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Mannahnin wrote:True; which is a ready-made excuse for him getting sloppy and careless, once he was already scared and stranded by the storm and using it to calm down. But pretty much all oh his dumb behavior comes BEFORE that.

This has been mentioned before, but them getting lost was terrible. Fifield carries in and activates the mapping robots; refers to them as his "pups", and he doesn't have so much as an iphone-equivalent to display the map on, so they can navigate out?

I wasn't trying to justify it, just recalling that it occurred. It did so with such great force and emphasis that it made no impact, and still doesn't really explain why he, the cave mapper, would get lost even stoned. It seems such an odd thing to just flippantly toss out there. To often it feels like there were two similar, but different, scripts that were working in opposition with each other. In the original script the characters are going right and carrying a gps and in the next scene they are walking left and sipping tea. I can't help but feel the train went off the rails when Lindeloff (last screenwriter, guy behind all of Lost's deadend mysteries) was brought in. If you read articles of early pre-production such as the one I posted above there is a much more clear vision for the story. I'm sure studios probably wanted some changes as well, especially the parts that were historical fiction that involved religion.

While some may not have liked it, the original concept that Jesus (among others) was an emissary sent by the Engineers to try and get humanity to get it's gak together and stop being a bunch of jerks at least would have unified the story. Humans killed him and so the Engineers decided that we were to unruly and to wipe out their creation. It would have been about as controversial as Da Vinci Code, though not as controversial as the Last Temptation of Christ. This route created a cohesive narrative that tied together Greek, Sumerian, and Christian myths (using the word in the sense of sacred stories, not lies) while giving a back story of the Engineers' role in trying to shape humanity as well as create it. It would still leave a mystery as to why they created humans, if they were the doing so alone or at the behest of others, their culture, and what exactly happened on that ship. It would explain why pre-Christian civilizations had recorded the Engineers and worshiped them. It would explain why the Engineer had a melancholy expression/attitude initially after being woke up. It would also explain why Shaw was the main survivor: as a Christian it meant, in essence she was only one (shown) faithful to the message of the Engineers in trying to get humans to be good to one another.

The same is true of initially having the people infected have more xenomorph features, at least to the point of the audience seeing the connection. We don't know why they weaponized the xenomorph or their attitude toward the creature, but those are fine mysteries. It just seems another instance of changing mid-stream. Early on they were going to go this route, and even have props made, but then went against that idea but left enough parts of it in the script that the idea still feels present.

I guess it just seems like to much of the movie is changes based on second guessing their initial instincts, and it comes across in the final product. I enjoyed the movie partially for the cinematography and production values, and partially for what it was trying to achieve, even if it failed to do so.

Well weaponized zenomorph, or bio bombing a planet with facehuggers, goes back to the original Alien. This type opf "xenomorphing everything" seems like a much more advanced option.

It still doesn't fit with FACEHUGGER 1.0 squid thing though.
In alien the original lifecycle was facehugger...alien...facehugger (deleted scenes with crewmen being transmogrified into the egg cacoons, kid of gross actually). That would fit as a weaponized bug where the idea comes from.


But you are correct, it feels like the director lost control of "that vision thing." This seems not uncommon of Ridley Scott. Kingdom of Heaven and the Robin Hood movie seem to meander with a lot of that. Now some will say that the Director's Cut will clear it up. But frankly, if you can't make a tight movie in the time alotted, thats means you fail as a Director. PLus, as we have had the advent of very successful three hour movies (LOTR series) thats not nearly as much f an excuse as it used to be.

Medium of Death wrote:
I really have no idea why they insisted on taking on a crew of civilians on a mission to discover Alien life. I can understand the presence of Holloway and Shaw, but what is the point of the other Scientists? Surely Wayland corp. could have easily hired specialists in the field, or employed their own staff to go on the mission. It seems like they took an awfully big risk considering how much Vickers stressed the mission cost. They didn't even have that many 'company' men to secure the continuation of the mission/safety of the ship.

