Wow, I had avoided this thread until I saw the movie, because of the spoilers of course. But I figured it was going to be full of people who loved the movie, and I thought I was the only one who going to complain about it haha. But apparently you all have the same complaints I had.. pointless characters, plot holes, bad character development.... not a bad movie overall, but there better be a sequel.
I did like this: http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/new...ef=.T9YNhBafZsU.like&fb_source=home_multiline Spoiler Previously shown murals demonstrate that the Xenomorphs were around and well known to the Engineers before the "extinction event" on the planet 2000 years ago.
I saw the movie last night, and I enjoyed it. This is not exactly a huge spoiler, but I do recommend you watch "Alien" before watching this film, you will thank me later. The way the movie ended, it was obvious that there is going to be a sequel. However, I did find a few plotholes. Spoiler Weyland wasn't supposed to look like he's 200 years old in the movie when he looks so young in Alien 3. That Space Jockey/Engineer that gave birth to the first "Alien was found on the Engineer ship and not on Prometheus escape ship. PLUS, he had a helmet on and no squid was found in "Alien". And why in the hell were Vickers and Shaw running in one straight line when that ship was about to fall on them? Just friggin run to the side and not in one straight line. Is this some way to create excitement or something? LOL I thought Fassbender was supposed to play a bad android, but he was more helpful than I thought. So the movie ends with Shaw and the android (The last remaining survivors) leaving the planet on a ship to set out and discover the creators of the engineers, so that they can find out why they wanted the humans destroyed. But didn't someone have had to make them as well? Then they would try to find them and then the ones who created them, etc. It's almost neverending. And how the hell are Shaw and the android expect to survive on what they are about to find? It's just her and the head of the android looking for beings that CREATED an advanced civilization as the engineers that created human beings. They're gonna be squashed like ants. And in all, I loved it.
Spoiler Actually I think that piece of art was the original Alien concept art and not Prometheus art.
Spoiler -"Peter Weyland" did not appear in A3 ("Michael Bishop"), and Ridley Scott does not appear to consider anything after Aliens to be canon. Also, Weyland is just north of 100 years old for this film (2093, born 1990) -It's the #1 source of conclusion (and major problem) regarding the film - Prometheus is NOT a direct tie in prequel to Alien. The Space Jockey and ship in Alien was not featured in this movie. -It was absolutely stupid that neither did the sensible thing and go sideways. -David was malicious and creepy enough in my book. But at the same time sympathetic. -They didn't go to find the creators of the engineers - they left for the engineers' home planet. LV-223 was concluded to be a remote facility. I'd probably want to go back to Earth myself, but hey. She's been on an obsessive mission from the get go. I'm sure she's the only one in the crew that would make that call.
It was, but Scott did revisit/reincorporate a lot of his original ideas that there wasn't room/budget for in Alien. The mural that was seen in the film explicitly displayed the same notion.
I don't think there are plot holes problem with Prometheus. It is cut/edit in a way by Ridley not to give everything away leaving it a bit ambiguous. As you can already see there are so many good/great theories about Prometheus/Engineers and you can see people are slowly putting it all together with little clues. If they give too much away they might give away the sequel and the whole intentions of the Engineers' purpose. We'll just have to wait and see what kind of Director's Cut we will be getting for Prometheus and hopefully it will clear up some questions or even plot holes.
Spoiler the mural in the movie though shows pretty much the same thing so they definitely knew about what the black good would create. We know from the evidence that at some point the xenomorphs were engineered as a killing machine. That's their only purpose. They kill. They can't reproduce without a host so it really is meant as a species to wipe clean another species. They were designed for genocide. Why the engineers would appear to Humans and tell them about the star system from which their destruction would come from is unknown. Or why even destroy humanity. Remember they had decided 2,000 years ago to wipe out humanity, there was no need to wait until humans developed space travel. There is a religious theme here. A christian one. Shaw's cross is prominent in the movie, and the mural has the xenomorph in a Christ on the cross pose. It implies the engineer's god is a Xenomorph. At some point their might have been a race of xenomorphs that the engineers defeated, and the Xenomorphs created the engineers as hosts. But some engineers might have worshiped the xenomorphs as gods and saw the Xenomorph sacrificing themselves for their existence. They are now trying to bring back the xenomorphs, using earth as a testing ground. They planted life on earth to create a 100 million hosts for the xenomorphs. The engineers told early man kind that their maker was coming in the form of black goo. And essentially the arrival of the black goo was to be the apocolpyse on earth. Humanity was created to be hosts for Xenomorphs, that's what everything is pointing to.
