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[Warning. Spoilers] So, I just saw Prometheus ...
13 years ago
... and I HATED it.
You know, for a movie that is sold on the premise of being a prequel to Alien, you would therefore expect it to leave itself at a point where Alien could therefore pick up from.
That sounds like the best idea to run with, right?
Then why was that far too much to ask of the Production Team on this movie?
Sweet Christy-McBollock-Waffles what the SHIT happened in that planning meeting? Was there a good story at one point and then somebody walked in, picked it up and said 'Hmmm, this is good ... let's change that.'
Now, it says it in the title, but often that's not enough to warn people about the spoilers, but I guarantee you that they are below, and IF you read on you will be told things about the movie, specifically the end and I take no responsibility for you reading onwards because you have now officially and decisively been warned.
So stop reading now if you want to see thins film and still have a shred of hope left in you that the Alien and/or Predator franchise has a shred of hope left in it ...
... actually, maybe it would be good for those people to read on. Then you won't waste your money watching this movie.
Okay so, I WILL say, that, as a standalone movie, if this were not supposed to be the Alien predecessor, I would congratulate them on a job well done for the most part.
However, that is not the case.
So, here are my gripes. No particular order as I'm too full of .. well, not rage per-se, that's a little dramatic, but a profound disappointment yet again in movie production teams. You were once great, Ridley Scott. What happened?
Okay so, gripe number one. This is meant to be an Alien prequel. And yet, there are no Xenomorphs present in the movie at all in the manner which we have come to expect. One is seen at the end ... sort of ... but that is all. So if you were expecting the creeping giant-headed slobbery fiends in gimp suits then you will be sorely disappointed.
I can understand that maybe they didn't want to make this a generic Alien movie, but that really is no excuse for replacing the Alien species that we know and substituting them for some tentacle waving bullshit.
Gripe 2. The 'Astronaut' That massive guy sat in the massive chair in Alien post chest-buster-ectomy. He's IN this movie and he sits in that big chair in the big ship that crashes ... but he doesn't die in the chair. He dies a mile away in a shuttle craft ... so how the cock does he get back in the chair? That's not just a continuity error, that's SUCH a failure it may actually haunt me as to how the hell that was approved by anybody making this movie.
Plus, the armour in the chair makes him a little bigger, but in the film, he's about 7 foot tall and nowhere near the size necessary for him to be the same guy in Alien who is MUCH bigger.
Error after error.
Gripe 3. Alien Genesis?
REAL SERIOUS SPOILER ALERT HERE
The whole idea of this movie (and I'm guessing because the motives behind the 'astronaut''s race could not be more unexplained if they tried. We have the guesswork of the actress who plays the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is that the 'astronaut' (whose race is referred to throughout Prometheus as 'the engineers, and I will henceforth be using that mantle) created human life on Earth. I am not sure if this is what is depicted in the opening sequence because after creating human life, they apparently then decide to destroy it ... with (say it with me) Aliens.
But the reason why they do this could not be more unclear. Deliberately so, it seems.
But the Aliens in question are not the Aliens as we know them. Think of the movie Evolution. They start as black goo and then those mix with worms, which become snake-like tentacle things, which then become the elephant man's less appealing second cousin, which then catch THE engineer whose corpse we allegedly see in Alien and out of him emerges a not-very-evolved version of a Xenomorph Drone.
Now, this is supposedly a very dead planet (and it's quite by chance that one of the engineers is discovered alive at all) So I'd like to know how 1 drone can evolve into a Queen Alien and find enough sustenance to help her lay those thousands of eggs in the hull of the crashed vessel.
Did nobody bother to point out these plot holes?
AT ALL?
I could suspend disbelief. The synthetic human (who is played exceptionally well by Michael Fassbender and he is one of very few things worth watching in this movie) mentions that there are 'thousands more ships' just like it. So, even if there are Engineers alive on those too, am I to them believe that another one is going to be brought down by ... someone else who wants to save human life on Earth and force the vessel to crash in the EXACT SAME WAY with a pilot in the chair who later has a fully developed Xenomorph queen bust from his chest?