That's the problem, these people WERE specialists in their respective fields.

Darn someone posted the Redlettermedia video. Love those guys!

Its written by Damon 'Lost' Lindelof, remember my stomach lurching when i read the name after the very cool opening credits. By talking about it in such depth you are having him laugh in your face.

Corpsesarefun wrote:That's the problem, these people WERE specialists in their respective fields.

Vickers was in charge of hiring and she had no faith in the project at all, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out she didn't go for the best and brightest the fields had to offer.

They took civilians because it was a civilian project. This wasn't a scientific mission for discovery like the space station or a government funded mission exploratory mission such as going to the moon. On the surface it was a corporate venture, and under the surface it was one rich mans personal mission to find immortality.

They weren't focused on, but there were quite a few people there for security: when crab boy goes on a rampage he kills a few, and then Weyland has at least two guards. Guys with guns (they show flamethrowers, pistols, and some kind of carbines in the film) make up about a third of the people on the voyage.

Frazzled wrote:

It still doesn't fit with FACEHUGGER 1.0 squid thing though.
In alien the original lifecycle was facehugger...alien...facehugger (deleted scenes with crewmen being transmogrified into the egg cacoons, kid of gross actually). That would fit as a weaponized bug where the idea comes from.

Just saw that recently. I'm not sure they were implanted. They almost looked like they were being digested to me.
And that seen was clearly seen by Cameron. It was a scene that I think he (RS) should have left in, IMHO.

Well i'm back from seeing it a second time (Father wanted to see it).

Going in a second time and remembering that the drink at the start and the black goo are different helps to a degree. The drink at the start does have a kind of yellowish glow to it but its not obvious enough as we all know.

I enjoyed it more the second time around as I didn't have the soul crushing disappointment at the end. I think a sequel could be good, just need to get rid of that script writer. I agree that the film feels like there are two separate scripts running parallel with each other and a fair few things get left in the background or completely ignored that should be the main focus of the movie.

I think they may still try to get the Christian/Space Jesus theme in. The Alien mural has the xenomorph like creature depicted in a crucified pose.

Then again it could be referencing the Vitruvian Man, seeing as the Black Goo is weaponised Xenomorph DNA. Because of the surface texture of the mural the amount of limbs depicted and their position is not immediately clear.

I'm not convinced that the goo is different - perhaps just that it has a different impact depending on its use. Think, in both cases it 'makes life' - we see the DNA strands forming at the start of the movie, and then the xenomorph being born from both Shaw and the Engineer (and even the dead crew members being re-animated). Perhaps it can be 'weaponised', where if it comes into contact with an already advanced life-form it changes into something that destroys it?

The Black Goo seems to make engineers heads explode as we can see from the corpses stacked against the door (they say that it's exploded from the inside out) and the engineers head in the Prometheus. When I first saw the corpses and the holes in there head I was like 'Ah, Xenomorph!', but now that's obviously not the case...

It's getting to the point where untangling the story of this film is becoming ridiculous.

I just assumed the goo was some kind of super mutagen that causes whatever touches it (or vice versa) to start mutating out of control).

Plothole (again)

The goo at the beginning, which has a bit of a different look, almost instantly breaks the creature down to it's component parts and then starts multiplying its DNA.

The goo in the temple slowly, compared to the speed of the other liquid, transforms life forms into another creature. Worms become alien snakes, humans become alien hybrids, and altered DNA humans apparently can pass the mutation along through their sperm. The thing in Shaw's stomach is some sort of species that is not from transformation, but has a 'natural' life cycle from altered and standard DNA.

Who got the goo in the beginning again?

Frazzled wrote:Who got the goo in the beginning again?

The very first thing in the movie is a random engineer taking a big swig of sweet goo and instantly dissolving into a river.

Not really instant, it looked kinda painful really...

You'd think they'd have a more effective way of doing that.

Corpsesarefun wrote:Not really instant, it looked kinda painful really...

