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Even without all the gaping plot holes,

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the overeager scientists were so much like the one-note teenagers you'd expect to find in a teen horror film--one of them even dies not long after they have sex!--that it was impossible to get invested in their fates. All I was doing was waiting to see in what gruesome manner each cast member would be dispatched. And even though Noomi Rapace gives a good performance, esp. during the 'abortion' scene, there's nothing she can do with that godawful dialog, which had me rolling my eyes throughout.

The script needed another year or two of polishing. That said, Prometheus was visually spectacular and I have pretty low expectations for summer popcorn flicks, so I enjoyed it, but only about as much as one might enjoy a super-expensive Saw movie.

Also, this may be minor nitpicking given all the other problems, but

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how the fuck can Shaw feel entitled to answers from the engineers? Given that she's resolutely Christian, even insisting that she retrieve her cross necklace from David's body before rescuing him, she ought to know full well that you're not entitled to answers from your maker(s). But then, all of the dialog in the last ten minutes is especially bad anyway.

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The opening bit with cgi engineer was kinda meh, and a few people laughed at our local theater. I really enjoyed the first 20-30? minutes of the film though especially the sequence with Michael Fassbender's character David performing daily activities when everyone else was in hyper sleep (It reminded me of 2001 a little bit) I thought the crews awakening and sitting around the table eating was reminiscent of the first Alien film, I felt the same way when the crew first investigates the alien ship where they find dead engineer. However, after that the film turned more and more into a routine Summer blockbuster. The scene in which Halloway and Shaw have sex seconds after she is upset about not being able to conceive seemed ridiculous. Guy Pearce wearing old man make up and randomly appearing only to have Charlize Theron drop the "father" line was awful. Though I enjoyed the emergency alien abortion/surgery scene just for the spectacle of it, I soon felt myself hoping the movie would just end and it didn't help that the film just kept going with Shaw escaping death a few times only to be aided by David who had already used her numerous times. "I guess thats because i'm a human and your a robot." (Duh)

After months of waiting and hoping this would be a triumphant return to the Sci-Fi genre for Scott I was disappointed. I'm not even sure I want to see him try to do a Blade Runner sequel now.

I rarely post here, but feel compelled to by the discussion. Some things:

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Just for clarity, the moon they go to, as mentioned, is LV 223. In Aliens it is said that they are on LV426.
The jockey in Alien has a chestburster hole in him/her. This suggested at the time that an alien had come out of him.
The parasitic worm that ends being removed by Rapace could just be the second step in its metamorphosis (first being the worm in the ship). The third step is the proto-alien at the end.
Michael seems to know a lot more about everything that is happening than he is letting on. The fact that he learned their language and hieroglyphs so quickly, as is suggested, seems unlikely. Just as it is unlikely that he knew a drop of liquid/DNA/blood/goop from the proto alien sac would infect someone else. He knows more. And why would a rich man beyond all his years go to a planet like this in the first place or even fund the mission? Because he knows more than he is letting on.
Why do the ancient hieroglyphs have to be telling us that we should go to their system? It could be just a way to communicate on the wall what people were told by these beings. Also, by having these glyphs, it is obvious that they came back to Earth to see how we were doing.
Theron's character does not definitively die within the narrative. We hear a crunch, but there is a possibility that she survives. Maybe she was an android after all that was so advanced she could fool someone during intercourse. So, at least some of her could be left.
Yes, the scientists do seem to be foolish and dumb. But one could argue that under the stressful and mindbending circumstances of discovering new life on an alien planet, there could be a lot of miscalculations and nervousness.
That the aliens have the same DNA as humans seems hard to swallow, but maybe they programed all of life to work out the way it did in that drink in the beginning. One could imagine that a sequel will reveal this.

zedz wrote:

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Or all the times, presumably in response to a bygone note that a woman who'd just undergone major surgery couldn't be doing a whole lot of running and jumping, that shots of Shaw going "Ow!" and clutching her stomach were inserted between running / jumping shots. That sort of thing is even more embarrassing than inventing a 'magic healing drug' to go with the 'magic surgery machine'.

