Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

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McCrutchy
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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#126 Post by McCrutchy » Sun Jun 10, 2012 5:08 pm

Just got back from seeing this. I enjoyed the film immensely, and I think it does serve as both a prequel to the Alien series and also a first film in a possible series of its own. Spoilers abound for Prometheus and other Alien franchise films where noted.

Some points to make (mild spoilers for Alien):

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:
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There wasn't a hell of a lot of characterization in Alien. Yes there was more, specifically, the post-statis scene in the galley, but aside from that, there was very little screen time devoted to fleshing out the characters beyond the same brief character sketches we get in Prometheus. Think carefully now, what do you remember about Parker (Yaphet Kotto) beyond that he was a wisecraker and was buddies with Brett (Harry Dean Stanton)? Or who Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) was beyond a whiny crybaby? And do we really learn anything significant about Dallas (Tom Skerritt), or is he really just there to captain a vessel (Director's Cut notwithstanding)? We spend time with three people in Alien the most: Ripley, Ash and Kane. Instead, the other characters in Alien are more defined by their actions and how they move the plot along than anything else.

The latter film's failing is that the crew is about five members too large; cut those guys out (especially the two co-pilots) and/or replace them with automation, and then give the larger parts a bit more to do in the film. Janek could have piloted the ship alone in the end, for example, and Vickers could have been the Company rep on the ship (i.e. the one who sees financial opportunity in the Aliens and wants to bring them back), while David could have simply been Weyland's agent (for his personal goals), eliminating his presence from the ship. The one characterization I truly felt was lacking in Prometheus was Holloway, who felt like he was only there to inseminate Shaw. He did need a bit more screen time.

But just like in Alien, we again spend most of out time with three people: Shaw, David and Vickers. It's simply that these people have less to do because they're on a bigger ship with more people. To have less people in Prometheus would have made it stronger, but I still feel the plot is as inventive as Alien.
Which brings me to the second point I wanted to make (mild spoilers for Aliens, Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection):
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People are saying the plot of Prometheus "has too may holes" when really, this is a film full of questions, and (to the disappointment of some, it seems) it doesn't necessarily have the answers to them. Fine, I say. Why do you need answers?

Is it really the point of a single film to make a journey like the one in Prometheus, and at the end of two hours, we should know Who exactly the Engineers are and why they wanted us dead? That after being told repeatedly that the film is not a direct prequel to Alien, we should see a Xenomorph? That we should be shown exactly why David feels he can destroy human lives in the name of his mission?

I think it's unfair to expect a single, two hour film to raise and answer all of these questions. Look at what you already can infer from the Alien franchise:

-Xenomorphs can take different forms based on the host creature. The classic Xenomorph is from a human, but many different varieties could exist (e.g. the Xenomorph of Alien³ or the creature at the end of Alien: Resurrection, which I'm not sure is technically a Xenomorph). Also, from what we can infer from the previous films, "classic" Xenomorphs did not exist until the one from Kane in Alien, because that one came from an egg laid by a Queen on LV-426. The question that Alien did not answer (and which Prometheus may have answered), is what host that Queen had come from.

-Androids are not to be trusted and may have ulterior motives.

I will grant you that the point about Engineers is new material that Prometheus brings to the table, but that very point is what Scott used to set up a sequel to the film, and to be honest, how do you really answer that question? Whatever answer is ultimately provided would arguably be a let down, because it would be like finding out that our creators truly want to wipe us out and here is why. I find it much more appealing to simply contemplate the idea instead of having the final answer, especially when the revelation of the Engineers themselves (including seeing one alive) and subsequent exposure to the creatures that pre-figured the Xenomorph from Alien (like the Queen that came from the Engineer at the end) is already a lot to see in a single two hour film. Much better to let the question weigh on our minds as a possible sequel comes along which could provide more answers and ask different questions.

