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

I should've known.

terminator's a paper tiger in this fight, way clumsier than predator and the acid for blood thing doesnt bode well re: alien.

SKYNET

does Bill Paxton star in that comic story? Because, you know.

would be cool if the predators are only after terminator because of its uncanny resemblance to "dutch" schaefer, and they get more than they bargained for in a wacky case of mistaken identity

Caught this again on film4 the other night, I thought

- seemed much more coherent on a second watch on TV, than it did first time at cinema
- even so it keeps leaving things unanswered, in a way that does not entrance, but merely aggravates the viewer
- not just bad acting but the wrong type of acting
- they're in and out of that tomb like nobody's business, compare with Jurassic Park's strict day/night/day sequence
- when I say the wrong type of acting I mean the actors should have stayed on an oil rig for six months, trying to catch the ordinariness, and small tics and tells of people in a confined space
- there's a Lovecraft story called The Nameless City where our narrator wanders down into a ruined city discovering things about the civilisation that lived there, its rise and fall, going deeper until he falls into a pit at the bottom where they've all turned into lizards ... that's the plot they should have gone for right there

OTM. Especially about the Nameless City, which is exactly what this film should have been. Instead it's much more 'hey here's another cool-looking but totally random occurrence, whatever'. i saw prometheus before really having watched any of the other Alien movies, and enjoyed it enough at the cinema to go back and watch the first two. I'd dismissed Alien/Aliens before, thinking that I'd basically seen enough spoofs and references to them that I didn't need to watch them. But they really are masterpieces, and watching back Prometheus the other night I could see two things: a. it is a very frustrating film, especially if you're familiar with the Alien backstory; and b: it's still a good laugh, a fun action film with enough cool bits to keep it from flailing under its own implausibility.

I remember the pacing of their exploration of the lost city just feeling so wrong and perfunctory. Like I feel like they spent less time than John Hurt did in the original Alien just like, grappling with this unfathomable mystery one room at a time. All of a sudden it's like, no big deal.

At this point all I think of when I think of this movie is the F! This Movie podcast where the one guy points out that Guy Pearce's motivation (which is driving the whole plot) is based on his assumption that if you find your creator, the first thing they will do is give you eternal life. Which is kind of a weird assumption to make. "So, what, it's the Bozo Big Top Prize? Congratulations - You found me!! So God is now a scavenger hunt?" It just makes no sense and it seems to be what makes everything happen.

I guess the other thing is that he assumes that whatever random black goo they find in the first room where they find something interesting might possibly give you eternal life if you drink it dissolved in a glass of tap water. But he's less sure about that one and so he has his robot test it out on the whiny guy who manages to be disappointed by discovering a spectacular lost civilization on another planet. It's like if the villain in Last Crusade just wandered around the Middle East drinking any liquid he could find in any container in the hopes that one of them might conceivably be the Grail. Except at least he has heard of something called a Grail and believes it to be a vessel for drinking liquids out of, whereas Guy Pearce has no reason to think the black goo is any more interesting than anything else they have found on this planet, or might find tomorrow, or next week.

So those are the two big things that make everything else happen in the plot, and they're both so removed from the way we would expect a person to think about things that all you can do is really just say it's what happens, like an eight-year-old summarizing the plot. And then the old man wants to be young again so he talks to the giant white guy. Actually, this is about how the Wikipedia plot summary reads. What a disappointment this movie was.

the old man's motivation is essentially the same as the motivation of every other human baddie in the alien movies: that we can harness the talents of the alien and bend them to our own selfish wills. no it doesn't make much sense but he's a crazy old man who's afraid of death and has spaceships at his disposal. hell yeah he's gonna drink stuff if he thinks it might help. anyway this greed leads him, as it led paul reiser before him, to commit the chief sin of alien movies: not respecting the alien's otherness, its killingness. it's basically grizzly man in this respect. the driver for everyone else is, once they realize what they're dealing with, getting off this fucking planet before we all die (as it is in every alien movie).

