Prometheus

[Magus]

Pretty fantastic. I thought it answered many of the questions inherent in the Alien franchise in an interesting way, while still definitely being its own thing. If you were judging this by, say, Alien itself, I'd say it's not as tightly paced as that film, but if your benchmark is Aliens I'd say it more than matches that film, and even out performs it in its horror aspects (many people's complaints with Aliens--not actually scary. I think Prometheus has at least one scene that is going to match that horror aspect for people that they say has been missing).

I can definitely recommend the movie. It's easily the best thing in the franchise since Aliens.

BELOW I DETAIL MY THOUGHTS ON CERTAIN THINGS WITH TONS OF SPOILERS. DON'T READ ANYTHING BELOW THIS WITHOUT WATCHING THE MOVIE.

The Space Jockeys-- I liked the film's explanation for who the Space Jockeys, or Engineers, as they are called in this film, are. The reveal that the apparently inhuman/elephantine being in the first movie is actually an exosuit on a 9-foot tall human was really surprising to me. I didn't expect it--I didn't expect the opening scene to actually follow through with "these are the Engineers", as I thought that was some proto-human (well, I guess it was a proto-human) getting offed by the eventually to be introduced Engineers. In retrospect I kind of dislike that opening scene (not for its ambiguity, I"ll get into that later), but for the potential that it has to reveal too early what the Engineers are. BUT since it didn't ruin the surprise for me, at least, I can't be too harsh on it.

The Nephilim--

Genesis 6:1-4 "And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."

As for the Engineers themselves, they remind me of the Nephilim from the Bible. If you follow that sort of stuff, in Biblical cosmology (or at least the parts thought up by people who possibly had too much time on their hands), the Nephilim were fallen angels who slept with human women to produce the race of giants such as Goliath. There were a whole bunch of these fellows apparently, until they were eventually all killed off in various wars and such.

If you take this one step further to the Engineers in Prometheus, who are 9-foot tall albino giants who apparently visited Earth in the past, descending from the sky...it seems clear what the producers were going for, that the Nephilim in the Bible were actually aliens coming down, interbreeding with proto-humans (or creating them in the first place, as the film would posit), getting worshipped as gods or angels, as depicted in the various ruins and cave art the archaelogists found, telling them about the planetary alignment in the sky, etc. The tales of giants or Nephilim in the Bible are actually due to the Engineers and so forth.

The First Scene--This scene is a bit confusing to me. My interpretation is this scene is happening on ancient Earth and the reason the Engineers were attacking earth is a tribe of enemy Engineers were inhabiting it. This enemy Engineer drinks the ooze stuff unknowingly, thinking it is a peace offering, and dies, then falls into the water. His mutated DNA then spreads throughout the planet, creating advanced life on Earth, including being drunk by apes or proto-humans and producing modern humans. Or perhaps I'm reading this scene wrong and the Engineers purposefully created humans on the planet (which goes into my earlier thoughts on the Nephilim) and then later wanted to exterminate them for some reason, as is posited in the movie. It seems obvious that ancient people were supposed to have been in contact with the Engineers, so perhaps some of the enemy Engineers survived this initial attack and told their "descendants" about where they had come from, perhaps as a warning, or otherwise the Engineers were simply in contact with the humans they had created on Earth from the beginning, told them where they had come from, and then were going to exterminate them but screwed up and ended up offing themselves. It's all a bit muddled to me.

The Secret of the Ooze--So, about that uber-primordial ooze the Engineers created to use as a chemical weapon on planets. I'm a bit confused as to how exactly it worked--did it simply speed up evolutionary processes a thousand fold, or does it actually create life? In a scene in the cave we earlier see worms wriggling around in the soil after the stuff has started to seep out. Mere hours later, these worms have turned into freaky monster worms that murder those two scientists (Fifield and...whats-his-name), with apparently acid for blood and so on. Well, I guess Fifield survives as a grotesque zombie creature infected by the virus, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, regarding the worms popping out of the ground--did the ooze combine with the chemicals in the ground and actually create life, the worms, or does it simply speed it up? I'm not sure if this is supposed to be ambiguous or not, but we saw basically no signs of animal life on the planet (or maybe even no plant life, actually) prior to the ooze coming out, so I guess it could go either way.

Xenomorph Genesis--I thought this was a pretty original way to explain the creation of the xenomorphs, especially when internet speculation had already kind of explained it. A lot of speculation prior to this movie being made was that the xenomorphs were created by the Space Jockeys/Engineers as a biological weapon which then got out of hand and turned on them. This turns out to be true, in a sense, since the biological ooze weapon started mutating them and causing them to turn on each other (or have their heads explode, anyway). In the movie itself we see the proto stages of alien development begin to play out--Holloway is infected with the bio-ooze, he impregnates his girlfriend with a freaky squid monster, once the squid monster is removed it grows to resemble a gigantic face hugger (body hugger?). This body hugger then infects the Engineer they find with what resembles a basic proto-xenomorph, presumably a queen that will lay eggs with body huggers that will seek out more prey, etc., and over several generations we will get the xenomorphs from Alien with the current life-cycle, having infected an Engineer (lets just assume that after Prometheus ends, he goes and investigates it and gets infected) who then crashlands on a planet only to be discovered by the Nostromo.

Thoughts?

[Lumenskir]

I thought it was great. Not as good as Alien, but I think you're right in comparing it closer to the Aliens side of the horror-action spectrum, although this was definitely loaded with some great body horror. Either Ridley Scott had a really bad experience with C-Sections, or he is funding these movies almost solely with sponsorships from Big Natural Birth.

The First Scene - I've heard it theorized or explained elsewhere that the Engineer was acting as a 'genetic gardener', giving up his life to seed the world with usable DNA/life. I also don't think that it's necessarily Earth, but rather a representation of the typical Engineer plan of going to a hospitable planet and bringing life to it.

The Secret of the Ooze - I've read a lot of hand-wringing and whinging about why and how the ooze can have such diverse effects, but I think that's supposed to be the point. Like in Alien, when the chestburster went from cat-sized to human-sized in the space of two scenes without eating anything, the way this stuff works is meant to be completely bizarre. As a basic explanation, it appears to just react to a local life form and mutate it into the perfect killing version of that organism. My personal theory is that there's a bunch of different versions of the ooze meant to be dumped all at once on hostiles in order to create absolute chaos, we just can't differentiate between the different forms yet.

Maybe this is because I just think it'd be great to consider a war scenario where the local wildlife now has multiple mouths and acid blood, some people are turning into zombies, and xenomorphs are popping up around the population.

[Magus]

Yeah, I just read on the AV Club that that was the Word of God explanation from Scott himself on the meaning of the first scene, so that takes care of that.

The ooze being made to purposefully mutate things into a vicious/violent version of their former selves is something I hadn't thought of. If it is engineered to act specifically that way, it helps explain its use as a weapon.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Eugh.

I duno what movie you guys were watching, but I found Prometheus to be utter shit. Like, all it did was introduce a ton of plotholes/retcons for no other reason than to make a new movie that's only tangenially related to Aliens. I am officially removing this movie from my personal headcanon because it was so terrible. Pretty much every element of the film was crap, from the terrible acting of the main female lead, to the lack of communication between characters, to the stupidiy of these so called "scientists" ("hey guys we can breathe in here, let's all take off our helmets, we can't possibly be infected by any alien germs that we don't know might be here")(oh look a giant teethed worm thing, let's play with it!)

Eugh. Just fucking eugh! I could go into more detail and spoiler everything but it will turn into a massive rant in which I breakdown and critiscise pretty much everything that was in the film and I really don't want to because it pisses me off so much. This whole thing was AvP Requiem level bad and should be avoided at all costs. I don't know why people think it was good, it wasn't scary, it was ill-paced, non-sensical, boring, plot hole filled waste of time exploring an element of the Aliens verse that never needed exploring. Fuck this movie.

[Magus]

I don't know that it really retcons things. None of those things had established explanations in the first place. So rather it would be the explanations they came up with, you didn't like, as opposed to them being retcons.

Like I said, it wasn't as tightly wound as Alien, but I thought it was pretty good.

Anyway, the reason the scientists took off their helmets is the same reason they refused to take weapons with them or why they acted so skeptically to Charlize Theron's character telling them not to make contact with any aliens they find: they are naive, literally sandal-wearing liberal hippy scientist types. Hell, they're archaeologists or anthropologists, in fact, not actual science scientists (though the one who does have a degree in biology also acted stupidly in another scene, so that would be an example of someone acting really stupidly, but that is another scene besides that one...).

I did dislike that the film characterized Theron as being a "bad guy" even though she was the only one acting intelligently throughout.

[Azisien]

Wait... Are you telling me people acted stupidly in a horror film???

[Lumenskir]

Wait... Are you telling me people acted stupidly in a horror film???

I'd say it tends more towards overly hubristic, but yeah, horror movie behavior in a horror movie. Except instead of a hulking slasher it's vagina monsters!

Slightly unrelated, but I kind of wish I could see what internet comments would have been like circa Alien being released.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Originally Posted by Magus

I don't know that it really retcons things. None of those things had established explanations in the first place. So rather it would be the explanations they came up with, you didn't like, as opposed to them being retcons.

I don't know if they were retcons or plotholes, so I used both words. For instance, the fact that this isn't the same planet that Alien/s took place on (lv426, Prometheus is set on lv223 (LV426 didn't have rings, there were no destroyed human ship parts near the alien ship in the original, and the last surviving engineer died on the human module, leaving the captain seat empty for the Nostromo crew to find, in case you're wondering where that comes from)), which means this isn't the same ship found in those films, which begs the question as to why they even bothered putting the alien in at the end, since we never again saw this planet. This means that the ship found on lv426 is probably the one that flew off at the end and the aliens that were later found on it in Alien are not descended from the same alien were saw being born here. You tell me if that's a retcon or a plothole.

This also means that through the entire Alien series, there was probably another planet and another dead ship full of xenos, assuming Prometheus isn't a retcon.

Then there's all the other stupid shit, like why did the android poison that guy (it served no purpose other than to get everyone killed), why did nobody go and actually kill the damn squid thing after it appeared, or even mention it again (seriously, she runs off from the people trying to put her into stasis, has time enough to get it removed, locks it in a room and then everyone seemingly forgets about it).

And why did the engineers bother leaving maps to their secret bio weapons base again? Oh right, so we could get this trainwreck of a plot moving.

Originally Posted by Azisien

Wait... Are you telling me people acted stupidly in a horror film???

Horror film? This was not a horror film. I say this as a guy who doesn't even particularly like horror films, but there was nothing like horror in this. Fucking Pandorum was more horror movie than this. It was just people being stupid so something would actually happen, like the idiot geologist running off and getting lost in a cave he just went and mapped! Honestly, even if he couldn't access the map himself, you'd think he'd know his way around a cave since he probably spends most of his life exploring them. But no, he had to get lost so him and the other guy could get attacked by the mutant worm thing that they had to go and poke around with in the room full of canisters of unidentified black goop that is clearly needs identifying before you walk around in there without your helmets on and touch shit!

[Lumenskir]

So, Hawk, if I told you this had nothing to do with established Alien continuity, and was just Ridley Scott creating a new universe and timeline with some familiar names and elements but no connection to what we've seen before...I mean, you pretty vehemently didn't seem to derive any enjoyment from the movie as a movie, but as an Alien-continuity fan would you be placated?

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Then why not go and create an actually new and different universe without incorporating elements from the alien verse? Why show a goddamn alien at the end? It pretty clearly is supposed to be connected, so why is it such a fucking mess?