Prometheus - Spoilery thread of Spoilers

ccesarano wrote:

This discussion moves too fast for me to keep up dammit.

All I know is that IGN interview basically says "Lindelof ruined this". Somehow, I'm sure.

Though by ruined I mean "made less good", because I still like the movie.

How about some non-story complaints, eh? Like how Weyland looked like Future-Biff-Tannen.

I would also like to once more extend an invite to anyone that would be interested to guest on my Podcast recording this Wednesday evening if you'd like to be a part of a Prometheus discussion there.

I'd be in for that. Send me a PM.

ccesarano wrote:

I would also like to once more extend an invite to anyone that would be interested to guest on my Podcast recording this Wednesday evening if you'd like to be a part of a Prometheus discussion there.

I'm interested in this. Let me know if you need a guest.

Here's a question for the gallery: Do you guys want to see a sequel?

Demiurge wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

I would also like to once more extend an invite to anyone that would be interested to guest on my Podcast recording this Wednesday evening if you'd like to be a part of a Prometheus discussion there.

I'm interested in this. Let me know if you need a guest.

Here's a question for the gallery: Do you guys want to see a sequel?

No sequel, please. Other stories in the same universe? Sure. I don't want to see the further wacky adventures of Shaw and David's Head, though.

Tanglebones wrote:

No sequel, please. Other stories in the same universe? Sure. I don't want to see the further wacky adventures of Shaw and David's Head, though.

That... sounds like the core of a really bad series made for SyFy.

Demiurge wrote:

Here's a question for the gallery: Do you guys want to see a sequel?

No, but I definitely want to see the inevitable director's cut.

Hypatian wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:

No sequel, please. Other stories in the same universe? Sure. I don't want to see the further wacky adventures of Shaw and David's Head, though.

That... sounds like the core of a really bad series made for SyFy.

I was thinking it would be a great terrible animated kids cartoon.

Montalban wrote:

I felt bad for Charlize Theron. Whenever she started frantically giving orders the music drowned her out.

Actually, whenever anyone tried to communicate anything urgent over the radio, the music drowned them out.

Sounds like a problem with the audio balance in your theater, probably between their center channel where most of the dialog comes from and everything else. I never had any trouble understanding any of the dialog at the IMAX screening we saw.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Demiurge wrote:

Here's a question for the gallery: Do you guys want to see a sequel?

No, but I definitely want to see the inevitable director's cut.

Ditto.

PMs sent.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Demiurge wrote:

Here's a question for the gallery: Do you guys want to see a sequel?

No, but I definitely want to see the inevitable director's cut.

Definitely a director's cut.

Truth told, I'm starting to get that feeling of "things better left unexplained" again. While I enjoyed this film, and I am curious to see the director's cut, but people have been clamoring for an origin to the Space Jockeys for a long time. Meanwhile, the characters in the movie are desperate to find their own origin.

If it was intentional I'd say it is damn near genius, and just like the characters in the film weren't happy with what their origins turned out to be, neither are any of us (mostly...well, scratch that, I do like it).

I like the idea of the universe being expanded, but I would much rather see people discovering ancient architecture where serious sh*t went down and the sad truth that the Engineers are now long since dead, extinct, gone from the universe.

Neat! Prometheus passed the Bechdel test:
http://bechdeltest.com/view/3301/pro...

I'm really bothered by Ridley's "well, they sent Jesus" idea, even if it wasn't covered in the film. I'm honestly much happier with the notion that the Engineer's sacrifice at the beginning of the film lead to all life on earth (we saw no signs of life apart from him, yes?) and that humans evolved on up from the seed, and the DNA link is incidental. Pissing them off by murdering one of their dudes sent to check on us makes us seem too significant...although of course this fits in with the Shaw's-faith-says-there's-a-why! sequel idea, which I'm not at all eager to see.

This is also why I want to punch whichever co-writer is responsible for the the throw-away bit about the Engineer theory flying in the face of evolution without a follow-up line - the theory of evolution doesn't touch on the origin of life, just how life changes over long periods of time. Thanks for conflating and confusing hotbed issues for the rubes, whichever of the two of you it was. : \

From i09

All of Your Lingering Prometheus Questions, Answered!

Lots of answers actually.

Tanglebones wrote:

Neat! Prometheus passed the Bechdel test:
http://bechdeltest.com/view/3301/pro...

It shouldn't pass. The root of everything here is daddy issues. ***runs***

Demiurge wrote:

Here's a question for the gallery: Do you guys want to see a sequel?

You mean like, do we want to know what happens on October 11, 2012?

ianunderhill wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:

Neat! Prometheus passed the Bechdel test:
http://bechdeltest.com/view/3301/pro...

