Independent Thief on 12/10/2012 at 11:08
Quote Posted by Dia
h I'm still a little confused as to why the super-human tried to kill everyone once he was awakened - was he already infected with one of the too-many-to-count bio-weapons that was making him nuts or was he just homicidal by nature?
My guess is when he realized he was being interrogated for information while being confronted by squabbling people toting guns, he knew they didn't have his best interests at heart and decided to strike first-good move but he blew it by trying to get even instead of just jogging to another ship.
Thirith on 12/10/2012 at 11:18
Doesn't the film make it pretty clear that at some point the Engineers go from "Let's create life!" to "Let's destroy our creation, that'll teach them!", and the surviving engineer just continued down that road?
Vasquez on 12/10/2012 at 11:21
I thought he was morning-cranky, god knows how long he'd been sleeping.
Dia on 12/10/2012 at 12:55
Lol, Vas. Yeah, I considered the possibility that the super-human 'Engineer' may have been a tad disoriented as a result of his long sleep in cryo, but then he goes and tracks down Shaw with the obvious intent to do her harm. Imo that went waaayyy beyond the morning crankies.
@Thirith: The movie did indeed make it clear that the Engineers seemed to be suffering from a massive God complex, but I did wonder whether they were deliberately attempting to destroy their human creations on Earth or just taking their 'experiment' to a new level. They obviously thought of us as their creations and/or experiments and along that line, the Engineer, upon awakening, could have just been exterminating the Prometheus humans as we might swat at pesky flies. Maybe they thought of us as an experiment gone wrong? On the other hand, they may have realized that eventually we would evolve into a race that could very well become space faring and perhaps become a threat to them? OR .... the Engineer might very well have thought that the Earthers were just another result of the escaped contents of one of those amphorae. I really need to watch the movie again.
@IT: I just felt that the reaction of the Engineer seemed to be overly violent and yeah, totally uncalled for. ;) But then again, it would have made for an entirely different movie if the Engineer had been a tad more docile and sat down to answer the Earthers' questions, wouldn't it?
And did all those amphorae actually contain what the Engineers considered to be bio-weapons, or were they just experiments intended to be used to seed other worlds as the Engineers had seeded Earth? It was the Earthers' conclusion that the vessels contained bio-weapons, but they could have just as easily contained organisms the Engineers were going to use in further seeding experiments. Although, the organism that destroyed the first Engineer (we see) at the beginning of the movie seemed seriously lethal, didn't it? Could that (first seen) super-human have been a kamikaze-type protester (who stood against what his bretheren were doing)?
Nicker on 13/10/2012 at 19:55
I figured that the first Engineer was literally going to seed to provide earth with genetic source material but of course if that was the case, humans (or hominid DNA) would have been in evidence from the very earliest manifestations of life instead of at the end of an unlikely journey of mutation and adaptation (not to mention surviving global catastrophes which reduced our population to a few thousand individuals).
As for the last Engineer, my guess was that he was infected by one of the bio-weapons his race created. They seemed to be using a parasitic model and parasites often modify host behaviour.
But like the utter lack of procedures, the mismatched gang of neurotic wankers posing as professional exo-planetary explorers, the missed opportunities for exploiting genuine conflict, the imbalanced performances, the obstetrical forceps (jk) - even the questions this film asked were well below par.
The answers were just laughable.
PS: The graphics were excellent but the best music was in the trailer.
Dia on 14/10/2012 at 12:27
Watched the movie again. I agree about the Prometheus' crew. For a group of alleged professionals, their seriously unprofessional behavior when researching the site on LV-223 had me grinding my teeth. Especially the part where Milburn tries to make friends with the eel-like creature ..... I mean, REALLY?!!! Even a total novice researcher would know enough not to touch something like that. Then again, it wouldn't have been much of a movie if everyone had behaved in a professional manner - though we might have found out more about the Engineers if the researchers had actually researched properly instead of running amok like a bunch of undisciplined children. Of course, it didn't help matters any that David had his own agenda and couldn't be controlled by anyone except Weyland. Who was just another asshole.
