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

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

no, i literally thought it was hilarious that the dude got lost. that's not fanfic that was my gut reaction.

i believe you when you say the characters are badly written (i care a lot about acting but i'm not In The Biz and i don't really think in such technical terms about scripts). i just don't think i care that much, or even notice, when the movie is as ridiculously entertaining to me as this one is (cf. pacific rim, lots of others)

i mean, in aliens vasquez and gorman barely qualified as sketches of people; the gung-ho cigar chomping sergeant, i mean, was he "well written"? (i dunno, i'd say no.)

i would say yes.

im literally repeating lines those characters said all the time some 30 years after i first saw that movie.

in prometheus, the characters are conveniences to the plot

but the plot is great! "people do dumb shit, chaos ensues."

it is crazy how many times this exact moment has played out on ILX, over more than a decade now. some people say "yay i like this thing! not even really sure why, let me try to explain!" and a bunch of other people say "your comments just prove that you don't understand why it's shit"

s1ocki keep in mind that it is very very difficult in 2014 for any media object to attain the sort of iconic status that major media projects in the mid-1980s did, no matter how well-written its characters

its like we're ripley and you guys are the weyland-yutani execs and we just can't convince you that going back to LV426 is a good idea

you mean a bad idea presumably!

s1ocki i think... you need to take your script-splainin' to a thread that wants it

haha yes. I DO MEAN THAT.

The only thing this movie is missing is an early scene where every character gets really high, then it would make more sense.

it's true in aliens they are caricatures, but the actors (especially the guy playing apone) take to them with gusto and breathe life into them where even the throwaway characters get weird tributes to them later.
(I found out recently that the dropship pilot is a meme now)

she has like five lines in the movie and four of them are some video game catchphrase.

s1ocki keep in mind that it is very very difficult in 2014 for any media object to attain the sort of iconic status that major media projects in the mid-1980s did

I've been wondering about this off & on lately; is there a year that pop-culture changed, or did it take a full decade? Like, there's a somewhen in there between the popularization of the internet and enough studio/media execs finally realizing that they should just make stuff aimed at the audience obsessed with nerd shit, since their consumption habits are the most predictably monetized?

Also, something about the increased output of genre flicks, where you'd have one or two in a season that could stand alone until the next one hit.

Like 95-05, maybe?

the actors (especially the guy playing apone) take to them with gusto and breathe life into them

this is totally true. i sort of chalk this up to the era, there was a looseness allowed to 80s action and comedy acting that's maybe a hangover of the freebootin' 70s? in any case, possibly because of CGI, possibly because of other, deeper, more insidious circumstances about what the vibe on a big budget film set is like in 2014, it just seems like you so rarely get the kind of jackass goofery that makes a movie feel fun and real (cf. star wars prequels as a prime example)

People writing about Minority Report in 2002(Christ, that was 12 years ago) was the first time I can remember explicit commentary that Hollywood treated sci-fi in general(and PKD in particular) as a framework of just a buncha shit that happens to hang explosion on, original story be damned.

sorry s1ocki, i always like reading you except when you are trying to harsh my vibe

s1ocki keep in mind that it is very very difficult in 2014 for any media object to attain the sort of iconic status that major media projects in the mid-1980s did

what? are you saying people don't quote movies lines and song lyrics and stuff anymore? if anything we live in a much more meme-ified culture!

sorry s1ocki, i always like reading you except when you are trying to harsh my vibe

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, May 12, 2014 12:41 PM (45 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i consider this playful volleying and i hope you feel the same!

With the performances of Aliens, I wonder how much of it was the life experiences if the filmmakers. Ridley Scott talked about the success and look of Star Wars allowing him to make a movie about "truckers in space," so now you have a sequel made by an actual ex-trucker

I have poorly formed idea that I don't know is even true or not but

maybe the loosey-gooseyness of the first movie and the fun that the actors had with the character is more of an indication that ridley was more open to them doing that, same way Lucas was, because it's early in their career and they haven't been ridden into town as heroes with parades in their name and they legit don't know if what they're doing is even going to work

whereas 30 year on and their names are carved into mount rushmore and what they want is treated as gospel and maybe not even really questioned and THAT's why there's a sort of, lifelessness because the actors are filling the requirements of what's on paper and no-one's really asking them to bring any humanity to anything because it's assumed that everything's there on paper

idk

I'm totally talking out of my ass

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

i dunno, it's not really fanfic if what is objectively presented in the movie is scientists being idiots--it's only natural to sorta accept that these scientists are idiots (or more charitably, reckless and naive) as a basic framework for the movie. there's not a single human character with anything approaching wisdom, caution, or humility

and yeah vegemitegrrl otm.

