“Prometheus” did pretty well financially: it lost out to dancing circus animals at the box office, but still grossed $50 million. It did pretty well critically, too, with audiences and critics equally enjoying it.
What did we think about it?
Well…honestly, it’s not a bad movie. But it’s not a good one either. If anything, it’s a good argument for hiring a master director and giving him a good cast: Scott and his actors regularly save a movie that wants to be both a carbon copy of “Alien” and a profound science fiction movie, and finds both to be at odds with each other.
(spoilers, and lots of them, beyond this point)
To give you an idea of how muddled this movie is, it’s a movie that asks the classic Gene Roddenberry question of “What if we find God in space, and he turns out to be a dick?” that features a scene where Noomi Rapace’s character, Shaw, gives herself an abortion about halfway through.
It’s an incredibly disgusting, unnerving, and visceral scene, with a few notes of black humor. People are going to talk about it for years. If this weren’t a Fox movie, Fox News would be screaming about it already. When I was in the theater, some ass brought his son and two daughters to see it and the daughters, who couldn’t have been more than thirteen, were nearly in tears. Even for the Alien franchise, this is some pretty strong and gory stuff.
Here’s the problem: in terms of theme and tone, it comes so far out of left-field it’s like you’re watching a whole other movie. And this isn’t some accident, either. This is deliberately an abortion scene. It’s set up, launched, and dealt with in the space of a few minutes and then it’s completely irrelevant until the end of the movie. It’s so distracting that when David, the android who put a freakish octopus monster in her womb (albeit by accident), asks for Shaw’s help and says “I know we’ve had our differences”, you wonder why she doesn’t smash his milk spewing cranium in with a hammer.
The whole movie is like this, in the broad strokes. There are a lot of bits copied from “Alien”, and it goes beyond the set design to evoking specific shots and lifting plot points wholesale. Antagonists are set up and then thrown away without ceremony (the movie does this not once, not twice, but three times). The climax of the film is essentially the end of “Alien” with a slight twist.
And then there are points where we learn about the Space Jockeys, we ponder why they created humanity and serious discussions of faith are held. At least until we discover that the Space Jockeys are, well, complete unmitigated bastards. The movie doesn’t really have time to explore how the race that created our species are basically pure evil that wanted to wipe us out, or all the moral implications of it. Perhaps it’s wise not to answer that question, but it doesn’t even try to.
As much as I want to take a bat to Damon Lindelhof, responsible for the hamfisted “Lost”, and Jon Spaihts, who wrote “The Darkest Hour”, the truth is that the script is a lot better and smarter in the small moments. In fact, in a lot of places, it’s actually pretty funny and clever, subverting expectations, giving the cast character moments that make you care, and generally being a lot better than its own plot.
And, of course, the cast is great. It’s almost worth a ticket just to see Charlize Theron and Idris Alba play off each other in one scene. Noomi Rapace makes a better case for being an actress worth watching here than she did in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”
In short, it’s not really a bad movie, but it’s not “Alien”, either.
What’d you think?
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I didn’t understand the opening sequence. It’s driving me nuts.
Humans are spawned from Engineer DNA. The engineer drinks a solution that “dissolves him”, at which point his genetic material falls into water and reassembles itself as human DNA.
He essentially uses his own material to create the “Primordial Ooze” humans came from.
That’s kinda what I thought, but my brain hurts.
———-SPOILERS————–
———-SPOILERS————–
To expound on that…the hostility towards humanity expressed by the Space Jockeys later in the movie (I refuse to call them Engineers) suggests that MAYBE the one that drank the stuff on Earth was actually supposed to be marooned there. He smuggled whatever that stuff was onboard, and as the ship was taking off, he seeds the Earth. Few million years pass, they see what happened, but kind of turn a blind eye to it. Few more million years, and humanity has started to become a big ol’ bag o’ dicks. “Alright, fuck it, these guys are done.” Hence, the development of galactic-scale WMDs. One ship sent to earth, egg hatches, implants in Space Jockey, that one lands on LV-426, creating the Xenomorphs we’re familiar with. The ships on LV-223 have completely different creatures. We meet those in Prometheus. This explains why the Xeno that pops out of the SJ at the end looks so different.
My biggest complaint with the movie is that the Engineers are supposedly these genius superbeings who can create life and travel the universe at will, but the second one revives its basically a stereotypical monster growling and killing things with his bare hands.
I mean, why would he even attack the humans? He is supposedly a super genius. Why not use that intelligence? Why not just tell the old guy to drink the virus making solution because “it will heal you” and then send him back to earth to kill everyone?