It shouldn't pass. The root of everything here is daddy issues. ***runs***

There's this, and also the way they discuss the abortion is incorrect; given that it was a live birth implies that the progression of the alien fetus is not analogous to normal human development, and so when she requested Cesarean, it was for an early induced birth, not an abortion and was knowing on her part.

Beyond that, I can't really say one way or the other.

farley3k wrote:

From i09

All of Your Lingering Prometheus Questions, Answered!

Lots of answers actually.

i09 wrote:

What was David's motivation for "infecting" Holloway with black goop?

Damon Lindelof: I'd say that the short answer is: That's his programming. In the scene preceding him doing that, he is talking to Weyland (although we don't know it at the time) and he's telling Weyland that this is a bust. That they haven't found anything on this mission other than the stuff in the vials. And Weyland presumably says to him, "Well, what's in the vials?" And David would say, "I'm not entirely sure, we'll have to run some experiments." And Weyland would say, "What would happen if you put it in inside a person?" And David would say, "I don't know, I'll go find out." He doesn't know that he's poisoning Holloway, he asks Holloway, "What would you be willing to do to get the answers to your questions?" Holloway says, "Anything and everything." And that basically overrides whatever ethical programming David is mandated by, [allowing him] to spike his drink.

Guess that answers that. David infected Holloway because Weyland told him to.

farley3k wrote:

From i09

All of Your Lingering Prometheus Questions, Answered!

Lots of answers actually.

Wow. I have major issues with this and just started reading it.

First, if there was anyone watching this that didn't immediately realize it was Weyland in that cryo-chamber, then I feel really good. I am horrible at mysteries and reveals, but it was immediately obvious based on Vickers reaction that the individual clearly held power over them both and that she resented it; Weyland is the only person in the film who we'd seen that fit that bill. I mean, I'm horrible at realizing those things and it was immediately apparent to me.

Beyond that, and while there may be lots of answers, I think they all really suck. There's more meta-information with him talking about writing the movie than there is talking about things that weren't in it. Good example of this is the question about what David told the engineer; he answers it with "Yea, there is, but we left it out on purpose so we're not telling you either".

After some consideration, my overall feeling on the story of this movie is "meh". The specific problem is that it's trying to do way way way too many things at once. That results in not enough time to address anything in sufficient detail to be useful.

There's clearly some underlying stuff going on here that makes sense. However, the amount of it that's missing is way too high. You end up with 20% source material and 80% speculation, and because of that any speculation is going to be unsatisfying... sure, you have a theory that makes sense of the story. But unfortunately, there are twelve other different theories that also make sense of the story, alongside the "they didn't bother to think this through" theory, which is also consistent with the evidence.

And that's rather unfortunate.

If a single thread of the narrative had been pulled out and focused on more strongly, that would have given a better result. That thread would be in good shape in terms of making sense, and the other threads would be weaker (but that's okay), leaving room for fruitful speculation about how those very weak threads tied into the central one.

Oh, well.

----

P.S., from the io9 thing:

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 guess Logan Marshall-Green has never read any science fiction before in his life, then. T_T;;;

The more I read this thread, the less I am liking the movie. Darn you all and your insightful critiques!

/exit thread

Yeah. As a movie to watch, I stand by my "it wasn't all that I hoped for, but it was okay" critique. But boy, it sure doesn't stand up to deeper reflection.

Hypatian wrote:

Yeah. As a movie to watch, I stand by my "it wasn't all that I hoped for, but it was okay" critique. But boy, it sure doesn't stand up to deeper reflection.

I disagree. It all depends on what you take from it. If you look at the details of the film, then yeah all you get is a bunch of tired character archetypes walking into a horror monster movie. But the higher themes, like creation, sacrifice, purpose... this film is an excellent canvas for some interesting speculation, as evidenced by all the discussion about this film around the internet.

Sometimes it is more about the journey than the destination. But most of the movies I really like are this way as well (2001: A Space Odyssey, Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, etc.), so it is admittedly a pretty niche way of thinking about it.

I've grown impatient. Here's that "subplot I could've done without" business I referred to over in the non-spoiler thread. I'm afraid it's not going to be especially well-put, but that i09 stuff pushed me over the edge:

Peter Weyland doesn't belong on the damned ship. His motivation is extremely thin without having seen the viral video. Moreover, he just isn't important. His relationship with Vickers is meaningless - she's better as a corporate person trying to maintain structure and order in the face of extraordinary circumstances and a rapid breakdown. The whole business of him instructing David takes away from David's emotional disconnect/moral ambiguity/curious entity/resentful subjugate bit, which is very nuanced and complicated until you go, "Just following orders". This devalues everything we see about him having conflict with other characters, his vanity, and his ability to rapidly make sense of information and draw conclusions.