To my mind, the only other weak point of Prometheus is the idea that this is a different planet than LV-426, when the Space Jockey and ship position have been conveniently set up on this planet (I think it was LV-223?). On the one hand, if we set aside the convenient ship position, and believe, as Scott says, that we are not setting up the events of Alien, we could then say that somehow the Queen from the Engineer (or her progeny) moved planets, and that there were more Engineer ships on other planets, but on the other hand, given the distress signal and the Space Jockey, it feels more accurate to say that this is the same planet from Alien, and the Queen from the Engineer is the missing link between the creatures in Prometheus and the egg that implanted Kane in Alien. As far as I can remember, though, the only time the planet was labeled in Prometheus was on a ship monitor screen, and if I recall, the label of the planet wasn't given in Alien and only first appeared in Aliens (but I could be wrong), so maybe this is just some sort of small but important error.
So, Prometheus, while not technically perfect as a narrative film, is such a thought-provoking and visually enthralling one that I found it to be excellent nonetheless. It's right up there with Alien and Blade Runner for me.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#127 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Jun 10, 2012 5:27 pm


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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#128 Post by TheDudeAbides » Sun Jun 10, 2012 6:48 pm

I just watched Prometheus and I thought it was an enjoyable hollywood summer blockbuster but nothing more. The visual effects were absolutely stunning, as was the 3D; both of those were some of the best I've ever seen, but as expected the story was lacking, was rather plain, and although it reached for many large ideas it failed to answer almost all of the them.

On the positive side, I found the first act to be incredible. The beginning was a wonderful build up, was very intriguing and presented some nice, grandiose philosophical ideas. By the time they had landed on the moon and began exploring, this film had me thinking that it was gonna make my top ten of the year and would be in my all time favourite sci-fi.

After that though it fell apart. It started to lose its edginess and creativity and really showed that it was no more than a middling affair. I found the ending to be rather sloppy, poorly conceived and definitely rushed; however, I still found the ending to be more enthralling than its lackluster second act.

Fassbender btw was fantastic IMO, reconfirming my believe that he is one of the greatest actors in hollywood right now.

All in all I found it to be a pretty decent blockbuster/action-adventure, better than the avengers but not quite as good as my expectations. I'll give it a second viewing to see if it changes my opinion but I'd say it earns a solid 7 out of 10.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#129 Post by zedz » Sun Jun 10, 2012 6:52 pm

HistoryProf wrote:While I enjoyed this immensely, and it was definitely worth the IMAX cash which I doled out for the first time, I do agree that it's major flaw lays in the lack of character development....I really didn't find that I cared much about anyone who gets in trouble w/ various baddies.
Watching this film, and feeling my interest in it draining steadily away, I remembered this happening in a number of other Ridley Scott films over the years (really, Alien is the only one of his movies which completely works for me), and I pinpointed the inadequate characterization of almost all of his characters as one of the consistent problems. However, he often managed to camouflage this by casting actors who were far better than their roles. Even in Alien, the characters are generally anonymous (or worse: one-note), but when you've got Harry Dean Stanton or Ian Holm playing Victim #3 and Villain #2, they impart far more idiosyncracy and charisma to the roles than they had as written. And Scott's films are dotted with effective performances in thankless or underwritten roles.

Prometheus's cast of characters were a cavalcade of cyphers, mostly boiling down to simplistic, single characteristics (Mister Devious, Miss Efficiency, Mister Angry), and unfortunately few of the actors were of sufficient calibre to rise above the script. And then the script added insult to injury by larding on Screenwriting 101 cliches that were just embarrassing. e.g.
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Do you really think Shaw wouldn't have been sufficiently freaked out by an impossible, aggressively accelerated pregnancy, which could only have been achieved by intercourse with an Alien-infected person, without the ersatz personal tragedy / irony of "But, I cannot have children!"?

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'.
That said, I thought Charlize Theron and Idris Elba did very well with their nothing characters, even managing to sell that sassy, comic-booky seduction scene (which could easily have been the worst scene in the film if it had been played differently - let's face it, it's abominably written, with its fogey CSNY references and by-the-numbers horny librarian dynamics). If those two were the ones flying off into the unknown at the end of the film, I would have been more interested in the inevitable sequel. Fassbender did a fine job as well, but his was the show-pony role, and he's a good technician, so that was hardly surprising.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#130 Post by HistoryProf » Sun Jun 10, 2012 7:15 pm

McCrutchy wrote:
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To my mind, the only other weak point of Prometheus is the idea that this is a different planet than LV-426, when the Space Jockey and ship position have been conveniently set up on this planet (I think it was LV-223?). On the one hand, if we set aside the convenient ship position, and believe, as Scott says, that we are not setting up the events of Alien, we could then say that somehow the Queen from the Engineer (or her progeny) moved planets, and that there were more Engineer ships on other planets, but on the other hand, given the distress signal and the Space Jockey, it feels more accurate to say that this is the same planet from Alien, and the Queen from the Engineer is the missing link between the creatures in Prometheus and the egg that implanted Kane in Alien. As far as I can remember, though, the only time the planet was labeled in Prometheus was on a ship monitor screen, and if I recall, the label of the planet wasn't given in Alien and only first appeared in Aliens (but I could be wrong), so maybe this is just some sort of small but important error.
So, Prometheus, while not technically perfect as a narrative film, is such a thought-provoking and visually enthralling one that I found it to be excellent nonetheless. It's right up there with Alien and Blade Runner for me.
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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).

