Prometheus

[Nymethus]

There are like twothreesomethn scenes that could appear as scary but they're not scary since there's no tension and you don't care about the characters.

Some IMDB quotes:

The best explanation for why this movie was so bad was a quote I saw from a review at rottentomatoes:

"Questions go unanswered, shocking occurences go unquestioned, and supposedly intelligent people do stupid things."

- Horribly trite religious mirroring and symbolism. Infertile woman gets pregnant, gives birth on christmas, an evil animal resembling a snake, etc..
- Needlessly ambiguous and frustrating lack of answers
- Paper thin characters with little to no established or observable motivation, aside from the broad strokes, "I want to find god," type bullish!t.
- At times, clunky and cliched dialogue - "It's carrying death!"
- Inexplicably stupid characters doing inexplicably stupid things -

"Hey, we've now learnt that something obviously powerful killed the Engineers inside the very building we happen to be standing in, so when two of our guys get left behind in there, let's not, ya know, do the prudent thing and post someone on the phone at least to make sure nothing bad happens to them through the night, ya know like, in shifts or something... Captain, it's a better idea if you just go have love instead..."

OR

"Hey, my boss is about to die, so I'm gonna take this black goo that I only just discovered exists a few hours before and know literally nothing about, and infect some innocent guy with it in the hopes that SOMETHING might happen that helps me in SOME way, whilst being completely oblivious to the well-being of everyone around, including the guy hiding in the next room, who I'M SUPPOSED TO BE PROTECTING"

OR

"Hey, I just saw a freaky thing in my EYEBALL, I'm not gonna do something stupid like, I dunno.. TELL MY GIRLFRIEND WHO I JUST BONED,"

ORRRR

"The very guy who, just FIVE MINUTES before, was telling us where to go in the caves based on the direction of HIS OWN PUPS, gets himself lost on the way out..."

Sorry, stupid.

- Stupid plot inconsistencies - so they're about to operate to take the thing out of Shaw, so she attacks them, get's it out herself, and then not a single person bothers to follow her, OR EVEN ASK, "Hey, what gives with being covered in blood and goo... and that HUGE FU#KING WOUND ON YOUR STOMACH!" Sh!t like this needs to be followed up on. Or better yet - "They decided to kill us, then changed their minds," Are you sure about that Dr. Shaw, coz a minute ago one of them was trying to kill you for no reason... or even better yet, why were the early humans praising the star system that turns out to be unremarkable and just a weapons storage factory..?? Why was that particular part in space significant to them?????
- Choppy and inconsistent tone - I'm sorry, is this a quasi sci-fi movie about faith or philosophy, or a sci-fi action film, or a sci-fi horror/monster movie.. heck, for a minute it turns into a fu#king zombie film.
- Archaeologists who also happen to be biology experts, ALIEN biology experts at that.

Satisfied?
Uggh, there are more, I just can't be bothered typing them all. I'd have been more disappointed if the whole Alien franchise wasn't already fubared.

Flat characters acting irrationally at the service of the plot.

Atrocious dialogue that is often laughable.

It's a string of random scenes, especially towards the end, that don't build together at all.

The entire middle of the film stalls for time and is filled with often pointless scenes, like the black guy trying to get in the hot white chick's pants, which felt like it should have been in the research parody, not the actual film. Plus we have the two idiots wandering in the ship, which derails the film and takes it nowhere.

None of the ideas are explored enough, and neither are any of the characters.

The script is just AWFUL. If you're shallow, then you'll be tricked by the awesome look of the film. But the script...not good. And that's a flat out FACT.

My apologies, I tried to keep this brief but I've been stewing over this film all weekend and found I could not.

I didn't HATE the movie, though I was very disappointed with it. The more I think about it the less I like it, but at the moment I've given it a score of 6/10, mostly for the visuals, Noomi Rapace, and Michael Fassbender.

I'll start just with some general things. As many have mentioned the characters were quite one dimensional. David and Shaw are the only ones who get anything close to a character arc, but they're also the best performances. The acting on the whole was pretty mediocre. I've expressed an appreciation for Rapace and Fassbender already, and I think Idris Elba did the best he could with one of the most one dimensional characters.

The poor performances may be in part due to some fairly bad writing. Having only seen the film once I don't have a lot of specific examples, but I'll do my best here. It seemed like there were a lot of instances of somebody saying something and then somebody else shouting, "What do you MEAN [thing you just said]!?!?" There was also that terrible line from Fifield, "I'm not here to be your friend, I'm here to make money." Which would seem to be suggesting also that he's some sort of mercenary, a hired gun, but we find out later that he's a geologist. Who is afraid of caverns...

Moving on to specifics, I was actually quite intrigued by the first forty minutes or so. Once they begin exploring the caverns it started to lose me. For a start, they take their helmets off. Maybe Holloway would do it, because his character was painted as something of a reckless idiot, but no way would the rest of the scientists all follow suit. Just because the air is breathable doesn't mean it's safe to remove your helmet. They don't have any idea what kind of bacteria could be floating around. This is sheer idiocy for normal humans, but these are supposed to be scientists.

Vickers as a character is entirely superfluous. You could write her out and have other characters perform her one or two important actions and it would be no detriment to the film. She's there to be the cliched "shadowy agenda" character, but she doesn't really have one. Her death was one of the most idiotic I can think of in a long time. The twist that she's Weyland's daughter was obvious and unimportant.

