Prometheus

[Colin]

So I can't find it entertaining because you say so?

[noobish hat]

Who said that?

[rmoxon]

It was an entertaining and good looking film. But it also made no sense. There's the overbearing factor that the filmakers didn't even try to create something that made sense, they didn't worry that people would ask questions and just thought people would think "wow it lets us know how the aliens came into existence!".

Its a frustrating film because not only are the film makers wrong in thinking people really wanted to know where the aliens came from, but it's also full of lazy and convenient instances of storytelling that make for a film that not only doesn't really have any fulfilling results but also doesn't make any sense getting there either. Plus Everything from the purposely obscure opening to the horrible ending that really didn't conclude anything just made it feel like a bit of a waste of time.

[Guts]

Saying stuff like "it didn't make any sense" is a huge over reaction. Sure there was dumb stuff like sticking your hand to an alien species the moment you see it and that the mapper got lost, but otherwise it didn't really make less sense than your typical Hollywood blockbuster. Not less than a fridge that protects you from an atom bomb blast anyway.

The film is judged more harshly because it's a prequel to the Alien by Ridley Scott himself.

[QualityChimp]

It was full of stoooopid people doing stoopid things!

On top of the eight-or-so things mentioned in the video Charles posted, there was also:
"My wristwatch says we can breathe down here. Sounds plausible for us all to take our helmets off!"

COMPUTER: "SCANNING! NO VIRUS DETECTED. But how would I know what an alien virus looks like? Ah, what do I care, you can lick it, if you want!"

"Hey, this alien looks a lot like a coiled viper about to strike. I wonder how close I can get my face?"

... And so on.

[rmoxon]

Saying stuff like "it didn't make any sense" is a huge over reaction. Sure there was dumb stuff like sticking your hand to an alien species the moment you see it and that the mapper got lost, but otherwise it didn't really make less sense than your typical Hollywood blockbuster. Not less than a fridge that protects you from an atom bomb blast anyway.

The film is judged more harshly because it's a prequel to the Alien by Ridley Scott himself.

No.

it was full of things that made no sense. Virtually everything that happened in the film really did make no sense. There was no explination for anything, we are just suppose to buy into things happening and not question why for two hours. It's worse than the average Hollywood film in this respect, a lot worse.

We are just suppose to accept things happening in the film even thou they actually seem like they shouldn't be happening. It's just bloody stupid. Here's quite a few examples of questions no one will ever have an answer for....

->Open Spoiler<-

how does a man infected with an alien blog impreganate a woman with a squid monster? How does that squid monster have the means to plant eggs inside an alien dude? Why does the infected guy turn into an angry toasted man with superhuman strength? How exactly does melting yourself into ashes and landing in a lake create human life? Why do infected worms grow massive yet Infected humans don't? If a xenomorph or something like it appearS at the end then where does the queen come from?

Now we can speculate all day about answer to questions like those above, yet the truth is it will only ever be that, because the writers never bothered to think up any answers. It really is a Mess of a film, and I'm speaking as someone who still pretty much enjoyed it. So I can definitely see where people are coming from who didn't like the film.

[Guts]

Short answer: alien, biological, gene-altering weapon to create perfect organisms to kill anything (xenomorphs).

Squid monster: human sperm mutated by the black goo then combined with a human female egg.

Infected man: he was burned by acid (which is why he's "toasted"), turned to a biological weapon because of contamination to the black goo (super hostility and increased strength).

Beginning: I understand that he started the first life on Earth, after which evolution took place.

Why worms grow bigger: because the bio weapon affects different organisms differently. Humans are pretty far from worms.

About the queen alien: Haven't thought about that really. Maybe the one that came from the Engineer was a queen as it was so big compared to normal xenomorph.

What it doesn't give an answer to is, what a human would transform into with time if subjected to the black goo, some theories on the internet suggest the xenomorph would be the final stage of the transformation.