The process of him dieing may have not been instant (a whole 45-60 seconds, so long!*), but the speed at which the goo began its chemical reaction was fairly instantaneous.


Considering that it is essentially magic I'm not sure how we can know that they could do it less painful. Of course knowing nothing of their culture it may be important to them for the sacrifice to be painful, as ritualistic as it is presented.


*Admittedly that was probably an excruciating 45-60 seconds. Of course the trade of is you get to be a daddy to a whole planet.

Fire can heat a cave. Fire can power a nation.

The Black Liquid is Promethean Fire, a symbol of technology in a symbolist story.

Frazzled wrote:

Spoiler:

When biker geologist crab guy reappears. They fail to notice and do a double take or something and then he just attacks.

Why does craboid attack everyone?

Obviously he was upset no one came to his birthday party.

Back from seeing it... Enjoyable, but terribly forgettable would be my vote.

The myth aspect was interesting but it could have been given better treatment.
To summarise : we see an Engineer (ritually ?) giving birth to life, or a branch thereof, on Earth.
Archaeologists discover millenia old hints of the existence of quasi-divine precursors who may be our creators.
An expedition is launched to investigate.
Expedition arrives and discovers alien facilities.
For some reason, the facility seems to react to their presence and a black goo starts oozing from jars and everything goes to hell.

They could have played the "investigation" card a bit more... Say, expedition starts looking for explanations about what happened there or about the nature of the place and of the Engineers. They discover stylised murals that echo the patterns discovered on Earth, and crypted or damaged logs that may contain some answers ; David is tasked with deciphering them back on board while the crew can only make conjectures. During their exploration, they accidentally "awake" or let loose the mutagen while bringing some back to the Prometheus to study it. They experiment on lab animals, which doesn't end well, and they begin to seriously wonder what the hell is going on. Someone gets unknowingly infected. David makes discoveries but keeps part of it to himself, telling half-truths to the crew (and the viewer) to manipulate them so he can learn more at their possible detriment. They go back to the facility for more answers, and things start going downhill fast.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a good writer, and this is just provided as an illustration ; that's more the kind of thing I was expecting from the movie. Mystery thickening, suspense unfolding, then maybe aliens hissing. Instead, my general impression was "maybe our creators, alien facilities, then WHAM! black goo of doom in yo face". And then, seemingly out of nowhere, someone seems to have figured out the facility was a bio-WMD production plant, probably because he hadn't had much significant screen time yet. And then the myth surfaces back with a vengeance : for some reason they hate us and want to destroy humanity.
The underlying theme is very interesting, but I don't get the form.
Mind you, this may be due to my annoyance at the apparent inconsistency of said mutagen. It changes worms into xenocobras, people into zombies, and it allows one to impregnate others with squid-like facehuggers. Ehm... Oookay, I guess ? There's also the fact I didn't make the distinction between it and what the Engineer ingests at the beginning. Doesn't help.

About plotholes, I like to think the medics Shaw assaulted actually went to check on the med pod, only to serve as food for the squid.
Hey, it was in its period of growth, it needed all the nutrients it could get !

Speaking of which... Mother of god, the scene with the Engineer and the giant squid. We see the Engineer resist with all his superhuman might, only for the facehugger to take the time to show us each layer of nastiness it has in stock and end with a brutal facerape. And the unholy embrace, when it crawls and covers the Engineer's body with its writhing mass... *shudder* That was not pleasant. They really had a field day with Giger's concepts, it struck me much more than in the Alien movies.

sebster wrote:I've certainly spent enough time with people to know that 'people are stupid' is a ridiculous piece of reduction, that is almost always used to explain away complex motivations, and normally does little more than demonstrate the failings of the person who said it.

This is so sadly true.
The Prometheus crew just acts as slasher movie fodder. They don't strike me as realistic at all. If you think they are because in reality people are hopelessly stupid, you might be a tad misanthropic. I don't exactly have an unlimited faith in humanity myself, but come on.
In fact, I think Kaldor has a tendency to argue about things he does not believe himself, probably to hone his argumentation skills. Poe's law in full force.

