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

A mystery at the beginning? Does this movie leave open the possibility of a sequel AND a prequel?

Honestly, I can't see why not. There's a lot of years that pass in the first few minutes.

That said, I hope the sequel is all "The Adventures of Dr. Noomi and Fassbender's Head."

Too much left for a sequel really. They should have answered a bit more. Assuming that opening dude was a Prometheus figure though.

There is absolutely no way to even guess what the being at the beginning was up to. Did he eat the goo on purpose? Was there a miscommunication? Was he dropped off or was that ship there to pick him up? We also have no idea if that is pre-humanity or not. Does it ever say when that early stuff is taking place? There is also a subtle hint later, from David, that the Christian doctor's dad didn't die of ebola but "ebola," ie some other virus that may or may not have been created by the being at the beginning,

But unanswered questions are neither here nor there, I say. I mean, we don't even know if Charlize is an android or not (maybe she herself doesn't know, a la Blade Runner!). The only problems I had with this movie were practical, that is, the utter stupidity of the people, the religious component, the fact that the Tom Hardy guy is such an asshole bro from minute one. That sort of stuff.

Vital interview:

http://www.movies.com/movie-news/ridley-scott-prometheus-interview/8232?wssac=164&wssaffid=news

RS: ... you have a sequence at the beginning of the film that is fundamentally creation. It’s a donation, in the sense that the weight and the construction of the DNA of those aliens is way beyond what we can possibly imagine …

Movies.com: That is our planet, right?

RS: No, it doesn’t have to be. That could be anywhere. That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself.

If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.

I always think about how often we attribute what has happened to either our invention or memory. A lot of ideas evolve from past histories, but when you look so far back, you wonder, Really? Is there really a connection there?”

Then when I jump back, and you put yourself in a situation of a cave painting, you see that someone 32,000 years ago is showing me a little man sitting in the darkness, using a candle light that is fat from a creature he killed and ate. And in the darkness are two or three other family members whose body heat is warming the cave. But he has discovered that from a piece of this black, burnt stick, he has discovered that he can draw pictures on the wall.

In essence, you have the first level of emotion and a demonstration of entertainment, right? Because he’s drawing brilliantly on the God damn wall. Now, you put yourself into that context, it’s 100-times bigger than Edison. And people don’t go back to the basics and ask, “Holy shit, what gave him that knowledge, that jolt to not scribble on the wall but draw on it brilliantly?”

If you go back and look, a completely underrated film is Quest for Fire. That was one of the most genius, simplistic but incredibly sophisticated notion of what it was. The evolution of that was just fantastic. And that got me sitting back on my ass thinking, “Damn! What a fundamentally massive idea.”

(Hmm, maybe that was linked upthread? Regardless ...)

Pretty sure that waterfall was the beautiful Gullfoss

http://venefica84.deviantart.com/art/Gullfoss-Iceland-270361485

I thought this movie was not much better or worse than an Avatar or a Gladiator or an Inception.

Yeah have been thinking of quality comparisons with Avatar. It's another film with pseudo profundity at its heart innit?
Also looks pretty good in 3d.

Prometheus is way better than Avatar imo. It looks a lot better, has some genuinely great moments, etc.

Yeah, this is better than "Avatar." "Avatar" left no questions that needed to be answered, and answered lots of questions no one asked. It was pretty self-contained and a little too tidy. "Prometheus" is an intriguing mess, which is far more entertaining to me.

"Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About"

http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1

^^ otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJSayPfRmFc

The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day.

Yeah, this was pretty subtle in the film, what with all the talk of Christmas.

Why did the engineers wait thousands of years to destroy humanity? Why did it take visiting humans to wake them from their hypersleep to start up the death ships? Why did those holograph videos show them running scared and getting their heads chopped off by closing doors? What were they running from? Why was there an alien (as we know it) embedded in the wall? Where did those worms come from?

It's cool that the guy wrote a long post hammered all these square pegs into round holes, but he's basically as lost as any of us are. Personally, I'd like to think of the Engineers - where did the scientist even get the idea that they made us, anyway? - as victims of hubris, like they found this planet as a base station but didn't realize it was already overrun with cooties that cottoned to their black goo.

I think it'd be pretty ironic if this movie is sort of a mess not because of the religious stuff stuck in but because there was a bunch of religious stuff taken out. Seems like Ridley had been watching a lot of "Tree of Life" and "Cave of Forgotten Dreams."

I'd blame Lindelof for that, not Scott.

Entire scenes seemed pasted in from previous script drafts. Like the oh I can't get pregnant bit, or the old guy reveals at the end, which seemed to be payoffs of stuff that was to be already set-up.

