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

i just watched this again. it's great! i think someone on this thread said that they liked the way it smushed together a bunch of different types of horror movie-that's what i like the most about it. the scene where the lil proto-facehugger kills the two guys is so great. it's a type of scene that's in every monster movie ever-human discovers monster, monster shows what it can do-and the execution is perfect. there's just something about the tempo of it. the way the gruesomeness ramps up so fast, cramming so many horrible things-having a creature tighten itself on you. getting your arm broken, getting attacked by something, being suffocated, having a hostile entity invade your body, having plastic melt onto your face, having something forced down your throat-into a 30-second span but making it feel organic and scary. and then i love the way you don't find out what exactly happened to them for awhile.

another great monster movie moment: when the second guy turns up at the entrance to the spaceship, alive, but with his body contorted into that horrible position that seems to be giving him no discomfort, and the other guy's dawning realization that something really fucked up has happened. and then he stands up!

i think if stephen king ever updates danse macabre he would write about that scene. the only people behaving dumbly part that really bugs me is charlize theron at the end running away from what is basically a giant wheel. like if that was really happening i think your first instinct would not be to run in a straight line directly in it's path. maybe run a dogleg. something.

To be fair, I don't know a lot about horror movies or anything, but this is a great horror movie.

Honestly, I do wonder if this is a fight that breaks down on horror nerd/sci fi nerd/film dork lines. I'm actually mystified by the level of hate people have towards this movie, and a couple of you tend to have good taste, so I'm trying to work out why I think it's super solid and you all don't, which is why I'm guessing it has a lot to do with your approach etc

It's probably similar to the way Star Wars fans hate the prequels

can we settle this with a dance battle y/n

Well the answer to that is always yes duh

XP alien fans (oh hi dere) would better serve their energy by hating the shitbag AVP movies though honestly.

Yeah but everybody knew those were gonna be trash

We had a small hope that Ridley Scott would have done something worthy of the mythos

Like unfortunately every time you see the original Space Jockey in Alien you're just gonna think of Powder

I've never seen Powder, so I just think "a big bald white guy"

Wait so are people sad because space jockey wasn't terrible cgi squid head?

I am so confused by this reaction across the board.

The point is they should never haver revealed the Space Jockey at all and focused on something else for this pointless prequel

creepy apple robot ads were great.

I really liked Prometheus. I watched five times in the first month after I saw it. I would still sit down and watch it any time. I found out from some Cracked article that pedants hated it for pedantic reasons and so I am choosing not to read this thread.

― just like the one wing dove (Crabbits), Sunday, May 11, 2014 8:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a lot of people love Battleship too

Wait so are people sad because space jockey wasn't terrible cgi squid head?

I am so confused by this reaction across the board.

― ohhhh lorde 2pac big please mansplain to this sucker (jjjusten), Monday, May 12, 2014 4:05 AM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well not having a squid head is ridiculous retconning on its own (the helmet just happened to look like bones!), but having him turn out to just be a tall guy with a sick gym bod and pale skin is stupid. Having him drink something and turn into DNA is stupid. Having his DNA be "identical" to ours is stupid.

So

You accept a world where huge aliens exist, but only if their heads don't look like people. And this whole DNA thing is ridiculous, but blood made of acid is completely within the biological rules. Huh.

Acid blood is cool as shit, is the thing

You can have any imagined present you like in yr SciFi movie.

Just dont explain it if yr explanation is going to annoy everyone.

The acid blood alien/dna powder gym buffs/future intergalactical travel etc etc arent the problem here ito what the audience will swallow while maintaining goodwill. It's the behaviour of the friggin humans (with whom we are meant to identify) that leaves me smh, wtmc & fmsats.

Kill lindelhof slowly over heat and euthanize Scott.