That's asking a lot of disbelief to be suspended.
Gripe 4. Alien Vs Predator
This is a continuation of the gripe above. As mentioned, this movie, set in the 2090's apparently delivers unto us the beginnings of the Alien species. From scratch.
So, forgive my ignorance, Sir Scott, but if that is the case then how can a) An Alien skull adorn the interior of a Predator ship in the 1990's and b) have quite an exceptional amount of them in an underground pyramid in Antarctica dated back a few thousand years?
So either, Prometheus is wrong or the absolute entirety of the Predator canon is to be utterly and completely ignored.
Aliens Vs Predator 2 was bad, but that's going a bit far.
Gripe 5. Technology
The technology in Alien is a little bit crap. But it's set and you can't change it.
So why *said rubbing my forehead* in a movie that is meant to be the sequel, do you make everything several times more high-tech and advanced than it is in the (supposed) future?
Was there a single person awake during the planning of Prometheus?
Prometheus leaves so many holes that it would take a hive of Xenomorphs to count them ... that is, if they do count ...
It is either scrubbing out everything before it (still with massive, gaping continuity errors) or it is a lazy script that has not been checked properly by anybody with a fully functioning memory.
Dear lord
Movie makers keep whining and griping about how Piracy is destroying cinema.
Well, to be perfectly honest, if THIS is the shit that you deliver on all that money that pours in from cinema tickets, then that is revenue that you do not deserve.
I expected better from Ridley Scott. I really expected better.
For shame.
You know, for a movie that is sold on the premise of being a prequel to Alien, you would therefore expect it to leave itself at a point where Alien could therefore pick up from.
That sounds like the best idea to run with, right?
Then why was that far too much to ask of the Production Team on this movie?
Sweet Christy-McBollock-Waffles what the SHIT happened in that planning meeting? Was there a good story at one point and then somebody walked in, picked it up and said 'Hmmm, this is good ... let's change that.'
Now, it says it in the title, but often that's not enough to warn people about the spoilers, but I guarantee you that they are below, and IF you read on you will be told things about the movie, specifically the end and I take no responsibility for you reading onwards because you have now officially and decisively been warned.
So stop reading now if you want to see thins film and still have a shred of hope left in you that the Alien and/or Predator franchise has a shred of hope left in it ...
... actually, maybe it would be good for those people to read on. Then you won't waste your money watching this movie.
Okay so, I WILL say, that, as a standalone movie, if this were not supposed to be the Alien predecessor, I would congratulate them on a job well done for the most part.
However, that is not the case.
So, here are my gripes. No particular order as I'm too full of .. well, not rage per-se, that's a little dramatic, but a profound disappointment yet again in movie production teams. You were once great, Ridley Scott. What happened?
Okay so, gripe number one. This is meant to be an Alien prequel. And yet, there are no Xenomorphs present in the movie at all in the manner which we have come to expect. One is seen at the end ... sort of ... but that is all. So if you were expecting the creeping giant-headed slobbery fiends in gimp suits then you will be sorely disappointed.
I can understand that maybe they didn't want to make this a generic Alien movie, but that really is no excuse for replacing the Alien species that we know and substituting them for some tentacle waving bullshit.
Gripe 2. The 'Astronaut' That massive guy sat in the massive chair in Alien post chest-buster-ectomy. He's IN this movie and he sits in that big chair in the big ship that crashes ... but he doesn't die in the chair. He dies a mile away in a shuttle craft ... so how the cock does he get back in the chair? That's not just a continuity error, that's SUCH a failure it may actually haunt me as to how the hell that was approved by anybody making this movie.
Plus, the armour in the chair makes him a little bigger, but in the film, he's about 7 foot tall and nowhere near the size necessary for him to be the same guy in Alien who is MUCH bigger.
Error after error.
Gripe 3. Alien Genesis?
