Very much liked Prometheus. Some astounding visuals, with big ideas to back those up, and it opens and closes on pretty breathtaking sequences. Michael Fassbender is utterly hypnotic, and has the best line of the year (so far.) Recommended, well worth the time and money, spoiler-y thoughts and 3 minor complaints post-jump.
-that’s the most promising set-up for a sequel since Batman Begins…
-this could work as a prequel to Lexx, almost as easily as it’s a prequel to Alien.
-never expected to see the opening of Begotten incorporated into a giant summer blockbuster. Would love to hear what someone who’d never seen an Alien movie made of that final scene.
-final boss(es) fight definitively establishes that Starro could make for a horrifying threat in a Justice League movie.
-Roger Ebert may go off the rails now and then, but his review of Prometheus is eloquent, insightful, and worth a read.
complaint #1: why establish that David can watch the dreams of hyper-sleepers, then not have him watch the Engineer’s dream? I would have paid 2x or 3x standard ticket price for a couple minutes of seeing what their planet/society/relationships were like.
complaint #2: we saw 3 Engineers without the exo-suit…couldn’t one of them have been female? Nobody involved wanted to see a giant, bald, pale, perfect demi-goddess rendered on-screen?
complaint #3: did they screen different footage at SDCC 2011? Remember specifically hearing/reading that they showed footage of Charlize doing naked push-ups. We even shot something similar, just because that sounded like such a dope idea.
6 Responses to “Prometheus: making FSM bumper stickers look even lamer”
That’s the stuff!
My two immediate complaints both involved the post-c-section action:
SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN”T SEEN!
1) She just happened to stumble into the room where they had been hiding Weyland for the entire voyage? Or did I miss an explanation for that?
2) To paraphrase a friend I saw it with – “I was not up for rappelling after either of my c-sections.” Granted, this is future medical science, but why then use the staples rather than just closing her up? I know, I know – the visual impact.
Overall, though, I loved it and can’t wait to see it now that I can actually analyze rather than just going, “SHIT this is cool,” the whole time.
I see a lot of reviewers complaining about the unanswered questions. Whatever. If we get a sequel that’s great. If we don’t, then maybe a comic. If not that, then they’re just mysteries like the xenomorphs have always been anyways. The movie was still the shit.
Loved Prometheus, visuals were stunning, and the story was epic in scope of its ideas, without being prentiously allegorical and blunt in its delivery (cf. Avatar).
Just my thoughts on a couple of the issues you raised:
1) Might it have been a combination of the Prometheus hyper-sleep chambers and visors that allowed the dream-viewing? Combining tech like that with alien tech would be as ambitious as uploading a virus from a laptop PC to an invading mother ship
But yes, if they’d used another mechanism that worked in the story for David to be able to decode brainwaves the potential for the aliens dreams would have been visually stunning. I think part of the narrative though was about our failure to bridge that gap between us and ‘the gods’ though, like the original Prometheus myth (or at least, without angering them at our presumption)
2) I didn’t see any sexual characteristics on the Engineers. Nothing to say they were male, nothing to say they were or weren’t female. Nothing to say that they weren’t genderless. Certainly I thought they were androgynous. All of the sexual/physical were reserved for us and the parasites, keeping that psychosexual body horror strand from Alien in play.
My only question is how did the Derelict ship wind up on LV 426? I’m assuming the creature that attacked the engineer was more or less the first “face hugger” which gave rise to the first “xenomorph”. I’d assume that xenomorph would of been a queen so it could create life meaning it spawned more face huggers which would attack any remaining engineers. So how did one of the engineers ships end up on 426 with a hive full of eggs that the crew of the Nostromo would discover 30 years later. Also, was Shaws warning message the same message picked up by the Nostromo which sent that ship to LV 426?
Sometimes I think that there aren’t any writers allowed into Hollywood anymore. That what we see as a ‘written by’ credit is some kind of in-joke made up by the producers. As much as I enjoyed the film when I saw it, and found the direction and art to be as near to flawless as humanly allowable… the bad writing has just ruined the experience for me. There are so many amazing moments, beautiful scenes, and incredible bits of art direction. Yet.