Really, I think this movie suffers from the same problem “Splice” suffered from. It’s a really good movie about the subtle horror of genetic manipulation, creating life, and the moral dilemmas about being a “creator” and then I imagine a producer walks onto set and goes “We need some monsters and killin’”
My supposition is that Engineers have a serious problem with artificial intelligence and artificial life. The Engineer doesn’t become hostile until David talks to him; then he immediately decapitates David and tries to kill everyone else present. Given that they are geneticists beyond compare, and that most of their technology appears bio-organic, it’s possible that they have some strong cultural prohibition against artificial life, and seeing David made the Engineer realize that humanity had taken a serious wrong turn.
That, or it was the reaction of a godlike scientist awakened from sleep by a bunch of tiny, frail, pink, disgusting worm babies, and immediately deciding to clean house. Unfortunately, we’ll never know unless they make a sequel. Hooray.
Did you never wake up your hungover Dad when you were a little kid? I got that reaction once. It’s 8 year-old Ridley Scott being told to “shut the f*ck up!”, translated to cinema.
Well, they were planning on wiping us out, so maybe they view us the same way we view, say, cockroaches.
@White
The engineers have already loaded up their cargo bay with a shitload of these urns that are designed to genetically modify whatever they can face fuck. Those plans are already underway and the only reason they hadn’t yet traveled to earth was the fact that they accidentally broke protocol and unleashed the beasties on themselves. The sleepy 2000 year old engineer meeting David was inconsequential in the larger scheme of things.
I like the idea that the Engineers would be pissed that we were “engineering”.
Why the Engineers were going to wipe us out. Taken from a movies.com interview with Scott.
Movies.com: 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?
Ridley Scott: 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, “Let’s send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.” Guess what? They crucified him.
Jesus was a bodybuilder? Because abs.
Trying to be ambiguous about the spoilers.
The head they “brought back to life” looked to be the same as the guy from the first five minutes, which looked the same as the guy at the end. Its DNA was human, the same as ours. Yet he wanted to eradicate us, ergo himself.
I’m nursing a hangover, so maybe I’m just not thinking clearly. Is this a plot hole, or does humanity really fucking loathe itself this much?
The problem the film had was simple: It was competing with History. The original ALIEN was a perfect film. How do you make a sequel to a perfect film?
I consider Bladerunner to also be a perfect film. Revisiting it will only get him partial success again.
This was a great film if it premieres in a world where the original ALIEN didn’t exist. There’d still be more wonderment, more surprise.
Think of it like a horror flick with a slasher. First time Jason or Michael Meyers pop up and get someone unexpectedly, it has impact. Every subsequent film is just a long pause waiting for the same scare.
That djinni left the bottle long ago.
I should mention I liked it, I recommend it to my friends, but I caution that it’s nothing they haven’t seen before.
Having watched Aliens again last night I can only conclude that the next Prometheus installment better have some goddamn Colonial Marines. Oh, and if some smartypants suggests they’d better not use their armour piercing ammunition just because they happen to be under a reactor’s cooling tower than just ignore them. Those steadicam-rig machine guns didn’t look too practical for room clearing tactics either.
?
I moderately enjoyed it but my night was ruined by the teenagers (am I REALLY that old?!) that said, and I will quote, “It was alright, but I didn’t get the alien at the end that came out of that other alien’s stomach…” I was waiting for someone near the restroom and I almost kicked my jaw when it hit the floor. I calmly said, “That’s the alien from the first Alien movies…from the 80′s.” They gave me this face: O_O then said, “Oh like in the Alien Vs. Predator movies?” Again I iterated, “No, like the 1980′s films with Sigourney Weaver.” They replied with an “Oooooh” that didn’t make me feel like they knew what I was talking about… Oh well.
Technically, it was from the 70′s, but I get your point.
It wasn’t even a traditional Alien as we know it, but more of a “proto-Alien.” The head was conical instead of tubular and came to a point in the rear and the inner-jaw mechanism worked very differently. Its skin was smooth and less skeletal and the creature itself resembled the relief on the door inside one of the chambers in the Engineer’s craft.
Yeah, that kind of infuriated me. “Oh, it’s not a prequel to ‘Alien’”. BULLS***, SIR, UNMITIGATED UNREFINED BULLS***.
They’re spawned from different creatures….they SHOULD look different. That’s the thing, the original Alien creatures, are spawned from the eggs, and implanted by a face-hugger that looks like a fleshy spider with a tail. THESE critters are spawned from ooze, and implanted by a face hugger that looks like a squid with vagina-dentata. Two critters, two looks. They’re kind of like….the same Genus, but not the same Species.
The Engineer that had his head cut off was over 2000 years old so they started around after Christ was around. They wanted to end humanity due to Christ’s death, due to him being an Engineer.
