Prometheus (2012) discussion - *SPOILERS!*

[wonkishere]

The nitpicking that I mentioned is not discussing it in detail, it's stuff like talking about how DNA works, or how the aliens didn't have enough mass to consume to get as big as they did. Picking out details of science and saying that it couldn't have happened that way; it's the sort of thing that scares writers off from even trying to sell a script literally, because they drive themselves crazy trying to reach a degree of scientific accuracy that isn't possible with their plot.

That's nitpicking. Discussing in detail is fine.

And I don't believe they got lost, I understand what you're talking about now. The geologist was mad because he could tell they were taking the discovery mission in a direction he didn't like, so he and the other guy left, and if I am not mistaken they were taking readings in the other room. He was checking the floor and the biologist was trailing him. The fact that they said they were going to the ship doesn't mean they got lost, they just changed their mind. That's something that should have been further developed, but I'm not sure why you care about it as much as you did.

So basically, they decided to go do their own discovery mission. I never got the sense they got lost, which is why I didn't know what you were referring too.

I thought the biologist was being awfully stupid, but there was quite a bit of difference between the two encounters, which I sense you don't want to notice at this point. The second encounter he tripped over a small lifeform in a pond. I suspect he's been to a lot of ponds and looked at a lot of lifeforms in the past in this type of setting, so he made some bad assumptions at that point.

The biologist and geologist were heading back to the ship, disliking the discovery of the dead engineer (wait, who is the guy who didn't understand what they saw again?) They do not go in search of rocks. They do get lost (characters inquire why they are not back yet.)

The fact they got lost is silly, as the geologist was the one in charge of the mapping technology. David was not in charge of the mapping bots, so no, I wasn't talking about him. And the geologist seems to think a lot of the bots, referring to them as his pups if I heard him right. Yet he seems clueless on how to read the map they generate.

Biologist was thrilled to see an alien - but he just ran away from one when the probe detected a life form, when he declared with obvious fear that they should go in the other direction from the detected ping. I can get if he is thrilled on discovering life being a biologist, but then he would move TOWARD that first ping of life, excited to see what it is.

Yet when a lifeform shows up, he goes right up close. I get if he is afraid of unknown life even as a biologist, especially given that he and geologist buddy just discovered huge pile of dead bodies, but then he should move AWAY from this life form just like he did the first detection of one.

He should be consistent in his desires, and he isn't.

I don't think we are picking apart the first intelligent sci fi movie in ages, because it just is not intelligent, sorry. We're picking apart a sci fi movie we hoped would be intelligent, that perhaps the director intended to be intelligent, but that has so many badly written characters and events that any pretension to the throne of being a smart sci fi that makes you think is totally lost.

We discuss it in such detail, because we had such high hopes, sadly dashed.

 

[TheTomG]

I see where you are at, yep! Those items bother me so much because I am always big on characters and what motivates them. Sure human beings aren't always consistent, but it would have taken so little to turn it around into something sound for me.

Biologist and geologist could have argued in just a few sentences about "Told you we should have just gone back to the ship!" and bingo, strange inexplicable behavior is tied in to something.

For the pond worm (to just give it a name of some sort!) geologist goes "Don't touch it, we saw all those dead bodies!" Biologist goes "This tiny thing couldn't be the cause of those!" and bingo, again we have an explanation for the behavior.

Now, why not just assume those kinds of things myself, since they are small? The answer to me as a writer is they do overtly fix motivation early - they call out the motivation "I don't like big dead bodies and this freaks me out and is not what I expected as I thought your theory was baloney and now it's real, I am out of here and back to the ship!"

Having fixed that motivation and called it out specifically, they need to tell me why that changes, just as overtly. Writer and director decided to call that out in the first place, so, now they need to answer to it.

Same goes for running away from the detected life form, another overt piece of character development which they then should not contradict without explanation. If I deliberately have a scene that shows a character's fears, then my readers (or viewers in this case) would need to be told why the person is now acting in a different way.

