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

seriously you'd think a super advanced race of lumbering flautist dudes would manage to find a more expedient way to wipe out the human race, no wonder it was a balls up

he looked like old man Biff in Back to the Future

Someone shouted out "Mr. Burns!" at the screening I was at.

I thought he looked like Grandpa from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

http://cdn.springboard.gorillanation.com/storage//upl_images/dads-TCMGrandpa%281%29.jpg

You could handwave it as "This is an exact match with the bits of human DNA that we all have in common"

Also hey look, our ancestors weren't black after all, but whiter than white! Whooo!

this is starting to sound like an episode of dr who

I'm impressed by the consistency of the reviews, positive and negative alike: this is pretty, but pretty daft.

I saw this twice within 24 hours, and would see it again in a heartbeat. Love it. It's like Forbidden Planet mixed with Star Trek: the Motion Picture and a selection of front covers from 1970s SF novels. The plot doesn't make one lick of sense but it looks like what I always hope sci-fi movies would look, but never, ever actually do.

Basically this for me, combined with Edward III/latebloomer's thoughts, especially:

not scary at all, suspense almost non-existent. but it's a v weird movie, and quite beautiful in its rendering of natural phenomena - the opening pan over plains and waterfalls is breathtaking. I can't quite explain why I enjoyed it, but I was never bored.

If pretty prettiness is all you're after, just watch Koyanisqaatsi again. Or any Malick film.

it really doesn't look like 70s sci-fi novel front covers though. It does look nice, but it's way more boring than that

The waterfall was amazing but I put that down to the waterfall being amazing, rather than any skill of the film makers.

yeah iceland* is a real place guys

*nb not the supermarket, tho that is real too

Just watch Sigur Ros music videos.

I have been to Dettifoss and stood almost exactly where Potato Head stood when he drank whatever it was.

You then shivered into a million pieces and created life.

I try my best.

One thing I liked about that opening was that it wasn't clear whether it was a willing sacrifice or a punishment or something else going on. (Obviously SEEMS like a willing sacrifice but...is it? But again, doesn't need to be explained either way.)

Ugh. What a shit sandwich this was.

another odd thing: alien is such a patient, suspenseful movie but even scott's knowing nods to it here are all wrong. like the sequence of discovering and entering the engineer's base (I've had lunches at drive-thrus take longer) or noomi being attacked in the shuttle by the engineer (you're breaking in? I'll just dispatch you in seconds!).

At least we know the answer to the question "What if Schick Sunn Classic Pictures had a quarter-billion dollar budget?"

Ha, I was wondering what your reaction would be and figured it would go either way.

this was somehow better than i was expecting, yet exactly what i was expecting. it's a gorgeous movie, scott hasnt made a movie this good looking since the 80s. at times its a pretty good horror movie. but its terrible sci-fi. lindelof's insipid fingerprints are all over it, and he doesn't have a single idea rattling around in his skull. i didn't hate it though, it was tense and cool-looking. c-section scene and the build-up to it is seriously fantastic

Which is funny, because you can see so vividly where he was ADDED to it. It's got the most visible rewrite seams of anything maybe ever! All the daddy issues/cheeseball faith vs. science spirituality stuff (stop trying to push this theme in sci fi!!!!!!!)... etc. etc...

― Walter Galt, Thursday, June 7, 2012 10:29 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

otm

that awful scene with patrick wilson = first bad sign

the scene where tattooskull and glassesguy are first talking right out of cryosleep = the anti-Alien, which never needed dialogue like "i don't want to be your friend" to let you know everyone on the nostromo hated each other's guts

the pearce/theron reveal was classic lindelof, by which i mean a horrible horrible horrible scene

i got a lot of 2nd rate jurassic park vibes out of this, from the phony sense of wonder & themes of scientific meddling to the nedry scene where glassesbro is trying to entice a giant snake monster to sniff his hand for no discernable reason

meddling to the nedry scene

Well I have my place in the universe and all but...

The waterfall was amazing but I put that down to the waterfall being amazing, rather than any skill of the film makers.

― Jesu swept (ledge), Friday, June 8, 2012 11:50 AM (1 hour ago)

I dunno, that's kinda like saying the opening of the shining is impressive because the rockies are beautiful. this movie's indefensible on the whole but let's give credit where credit is due.

i got a lot of 2nd rate jurassic park vibes out of this, from the phony sense of wonder & themes of scientific meddling to the nedry scene where glassesbro is trying to entice a giant snake monster to sniff his hand for no discernable reason

I got some lolsome "ghost adventures" vibes from that scene where glasses guy and mohawk dude are wigging out in the cave

for a recently terrified biologist, he sure was eager to have his arm ripped open by a penile vagina fish

Maybe that's what he always wanted.

yeah whoever was doing the psych evaluations for prospective crew members must have had a cruel sense of humor

I dunno, that's kinda like saying the opening of the shining is impressive because the rockies are beautiful. this movie's indefensible on the whole but let's give credit where credit is due.

sometimes scenery really does do 90% of the work though. the icy mountainscapes in game of thrones are absolutely gorgeous, jaw-dropping, some of the most beautiful imagery i've ever seen in a television drama. but the rest of the show is quite pedestrian, visually speaking. now it may be that the DP for the iceland-shot stuff is just way better than anybody else holding a camera for GoT, but i suspect the location itself has a lot to do with it.