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My midwife-ultrasonographer wife had the same problem with this scene (or its aftermath) that she had with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days - after that level of physical trauma (never mind the accompanying psychological issues), you're barely going to be mobile at all for days, let alone running around as though nothing had happened, with only the occasional "ow" to add what the filmmakers presumably thought was a touch of verisimilitude.

Finch wrote:No Director's Cut for Prometheus anytime soon according to Scott

But there will be an extended cut, running 20 minutes longer than the theatrical

HistoryProf wrote:

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i'm not sure why this different planets thing is so difficult for people. The ship's position is a silly distraction because I can't imagine any other position such a ship could possibly come to rest. it's not like it could be end up like a horse shoe. And people are reading way to much into the creature that comes out of the Engineer at the very end. In Alien they say something about the Space Jockey being over 1,000 years old. They also can't decipher the distress call - which they surely would have had it been Shaw's message. It was probably sent out in the proto-Sumerian language they spoke, hence the difficulty in translating it. And again, that ship's Engineer had been dead for a very very long time just like those in Prometheus. Ergo it was clearly a different ship that had taken off from the planet in Prometheus but the xenomorphs formed en route and forced the ship to crash.

In addition to the logic failures that clearly indicate they must be different planets you have the director and writers saying it explicitly, yet people still want them to be the same. They are not the same - which fits fine as this story is set up as a tangent anyway, not a true "prequel" (which Scott has repeatedly said).

Ah, okay, I didn't know that

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it wasn't supposed to be the same planet, I was just trying to explain away what I thought was a mistaken labeling

since it's not the case, all the better for the film, as it fits with the dreamy, childlike curiosity I feel from this and Scott's other Sci-Fi pics.

Going to see this again tomorrow in IMAX 3D (a last stand for me and 3D as I've never tried IMAX 3D before). Excited to see the additional footage (deleted scenes or extended cut) as well. Guess I'll be keeping my Blu-ray pre-order, since I used the Amazon ticket promo to see the 2D version for free yesterday.

If your IMAX theater is anything like mine, you will want to sit as far back as possible (without being too high above the screen) - the large format of the IMAX screen makes it very difficult to focus your eyes on any more than one portion of the action onscreen, causing the parts of the screen you're not looking directly at to be blurred in the way that 3D appears without your glasses on. It can be nauseating/disorienting.

I can vouch for that. I usually try and sit as far back (and to the center, that's important too with this format) as I can because it gives a nice vantage point for what's going on.

Call me a cynic but I can't help thinking it's going to be 20 more minutes of characters behaving like total idiots.

mfunk9786 wrote:If your IMAX theater is anything like mine, you will want to sit as far back as possible (without being too high above the screen) - the large format of the IMAX screen makes it very difficult to focus your eyes on any more than one portion of the action onscreen, causing the parts of the screen you're not looking directly at to be blurred in the way that 3D appears without your glasses on. It can be nauseating/disorienting.

Agreed. This was my first IMAX experience and we were right in the middle about perfectly half way up so we were situated right at the mid point of the screen. I wished we had gone back a few rows to have a bit more distance between us and the screen - but then I also don't like being at eye level with the top of the screen so i'm looking down on it either.

I must admit it was worth the extra money, especially for the enhanced soundtrack - the seats were absolutely rumbling in the end scenes with the ships. It was a great theater experience overall. That said, I don't foresee making $16 a movie a habit.

McCrutchy wrote:People are complaining about the lack of characterization, especially compared to Alien, putting aside the fact that there were far fewer actors in the 1970s (hence the ones we had were better), I'd like to point something out: There wasn't a hell of a lot of characterization in Alien.

It's because Alien has a cat.

McCrutchy wrote:People are complaining about the lack of characterization, especially compared to Alien, putting aside the fact that there were far fewer actors in the 1970s (hence the ones we had were better), I'd like to point something out: There wasn't a hell of a lot of characterization in Alien.