It's a bit like they come up with a structure of how to put a film together, then think what have we got that can connect this with this to keep the story going without looking at the internal logic of why you would actually use the object that way. like if you were actually going to do an archaeological dig at a site there are processes that you would follow but since this is a film you just need to show some token activity at node point tagged archaeological discovery.
So yeah the original films did seem to be better on that level that there were some self interested crew members of a salvage vessel going around their business when they apparently chance upon a strange discovery. There are things that aren't really fleshed out, I think the ship itself is very sketchy but I haven't watched the film in a while.

So a better story teller would have looked at who these individuals on the Prometheus were supposed to be, what their motivations and normal activity would have been and made the film with that in mind. At the moment I'm left thinking about the big talking point about Charlize Theorn not copping on that if the wheel is running in a straight line, it might just be a good idea to diverge from what that line was instead of just trying to run faster than it. Is taht the way that anybody without a pronounced level on the autism spectrum would behave? Probably not & I would guess its because that's not a fleshed out character, more of a stick figure that's tied into a larger sketchy plot. So would hope that further volumes in the franchise might address that a bit better.

I think I quite liked the film on watching it despite it having some glaring wtfs. It is quite atmospheric in places and funny in others. yeah.

Yeah shit like "charlize theron can't turn left" is egregious to a level far beyond "no true scientist would do this!!" pedantry

Funny as in risible, yep. Atmospheric, sure, but it isn't Tarkovsky. It's plot and character driven and the plot is incomprehensible garbage, the characters witless imbeciles. The Wikipedia page is astonishing, it makes it seem like a well respected movie. Ebert gave it four stars! Wtf.

like an eight-year-old summarizing the plot

There's a script extract somewhere up thread (of the 'charlize theron can't turn left' scene), all the DRAMATIC moments are highlighted in CAPITALS and it reads just like something written by an excited eight year old.

I said it must be the worst blockbuster of recent years, but that might be wrong, I suspect Man of Steel is probably as bad. But this one is just all bad, it's not particularly atmospheric, it has the colored neon-lights going for it, but that's it. Stuff like sandstorms and monsters come as if editing was done by a scriptwriting manual and a timer, destroying all attempts at building a mood. And it took the one franchise thematically focused on mothers and women and turned it into the usual whining about father figures. It's just horrible. And it's not even fun.

http://joelrobison.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/tattly-singles-haters-gonna-hate-1-lg-300x300.jpg

I know taht I sat through it in the cinema and definitely enjoyed some of it. Not really sure what, I couldn't bring myself to watch it a couple of days ago when it was on Film4, gave up after the initial archaeology scene but may have had other things i wanted to watch.
I said i thought it was atmospheric and funny in places. Can't actually think of examples of either.
Do think I cared enough about the main protagonist to be rooting for her when she had to cut the alien out of her.
& might be up for seeing the sequel at least once.

Haven't bothered with the Aliens vs predators films beyond watching a bit of one when it was on tv. But those are really bad aren't they?
Did hope for so much more from examinations of the extended universe of these things but it does seem so much more that they had half a thought and didn't see how it could fit into the story but just threw it in anyway. I think there are things there that might have been interesting if handled differently. But everything does need to tie in with the bigger picture not just be an ostentatious display in itself that makes no further sense. dunnit?

Tracer - I hear that but I think it's a little too generous - I mean by that logic basically anything they filmed would be just the same as the first two films. "A paranoid king seeks to wed his daughter off to a xenomorph, but he has underestimated the alien's killingness and it all goes wrong when he tries planting one of the eggs in the ground expecting it to grow into a beanstalk" would make about as much sense. I think it sells the Paul Reiser character short, as well; we get to know him well enough that when his plan is revealed (actually, when it's pieced together by the other characters, using their respective intelligences and with the scene developing out of their individual ways of handling a situation), it makes sense. It was a bad plan (or a "bad call") but it's the kind of bad plan this ambitious but gutless weasel would have come up with then backed himself into as things went wrong around him. And at root you get it: obviously the xenomorphs are really dangerous, so sure, the unseen "weapons division" could probably do something with them. Got it.