[yvrmikiw]

after i watched prometheus i watched the 2004 alien vs predator. i didnt like it at the time but alien vs predator was definitely the better movie. it had a logical flow to it that prometheus doesnt. unlike prometheus it doesnt pretend to be a smart movie, both are dumb but one is pretentious with it.

i also watched the original Alien not long after, and sad to say its not the same any more after prometheus. the scenes of the alien ship and the space jockey will never be the same again.

never mind all the whys about what the goo does, that can be fobbed off by just saying its sci-fi, my biggest problem was what the android was doing, maybe he had a blown fuse in his head they way he went about pushing buttons, messing with stuff and poisoning people for no reason at all. it was like they just made him do stuff for no other reason than androids in alien movies are supposed to be suspicious.

sorry, not my biggest problem, that was the c-section and the way nobody mentioned it afterwards

or maybe it was the pointless old man makeup

[rmoxon]

Short answer: alien, biological, gene-altering weapon to create perfect organisms to kill anything (xenomorphs).

Squid monster: human sperm mutated by the black goo then combined with a human female egg.

Infected man: he was burned by acid (which is why he's "toasted"), turned to a biological weapon because of contamination to the black goo (super hostility and increased strength).

Beginning: I understand that he started the first life on Earth, after which evolution took place.

Why worms grow bigger: because the bio weapon affects different organisms differently. Humans are pretty far from worms.

About the queen alien: Haven't thought about that really. Maybe the one that came from the Engineer was a queen as it was so big compared to normal xenomorph.

What it doesn't give an answer to is, what a human would transform into with time if subjected to the black goo, some theories on the internet suggest the xenomorph would be the final stage of the transformation.

sorry but answers like "the black goo does different things to different organisms" are not answers to me. It's just proof of lazy writing and the writers pulled things out or thir arses without thought becuase they presumed people would think it cool.

after i watched prometheus i watched the 2004 alien vs predator. i didnt like it at the time but alien vs predator was definitely the better movie. it had a logical flow to it that prometheus doesnt. unlike prometheus it doesnt pretend to be a smart movie, both are dumb but one is pretentious with it.

i also watched the original Alien not long after, and sad to say its not the same any more after prometheus. the scenes of the alien ship and the space jockey will never be the same again.

never mind all the whys about what the goo does, that can be fobbed off by just saying its sci-fi, my biggest problem was what the android was doing, maybe he had a blown fuse in his head they way he went about pushing buttons, messing with stuff and poisoning people for no reason at all. it was like they just made him do stuff for no other reason than androids in alien movies are supposed to be suspicious.

sorry, not my biggest problem, that was the c-section and the way nobody mentioned it afterwards

or maybe it was the pointless old man makeup

The c section was one of the most unintentionally hilairious things I have ever seen. Most entertaining part of the film. Though not for the right reasons.

[Dogg Thang]

Saying stuff like "it didn't make any sense" is a huge over reaction. Sure there was dumb stuff like sticking your hand to an alien species the moment you see it and that the mapper got lost, but otherwise it didn't really make less sense than your typical Hollywood blockbuster. Not less than a fridge that protects you from an atom bomb blast anyway.

The film is judged more harshly because it's a prequel to the Alien by Ridley Scott himself.

No, it's because it's a prequel to Alien by Scott that it's not a forgotten film totally written off to the DVD bargain bin at this point. It's not that it's judged more harshly. It's just harder to completely dismiss.

And yes, it did make less sense than my typical Hollywood blockbuster. Wolverine Origins is about the only film I can think of that comes close when it comes to mystifying character actions. And when I'm comparing it to Wolverine and you're comparing it to Crystal Skull, I think that firmly throws it into the piece of crap category.

[originalbadboy]

sorry but answers like "the black goo does different things to different organisms" are not answers to me. It's just proof of lazy writing and the writers pulled things out or thir arses without thought becuase they presumed people would think it cool.

You could level that criticism at any fiction though , rarely do things get explained in any sort of detail, and when it comes down to advanced technology (which the 'black goo' essentially is) how can it be explained if it doesn't exist in reality anyway. And even if it did it still wouldn't make sense.

Look at Star Trek for example, technological things are 'explained' in that all the time, the shows / films are rife with 'technobable'. The majority of it doesn't make sense, even it it is grounded in some sort of reality.

