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

i read your blog post and otm-ed it throughout

i dunno--maybe i missed some things but i didnt get a "humans are special" vibe from the movie. kinda felt that idea was part of what led them into that death trap. almost a freudian death-drive kinda thing. and that the closing "that's why I'm human and you're not" (or whatever it was) seemed far more ambiguous to me than reaffirming the audience's faith in their own humanity.

i could def be wrong but some of the collective wisdom coalescing around this movie strikes me as a little off (not unlike what happened to AI).

it connects the dots back to humanity whcih is lame

making the aliens in this movie "genetically identical" to humans is also lame

xp Rather than there being a vast universe which has nothing to do with us and which contains unimaginable dangers, the dude in the chair from the original movie is part of a group that invented human beings.

Sure I guess but it didn't strike me as lame. Charles Peirce has a line about Ecclesiastes along the lines of "we do not know whether god bears us love or hatred" and I dug that same idea about this movie.

I do think the movie is very ambiguous about how we are to feel about chucking "Darwinism" out the window. Anyway I don't mean to challenge anyone too hard but I feel like this stuff is more and better thought through than many are assuming.

I mean she even says "we were wrong, we were SO wrong"

^^ most otm line, which is why it was in the trailer and a harbinger of things to come

I'm not going to talk about Alien on this thread because it'll just devolve into me explaining how Alien is better than Aliens by a fair bit

I want Prometheus 2 by a French director who complies with the classic French sci-fi tropes of fart jokes and goofy body gross-out humor.

Ha!

I was also reminded of a bit from tarkovsky's "Solaris" along the lines of "man needs man"--meaning our search into the cosmos is merely looking for ourselves. Kinda loved how that plays out in this movie.

Again don't wanna suggest this is tarkovsky--just thought it was pretty cool and not getting a fair shake.

not sure if this is where you are going w/ this ryan but I wrote about the vaguely kubrickian feel I got from prometheus on my own blog aka ned's FB page. not to say it's in any way comparable quality-wise to a kubrick film, but that it shared kubrick's chilly disinterest in the fate and well-being of his characters.

lol tarkovsky xp

i'll toss my hat in the ring and say i totally dug this movie. not a perfect film by any means, but pretty shocked to see such a negative reaction online. it was simply gorgeous, for one thing; also, that perpetua essay seems waaaay off the mark considering what a quasi-prequel this is

being gorgeous without substance is a surefire way to ensure a negative reaction tho

except tons and tons and tons of people loved Avatar

I think you're right there, though it's something I've never understood. I like things that are gorgeous, irrespective of substance.

being gorgeous without substance is a surefire way to ensure a negative reaction tho

― diamanda ram dass (Edward III), Wednesday, June 13, 2012

has OK Cupid Labs confirmed this?

would rather watch and be infuriated by Prometheus a hundred times than rewatch Avatar, I think

^^^^ this

don't think tons and tons of ilxors loved avatar either tho?

and avatar is simple-minded but as someone pointed out above, cameron at least had a grasp on the basic mechanics like story arc, character consistency, and motivations, etc.

xps

Avatar has a strong grasp on basic storytelling mechanics, that is most definitely correct

Like Grimm's fairy tales have more nuance and plot ambiguity

anyway, I'm in the pro-prometheus camp but I'm not shocked that ppl are dragging it through the mud. it writes an awful lot of profound checks its shallow ass can't cash.

that said I'd rather watch a bizarro failure like prometheus than a self-assured void like avatar.

that said I'd rather watch a bizarro failure like prometheus than a self-assured void like avatar.
^^^

Nice look at some of the vfx here: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/prometheus-rebuilding-hallowed-vfx-space/

Think it was Irvine Welsh who tweeted saying it was weird watching a film that was simultaneously brilliant and shite. Seems otm.

Yeah that pretty much sums up my feelings haha

god I disliked Avatar so much

and this movie is just a beautiful beautiful mess. I'm glad someone else mentioned Zulawski upthread before I did because I'm sure everyone's tired of me going on about that director, but after watching the Adult Trilobite penetrate & slump over onto the Engineer's head to mate with it, I'm pretty sure they watched Possession recently. The best parts of this film go for the same kind of hysterical excess; half of the bad reviews criticizing this film for being incoherent, that is one of the things I actually quite like about it (and on a second viewing, I think that under the hood, it's a little more together than the slapdash surface tone suggests)

I realized another reason why I'm prone to giving Prometheus so much slack: the granddaddy of these, exploring the same alien forefathers plotline, Quatermass and the Pit, is one of my top 5 science fiction films. that film is about five million times more successful than this one shot with five million times the budget. (still out of print on region 1 DVD but I just googled and thank you internet: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3434833733223827719# )

Wow thanks for the recommendation, that looks really good.

good grief the comparisons to 'possession' make me not want to see this movie

Anyone else notice the giant squid thingy, when it attached to the engineer, looked like a less-insectoid GIANT facehugger?