As was the twist that Weyland was alive. The moment we become aware that David is communicating with some unknown figure, we all know it's Weyland. Why the need for secrecy? It's his company, and his money funding the expedition. It's not like his presence there would automatically indicate that he had sinister ulterior motives, unless he told them outright. And there was no reaction to his being there, it was just, "Huh, Weyland's here now, I guess." And why cast Guy Pearce and put him in heavy old age make-up? Surely not just so you could do that TED Talk viral video.

Structurally, it's just a mash-up of different scenes that bear no relationship to each other, and have no impact on each other. They find the two goofball scientists dead, and it's of no consequence. Nobody talks about it, it doesn't cast any sort of a pall on the mission. The most egregious example is perhaps the cesarean sequence. They want to put Shaw back in cryo-sleep so they can operate properly on Earth. Seems sound enough. But she fights them and runs off to the surgery pod. Nobody chases after her, nobody comes in while she's performing the surgery. She gets the thing out of her and just leaves it in the room, it doesn't come back until much later. She stumbles upon Weyland, nobody seems to care that she's obviously just done the surgery, nobody asks her what came out of her or where it is.

I see a lot of reference to the "big questions" the film asks. I pose that there are none. The characters wonder where we came from and talk of meeting our creators. That's as deep as it gets. And the idea that aliens had something to do with human evolution is a sci-fi cliche, is relatively absurd, and does nothing to get somebody thinking about their own existence in the real world. The film similarly deals with Shaw's faith and religion in the most perfunctory way. Shaw says, "I believe it because I choose to" about a number of things, including things that should come down to science. And also she has a cross necklace.

The black goo is biologically inconsistent, it does what the plot needs it to. I'm willing to grant them a certain amount of leeway with the fluid, just because it's "alien," but they abuse it. It dissolves one of the Space Jockeys and strips him down to his DNA. Fine, it can do that, I'll allow it. It turns the maggots into weird phallic snakes, again, I suppose that's alright. Then it turns Holloway into... well seemingly something of a Space Jockey himself, though we never learn if he would survive the transformation. But what was that in his eye? Never explained. Why is he super fertile? Dunno. Why is his and Shaw's baby some bizarre squid monster that turns into a giant face hugger despite having no food source? Doesn't matter...

And finally, the Alien prequel conundrum. Scott has stated as many times as possible that this is not a prequel in the traditional sense, that it's just a new story set in the Alien universe. But the trouble is that it both is and isn't. It's not tied to the Xenomorphs or the crew of the Nostromo, this is true. But the only reason I stay interested at all once they get on the planet is because of the familiarity I have with the ship and the setting. I want to see how it ties in to Alien. If I didn't have that connection, if you strip away those Alien trappings and make it a wholly original work, then I have no reason to be interested because they haven't set up a compelling mystery of their own. They use these familiar elements as a crutch, and yet they never link them to Alien in a satisfactory way.

I'm all for a movie making me think and leaving me with questions. But they have to be questions I can ponder on my own and reach my own conclusions about. Questions of philosophy, or questions of existence. These are not the kind of questions Prometheus leaves me with. Prometheus leaves me with questions of logic and plot that I CAN'T answer on my own, and with a successful film wouldn't HAVE to. I don't care that they have a grand trilogy planned, because I didn't like this movie and don't want to have to sit through another one in order to get answers that should have been given me in this one.

[Ad Bot]

[Freeze]

the scariest bit in the original alien was when that guy exploded into milk

[carolcat]

the scariest bit in the original alien was when that guy exploded into milk

i thought it was  the part where jones just like suddenly pops up in the locker thing

[Freeze]

i thought it was  the part where jones just like suddenly pops up in the locker thing

jones was the milk

[T0XIC]

I just got back from it, it was loving awesome @.@

[Jenxas]

hey guys like alien abortions?

watch this movie!

I watched it at the midnight premier
so much fun

[Jacob/Lee]

Took me a bit to realize it was supposed to be an Alien prequel.

[Niven]

its handicapped

[Donro98]

It is horrible.

[Pixel]

It IS an alien prequel, did you not see the ending scene..?

The film began development in the early 2000s as a fifth entry in the Alien franchise, with both Scott and director James Cameron developing ideas for a film that would serve as a prequel to Scott's 1979 science fiction horror film Alien. By 2003, the project was sidelined by the development of Alien vs. Predator, and remained dormant until 2009 when Scott again showed interest. A script by Spaihts acted as a prequel to the events of the Alien films, but Scott opted for a different direction to avoid repeating cues from those films. In late 2010, he brought Lindelof onto the project to rewrite Spaihts' script, and together they developed a separate story that precedes the story of Alien but is not directly connected to that franchise

[Nymethus]

well technically it's not an Alien prequel yet

[Talent74]

Looked at the trailers and whatnot. However, I'm not interested in watching the film.

[Scream.]

I threw up during the C-section
ugh so loving gross

im never having kids
especially never aliens

[Master Shadow Phoenix]

When I looked at their suits, I thought to myself: Why are they wearing fishbowls as helmets?

[MegaScientifical]

I did think it was kind of annoying how they purposefully left as many holes as possible in an attempt to force want for a sequel, but I didn't think it was that bad. If another movie is made, hopefully they won't leave as many holes and learn from their mistakes with this movie. It was weird at parts, but... Ya...

I threw up during the C-section
ugh so loving gross

im never having kids
especially never aliens

Seriously, you threw up? How did that work out in a theater?