What annoys me is where people will accuse one thing of being lazy writing and yet another is 'cool' even though they are essentially doing the same thing.

Maybe it was how it was presented to screen fair enough but I personally don't see anything wrong with it in Prometheus, it made perfect sense to me. The black goo represented some sort of advanced bioengineering which accelerated evolution extremely quickly. It doesn't need to be explained as long as you have half a brain.

For example when they first go in to the room with the pods and the black goo, you see someone step on it, and then seconds later there are worms / maggots there. That's because the microbes on the foot of that person (which are earth based) got super accelerated very quickly to the point where within seconds there were life forms, that's what the black goo does.

From that point of view the accelerated evolution of those life forms could be very random, its not lazy writing, its just letting the viewer decide what they think is going on. And like all life forms the first thing it tries to do is survive, which is why it turned hostile.

Don't get me wrong there were things about the film that didn't make sense, and they certainly were the worst set of space explorers in the history if cinema, saying that if something like this happened in the future I can quite easily see the arrogance and ignorance of the human race making this happen.

What I have learned lately is just to enjoy films regardless of how poor some of the plot mechanics may be, as they are there just to be enjoyed.

[yvrmikiw]

we never used to have to settle for what we get in that way, there used to be a time when the stories were actually good. cant remember the last time i saw a good new movie

[Dogg Thang]

You could level that criticism at any fiction though , rarely do things get explained in any sort of detail, and when it comes down to advanced technology (which the 'black goo' essentially is) how can it be explained if it doesn't exist in reality anyway. And even if it did it still wouldn't make sense.

If it worked in the context of the story, it wouldn't need to be explained in detail. Your Star Trek example doesn't really fit because most Star Trek inconsistencies happened across whole other episodes or movies, written by different people at different times. They usually always worked well enough for the individual stories. When they didn't (like the black hole behaviour in the recent movie, for example) they were rightly hauled up on it.

And there is a threshold at which it becomes too much. Take Star Trek as the example just because it's now come up (but you could take most other movies and discuss them the same way). Star Trek had some fluffy villain motivations with Eric Bana. It also had the black hole which changed behaviour depending on the needs of the scene. So some bad inconsistent science and poor character motivation. But just about everything else in the movie worked, especially when it came to the actions of the main characters, so we're able to go along with it and get past those 2 problems. At least, most of us are.

Prometheus shares those two problems. Unfortunately it bombards us with them from start to finish with conflicting actions and motivations in all the main characters and inconsistent science everywhere. Yes, it is easy to pull up examples of this stuff in many movies. But very few movies that we'll ever hear about have them happening in just about every scene. That is on a whole other level.

And it IS lazy writing.

If the goo was the only problem and everything those characters did about it made sense, we could call it ambiguity and move on. But that's not the case. Character motivations don't gel. Basic inconsistencies are everywhere. Poor exposition dumps occur from random characters at random times even though nothing in the movie ever shows how they might know any of what's actually going on. Pointless clunky story points turn out unintentionally hilarious (father!). You could explain every bit of the black goo and you'd still be left with piss poor writing.

This isn't about science fiction ambiguity or technology beyond our comprehension. It's poor writing plain and simple.

[rmoxon]

Yeah on top of the fact that its one of he most nonesensical films ever made it is also riddled with bad dialogue and Charlie therons embaressing over acting. That's without even mentioning the idiotic characters who have mind sets such as "the captain says we can escape the ship on a life pod??? He'll no! I want to stand here pointlessly as we fly this ship into another one and we all blow up!". Or are we suppose to belive it requires three people to fly the ship in a striGht line now?

its not a very good film at all, but I do have to keep stressing that that I did enjoy it regardless and believe it is worth watching.

[noobish hat]

One of the most annoying tropes in cinema, and particularly American sci-fi/disaster films, is the absolute disregard characters have for their own life. It seems they only need the flimsiest excuse to gleefully accept their own death for the good of others. I don't believe a single American has ever done this. I'm reminded of the 'remember the Alamo' joke from American Werewolf in London.