And damn it, I hate saying it, but...great sweet ever loving crap, Lindelof's bonkers! David infecting Holoway makes way more sense as a combination of an act of revenge and testing a theory than it does some preservative-addled fart telling him to "see what happens with that lifeform inside another lifeform". That is, it's something I can see David -who, realistically or not, is in this universe capable of teaching himself an undiscovered language- coming up with, but not an old man who's got some wacky obsession with cheating death that's not even remotely tangential to anything we see depicted. If anything, it'd be much more believable for him to be in stasis back on Earth in the event that something can be brought back for analysis or other use relevant to his goal. The idea about literal immortality is out of place, anyway - to fit the theme of the freaking title, for crying out loud, further the idea of creating organic life - that's the fire, after all! With everything else here, you think it'd be easy to dodge superfluous Ponce De Leon in Space nonsense. Harken back to the Sacrifice Engineer at the beginning! Contrast people against the android harder to ask if the source of the life's relevant! Great Scott, Sir Ridley - I thought you knew how to do that! We had evidence of it once upon a time!

But the worst part about the immortality sub-plot is that, tonally, this Weyland/Vickers/David stuff is really out of place. It feels like a bad soap opera cut into the middle of the film. I'd wager it could be removed and things would tighten up considerably - we just need some more shots of David checking stuff out in the lab and a hair more of Holoway being a tool, and we're good.

EDIT: Yes, I know, that sounds ranty and angry, and it is. Mostly because it feels sloppy and gets in the way of the big thematic stuff I really, really liked about the film.

On an unrelated subject to Peter Weyland, why the heck is Guy Pearce in that role? Other than the TED conference promo we never see him young. Could they not have used an already older actor and made him look a bit older instead of completely plastering a 44 year old? The aging special effects weren't even that great.

At the end when Shaw staggers into the lifeboat and the violin is playing and the chandelier and rest of the room is in tatters...am I the only one who felt like I was about to fight a boss in Bioshock?

Well, good to know I was pretty much right with why he poisoned Holloway, but a lot of that reasoning I'm not a fan of. This guy is playing with concepts beyond his talents, I think.

I can also see the idea of seeing the creations crucifying Space Jesus and being all angry, but honestly, they've genetically designed a horrifying weapon. This isn't like a bunch of pacifist scientists that have evolved beyond violence. Everything suggests otherwise. So seeing their creation being all war-like and thinking "We gotta end that and start over" is absolutely ridiculous and insulting.

And yeah, the movie would have been better without Weyland. I don't know why folks need to keep including him in films. Plus, what about good ol' Yutani?

ccesarano wrote:

Well, good to know I was pretty much right with why he poisoned Holloway, but a lot of that reasoning I'm not a fan of. This guy is playing with concepts beyond his talents, I think.

I can also see the idea of seeing the creations crucifying Space Jesus and being all angry, but honestly, they've genetically designed a horrifying weapon. This isn't like a bunch of pacifist scientists that have evolved beyond violence. Everything suggests otherwise. So seeing their creation being all war-like and thinking "We gotta end that and start over" is absolutely ridiculous and insulting.

And yeah, the movie would have been better without Weyland. I don't know why folks need to keep including him in films. Plus, what about good ol' Yutani?

I don't know. If humans created an AI sub-race and it started demonstrating violence and war-like tendencies, we'd be like "Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!" and we're far from being "a bunch of pacifist scientists that have evolved beyond violence".

I took my wife to see this today. She'd seen the Alien trilogy but didn't know anything about Prometheus except that it was sci-fi by Ridley Scott. She didn't catch on til the crew discovered the Giger-looking mural in the "tunnel". I think that's the best way to go into a movie like this; no preconceptions or expectations. We both loved it, and I'm so glad they left out the space Jesus portion, it would have been distracting from the main plot.

I enjoyed the film. Here's my take:

Although it's been awhile, I remember Alien as a bunch of folks are in space, and things go bad. Real bad. And we're along for the ride. It was great!

Prometheus, on the other hand, wants to do so much more. But, I feel like it was edited/written more like "people in space, then things go bad." They're touching on some great themes here, creation, religion, parent/child, etc., but they're poorly handled. If they're going to explore these things, they need more time with them. We need to care about the characters more. There are a lot of good moments in the movie, but they feel a bit disjointed.

I think maybe they should've just left out all the higher thematic exploration, and just stuck with "This is great! We're exploring a cool planet! Oh SH*T!"

I suppose that probably would've just made it "Alien: The Prequel (tm)", but, frankly, that's kinda what I was looking for.