REAL SERIOUS SPOILER ALERT HERE
The whole idea of this movie (and I'm guessing because the motives behind the 'astronaut''s race could not be more unexplained if they tried. We have the guesswork of the actress who plays the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is that the 'astronaut' (whose race is referred to throughout Prometheus as 'the engineers, and I will henceforth be using that mantle) created human life on Earth. I am not sure if this is what is depicted in the opening sequence because after creating human life, they apparently then decide to destroy it ... with (say it with me) Aliens.
But the reason why they do this could not be more unclear. Deliberately so, it seems.
But the Aliens in question are not the Aliens as we know them. Think of the movie Evolution. They start as black goo and then those mix with worms, which become snake-like tentacle things, which then become the elephant man's less appealing second cousin, which then catch THE engineer whose corpse we allegedly see in Alien and out of him emerges a not-very-evolved version of a Xenomorph Drone.
Now, this is supposedly a very dead planet (and it's quite by chance that one of the engineers is discovered alive at all) So I'd like to know how 1 drone can evolve into a Queen Alien and find enough sustenance to help her lay those thousands of eggs in the hull of the crashed vessel.
Did nobody bother to point out these plot holes?
AT ALL?
I could suspend disbelief. The synthetic human (who is played exceptionally well by Michael Fassbender and he is one of very few things worth watching in this movie) mentions that there are 'thousands more ships' just like it. So, even if there are Engineers alive on those too, am I to them believe that another one is going to be brought down by ... someone else who wants to save human life on Earth and force the vessel to crash in the EXACT SAME WAY with a pilot in the chair who later has a fully developed Xenomorph queen bust from his chest?
That's asking a lot of disbelief to be suspended.
Gripe 4. Alien Vs Predator
This is a continuation of the gripe above. As mentioned, this movie, set in the 2090's apparently delivers unto us the beginnings of the Alien species. From scratch.
So, forgive my ignorance, Sir Scott, but if that is the case then how can a) An Alien skull adorn the interior of a Predator ship in the 1990's and b) have quite an exceptional amount of them in an underground pyramid in Antarctica dated back a few thousand years?
So either, Prometheus is wrong or the absolute entirety of the Predator canon is to be utterly and completely ignored.
Aliens Vs Predator 2 was bad, but that's going a bit far.
Gripe 5. Technology
The technology in Alien is a little bit crap. But it's set and you can't change it.
So why *said rubbing my forehead* in a movie that is meant to be the sequel, do you make everything several times more high-tech and advanced than it is in the (supposed) future?
Was there a single person awake during the planning of Prometheus?
Prometheus leaves so many holes that it would take a hive of Xenomorphs to count them ... that is, if they do count ...
It is either scrubbing out everything before it (still with massive, gaping continuity errors) or it is a lazy script that has not been checked properly by anybody with a fully functioning memory.
Dear lord
Movie makers keep whining and griping about how Piracy is destroying cinema.
Well, to be perfectly honest, if THIS is the shit that you deliver on all that money that pours in from cinema tickets, then that is revenue that you do not deserve.
I expected better from Ridley Scott. I really expected better.
For shame.
G1-Being a prequel, Prometheus is mainly concerned with back story, namely, who the fuck are the "Space Jockeys" from the original film? Why were they on that moon? Where/how did the xenos originate? I believe this was the ultimate purpose of the movie, to answer THOSE questions, not re-hash Alien and Aliens.
G2-The Space Jockey you see in "Alien" is just the big guy's environmental suit. As for the size difference, Ridley Scott used kids in space suits in the original movie to make the set look bigger (no CGI in them days).
G3-The Space Jockeys as progenitors of the human race is as good a plot as any, considering that all there was to work with was a suit and a derelict ship.
But, where did the eggs and, presumably, a queen, come from? Well, we know the infected geologist (mo-hawk guy) came back to the ship to fuck shit up. However, we never find out what eventually came out of the biologist who was attacked by the proto-facehugger thingy. A queen could have hatched from him. It's also possible that the xeno at the end of the movie is in fact a juvenile queen, which is why it looked so different.
G4-Alien Vs Predator movies have absolutely no relation to the original time line represented by Alien 1-3. They were a way to profit from the franchise, fuck them.
