[civilian_number_two]

The most boring and stupid thing a lazy author can do is to borrow from a classical source, especially the bible, and use it as a template for his fiction. Any time you suspect an author has done so, you will probably be right. Stealing from the Bible is about as cliched as quoting The Wizard of Oz. Any Screenwriting 101 professor would slap you on the wrist fro trying any of this crap. It is neither deep nor original to reference the most-referenced material ever written. It is embarrassing.

The religious nonsense in this movie stood out like a sore thumb and all of this ponderous posturing made a potentially-good dumb monster movie into garbage. I thought this was a beautiful if scientifically flawed film, on the surface. Once the narrative became more and more clear, I felt like I was watching the Matrix sequels as written by George Lucas.

Here's a rule for film producers going forward. It won't be followed, because who am I to dictate rules? but here it is: jot down the names of all the writers who worked on LOST. Memorize the names. NEVER HIRE THESE PEOPLE.

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer films that answer the questions they ask. The ones that leave open questions, well sometimes that is good too, but the questions had better be interesting ones.

For instance: "Where did we come from?" may be interesting in the right context. But "Given that the well-documented process of evolution can now be traced back to the introduction of amino acids into a river in Iceland, and given that it makes no sense that that these amino acids would go on after millennia to form humans (and along the way, numerous species of non-humans), and I say that it makes no sense because we now have a pretty good idea of how evolution works and the idea of demolished DNA strands somehow remembering how to get back together exactly as they once were can only exist WITHOUT that understanding, and given that these amino acids were introduced by an alien species that comes back later as a giant, boring, rampaging Hulk, where did that Hulk come from?" is NOT interesting. It's a parody of the Bible as written by the staff of MAD Magazine.

They had 33 years to make a sequel to ALIEN. Why weren't they ready?

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 16 June 2012 - 06:30 PM

[Jordan]

I haven't seen this film. But I'm going to this week. But you made a point how borrowing from classical sources is lazy. Why do you feel this way? Is it worse than pilfering recent works (No Country for old Men = Missouri Breaks)? There are so many classical stories in the bible that it's almost impossible not to pilfer at least one. Was this film anything like Event Horizon, that movie was pretty good as I recall. Sci-Fi horrors are an awesome genre, I hate horror films in general but always enjoyed them with a sci-fi backdrop.

I assumed this film had something to do with the Greek Mythos, but found out it may have a creationist detail to it. Is that the lazy writing you were refering too?

This post has been edited by Jordan: 18 June 2012 - 05:58 AM

[civilian_number_two]

Yeah that's the lazy writing right there. All the way through it, it was reminding me of Creative Writing assignments in high school. I remember you could always get top grades and the attention / envy of your peers just by dropping occasional simplistic references to the Bible, Greek Mythology, etc. People would always assume you were onto something because you were able to make superficial pop culture references, or you have the courage to answer open-ended questions with no promise of an answer. Funny enough, were you to borrow from other pop culture, and say, reference popular movies or comic books, you would not enjoy similar accolades. think that's why Steven King, who frequently cites the lyrics to pop songs to his novels, is generally considered low-brow, while this is being praised to high heaven for its ability to make extremely shallow references to the Myth of Prometheus and to the also-inscrutable 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I will hold off on more specific spoilers until after you've seen it and hated it.

[Lord Aquaman]

I didn't think the film was terrible, just not up to par with the original ALIEN.

[Just your average movie goer]

As always, I'll start this under the assumption that everyone reading this has now seen it so there'll probably be some spoilers but it's unlikely I can spoil it any more than the trailer did. The only thing the trailer didn't tell us was that the movie wasn't any good - but I suppose that level of honesty wouldn't be particularly sensible from a marketing perspective so I can understand why it was omitted.

That said, I found it enjoyable enough in the cinema after lowering my expectations appropriately as the early reviews came in and of course, switching my brain off. I wanted to have a good time at the movies and so did my best to enjoy the thing, which I did... but still, you have to be in a really charitable mood to get any entertainment out of watching Prometheus.

Okay. Onto the discussion. Civilian's touched on the religious symbolism - the engineer sacrificing himself to create life for instance - as well as the dull premise. And it is dull for exactly the reason he mentioned. It doesn't work as an intriguing "What if..." concept, because we already know it's total rubbish.