Whereas, why Guy Pearce thinks an alien who once visited earth and did something with primitive humans and their DNA will grant you eternal life is just not even discussed. Having David put the goo in whatsisguy's drink is like the cheapest possible way to try and emulate Burke leaving Ripley and Newt to the face-huggers, sucked dry of all dramatic tension and monster-movie heart-pounding suspense. It just happens.

i am amazed y'all even knew what was going on at that point of the movie. I gave up pretty early

shame cos there was like 40 minutes of a quality movie in there

The point where I gave up was the sandstorm. I realize that is silly, it's not a plothole, it could prob well happen. But that was the point where the film just became generic to me.

'Oh, we've done another fifteen pages, quick, action beat!' 'Uh, sandstorm?' 'Great, and then they'll JUST make it to the ship. Awesome!'

It was a bad plan (or a "bad call")

i love you for this.

i'm going to watch this again, probably tonight, just to see about the goo in the drink. and everything else. but as for megalomaniacal rich guy's plan yeah, i just don't have a problem with it not being thought through, or founded on baseless speculation. megalomaniacal rich dudes kick plans into action on the basis of less all the time. as to why all the brilliant scientists he employs don't raise a few more red flags, to me it's just evidence of how the 1% use their power, money and influence to bend everyone else to their project. YES I WENT THERE. OCCUPY NOSTROMO.

http://tom.ledger.name/img/engineer.jpg

lol

t shirts available

Haven't see it since opening weekend and likely won't, but I still think this would have worked really well with the reveal that Theron is also a robot, a sibling of sorts to David. The film could focus on their jealousy and competition for the affections of their imperfect "father" who created them in the image of his real kids, then end with them outliving and/or killing everyone and left stranded on that planet, where they set up the distress beacon that leads to the events of the first Alien.

The fun thing about Prometheus speculation is that literally anything and everything would be as valid as the final product, whose greatest frustration was its wealth of dangling threads that no one made an effort to pull, let alone knit into something coherent.

exactly so.

it seemed perfectly clear that theron was a robot all the way through. they just forgot about it.

best scene is still the engineer beating weyland to death with the android head

nah, the only scene worth saving in this movie is the c-section

Art direction deserved an Oscar nomination. Damon Lindelof deserves vacuous obscurity.

oh yeah the space abortion scene, also good

I still hear it as "GIVE ME A SPACE ABORTION, NOW!" when she is yelling at the machine

lol

He's been really sheepish in interviews lately, like he knows what's up and how little many think of him, yet is, I don't know, maybe contractually obligated to take the fall or something and not throw someone else under the bus? I don't want to defend the dude, because his name is attached to too many things that fail for similar reasons, but I suppose one hypothetical (given how much work he keeps getting, and how so many in Hollywood praise him) is that he is a team player hack called in to save shitty scripts that stay shitty but end up with his name on it? I've told this story before, but once I interviewed David Koepp, and I specifically brought up the gymnastics girl vs. dino scene. He got pretty pissed, but once he settled down he had me turn off the tape and basically told me it was someone else's shitty idea and he was powerless to change it. So who knows?

Didn't the original script of this leak at some point, revealing that a lot of the bad stuff was in there before Lindelof was even brought in?

xpost

if you're a highly paid hack fixer who nevertheless leaves projects in as shitty a shape as lindelhof does while leaving your name on the front cover then you implicitly accept that people who pay to see that shit will say nasty things about you on the internet and in print. lyfe

He's certainly used to it as this point! These big budget things are just such a muddle that it's hard to believe he alone is to blame for something as giant and giantly wrong as this movie. This mess was collaborative

def agreed, its that he has form at this stage!

lol at koepp story

Didn't the original script of this leak at some point, revealing that a lot of the bad stuff was in there before Lindelof was even brought in?

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 28 September 2015 16:49 (2 hours ago) Permalink

I've read it! Alien: Engineers by John Spaihts. It's actually pretty good--certainly more coherent than the final product.

