Prometheus - Spoilery thread of Spoilers

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"Ridley is incredibly excited about the movie, but we have to get it right. We can't rush it," says Fox president of production Emma Watts, who also has overseen the successful reboots of the X-Men and Planet of the Apes franchises.

Ug. How long did you have to get that first one right, lady?
Also, which wonderful Planet of the Apes movie do you have your fingerprints on? The one where Markie Mark crashes twice a spacepod that a chimp can land, or the one where the main character thought it was necessary to weaponize the Alzheimer's treatment drug?

Are you dissing Rise of the Planet of the Apes? That movie rocked.

Alien Love Gardener wrote:

Are you dissing Rise of the Planet of the Apes? That movie rocked.

+1. I was extremely surprised.

Though I'm sort of disappointed they consider it a reboot.

I know I'm super late on this. But I finally saw Prometheus last night at $2 show (theater was sold out, crazy).

I absolutely loved the special effects, the atmosphere, Michael Fassbender's performance and even the creation mythology. It was a better version of what ST TNG was trying to do in the episode 'The Chase'.

But holy crap, everything after the cesarean section scene bordered on awful. The crowd was actually laughing, and not in a good way, at he ridiculousness of what was happening.

It was incredibly disconcerting when no one seemed to care that Shaw just assaulted two members of the crew and gave birth to an alien. She even walks into the room with Weylan! Why didn't David or his security guards remove or kill her on sight?

Yeah, that's probably Exhibit A in the examples of character actions and reactions that make no sense. Seems like either there's a whole bunch of stuff on the cutting room floor that links those scenes together, or that Scott & Lindelhof just were willing to sacrifice character in service of theme. (I'm betting on the latter.)

Bluray specs are out. Lots of interesting, tantalizing clues in the deleted scenes list. I just don't know if I can bring myself to watch it again.

Well I'll be interested to see the sequel, and see what Tony's death does. Hopefully that isn't too grim a curiosity.

I want to see it again. The deleted scenes should be interesting, but for me the biggest problem with the movie was the bad dialogue. I hope they have alternate takes (lines) so they can replace some of the crap lines the characters spewed out.

I wish Ridley Scott had the balls to go with silence. Movies are short stories, but they are all still treated like novels. I wish more directors/writers let things go unsaid. When they tell me what is going on or how someone feels, I pop right out of the movie and shake my head. The Dark Knight Rises suffered from this problem and only The English Patient rivals the boredom I felt in the theater while watching the latest Nolan Batman film. Less is more in my opinion. I am thinking of Blade Runner without the voice-over, for example. Unbreakable is another movie that used the "less is more" (show don't tell) mentality. I despise clumsy exposition, unless Aaron Sorkin is doing it and somehow he can make a deposition (The Social Network) feel tense, exciting, and riveting. It must be his theater background.

If Christopher Nolan would befriend Aaron Sorkin (and toss David Goyer over to Micheal Bay's writing squad; that seems to be his wheelhouse) we could get the next Citizen Kane, but with lots more action-y goodness.

Just watched the movie. I liked watching the movie but didn't think it was a good movie. Like someone else stated it reminded me of lost in space the tv show. Shaw attacks two nurses and nobody goes after her. Nobody reacts to Shaw giving birth to monster baby. Nobody thinks it is odd for the old guy to show up. Based on the word of one person the captain decides to ram the ship. I mean she said the alien ship was filled with death, not that alien ship was filled with bio weapons that would be launch at Earth from orbit. Going to the home world of a group of aliens that tried to wipe out the human race. What if the aliens thought the original ship completed it mission. When a Earthling shows up they might send another ship to destroy Earth.

The crazy things the aliens or android did didn't bother me much since I didn't need a reason for why they were doing thing. Their actions were beyond human, trying to understand them is useless.

This is pretty much how I felt through the movie:

Worst part is I'm not even smart enough to be the guy asking questions, I just felt like the other guy

Mex wrote:

This is pretty much how I felt through the movie:

Worst part is I'm not even smart enough to be the guy asking questions, I just felt like the other guy

Yeah, this sums it up for me.

I love the commercial for the Blu Ray

"Questions will be answered!" I LOLed

IMAGE(http://i1.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/157/ackbar.jpg)

TempestBlayze wrote:

I love the commercial for the Blu Ray

"Questions will be answered!" I LOLed

Wasn't that the same tag for the last season of Lost?

LINDELOFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Well, questions will be answered...

Not the major questions everyone has been asking, but some question someone asked somewhere along the line I'm sure will be answered.

Technically, "can you get sci-fi nerds to spend money on a crappy movie twice?" IS a question.

hbi2k wrote:

Technically, "can you get sci-fi nerds to spend money on a crappy movie twice?" IS a question.

Here's your answer: I just spent $30 on the 3D Bluray!

An interview with Jon Spaiths on his drafts and what changed between him stepping off and the shooting script.

Nothing indepth. There's some tantalizing tidbits: Holloway taking off his helmet leads to him getting a face full of facehugger, which bursts out while he's having sex with Shaw -- ewww -- David is clearly evil and plants a facehugger in Shaw's face, and the medpod ends with Shaw sealed inside and the chestburster outside, her drifting in and out of conciousness while being reconstructed for a couple of hours and catching glimpses of it feeding and growing.

I kind of like the decision to try and move it away from the Alien trappings to be honest, but it seems to me the problem is that they didn't change it enough, and managed to ruin what sounds like a perfectly functional sci-fi horror script in the process. The medpod sequence in particular makes a lot more sense as he describes it.

tanstaafl wrote:

Well, questions will be answered...