LOVED the movie, the detail that went into the ship and the technology was incredible (as was the detail within the Engineer’s building/ship. My problem with the movie was this:
#1 – so in the beginning, an Engineer dissolves himself into water in the Earth, thereby creating the primordial soup that (eventually) gave birth to Man. Why, then, would the Engineers then want to destroy man later on? Scott’s interview above states that we were ‘misbehaving’ somehow and this was the reason they wanted us gone. Did they really plan to create an entire new race of Engineer-esque beings (humans) over thousands and thousands of years, only to squash us like bugs at the first sight of bombs and armor? Wouldn’t they understand that WAR would be an inevitable outcome of a developing species?
#2 – that black DEATH liquid is still confusing me. My personal belief is that it basically fucks with whatever it touches and turns it evil… that’s why the maggots on the floor turned into Terror-Cobras and the tattooed geologist guy turns into Horror-Zombie. Why, then, does Dr. Holloway not turn evil and try killing people when he began getting sick and he had worms in his eyes? Also, why does the black DEATH liquid equate an alien species? (ie – Holloway having sex with Shaw leads to her having a squid in her stomach) it’s all very confusing. ALSO, why does the Alien proto-xenomorph come out at the end? where does it come from? I know the Adult Squid gives birth to it after latching onto the Engineer.. but fucking WHY? a whole new species of alien, just because? It’s all very confusing.
God forbid someone reads this who hasn’t seen the movie, I just ruined all of it. Oh, “spoilers.” or something.
I think Holloway sacrificed himself before he got to the murder-zombie point.
Techically, it was a C-section, not an abortion. The alien-fetus lived through the procedure.
BTW, I recommend checking out this guy’s write-up. Some interesting and illuminating stuff. [cavalorn.livejournal.com]
That was a worthwhile read, thanks for providing it.
This about this. There’s a lot of undertones about EVOLUTION. Think about the worms – they evolved into serpents, and then squids. That huge squid at the end, looked like an oversized but original FACE HUGGER. The alien that came out of the white dudes stomach at the end, wasn’t quite the alien we remember, cuz it hadn’t evolved. Human’s were not yet EVOLVED into the engineers.
Think about this. The planet they went to was called LV-322 (or something close to that) and was NOT LV-426 from the aliens we remember. It clearly was not the same planet from the first movie either. And David says there are MANY ships. Are we to believe that there’s other canisters of evolutionary OOze on other moons in this system? And that there are MORE crashed spaceships, etc?? this is where it all turns into a muddy pile of crapola. Thanks Damon.
I actually told my wife that I thought the liquid was distilled evolution.
I liked it a lot.
I dunno, if you were looking for this to be a neat, tidy prequel to Alien you were going to be disappointed. If you’re a plot-hole picker, you were going to have lots of fodder. Ultimately though, I didn’t find myself bothered by any of that.
I think there’s a reason why Ridley Scott refused to classify this as a prequel even though it had about a million really obvious ties to Alien. I think he didn’t want to make that kind of movie. I think an official prequel would have had to be too tied up in plot — too structured.
This movie was, I think, intentionally designed to be a long, sweaty, fever dream. People make odd decisions, people you thought weren’t there, suddenly appear and major characters just blank out for large chunks of the story. When it comes time for Noomi to give herself a c-section and run around covered in blood the ship is suddenly cavernous and completely deserted. David is clearly insane but nobody notices. The alien biology really makes no sense this time around — they’re just there to be phallic nightmare fuel.
Every Alien movie starts with somebody waking up from a long sleep. In this movie it’s almost like they never woke up — at least not completely. You could chalk up all the strangeness to bad plotting, but everything else about this movie is so carefully constructed that I doubt that’s it. I think the movie was made this way intentionally.
Anyways, yeah, I thought the movie was f–king beautiful and extremely effective. This is this generation’s The Shining. Specific plot points don’t bother me — largely because I don’t really remember specific plot points from Alien aside from “holy s–t, that wiener monster just burst out of that dude’s chest!”
Agreed. Although I wish some of the other characters had more screen time (or survived) just so we could get to know them more, I thought overall the movie accomplished what it set out to do. Best “space” sci-fi movie to come out in the last ten years except for maybe Moon or Sunshine (which is hard to argue since they’re all very different movies.
I’m with ya Birch, saw it last night on a huge ass IMAX screen. I loved it, the narrative was so compelling that I was fine with the flaws. The only flaw that took me out of it for a second was Charlize not being able to run to the left or right. But Noomi does a little combat roll and she’s good?