In that Lindelof interview linked upthread (maybe?) he seems to be subtly distancing himself from some of the more batshit elements, basically saying he came in at the last minute to put a polish on a mostly complete script/idea. Maybe so. Or maybe that is just bad false modesty, since he has a history of doofustry.

but there are other moments in the film besides the opening that get "big nature" right - like the dust storm on LV-223, which as far as I know had no second unit DP shooting footage

xp

Saw a review somewhere that compared this, unfavorably, to DePalma's "Mission to Mars," which iirc had a giant sentient sandstorm in it.

Ok it was shot well, I'll give it that. Xp.

(waves hand royally)

Saw a review somewhere that compared this, unfavorably, to DePalma's "Mission to Mars," which iirc had a giant sentient sandstorm in it.

:O

That is one of the worst movies I've ever sat through. Fucking Jerry O'Connell.

Ha, I was wondering what your reaction would be and figured it would go either way.

There are sone bones of a good movie here, but to work it would need to have been lower budget (I kept thinking that Duncan Jones would have been a far better director). Prometheus is so wrapped up in in trying to fill every frame with spectacle that you never really get involved and by extension, it seems that no one: actor, director, or crew was really involved with the movie either. Actually, that's not true... Damon Lindelof is definitely engaged here and that's to the detriment of everyone. There's always been an implied cynicism that sci-fi fans will go see any sci-fi movie regardless of quality and that's exactly what you get here, but the execution is so WTF that the closest movie I could think of was Mission To Mars (even down to the once good director)

x-post

To put it another way, Battlestar Galactica remake's final episode was far more engaging.

Gawkerville has two pieces up:

http://io9.com/5916778/the-best-part-of-prometheus-isnt-the-aliens

http://deadspin.com/5915878/it-feels-like-the-first-timealmost-prometheus-reviewed

Would've been better if it was just David pottering around the space ship for two hours.

Like "Silent Running" with aliens.

BTW, isn't the black oil substance in this lifted directly from The X-Files?

haha yeah point 10 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jun/08/prometheus-ten-key-questions

pretty much everyone over there hates it too

A few of those misgivings are valid, a few are nitpicky.

I actually liked this, though it would have been vastly superior as a standalone, no-franchise-ambitions, no-Alien-connection flick.

And yeah basically everything shitty about it can be traced back to Lindelof.

re those Guardian points

1. yes
2. clearly been visiting, and at some point changed their mind - whatever happened in the cave/pyramid thing was about 2,000 years ago
3. money
4. this is fair - and muddled, though in regards to Holloway vs. the guy that went nutso...Holloway had a single drop infecting his system, the other guy planted face down in a flowing stream of the good
5. I assumed for sequel purposes, because otherwise, yes, it makes no sense
6. Presumably Weyland doesn't want anyone know his motives and the fact that he's probably got David running around using the people as guinea pigs to see what effects if any there are to whatever they find
7. see #6
8. because the plot needed her to
9. that's the question they explicitly ask in the movie and explicitly state they are going to fly off into the sequel to try to find out so why that's a question her i have no idea
10. yeah, it is a bit.

good=goo*

Meanwhile, v. good Rich Juzwiak take (unsurprisingly).

http://gawker.com/5916932/what-is-the-meaning-of-life-and-other-questions-prometheus-fails-to-answer

thought this was overall good, but a lot has to do with expectations and what to expect from a Ridley Scott film since 1982 (i.e. not much). can understand derision but i think that misses out on some good stuff. Not sure why Ebert and Glenn Kenny thought it was super mega awesome, other than it has a decent stab at "old school sci-fi" for a little while

i think the "dude who told them where to go was a rogue" theory is pretty good since it's called prometheus and all that

So I was vaguely curious who was playing all the engineers -- turns out it wasn't just one person:

Daniel James = 'Sacrifice Engineer'

John Lebar = 'Ghost Engineer'

Ian Whyte = 'Last Engineer'

thought this was overall good, but a lot has to do with expectations and what to expect from a Ridley Scott film since 1982 (i.e. not much). can understand derision but i think that misses out on some good stuff

I'm OK with movies trying to reach out a bit and failing. For example, I thought that Contact was ridiculous, clumsy, and hokey in how it handled its subject, but completely entertaining as a movie. By the end of Prometheus, I was ready for the Engineers to full-tilt gnostic and destroy all life on earth for evolving the ship's crew.