That's why that part bothers me, and in this instance it transcends the genre - such things would bother me as much in war movies, action movies, westerns, period dramas and anything else

 

[Moonbat]

In a good script/screenplay the characters will say what the characters think, not exposition. So when we hear Idis Elba say 'they [the engineers] created a biological WMD and it killed them' if we consider it a good script then that should be thought of as the character's assumptions and not a piece of exposition put in to explain to us (the viewer) what has happened.

Likewise, we don't know what David said to the Engineer, do we? I don't speak Click.
We can assume (which I think is a bit presumptuous considering all that David has done throughout the film) that David asks exactly what Weyland wants him to. In which case I'm not sure I agree that the Engineer would want to destroy us years later, maybe destroy the human race, but a strangely dangerous bio-weapon (the xenomorph) is an odd way to do it, when a big gun would suffice, but why pull off David's head and batter Weyland's team?

If we take the example that Wonki gave, we create a lifeform (lets say David) and thousands of years later (let's not argue over how many years ago the engineers created us) we stumble upon it, or a group of Davids appear before us and chat to us in our own language (see point above about what David said) would we necessarily attack them? I find that a bit hard to understand, but then again understanding an alien mind is not something we can do, but then again the Engineers share our DNA so must be a least a bit like us (though the thought process/understanding could be said to be socialogical nopt physiological).

 

[iansales]

Right, then they would certainly know that. It opened to awful reviews and lukewarm response from audiences, and made substantially less than they spent. It was a special effects heavy movie and they aren't cheap to make.

The film was badly marketed - the title, for example, didn't exactly signal it was a sf film - and once word had got out that reviews were bad, it snowballed (it was far from all reviews, incidentally). Despite the fact that a lot of exit polls were approving, and a number of critics praised it. But the "story" of John Carter had already been written, and it said the film was a flop. Nor were Disney interested in supporting it. All this despite the movie going on to make a profit overseas. And it'll likely to do really well in sell-through and PPV too.

A similar thing happened with The Golden Compass. The film was generally liked, but the story went round that fundamentalist Christians thought it was blasphemous and that was enough to put the kaibosh on the sequels.

 

[James Coote]

Right at the start, David is practicing his language skills with some program that has a teacher say "repeat after me" and then some phrase in the engineers' language.

David says the same phrase to the engineer near the film's end. Either:

a) the writers couldn't be bothered to make up more than one mumbo-jumbo phrase
b) it actually means something in a real (but obscure) language
c) if it was meant to be a special message prepared by weyland, then whoever made the translation software and/or the teacher must have known about weyland's plan

However, I think c) is reading into it too much, and it's hardly like we need another plot hole

I really think it was more like a formal greeting for those that have never met. Something like "Greetings from your humble servants" or "Yo, wassup?" or words to that effect

 

[Dave]

Nobody bothers to pick apart Independence Day, they generally come after movies like this one.

Yes, they do:
http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/14698-independence-day-1996-a.html
(but not until around page 6 and the lists of the 78 cliches it uses.)

I'm not sure why you keep mentioning Independence Day in comparison as that is hardly an intelligent film itself. Some films are easy to pick holes in.

Why not compare it with Inception? That plot was so complicated that you felt sure Nolan would have slipped up somewhere as they jumped between the levels of the dream, but it was difficult to find fault with it because he had obviously spent some considerable time making sure that it worked.

Why not compare it with 2001: A Space Odyssey? Now, there you have a film that is extremely difficult to follow, and incomprehensible to many unless they have read the book, but the narrative still follows some logic and the characters do not suddenly change tack.

 

[clovis-man]

Well, now that most of the heated discussion seems to be over, I can only offer this:

http://screencrush.com/prometheus-engineer-handsome-squidward-dead-ringers/

 

[ghost8772]

Well, I've read some of the postings, skipped a number of others. I might express similar opinions of posts in the middle somewhere, if so, sorry guys, eyes started glazing over on some.