That was it, otherwise I thought it was beautifully shot and the tension of the unknown totally kept me enjoying it while my brain tried to make sense of the clues and questions. The whole 2000 years ago thing def caught my attention and the self-sacrifice = life VS self-preservation = death theme was fascinating brain food.
Bottom line, I had a great time at the theater watching this and I def want to go see it again.
I liked the movie. I think it was dark and beautiful and even the plot holes that you could drive trucks through are fine with me. Those holes still have me thinking about what was meant by the movie a few days later. Do you understand how rare that is with a movie these days? It wasn’t David Lynch (weird for the sake of being weird) but it was just vague enough to leave me scratching my head over it. I dig that.
Also, the Fass-robot was creepy and wonderful. The fact that he survived pretty much made me want to cheer in the theater. He was more of a Blade Runner android than a Bishop android. I think he wanted to kill his father. I think that somehow he knew that Shaw could end up being a vessel for that god awful hell spawn. His reaction to her wanting to have it removed only furthers this line of thinking. David wanted to create choas. There was no way for him to understand the destruction that he was courting with his actions, but his every decision went toward that bent. Weyland didn’t give him a soul, but he didn’t give him compassion either.
Along the same lines as what Vince at Filmdrunk said, I really enjoyed it but not enough to defend it on the internet.
David made me feel like he was just bored with all of it and was kind of just pushing boundaries for the sake of it, for curiosities sake, to see what would happen. Like the part where he ultimately dooms Holloway by tabbing his finger in the champagne. It didn’t seem as if he was doing it in a vindictive or evil way; he just wanted to see what would happen. That, to me, was the most interesting part about him. he’s not evil, he just doesn’t give a shit. He knows his place in all of it and he understand’s he’s a replica of a replica and that he’s following these lost puppies on this pointless mission to search for pointlessness.
The part near the end where he’s looking at the last Engineer with such wonderment and excitement only to have his head yanked off; I don’t think he was reacting like that because he was all, “oh my god they are the creators and one of them is in front of me and i’m so hard right now.” I think he knew that FINALLY something was actually *happening* and there would be some kind of closure. IE, people died. Hence his calm answer to Weyland’s last words (speaking of which, am I the only one that wants to know how the Weyland Corporation becomes Weyland-Yutani? so cool).
Another thing I felt was SO mind-blowing once I actually realized it is that if that proto-xenomorph at the end really is the 1st in the line of aliens that evolves into what we know today as The Alien (or Xenomorph for you nerds out there), then Dr. Shaw gave birth to it. Or rather, Dr. Shaw gave birth to the huge face-hugger-esque squid thing that laid it’s eggs in the Engineer to give birth to THAT. It was essentially her baby; it was formed in her, came out of her, and if it wasn’t for her it wouldn’t have existed. Cut to hundreds/thousands of years later when a ton of those things (in the form we know today) are killing Colonial Marines and colonists. It’s all her fault! The creation of a FUCKED species.
Weyland-Yutani probably forms now that the two people that normally WOULD have helmed the Weyland corporation are dead. And the proto at the end wasn’t the first of the Xenos we know and love today, since this movie takes place on a completely different moon than Alien does. LV 223 for Prometheus, and LV 426 for Alien/Aliens. Also the Xenomorphs from Alien are spawned from different face-huggers which hatch from “eggs.” They’re two different critters.
I don’t understand how they can be 2 different species then, and related.
These creatures from LV 223 come from the ooze (WHAT THE FUCK IS IT ALREADY). The xenomorphs from the Alien series come from eggs, laid by a Queen. However there’s an obvious connection. soooo… how?!
Also, the ‘terror cobra’ things are obviously part of the same family as well because then tattooed geologist guy cuts it off of the other dude’s arm, the acid melts his helmet (and then it grows back! and snaps the guy’s arm! and then goes INSIDE of him! fuck, best worst part ever!)
Think of them as like, the difference between wolves and labradors. Both canids, but different. The Ooze is like pure evolution distilled or something. It is a hyper mutagen that causes creatures exposed to it to mutate into weapons. The connection is that the ooze and the xenos that we know are both bio-weapons created by the Jockeys. They’re Assault Rifles and Shotguns, essentially. Two different weapons designed to kill their enemies in two different ways. They both ORIGINATED on 223, that’s basically the “bio-weapon engineering plant” moon. 426 is just the moon that the Derelict from Alien happened to crash land on once the pilot had the Xeno burst from his chest.
Squid baby, I say again, SQUID BABY. WTF?
Yeah, that…that was out of left field. To put it mildly.
EXACTLY. why did black goo inside of Holloway semen equal squid baby? can anyone explain?!
Because it caused a chain reaction in his DNA? That was my first thought anyways.