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

that's cool. i might like it more on a second pass, but i don't know that i'll ever get over the disappointment (verging on betrayal, silly as that sounds). expectations are a curse.

Demanding quality from science fiction is bizarre. Real sci fi fans embrace the shitness

fantastic planet? surely you mean forbidden planet?

oh no no any space jockey prequel should be a lot more like fantastic planet than forbidden planet

fantastic planet is basically like the seventies made a movie about itself starring its favorite drugs

ok this thread is now about the antikythera mechanism and fantastic planet, please allow me to mash up the wikipedia entries for each into a mind melting face slammer of prose

Terr and the Wizard's champion have child-sized animals bound to their torsos in such a way as to prevent the combatants from using anything but the beaks of said animals to attack. The lower back dial is also in the form of a spiral, with 223 divisions showing the saros; it also has a smaller subsidiary dial which displays the 54 year "triple saros" or exeligmos.

Over the next several scenes, it is shown how the Oms have adapted to life on the Draags' planet. German Philologist Albert Rehm; Derek J. de Solla Price (with Charalampos Karakalos and his wife Emily); Allan George Bromley. Snail-like animals weave clothes onto the Oms, predators that would eat Oms are in turn hunted and efficiently stripped of useful materials, and the gene pool is kept well-mixed. Damp, salt-laden marine environments would quickly corrode the gears, rendering it useless.

why don't our astronauts have elephant helmets? maybe this is holding us back.

https://www.google.com/search?q=weyland+linkedin

hey man i got la planete sauvage on dvd, you know i'm bout it bout it

i just dont see the prometheus connection

love when terr interrupts the imagination session

i guess i'm just in love with draag culture if you know what i mean

why don't our astronauts have elephant helmets? maybe this is holding us back.

Have NASA, SpaceX, etc. flight-rated this guy's stuff? http://bobbasset.com/

what I was trying to say is "the engineers" should totally be like draags
sauvage is so much more fun than verboten

Fantastic Planet, trippy as it is, is real social-commentary classical sci-fi at its core.

ok - the last 20 mins of this were some crazy unexpectedly batshit Cthulhoid Hollywood filmmaking. What a confused yet gorgeous looking film.

Demanding quality from science fiction is bizarre. Real sci fi fans embrace the shitness

It's this attitude that's given us Joss Wheedon, Lindelof and co.

whoa there buster

So when does this movie open again?

the last 20 mins of this were some crazy unexpectedly batshit Cthulhoid Hollywood filmmaking.

Which is why Del Toro said Mountains of Madness had to be scrapped, b/c it has a lot of the same plot

Avatar is dreadful. Far worse than this.

I'M GLAD THAT's SETTLED

Which is why Del Toro said Mountains of Madness had to be scrapped, b/c it has a lot of the same plot

yeah, the similarities really are striking. engineers = elder things; black goo = shoggoths; curious explorers, ancient ruins and heiroglyphics, angry gods all present and accounted for.

I like this:

http://m.hitfix.com/motion-captured/prometheus-second-look-digging-deep-into-spoilers-and-questions

http://badassdigest.com/2012/06/08/sam-strange-remembers-prometheus/

Once upon a time, there was a show called Lost. The show was really popular because it allowed people to enjoy hokey sci-fi conventions without feeling like nerds. Everything supposedly serviced a very human story elevated high above geeky crap like that. It pulled this off simply by averring that it was pulling it off. It also kept things vague enough that people would invent the show's integrity all by themselves. By the time characters were time traveling and drinking magic water right and left without abandon, it was far too late for people to call bullshit and walk away. Brilliant.

So I hired that Lost guy to write Prometheus. I figured it would go the same way. We'd get people to buy tickets on false promises of thrilling intellectual storytelling and then kind of abandon all that halfway through. It's too much work to make a great movie. But a great trailer is child's play. The masterstroke was calling it an Alien prequel and letting that pedigree do all the work for us. Again, brilliant.

Prometheus is about a ship called "Prometheus" that goes looking for sort of a literal Prometheus. In a really cool looking prologue, we see a muscular Space Albino drink Space Acid so that he falls apart into Earth's water supply, therefore creating humans. But not Chimps...

Demanding quality from science fiction is bizarre. Real sci fi fans embrace the shitness

― badg, Wednesday, June 13, 2012 10:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is exactly backwards.

Although maybe not, if you're positing that "science fiction" and "sci-fi" are two different things.

distinction between scifi and sf can just diaf, afaiac

SCIENTIFICTION 4EVER

skiffy

sigh-fi

Guys it's SyFy.

phil d. otm

under the right circumstances, i like crappy crapmovies as much as anyone, but i've been a science fiction fan all my life, and i have yet to "embrace the shitness" as my default approach to the genre. because i'm a fan, i want better than that.

all fiction is science fiction

The more I think/read about it, the more I think it's some sort of achievement that a two hour movie could have so many plot holes, loose ends, unanswered questions, unexplained motives, and even a character who may or may not be a robot (but probably isn't, though I'd like to believe she is, given that she's basically written like a robot are there are several indications she could be a robot to the extent that one crew member even asks her flat out if she is a robot, a question she does not answer, so she probably should have been written as a robot all along) and still be a fundamentally solid film in terms of direction, effects, etc. It's really kind of amazing.

It's messy, like real life. Ergo, this film is the secret triumph of Dogme 95.

Most movies, even good ones, are full of plot holes, loose ends, unanswered questions, unexplained motives.

Yeah, but not this many, and not this huge! I mean, there are reviews that are literally just perplexed litanies, from that Red Letter Media review to the Hitflix thing just above. None call the movie incompetent, because it is not. And yet, it's a total mess.

Usually if the script is this terrible, the film follows.

The more I think/read about it, the more I think it's some sort of achievement that a two hour movie could have so many plot holes, loose ends, unanswered questions, unexplained motives, and even a character who may or may not be a robot (but probably isn't, though I'd like to believe she is, given that she's basically written like a robot are there are several indications she could be a robot to the extent that one crew member even asks her flat out if she is a robot, a question she does not answer, so she probably should have been written as a robot all along) and still be a fundamentally solid film in terms of direction, effects, etc. It's really kind of amazing.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, June 14, 2012 10:15 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what really drives me in crazy are the people tying themselves in knots trying to interpolate some sort of profound meaning/reason for all the holes

i guess that was being a fan of LOST in a nutshell though :/

xpost -- How dare you criticize the life's work of Coil and Michael Gira.

haha, s1ocki so sadly otm

After Alien: "Hey, what was that Space Jockey thing, kind of makes you think"

After LOST-style mystery: "Here is my ten point conjecture about the meaning of this throw-away line meant to invoke occult ideas"

prometheus: a masterpiece of postmodern magical realism

also scifi and science fiction both for nerds and fanboys

adults read "speculative fiction"

"Let's speculate on the dull angst of dull people here in 2012."

"You are the new John Cheever."

*death*

haha i had never really thought about what a meaningless phrase that is

what if everyone in the world went blind all at once?!?

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/you-are-the-only-human-being-left-on-earth-not-in-graduate-school-a-post-apocalyptic-nightmare

kept waiting for zatoichi to show up and put everyone out of their misery, sorry jose

Heh, from that other thing above:

In the same way David from A.I. was programmed to love without actually understanding it, David from Prometheus was designed to be a shithead without understanding exactly how being a shithead works.