Anyways, I hadn't noticed anyone making a speculation that the "engineers" that were found on LV-233, or whichever designation that planet, excuse me, moon, is,were not the life forms that populated Earth, and maybe even a planet that spawned marble skinned nine foot tall human life. maybe its possible that the engineers had found the stash of primordial soup, and were starting to travel the galaxy, removing life forms, and replacing them with something else. I don't remember a sub title on the screen at the beginning that SAID the planet being shown was Earth, so it could have been a totally different planet being "populated" whatever.

Overall I found the movie was a 'one off' from being prequel, The moon landed on was not the one the crew of Nostromo landed on, the Ship that did leave the moon went right back down, and could not launch again. the ship Android and Doctor took, in all likelihood did not land on that moon, because the space Jockey is way different size, and I doubt they tried to wake a cryo frozen one on the new ship. very likely that ship had been lost for millennia etc... Also the Aliens we all knew previously had a decidedly male setup, back of their heads looked like shall we say male parts, where the altered worm looked remarkably like girl parts. the similarities in propogation do point that there is a similar start point, but the differences say a divergence in natural selection whatever from what was founf in Prometheus, and discovered in Alien.
Unfortunately plot holes, science skipped, etc... can only really be explained as "because it was in the script" after all Ridley Scott made the movie, not Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawkings, and Isaac Asimov, with a think tank helping with details.
of course if that was the case I'd avoid THAT movie unless I had insomnia.
personally I found the movie decent. Yeah a bit light on explanations and plot more closely resembling hopscotch at times, but for the regular masses, lots of horror, WEIRD aliens, death, zombies, etc...

 

[Brian G Turner]

Watched this on Saturday night.

What. An. Awful. Film.

Lovely visuals, but awful script with no continuity.

It was like watching one of those awful cheap zombie movies, where different people wander off just to die horribly, and nothing makes sense.

- taking their helmets off just because the air is breathable, with no concern of being infected by pathogens, or polluting the environment with their own?

- people wandering off by themselves for no reason other than to die horribly

- someone is burned to death, only to inexplicably become a rampant zombie to kill load of people

- the robot spontaneously decides to place a fragment of tissue in someone's drink, knowing it will enter his semen and impregnate his girlfriend with a squid monster

- said squid monster, in the space of a few hours confined in a lab, suddenly turns into a giant monster

- headless robot is fully aware of exactly what is happening to everyone else, despite no comms link, and is able to chat to them

- when faced with a deadly object rolling towards them, no one thinks to run aside, but instead to run along its direct path!

- too many little issues!!

Also, this film has nothing to do with Alien, except for a 30 second epilogue that was incredibly weak. Think they added that in because they realised they'd be accused of using Alien as an inspiration, even though nothing in the film relates to it, except that poor poor epilogue.

All in all, a very pointless film. Really can't believe Ridley Scott put his name to it, unless he's gone senile.

 

[glutton]

Poor Space Jockeys/Engineers. How the mighty have fallen, from glorious giant creatures of mystery to pro wrestlers with blue paint.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Well, I finally managed to get round to watching this over the Xmas break. I feel like the only person on the site to have not seen it till this late.

Thankfully I hadn't been enthused about seeing the film (too old and cynical to trust something that is described as a prequel), otherwise I would have been sorely dissappointed. Thus I can only muster an apathetic shrug. T'was incoherent and jumbled. I believe it was an attempt to explain the space jockey - but it just multiplied the questions and mysteries by two.

Didn't even line up with Alien that well, and is effectively a re-boot of the Alien franchise that kinda pushes the excellent sequel Aliens into non-canon/discord/alternative time line, which is a shame as Alien/Aliens made sense.



Anyhoo, Happy new year everyone and hope Crimbo just been has been a lot of fun.

 

[SpanishMill]

My comments in Bold...

The 'Engineer' seemed pretty happy to kill everyone he saw. Here is my take on it:

The very beginning of the movie, where we see an Engineer watching the ship leave I believe was on Earth, and was facing some sort of punishment.
Taking the drink was some form of suicide, I think, but when he fell into the water, there was an adverse reaction. He broke down into molecules, which we saw floating in the water. Through evolution, those molecules eventually formed the human race. Hence, the 'we were created by the Engineers' theory.[I think that's idea they were trying to get across... pleasing bible readers "God created man in his image" / evolutionist "Life evolved in from the sea" / ancient alien believers "The Engineers".... I think it's a scene everyone can live with....]

The Engineers clearly came back and discovered the human race developing on Earth and figured out what happened. They decided to create a bioweapon of mass-destruction to destroy the human race. [Bible reference to God becoming angry with his creation. Genesis 6:7 "I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth"...]


What doesn't make sense to me is that the Engineers don't appear to know the location on Earth until David plucks it out of the map, essentially telling the Engineers where to find the human race. If they had already been to Earth several times, then why did they need David to show them? And why leave it until now? [Well, the fact that the earth was already on the map tells me they obviously knew where was...]


There is a possibility that the Space Jockey in Alien isn't actually an Engineer at all. They drew a lot of attention to the periodical cramping spasms Elizabeth got. The pain came and went, not consistent with the constant pain she would have every time she moved from the c-section. It is possible that she, through the pregnancy, became infected and had an alien growing in her. Being female, that alien would likely be a queen. What if it was Elizabeth controlling the ship, the alien burst out of her, and she crashed on the planet from the first movie? She would look like a Space Jockey because you have to wear the armour to control the ship. Any message she left, using the technology of the alien ship, could possibly be garbled, or come out in the Engineer's language, or deteriorate with time, or is altered from wearing the suit.[I tend to agree with Elizabeth being what was in the Engineers suit in the original film and that she produced a queen...otherwise how did all those eggs get there in the original film???...]

It's just a theory, but makes sense to me... [We think alike... ]

 

[Venusian Broon]

Hi SpanishMill,

I struggled for a day or two with a lot of inconsistencies with the movie but after having a look through the interweb and having a look at what Ridly Scott has said, the reason it's all over the place makes a bit more sense.

Someone mentioned the Golden Compass in the thread and the comparison is apt. RS definitely has a sequel to Prometheus in mind, (Elizabeth's journey to the home of the engineers, paradise), but I believe he wasn't sure that he could get a green light for that one. So he tried to make Prometheus as standalone as he could. Furthermore I believe he has stated that to make a bridge to Alien, he'd have to make another sequel on top of that - thus making a trilogy. So perhaps we have another film like the Golden Compass which is part one of a trilogy that may never be made.

an Engineer watching the ship leave I believe was on Earth, and was facing some sort of punishment....

RS states that the planet at the start is not necessarily Earth - which could explain any problems we have with our billion year fossil record and the sudden appearance of humans. It's just somewhere else. (Or perhaps a very, very long time ago - maybe after the KT extinction event when life was struggling after the asteroid hit, so they came along and decided to seed new life to help the ecosystem along...)

But the scene is there to show what the engineers do - which is spread life among the planets of the universe. RS talks about Aztec/Maya creation myths/practices where kings or princes were all powerful for a year but then were sacrificed to the gods to sustain vegetation/life as his motif or thinking about the engineers. Here he protrays it literally - the engineer altruristically sacrifices himself to kickstart life on the planet (whatever planet that happens to be).

...Bible reference to God becoming angry with his creation...

I believe RS's original idea, that in the end he just hinted at (clue, look at the timeline) but didn't spell out was that Jesus Christ was an engineer that they put on Earth to try and pacify our war-like and nasty population and teach us to be good. And then we crucified him. So they were going to wipe us out for being naughty boys and girls.

[I tend to agree with Elizabeth being what was in the Engineers suit in the original film and that she produced a queen...otherwise how did all those eggs get there in the original film???...]

Apart from the fact that this would be finally explained in Promethesus III so really anything probably goes, I'd disagree with this - David was the only one that could fly the ship and he ain't tasty for chest bursters. Plus I'd have to go back to Alien to see the original space jockey, but from memory his chest bursted ribs are shown, which are clearly not human sized