He actually hired Giger to do that particular mural for Prometheus. Some other stuff they did take it from Giger's Dune concept, Alien and maybe some of his own totally whacked out pieces. Don't click the links if you haven't seen the movie yet. http://prometheusfrance.forumdefans.com/t36-le-livre-officiel-informations-officielles
Wouldn't that theory only work if the alien creatures were intelligent. They seemed to not only be devolved towards making a superior being, but seemingly are closer to ant like creatures. Since the are mindless beings only living for the queen.
Spoiler I think it's clear that they had decided to wipe out humanity 2,000 years ago but it's not clear if that was conditional. The clues to find the Engineers on LV 233 seem more to fit with the idea that they were luring a sufficiently advanced humanity into a trap. It's possible that the if we are to tie in the Christianity angle that the crucifixion convinced that humanity was developing in a way to be a threat and maybe LV233 wasn't originally a military installation was turned into one so what had been a research facility that they were inviting humanity to come back to if they reached interstellar capability was turned into a trap. As far as the crucifix imagery to me that might just be part of what a completely alien language and iconography might be like. Those might just be simple explanations and warning signs with no deeper meaning. I think the real reason is that Giger and Scott have an interest in Christian imagery and are using such to be unsettling and provocative rather than hinting at the religion of the Engineers. I don't find it convincing that the Engineers worship xenomorphs and / or that the xenomorphs created the Engineers so the Engineers are returning the favor by created humans. The xenomorphs don't seem to show much higher level thinking, although in Aliens is said they know how to cut the power to the station, further they don't really show a culture or science. Also if the Engineers worshipped xenomorphs why would the one on LV426 leave a warning message or the one at the end try to fight as hard as he can to not get impregnated? The xenomorphs / goo seems like a bio weapon developed for a purpose, possible loaded up with ritual, but not the god of the Engineers.
Nice takes. We might have some better clue if someone can decipher and connect the dots to the mural, Xeno, Engineers and the black goo.
Spoiler Ok, I will agree on axing the engineers worshiping the xenomorphs but clearly the xenomorphs existed prior to 2,000 years ago, probably much much further back and seem to be integrated into the lore of the Engineers. They would not the chambers the way they did with murals and a big head if they were not heavily influenced by religion. There is some sort of deeper relationship between the Xenomorph and the Space Jockeys. It is very possible that the Xenomorphs evolved themselves to prey on engineers and the engineers incorporated them into their culture and then as their technology advanced used them as a weapon by distilling their DNA into the goo. You can't deny that the mural is elevating the Xenomorph into a central figure. They are indeed worshiping them, if not as a god, then as a weapon to destroy their enemies. But who is it that was their ancient enemy? It does not seem humans are even worthy of being a threat to the Engineers. It's clear that when the Engineer encountered humans he did not feel threatned but more curious and then just treated them as bugs to squash. Hardly a threat. I don't buy your trap theory either. The engineers had an entire invasion force on the planet - many ships to hit earth with. They weren't just planning on sending one. One ship could have trouble along the way. or get destroyed in some fashion. Or crash land prematurely on LV 226 and thus fail to deliver its cargo. And how would the Engineers know that the humans would wake up the Engineer and not just get wiped out by the goo instead? It's way too elaborate to be a trap in my opinion. Plus humanity would have 4 years to prep for the goo, knowing basically how it works and building the equipment to fight the xenomorphs once they relayed everything that happened. They would fight in space to prevent the goo from even getting into the environment. You'd need a fleet of good ships to get some through to guarantee results. They were going to exterminate humanity, but for some reason, they did not. There was some sort of conflict that wiped out the engineers on that moon. And the engineer that survived did so because he was behind a door. Sounds like they created a weapon and realized it might be too powerful. And they were afraid of unleashing it. Or there was two factions of engineers who had a different vision. Why would an advanced society create such a horrific killing machine? Unless it was the military branch or a fascist element. That implies there was a greater Engineering gov't that might have pulled the plug on the project. Still doesn't explain why they wanted to wipe out humanity in the first place unless they just wanted to test the weapon.