And what was with the alien DNA/human DNA 100% identical match, while we're on that subject? Surely, with a 100% identical match, there would be a somewhat stronger likeness between the engineers and the human race, no? After all, the closest thing you can get to separate individuals with 100% identical DNA is identical twins.

Also, before I forget... I know everyone's already said it but Damon Lindelof is a terrible writer. And after seeing this, I'm convinced that Ridley Scott is not a director but just a good cinematographer - because a real director would take more interest in the story. There is no way that an actual director, fully conscious, would allow the multitude of flaws that were in this movie's script to not only slip through initial discussions but to actually let them into the final picture. That is especially true of a picture with the kind of budget this movie had and the expectations that were riding on it. After watching Prometheus, I further confirmed this by looking at the backlog of Ridley Scott's work on the IMDB and it really is hit-and-miss. The man clearly has no aptitude for nor interest in the story aspect of movie making.

Now, what else can we look at? I suppose we can ignore the premise from here on. I certainly ignored it when I was in the cinema. It was part of the strategy I used so I could enjoy the movie. I even ignored the way Elizabeth Shaw was able to run around after that major operation she performed on her abdomen as well, since I was feeling so generous at the time. I'm no scientist but I think people need intact abdominal muscles to even stand up. However, I let that slide. Incidentally, the transition from the operation scene to the final act is the worst scene transition I've ever seen in a movie. Shaw doesn't react to seeing the hideous Guy Pierce Monster Weyland and nobody really reacts to seeing Shaw. I thought it might have been nice if someone had asked her whether she was okay. Oddly enough, the only one who comments on what happened is David, the android - and only later in the movie.

Anyway, what really got me in Prometheus was the lack of structure and story. There was absolutely nothing driving the narrative - and you need something. A threat for the characters to ward off. A mystery to solve. Something to find. A romantic relationship to build. Anything would do but there needs to be something there. Now, some charitable souls might argue that there was a threat in Prometheus but I couldn't see one. The characters could have packed up and left at any moment in the movie. It wasn't as though anyone was trying to stop them. And the one surviving engineer doesn't count as a threat because it was only when the characters woke him up that he became one - and that was very late in the film.

As for the rest of the movie, I can only really describe the middle hour as shenanigans. Prometheus lands on the planet. The characters (for want of a better word) do some exploring. They touch things they shouldn't touch. They behave recklessly and do silly things and some of them get away with this and some of them don't. The only things holding our interest at this stage are the characters of David and Elizabeth - David because despite the weakness of the movie he's in, he's a compelling character, and Elizabeth because Noomi Rapace does a wonderful job with the limited material she has to work with. Idris Elba is enjoyable too because of the laconic charm he brings to his role, I suppose, but his character is really given nothing to do at all until that implausible ending that comes out of left field - and Meredith Vickers is easy on the eyes because Charlize Theron is playing her. Charlize does a great job with what she's given too but again, what she's given is very little. Still, better than Aeon Flux. I gave up on that film after five minutes, which might be a record for me. I really wish someone would give that woman a role in a decent movie because she's clearly a capable actress.

Anyway, the rest of it's just a series of random set pieces with little connection between them that do nothing to advance the plot. The two idiots who got lost, for instance. They add nothing to the film by the presence and their grisly ends add nothing either. When one of them comes back to the ship as some kind of zombie thing (never mind how; the movie doesn't) and a whole lot of other characters are killed off, it just trims the extraneous characters so the movie can begin to have something of an ensemble that the audience can possible care about (although by that time, it's over an hour too late for that). They should have just had fewer characters to begin with. Also, I'm sure there was a piece of dialogue missing there: "Idiot One has come back to the ship. All unnamed characters report to the cargo bay!"

On a side-note, the scene with the cobra-like creature was a pretty bad move for another reason. Here, the movie presented us with a stupid scene that had no bearing on the plot. However... that's not the real problem. Prometheus had plenty of those - Elizabeth's dream for instance. No, the really silly thing about that scene was that it reminded the audience of a much better scene that was pivotal to the plot of a far better movie. Why Ridley Scott and that incompetent screenwriter of his would want to deliberately remind the audience that they could be watching a much better movie instead of Prometheus is beyond me. The same can be said for the references to Lawrence of Arabia as well - although admittedly, when those references were made, the film still looked as though it could come together. After all, the montage with David at the beginning was actually nicely done.

