heywood on 5/4/2017 at 15:50

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I'm not sure I agree about that. Poor execution would imply bad direction, bad acting, bad editing, or other flaws in production. Prometheus' flaws are deeper and more basic than that.

The plot themes are tired and unoriginal:
Humans are special because we were planted here and didn't just evolve on Earth (yawn)
A megalomaniac is seeking immortality from his God, and (as always happens) he dies at the hands of his God instead (yawn)
A sentient android is escaping human servitude (yawn)

And then, we get the ALL TIME most generic one of all: some alien(s) want to destroy the human race. Why? No fucking clue. For our resources... nope. I guess they're mad at us for... I don't know. The Day the Earth Stood Still and other films used that as a basis for a morality play, but not here.

And as we've discussed many times, the writing was terrible and the resulting characters and plot details are mostly an insult to common sense.

I'm having a hard time seeing where good intentions went awry in execution. My impression is that the people at the front end of this production lacked talent and creativity, and the actors and people at the back end tried to make the best out of the pile of garbage they had to work with.

faetal on 8/4/2017 at 22:33

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For me, the shitness just came from transposing a horror concept extracted from the loneliness and cold brutality of nature throuhgout the universe, to a bog standard sci-fi MacGuffin that feels like it was written on a fan fic forum.

Then, on top of that, the execution was just terrible.

Volitions Advocate on 19/4/2017 at 17:00

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Oh boy, So I can’t possibly claim to be the resident Alien fanboy here because there are so many of us. I have a bit of a problem though, in that I obsess over this IP no matter how terrible it gets.

I’ve been going through some crazy personal .. stuff.. the last few months and I have not had much of an active role in any of my online communities. SO I missed this entire thread and I just read all 9 pages of it so I could catch up and see what everyone else said before I throw in my 5 cents. (I never do that, even on TTLG, too much reading. You guys talk so much, I love it despite the spats we get into sometimes).

So here goes. I was keeping a mental list of things specific people said, but now that I’m writing I’ve mostly forgotten, so I’ll just address the talking points.

Talking about themes of the engineers creating life, whether human or Xeno, making the creatures seem so uninteresting because of the koombaya factor actually is very interesting to me for a couple of reasons. In response to the question about whether or not the jockeys would have put a biological killswitch (lysine deficiency?) into the xenos I think becomes a moot point when you look at it through this weird DNA resequencing thing that Prometheus introduced. “Life finds a way” right? (TWO Jurassic Park references in one post. I’m surprised nobody had ventured there yet) And if the Xenos, why not humans as well? It’s interesting in the Creator/Created dynamic that the createe in both instances has managed to surpass the creators ability to control it. Prometheus gave them a big headache when they exploded their plans to finish the mission to destroy earth. And it’s obvious that the Xenos have also out grown whatever controls were placed on them. Humans and Xenos have both overcome the Lysene problem. I find this thematically interesting.

I loved the 3 original movies, and I get into debates all the time about which is better. I want to explain why I love Alien 3 so much, and I think it mirrors some things that Kolya (I think) said about it being Riply’s descent into Hell.

Why do the aliens want to kill people? Why is that cliché so hammered on? I like to think they are just Animals. They have an instinct, and the instinct of most biological life forms is procreation, so why not? All the body horror stuff is important in crafting a narrative for us to feel scared or uncomfortable while watching, but in the end, to me, the Alien is just a piece of Tofu. Tofu is a chameleon that will taste like whatever you cook with it, right? The alien is just an animal that we project our own fears and insecurities onto. We can debate this next part, and I’m not claiming to be correct, but nobody else in this thread as really touched on this idea, so I’ll go ahead and try.

Alien, it was a rapist. For obvious reasons with Kane and introducing us all to that idea of having our body violated. Due to its behavior in that situation it would seem like a mugger waiting in a shadow for you, or a rapist. There’s been questions about whether or not it literally sexually assaulted Lambert before it killed her because of the sounds we hear in the movie.

Aliens, it was a soldier. Obvious, I don’t think I can really talk about that much. 2 Armies fighting a battle. There was a social order introduced with the queen giving orders to the warrior aliens, but I don’t think that’s something to delve too deeply into in the context of that film or the franchise as a whole. Animals do the same thing.

Alien 3, it was a demon, it represented temptation. This is far more obvious I think in the recut version, because you see a bit more of the religious stuff, but it I think we look at the religious part a bit too much, and we should focus on what it does to motivate the inmates. In the original Ward idea, they were monks right? Ripley was a temptation to them which disrupted their serenity. It’s the same with the inmates. They are horrible men who have found peace, not because of religion or Dillon’s “god squad”, but because they have found a place where their baser instincts do not plague them, and they find companionship in each other, even as flawed as it is. The Alien represents this demon that is killing them because of the break in their serenity, because of the tempations they feel and in some cases, act upon. It’s divine retribution, and that’s how many of them feel about it. But in the end, it’s just the Alien, doing what it does. It’s personality is just tofu.

I am enjoying this new premise based on the slasher aspects of the film. The nice thing is that each director has been a bit ambiguous about the minutiae of the science and biology involved. We hear all those sex noises from Lambert’s interaction with the alien, but don’t see it and it’s never explained. We see Dallas being converted into some sort of gooey egg and Brett already mostly gone, but it’s never explained. We explicitly see the queen alien and the life cycle, but it’s in contradiction to the deleted scene from Alien, as well as the unexplained events at the end of Alien: Isolation. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve played it but I won’t spoil it here.

It’s obvious that the proto-hugger and proto-alien in Prometheus are not exactly what we expect, however in the trailers for covenant you see both the proto-creatures, and the Alien we already know.

More ambiguity I guess. But honestly, despite the McGuffins, I prefer the ambiguity and confusion over the Arc that Cameron started. I love Aliens, but I hate it at the same time. Because Newt really did have to die, and so did Hicks, if we weren’t going to just get more Aliens clones going forward. One look at what Dark Horse offers for the comics will prove me right. Somebody mentioned GITS, the endings of the Anime and the live action movie illustrate this dilemma for me. I won’t spoil it but the ScarJo movie’s ending is nowhere near as impactful as the Anime, and I feel like if all we got from Alien movies was what’s in those comic books, we might as well call the franchise the Pulse Rifle franchise instead of the Alien franchise.

I’m not saying Prometheus didn’t suck. But AVP1&2 certainly did because they didn’t care about any thematic progression, it was just an excuse to get the aliens to fight each other. And in the end I’ve found that as I’m getting older, having had these movies in my VCR and DVD player my entire life, I prefer to forget about the one liners of Hudson and Vasquez, and focus on the musings of Ash when we was talking about delusions of morality.

Volitions Advocate on 21/4/2017 at 09:11

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Never thought of it that way, I suppose that might account for the flying saucer in the opening scene of Prometheus compared to the Giger design everywhere else?

Pyrian on 25/4/2017 at 00:15

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I'm kind of wondering if there's anything to it worth spoiling?