http://www.whatis101112.com/

I've been meaning to mention that my favorite scene of the film was the simplest and most subtle- holo-Weyland says something about David being a robot and not having a son, there's a closeup of David's face for his "reaction", and I swear you could see the light die in his eyes despite Fassbender being absolutely motionless.  Not a twitch nor tremble, not a muscle moved.  I don't even know how he did that.  

YES!

I caught that. He's a hell of an actor.

I stopped reading on page 3...





So have we actually figured out what the heck the movie was about? ( I'm sorry but that whole "Jesus was a alien" seemed far fetched)

That's a damned good analysis of the movie.

EDIT:  And I liked the movie, anyway.

Considering how this film is a viral market tour de force,

Great scene.  My favorite was when Charlize was trying to get in her spacesuit before the Prometheus suicided into the Engineer ship.  It would have been so easy to make that kind of scene either cheesy or melodramatic, but I thought she gave it a very real and visceral sense of panic.  Again, a very subtle thing but a very good piece of acting IMHO.  



 

I saw that, too.  I almost thought I imagined it or something.

no i saw it too.. just sheer disappointment.

Brilliant and subtle acting, just as good as Spaceys death in L.A. Confidential which is my go to description for this sort of thing.



 

Went and watched this weekend.

Put me in the "very disappointed camp."

Once again, we have film-makers so utterly focused on visual effects that they seem to forget the importance of story and character development.

There's a benefit to intrigue and mystery, to letting the audience contemplate some open questions... but this was not that.   This was just a bunch of gaping holes.

We have stupidity after stupidity which killed my ability suspend disbelief.   The helmets, the failure to use any archeological safeguards, the lack of quarantine, a woman who just had a c-section (involving an incision through abdominal muscle) running around like Ellen Ripley; the stupid use of prosthetic aging on a much younger actor playing Weyland;  I could go on and on.

And then using his fingers, he snuffs out a crew member in much the same way....

I have seen it twice now. After the first viewing I thought much the same as this. I gave it a 5/10. After a 2nd viewing and further reflection it's more like 8/10 and it's tied for 2nd with Aliens on my ranking of the Alien universe movies. There are no large "plot holes" if you pay attention, and most of the things like this that people are bitching about are just minor things. Like Ridley Scott said, "it's a movie not a science class". You have to be able to accept that it's just a film and suspend some disbelief.

As far as a lack of importance given to story and character development? WTF? On a scale of 1 to 10 for depth, complexity and "making you think", the story in Alien is about a 1 and Prometheus is a 10. I couldn't believe they had the audacity to even IMPLY some of the stuff they seem to be getting at in this movie. I for one appreciated them having the balls to actually ask the questions and take the movie in a totally unexpected "non-hollywood" direction. There is a lot of development with the main characters (Shaw/David). Theres more going on there than Alien's characters' single motivation of survival. If you were expecting a shallow standard sci-fi horror movie like Alien or The Thing, I guess I can see you being overwhelmed by this film. There are many questions asked in the film and the vast majority are answered either outright or with the application of just a little thought.

For those of you who let things like "The helmets, the failure to use any archeological safeguards, the lack of quarantine" bother you, what do you think of Alien? That film is held up as a masterpiece, but most of those same elements are there too. You dont have people bitching about Alien and being unable to suspend disbelief because Kane was so stupid as to go messing around with some weird alien eggs when he had no idea what they were.

As far as Shaw running around after the C-section, she spends most of the rest of the movie after that either doubled over in pain from it, or literally having to run for her life. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that while it's probably not a good idea to be moving around after abdominal surgery her motivation to get answers to questions she's been asking her whole life and her survival instinct overrode the pain. Also she jabbed herself with painkiller injector no fewer than 3 times. Pretty sure they have some good stuff in the future.

Maybe the prosthetics used on Guy Pierce were not perfect but if that takes you out of the movie then, well, you're simply too concerned with the small stuff IMO. It was effective enough to get the point across and I'd rather have the same actor playing the young and old character if possible.

If anyone has any "gaping holes" to point out, I'm pretty sure I can fill you in on what you missed.

I just wanted to inject clarification about this point. A c-section much access the uterus which lies behind it. The autoDoc performs the procedure, and in the short time shown, it appears to only staple the incision closed. An actual c-section involves reconnecting the cut ends of the organs and muscles prior to closing the incision. Even I were generous and assume that the autoDoc did this, vigorous use of the muscles and physical exertion shown at the climax of the film would have popped the staples or stitches. After that, the muscle cannot flex the abdomen as it is not anchored to at least two points. At this point, Dr. Shaw does not merely have to overcome pain, she would have to overcome the cold reality that the muscle is not useable.

The abdominal rectus muscle is used thoroughly during running to flex the abdomen in raising the forward leg during the start of each stride, not to mention it use in vaulting and climbing as shown on the planet surface during the Engineer ship launch.

This is not a quibble from a tiny fraction of 1% of viewers. Women who underwent caesarian delivery or those who know of someone who did would have to be very generous to suspend disbelief over this oversight.

BTW, my wife is pregnant with our first child and the delivery scene thoroughly freaked her out. Kudos to Ridley Scott for successfully for pushing the same buttons that made the chestburster scene in Alien so powerful.

That was fucking good.  He OWNED that role.

Suspend disbelief a little.  They have technology that's several decades more advanced.







 

Does this medically make 100% sense? Maybe, maybe not. It's a MOVIE not a medical documentary. At present, physics says there's no way to go FTL yet without a FTL ship there is no movie at all. That being the case why not just stay home and not subject yourself to such "oversights".

Also, although it's implied that this is a "C-section" we don't know that the alien fetus was necessarily even in the uterus. Nobody says to Shaw "it's in your uterus".  The alien in Alien was not in the uterus because Kane had none and that may be how they all work. It could be argued that Shaw was infected rather than impregnated and since we'd seen Holloway's "eye-worm" (suggesting that the goo could travel anywhere in the body), one could infer that the alien fetus was simply in the abdominal cavity.

Shaw is wearing what amounts to a very tight wet suit after her operation. I would think that this would help in holding her together after the "c-section". Maybe the incision DID come open and all thats holding her innards in is that suit. We don't know, and frankly, it's not important. Again, there's no addressing of the pain killer (or whatever it was, maybe it was super future fast healing drug) that Shaw injected herself with 3 times. It's clear she's still struggling, but maybe this accounts for how she can do what she does whereas a woman who just had a normal c-section could not. I think there is precedent for humans doing things that are not normally possible under the influence of strong drugs.

And what difference does it make that the alien is "just" in the abdominal cavity and not the uterus? The uterus is not a weight bearing organ. There is no way in PHYSIOLOGICAL HELL that someone who just had their abdomen cut open to do ANYTHING she did.

btw, it wasnt a c-section.  the machine wasnt calibrated for female anatomy so she did it as 'removal of foreign body from the abdomen' or something like that....
 

Just like there's no way in PHYSIOLOGICAL HELL that people high on PCP can shrug off bullet wounds and other kinds of trauma that they "shouldn't be able to" because they're all hopped up?

Did anyone mention it's just a MOVIE?

So this seems to be a major hang-up. Anything else? If this "you can't do that after abdominal surgery" thing is enough to ruin this whole movie for you I think maybe you better just not go to movies.

Anyone looking forward to the next Batman movie? How about The Hobbit? I'm sure everything in those is securely grounded in good science, so don't worry.

In a world of John McClane taking a round in the shoulder as well as running barefoot across glass and STILL running around a skyscraper killing Eurotrash, I can buy the abdomen thing.

John Matrix being shot in the shoulder and beat with a furnace door by Bennet (Who was ELECTROCUTED) and still beating the shit out of each other for fifteen minutes, I can buy it.

Hell, Riddick dislocating and then re-locating both his shoulders to escape means I'll buy the abdomen bit.

How do you get to the womb, from the front? Through the abdominal wall.

