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

i need to rewatch it to nail some things into place, but if you look at it with the perspective that at some point david has decided that it is in his/the general best interest to destroy his creators, it makes a lot of sense. in fact its the only argument for why david wants to cryosleep shaw and perform the operation back on earth.

i keep wanting to lay out my 13-point plan for why i think david wants to end humanity but it feels a little like shouting into a empty room at this point. this is what i get for waiting to see the movie for a bit i suppose.

after a second viewing vickers becomes a more sympathetic character, would've been interesting if they honored the fire by making her more central. I remember when first seeing alien back in the day, ripley came off as a total brittle officious - apologies to aerosmith - bitch. but that was the genius of alien, making ripley unlikeable made her high probability alien food but the film turns that on its head when our gruff sensible beardo leader gets eated in an airshaft.

would've prefered an end where vickers + noooomi form a begrudging mutual respect and fly off together all girl power with a dude's head in a bag, coulda been scott's in-the-future-thelma-and-louise-get-away-with-it message.

memorial me + jjj talk about prometheus thread

another thing I noticed on a second viewing - the engineer at the beginning of the film is a perfect specimen until he takes the black goo and mutates. but the aggressive engineer at the end of the film has signs that he's been partially mutated, he has a black furrow down his spine and a weird honeycomb on his neck.

xpost -- I'm reading it all, EIII, just not chiming in.

Don't see how a plausible interpretation of the movie makes up for a generally appalling script full of unrealistically asinine characters and scenes that just don't connect with each other.

I like that take on it jjj. I was reading the other day about the gnostic idea of archons (which is obv a big inspiration on the movie) and seeing David that way makes for a compelling doubling (or reversal) of that theme.

The other line about succession that the movie seems to put flashing lights around is of course "a king has his reign, and then he dies"

I'm all for having fun with the movie. I quite enjoyed it, but I think Hitler did a pretty good job of summing up many of the moments that made me lol & roll my eyes.

haha I was trying to think up a line about Fascist criticism

"They should have called it Poopmetheus." = LOLs irl.

Anything that somehow shapes this film into something resembling coherence is based almost entirely on assumption and extrapolation and little on what is actually on the screen. I can extrapolate this (perfectly entertaining!) misfire into just about anything short of a "Lethal Weapon" sequel.

i decidedly disagree! also i think that you can approach most texts that way if you choose to, and that the idea that the source material here is so open-ended that it defies interpretation is only an argument that can be made if you have already decided that the film is inherently without meaning. people develop narratives for late period lynch films with far less to go on, and i certainly dont think they are wrong in doing so.

also i think that the problem is that people are focused on the idea that the film is about the engineers and what they are/why they do what they do, when to me it seems clear that the movie is about david - he is by far the most carefully presented and scripted character, and almost certainly has more screen time than anyone else in the film. if david is the protagonist, the human creation myth and religious vibe becomes a setting rather than a plot.

that should say setting/means of analogy. in other words, the overt creator destroying the created setup is a means to dig into the implied idea of the created destroying its creators. which of course is the idea that the film closes on, with a bioweapon laden ship headed to the world of its creators.

Can someone explain how you go from infected Man sleeps with woman to squid baby??

I understand they are trying to use the DNA-gloop getting poured all over the space worms to explain the aliens parasitic nature and general "oh that's why they look all messed up, its alien worm and engineer DNA", but how did you get the space worm DNA into the man then woman to make the space squid baby.

Or put another way:

if DNA-gloop and engineer next to waterfall = mankind.

how come DNA-gloop and man = OH GOD CUT IT OUT OF ME!!!

how come DNA-gloop and man = OH GOD CUT IT OUT OF ME!!!