Like I said above, the big difference is that in Alien you've got Hurt, Holm, Stanton et al, all bringing personality to characters that are left deliberately blank in the script. In Prometheus, you've got a terrible script that goes out of its way to pin down its characters as one-note stick figures (This character has FAITH! How do we know? Because everybody else keeps telling us so! This character is ANGRY! Let's watch him be ANGRY in every scene, for no particular reason, until we get around to turning him into an ANGRY ZOMBIE!) or plot ciphers who make absurd decisions that no actor's charisma could transmogrify into 'motivation,' plus in most cases they gave those roles to actors without the chops to gild their respective turds. (I have no idea who the nonentity was who played the male scientist, but he was by far the worst offender.)

zedz wrote:Like I said above, the big difference is that in Alien you've got Hurt, Holm, Stanton et al, all bringing personality to characters that are left deliberately blank in the script.

I don't know how much of this was in the script or down to the acting or the direction, but a major part of the film's success in this area is due to the way the characters come across as if they have a history with each other, eg. the tension you can feel between Ripley and Lambert. You can tell they get on each other's nerves for whatever reason, but that history is never explained away with some melodramatic plot device, it just hangs there as part of the atmosphere. Small stuff like that makes it feel like you are watching characters with actual lives and not just place holders for teeth to chomp through.

R0lf wrote:It's because Alien has a cat.

Of course, how could I forget Jonesy. It's too bad there wasn't some kind of homage to him as well.

I got back from my IMAX 3D screening (3D is useless to me, it seems, but the IMAX was nice, and they opened up the image to something like 1.78:1, which was interesting), and I have softened a bit on the film, it's still very good, but it runs awfully fast the second time around, and so the lack of characterization (and the weaker acting) is much more irritating, because you've made the visual journey already.

EDIT: As suggested, I sat as far back as I could in a true IMAX theater so that I could see the whole screen but was not above it. I was literally in the best seat of the house: dead center in the top row. Just to note, this is exactly what I would have done anyway.

I did notice a few things this time:

Everybody does actually have a name that is said by themselves or someone else at least once, with the possible exception of the Scottish lady, as I never caught that one. I don't remember most of them, though...

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The two redshirt scientists who die first (I know one of them is Sean Harris from Channel 4's Red Riding Trilogy), are in constant radio contact with the Prometheus, that is receiving a virtual map of where they are, but they never think to have Janek or someone on the ship guide them out of the cave when they elect to leave (something that pisses me off). Also, the tiny creature that apparently births from the cobra when the crew go back and find their bodies in the cave never gets up to anything at all. In fact, neither does anything else from that cave, despite the fact that the human characters continue to spend a lot of time there in the ship portion. The only danger appears to come from that chamber, David's vase, and the fetus from hell that Shaw removes from herself*.

I should think that everything evil started "cooking" (i.e. evolving, from the goo and worms onwards) once David opened the chamber door and the atmosphere in it changed. Notice that David later freezes the canister he brings back, surely to halt the process, which must stop when it gets too hot or cold.

*Let's take this point though--much was made of how unbelievable it is, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Medical science has progressed quite a lot in the past century, and there's no reason to think that another century from now, cutting your abdomen open and removing a fetus (which was, after all, an alien, and not a human pregnancy) would be as complex or as painful a procedure as it is now.That's assuming that the procedure itself is causing the pain, and not the alien fetus and its reaction to it. Additionally, through the worst of it, including after she removes the fetus, Shaw is locally anesthetizing herself, and again, it's not unreasonable to think that 2094 anesthetics could be far more effective than the ones we have now. As to the groaning and moaning after the procedure, I only noticed her doing it twice, once, when she is violently hit in her abdomen in the Engineer spacecraft control room, and the other, when she rappels down from Vickers' module with David's body and head in tow.

Mr Sausage wrote:You can tell they get on each other's nerves for whatever reason, but that history is never explained away with some melodramatic plot device, it just hangs there as part of the atmosphere. Small stuff like that makes it feel like you are watching characters with actual lives and not just place holders for teeth to chomp through.