In the case of Prometheus I don't think Lindelof was called in to "fix" the script, I think he was hired to strip mine it and leave the rest for potential sequels.

This mess was collaborative

Well Alien's success was collaborative so I guess Ridley managed to capture some of the spirit of the original.

the thing about the Alien franchise that most everyone seems to miss is that for max suspense the Alien works best as a one-on-one booga booga monster, not a rampaging horde.

depends what kind of movie you're making doesn't it? 3 and Prometheus only had one alien each. It didn't make them better films

Maybe they need a horde of dog aliens?

i don't think 3 or prometheus dug deep on the booga booga factor.

About these scientists. I would buy the idea put across on this thread that Weyland insane rich dude, using poor judgement, hand-picked a selection of lunatics for the team, if the film showed us this.

The scene would probably involve Noomi and her boyfriend waking up from hypersleep, then slowly realising that there was something not quite right about the rest of the personnel, over a few days. Or perhaps David could raise his eyebrows at all of them whilst they were talking and that would be the subtle tell. There would be various hints in their prior behaviour as to what exact kind of horrible fuck up each of them was going to cause/suffer.

As it is, it's plausible, and like, was clearly going to be a big part of the movie at some point, but what we get doesn't really do the work of realising that.

There's another reading which would go: 'This planet is evil, the whole idea was doomed, and madness is inevitable for foolish humans who set foot on it'.

That's the reading that the film (i.e. the sheepish final edition we actually get) seems to be looking for

i like your idea, a movie about scientists slowly realizing that all the other scientists are nuts. could even go further, noomi rapace realizes husband guy is nuts too with his garbled up version of religion and science that's hollow at the core and really about his own desire to be great than it is the search for truth. so you could like, take the paranoia/and-then-there-were-none-thing that saturates alien but make that most of the movie. maybe in this pre-xenomorph universe the black goo (or whatever) is more like The Thing. people have aliens inside them but there's no chestbursting and all that, it's really a tense claustrophobic space movie, who can you trust, who is secretly a monster literally and figuratively. y'know... what they find out there in space is really just the empty parts inside themselves, the things they were hoping to fill up. could reinvent the whole symbolic framework of the alien series from there.

i never thought i'd say the best part of this movie was the terrible characterization of the scientists as morons but really if you wrote it backwards from that and purged everything else that didn't make sense this could actually have been really fucking awesome.

I can see that tbh

their biologist apparently last worked at a petting zoo

One thing the film did work hard at was going back to the spirit of the original Alien ...

An interesting thing about HR Giger's artwork is that while the thick claustrophobic style seems to have come out of nowhere, it does belong in a family tree that also includes Viennese fin-de-siecle artworks like this by Klimt. Again the 'biomechanical' style has definite precedents in other late 19th century decadent stuff, for example
this by Aubrey Beardsley is obviously in the same lineage as Giger's work. The sexual themes go without saying.

There's a lot of this vibe in the first Alien, at least while they're in the derelict at the start; with Aliens the alien itself detaches from the HR Giger aesthetic (which is also Viennese decadent aesthetic) and goes into a world which is distinctly post-war industrial, where it more or less stays throughout three and four. There's nothing mysterious about them by the time of four, they're just video game enemies of varying degrees of difficulty.

In Prometheus I thought that sense of decadence had been brought back - particularly when David decided to poison Charley in a baroque fashion, but also with Charlize Theron kissing her father's hand, and also in things like the charming little spacesuits the astronauts had dressed up in and their funny flashing weapons which were no use against Fyfield.

So credit where credit is due on that score. It's just such a shame that the blatantly obvious narrative - the engineers were a great and powerful race who discovered how to create life using Ye Wonderful Alchemickal Black Gooe (this would be one mural) but then their creations i.e. xenomorphs turned against them (this would be another mural) - seems to have been more or less scrubbed out by Lindelof and whoever else it was getting greedy for themes and breaking their shoe-horn in the process

xp by the way