Prometheus trailer

I am hoping if they make another one, they start it with revealing what David said to the Engineer. Given his comment about what he wanted to happen to Weiland, it would be AWESOME if he told him something to piss him off. You got the humans trying to figure out the deal with their makers, and then the robot dealing with his maker, and then the robot and the humans discussing motivations/desires. These are the things I liked.
 
too many characters, not enough screentime or empathy for any of them, some were pointless.
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Agree to certain point. But I'm at peace with the fact that I'm never going to revisit the awesomeness of films from the 80's. I think a lot of us guys in our 30's-40's set ourselves up for disappointment with the films of today. Cuz we're not kids anymore! No, Prometheus doesn't have the character development of a Ripley, Vasquez or the dude from Big Love ("Game over, man"), but it's pretty damn entertaining.

Hey, I got out of the house & away from two screaming kids for two hours. Win.

And BTW, that whole "operation scene": Worth the price of admission for me. Could you imagine?
 
This movie was a mess.

Too many characters, most of which were acted out very poorly. I really...REALLY like Charlize, but her character was a joke. The story was all over the place. Was the movie about the dawn of man? A philosophical diatribe? Or just a way to re-market the Alien franchise?

I really wanted to like it. This is the first movie I've seen in a theater since Moneyball came out. Other parents here might be able to relate with not getting to the movies very often. I was so geeked about it. The buddy I went with said that every time he looked over at me I had a confused look on my face.

The good? Well, it was cool. 3D was well-done, and not overdone. Effects and art were fitting.
 
cpc said:
(spoilers below)



some quick nitpicks:
- the character of theron is pointless. I don't mind watching her walking around. But i'd rather have a character that has something to do with the narrative.
- yoga space zombie. Because every movie is better with zombies... Not.
- out-of-place cheerful "lets-kamikaze-this" attitude in the end.
- the captain figuring out the purpose of the whole engineers tech (bio weapons, won't let this go to earth, etc) from a quick visit to fetch the bodies and a glance at a hologram.
- the geologist and the biologist getting lost. After the geologist mapped the cave with his own drones. they didn't ask for help on the radio. Noone looked for them until some time passed. "oh, btw, where are x and y?" on a freaking unexplored alien planet. That's where. Yeah. Right. But hey, work force is cheap and expendable.
- the moment below the falling ship actually made the audience laugh hysterically and/or shouting advice while vickers and shaw kept running forward, instead of stepping to the side.
- too many holograms and shiny stuff. alien tech looks like ancient history compared to this. And this is a prequel. Erm, continuity?
- the whole xenomorph birth chain is ridiculous. And ridley didn't like the facehugger and thought that it was cheesy... Because, you see, a black-alien-goo-sexually-transfered-turned-to-prematurely-aborted-mini-octopus-turned-giant-octopus-infesting-a-superman-through-his-mouth is totally not cheesy.

And there is more where this comes from. :)
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:grin:

+
 
The buddy I went with said that every time he looked over at me I had a confused look on my face.
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Hahahaha, classic. I'm struggling to remember the last film I saw in a theatre besides "The Dictator". Black Swan? It's been a while.

Hey, another thought. How well was this movie marketed? Now most of us sci-fi geeks have been following the trailers on youtube, etc & talking about it online. But most real-world people I've talked to have NO IDEA this film exists. The theatre I was in was dead as a fart, but the box office numbers look OK, I guess. I don't think this thing is going to have legs with all the other blockbusters on the way.
 
SPOILERS






The black goo definitely turned the worms into the alien snakes, the geologist into a super zombie, and it really poo pooed Charlie up, no doubt. That was super clear. I enjoyed the Engineers as well.

What I didn't like was the pacing and all the stupid things that happened.

Let's start with the geologist and biologist getting lost. The storm announcement went out to the entire ground crew, guess they didn't hear it. I also guess that the captain decided to ignore that he could see on the holomap that they weren't with the group. I also guess that the two bozos didn't bother to ask how the hell to get out as they could have easily just asked the captain who was looking at the map. And really, it's not like they walked through a maze to get to where they were.