"There's nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing."
"What's that?"
"Oh, it's just something from a movie I happen to like much more than this one."

As for the scene where Elizabeth performs emergency surgery on herself, I think that is pretty much like the other shenanigans that litter the film, except for the fact that it has a bearing on the film's ending. It shouldn't have any bearing on it but unfortunately, this is the type of film Prometheus is.

Then, after all the silliness is done, someone decides that steps should be taken to end the movie and the audience is then treated to a rushed finale with little set-up and consequently no real pay-off. When the movie ends, the feeling one gets is that they've seen some pretty landscapes and some nice sets but little else. There isn't a lot of point to the movie. It doesn't answer any questions. Its relationship to Alien is poorly handled. If you include Prometheus in the continuity line, then there are now two wrecked space jockey ships on separate planets, along with two warnings about the contents of these ships. Great. I would have been fine if Ridley Scott had made a direct prequel to Alien. I would have been fine if he made something completely unrelated. But instead, he made blatantly obvious (and cringe-worthy) references to it, while taking neither of these options. And of course, he took the space jockey, talked and talked about how he would explore its origins and then made it really boring. I see no reason, even within the context of the movie's premise that the space jockeys created the human race... no reason why they couldn't have still retained their alien features. When I saw the engineer suit up at the end so that he resembled the space jockey from Alien, I wasn't impressed. I just felt disappointed. There is nothing inherently wrong with the concept that the elephantine features that we believed were part of these aliens' appearances are just features of a helmet that they wear but it's just really uninteresting.

Finally, one cannot help but feel cheated by the obvious sequel set-up. Whether sequels are intended or not, movies should really be made to stand alone on their own two feet as self-contained stories. Also, Ridley Scott has made a rather large fool of himself by prattling on an on about how profoundly clever this movie was going to be. In the end, it was a monster movie and a dumb one at that. If he had simply said that he was going to make a fun science-fiction monster movie for a bit of light summer entertainment, I think that would have been fine. There's nothing wrong with a monster movie. The original Alien, for instance, was at its heart a monster movie. It had a simple B-Grade premise and out of it came an A-grade film. A monster movie but something that was so much more. Prometheus wanted to be so much more but was just a monster movie. I remember finding another review somewhere that mentioned this. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought so.

Now, there are a lot of reviews on this movie out there so I don't really need to say a great deal more about it. I read a handful of them just for the fun of it and most of them say more or less the same thing. I did come across a nice quote though, which offers this wonderful tidbit for anyone planning on watching the thing:

"The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it sucks."

I had to throw that in there. However, as I said, while I didn't mind that it sucked when I saw it at the cinema, I doubt anything good could come out of a repeat viewing aside from a greater appreciation of the numerous problems - a myriad of the things, of which I've only mentioned a handful. Now the movie's not horrendously awful but it's pretty mediocre. Horrendously awful would be like Alien3, Alien Resurrection or the Alien vs Predator movies that deserve half a star at best (and the second Alien vs Predator deserves none at all). They're unwatchable. Prometheus isn't unwatchable. As I said, with the right type of mindset, appropriate lowering of expectations and the right environment (the cinema), Prometheus is enjoyable enough for a mindless summer blockbuster. David was a compelling character. A few other leads did good jobs with their limited material. The storm sequence was a bit of a thrill, if not wholly necessary for the story. Ah... let's see... Iceland looked nice. Prometheus looked good in flight. That map of the galaxy was pretty. But anyway, here's how I think it ultimately stacked up.

Alien *****
Aliens ****
Prometheus ** and a half

I initially gave it *** and a half but after reflection, I thought that was too generous. At best, it's *** but clearly, it's not in the same league as Alien.