Got way more outta this than Avatar, I will say.

Whoa at the parallel to the Annunciation

But the pregnant bit seemed to play a role, telegraphed though it may have been. The old guy reveal ... I have no idea what purpose that served. Again, wish there was an extra 20 or 30 minutes at the start, exploring the development of David, the nature of his programming, his relationship to Charlize (who is essentially his sister, whether she is a robot or not). It would have been more "2001"-like, a placid, odd, sterile start to something that gets grim and gooey.

director's cut

eek I am about to see this right now in ultra avx 3d!
Then I will read thread

here's a super-big shot of the ceiling mural that I couldn't see clearly in the theater

Trying to figure that one out...someone observing the opening of an egg/pod?

Anyway the viral nonsense continues:

http://www.projectprometheus.com/genesis/

http://www.whatis101112.com/

Latter one doubtless refers to Blu-Ray/DVD release.

so it turns out the space jockey is just a humanoid who happens to wear a helmet that makes him look like an elephant? Fuck this shit.

can't believe a bullshit cash-in of empty cash turned out to be bullshit

Hahaa
Well, at least it looked super cool...

It's too bad that hollywood hates writers so much

why didn't they just get an old guy to play weyland

IKR!!! like why the fuck waste so many pounds of makeup making him look like The Thing when there are actually old people actors out there

is guy pearce really so great of an actor/so much of a box office draw to justify that

a lot of people want to see Guy Pearce near death obv

all people in this movie must be hot, so the old geezer needs to be a hot dude in old man makeup

clearly we are the ones who made the engineers in the first place imo

in the future
and then... time travel, lots of it

Personally, I'd like to think of the Engineers - where did the scientist even get the idea that they made us, anyway?

from the script

anyway, ignoring the "well now you can take off that cross" bullshit, the first 2/3 of this are really fine. everything up to and including the c-section is worthy of "alien prequel" status at least in that it presses all the same buttons as alien and does it well enough, is suspenseful, is scary, imo. felt like old times, buncha assholes going to space and getting killed in creative ways.

the rest of the movie is just fucking lindelof

scientists written by a team of writers+producers+director aren't the smartest tbh

surgery scene is the greatest

stop giving him work, he actually does not know how to tell a story without trying to explain the origin of the universe and science vs faith and ugggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh

it's like he's the only one in hollywood who knows he uses all this shit as a crutch/deus ex machina because he has no idea what else to do

xp to myself wrt lindelof

pretty sure every century gets the Boethius it deserves

also fwiw it made sense to me for assbender to contaminate asshole bro boyfriend. he was clearly resentful, but he also spends the whole movie going off and exploring and acting like a child because science is magic. he might as well represent unchecked scientific curiosity. also guessing oldface mcgee gave him secret orders to do whatever he felt necessary to help him.

this was one of the dumbest and most irritating movies i've seen in a long, long time. i went in with what i thought were sensibly reduced expectations, but was still staggered by the towering foolishness on display. nothing anyone did or (apparently) thought made even the slightest bit of sense. the action was pointless and disconnected, a series of seemingly random events brought to hundred million dollar life for no apparent reason. i cannot for the life of me imagine how this thing got made. worse than the third and fourth alien installments, worse than event horizon and far, far worse than avatar. fuck you, ridley scott.

praise from caesar

http://www.nyfcc.com/2012/06/prometheus-reviewed-by-armond-white-for-cityarts/

As I was reading, I thought the highlight might be the way he praises Alien but refuses to give Scott any credit at all for it, but then he builds to this lovely climax:

Just as Wall-E demeaned the spectacular movie-musical romance Hello, Dolly! to the delight of ignorant film geeks, Prometheus plays with our culture’s most profound artistic expressions of human ambition, merely for a series of unpleasant thrills: Noomi Rapace performing an abortion on herself, various decapitations, dispirited ruminations on religion and, finally, Guy Pearce in ludicrous Halloween make-up. It’s a foul repeat, a noxious burp. If you swallow Prometheus, you’ll swallow anything.

also this little gem:

(played by Michael Fassbender who quickly has come to emblematize crap cinema)

the reactions to this have been really violent!

hello dolly will never recover

i'm going to wait until tomorrow to decide how i really feel about this movie (tho i'm already feeling that not-so-good feeling)
right now i'm just being like "it was cool when x happened..." about it. i do know that i don't feel like shuddering spite i felt immediately after watching Alien 4. but maybe i'm a more tolerant person now than i was then. haha no. i just see things more for what they are.

seriously though, remind me to never become a screenwriter