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P R O M E T H E U S |OT| Ridley Scott goes back to Building Better Worlds

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D

daviyoung

Banned
gofreak said:
In terms of David's motivations, the director commentary suggests something else other than him simply 'working for the corporation'. Does cast an interesting and logical light on some things.
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He does say "don't we all want to see our parents dead" or something similar, so even in the film it's obvious he's not just towing the corporate line and that there's an air of sentience to him.
 
C

calder

Member
Somehow missed it in the theaters, but finally watching it I really liked it. A bit mushy in places but really good overall, although I can imagine how Aliens fans might be disappointed in some of the 'lore' implications.
 
B

Blader

Member
daviyoung said:
He does say "don't we all want to see our parents dead" or something similar, so even in the film it's obvious he's not just towing the corporate line and that there's an air of sentience to him.
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That statement really caught me off guard at first; do most people really want their parents dead? I suppose it makes sense for David, where the parent-child relationship is just one person telling him what to do, with none of the emotional component to it, but it was still a weird thing to hear.
 
B

brotkasten

Member
Blader5489 said:
That statement really caught me off guard at first; do most people really want their parents dead? I suppose it makes sense for David, where the parent-child relationship is just one person telling him what to do, with none of the emotional component to it, but it was still a weird thing to hear.
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I wouldn't say that there aren't any emotions between them. During the hologram playback, Wayland said that David is the closest thing to a son he ever had.
 
S

Snkfanatic

Banned
Saw the deal for Best Buy on the collectors so I will be snagging that one. Taking a crappy old dvd in for 5 bucks off is pretty awesome.
 
E

Erigu

Member
Blader5489 said:
That statement really caught me off guard at first; do most people really want their parents dead? I suppose it makes sense for David, where the parent-child relationship is just one person telling him what to do, with none of the emotional component to it, but it was still a weird thing to hear.
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I loved how Shaw replied that she didn't. Oh, really, Shaw? Man, you're quite the anticonformist! I guess that's why you're our main character!
Such a weird exchange... It's like the writer was stoned, just ran with this "killing the father" thing in the most literal way possible and never looked back.
 
J

JB1981

Member
OK plot holes aside. Why is there a mural of the Xeno in the Temple? Do the Engies worship the Xeno? Is it there just because? This is the kind of shit I want to know ...
 
B

big ander

Member
GhaleonEB said:
It's clear from the movie that she's not an android. But even setting that aside, the writer did confirm that she's not.
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That's what I thought. Absolutely nothing in the film even leaned towards suggesting she was an android, so I thought it would be especially weird for some deleted scene to arbitrarily hint towards that.
 
R

Replicant

Member
JB1981 said:
OK plot holes aside. Why is there a mural of the Xeno in the Temple? Do the Engies worship the Xeno? Is it there just because? This is the kind of shit I want to know ...
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The funny thing about the mural is that if the fugly Xeno we saw at the end of the movie was the first Xeno (and it was implied as such because what are the likelihood that a squid-child from a human can mate with a engineer prior to this incident?), then where did they get the idea for the mural?

Even if the Xeno was a bio-accident that happened a long time ago, there's no reason for them to make a mural for it.
 
R

Raist

Banned
Replicant said:
The funny thing about the mural is that if the fugly Xeno we saw at the end of the movie was the first Xeno (and it was implied as such because what are the likelihood that a squid-child from a human can mate with a engineer prior to this incident?), then where did they get the idea for the mural?

Even if the Xeno was a bio-accident that happened a long time ago, there's no reason for them to make a mural for it.
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UNLESS

Xenos created engineers. Engineers worship them. Make murals.

Xenos got bored and left to another dimension.

Engineers missed their xeno gods.

They figured out they could recreate them by creating humans and then infecting them with a modified black goo and them have them have sex and then sacrifice one of their own.
 
R

Replicant

Member
Raist said:
UNLESS

Xenos created engineers. Engineers worship them. Make murals.

Xenos got bored and left to another dimension.

Engineers missed their xeno gods.

They figured out they could recreate them by creating humans and then infecting them with a modified black goo and them have them have sex and then sacrifice one of their own.
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SCIENCE!

How does it work? Where do babbies come from?
 
N

neorej

ERMYGERD!
Raist said:
UNLESS

Xenos created engineers. Engineers worship them. Make murals.

Xenos got bored and left to another dimension.

Engineers missed their xeno gods.

They figured out they could recreate them by creating humans and then infecting them with a modified black goo and them have them have sex and then sacrifice one of their own.
Click to expand...

Unless, the Xeno on the wall was a Xeno the Engineers created using humans guinea-pigs. Remember, the entire movie takes place on a different planet than Alien. The Xeno at the end of Prometheus has nothing to do with the Xeno that fucks up everything on board the Nostromo.
 