More random thoughts... Spoiler Anyone else wondering what exactly David said to the Engineer at the end, right before he was attacked? There was no translation or subtitle, so I wonder if it is known at all what he actually said. Also, this movie is the reason why Del Toro called off making his Lovecraft movie, citing that it was 'too similar'. I get the similarity of the big squid creature at the end - that is definitely Lovecraftian. But is that it? What else in this movie would parallel Del Toro's movie? I have never read any Lovecraft books, so I just don't know. Random nitpicks, niggles, picky points: Why have Pearce portray Weyland at all? He is never seen as a young man in the movie, so why not just cast some really old actor? I don't care how good 'old age makeup' is, it never works, and it always takes me straight out of the reality of the movie. Why send a live crew at all? David obviously was not the *only* David, he was just a particular production model, available for purchase by anyone who could afford it. Why bother sending a live crew, when David's mission was the only one which mattered to Weyland anyway. It would have been easier, cheaper, and probably faster to just send a crew filled with David's, or variants thereof. Weyland could still have accompanied the ship in stasis just like he did. There was no benefit to the mission of sending live humans at all. Why did the ancient Engineer have to sacrifice himself just to put DNA into the world? In fact that seems like an incredibly foolish and inefficient method. Suicide is not a sign of an advanced culture, quite the opposite, and yet most theories I have seen so far depend entirely upon the Engineer race being essentially suicidal, which is just silly. How did the Prometheus find that 'installation' so quickly? They basically went straight to it. That relatively small site should have taken weeks if not months of painstaking satellite analysis to discover. Unless the planet was covered with them, and they just found a random one. Conservation of mass and energy. (this one has ALWAYS bugged me about the Alien movies). A tiny teeny little creature cannot simply grow into a giant size all by itself. It would need a huge amount of mass and energy in order to undergo such a change, and of course it could never happen so quickly. In the Alien movies, the tiny little xenomorph inevitably jumps out of a chest as about a foot long little tyke, and then lickety-split it's about 7 feet tall and 300 pounds. And in Prometheus, it is even worse, this tiny little squid preemie is pulled out and left hanging, and then within what, half a day? It has become fully grown and its mass has increased about 300 times over. Now I know there are obviously things about xenomorphs which we don't know and aren't MEANT to know, but mass doesn't just appear from nowhere. Unless that little operating room also happened to be the larder for the entire ship, there is simply no way that creature grew to that size and that mass in the way it was portrayed in the film. Weyland must have been quite the randy old 70 year old, in order to have Charlize as his daughter. This is not a huge deal, but it still kind of bugged me. Also, in Bladerunner, the Replicants already had been shown to be able to receive memory implants from real people, so much so that it was entirely possible to create one which had no clue it was a replicant, and also had no expiration date. If Weyland was so concerned about death, why not simply place his memories into a replicant like David, place his real body into stasis, and then go on the search for a 'cure for death'? This also lends possible credence to the idea that Vickers may have been a replicant and simply not known it, which could explain Weyland's coldness toward her. What was Shaw supposed to eat and drink aboard the Engineer vessel? Absolutely nothing should lead the viewer to believe that there was the slightest thing potable or edible anywhere on the planet at all. She has maybe 4 or 5 days of her stellar search before she simply dies of starvation or dehydration. Not to mention air to breathe, which would have only been a few hours. Was David actually talking to Weyland while Weyland was in stasis? How is that supposed to work? Doesn't make sense. It seems extremely unlikely that a corporation would have spent a trillion dollars on an expedition, sent Vickers along to anally guard the ship, include a handful of commando-types unknown to the rest of the crew strictly for the purpose of protecting Weyland, and then NOT include any sort of weaponry of any kind on the ship itself. It's ridiculous. The ship would likely have been armed to the teeth, 'just in case', including nukes and high-powered lasers, and no telling what else. The idea that the only way to stop the Engineer ship was to ram it, well, that was just silly. Why did no one think to ask David how he knew what buttons to be pushing all the time, and then to stop and maybe ask him what the hell he was doing, just rushing headlong into things without anyone telling him to stop or slow down? I don't think their spacesuit helmets would have been made out of such easy-to-smash material, I think it probably was harder than steel, so the zombie douche should not have been able to just smack and punch people and make their helmets shatter like they did. Plus, 'Hey, the dead guy's helmet camera just showed up on our front door, on this supposedly lifeless planet, that definitely should NOT have just happened. Ok cool let's open the door and go walk out there to it, then turn our backs on it. Great idea!' Memo to all future space explorers: do NOT do that! Why was there breathable air inside the installation? I mean, I *know* why, it was so they could walk around in there with their helmets off, but it is never really explained, and made no particular sense either. I know it looks liek I am just picking on the movie, and I am a little bit, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. I did. I just had some problems with it, and I seriously doubt there is going to be a sequel with Shaw running around the galaxy in an alien ship with only David's head as company. No, those answers are just never going to be forthcoming, so it's kind of frustrating.
In regards to how similiar Del Toro's project would have been... Spoiler The Wiki rundown will give you a rough idea of the plot, lots of similar themes and situations.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness
