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

you know what else exists 70-something years in the future? clothes you can buy right now at the gap. and a psychotic raver geologist displaced in time from 1995.

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

That's very true. Alien and ALiens--with a minimum of introduction and dialogue, the characters were all believable, and you knew they had pasts. The Prometheus guys were internally inconsistent blanks whose only notable elements (besides stupidity and inconsistency) were the ones I projected onto them from better roles they've had in other films and TV shows.

I mean, biologist who refuses to look at the first-ever (dead, unthreatening) alien body ever encountered and prefers to run away, but then cheerfully messes with obviously threatening snake thing after spending a paranoid night in a tomb? But I kind of liked him a bit because Rafe Spall was so odd and good in 'The Shadow Line'.

>sigh<

The one attempt to give a character some sort of a past--Noomi--they fuck up her accent and make the past boring

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.

haha otm

scott saying they didn't want to go there explicitly cuz it was "too on the nose", what a wuss. BE ON THE NOSE THAT'S THE POINT

though tbh playing up the jesus stuff would have just made it a disaster in a different kind of way

Prometheus is actually Star Trek V.

http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/prometheus-basically-star-trek-proof.html

Omg two sci-fi films share some of the same generic tropes, who'da thunk it?

They land on a barren stretch of land! Instead of Idk in the middle of a forest or on a mountain peak.

Ultrahack Scott reveals himself as little more than a production-design freak

Armond otm tbh.

Armond can't go one paragraph deep without trolling:

"Even the 1979 original (the best, seconded by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection)…"

And:

"The original film almost passes for art due to producer Walter Hill’s efficient adherence to genre storytelling …"

Dan O'Bannon spins in his grave. Hill's contributions to the screenplay were trivial at best, the only notable one being making Ash into a robot.

I think he gave the script a decent shave and haircut at the very least.

Something else weird: I got the impression that bio rave map dude had passed his respirator through a bong. That it in itself is not weird; so he was hot-boxing in his suit, fine. But then the bio idiot asks him about it (response: "Yeah, it's tobacco, ha ha" wink), end scene, and the next scene back with them they're both acting like total giggling idiots around snake tentacle alien monster. I have a feeling there's a cut gag with bio idiot huffing some of that smoke and getting high, which would explain their behavior (in movie world, at least). I bet at the last minute they decided to cut out the Cheech and Chong routineto heighten the "suspense" and "scares," which of course there are none of.

For fun: O'Bannon script: http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_early.html

Hill script: http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_shooting.html

Meanwhile, saw it again last night, IMAX 3D again, actually enjoyed it even more! Likely because since I knew when unavoidably foolish moments were coming I shrugged past 'em; in the meantime I was checking out various design details as I could in greater depth.

Am I right that there is no date stamp for the alien at the beginning? And how many years pass between the discovery of the cave paintings and the arrival of the ship?

no date stamp, no geotag

Huh, I thought (though I'm not going to be rushing back to find out) that the establishing shots over the salt plains or whatever in the opening scene were the same as those used when the Prometheus was coming in to land.

Lindelof: Originally in the draft there’s a scene in the movie where we see David with his headset on and he’s talking to someone, and we don’t know who it is, and he gets confronted by Vickers [Charlize Theron]. There’s a scene in the script that we decided not to shoot, where we see the inside of that dream, and basically David takes a jet ski out with a beautiful woman in a bikini, to a yacht, and on the yacht is Weyland – played by Guy, without old-age make-up: this is his dream. They have a scene together and in it David says, “The engineers are dead, they’re all gone, mission failure,” and Weyland says, “Go back and try harder.” We rewrote it so that we were going to play Weyland’s identity closed, give the audience a sense that David was talking to someone on the ship but not view them.

But we had already shot the scenes with Guy in the old-age make-up. So we were like, "Are people are going to wonder why we cast Guy Pearce to play an old man, unless we represent him as Guy Pearce?"

still wondering over here

this movie was pretty awesome... thought the last 20 or 30 mins were mildly disappointing, but the rest of it was kinda incredible

It was a kind of incredible, yes.

Would like to see a Prometheus featuring a robot jetskiing with bikini babes tbh.

That would bring it one step closer to Inception.

Speaking of which, bro asshole scientist really did look exactly like Tom Hardy, didn't he?

I honestly didn't notice his Tom Hardyness at all until other people pointed it out. And while I see it now I don't automatically think it.

lacking those muscles a bit

I thought it was Hardy for the first five minutes. Well confused.

so i just realised that History Channel series "Ancient Aliens" is produced by Prometheus Entertainment and I think it MEANS something.

Yeah: more viral bullshit.

Maybe this whole movie is the ultimate viral ad for something else! We're all dropping through the rabbit hole!

Genuflect upon the Alien, who died for our sins.

http://i46.tinypic.com/2qv5z55.jpg

The alien in the wall was one of the many wtf moments of this movie. Was it supposed to be an in joke?

This scene would have been improved by a booming voice.

http://www.thereelbits.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/prometheus001f-285x280.jpg

"The Gun is Good. The penis is Evil."

Not as good as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/olmec-legends-hidden-temple.jpg

"With your guide, Kirk Fogg!

When smiling Fassbender head was placed in the duffel bag, it was really pretty amazing.

xp lmao thank you for posting that exact legends of the hidden temple pic before i started hastily photoshopping!

Ugh this interview.

There is so much self-satisfaction in this Lindelof interview. He pats himself on the back for "ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the New York Times crossword puzzle does", but in his case he uses ambiguity to paper over gaping plot holes and poorly conceived characters. It's just lazy.

i dunno. maybe the Monday NYT crossword.

What’s rewarding is putting a puzzle together and popping that final piece in, and suddenly you understand -- this actually does connect to the world I know but in unexpected ways.

fuuuuuuck yooooou and fuck anyone who thinks art needs the crap redditbro pondering to connect to the real world

alien + aliens both 'connected' a billion times better than this dreck and damon lindelof is a hack and an idiot

i am angry on the internet

So it was really about embracing something that felt a little bit more original and unexpected.

q: did lindelof add anything to this franchise that was not already in lost

sculpey alien at the end

this was pretty sweet. like that it embraced the nihilism of the other movies. some sympathy for people who thought it was slow. total eyeroll at people who wanted some deeper meaning.

Like the filmmakers, you mean?

Working backwards from that smug Lindelof interview, I see that he is rewriting "World War Z." No doubt the cure for zombies will be ... faith. And hope. And maybe we are the zombies, and they are us, and they have always been here and part of us. And also smoke monsters.

Just saw this and found it totally entertaining. Not sure why a board that champions The Fast and the Furious and Miami Vice: The Movie! is scrutinizing this with such agonizing detail.

because it tries to be something else and doesn't really succeed. we have to make sure it KNOWS ITS GODDAMN PLACE.

Also I liked this movie a lot but it's not a patch on Miami Vice.

I think I went into the theater w/such low expectations based on this thread, I was really surprised. It's beautiful, creepy, scary... I don't know... I think a little suspension of disbelief goes a long way.

Honestly my only enduring beef with this is going to be in the editing/pacing; I thought tons of aspects of the plot/characterization were DUMB but basically admired their refusal to make anything like the creepy suspenseful Alien prequel promised by the trailer, which would have been mediocre but basically acceptable to everybody.... but boy was the pacing of this thing weird. Half the time I was convinced my theater was running the film too fast, particularly in the opening flyover montages.

Second viewing brought a very weird moment into focus -- Shaw and Janek on the bridge after Fifield's attack and death, with Janek talking about it being a military installation and etc. You could tell the scene as filmed was nothing but tense anger and fear, but the music, taking Shaw's note about a chance to meet the Engineers finally happening, busts into that demi-Star Trek hopeful theme. Very jarring.