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

enjoyed my prometheus experience. It was shiny. Def laughed at goofy scripting- mostly affectionately so. Movie works well, retroactively, when I pretend all human characters escaped from some sort of asylum for morons.

there were some lovely mysteries but mostly a lot of questions around how it was possible for these people to get food into their mouths and remember to breathe, much less run vast corporations and run science expeditions across the universe.

most things can be blamed on the script, but a lot can definitely be blamed on the editing, if not the direction. multiple subplots could have been eliminated or tweaked just enough to not be flapping around like vestigial appendages.

didn't sweat the science and enjoyed not having any clear answers, knowing that the idiot humans could be very wrong about most of their assumptions. I hear walt is scheduled to come back in Prometheus cubed

gonna watch it again on IMAX 3D

Movie works well, retroactively, when I pretend all human characters escaped from some sort of asylum for morons.

Earth, iirc

"I'm a space biologist. I didn't sign up on this mission to an alien planet just to investigate the bodies of an alien race. My main motiovation for my sudden disinterest is that I think the space geoplogist is cool and I'm going to follow him around and be his buddy."

"I'm a space geologist with advanced mapping technologies, but I got lost because no one thought to put an app on my iphone."

Is Charles Band still alive? I need him to make a quickie ripoff of this.

"I found hueg film moronic, but must watch it again but bigger while arty sinny die"

DEFINITELY quitting film criticism

It's the surest way to start enjoying movies again.

and fill up your days w/ poles & liszts

there's a whole world out there

where people do none of these things

other than watch good films and enjoy them

and discuss them with friends over well-made cocktails, or around a warm hearth

while dying their roots blond, quoting lawrence of arabia

Critics are afraid of talking about movies IRL with IRL people.

and getting some fools killed

IN A WORLD WHERE PEOPLE WATCH ONLY GOOD MOVIES AND ENJOY THEM ...

scans from the "art of" book

http://prometheusfrance.forumdefans.com/t36-le-livre-officiel-informations-officielles

Check out this intrepid little guy

http://i42.servimg.com/u/f42/16/22/94/10/p19210.jpg

ONE BITTER FILM CRITIC WAS DAYS AWAY FROM RETIREMENT

that jogging alien is the dumbest looking thing

from GIS of "dumbest looking thing"

http://grfx.cstv.com/schools/ucsb/graphics/auto/olepromo.jpg

https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQiSUOoBwYg4CeIZobXOLyOhQQ0RuTmqNlpfFG7lU3s_b3jp_br

microsoft introduces its new virtual concierge for windows 8, squishy the spermicle

http://i42.servimg.com/u/f42/16/22/94/10/p19210.jpg

that alien is dumber than that dumbest thing

To be fair, if you just looked at the art book pictures without understanding the French text you could probably put together a pretty terrific narrative that's far better than the movie.

xxxposts jon I can confirm Charles Band is still very much alive - he runs a little studio called Full Moon Pictures and is currently in production on Zombies Vs Strippers :D

has anyone seen his rubber suit monster movies? are those any fun?

More book tidbits/photos/background stories:

http://io9.com/5917639/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-design-of-prometheus

This review piles it on, but this part nails my dislike...

As in any Ridley Scott attempt to grapple with “big themes,” the ideas in Prometheus get handled with utter heavy-handedness in those few moments where they aren’t being ignored entirely in favor of empty bombast. Take the “questions of faith” Scott boldly explores here. Elizabeth, shown to be religious from childhood in a dreamscape flashback, and Charlie, who bears a cross tattoo on his arm, are the film’s standard-bearers for belief; they’re convinced their quest will lead to final answers. On the opposite side are the ship’s pragmatic, universe-weary captain Janek (Idris Elba), stern Weiland representative Meredith (Charlize Theron), and geologist Fifield (Sean Harris), all of whom seem far less concerned with the identity of their creator than making money and continuing to live. Somewhere in the middle is the ship’s android steward David (Michael Fassbender, providing the film’s only true signs of life); his motives in relation to the overall mission are opaque, but he does take any chance he can to remind the humans of his own created-ness at the hands of man. This confluence of characters should be the basis for some meaty narrative conflict, but you won’t learn much more about Sir Ridley’s thoughts on these weighty matters beyond the brief description I’ve just provided. Why explore the elements of your films, when it’s just so easy to merely introduce lots of stuff and hope that audiences will do the work for you?

Though science fiction often seems uniquely positioned to ponder the most massive of ontological questions, one can forgive when well-crafted futuristic fictions skimp on the thematic heft; Alien is remarkable for just how little it seemed to care about anything beyond great scares and thrills. It didn’t try to be 2001, unlike its new prequel. However, the real problem with Prometheus isn’t that its pretension can’t masks its ultimate empty-headedness; it’s that on a very basic level the movie just doesn’t really make any sense. (Not to mention that its creation myth completely contradicts everything we learned about our prehistory from Alien vs. Predator!) Plot threads begin, but are never resolved. Others happen in inexplicable vacuums: Elizabeth, accidentally impregnated with alien DNA, aborts the deadly fetus with the help of some kind of surgery machine pod, yet somehow no one else on the ship seems to know or hear anything about it. Major events are completely unlinked from consequence or are raised and resolved with impressive velocity: when Charlie, infected by the same DNA, is torched to death a few scenes later by a flamethrower wielding Meredith, the rest of the team reacts with little more than a “whatevs.” Others simply baffle: when the remaining members of the group find Powder’s similarly albino cousin and wake him from his eons-long slumber, what does the creature do but immediately recommence the mission to destroy all life on Earth that was begun thousands of years prior? Couldn’t this highly advanced race of beings just have sent another ship and killed off the human race at any time? Why wait until a bunch of knuckle-dragging cave dwellers learned the art of interstellar travel and came to find their “engineers” (the film’s ridiculous parlance, not mine)? This list could easily extend. It’s fine for movies to be simple of mind, but it’s unacceptable for them to treat their audiences as if they are as well.

Roger Ebert argued in his wildly positive review of Prometheus that it is “all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn’t have the answers.” This is a quite stupid thing to say in relation to a film like Prometheus for any number of reasons, not least of which is that it is clearly a film so utterly underconceived that it couldn’t even be said to be actively withholding the answers it obnoxiously never provides. It’s a lovely thing to look at—a feast of silvery grays and murky browns—but Scott’s been the master of lushly brainless imagery since at least as far back as 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Why do we exist? Prometheus will never tell—it’s not even curious enough to guess.

tbh would totally watch a series of webisodes featuring widdlest xenomorph just checkin things out

(xpost)

people on facebook/twitter/here keep posting about people complaining about this movie while not seeing "good movies"/artsy independent films - if you can recommend any good smaller/obscure movies that are out right now, please feel free to do so, because all the ones i read about sound shitty

like i guess i should have spent my $11 on quirky indie romcom lola versus? or quirky indie rom com safety not guaranteed?

stern Weiland representative

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzVgIop0f0Y

like i guess i should have spent my $11 on quirky indie romcom lola versus? or quirky indie rom com safety not guaranteed?

Bernie was funny

I bet the new Cronenberg is worth seeing

is that the weekend at bernie's prequel

yes, it answers (and raises) a lot of fascinating questions only hinted at in the original film

like, who was that one guy at the party? and was he related to Jesus?

eh i guess the problem is getting motivated to see any of those movies in the theater vs. at home - like what is "bernie" going to gain from being seen on the big screen? question for another thread i guess.

every kind of movie is better in a theater

well yeah Bernie is not in 3D Imax and doesn't FLY AT U FACE, on the other hand you might relish spending an enjoyable evening in the company of gay couples and old people, if my experience is any indicator lol

lol

Couldn’t this highly advanced race of beings just have sent another ship and killed off the human race at any time?

This is kind of recurring - why couldn't "the company" just fly a spaceship to the original planet and pick up a nice big box of the eggs, instead of continually sending random punters off to be eaten.

huh?

Well, the idea in "Aliens" was basically that the colonists were sent there specifically to be eaten and hatch aliens, right?

not really?

The idea was that Paul Reiser needed to be eaten.

if only

you know what would have been better, is if Paul Reiser's character had been played by Helen Hunt

you know what would have been better, is if Paul Reiser's character had been eaten by Helen Hunt

Yeah but they did it 57 years after the company's first attempt to get the eggs/aliens. Why the gap?