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

Congo is hilarious

Also, I now see why Kate Dickie had so little dialogue in Red Road. She reminded me of that woman from Spatz and Mike & Angelo.
Haha, excellent! KD's accent kept kicking me out of the film. I wasn't sure if it was because she was wooden, or because it was too fucking weird hearing someone from East Kilbride in a science fiction film. One of the folk I saw it with said it would have been better if they'd cast Limmy instead of her. Wouldn't've been any more jarring.

damon lindelof should be imprisoned

on an island, in space, with god

hmm strikes me that this may well be his outlook anyway

I'm trying to forget that I spent money on watching this piece of shit, so kindly leave this thread to die.

bonus footage is apparently stuff that fills plot holes that enable a sequel that may not happen <--- unlikely to make this shitpile any better admittedly

it would have been better if they'd cast Limmy instead of her

lol

pretty sure the sequel got greenlit for 2014

what I'd like to see in an extra 20 minutes are things that square some of the unexplained character behavior - e.g. fifield getting the biologist high on his "tobacco" before he starts inexplicably sticking his hand in strange alien faces. supposedly the edit that was released was scott's pg-13 cut (i.e. he was expecting it to be rated pg-13).

I'm getting this weird feeling you guys didn't like this movie

I enjoyed it

Pretty much all the character behaviour in this film is unexplained - except where that one guy at the beginning says "I'M A LONER SOCIOPATH ONLY IN THIS FOR THE MONEY JUST SO WE'RE CLEAR OK" - so that would be a long 20 minutes.

pretty sure the sequel got greenlit for 2014

i thought it was "in talks"

i mean i'm only interested so i know which films i won't be seeing in 2014

loner sociopath who's only in it for the money - i mean obviously, on a trillion dollar mission with a crew of approx 18 you're gonna want to recruit a loner sociopath who's only in it for the money - turns out to be in it for the rocks afterwards iirc? or am i just confusing these wooden characters whose main distinguishing traits are there hair?

clearly expecting anybody to behave like an actual person in a film about space jesuses making monsters out of goo is nitpicking tbf, i just think it shd be more clear whether this is a surrealist picture show or if there was meant to be a story

in it for the vagina squid

octomom

what the shit was this shit

ffs

when she runs into the escape pod at the end i was all she should go put the head back on the robot for company AND THEN THATS WHAT HAPPENS

as soon as i saw that giant white guy gazing at the spaceship i was all oh shit this is a terrible film isnt it

sick gym bod tho nice one giant white guy

truth bomb

I wanna find out what happens when david's head futurama-style trolls a whole other galaxy + species

I finally saw this movie, and pretty much agree with what seems to be the general consensus in this thread: the movie looks great, has many great scenes, but the general stupidity of the plot and the characters makes it less than great. However, thinking about the movie, I thought there was a pretty interesting theme there of parenthood, of parental sacrifice, and (as a counterpoint) parents refusing to let their children take their place. You can see this pretty much throughout the film:

* It begins with the Engineer guy killing himself in a ritual to create life, a parent literally sacrificing himself so that his kids could live.

* David is the figurative son of Weyland (as mentioned by Weyland himself), but Weyland uses him as a tool; he can never become a person in his own right (to become a person he would need to gain his soul, but that is the one thing Weyland denies of him) until Weyland dies (this is why David mentions that all children hope for their parents' death). But Weyland refuses to die.

* There's a similar dynamic going on with Weyland and Vickers: she wants to finally take her rightful place as the boss of the company, but Weyland doesn't want to accept the natural order of kids replacing their parents, he wants to live forever. (This whole theme that I'm outlining here is pretty much summarized in Vickers' "a king has his reign" comment to Weyland.)

* Because of the above, Weyland get poetic justice meted out on him. Note that when the Engineer guy is woken up, he's chill at first, until David tells him why they are here: because this old geezer refuses to die. Weyland acts against the natural order, so he is stricken down by "God", a literal deus ex machina.

* But the Engineers too can be seen as parents who refuse to let their children grow up. If we accept the theory that the reason the Engineers changed their mind and wanted to kill all humans is because they feared humanity would advance far enough that they could eventually challenge the Engineers themselves, then what they are doing is the exact same thing as Weyland. In this light, the surviving Engineer's decision to strike down the humans make sense... He wakes up to hear humans, the Engineers' children, demanding things (an extended lifespan) that go far beyond what their parents alloted to them. So in this sense it's the same scene as Roy Batty meeting Tyrell in Blade Runner: "I want more life, father!".

* From this point of view the ending makes a lot sense: the children and grandchildren of the Engineers come crashing down on them, with a spaceship full of stuff that's potentially lethal to them (kids destroying their parents again), to demand answers, to demand their place in the cosmos instead of being considered the property of the ones who created them.

* The only significant parenthood-related strand in the movie that doesn't quite fit here is Shaw's and Holloway's wish for children, and the "pregnancy" that follows. But there are some similarities there, too: the xenomorph child wants to kill its "parent", but it doesn't succeed (though neither does Shaw manage to kill her "kid"). That's probably because humans aren't the true parents of the engineers, it's the Engineers who created them. So in that sense the final stinger makes sense as more than just a nod to the Alien franchise: again the parent has to die so the child can live.