One last thing. I worried when I went to see Prometheus whether it would spoil my enjoyment of Alien. However, I'm happy to say that after watching Alien again recently, Prometheus doesn't affect it in the slightest. In fact, I only remembered Prometheus briefly while I was watching Alien and then just shrugged it off. The space jockey was still the space jockey for me. He wasn't a steroid-injected albino in a suit. He was the same mysterious alien creature who had set off that warning that the Nostromo picked up.

So was Prometheus its own entity, a prequel or a cousin-once-removed? It was none of these. It was just a silly 'what if' film that's enjoyable enough for a single viewing and can be discarded afterwards. Prometheus was a non-event.

If you really want to see a great movie in the Alien series, watch Alien.

This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 06 July 2012 - 09:21 PM

[civilian_number_two]

Yes. Obviously I agree with everything there. Except maybe the 2.5 stars. I think I'd go for a 2, the out-of-five rating I give to movies I would never watch again. Not bad enough for any sort of ironic fun, not good enough for any real fun. But maybe for you that's 2.5, so it's a small quibble.

I think the look of the Engineers was a huge disappointment. In order to make their premise work, they had to say "hey remember the space jockey? That was a costume; he really looked like this!" That's classic retcon shit. I half-expected Alec Guinness to show up to explain that the space jockeys had been humans all along, "from a certain point of view."

The DNA is garbage of course. Looking at DNA through a hand-held microscope is laughable, and not in the way that this comic is laughable:

http://www.sun-senti...0,5191096.story

But yeah, the pat of the Genome that is unique to the human species could match 100% while the remainder would be enough to explain diversity. But for her to say that it's a perfect match, while the product is 9 feet tall and clearly different from human, ah I can't even finish this sentence.

The IMDB boards are full of gushing fanboys who insist that if you didn't like the movie then you didn't "understand its themes" or that it was "too smart" for the action-movie crowd. It is really disappointing that a cynical maneuver like injecting superficial cosmological questions into a terribly-plotted and poorly-scripted horror film can be so successful at hooking in the gushers.

Oh, and I didn't like David either. His motivation couldn't be tracked, and therefore his actions seemed random and willfully reckless; he may have seemed compelling because of a good actor. He was just a good actor filling a thankless role.

[Just your average movie goer]

Actually, you wouldn't need much to persuade me to lower my rating to two stars, to tell you the truth. It really isn't much to write home about.

You raise an interesting point about how movies like this are sometimes well received - not despite their inadequacies but because of them. In this case, some people have mistaken the half-baked ideas and plot holes for some type of mystery that viewers need to work to unravel. I've even read some long-winded explanation about how the black ooze functions, viewing it as something akin to the mood slime in Ghostbusters 2. The analysis went on with connections to the theme of self-sacrifice, saying that when it affected Holloway, he adopted the engineers' spirit of self-sacrifice and that was why he was so calm about putting himself in front of Vickers and the flamethrower (which was a really subtle way of stopping a contaminated crew member from coming onto a ship, wasn't it?).

That was just a snippet of the theories this viewer was spinning to explain what he saw onscreen but you can get the idea. Anyway, the point is that fans like this are doing all the filmmakers' work for them. So if you ever want to make a major motion picture and you're short on ideas, don't worry. Just throw a half-finished script out there and watch as the online community bends over backwards making theories to fill in all the gaps.

Oh, I remembered something else I wanted to mention - the first ten or fifteen minutes of the movie should have been left on the cutting room floor (along with the shenanigans mentioned in my previous post):

* The prologue showing the engineer seeding the Earth with his DNA. Shaw's going to talk about this in a few scenes so why's this scene there? Also, it does rather take away from the scene where Weyland and the others wake up the engineer when the audience has seen one of his kind already. Why throw away the mystery with the first few frames? Is it to give the audience ninety minutes to deal with the disappointment in the new creature design?

* The discovery of the cave paintings. Just like the prologue, Shaw's going to talk about this as well.

* The dream. Why? ... Why?


The movie could have just started in media res, with that external shot of Prometheus gliding through space. I'm not sure who said this - it might have been Kurt Vonnegut - but I remember a quote that the ideal place to start a story is as close to the end as you can.

Can you imagine if Alien had taken the Prometheus route? We'd have a lengthy prologue showing what happened to that space jockey. Then we'd have a placard telling us that 2000 or 3000 years had passed. Then we'd see a secondary prologue with company executives learning about the aliens. Then we'd see someone program Ash before sending him out to rendezvous with the Nostromo. And then we could also have a little dream sequence to show us Ripley as a little girl. The movie would be close to two hours and forty minutes!

Then again, with Prometheus, I suppose if they took out the unnecessary scenes at the beginning... and the unnecessary scenes in the middle... and the unnecessary scene where the alien mugs for the camera at the end, there might not be enough left to make a movie.


Now, onto David again. I can perfectly understand that you don't find him interesting. For myself, I may well be extrapolating ideas from the movie that weren't there. I interpreted David as being somewhat impish and that he did a lot of things simply to see what happened. It does get a bit muddled in the middle of the movie though. I think I understand why he spiked Holloway's drink; Holloway was insulting him and clearly as an android who's learning about human behaviour, David doesn't know the difference between an appropriate response and the rather extreme act of revenge he chooses to take. However, when it came to Shaw's situation with the alien embryo inside her, one could wonder why David didn't help her when it's clear from other scenes that he is infatuated with her (albeit in a creepy way).

You may be right, Civilian. Perhaps, my interest in watching that character at work is really just my enjoyment of Michael Fassbender's performance. Certainly, despite the film's shortcomings, he comes out with his dignity intact. Not all the actors were quite so lucky and I imagine some of them won't want to put Prometheus on their resumes.

Ah. Such a missed opportunity. It didn't even need to be great. Even if it had just been a fun monster movie, I wouldn't have any complaints. However, it's just empty - full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

On another note though, that little comic panel was great.

[civilian_number_two]

Yeah spiking the drink: most times, like nearly 100% of times, nearly, when you eat something, it dies.

Robot David seemed to know (not just "let's see what happens") that if he put this slime into a drink, it would turn into a complex life form, right inside a human body.

I can't make sense of how the alien shit works in this movie. There's this slime that can turn itself into something specialized in a matter of hours (in one scene, it seems to take seconds)? Why would this be an advantage for any life form? Once it's specialized, it seems not to be able to turn back - nowhere in ALIEN nor in any of its sequels did the creature ever revert - a la the critter in THE THING - back to slime, nor did it ever take on any other form. So it goes from slime that could be apparently anything, from humanoid to tentacled giant penisvagina, to a boring old xenomorph that we all know can be destroyed with a volley of explosive rounds. And when it turns into that thing, its new form has a complicated life cycle, dependent on parasitic hosting inside other life forms. It goes from the general to the very specific within what looks like 1-2 days. And the specific thing it turns into looks nothing like a human (or any other terrestrial life), even though we have a prologue showing us that this slime, or something like it, was used to create all life on Earth.

I got dumber again, just building those sentences. Either I missed something (I didn't), or the filmmakers actually made a movie without bothering even to know for themselves how their monster worked.

[Just your average movie goer]

Yet, as senseless as all the alien biology/magic slime/morphing in the movie is, we can pretty much guarantee that those who are staunch defenders of the movie have designed all sorts of elaborate theories to accommodate it all.

Here's my theory on the magic slime. I think it's "Whim slim" that reacts to the whims of Lindelof. Not only is there no consistency in the alien biology in Prometheus with what is established in Alien and Aliens - but there is no consistency even within the movie from scene to scene. Some reviewers have said that people shouldn't compare Prometheus to Alien all the time as Prometheus was never going to live up to it.

Well, certainly not with the level of laziness that went into creating the story, it wasn't... but ignoring that, Prometheus doesn't stand up on its own terms either. It's a mess - and the more I think about it, the more I find wrong with it.

Incidentally, I watched Aliens again last night and in light of Prometheus, I think now that I've always been too hard on the movie. James Cameron is far more faithful to the original movie than Ridley Scott is in his latest outing.

What I don't understand about movies like Prometheus is how any studio can pour millions and millions of dollars into producing them when they don't have decent scripts. I've even read about movies where the script gets written as a last minute edition - literally as in "We're starting principal photography in three hours. Has anyone got any ideas for a script?"

I cannot understand it. You would think that a quality script would be need to be produced before a project could be given a green light. With Prometheus, it's unclear whether the script was ever even finished.