Not the major questions everyone has been asking, but some question someone asked somewhere along the line I'm sure will be answered.

If there's an interview with the director, and they ask questions, and he answers them, then they have fulfilled their obligation to answer questions.

Okay, well, I'll offer a bit of pushback here, since I'm one of the few who thought that Prometheus was a good movie. I'll just remind folks that the movie did provide a lot of answers along the lines of who the engineer from the first movie was, where the engineers came from, what their purpose was, why they began interacting with the human race, what the nature of those interactions were, what the engineer's ship was for, etc., etc., etc. Were there still questions left unanswered? Yes. Am I trying to say that the movie was a model of clarity and airtight storytelling? No.

While I still attest to the fact that we never needed to learn where the Space Jockey came from as, sometimes, mystery is a good thing, I did appreciate this origin of them.

Unfortunately, the unanswered questions in Prometheus were of a very different nature than the original Alien. The original Alien wasn't about the Space Jockeys, or even the origin of the creature itself. The mystery enhanced that film. Prometheus was....confused? They wanted to answer the questions and at the same time they didn't.

So, anyone wading through the Blu-Ray extras? I'm on the fence about getting it, because while I was disappointed, there was still a lot I enjoyed, and so I've put this movie in the "spectacular failures" category. I'm tempted to pick up a copy, but only if the extras point towards being able to construct my own post-mortem as to what happened in production, what post-screening edits might have been made at the behest of the studio or test audiences, etc. Note that I'm not expecting Scott and Lindelof to be saying "This is where we really screwed up" in commentaries, just "this is why we made this decision/change" statements. If things are overly self-congratulatory, I'll pass.

I'm still holding out hope that there will eventually be a director's cut of this along the lines of Kingdom of Heaven that turns it from an interesting failure into a really good movie that was way too long for theaters.

I put this Blu-Ray in the "I can't support this film by giving it any more money" camp just to sate my curiosity about its creative process - or lack thereof.

Fact is, it's a big expensive train-wreck that seems like it went through a lot in development and still has quite a bit of interesting things going on in the tremendously flawed end product. I personally find that those can be very interesting at times, given the availability of the right sort of info, which is why I asked. No need to make with the smug/superior stuff.

Alien Love Gardener wrote:

An interview with Jon Spaiths on his drafts and what changed between him stepping off and the shooting script.

Nothing indepth. There's some tantalizing tidbits: Holloway taking off his helmet leads to him getting a face full of facehugger, which bursts out while he's having sex with Shaw -- ewww -- David is clearly evil and plants a facehugger in Shaw's face, and the medpod ends with Shaw sealed inside and the chestburster outside, her drifting in and out of conciousness while being reconstructed for a couple of hours and catching glimpses of it feeding and growing.

I kind of like the decision to try and move it away from the Alien trappings to be honest, but it seems to me the problem is that they didn't change it enough, and managed to ruin what sounds like a perfectly functional sci-fi horror script in the process. The medpod sequence in particular makes a lot more sense as he describes it.

Reading that link actually makes me kind of sad. It reads like Ridley and him had a solid rapport and vision for the film but then Lindelof was brought in by the studio to add his trademark stamp of BS to the whole thing.

I ordered the Blu-ray this morning off of Amazon, then after checking the review on blu-ray.com, realized that the non-3D version doesn't have all of the special features. Fortunately, I actually checked that quickly, so I managed to cancel and order the $25 version.

I'm very excited to watch it again and for all of the special features!

Do remember to come back and answer ianunderhill's question, as I'm curious, too. I wonder if there's enough for there to even be a Director's Cut. I was expecting one for Robin Hood by now based on when Kingdom of Heaven got one, but it has yet to show itself.

It could be like Gladiator, though, where the extended cut doesn't really add to it (though let's face it, Gladiator was a perfectly competent film without the extended content).

ccesarano wrote:

Do remember to come back and answer ianunderhill's question, as I'm curious, too. I wonder if there's enough for there to even be a Director's Cut. I was expecting one for Robin Hood by now based on when Kingdom of Heaven got one, but it has yet to show itself.

It could be like Gladiator, though, where the extended cut doesn't really add to it (though let's face it, Gladiator was a perfectly competent film without the extended content).

I'll let you guys know. I actually kind of doubt it on this one going from the blu-ray.com review.

blu-ray.com wrote:

Ridley Scott and editor Pietro Scalia have put together nearly 37-minutes of deleted/extended/alternate scenes, most of which are small character-building beats. There are a few small revelations here, though—nothing game changing—that give insight into the world of the engineers. Each scene features optional commentary by Scalia and visual effects supervisor Richard Stammers. Below I've included the scene descriptions that are included on the disc; tread lightly, there are spoilers ahead.

So, maybe they could get an extra 15-20 minutes of stuff in there. Then there are the Weyland Files (example being that TED conference) at 18:57 total. Those could possibly make it into a director's cut. Whether or not the extra content improves the film remains to be seen. I'll let you guys know what I think. Personally, I rather liked the film the way it was barring a few glaring cases of poor cutting. For example, the part where Shaw gets done with the surgery and then shows up and nobody is particularly bothered or concerned was a bit annoying. I sometimes like films with unanswered and perhaps a few unanswerable questions thrown in. I generally weigh the look and sound of films in my final opinion much more heavily than most. Even if the content of a film is bad, I can still love a film if the look and sound of it is superb. I'm the same way if not more so with music. I don't care a lick about lyrics. They have basically no influence on my judgement of music.