So, in my opinion Prometheus could've been a better movie had scrapped all the stupid Christian references and emphasized this parental theme more. For example, they could've illuminating the Engineers' motivations at least a bit, and have Vickers survive instead of killing her in the most pointless way possible. Though I suspect one reason why reason Vickers dies is because Charlize Theron, unlike Noomi Rapace, is an actor much in demand in Hollywood, so they couldn't be sure they' get her for the sequel. On the other hand, they could've easily scrapped the whole character of Vickers altogether... She doesn't really do anything that's relevant to the overall plot, and the whole parent/child dynamic is already there in the relationship between David and Weyland, there was no need for another kid of his to be in the movie.

i think vickers died to draw a contrast with noomi, maybe vickers died a strict rationalist whereas noomi lived because of deus ex machina

anyway all of that stuff is there, sure, doesn't make the dumb parts any less dumb and those dumb parts harpoon the whole big whale

Yeah, I didn't mean to say it's not a mess of movie even if it has some cool themes, just that emphasizing some of those themes and leaving out others altogether might've made it less of a mess.

And, of course, not having the characters act so irrationally... Though I, like many others apparently, got the feeling that at least some of the odd behaviour was because explanatory scenes were cut; it literally felt like there where chunks of film missing where a normal movie would've had them. Like a scene of the biologist guy smoking the geologist's weed (thus explaining his behaviour towards the snake thingy), some scenes that would explain why the captain wasn't paying attention to what was happening on his ship, a scene where the medics go after Shaw and find the octopus, who eats them (explaining both their disappearance and weird growth in size of the octopus), any scenes that would actually show someone being surprised to find out their supposedly dead funder was alive and on the ship, and so on... So this is one of those rare cases where I feel an extended director's cut might actually improve the movie. (Though of course some of the silliness in the movie can never be explained by any director's cut, like the totally carefree way the members of a scientific expedition react to a completely alien environment: not doing any reconaissance of the planet before entering the cave, immediately taking their helmets of when they hear you can breathe the air, joyfully touching everything they see, not having any weapons with them, etc.)

i think vickers died to draw a contrast with noomi, maybe vickers died a strict rationalist whereas noomi lived because of deus ex machina

Maybe, but this is just the religious crap that needed to be cut from the movie... I'm not familiar with the screenwriter (never watched Lost), but based on what people are saying in this thread, seems that he's a Christian and likes to add Christian themes to his scripts? I don't think people like that should write sci-fi... Or I guess they can write Matrix style messianic-fantasy-dressed-as-sci-fi, but not something that tries, at least nominally, base it's fiction on science.

yeah i agree people like Philip Dick or R.A. Lafferty shdn't write SF

Actually, I'd like to retract what I said above... I guess an extended cut could explain all the irrational behaviour by having the opening scenes on Earth, where we learn that no respectable scientist would take a 5 year trip to a planet they know nothing about, for a reason that can't be disclosed to them, so Weyland has no other alternative but to hire wackos and stoners desperate for money. But I suspect such a scene was never scripted or filmed.

yeah i agree people like Philip Dick or R.A. Lafferty shdn't write SF

Dick's writing clearly falls to the Matrix side of things, I doubt he cared that much about the actual science in his books.

could've been a better movie had scrapped all the stupid Christian references and emphasized this parental theme more. For example, they could've illuminating the Engineers' motivations at least a bit

The Engineers intended to undertake their mission to end humanity 2000 years ago.

So aside from the other Christian claptrap, the implication is that Jesus was an Engineer.

i missed half of this, must've been cringing or shouting at the screen.

just wanted to be clear that you don't think anybody who uses religious themes shd be classified as an SF writer Tuomas. fair enough.

For all its flaws and failure to understand stuff like genetics, Prometheus still mostly deals with hard sci-fi themes, not with inner space trips or messianic uprisings, so a religious approach to the subject matter was ill-advised, IMO.

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It dealt mostly with hard sci-fi imagery - spaceships and aliens. Themes are a different matter and often down to the viewer to interpret as they see fit, but this was obviously heavily infused with religious bullshit from the very beginning.

isaac asimov (not a writer i'm keen on) once said he'd once read an interview w/ phillip jose farmer where farmer talked about keeping up to date with all the latest scientific journals. now farmer was not known for being a 'hard' sf writer - more of a mad pulp fantasist - whereas asimov was thought to be very much on the pure science side of the equation, yet farmer's claim guilted asimov into resuming his reading round the subject. my point is, i don't think you have any idea how much or how little dick or lafferty cared about the science in their writing, how it fed into their work, and that tidy assumptions about such things can often be wide of the mark.

Okay, maybe that was badly worded, what I meant was that Dick's sci-fi had less to do with speculating on actual scientific questions, more to do with using sci-fi as a setting for metaphorical adventures. Since that side of sci-fi automatically has a larger fantasy element to it than hard sci-fi, I don't think mixing religion to it is always bad. But it is bad in hard sci-fi, or can you name a lot of examples where it would work?

i don't know if the "hard" label ever meant a lot and i certainly don't think it means anything now. and really Prometheus has got very little to do with actual science compared to the debt it owes to Giger's artwork. but this is nitpickery approaching craziness imo.

I mean, it's telling that Dick's last published novel isn't sci-fi at all, and yet its themes are unmistakably similar to his earlier books.

(x-post)

there is a ton of hard (and yeah, you could argue about what this means all day) sci-fi with religious themes

Childhood's End to name one pretty famous example

spaceships doesn't equal science, using DNA as a macguffin doesn't equal science, aliens doesn't equal science, i'm not sure what theoretical framework is being violated anyway

if you want to take that tack then lindelof-style-insert-messiah-reference != religion

is he actually christian btw? i thought this was just a thing he did because Symbolic Relevance Is Clever

he's Jewish

{dramatic sting}

i wd take that tack tbh thomp, using imagery or setting to tell a story isn't really being "about" something, as isn't Symbolism when it becomes a game of reference for the hell of it

stand by my original impression that this is mostly "about" linear movements and helmet placement