That was the idea, surely.

Well, when you put it that way, yes I do sound like a simpleton

avatar wasn't that bad

Let's not argue the point until we're blue in the face. #killme

ha

omg ned

avatar wasn't that bad

it wasn't that good either

I still haven't seen this, but the "Oh it's not a prequel" talk sounds so silly. Like if they made the Star Wars prequels the exact same, just renamed the characters and said "this takes place 1000 years before Star Wars, in a different galaxy.

50 Stars of Grey

xpost Quartermass and the Pit is out of print? Maybe I'll sell my copy!!!

tonally the phantom menace is so diff from star wars that that doesn't sound like such a bad idea

xxps

a certain tone found in both:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAafHAQkHm8

i dunno--maybe i missed some things but i didnt get a "humans are special" vibe from the movie. kinda felt that idea was part of what led them into that death trap. almost a freudian death-drive kinda thing. and that the closing "that's why I'm human and you're not" (or whatever it was) seemed far more ambiguous to me than reaffirming the audience's faith in their own humanity.

...Charles Peirce has a line about Ecclesiastes along the lines of "we do not know whether god bears us love or hatred" and I dug that same idea about this movie.

...I was also reminded of a bit from tarkovsky's "Solaris" along the lines of "man needs man"--meaning our search into the cosmos is merely looking for ourselves. Kinda loved how that plays out in this movie.

― ryan, Wednesday, June 13, 2012 11:00/11:15/11:38 AM (2 hours ago)

i'll toss my hat in the ring and say i totally dug this movie. not a perfect film by any means, but pretty shocked to see such a negative reaction online. it was simply gorgeous, for one thing; also, that perpetua essay seems waaaay off the mark considering what a quasi-prequel this is

― Nhex, Wednesday, June 13, 2012 11:43 AM (2 hours ago)

it seems to me that these are the two most viable defenses: (paraphrasing) "there are some interesting ideas involved," and "it's really cool-looking."

the problem for me is that these arguments consider only the film's superficial costuming, the skin of its cinema and themes. fwiw, i agree on both counts. the production design and special effects are cool as hell. i love the idea that man might be doomed by his search for self-knowledge; that even if a creator does exist, we might mean nothing to it.

but that's it. the potentially intriguing themes don't arise naturally out of credible characters and an independently interesting narrative. instead, they're carelessly draped over a haphazard pile of names and "stuff that happened" in the apparent hope that they can substitute for coherent storytelling. they can't. what results is gibberish posing as profundity. and the spectacular visuals never really struck me as beautiful or "gorgeous". they're too artistically generic for that. though they're a good deal darker, stranger and, well, more alien than what we saw in avatar, they're similarly impersonal.

a dumb movie wrapped up in a skin of potentially interesting ideas is not a smart movie. and a billion-dollar heap of pretty/spooky special effects doesn't excuse moronic characterization and plotting. perhaps if the movie had been a bit more abstract and artful in general, i'd be willing to forgive the apparent idiocies and poor narrative construction, but this isn't a stylized aesthetic indulgence - it's a brain-dead, piece-of-shit would-be blockbuster.

yeah enjoyment of this movie might be how much you're willing to accept.

perhaps if the movie had been a bit more abstract and artful in general, i'd be willing to forgive the apparent idiocies and poor narrative construction, but this isn't a stylized aesthetic indulgence - it's a brain-dead, piece-of-shit would-be blockbuster.

this makes no sense to me

i would like to agree with contenderizer that the argument that a movie has cool "themes" doesn't really have any bearing on whether it's any good or not, while at the same time pointing out that that argument basically constituted his defence of avatar.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5j8cd15He1rt52f4o1_400.gif

lolol

complaining about this movie diminishing Alien is so stupid

losing the sense of mystery from its world is something of a blow. despite high production values and ridley scott stamp of approval i'm trying to tell myself this is just some random fools interpretation and extension of the mythos and it is NOT CANON.

space jockey you are not a scooby doo villain and i still <3 you, you big biomechanical elephant trunked freak.

you know the scooby doo engineers weren't even big enough by half. i've got a picture of giger right next to the original space jockey model and its head is more than twice as big as his - and in the scene the crew were actually kids in spacesuits, to make it seem even larger.

really this handwringing? the introduction of a freaking queen did more to diminish ALIEN than anything in PROMETHEUS

afaic there is no canon. ALIEN exists on its own and the poor saps aboard the Nostromo will be no better off when they encounter that utmost Other than they were before we knew (rather than merely suspected) that the Space Jockey was wearing a flight suit.

xpost -- Well maybe that's why that space jockey was on his own, he was the big freak everyone made fun of in school.