And here's another great contribution from Prometheus: Engineers were killed off by their own creations not only on the planet depicted in Alien but also on the planet depicted in Prometheus. So not only are they boring giant albino versions of humans, they're also not very good at... whatever it is they're supposedly doing. Perhaps Shaw should have called them "the Tinkerers".

[civilian_number_two]

We haven't yet even gone on about how one of the guys who gets lost in the tunnels is the guy who has little drone robots that were designed to map tunnels. Everyone else, who have never even heard of robots like this, have no trouble. Except for the guy with that guy, of course. That guy got lost too.

And they were trapped in the tunnels by a freak storm. That's about the most boring plot device imaginable. Well the characters should be out of danger by now ... no! storm! They're stuck! I think even Gilligan's Island used this one three times. At least in Aliens, god bless it, they were hampered by carrying the wrong type of weapon into a war zone and lacking the common sense to turn around immediately on realizing this. It's dumb, but at least it's original.

[Just your average movie goer]

Makes you wonder how bad Lost was. You know, I never even got through an entire episode of that thing. I started watching one just to find out what all the fuss about and it was absolute rubbish - cheap and nasty with (interestingly enough) far too many characters. If the show was as popular as the mainstream media would have me believe, then there really is no accounting for taste.

Anyway, to Prometheus, those two guys who got lost annoyed the hell out of me for another reason. Yes, one of them was the one who released those flying robots that mapped the entire place - but also, they appeared to leave twenty minutes before the other characters.

When it got to the part of the movie where Captain Janek tells Shaw that that stupid pair were missing, I just thought "You've gotta be kidding me."

Well, it looks like we're set for a thorough grilling of this thing so here are a few other points:

Giger was missing. There was a lot missing from the engineer's ship - the sensation of being truly alien, a sinister atmosphere, a sense of mystery... and there is no way that if Giger had been on board that we would have ended up with jars that looked like they were bought at a local gardening store on Earth. The derelict in Alien looked both organic and mechanical (and more on this shortly!) and it's really weird. You get the impression that this isn't something you'd casually step on board - and also the characters have a hard time moving around it.

In Prometheus, its so easy for characters to wander all over that ship that even an ancient Guy Pierce monster can manage it. FUN FACT: After the ship crashes and turns end over end before falling into the dust, David's head's still in the exact same place as it was before without so much as a hair out of place.

Now, regarding the organic and the mechanical... I remembered something about our friend the space jockey. In Alien, Dallas says that its ribs are bent outwards. That's right - it's ribs, not the covering of some special suit its wearing. The visuals on screen confirm what Dallas says. He also mentions that the thing is fossilized. So it's been there for an extremely long period of time and all that remains is its skeletal structure, whatever suit it was wearing having rotted away eons ago. So it's conclusive that the retconned engineers in Prometheus cannot be reconciled with the original creature design. That's skirting dangerously close to Star Wars territory.

Segue alert: On the topic of Star Wars territory, the hammering this franchise has taken since Aliens is pretty heavy. With the release of Prometheus, there are now five movies in the franchise (or seven if we decide to count those Alien vs Predator things). Yet, only the first two movies were good. So we're looking at two out of five (which I think is my new rating for Prometheus) or two out of seven. Either way, that's Star Wars territory and that's not a good thing.

So to break even and bring some dignity back to this thing, 20th Century Fox would need to make two really good movies to get out a passable four out of seven grade - or, if they have to atone for the Alien vs Predator films, they would have to make four really good movies to get a six out of eleven.

Personally, I think they'd be better to quit while they're marginally behind.

On another note - Holloway is an extremely lousy character. I could not understand why after travelling further than any human being before him and seeing things that no others have seen, including the remains of an extra-terrestrial lifeform, his reaction is to go back to the ship, get drunk and act surly. Yeah, I get that he wanted to find a living alien but really, they'd only just arrived on the planet and they'd just investigated a tiny portion of one structure. What after two years, he couldn't wait another day to look around some more? Unbelievable.

And yet another note - why would the engineers, when fleeing for their lives from their weird creations, go to the trouble of recording the whole thing?

"Run for your lives! And can someone record this for posterity? You know... it might come in handy."

Yet more unanswered questions.