G5-The Prometheus ship was constructed for that exact mission BY Mr. Weyland, and as such, was a state-of-the-art science vessel. The Nostromo was a mining ship diverted there after the fact, and is, well, a mining ship...
...phew. Sorry, I'm huge Alien nerd and I had to clear that up. Love yer artwork, by the way. The descriptions really make them. Any stories based on them?
G1 - It was a backstory, but even though Predators may not be the original timeline as it was envisioned, and maybe the AVP stuff isn't the greatest, it is an established timeline thing. If something doesn't work, find a way to make it better, this was like just sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming 'la la la not listening la laaa'
And to be perfectly honest, Prometheus doesn't answer anything really, it establishes the set pieces ... ish ... but there is no answer as to how/why the Space Jockeys made humanity and then suddenly decide to destroy them.
G2. Okay, maybe that was just the suit in the chair, but if that's the case, why would the alien bust out of the Space Jockey's chest miles away and then go put a chest-bust hole in his empty space suit back in his ship? It's a massive plot hole.
And alright, they used kids due to no CGI ... but why not retain the size difference? His suit is not THAT much bigger than him. The colossal size of the Space Jockey (and the layout of that chamber too, It's just ignored! .... Does the human species shrink by an average of 3 feet in 2 hundred years? Does somebody come in and move all the furniture about? It's like Ridley and the set builders didn't bother to look at Alien to check they were doing it right and went off memory of the last time they saw the movie a few years ago when they were drunk at a friend's house.
G3. There is clearly a massive evolutionary gap between the alien and the one that was seen at the end. How did it develop on a seemingly dead world?
G4. Agreed, they are crap, but it's no reason to just ignore their existence. I would prefer if Alien 3 and Resurrection didn't exist either, but we can't wipe the slate clean. Adopt, adapt, improve. Not ignore.
G5. Think of technology 100 years ago and think of what we have today. Nostromo might be a mining vessel, but compare the most menial of jobs now compared to even 50 years ago, leaps forward in technology are utterly ridiculous! There is no way that even a crappy mining ship would be technologically inferior to something made 200 years before. At least not at the levels seen in the movie. It's the same company running to show, and I refuse to believe that, even as a cost saving exercise, they would downgrade so spectacularly to the point where they need dedicated maintenance people there just to stop the thing from falling apart.
I'm sorry, but Prometheus was a crushing, bitter disappointment for me. It doesn't really answer any questions. It's far too pretentious for its own good and tries to be much more clever than the sum of its parts. Well imagined and cinematically superior as far as graphics go, it may be, but it trips over its own ego at several turns and doesn't seem to feel the need to correct anything.
*sigh* As a stand-alone movie, it would be absolutely fine. It would work. But pegging itself as the prequel to Alien and then completely failing in that respect is really quite unforgivable.
It will not be finding itself on my DVD shelf.
G1- I love the Predator movies and I even love the idea of Aliens and Predators mixing it up old testament style. I doubt there are many Alien fans who aren't also Predator fans. That said, AVP completely fucks the lore and "reality" the Alien movies occupy, but the reverse is not true. The Predator universe is completely kosher with Xenos in it, because in AVP, the predators discovered and even loosely control the Xenos so they can hunt them. If you combine these two franchises in a single reality, then the Space Jockeys are in fact Predators, which is ridiculous. Granted, the AVP plot line would be awesome in its own way, but the Alien story would lose all of its integrity and atmosphere....more than it has already.