Here's one for you:

Why would the Engineers plant "maps" all over earth pointing NOT to the engineer's home world, but to some random moon that was a military biological WMD base?  Even buying into the speculation that the engineers created the humans and only later decided to annihilate them for killing the engineer Jesus-Jockey –– many of those star charts (including the one discovered at the beginning) were much older than the alleged issue that turned the engineers on the Earth's inhabitants, so what gives?

Or how about this:   They've got the red mapping orbs running around the whole place so why didn't they discovery the life signs of the meal worms that turned into penis aliens from the black goo.

Or how about this:   What was chasing the engineers in the holographic videos?

Or how about this:   You sign up an entire crew for a mission and don't brief them until they arrive, WTF?    Yeah yeah, I hear ya... 'opsec."   But if your crew can't be briefed before going to sleep, then how are you going to trust them in mission critical applications when TSHTF?

Or how about this:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x1YuvUQFJ0

Dinner and a few drinks usually works....





 

Golfclap.

another good (but long) analysis:



http://www.crankleft.com/blog/2012/june/12/explaining-prometheus––whats-this-movie-about2


 

Most geologists are weird.

It appeared the wound was healed and scared shortly after the operation.  Perhaps the unit or the injection she gave herself advanced the healing process.

Wait.  Are you suggesting that a sci fi movie might have futuristic technology?







 

He is a great actor.

The maps led to the LV-223 facility because if we ever evolved and had technology to go FTL it stands to reason that the engineers might not want us going straight to their home planet. Better to invite us to a remote outpost for our first meeting lest we cause trouble/become a threat.

The worms were very small, maybe the probes aren't able to pick up such small life forms. They seemed to be mostly about mapping and so they likely weren't calibrated for that. They didn't pick up the "hammerpedes" either. The only time they detected life was when the engineer's stasis pod periodically powered on.

The engineers were running from an outbreak of the black goo or some version of it that got out of control. The pile of dead engineers were killed in various ways, heads, bodies exploded. This is just what happened to the head that they brought back to Prometheus. Once they started messing with it they re-animated the goo that had been dormant in the head for the previous 2000 or so years and it blew up, which is the same thing that happened to the other engineers.

As far as the crew not being briefed, this was totally Weyland's show. He's a selfish old man and raided his own company to the tune of a trillion bucks to finance his search for longer life, so my assumption is he wanted it that way because he's batty. Either that or as his daughter had no particular interest in his search for immortality actually succeeding, it's possible the selection of emotionally "iffy" team members and the half assed way they went in was her attempt to undermine the whole thing.

I don't really have time to go step by step through all that Red letter media stuff but suffice to say nearly all of it has perfectly reasonable explanations that are contained in the film or can be reasoned out.

Fucking awesome movie.

I have two big gripes - no thought was put into the "science" part of this fiction (e.g., ion drives are constrained by physics to be low thrust drives. If you have a drive that shoots your ship forward for a terrifying collision, "ion drive" is the last name you'd choose for it....any halfwit can tell you that), and the crew excelled only in unprofessionalism. In the original trilogy, a lot of the crew were MINERS, or MARINES, and acted according to what I'd expect. But this handpicked, trillion dollar expedition was populated with goofballs. It's just not believable.



 

Agree that RLM is going a little overboard here. Question: Did they ever explain why the engineers were trying to get into those rooms? The rooms were full of goo too....also, what was the reason behind the large head statue and mural? For a scientific outpost, the decoration was ornate.



 

Actually most of the situations and actions of the characters ARE totally believable, IF you apply more than a minimum of thought.

I'd argue that most "halfwits" actually DON'T know anything about ion drives. Maybe it's a different kind of "ion drive"? It doesn't generate thrust by shooting ions out but smashes them together in some kind of reactor? Who knows?For the millionth time, it's a MOVIE. The science behind most of the technologies in Star Wars, Star Trek, and most other sci-fi movies are just make believe gobbledegook, so why should this be different? Physicists say that FTL is not possible but in this movie we have a FTL ship, and you're taken out of the movie because they called it an "ion drive"? Just stay home and save yourself the aggravation. There's a reason these are movies are called science FICTION.