One thing that had me scratching my head was why Shaw seemed so hellbent on getting to the Engineers' homeworld with her Big Question of why they never carried out their plan to destroy life on Earth - when the answer was staring her right in the face on LV-223. It seemed pretty obvious to me that it wasn't a conscious decision; contamination occured, the Engineers were infected, all but one of them died, he went into cryo-stasis & the ship never took off so they never made it off-planet with their lethal cargo. It didn't seem as though anyone changed their minds about anything. But then there wouldn't have been any room left for a sequel now, would there.(?)
I would have dearly loved to know what David said to the Engineer, however. For all we know, he could have been saying, 'These assholes came here to destroy you and think your mama's ugly'.
Hopefully the sequel will include subtitle translations of the Engineers' language. ;)
Morte on 14/10/2012 at 14:49
(
http://thebioscopist.com/2012/06/20/the-linguistics-of-prometheus-what-david-says-to-the-engineer/) According to the linguistics consultant employed by the movie, David's line is; "‘This man is here because he does not want to die. He believes you can give him more life'."
So nothing earthshattering then.
And semi-relatedly, there was an interview with (
http://www.empireonline.com/interviews/interview.asp?IID=1563) Jon Spaihts at empire recently, on the differences between his drafts and the final script. Much as I teorethically liked the idea of shifting the movie away from xenomorphs, I think I'd rather have seen his draft filmed. Obviously it's kind of hard to tell from snatches of scenes, but there seems to be a cause and effect relationship there, like the pointless helm removal that's basically there to show how terrible a scientist the asshole dude is and to trumpet THAT THIS IS A MOVIE ABOUT FAITH actually leads to him getting infected via a faceful of facehugger. And the ceasarian as initially envisioned seems a lot stronger, instead of being a consequence free detour:
Quote:
One of the things I realised was that we hadn't seen anyone survive a classic Alien chest bursting. And I was really intrigued by the notion that a character might be infected by the parasite and know that it was coming, know they had a timeframe of a few hours, and that we would have set up previously a nearly omnipotent medical device, designed to extend life for explorers in foreign places. Our heroine would have a short time to get to the machine and extract the thing inside her. It was a very gory sequence and it plays out very much like the sequence in the film. The main difference is in choreography. At the end of the sequence as I first conceived it, the heroine manages to get the creature extracted from her and it is expelled from the pod and she's sealed inside, whereas in the final film it goes the other way.
Then she lapses in and out of consciousness for a number of hours as the machine puts her back together. As she comes back to consciousness, she sees the thing growing in the cabin outside and even killing people. So by the time she emerges from the pod eight hours later, the thing is abroad in the ship and big enough to be a huge danger. That was the original conception of the medpod scene.
Dia on 14/10/2012 at 22:52
Thanks for the link regarding the translation of David's question to the Engineer, Morte. Very interesting indeed. And you're right; nothing earthshattering at all - disappointing. (Looks like I bought the dvd version when I should have bought the blue-ray version instead.)
In regards to Shaw removing the alien from her abdomen, I have to admit that I prefer the version that made it to the screen rather than the version described in the original draft. I don't feel that the screen version of that scene was a consequence free detour, however. At least, not consequence free to the Engineer. There was (imo) a certain poetic justice that the human escaped being an incubator for the alien, while the Engineer, whose race designed the thing, became the victim while trying to kill the human.
I'm definitely looking forward to the director's cut edition.
rachel on 15/10/2012 at 12:51
Quote Posted by Dia
Then again, it wouldn't have been much of a movie if everyone had behaved in a professional manner - though we might have found out more about the Engineers if the researchers had actually researched properly instead of running amok like a bunch of undisciplined children.
Real science can be awesome ;)
[video=youtube;i5oc-70Fby4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5oc-70Fby4[/video]
Thirith on 15/10/2012 at 12:57
Quote Posted by Dia
Then again, it wouldn't have been much of a movie if everyone had behaved in a professional manner...
Can't say I agree with this. You could still have had the same plot elements, but they would've been more earned if the characters had behaved more professionally. If anything, the terror would've been that much more effective. I'm a big fan of well executed character flaws, but I hate character stupidity that's motivated by the plot. It's lazy writing.