I can maybe buy that they got left behind, barely. What I refuse to swallow is that the two once terrified bozos who ran in the opposite direction of a potential life form, grew crazy balls, and decided to play with an Alien snake that was showing classic signs of aggression towards them. That part was just stupid. I don't care what anyone says. STUPID!

Shaw finds out she's pregnant. Cool. She's drugged. Cool. While waiting for the crew to put her in stasis she grabs a metal oxygen tank or something and lies in wait to pummel them both with it. Why not leave before they get there? She obviously got up to get an object to beat them with. Oh well, moving on.

She runs off to get the c section and nobody cares. Nobody reports it or follows her. She delivers an alien/first gen facehugger, leaves it, nobody cares. Nobody. In fact, nobody really cared about anything anyone did on the ship. It bordered on ridiculous.

You have two guys left outside and not one person cared how they were doing. It was a joke.

The pacing in the latter half was just amped. Too much so. Not sure why. The movie wasn't scary at all. It felt like a b action movie at times. One with some of the best SFX I've ever seen.

Loved David and the Engineer(s). David was just wonderful. Loved everything he did and said.
This movie needed an extra 30 min in order to develop some of the characters in order to help us care about them. I didn't care for 95% of them.

I was also irked by Charlie's overreaction to the discovery. He was far too depressed considering that they just scratched the surface for 15 min and there was no way of really knowing at that point if they were all dead. I didn't buy that a guy searching caves for years would give up so fast. Very hard to swallow. And in fact, he was wrong. Might have helped if he waited to search more than 15 minutes to find an Engineer. Geesh.

This all sounds like I hated it, nope. I enjoyed it for what it was. I'll own it and I've already seen it twice. But this is not a fantastic Sci-Fi movie and I refuse to hold it up there with movies like Alien, 2001, J.C.'s The Thing, etc... It could have been SO much better and it's not fair to put them up on that pedestal.

The story and pacing really hurt it in the end. That and all the stupid/canon-fodder characters.
 
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TubEfingers said:
F**k me, that truly is a fantasmagoria of sights, sounds and wacky editing
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...And it has lots of action sequences that were lifted directly from the original "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope", it is truly the finest cinematic abomination I have ever witnessed. Ed Wood would be very proud.
 
I liked Prometheus as a sci-fi / adventure movie, but it wasn't nearly as scary as I hoped it would be.

Unlike Alien or Aliens, I never felt like they were on the verge of releasing an unstoppable horror that could conquer the entire universe. Maybe once the Engineer was trying to escape in the ship, but that was a minor element in the film that was quickly overcome.

And the incubation periods of the aliens were disappointingly brief compared to the previous films in the series. Aside from maybe Charlie, they never really spent the time to let the terror grow, and Charlie didn't really seem to be much of a threat to the other members of the crew except for Elizabeth.
 
Sigh. What an overall disappointment. I admire anyone making an attempt at real science fiction but what started out as a promising sci-fi story ended up being a generic horror flick, and it didn't really satisfy the requirements of either genre. I didn't really find the general storyline confusing, but it does require that the viewer fill in some gaps, which might baffle others. I felt like it answered questions I didn't want asked, and left questions that didn't need to be unanswered if that makes any sense. And frankly I didn't really find it that visually breathtaking. Nicely shot, to be sure, but I'll take the dark, shrouded atmosphere of Alien over the crystal clear CGI landscapes on display here, which are about as mysterious as a Penthouse centerfold. Fassbender was the best thing in the film to be sure. I found Noomi Rapace's character kind of pointless in the end. And I disliked the actor who played her boyfriend (or was it husband?). Also, the design of the Engineers felt kind of cheap and lacking in imagination. Some people have said you need to forget it's an Alien prequel to enjoy it but I don't see how that is possible. There are far too many elements that link it up to that series, and the last shot pretty much erases any claim to the contrary. I actually wish the filmmakers themselves would have forgotten this was an Alien prequel, as everything that feels contrived came from them trying to contort the narrative into that history. Prequels are just generally not a good idea. They are almost always terrible. To quote Patton Oswalt regarding prequels, they are like a guy saying, "Do you like pictures of Angelina Jolie? Does she give you a boner?...Well here's a picture of Jon Voight's sweaty ball sack!"...Sometimes it's best not to know where something comes from.
 