One of the worst trends in contemporary Hollywood filmmaking (going back quite a way) is that cookie-cutter writing trope of insisting that we can only care about characters who have supposedly 'relatable' 'issues'. So nowadays, we apparently can't empathise with a hero unless he or she has daddy issues, or mommy issues, or gol-darnit, is Learning to Be a Good Parent (see any Spielberg film). And the detective can't just be doing the job he's, you know, paid to do, he has to be tracking down the guy that killed his brother, or the guy that reminds him of the guy that killed his brother, or obscurely avenging his slain parent, or trying to live up to the image of a deceased mentor, or overcoming some childhood trauma.

The strength of Alien is that all that nonsense is stripped away and we're left with Howard Hawks basics: we care what happens to these people because they're basically decent folk just trying to do their jobs who find themselves in a horrible situation. The characters in Prometheus are sub-human plot engines and thematic talking points.

You won't miss much. Looks pretty, and the first half hour or so promises an interesting film, at least, but the irritation factor just mounts thereafter. Honestly, you'd be better off grabbing some popcorn and catching The Avengers, which at least has the good sense to realise that it's just a silly roller-coaster ride.

Well, I went into Prometheus with the best possible mindset, the most open and receptive one imaginable; I actively wanted it to be good. But it most assuredly is not. And this is a real shame to me as I had hoped for much from this. It's actually a regressive move for Scott and that's the last thing that needed to happen to him.

And by "regressive" I don't mean to imply that it's because he chose to explain a mystery via elaborate backstory; that didn't necessarily have to be bad. When this project was first announced, I assumed it would be but I came around to the idea as explanation gets kind of a bum rap (after all, everything is essentially some kind of explanation) and "explaining" the Space Jockey didn't have to meaning explaining it *away* but rather deepening it or complicating it. That could have been worthwhile and clearly that's what everyone involved thought they were doing but they were *so* *wrong*. The myriad of questions that are left over from this are very much of the Lost variety (appropriately enough, and I'll get more into that in a second) but they are also of the irrelevant distraction variety, mostly just plot info stuff, mostly just the product of relentless convolution. Clarity, you know, can be profoundly deep and mysterious enough on its own terms. In its relentless assumption that adding obtuse questions adds depth too Prometheus demonstrates here and elsewhere that its own real commitment is to the juvenilization of its genre and the Big Ideas it purports to raise.

I'm really pretty amazed that there are any fervent fans of this. It just seems to so utterly disarm any enthusiasm, partially due to its very nature. I can't recall another film of this kind that seemed so totally indifferent to its own spectacular premises. The crew is remarkably blasé about every bit of new information that comes along. If this was meant as a critique or commentary of some kind than that might have been worth something too, but it is not. And here we have indication of how Scott has slipped. The big reveal of what's behind door number one as it slides open has all the impact of walking into someone's living room and being mildly surprised that they're watching the new Price Is Right. It has no impact; it may as well be just another room, any room. Compare that to the scene in Someone to Watch Over Me in which Tom Berenger arrives at Mimi Rogers' apartment for the first time and there is a genuine sense of awestruck wonder at its magnificent opulence. Now we can argue as to whether that's simply a class based reaction made manifest but at the very least it evokes something to which we *can* react; by contrast, I was barely cognizant that anything of significance ever happened in Prometheus--at least until the final, gutbusting third act demands your attention (which isn't the same thing anyway).

And that's another thing. Where has all of Scott's much lauded (often by me) sense of aesthetic skill gone? Certainly there are moments here that work and that are striking and he still evidences an attention toward composition that most others don't bother with but where are the truly great images and sequences here? The iconic ones that would be so befitting to this narrative and its mythic aspirations? I can't think of anything here that has the simple power of the shot in Blade Runner of Deckard's gun barrel in closeup against the wall streaming with rainwater or the slow reveal of Rachael beneath the sheet at the end or the astonishing twin moments of the mists parting in 1492. Instead we get stuff that's clearly meant to be dramatically impactful but is not--like David's activation of the holographic control room. This is allegedly based on a Joseph Wright painting but looks and plays more like Yanni Live at the Acropolis.