No, no, there's something there. With Star Wars, you had a cast and production crew who had nooooo problem just ignoring Lucas' under-direction style(Harrison Ford especially, to the point of explicitly telling the more fresh-faced Hamill to do the same).

Empire had a stronger director, and Lucas on the other side of the planet making this movie with Spielberg.

By the time of Jedi, Lucas is in full control and on-set a lot, plus going thru a divorce with the one person in Hollywood who could tell him him "no." Previous important people like Gary Kurtz had just gotten upset and quit.

i actually thought about this movie recently because i came across a discussion of a bit in aeschylus's "prometheus bound" where apparently (i haven't read it) prometheus claims that, in addition to everything else, he gave mankind the "capacity for blind hope as a way of forestalling doom."

i think for your reading to make sense, the movie would have to be operating in the mode of satire (which it clearly is not), or i guess be some sort of cautionary "ship of fools" fable, which it also doesn't really seem to be. i think the movie honestly believes these are the smartest scientists around and yet makes them do dumb things to advance the plot.

dumb scientists could totally work, but you'd need a cost-cutting weyland at the helm instead of the guy who outfits his ship like a luxury yacht.

well i certainly do admit there's a weird tension (possibly incoherence) in the movie in which it doesn't seem to know what it's about at times.

well i certainly do admit there's a weird tension (possibly incoherence) in the movie in which it doesn't seem to know what it's about at times.
--ryan

:: strokes chin ::

LINDELOF!!!

could certainly have used, right after mapper dude says he's lost, yaphet kotto rolling his eyes

Interesting talk abt suspension of disbelief upthread.

There were times when I thought this film believed in itself too much, and other times when it didn't believe in itself enough. Whereas perhaps a good fantasy film should do the opposite, not be too leaden and serious about itself, but also really believe in itself at the crucial times.

One of the things that perhaps Scott should have just 'believed in' being the simple symbolic power of the mysterious image of the navigator found dead in the boneship in Alien - that one scene tells a huge story in a flash: here's this obviously huge and powerful being, that has fallen. Scene could just have been left there, if Scott had 'believed' in it, but unfortunately he 'believed' it was possible to make a good film out of explaining it. Etc.

Actually Prometheus is sort of 'Scooby Doo ghost is actually an irritable carney performer' moment writ large isn't it.

i thought wakened Powder dude was satisfyingly violent and inscrutable. as i said before, i tht the greatest moment in the movie was when old millionaire finally comes face to face with the creature he thinks can grant him eternal life or whatever and the alien just fucking houses him

What was the deal with the giant head sculpture in the biological containment room place? And the mural on the ceiling that was changing?

I have lots of questions about this movie.

the giant head sculpture was a giant head

the mural on the ceiling changed

~cool depth to the movie~

i thought wakened Powder dude was satisfyingly violent and inscrutable. as i said before, i tht the greatest moment in the movie was when old millionaire finally comes face to face with the creature he thinks can grant him eternal life or whatever and the alien just fucking houses him

The first sequence was great, everything inbetween was ridiculous. If only they would have kept to 'mostly wordless/semi-abstract/violent/inscrutable' it would have been a pretty winning movie. But really Lindelof's involvement doomed it no matter what.

Don't know if this is really the best thread for this but HR Giger has died, apparently from injuries sustained during a fall.

H.R. Giger ist tot
Mit seinen düsteren Skulpturen und Möbeln erlangte er Berühmtheit: Der Schweizer Künstler H.R. Giger ist gestorben.

RIP

:(

For some reason I was skimming through the thread and my favourite thing was this Super Furry Animals callout:

important questions to be answered in prometheus sequel

1) are there space jockey women

2) do they have hair

― the late great, Wednesday, 13 June 2012 02:54 (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jolly white giant as a giger/brothers quay stop-motion puppet instead of what we got was another missed opportunity.

http://www.cpnas.org/events/daser-051514.html

I still haven't seen the movie, and I can't vouch for the quality of the event either, but this is happening in DC on Thursday.

Prometheus woulda been a great movie if midway thru they had cut to The Last Starfighter

This makes me think there's potential in a Turkish Star Wars version of Prometheus

Why did David the android infect the dude scientist with the alien disease? Was that ever explained?