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#131 Post by jbeall » Sun Jun 10, 2012 7:47 pm

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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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#132 Post by Kellen » Sun Jun 10, 2012 10:14 pm

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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.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#133 Post by kiarostami » Sun Jun 10, 2012 10:53 pm

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.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#134 Post by oldsheperd » Sun Jun 10, 2012 11:21 pm

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I was curious about David spiking Holloway's cocktail. I think, like Ian Holm's character in Alien, he had an alternate protocol to bring back a specimen or something else. I definitely see a sequel in the works, especially in regards to the Yutani Company since in Alien on the company is referred to as Weyland Yutani. As some of you know at the end of AVP: Requiem we get a glimpse of Mrs. Yutani examining a Predator weapon. It appears that Yutani is the entity more obsessed with arms over Weyland.
I thought the Caesarean was cool, but my Dad and I were laughing about how Shaw was able to run and jump and all that after having her stomach opened and stapled.
I believe the slug parasites were sent to wipe out whatever was created as a way to erase the Engineers experiments. I don't think the beginning was a creation of Earth but LV-223. The Space Jockey in Alien may have been carrying a much more advanced. The Engineer head in Prometheus is said to be 1000 years old. We don't know how old the Engineer in Alien is but Alien takes place nearly 100 years after Prometheus.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#135 Post by MichaelB » Mon Jun 11, 2012 1:26 am

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.


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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#137 Post by McCrutchy » Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:46 pm

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.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#138 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jun 11, 2012 6:22 pm

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.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#139 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Jun 11, 2012 7:10 pm

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.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#140 Post by Finch » Mon Jun 11, 2012 7:12 pm

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

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#141 Post by HistoryProf » Mon Jun 11, 2012 11:35 pm

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.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#142 Post by Niale » Tue Jun 12, 2012 2:35 am

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It might be a stretch... But I think that Wayland is a stand in for Fox Corp, and thinking that makes me like the movie more (its what I chose to believe). I think the boss lady says something like "Raise two trillion dollars and we will do what YOU want to do... but for now we will do it our way". The same could be said about the movie, no? I mean... the end credits says "this movie property of wayland corp". This makes me think Scott was slyly saying... okay guys I tried to do more but... I had to pay waylands bills too. I also thought the use of classical music in the credits was hillarious! As everyone go to their feet snorting out their noses and pretending to be too sophisticated to fall for that last minute scare stuff.... Scott had beat them to the punch by using that music... I really respected him a LOT more as soon as I heard it. "You mean you DIDNT pay for cheap thrills and guts... oh right you are SO sophisticated here is some music you will LOVE". I think that Scott meant well and his heart was in the right place... which is more than I can say about most. One of the few times anyone makes a emphatic statement about ANYTHING (other than asking who what when where and why) is david when he quotes lawrence of arabia "There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing". I think that because its a movie quote is significant, The REASON is the love... worth is estimated by how much we deem it worthy! Never mind asking him or her IT why... we should ask ourselves why... "oh its just from a movie I like" is davids answer when someone asks him about the quote. I really liked prometheus!

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#143 Post by R0lf » Tue Jun 12, 2012 6:34 am

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.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#144 Post by zedz » Tue Jun 12, 2012 4:17 pm

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.)

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#145 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue Jun 12, 2012 5:05 pm

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.

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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#146 Post by McCrutchy » Tue Jun 12, 2012 7:01 pm

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. :D

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. :D

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.

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#147 Post by zedz » Tue Jun 12, 2012 7:24 pm

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.

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zedz
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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#148 Post by zedz » Tue Jun 12, 2012 8:10 pm

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.

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John Cope
Joined: Thu Dec 15, 2005 5:40 pm
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Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#149 Post by John Cope » Tue Jun 12, 2012 8:12 pm

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.

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greggster59
Joined: Mon Sep 25, 2006 1:37 pm

Re: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

#150 Post by greggster59 » Wed Jun 13, 2012 9:11 am

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;

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