Prometheus was a return to the original story line by the original director, who I'm sure didn't reflect too much on the movies he didn't direct. Ridley Scott is arguably one of the greatest living directors around, especially in terms of technical and cinematographic skill. He took his time making Prometheus (I've been waiting...) and had no reason to just shit something out, especially for money of which he has plenty. As to the Space Jockeys true intentions...well, I believe that was consciously left out in keeping with the spirit and mystique of the original movie, which was all about "less is more" and keeping things dark and murky. In fact, I would have never dreamed a prequel would have been possible for a movie as aloof and atmospheric as Alien was and is. So, what may seem like plot holes, and there are a few, I admit, was really a conscious decision to stay true to the tone and spirit of the original. Would you really want to know ALL the details and ruin the mystery? I thought it was refreshing that you had to figure out some of plot details for yourself, some of them using only brief, visual clues. That is a rare thing in movies today, of which most just blurt it out with obvious exposition that takes the audience out of the illusion movies are supposed to be creating. Yes, Prometheus had to be somewhat independent and be able to stand on its own to get made, but there was a lot of information there for hardcore fans to discover and figure out. I still watch Alien every now and then and very little of the "how and why" gets handed to you, and most of it is up to interpretation.
This "less is more" concept gets carried through the first three movies (yes, even 3, which I still enjoy despite its flaws), but Resurrection strayed away from this core concept with way too much exposure of the aliens themselves and too much plot exposition, in my opinion. Still a good movie, but it doesn't fit well with the others tonally. Not to mention the frankly lazy cloning plot (really, is that all you have to do to bring back dead franchise characters?)
Uh...So, what I'm trying to say is Prometheus had to strike a balance between being its own movie, expanding the Alien universe and preserving its core identity, which has been diluted over the decades....by Fox.I doubt there would have ever been another Alien movie, sans predators, if Ridley hadn't decided to do it and attempt to un-fuck the franchise.
So, if that speech seemed like WAY too much brain time for a movie, its because Alien and Aliens are really the first movies I can remember seeing as a child, and by that I mean 5-6, with my parents, no less. I even saw Alien 3 in the theater with my mom at 11-12. It's entirely possible that I wouldn't allow myself to see Prometheus as anything other than glorious. But, I can tell you that I can't remember the last time I was as satisfied with a movie as I was with Prometheus. I know these movies, literally, backwards and forwards and have come up with few plot holes that couldn't be filled with a second watch or some logical interpretation or imagination. The clues are all there or have been left intentionally vague. What I found most important, the character and soul, for lack of a better term, of Alien was definitely present. Except for whatever the fuck Charlise Theron was trying to do with that character. Anti-Ripley? The Company made flesh or something...I don't know...
Sooo, I could argue over the physical details, I have a know-it-all answer for just about everything you brought up, but I think this is a more truthful response. Give it another chance. Watch Alien again first.
....and I'll argue the details if you want, too.
I DID watch Alien before and after and I have given Prometheus a second viewing, and you know what, that actually made it worse. on the second time around, I noted that they completely disregarded the size difference between Jockey and human.
Let me be perfectly frank that I do not think Prometheus is a bad movie in its own right. It is spectacular. I simply fear that the Alien connection has been shoehorned in because somebody somewhere feared that the story wouldn't sell well without attaching it to something established and guaranteed to sell tickets.
I know that's not the case, and I know that Scott worked on this for AGES which is why I am even more disappointed with it.
Would it have been so hard, for example, to show that the ships were carrying the MASSIVE stocks of Alien eggs that we see in Alien to Earth to wipe us out?. Plothole filled, and it does not interfere with the established Predator involvement.
Forget all the turgid 'black goo' bollocks (okay, maybe have it to one side as a plan B to maybe wipe out the Aliens after they're done wiping out humanity?) as it only served to confuse matters (and has never been mentioned again in Alien or Aliens. There was enough of it leaking about the place, I refuse to believe that nothing else climbed out of the sludge to terrorize the eventual colonists in Aliens.
Would it have been so much of a stretch that the living Space Jockey put himself into stasis BECAUSE he'd been facehugged previously, and he only had a limited time to do his thing. Gets into the chair, tries to launch but gets chest busted mid-flight and THAT's why he crashes?
These are such simple things, but no, Ridley or whoever is pulling his strings has got lost in his own superiority complex. I don't begrudge him his status as one of the greatest directors of all time, but sometimes, you need to put your audience before your own ego.
My issue with this Movie is that, because they have blatantly ignored the above (and there really is NO GOOD REASON as to why they have not filled in their plot-holes, there was absolutely nothing stopping them). THAT is why it seems like a cheap cash-in. I know it's not. I know it was supposed to be something fantastic and brilliant and slide onto the front of the Alien saga with sublime grace. But it doesn't. It just confuses everything and I really take umbrage with the whole thing.
I don't buy the "studio interfering with the plot to make it more palatable for the public" bit. The plot choices made it more convoluted and more challenging to fans and public alike. The studio forced Ridley to do THAT? No, these were choices made by Ridley and his writers to make something unique that might live up to the now 30+ years old Space Jockey mystery.
Alright, here's my theory on the black goo and xenos in general. The reason you don't see the eggs in the ship is because there were none to begin with. The black goo is the first stage of a biological weapon that ends with a self-sufficient, reproducing "army" of xenos. It's much easier to disperse or weaponize a biological agent than a ship full of eggs, not to mention safer for the Jockeys. As the other movies have shown, you're pretty much fucked if those eggs show up on a ship. The goo infects and mutates any form of animal life it comes into contact with (I'm assuming, remember the grubs in the initial black goo chamber?), and drives it to infect other members of its species or anything else that gets close. Once the goo has infected a more complex and probably warm-blooded animal, like us, the infect behavior becomes more sexually specific. I'm sure you figured out that the love scene between the lead scientists wasn't just thrown in for spice. At this stage, the goo hijacks the host's reproductive system in order to produce what I'm calling the "Royal" face hugger. As the name suggests, it impregnates the host with a queen embryo. This particular face hugger has to be larger so its capable of defending itself and pursuing hosts without the support of a xeno nest.
Pretty good, eh? I'm convinced the xeno at the end of the movie is a newly born queen. That's why it looks slightly different and emerges at such a large size.
All of the plot holes would have been solved if they had just pulled head out of arse for two moments and thought about it. I really want to believe that Ridley was pressured into making the changes because otherwise, I have to live with the fact that he has just not thought several things through, written himself into a corner through trying to be too innovative and clever and rather than fixing it, he's just shrugged, decided that'll do, sod continuity and left it because he either couldn't be bothered, ran out of time or just plain considers himself too infallible to be questioned.
The eggs being transported is the only way to explain why they are laid out in so orderly a fashion in Alien. Look at Aliens, the way they are just stacked together wherever there is space in the Queen's chamber. She wouldn't bother being so damn orderly, even if it were just to kill time.
And plus, the chest-buster in Alien 3 that comes out of Ripley is meant to be a Queen, as decided by Alien Resurrection. But it's the same size as all the others, putting paid to the idea that queens hatch much bigger.
He's just ... I don't know what happened, but this is not adequate as a prequel. There are too many holes and clear evidence of what is either rushing, just not giving a toss, or giant ego deciding that his word is god.
... and more to the point, that kind of physical exertion right after a rather ham-fisted cesarian-section is just ludicrous. Hollywood ludicrousness.
I'm not buying it and, as with my assertion that there are only 3 Star Wars movies, I certainly will be deliberately excluding this offering from my sight of the Alien universe.
I don't disagree that it's a good movie in it's own right. I just feel so utterly let down by Ridley on this one. He hasn't saw fit to put in enough effort to make this fit in with the others and as such, let it stand alone.
And let's not forget about lovely, sandal-shod David....A sexier android I dare you to name. Still slightly demented, though, even more so than Ash.
Also, you have to admit that the Space Jockey's suit was a brilliant way to use H.R. Geiger's original design for them.
....and while its pretty late in the conversation to point THIS out....Ridley did state from the beginning that this was not a DIRECT prequel to Alien. It's Alien's progeny rather than its predecessor. Yeah, whatever, its art n' shit...
Ugh....and to nerd things up one more time....Xeno embryos adapt to the host they occupy and grow accordingly. Bigger host, longer gestation period, bigger start in life. They also adapt to their surroundings. Like a Queen altering "her" egg-laying pattern to suit the environment and circumstances. They are an engineered life-form, after all, and were designed to cope with many different environments. Yar!