That said, I still liked it, quite a bit. I thought the cinematography was great, and the sets were fun too. Oh, and yeah, they are some pretty dumb scientists.

Enjoying this discussion!

jamos5 wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

Yeah. As a movie to watch, I stand by my "it wasn't all that I hoped for, but it was okay" critique. But boy, it sure doesn't stand up to deeper reflection.

I disagree. It all depends on what you take from it. If you look at the details of the film, then yeah all you get is a bunch of tired character archetypes walking into a horror monster movie. But the higher themes, like creation, sacrifice, purpose... this film is an excellent canvas for some interesting speculation, as evidenced by all the discussion about this film around the internet.

Sometimes it is more about the journey than the destination. But most of the movies I really like are this way as well (2001: A Space Odyssey, Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, etc.), so it is admittedly a pretty niche way of thinking about it.

Eh. As far as I'm concerned, it's a [em]really sh*tty[/em] canvas for some interesting speculation, because it doesn't give you any more cud to chew on than the first day in an intro philosophy course. It's really bad. Good speculative fiction is good, and I've read a lot of that, and seen a little of that in film form. This is not even vaguely good speculative fiction. If it were good, it would take the "creation, sacrifice, purpose" thing as a theme and then draw it out along two or three different avenues. Instead, it just throws the concepts in your face and doesn't bother to even advance [em]one[/em] coherent thought about it.

There are creators (humans, maybe engineers) and created (android, maybe engineers, maybe xenomorphs) in this film. The only one of those with a coherent goal that relates to "creation, sacrifice, purpose" is Doctor Shaw. She wants to find out if they made us, and if they did, why. And at the end, she wants to know why they don't any more. David might have a goal related to that theme, but it's never made clear--it's all speculation. He talks about the subject with people, but he never expresses enough ideas for you to feel like you understand why he makes the choices he does. The engineers might have a goal related to that theme, but again it's all speculation--further muddled by questions of whether they're the creators or another creation.

Weyland's goal isn't really related to it--it's the standard alchemical "I want to live forever" goal. It's brought into contact with the creation thing because he imagines humanity's creators might care enough to preserve him. (Why does he think that? No clue.) Maybe this is meant to connect to the theme tangentially through the idea that "death allows for new creation". But that's pretty far afield. Similarly, Vickers' relationship to her father and to David isn't really about a creation/creator relationship, except perhaps tangentially. Weyland is in her way because he won't kick the bucket, and he loves David more than he loves her.

Holloway's motivation doesn't seem to be about creator/created, either. He really wants to meet some of these alien dudes, but he never really expresses a motivation for that.

And the other characters do not seem to have any motivations that are even loosely related to these concerns. They're just there to be eaten.

And this is all mushed together into a big nasty mess. Not only does the movie fail to explore even a single set of possible answers, it fails to set the stage by asking even one coherent question.

There's [em]far[/em] more philosophical depth to the conversation I heard some months back between a couple of high-school girls on the bus about "when we both see something that's red, are we seeing it the same way?" than there is to this movie.

--

That said: There are some good shock-action sequences here. Shiny effects. It was not a waste of a couple of hours to see it. I don't hate it.

But when looked at as a piece meant to encourage thought, it's absolute sh*t. You can probably find more food for thought reading [em]Lensmen[/em]. You can certainly find many many [em]Star Trek[/em] episodes that are better. Without even counting TNG.

Maq wrote:

I think my fundamental disagreement is I don't think "it wasn't all clearly spelt out" is ever a valid criticism for a work of narrative art.

Then you're reading my criticism wrong. I don't need things spelled out for me in big bold letters, but I WOULD like some indication that answers to these questions exist even if they're not shown to me there in the audience.

I'd direct your attention, again, to the first Alien movie. Why are the xenomorphs horrible murderous hell-creatures? Because that's just the way they are. How did the ship discovered by Ripley and Crew get infected with them? We don't know. What was the nature of the ship, its mission before its crew were killed off? We don't know. The clear implication is that there ARE answers to these questions, but we're not shown them because they're irrelevant to the film we're watching. It doesn't MATTER where the alien came from, what matters is that it's here aboard the Nostromo and Ripley and Crew have to find a way to survive against it.

In Prometheus, David is in many ways the central character, and we are given NO insight into what, if anything, he is trying to accomplish. If he does indeed have some advance knowledge of the nature and effects of the black goo, as seems likely given that he apparently expects it to do SOMETHING when a small amount of it is ingested by a human, then knowing the nature and source of that knowledge is absolutely required if we're to make any sense at all of his actions or the plot as a whole.

I worked in a chemistry department at a top tier university for a year; the postdocs, research scientists and doctoral students that I met there were as big a group of idiots as any other group of people.