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Post by mrsphyllistorgo on Jul 2, 2012 15:19:27 GMT -5
I had...problems with it. They are outlined in great and spoiler heavy detail at my blog, goddessoftransitory.blogspot.com/. Warning--this is seriously one long spoiler, plus I swear a lot. What did you all think of the film?
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Post by Satchmo on Jul 3, 2012 15:22:01 GMT -5
I really liked it. It wasn't Alien, but it was still a good, if flawed science fiction movie. So what if it perhaps reached a little too far? At least it was reaching for something. There's also a lengthier review on my blog, which you can get to from the link on my signature. Or here if you're lazy (I know the feeling). But the ADD version is that despite its flaws, it was still very good. I personally think that had it been a standalone film, people would see it in a better light. But even if it's good, Alien was flawless (IMO), and that comparison will inevitably hurt people's opinion of it. The casting of Guy Pearce did puzzle me, though. I love Pearce, but they should cast an old guy. I thought that it'd be cool to cast, say, Peter O'Toole or someone like that, given David's obsession with Lawrence of Arabia.
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Post by Mr. Atari on Jul 3, 2012 22:07:51 GMT -5
As I watched it, I enjoyed it. I liked that they dealt with real metaphysical questions like good science fiction should, and didn't just show spaceships and monsters for the sake of spaceships and monsters like bad science fiction does.
After I saw it, however, I thought about all of the plot holes, phony character motivations, and storytelling gaffes. The more I think about it, the less I like it.
For what it's worth, I haven't seen Alien in 20 years or so.
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Post by Crowfan on Jul 4, 2012 9:12:42 GMT -5
I liked it when I saw it. It wasn't perfect, no, but it was a nice prequel to 'Alien". For what it's worth, I didn't get the Guy Pierce casting either.
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Post by TheNewMads on Jul 4, 2012 13:12:07 GMT -5
i was underwhelmed. i vaguely recall going off on it on the "just finished watching" thread so i won't rehash, but in short i thought it assumed an air of profundity for itself that it didn't earn, the goody-goody scientists got on my nerves while being unconvincing as scientists (i'm getting just a little fed up with this thing in today's movies for 24-year-old emotional scientists with JC Penney underwear-model bodies and back tattoos) and all the characters' tendency to stupidly waddle back into the maw of danger went past dramatic license and into the realm of crap writing.
i mean the movie itself was gorgeous, yeah, yeah, blah blah. so was "sucker punch." and like "sucker punch," prometheus is a movie best seen on Blu-Ray with the sound turned off.
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Post by mylungswereaching on Jul 10, 2012 13:45:42 GMT -5
I thought it was an anti-science science fiction movie. When one of the scientist's called evolution, darwinism, I lost all respect. Darwinism is only used by religious zealots who believe that all science is just lucky guesses.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jul 10, 2012 17:33:12 GMT -5
I actually loved it. I agree with Atari that some of the character motivation had problems, but I blame part of that on trying to stay true to Alien's "quietness" and saying little. But it's ultimately not a character story (like Alien could be). It's myth. This guy says what I think: cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html
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Post by mylungswereaching on Jul 10, 2012 21:53:27 GMT -5
I find it difficult to like a movie when I don't like most of the characters and most of the people who are supposed to be scientists act like idiots. The only characters I liked were the captain and the woman who ran the expedition. It seems like the people who ran the expedition looked for the stupidest scientist they could find. Writing that relies on almost every character acting like idiots for major plot points is lazy.
I get that it is a myth. But I find stories that you have to read under the story to understand them completely boring. You know, you have to understand that this symbolizes this and that symbolizes that to truly understand it.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jul 10, 2012 22:35:55 GMT -5
Sure. But you also go into a story knowing what you're going to get. These weren't "people" so much as "types." It's that kind of story. No one complains that Superman is a tad too heroic or that a villain in an action movie is just a tad too evil for real life. This isn't "hard" science fiction by any stretch, and Alien wasn't, either, but I think that's where a lot of the complaints against the movie are coming from.
Besides, it's no stretch that Ridley Scott seems to have a beef with science and technology. In Alien, the "Science Officer" ends up being a cold murderous robot. In Blade Runner, we can't recognize the humanity in our own creations and kill them off. And here, the scientists are either naive or idiots. That's pretty much his point. You can disagree, sure, but I don't think it's a flaw; it's just his position. So you're right that in some ways it is an anti-science SF movie. But it's hardly the first, and it's less about being anti-science than about misunderstanding how science is used. Humans apparently use life for selfish-reasons; the Engineers apparently put "Life" before any individual.
I just liked the notion that violence wasn't necessarily anathema to Life. The Engineers kill things they see as destructive (robots, selfish "immortals") in order to maintain a larger sense of Life that looks beyond itself to some greater good, like the Engineer at the beginning who sacrifices himself to start life on the planet. The question I think the movie leaves is how it all got corrupted in the interim; how did the merely monstrous aliens and "black goo" creatures rebel against the Engineers? That's the next movie(s), I assume.