Meanwhile, as we draw closer to the heart of this thing, we come up against its mythic pretensions. Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am more than receptive to such stuff and, in fact, see it as foundational. I appreciate the fact that the film is replete with knowing references to classic myth and culture but references are not enough and, in fact, act as dead weight with no support, reducing the references to mere facile gestures. All of this should not surprise me given that screenwriter Lindelof was the force behind Lost and clearly evidenced there what a problem a little knowledge could be. If you're going to invoke this stuff then there are associations and implications that go along with that, though he's not shown a capacity to acknowledge that before. The mythic dimension is treated at the same level as the psycho-sexual one, too. The whole phallic penetration and invasion angle is so eye roll inducingly overplayed as to inspire only the thought that someone had just been introduced to the concept and went nuts with it.

There's also the fact that regardless of what may have been presumed by the "creative team" there is little justification here to think that the Big Ideas were being treated in a way that measured up to their Big-ness. The moment I realized this was the pool table conversation between David and Holloway (hollow way indeed). Somebody (Scott, Lindelof, somebody) seemed to think that David's comment to Holloway on how humans would feel if their creators admitted to having created them just because they could was a devastating statement of philosophic import. But it's a facile kind of reductionism in terms of assuming that it instantaneously foreshortens any additional philosophic implication or dimension. And this is the level of inanely misguided profundity with which the film is satisfied. And again, there are the moments that could have and should have been developed as critique or ironic commentary: like Shaw's equally eye roll inducingly overt re-application of her cross necklace at the end. Urggh. If this had been tied into the development of a larger, more serious or sophisticated philosophic investigation then it could have had great resonance and meaning; but, unfortunately, it just seems like the move of a defiant or petulant young evangelical who just attended an open house at Reed College. Too bad. Now perhaps one could say that Scott is trying to challenge the assumptions built into mythic thinking and that would be appreciated but such a challenge is hard to observe here, especially as he still wants to traffic in these tropes in a non-ironic way. That too could have been interesting (i.e. the superficial seeming Hollywood gloss representing broad contemporary era mythmaking) but nothing is done with that; its potential unsurprisingly unrecognized. It's all just references and gestures. Transformers does it better, for God's sake. And, once again, the half baked profundities get in the way and clutter the impact of developing the film along that line successfully. It may be that Scott's proposed sequels (his truly risible Paradise Lost aspirations) may resolve some of these things but I doubt it and for now what we have is nowhere near good enough for what it wants to be.

As it stands, I should have taken the cue provided by those who abandoned my screening immediately after the two seemingly drunken scientists were attacked by the serpent-phallus. At that point, National Lampoon's Alien would have been more welcome and, likely, more successful.

I finally read this entire thread, a day after seeing the movie. I didn't want to know anything about the film going in other than what I saw in the trailers and viral videos.
I have to say I agree with many of the criticisms leveled on this board such as the scientist who was mapping the installation not being about to find his way out, etc.. When Alien came out in 1979 almost everyone I know loved it but it was recognized as a reworked 50's B movie with a high budget approach.

at the end of the day I think Ridley Scott manages to deliver a fairly large serving of high concepts wrapped up in a summer blockbuster.
I found this essay yesterday and I think it does a good job of fleshing out some of the ideas.
http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Saw Prometheus yesterday. Could not believe it.
I made peace with this film later though, when I realized that it does not take place in the same world as other Alien films. This is not a prequel to "Alien". This is a sequel to the (wonderful) "Idiocracy". Imagine certain characters from "Idiocracy" sent to a distant planet. This sums it up pretty well.
For this Sir Riddly Scott deserves to be lounged into space where no one will hear his screams.

In case anybody needs further confirmation that Lindelof's a hack writer, this interview should launch a thousand facepalms. Logan Marshall-Green, who plays Holloway, provides this particular doozy:

Why is Holloway such a jerk to David?