Weyland bankrolled the trip, yes. However, he was on ice for two years before it actually left and as you'll recall, Vickers stated explicitly that SHE hired at least a portion of the crew. It never says exaclty who she hired, but given that she had zero interest in Weyland attaining his goals (the king has his reign then he dies) I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think that she INTENTIONALLY populated the expedition with goofballs. Really, only Fifield and Milburn were "goofballs" anyway and it was certainly implied that they were high while they were in the pyramid. I don't generally give potheads much credit for making great decsions while stoned.

They didn't explain why the engineers ran into that particular room. It seemed that the room would have been a dead end, unless the xenomorph mural was also a doorway and they all went in there. There was only the one decapitated head in the room so they had to go somewhere. YMMV but I don't see it as a "plot hole", just something that they didn't explicitly explain. The goo in the jars was different than the goo that killed the engineers. The jar black goo caused mutation into a stronger aggressive creature while the goo they were trying to get away from caused violent explosions of the body as evidenced by the pile o' engineers with burst open bodies and heads and the explosion of the recovered engineer head on the Prometheus.

The engineer culture is different from ours. From the large skull decorating the outside of the pyramid to the giant head inside, the painted mural and the xenomorph relief, it's clear they simply decorate their scientific facilities in symbolism they find significant for whatever reason as opposed to the drab, utilitarian way that human scientific facilities would be built.

I was thinking that the ghost engineers were running from the one whose head got cut off, he was probably a zombie like the crew member.



 

on another note, Prometheus convinced me to finally watch Lawrence of Arabia...damn that was a good movie!!
 

Saw it last night, fucking amazing, visually, and story wise. Have been thinking about it all day.

It is possible that Vickers hired goofballs on purpose, but that is inconsistent with her will to SURVIVE. You do not bring dumbasses along on dangerous missions far from any support. The crew's actions are pretty indefensible, but you can keep trying....





Ion drives are not science fiction, btw. I was just using it as an example.





 

One thing to add here. David speaks with Weyland, apparently while still asleep, and we heard Weyland say "Try Harder". I take this to mean, David told him about the goo, but that he had not been able to figure out what its purpose was yet. I would say Weyland, given his motives, thought it may be something powerful, and wanted David to "try harder" to figure out what it was, because shortly after is the scene with Holloway mentioned above.

NB

Ah, so that guy running from the deadly black goo is trying to get INTO the room filled with dozens of vases of the black goo?

Umm, ok.

Watched it and greatly disliked it.  A mess of a plot, inconsistent and incompetent characters, holes everywhere, inappropriate mixing of mythologies, terrible pacing, and etc.  

I do see it as a success in marketing.  How they keep adamantly denying it's an alien prequel, but shoving every allusion they could into the movie and commercials to remind you that it's in the aliens universe.  How they have Guy Pierce play old man Weyland despite not capable of sounding, acting, or looking like an old man, just so they can have him play young Weyland for the viral videos.

What David said to the Engineer

“This man is here because he does not want to die. He believes you can give him more life.”

Problem is that it also doesnt really work with the timeline of Aliens Vs Predator and it's follow-ups.   The "Classic" Geiger Aliens didnt appear in this movie except for the sort-of at the end, yet timeline-wise this movie occured 90 years AFTER the events of AVP, which also showed the Predators had put the Queen Alien here  a couple of dozen Milennia before the Current era.... As an Action movie?  it wasnt bad, as a precursor for Alien??  Meh.. there's just too much of a divorce between how things ended up in prometheus, and how things started in "Alien"

Dont get me wrong, I enjoyed the Movie, I was just dissapointed in how it tied into the existing storyline.  Oh and IMAX 3D is the Tits!!!!  

Yes it is. Glad they opened one near me.

Awesome. I can't wait for the BR release!

Maybe they were doing damage control/ spill containment.