As a related side note, am I the only one a little sad that Prometheus invalidated all the Xenomorph lore (not mind you that Xenomorph lore in the EU was all that consistent to begin with), which by token of coincidence also invalidated some of the lore for the Hish, aka, the Predators?

Some of that stuff was pretty good... When it wasn't being bad.

Am I the only one who got the whole 'exploding head' to be completely unrelated to the goo, or even the rest of the story?

I thought it was only to show that even decapitated, an Engineer would still live (albeit only for a few seconds) if there was still bioelectricity in him (the ear prod)? Some sort of indication of their 'immortality' of 'godhood'.

LordofHats wrote:As a related side note, am I the only one a little sad that Prometheus invalidated all the Xenomorph lore (not mind you that Xenomorph lore in the EU was all that consistent to begin with), which by token of coincidence also invalidated some of the lore for the Hish, aka, the Predators?

How so ?

Kovnik Obama : seems to me that the head did show symptoms of the goo doing its thing. It didn't explode spontaneously, now did it ?

Hyd wrote:How so ?

The film makes the Xenomorph much younger than it is in the EU, and a lot of Predator stuff was written with the Xenomorphs in tow. If the Xenomorphs are a much younger species, created in 2093, then a lot of the material about them and the Hish, and even the limited stuff for the Jockey's becomes kind of moot.

Not that is necessarily a great loss. Some of it was really good, but the lore has been retconned so many times I've lost count. EDIT: So actually this isn't even all that surprising in retrospect...

Hyd wrote:

LordofHats wrote:As a related side note, am I the only one a little sad that Prometheus invalidated all the Xenomorph lore (not mind you that Xenomorph lore in the EU was all that consistent to begin with), which by token of coincidence also invalidated some of the lore for the Hish, aka, the Predators?

How so ?

Kovnik Obama : seems to me that the head did show symptoms of the goo doing its thing. It didn't explode spontaneously, now did it ?

No, but dissolving and exploding are two very different effects. The Engineer's head came back to life once it was prodded and energised, had a few seconds where he looked cogent and aware, and then showed signs of something and then it's cranium went into expansion mode. That didn't look at all like the process at the beginning of the film.

I thought it was supposed to show that Engineers are pretty much immortal if nothing happens to them... and even then, that they could survive a crapload of injury?

LordofHats wrote:If the Xenomorphs are a much younger species, created in 2093

The 2000+ year old mural of a xenomorph didn't give the impression that they existed before the arrival of the Prometheus? The creature at the end is a new form of Xeno, but it is not the first by any stretch.


Also, anything that crosses xenomorphs and Predators isn't really canon to the films (Alien, Aliens, Alien3, and Alien Resurrection), except unto themselves.

Oops. Forgot about that (the mural that is) XD

Kovnik Obama wrote:No, but dissolving and exploding are two very different effects. The Engineer's head came back to life once it was prodded and energised, had a few seconds where he looked cogent and aware, and then showed signs of something and then it's cranium went into expansion mode. That didn't look at all like the process at the beginning of the film.

I thought it was supposed to show that Engineers are pretty much immortal if nothing happens to them... and even then, that they could survive a crapload of injury?

That is directly addressed in the Cinefex page I posted earlier. The 'helmet' was keeping the head healthy and the infection in check. Once they removed the helmet the infection was free to run it's course, and zapping it just accelerated the process. Apparently it was originally supposed to be the cause of the spread of alien infection in the ship, the way it is worded in the article.

Ahtman wrote:

Kovnik Obama wrote:No, but dissolving and exploding are two very different effects. The Engineer's head came back to life once it was prodded and energised, had a few seconds where he looked cogent and aware, and then showed signs of something and then it's cranium went into expansion mode. That didn't look at all like the process at the beginning of the film.