Logan Marshall-Green: It's something that I wanted to implement and I really, really liked it. Michael and I had a blast with it. It's something I haven't seen in science fiction, which is a sense of racism or bigotry towards androids and synthetic life. I think synthetic life is inevitable, and along that line bigotry and racism (if you will) will be inevitable as well. Although I can't approach a role thinking of [my character] as a racist or a bigot. Certainly now I can look back and explain his disdain for Michael in that way. I kind of loved it... that social reflection on a future being, a synthetic android.

From this answer I can only conclude that Marshall-Green hasn't watched any science fiction, ever. He certainly hasn't seen I, Robot (can't really blame him for that), but has he not seen Aliens?!?!? Ripley wasn't exactly buddy-buddy with Bishop...

greggster59 wrote:I found this essay yesterday and I think it does a good job of fleshing out some of the ideas.
http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I'll second that. A very interesting and erudite fan post that makes the case for how Prometheus can be pretty smart and coherent in its themes/images/ideas at the level of myth, even if it doesn't all play out so elegantly within the context of the film.

I share pretty much everybody's reaction to the film -- the good and the bad.

Sure, the script could have used some paring down and focus, maybe another year or so of careful tinkering. Yes, there are too many characters, too many ideas and too many endings. Certainly the director's desire for a visual set piece or arresting image often trumps narrative logic and the overall flow of the film. Yes, zedz and others are right about the thin characterization, and some of the boring literalism and one-to-one correspondence between everyone's clunkily conveyed backstory and his/her reactions in the present moment. And it's obviously at times a bit of a convoluted mess.

But for the most part an interesting mess. I enjoyed the film and will probably see it again. I guess I managed my expectations better or I'm able to forgive the film for its ambitions so as to not be so put off by its shortcomings.

It's no 2001 or Solaris, but it's also no Sunshine either. And it's a cut above most of what usually passes for science fiction in mainstream movies. There's a groping toward and a grappling with serious ideas informed by a personal darkness, skepticism, and pessimism that you don't ever find in other summer blockbusters.

Btw, we saw it in IMAX 3D (after they finally fixed the broken projector) and it was totally worth it for the increased size and resolution of the image and the tasteful if not groundbreaking 3D. Not the biggest fan of IMAX or 3D but we know some people who worked on the VFX and they insisted that this was the only way to take it in and after the screening I definitely agree.

jbeall wrote:From this answer I can only conclude that Marshall-Green hasn't watched any science fiction, ever. He certainly hasn't seen I, Robot (can't really blame him for that), but has he not seen Aliens?!?!? Ripley wasn't exactly buddy-buddy with Bishop...

Not to mention Mr Scott's own Blade Runner. You'd think he'd look through his boss's own filmography...

HistoryProf wrote:RE: The religion discussion, clearly there was intent to connect things with the advent of Christianity according to this interview with Scott. Very glad they didn't go as specific as the following snippet:

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Movies.com: You throw religion and spirituality into the equation for Prometheus, though, and it almost acts as a hand grenade. We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

RS: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Lets’ send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it. Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah, I'm glad he didn't use that, too. I wasn't terribly impressed with Prometheus to begin with, but I have to say that if this is what Scott is on about, the film is even more inane than I had originally thought. All he's doing here is adapting the most odious aspect of organized religion - the idea that there's a god upstairs just waiting to wipe us out when we step out of line - to a pseudo-scientific context. It's nothing more than a cheap rhetorical trick, basically saying, "you Christians think you have it all figured out, but now the tables are turned HA HA HA!"

For all the talk here and elsewhere about the movie's grand ideas, I thought they were rather hopelessly dull. I don't know why people who profess skepticism of religion seem to constantly turn to an alternate set of myths as a crutch, but that seems to be what's happening here. There's nothing radical or even all that interesting being contemplated here, just a slight revision of popular creation myths with a misanthropic spin put on top. It might have been more provocative in an era when those creation myths weren't already hopelessly outmoded, but the idea that we're subject to the whims of an angry creator is old as the hills and Scott is reinforcing that kind of silliness instead of attacking it, regardless of what he thinks.