^^^

lol pointing out that this film and everything that happens in it is fucking idiotic is hardly "TEARS DONT LOOK LIKE THAT IN SPACE" pedantry

I like the "you suspended disbelief once so nothing is ever dumb" reasoning too

^^^^

makes more sense to praise this in terms of (po-faced) surrealism than it does in terms of effective SF/Horror tropes

unless you complete ignore moments like "lol i was hiding on my spaceship all along, also i hired idiots for the lulz"

maybe it's like Star Wars and none of them are humans so are not obliged to behave in any way like humans

the harder i think about this it is kinda like some Ionesco thing with a bunch of random strangers all doing their own thing and not interacting on any level

or the random improvisations of a couple of 4 year-olds playing space monsters and making it up as they go along

having been given a shakey verbal account of the original Alien movie by a big brother who'd seen the trailer on Youtube

ya like... i can totally accept "the force" as a thing, but you try telling me the force exists because of high midichlorian counts in people's blood and i'm going to jump out the window

just because a story has fantastical elements doesnt mean that literally everything that happens in it is beyond criticism

"The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it's a complete mess"

This movie is probably just unintentional nü-camp

(Having never ever read anything Kael ever wrote on camp or having even seen any movie commonly categorized as camp)

And this whole DNA thing is ridiculous, but blood made of acid is completely within the biological rules.
― ohhhh lorde 2pac big please mansplain to this sucker (jjjusten), Monday, May 12, 2014 5:21 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the only wildly implausible thing in Alien was that it grew so fast (with seemingly no food). Prometheus has like 94 of these things.

Which would be more acceptable if it was campy fun, but instead it wants to be next 2001.

u mad doggie?

I watched it yesterday for the first time. Mostly it was just boring and incoherent. Bad script, moronic characters, awkward dialogue. "The kind of dumb that creeps up on you," totally. But as gore it was pretty good, especially on the classic Alien themes: horror of pregnancy, the alien as a parasitic parody of childbirth. The surgical tube scene with the self-administered C-section. That was great!

It's funny how this movie is so incredibly awkward and repressed when it tries to handle normal sex (Elba's "Are you a robot?"), but gleefully gruesome at horrific symbolizations of sex and reproduction.

this movie is so incredibly awkward and repressed when it tries to handle normal sex (Elba's "Are you a robot?"), but gleefully gruesome at horrific symbolizations of sex and reproduction

this is really true

maybe it would help if we imagine everyone is a humanoid bee

tbf i don't think that's an accident

that it would help if we imagine everyone is a humanoid bee?

Wait you're not a humanoid bee?

I believe he's an apian human iirc

subtle but important distinction, only one of them has a fatal sting

i'm an undercover hymenopteran

I don't see how anything in a sci-fi movie can be "too weird" when human men shoot DNA out of their, er, well, you know.

Their split dick slits?

I can find no fault with this movie because takes the francis crick panspermia thesis and then brilliantly makes it an accident!

i also don't see how anyone in a sci-fi movie can be "too stupid" when you look at what supposedly responsible people in the real world do on the reg

like, the mapping expert, he's got this incredible tech, this hover-sphere that explores every surface and beams its topology back to the ship - well OF COURSE he's the one who immediately gets lost

I think the complaint is really about the characters not being very well-drawn. In alien, nancy cartwright's character literally blocks the path between the flamethrower and the alien, but everyone in that movie (even jonesy!) feels like a lived-in person, so you can buy whatever stupidity goes on, but in prometheus, the characters are conveniences to the plot, and you can see when they do invest some time, like in the robot, you can accept and even speculate about whatever weird or inexplicable things he does without immediately chalking it up to bad writing. So the real complaint is for a kind of insulting laziness to the enterprise, and it's easier to point out and pile on visible traces of that, like weyland's sloppy old age makeup rather than guy pierce not inhabiting the role, and not being given much of a role to inhabit.

i honestly dont think that if you dont get that these are really badly-written characters there's nothing i can say to convince you

In alien, nancy cartwright's character literally blocks the path between the flamethrower and the alien

http://cdn.splitsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/etgohome1.jpg

i mean you can keep twisting yourself in knots interpreting the movie as like... a wry commentary on the ineptness of cave surveyors or something but at that point its almost fanfic