I thought it was supposed to show that Engineers are pretty much immortal if nothing happens to them... and even then, that they could survive a crapload of injury?

That is directly addressed in the Cinefex page I posted earlier. The 'helmet' was keeping the head healthy and the infection in check. Once they removed the helmet the infection was free to run it's course, and zapping it just accelerated the process. Apparently it was originally supposed to be the cause of the spread of alien infection in the ship, the way it is worded in the article.

Ah, thanks! Really didn't get that from the movie...

Ahtman wrote:While some may not have liked it, the original concept that Jesus (among others) was an emissary sent by the Engineers to try and get humanity to get it's gak together and stop being a bunch of jerks at least would have unified the story. Humans killed him and so the Engineers decided that we were to unruly and to wipe out their creation. It would have been about as controversial as Da Vinci Code, though not as controversial as the Last Temptation of Christ. This route created a cohesive narrative that tied together Greek, Sumerian, and Christian myths (using the word in the sense of sacred stories, not lies) while giving a back story of the Engineers' role in trying to shape humanity as well as create it. It would still leave a mystery as to why they created humans, if they were the doing so alone or at the behest of others, their culture, and what exactly happened on that ship. It would explain why pre-Christian civilizations had recorded the Engineers and worshiped them. It would explain why the Engineer had a melancholy expression/attitude initially after being woke up. It would also explain why Shaw was the main survivor: as a Christian it meant, in essence she was only one (shown) faithful to the message of the Engineers in trying to get humans to be good to one another.

I actually like that they put the idea of "Jesus was an Engineer and they're pissed we killed him" into the background. I think having it as an explicit part of the story would just be too much. Better to have it in the background, as a hinted at answer to the question 'why would our creators decide to destroy us'.

The problem is that I think you can leave a question like that unanswered, provided it is the one unanswered piece of the story. But there's so much other unanswered, or just plain incoherent parts of the setting that it all builds up into a giant mess.

I guess it just seems like to much of the movie is changes based on second guessing their initial instincts, and it comes across in the final product. I enjoyed the movie partially for the cinematography and production values, and partially for what it was trying to achieve, even if it failed to do so.

Yeah, same here.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Frazzled wrote:But you are correct, it feels like the director lost control of "that vision thing." This seems not uncommon of Ridley Scott. Kingdom of Heaven and the Robin Hood movie seem to meander with a lot of that. Now some will say that the Director's Cut will clear it up. But frankly, if you can't make a tight movie in the time alotted, thats means you fail as a Director. PLus, as we have had the advent of very successful three hour movies (LOTR series) thats not nearly as much f an excuse as it used to be.

Agree completely. It seems like he's trying for some very ambitious projects, and just despite his immense technical skills (Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood and Prometheus all look amazing), he just cannot get the story right. Too much stuff happening without enough of it hanging together in any of those movies.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Manchu wrote:Fire can heat a cave. Fire can power a nation.

The Black Liquid is Promethean Fire, a symbol of technology in a symbolist story.

What you suggest sounds great on the surface, and clearly was part of what the script intended, at least at one stage in its development. But when they start talking about goo as a weapons project intended to destroy Earth, they're no longer talking about it as symbol for technology. If it were they would have shown humans manipulating it for postive as well as negative. As it was, it really just ended up a blackbox technology used as a macguffin in a sci-fi slasher movie.

sebster wrote:I actually like that they put the idea of "Jesus was an Engineer and they're pissed we killed him" into the background. I think having it as an explicit part of the story would just be too much. Better to have it in the background, as a hinted at answer to the question 'why would our creators decide to destroy us'.

The problem is that I think you can leave a question like that unanswered, provided it is the one unanswered piece of the story. But there's so much other unanswered, or just plain incoherent parts of the setting that it all builds up into a giant mess.

I agree that it shouldn't be explicitly stated, but as they did it, it felt like they set up the framework to hint at it, but then abandoned the idea. Whether it was ADD or studios wanting them to avoid the subject I don't know, but the result was the same.