Batutta said:
Some people have said you need to forget it's an Alien prequel to enjoy it but I don't see how that is possible. There are far too many elements that link it up to that series, and the last shot pretty much erases any claim to the contrary. I actually wish the filmmakers themselves would have forgotten this was an Alien prequel, as everything that feels contrived came from them trying to contort the narrative into that history. Prequels are just generally not a good idea. They are almost always terrible. To quote Patton Oswalt regarding prequels, they are like a guy saying, "Do you like pictures of Angelina Jolie? Does she give you a boner?...Well here's a picture of Jon Voight's sweaty ball sack!"...Sometimes it's best not to know where something comes from.
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The funny thing is is that Scott himself has said the film is not an Alien prequel. It takes place in the 'Alien universe' and takes place prior to the events in Alien but it's not a prequel. What happens in Prometheus isn't supposed to lead up to Alien. At WonderCon this year they even stated that if there was a Prometheus 2 it would venture down it's own path and not towards Alien.

I think this 'it's a prequel but not really' approach muddies the waters even more because there is so much in common w/Alien that fans of that movie can't help but try and connect the dots but the dots, at least not all the dots, just won't line up because they aren't supposed to. It's like they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted the fan base, notoriety, and easy of working w/an established fictional universe, but they didn't want to feel hamstrung by Alien canon so they did this hybrid approach that I feel made the movie worse.

Overall I was disappointed by the film, for many reasons that have already been talked about here, though I can't say I disliked it.
 
This is a film that has me thinking about it 24 hours later. To me that's a good sign. I saw Dragon Tattoo a few weeks back and didn't think twice about it after the film ended. I like it when a film leaves some unanswered questions or leaves you digging for more. This film is in the vein of Blade Runner, big ideas, some of them intellectual, and the unfortunate side effect of a film of ideas is that it's not always easy to peg those ideas to characters the audience cares about or is emotionally invested in. On that level I think the film doesn't completely succeed. Actually, I take that back. I cared about David, I think that was the point and one of thegreat irony's about this universe and just one of the throughlines between this and original Alien films that come later. An android produced from man playing God, who in turn plays God. You keep digging at that basic theme and it's a warning and cautionary tale. It's simplistic but still pretty rich stuff.
 
Just saw it ... from a techinical standpoint one of the first film where I didnt mind the 3d ........
Story wise like mentioned before I thought this was gonna be Alien scary but maybe I just grew up.
David,the ai, to me was the scariest alien of them all.
 
Batutta said:
Oh, yeah, and if anyone thinks Prometheus was in any way original perhaps they should read the 80 year old story At The Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft. Pretty much the same plot. So similar in fact, that Guillermo Del Toro had to cancel his planned adaptation of the book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness
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To be fair, Del Toro's adaptation was cancelled primarily because it was going to need to make $500m globally in order to be profitable with how expensive it was going to be, and Del Toro insisted he couldn't make it PG-13. So with an R rating, even if it somehow hit $500m, it would be a tiny percentile of profit for the studio (don't remember who was behind that one -- Paramount?), and wouldn't have been worth the massive campaign it would take to get it there. Not to mention, it was highly unlikely to do $500m regardless.

Even Prometheus will probably only do $360-420m worldwide. I don't doubt that Prometheus is the same basic story, or that it influenced the decision, but Disney proved earlier this year how disastrous mega-budget sci-fi epics lifted directly from ancient tomes can be. And Del Toro wanted to cut his audience by 2/3 with the R, so I think that project never really had a chance to begin with.

-JMT
 
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