And was this really reading under the story? Every selfish character is punished. Every character that sacrifices something is heroic. The article I pointed to goes a bit deeper to make its point, but I don't think that it was anything hidden. David is interesting because he's basically a child. He's trying to decide who he wants to be: a human, an Engineer, or something else. He's not completely amoral, like the android in the first Alien. He's potentially sinister, but it's because he isn't fully formed yet; children can be sinister, too. In that sense, he was actually the most complex character to me because he's more of where Scott probably thinks the audience should be: somewhere on the fence with these issues at this point in the story.
And for an awesome list of every potential plot hole left open, watch this:
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jul 11, 2012 10:28:44 GMT -5
I think this is a pretty good summary of why Scott is both anti-science and, in the end, just dumb about science: www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=3211In the end, I think it still works as myth. But Watts' take is probably the best review I've read of why the movie was terrible in all but visual aspects.
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Post by Emperor Cupcake on Jul 12, 2012 14:56:02 GMT -5
Me and the pooky saw this a few weeks ago (and he went to see it again by himself when I was at work one day, haha), and he's been kinda obsessed with figuring it out, so we've been talking about it a lot. RE: The scientists (especially the geologist and the biologist) being idiots, he has a theory that Weyland basically hired a team of scientists to make it look like this was a totally legit scientific expedition, but purposely hired scientists who were stupid or didn't give a crap so that they wouldn't find out what the actual point of the mission was. He also thinks that Weyland wanted the two main archaeologists along because they were the only "true believers," i.e. the only people who knew exactly what this alien stuff might be about, and he wanted them to figure everything out before eliminating/experimenting on them or leaving them on the planet, with no one back home being the wiser. YMMV.
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Post by mylungswereaching on Jul 13, 2012 12:22:06 GMT -5
I like Emperor Cupcakes's idea that the owners of the expedition only really needed the two true believer scientists and the other scientists were there for protective coloration. He deliberately picked poor scientists who were desperate for work because they needed the paycheck because they would be less likely to notice anything, would be more likely to keep their mouth shut if they did and wouldn't be missed if they died. I just wished they could have had a throw away line somewhere that made it more clear.
I really hate bad science method more than bad science. The people in Alien and Aliens did things that made sense and were killed anyway. The trained scientists here did stupid things and died stupid deaths.
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Post by TheNewMads on Jul 16, 2012 20:24:41 GMT -5
it's been a while since i've read any lovecraft but wasn't his gig more, there are unnameable things science can't explain? i always thought of lovecraft as having a very casual relationship with science, his whole thing was this weird, bleak metaphysics with the universe being run by these malevolent, hideous gods and the space around us being filled with evil invisible psychic worms that magically know where we're going to move next and get out of our way, etc. his characters are sorta like the opposite of the characters in "prometheus," too; they're all emo and panicky, they've typically got some sort of insight that the rest of us lack because they've seen one of these invisible gods and been rendered insane, they have the weight of saving the world on their shoulders and know they're likely to fail, etc. the prometheus characters are all, on the other hand, frivolous airheads who don't take their jobs terribly seriously and don't know a damn thing about what's really going on. i mean there's some lovecrafty elements to "prometheus" but not only do i think overall the movie is very un-lovecraft-like, i think it would have been well-advised to follow lovecraft-poe-type vibes more closely. the first movie is pretty humorless, relentless and bleak, and you scarcely ever see the monster, which preserves some of that he-who-must-not-be-named thing. aliens is much more campy and humorous and fun while still being an effective action-suspense movie with horror elements. it kinda seemed like prometheus tried to combine the grimness of the first movie with the goofiness of the second and wound up failing at both. if they'd just gone with a straight-up, grim, bleak horror movie with strains of that lovecraft-type freakiness, a movie you could actually take seriously and wormed into your head a bit, that would have been a major improvement. course it would also be a totally different movie.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jul 16, 2012 22:15:32 GMT -5
Yeah, it doesn't really have a Lovecraftian vibe, apart from big tentacle-y things.
I still think there's a strong skepticism towards science at least in the way it punishes scientists' hubris and naivete. In the end, after all, it's a very religious story, at least in terms of suggesting that entire races can be chosen or damned for their actions. The whole bit about creators and wanting to destroy creations and why we were created and why they want to kill us...that's just sin and salvation and damnation with spaceships and aliens. And, at least at this point, part of the suggestion seems to be that the Engineers think that the scientists and the android are on the damnable side.
But we'll see. My feelings cool off the further away from it I am. It's no Alien or Aliens. But it's still got me wanting to know what happens.
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Post by mrsphyllistorgo on Jul 20, 2012 16:00:27 GMT -5
"One criticism is illegitimate on its face. The medical pod was clearly Peter Weyland's. It makes perfect sense that it'd be configured for males."
See, I can't agree with that. Even if it was put on board for Peter, Merideth the Survivor moved it to her quarters, quite deliberately. And as I said in my profanity-filled link, she is NOT the type of person to forget to recalibrate the damn thing. Her one character trait was surviving at all costs (that and being mad at daddy), so having the thing calibrated for a man in the circumstances laid out by the film just makes no sense.
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