjects in his dealings with god. he brings his non-crazy robot along to keep the peace, along with his half-crazy daughter (who may also be a robot, but mostly just needs to get laid).

somehow, miraculously, this ship of the damned does manage to find god, or something like it, but things go to hell anyway.

that is an interesting observation, keith. sci-fi is always a reflection of its time, of course, so i guess Prometheus is also reflecting how our shallow cultural desires to consume meaningless beauty and spectacle, no matter how good they feel for no matter how short a time, are ultimately no substitute for the human connection created by good storytelling. that makes it better to me, theoretically.