Pregnancy in general amirite thank here all week

that was the genius of alien, making ripley unlikeable made her high probability alien food but the film turns that on its head when our gruff sensible beardo leader gets eated in an airshaft.

this is a really good point. it's impossible now to experience alien without the foreknowledge that ripley is its star. but it must have been quite a headfake the first time around to realize that tom skerritt really had bit it, and that this humorless woman was in charge.

btw tom skerritt is 78 years old!!

feel like Tom Skerritt has been 50 years old his entire life

Skerritt gives such a great performance in that film. He's the most chilled spaceship captain ever

Well, this was from the mind that came up with the baked spacemen of "Dark Star."

skerritt is str8 fire in Alien, SO chill

I would fly anywhere with that dude

There is some godforsaken alternate universe where Alien never got major funding and is a terrible low-budget Dark Star style B movie. No Scott, no Weaver/Skerritt/Stanton/etc, no Giger.

yeah, easy to forget but weaver was a complete unknown at that point, she prolly had the least experience of anybody in the cast?

almost psycho-level audience misdirection

I'm so in love with that goddamn movie

i kinda like the idea of a thread where we pick random lines to justify the spinning of cinematic crap into art gold. feel like this one`s `been done` at this stage

ALso love the way that, when Ripley's character was changed from male to female in the script, they didn't add all sorts of bogus cliched Hollywood-style feminising elements to her character

xpost

John J - brilliant.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41ePSAN9KXL.jpg

Kris Kristofferson or Kenny Rogers?

Good 'Alien' drinking game: take a shot every time Dallas says "oh come on KNOCK IT OFF!" to any of the bickering crew members

lol hammered

That HULK crit thing is bad. Using a really terrible, badly executed gimmick to criticise Lindelof for being gimmicky? Whatever insight there is to be found in his pieces will remain forever buried in unreadable caps lock text. He needs to drop the act.

It would probably help, but it's not like he's writing in ancient Sumerian or anything.

I did use an online tool to transfer it all to sentence-case, but it's 6,000+ words of cod-psychoanalysis of Lindelof, and frankly I couldn't be arsed to read it all.

The Hulk conceit was pretty light, I thought. I'm not sure I've ever read that guy before, but it's like he wrote this epic exegesis, and then just randomly changed the occasional "I" to "Hulk." Which is to say, I didn't have a hard time reading it. It's in English. And the all-caps things? I get the internet vernacular, but, like, it's just capital letters. I didn't really feel like I was being screamed at for 6000 words. It'd be one thing if it actually was being screamed by the Hulk, but I had very little trouble using my imagination to un-Hulk it .... IN MY MIND.

yeah same. i cant imagine in a million years being bothered by it but i guess for some people its intolerable. in the early 2000s i posted on a forum where the predominant posting voice was all-caps so maybe im inured to it...

im not a fan of the lindelof psychoanalyzing but i guess he thought he needed to do something different since the internet had already documented all the plot holes and such

Welll also he appears to be a Lindehof stan (in so far as there are any) - the first positive words about Cowboys and Aliens I've heard there!

He is just oddly prescriptive on some stuff though - the linked review of John Carter was very "No, you are supposed to show the dead wife first so we can build up feeling for the protagonist", which, really? Are we not a bit beyond THIS is A story ARC?

fch hates cowboys and aliens! he wrote a good thing about how bad it sucks actually, but i think put the blame more on orci & kurtzman

hes prescriptive because hes a script editor/screenwriter irl - he should really be called screenwriter hulk imo

Ahhhhhhhh!

Meanwhile in Sullivanland

DavidM OTM... film criticism doesn't need a "gimmick" - especially an overused and unfunny one.

*crosses arms*

just saw this. it was fucking terrible in every way but design and music.

The first maybe 40 mins are good tension/premise building, imo everything after the first expedition was incoherent hackneyed cliche- and the incoherence is by far the greater problem than the cliche.

― pet tommy & the barkhaters (darraghmac), Saturday, June 2, 2012

Alien > Aliens > Alien 3 > Alien Resurrection > Prometheus

thats just a list of them in order

think of how shitty the next one will be

prometheuses