R

Raist

Banned
neorej said:
Unless, the Xeno on the wall was a Xeno the Engineers created using humans guinea-pigs. Remember, the entire movie takes place on a different planet than Alien. The Xeno at the end of Prometheus has nothing to do with the Xeno that fucks up everything on board the Nostromo.
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So Engineers wanted to eradicate life on earth but instead of just dropping their deadly (as evidenced bythe first 2 mins of the movie) black goo on the planet, they somehow waited for thousands of years and patiently conducted experiments with humans to develop some weird monsters. Maybe it'd be funner to watch than just instant desintegration. And carve murals about said monsters because well they look cool.

Sure possible. I mean it doesn't make any sense but it's not like the rest of the movie does.
 
Z

zephervack

Member
Raist said:
Well hum, yeah, I said "I can't find anything redeeming". The whole thing seems like a giant clusterfuck.

Premise: The Engineers came to earth and created life using some black substance to disintegrate one of their own into primordial blocks for life. Then they're somehow not happy with the whole thing and prepare some more (modified?) version of the black goo to destroy life on earth (or turn it into xenomorphs for some reason, maybe they're working for Predators who need more hunting grounds).

So first I'm not sure about the whole "creating life" since some of the opening shots have trees and the sequence of events starting from the engineer's DNA go straight into eukaryotic multicellular mode. So maybe it's just humans. Won't try to go too much into actual scientific stuff otherwise there would be a list of 20 more points.
Then, these guys have spaceships and can create life forms and stuff, but they somehow wait for billions (or hundreds of thousands if they only created humans) of years to stock pile some modified black goo and eridicate humans. Hum ok, why so long and why do they want to do that again? Unless they're like kids who like to build castles made of sand and then happily stomp them, I don't see how that works.

Then there's the whole David having weird mood changes that a few people pointed out already. His motives seem to change a lot and not make sense anymore at some point. Not to mention that he seems to know pretty much everything about engineers (their language, "passwords", what the black stuff does etc etc) out of absolutely nowhere.

There's about 20 people in that movie but 80% of them have about 3secs screen time and get wiped out in 30secs by the geologist guy who somehow turned into a zombie after having his face melted by the acid coming from the proto-face hugger. OK.
The biologist who got "infected" by a face hugger on the other hand, completely disappeared. The "twist" with the old guy not being dead after all was utterly useless because he gets killed 10mins later anyway.

Here's how it would have really worked for me, with some aspects of the movie being totally unchanged:

- Same thing with the opening. Engineers create life. Get rid of the non-sensical "Yeah but now we want to kill them all."

- Get rid of the old dude past his role in organizing the expedition. Leave him dead. He's a waste of 15 more minutes. Also, that obsession of Shaw's with religion. I mean, she is a scientist, pretty much discovers that life on earth was the result of an advanced Alien race, but wants her christian cross back becasue she still believes? Really?

- Keep David more or less the same, just give him the only motive of wanting to corrupt the human race (I assume he's the first android in that universe, so give him a grudge against that and humans. Maybe have characters be harder on him. Like the way Ripley treated Bishop). Since he seems to have unlimited knowledge already anyway, just have him modify the black goo so that instead of just reducing a living thing to a pile of nucleic acids and aminoacids, it turns them into monsters. In essence like Ash, just working for himself and not
an evil company.

- Keep pretty much all the incidents as they are, but get rid of that stupid squid birthing. Just have the biologist ending up giving birth to the first xenomorph (A queen) - and no need to imply that engineers know about xenomorphs already. That's pointless.

- Everyone but David dies in one way or the other (and please have some more character development or reduce the team to 4 people. In other Alien movies you care about everyone. Here it's like "hum, who the fuck are these 6 dudes who just got wiped out? Oh yeah they had a 10secs screen time 1h ago).
One engineer wakes up -that shot above can be used, he reads David's notes and realizes what he wants to do-, so he gets rid of David, realizes there's xenomorphs all over the place now and they don't look cool, jumps in his ship to fuck off, turns out he was infected at some point, chestbuster rips out as the ship was about to take off. So in essence, that's the guy you see in Alien, so yeah, have it happen on LV-426 and not yet another LV.

Point: humans absolutely wanted to know why (but there's no why, that's what Engineers do, bring life to other habitable planets without any purpose), and because of that (and a fucked up android's doings) they end up being the origin of xenomorphs, in a way also creating life but an evil one, and the cause of the resulting struggle with these creatures.

That would have made much more sense, be a real "origins" prequel and in that sense way more satisfying, instead of giving us a messy, weirdly paced movie that feels like 2/3 of the script got scrapped at some point and replaced by Lindelof's dumb ideas that don't work together.
Click to expand...