*Weyland shot a video to tell the crew members he’ll be dead by the time he gets there, but SURPRISE, he’s on the ship with them. Why’d he have to fake that? And since he did fake it, why’d he leave his door unlocked so that anyone- even a doped-up woman stumbling around after an emergency C-section- could have wandered in? I could see him lying to stockholders, but why bother lying to your crew when you’re going to let the cat out of the bag a couple of days later anyhow?
*Running, leaping, spelunking, and slamming your stomach against a retractable floor (then pulling the rest of your body up with said stomach muscles) are totally feasible mere hours after being gutted. And while we’re at it, the amniotic goop from the abortion monster splattered into her gaping stomach wound before getting sewn back up- peritonitis, anyone? Liz gets one week into her wacky space adventures in an alien ship with her decapitated android buddy, then keels over. If she doesn’t bleed to death first from the gigantic, surely ruptured gut wound…
*Future scientists are absolute morons with zero sense of self-preservation. (unless emergency robo-abortion is the answer)
*They’ve got a 3D map of the caves, and a geologist (of all people) gets hopelessly lost somehow.
*I’m not a biologist. But I know that when a snake with a hooded neck suddenly puffs up and makes warning noises, it’s time to leave. If I saw an alien penis cobra hentai nightmare beast puff out it’s hood? I’d be back on the ship in a locked bathroom stall clutching a gun and a bible in the blink of an eye. I’d teleport to fucking Ohio by the power of my sheer terror. I would not, for any reason whatsoever, assume that waving my hand at it, daring the thing to bite/rape me would be a good idea.
*Anyone else remember the scene in Amazon Women on the Moon where the lead astronaut takes off his helmet? Yeah…
*Fassbender’s android could have been the only humanoid character in the whole movie and that would have improved things by 70%. I just wish that his motivations- beyond randomly being either a petty sociopath or nurturing assistant- were a little clearer.
*So what kind of scientist is Elizabeth anyway? Isn’t she an archeologist? Maybe a genealogist? Astrobiologist?
*Why did the cave scratchings, runes, and whatever all point to a planet that was used to test incredibly dangerous bio weapons?
*I had to stifle a laugh when Elizabeth tripped and then decided to roll to the left a few feet to avoid the giant falling star ship, while Meredeth just continues running forward and gets crushed. I kept thinking in my mind ‘turn. TURN! TURN GODAMMIT!’ Meredeth seemed like the only person with a real sense of self preservation, but then she suffers the second-dumbest death in the whole picture.
On and on. And this is stuff that could have been easily fixed! Have a newscast where Weyland tells the news media that the crew will be reaching their destination by the time he dies- it’d make at least a modicum more sense for him to lie to the general populace (say this expedition was a gift to the world, and that he’s stepping down from the company to go die in peace surrounded by family or whatever) about going into space, but not the crew. Then have a scene where someone asks why there’s a door nobody has access to. Elizabeth can later pass out in front of that door. She can wake up to Fassbender walking out of the door with Weyland behind him. Instead of the cowardly geologist smoking weed in his space suit, make it the biologist doing that so that his bizarre trust of space cock snakes is at least sort of more sensical. Have Elizabeth scooting around on one of those land rovers rather than running on foot (and jumping, etc.) or give her one of those exo-support-suit things that Weyland was wearing. Explain that Elizabeth is some sort of scientific wunderkind. Just use a wee bit of critical thinking rather than scribbling down the basic story beats and then filming your movie.
This link was being forwarded around a lot over the weekend…dunno if you saw it:
http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html
Ancient archetypes may not always lend themselves to coherent narratives, but it is pretty dope to see them brought to life by a gifted visual artist with a big budget.
Fascinating reversal on the story of Jesus -that his death could have damned mankind, rather than redeemed it…well, fascinating to someone who’s sat through their share of religion courses in Catholic hs and university, but get that this stuff is not everyone’s cup o’ tea, and/or what they’re looking for in a big summer movie.
That is indeed a very interesting article, and given that I was aware of the mythological information in it I’m surprised a lot of that didn’t dawn on me when I watched it.
That said, the characters and narrative are really, really bad. It’s also frustrating that this movie essentially cost us (along with budgetary constraints) Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation of The Mountains of Madness. (Guillermo said that if Prometheus was basically about aliens creating mankind, mankind finding out about it and then being beset by tentacle’d monsters, then what’s the point of making another movie about the same thing. Damn.)
Also, re: Alien Jesus. I think of two things when I hear that: John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness and Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga.