SubJeff on 1/4/2017 at 07:14
Watched some of Prometheus again.
It starts great then gets ridiculous really fast.
1. Why wouldn't you introduce the team to each other before you set off?
2. How could anyone qualified to go on a mission like this (no matter how cheap - which is an argument rolled out btw; that Vickers got the cheapest people. If she were travelling all that way herself I'm pretty sure she'd pick good people. She even states she's risk averse) NOT believe that something is seriously up when Noomi explains why they are there.
3. How could Noomi insist on no weapons? They'd be 100% mandatory regardless.
And then it gets worse.
It's a great set up and like the ideas behind it. The atmosphere is great and overall it feels right. But... yeah, you know.
faetal on 2/4/2017 at 00:19
I kind of hated everything about it except Charlize Theron and Michael Fassbender and I suspect I only liked them because they're charismatic actors.
Spoilers below, if anyone cares about that kind of thing.
The whole premise feels more like a magical MacGuffin than a plausible extension of the Alien universe. It was fine to think that aliens are just another evolved life-form from somewhere which travel the universe by parasitising other species. The whole, BUT NO WAIT, THEY WERE CREATED BY THE SAME MAGIC GOO THAT HUMANS CAME FROM thing feels cheap - like watching a nature documentary and having some idiot start talking to you about Gaia and energy or some shit. Felt like a massive undercut to the series' intelligence. Even the whole "we're here to find god" thing felt more like a filed trip than a landmark event in human history.
If that wasn't bad enough, putting together an entire cast of disposable characters, with personalities ranging from insipid to annoying ("I'm a surly punkist who only cares about geology, first contact doesn't interest me") and scripting which works against the gravitas of a lot of the very dire situations ("Shall we crash our ship into that ship and kill ourselves in the process of attempting to save humanity? Better slip in some buddy comedy shit about losing that bet after all").
About the only pleasure I got from the film came from some brilliant acting in the form of what can only be Theron and Fassbender's C-list Stockholm syndrome, added to the slight glimmer of interest from seeing the latter events match up to events from the earlier films.
For just about everything else, I give a solid 4/10 - I might watch it again, but only if some situation required it (like a watching all the films weekend or something).
SubJeff on 2/4/2017 at 16:37
I think you do the premise a disservice.
The idea that we are engineered is not a new one but I thought it was handled quite well. The Aliens in Alien are clearly NOT travellers and are just being transported for who knows what. I had no problem with the basic premise that the Engineers are responsible for Humans and Xenomorphs, nor that they have the same DNA as us. There is clearly a Much Bigger Plan behind all their machinations and we're just children who stumbled upon Reality.
The actors were all fine, except the punkist with his terrible logic and terrible lines. Noomi was really good, imho, but her bf was a knob. Fassbender was the standout though, and Idris was pretty awful all in all. He should stick to his normal accent.
I think you should give it another go, just for the atmosphere.
faetal on 2/4/2017 at 21:54
I've seen it twice. A third go isn't warranted. Alien had this kind of unspoken warning about humans not being the biggest or the baddest and that if we explore far enough, we'll stumble on something a lot more deadly.
To its additional credit, that something wasn't something which outdoes humans by being better, but by being different and (name drop) Alien.
It was an over-arching feeling of multiply your endeavours by x and you'll unearth something terrible.
Prometheus wipes that away and replaces it with, it was no coincidence, these big white dudes made humans AND aliens. Completely removes the feeling of a large an inhospitable universe and replaces it with Marines vs Zerg vs Protoss. It felt cheesy, clumsy and contrived.
Kolya on 3/4/2017 at 07:02
Quote Posted by SubJeff
The Aliens in Alien are clearly NOT travellers and are just being transported for who knows what.
That's true, but the implication in Alien was always that the Jockey race had tried to harness the aliens as a weapon and then was killed by it. The beacon wasn't an SOS, it was a warning. There's that obvious parallel that if we would try the same we would meet the same end. And that the aliens are perhaps an evolutionary antidote that keeps interstellar idiocy in check.
But if the Jockeys created the Aliens then it's not really a parallel anymore. Chancing upon the aliens, not knowing what they are, and then trying to use them is very different from creating them and not being able to control them. In that case the Jockeys should have known everything about the aliens and still failed to contain them. It robs the aliens of their original mystery, if they were just miscalculations of the Jockeys. Instead of being this insidious parasite that is contracted through and the ultimate punishment for greed, they're just a costly mistake. That feels like a downgrade.
SubJeff on 3/4/2017 at 21:52
Nowhere does it state that the Engineers created the Aliens.
We don't know where they got their tech from. It seems like a weapon. How do we know it's theirs? They seem to mess up with it an awful lot - maybe they got it someplace else and cannot control it. Maybe it's not tech at all, maybe it's some sort of elemental proto-life they just happen to have found.
icemann on 4/4/2017 at 06:57
I've been hearing since day 1 that it was the Jockey's that made the xeno's as a bio weapon.
You would think if they created them, that they'd have setup an off switch (on a biological level) of some sort.
Kolya on 4/4/2017 at 10:04
Quote Posted by SubJeff
Nowhere does it state that the Engineers created the Aliens.
Maybe I got that wrong or maybe it was just part of some early promo, but I thought this was a premise of Prometheus. I don't really want to watch it again just to confirm though.
SubJeff on 4/4/2017 at 16:59
So the conclusion is you don't know and you're not willing to find out for yourself, but are willing to discount what I'm telling you when i just saw it again.
Par for the course i suppose.
Why do you even interact?
Renault on 4/4/2017 at 17:10
Geez, or maybe he just doesn't give a shit, because Prometheus was awful. That's pretty much the consensus around here anyway.