Im going to pretend this is what happens in the movie instead, you just fixed it for me :)
 
W

watershed

Banned
I wish this movie had truly cleared up the back story of Alien instead of just fucking with it. I love the Alien mural but I so wish the crashed Engineer ship ended up being the same one instead of a similar incident.

So they're probably gonna make a sequel right? I hope they don't choose to make things even more obtuse.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
It is pretty stupid that they crashed the ship, yet made a point of it not being LV426. Turns out Engineers are just shitty pilots or literally run into humans pretty often.
 
G

Gui_PT

Member
Scullibundo said:
It is pretty stupid that they crashed the ship, yet made a point of it not being LV426. Turns out Engineers are just shitty pilots or literally run into humans pretty often.
Click to expand...

I was so confused the 1st time I watched the movie. Everything made me think it was the same planet and ship as in Alien
 
R

Raist

Banned
Gui_PT said:
I was so confused the 1st time I watched the movie. Everything made me think it was the same planet and ship as in Alien
Click to expand...

Yep, same.
Overall it really does feel like the original script was a true prequel, and they somehow completely scrapped that idea but left bits here and there than indicate it.
 
Z

zoukka

Member
Scullibundo said:
It is pretty stupid that they crashed the ship, yet made a point of it not being LV426. Turns out Engineers are just shitty pilots or literally run into humans pretty often.
Click to expand...

The facebook image a few posts back reveals that the engineers actively seek (and spawn?) sentient lifeforms. Also it's kinda hard to pilot a ship if your chest explodes :)
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
zoukka said:
The facebook image a few posts back reveals that the engineers actively seek (and spawn?) sentient lifeforms. Also it's kinda hard to pilot a ship if your chest explodes :)
Click to expand...

Seems like the shit happens often enough that they need to rethink their protocol.

I mean, if two out of the two times humans come across an Engineer ship, their chest have burst and their ship crashed, some albino higher up needs to be shitcanned without pay.
 
Z

zoukka

Member
Scullibundo said:
Seems like the shit happens often enough that they need to rethink their protocol.

I mean, if two out of the two times humans come across an Engineer ship, their chest have burst and their ship crashed, some albino higher up needs to be shitcanned without pay.
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Dat xenomorph just too bad to contain.
 
A

afternoon delight

Member
The internet is the first place I've heard that this isn't the same planet as the Alien films. Everyone I've seen it with does not think this. Why are the explanations making the writing even worse, jesus.
 
Revolutionary

Revolutionary

Member
The fuck? I'm shocked that any Alien fan thinks it IS LV-426.
The movie states at several times that the planet's designation is LV-223. Yes, that can change... but by nearly 200 designations? Yeah, no.
 
M

MarshMellow96

Member
This has probably been picked up but...

'Mercenary 2' (Vladmir Furdik), gets an axe at his back at 01:26:46. At 01:27:45, he picks up Shaw after she stumbles upon Weyland being 'groomed'.

Paging Robert Webb.
 
Revolutionary

Revolutionary

Member
afternoon delight said:
Well some of smoke a lot of weed when we go to the theaters, okay?
Click to expand...
So do I, buddy! I still pay attention :p

Anyway, I went through the deleted and alternate scenes yesterday and I found myself preferring them all. Even the pre-coital scene which forced itself into a sex scene (the "but I can't have children" line in the finished film always struck me as hammy).
 
P

Price Drop

Member
Watched this again on Blu-ray last night.

The first time I didn't pay much attention to how the black goo works but it seems like there is some linearity to it.

When it touches anything, it mutates it. The snake, zombie Fifield (touched his face). When it's in the body and you reproduce (Shaw and Holloway) or Alien Queen (whether by herself or by a male), you create a Facehugger.

If the Engineer and Human DNA are a match, it's possible that a small sample was ingested by an Engineer, some procreated, gave birth to Facehuggers (or squid facehuggers), then the facehuggers raped Engineers to make Xenomorphs. My guess is that this happened, which would explain the mural, and that the Decon at the end wasn't the first to be birthed. The engineers had to be afraid of something and I suspect it was Xenomorphs. Also, the mural does include the facehugger in the art.

Overall, the deleted scenes do add some character development and even comradery among the crew that wasn't quite established. And the final battle sequence that was chopped up was good, but the editors were right. There's no way they could show Shaw having any kind of battle using an axe against an Engineer.
 
A

Anton Sugar

Member
Price Drop said:
Overall, the deleted scenes do add some character development and even comradery among the crew that wasn't quite established. And the final battle sequence that was chopped up was good, but the editors were right. There's no way they could show Shaw having any kind of battle using an axe against an Engineer.
Click to expand...

Still feel that's a copout. It's not like Ripley fought the xeno in Alien, but the entire escape sequence was tense as fuck.
 
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