"Prometheus review" Topic

I saw this movie twice. Once with 3 friends and the next day with my dad. I myself was not hyped, I liked the first short trailer for the movie but didn't find the longer trailer to be anything exciting or special.

I've written a spoiler free review of it which can be read here: link

And for those who have seen the movie and want to discuss spoilers I also wrote a post with questions/possible plotholes/weird/stupid things here: link

Saw it on release in UK,

Did wonder at the end, as it just does not sit right with me.

I wonder what was cut for a 15 in the UK rating, and if an 18 version or an extended cut would be better.

The person leaving the cinema in front of me said it was the cinematic equivalent of watching beige paint dry, and it was two hours he would not get back.

I enjoyed it, but then I like Alien and Blade Runner.

I would like to comment about two other "issues" with the movie, but they would be spoilers.

@Maddazz111
Would love to hear your thoughts, post them in the spoiler entry link :-)

I felt like they cut away 70% of all character development scenes. David alone probably has a lot of stuff explaining his behavior and decisions missing.

Thanks for the review. It's a shame they didn't hone the movie to its potential greatness.

I might just wait for the rental.

<fingers in ears> na na na na na na na na I can't hear you

I've got tickets to the midnight show on the 7th. I've been trying to manage my expectations like when I go in for a physical but I am still getting excited.

I used to really enjoy Ridley Scott as a film maker, but most of his work after Gladiator feels somewhat phoned in. I was hoping this film would be different, but I can't say I am surprised by the reviews/comments. I will check it out when it becomes available to stream.

I have managed to avoid learning anything about this film so that I can watch it with few preconceived notions.

I mean, what sort of director would purposely release a movie before it's polished to shine, so the after-market "director's cut" DVD would become a de facto standard for the true purpose the film set out to explore?

Looks interesting from the trailers … but your review sounds about what you'd expect with some of the current movie releases … But I'll watch it when it makes it to cable … With the current price of movies, I almost always wait until it hits cable …

Thosmoss – not many, what usually happens is the Studio had the movie slotted for release at a certain time, and if the movie does not get released at the scheduled time there is not backup. Movies are like airline seats or hotel rooms, if one is not used (released) on X date then that is a lost sale.

Saw it today, still collating my thoughts……….. other than I'm sure the almost certain directors cut will be fantastic and why did it get a 15 certificate, no nudity, no swearing etc.
The thing about a director's cut is it can afford to be longer, studios and cinemas don't like long films because people shy away (numb bum syndrome) and fewer screenings so less profit. On the documentory for Bladerunner the editor is quoted as saying when the film over runs, the first thing to go are the details/subtleties, another example is kingdom of heaven huge chunks go for the cinema release (hated the cinema version but love the director's cut) and it's not just Ridley Scott the film Red Cliff released in China as two films got a US release as one losing some 3hrs from it's run time but why not release it the way it was intended, in two parts. I think Prometheus is a very good film but the disc will be awesome.

Went to see Prometheus last night and unfortunately it was at best mediocre. Certainly it was very pretty but without dropping spoilers it has to be said it got wearing watching a film where the entire cast appeared to be card carrying members of League of People too Stupid to Live. With this and the equally disappointing Robin Hood I think as a director Ridley Scott has joined Lucas on my mental avoid list.

Funny I liked it. The wife and I are talking about all the little bits that add up to bigger bits. I actually plan on seeing it again to try to link some bits together. A movie for people who like to think. The pieces do fit together.

I thought the characters weren't. Stupid. When the two lost scientests heard there might be an alien to the east they went west. The captain figured out what the place was.

"Went to see Prometheus last night and unfortunately it was at best mediocre"

Yeah I'd have to agree. The vision, sound and costumes etc set the scene wonderfully. Unfortunately the believability of the character's behaviour bordered on the "Pearl Harbor" level. Well short of Alien.

It was like they had a group of scenes, which by themselves were good, but had no way of stringing them together in a cohesive way.

Think Alien 5: The Prequel, and you'll have a better level of expectation.

I saw it Thusday night at midnight, I was so hyped for this movie and was mildly disappointed. Great eye candy but the plot line had gaping holes in it.

My favorite part of the whole movie is the moment of truth when they wake the "Space Jockey" from cryo stasis. He pops out looking hung over, looks up and sees a room full of what must be lab rats to him. He seems startled when David starts speaking to him. I can imagine what he must have thought… (You want me to help this old lab rat live longer?) I was expecting something profound to be said not the violent reaction.

"Unfortunately the believability of the character's behaviour bordered on the "Pearl Harbor" level. Well short of Alien"- Max

They all behaved like a bunch of teenagers in a 70's horror slasher flick.

"They all behaved like a bunch of teenagers in a 70's horror slasher flick" Dragon Gunner
Yes thats it, I was trying to figure out what they reminded me of! It would have been so easy for him to have them acting like scientists seeing these things for the first time. A Biologist with no interest in alien biology. a Geologist with no interest in geology, a Doctor that doesn't treat anyone.

In Alien, several characters are imperiled while looking for the cat. It's just the way people act in these movies.

At first I kinda liked it… I left the theater still with a lot of questions going through my head, but at least I was thinking about them and coming to conclusions here and there. Visually it was a good movie… and I do think David was well acted even if it feels like they cut out too many of his scenes for us to come to any conclusions about his character.

It was too "Lost," though. Too many questions that are unanswerable (its a cop out to say "its what you choose to believe!" too many times). It intentionally leaves philosophical elements up to viewer interpretation-- that is fine. The problem is that the PLOT has too many elements which are just too unclear or illogical to actually provide anything to base the philosophical post movie debate on.

In the end one CAN enjoy the movie and even get something out of it, and even figure out a way to solve the puzzle that is the plot of this movie, but to do this one really has to fill in a bunch of blanks and do a lot of conjecture. From everything I've read about Scott's own views on the movie, his own interpretation doesn't entirely make sense and leaves much of the plot unexplained. I also find his explanation somewhat unsatisfying, as it seems simplistic philosophically and kinda pushes some of the cooler parts of the movie aside.

Some spoilers:
It starts out as a movie about people searching for our extraterrestrial creators. It is not entirely clear (and also not relevant) whether or not these creators created all life on Earth or just the humans. I get the complaint that if it is all life on Earth then the Space Jockeys never evolved in billions of years, but with hypersleep and such, I dont' care. Besides, I got the impression that he wasn't starting life on Earth, he was really just mixing his DNA in with the primitive life that existed… way pre-chimpanzee, but post protocells. The result would be that he put the code for eventually evolving into humans into life. Its not entirely sensical but I still view it as a relatively irrelevant part of the plot-- its just the premise. We were created, in one way or another, by aliens.

So the humans set out to find their creators, and they all either don't believe they'll find anything or they believe they're going to find benevolent creators (for Shaw this is religious, for Charlie I got the impression he was atheistic but for scientific reasons wanted to find man's origins).

The movie feels like its trying to be about how we assume the connection between the creator and the created will be good, but it actually can be strained or even antagonistic. We see this with David, Weyland, and Vickers, as well as between the SJ, the Aliens (kinda), and the humans. I think this point is somewhat interesting and it is explored to an extent, but one is left thinking more about the various plot holes. The ending was poorly executed as well, IMO. Not wrong, just a bad way of developing the movies' points. One could argue that the overall creator-created point is somewhat lame or insubstantial, but I'd ultimately disagree, even if it wasn't as well presented in the movie as it could be.

In either case, one is left wondering more about the black goo and the aliens and such, which really should have been a part of the whole creator-created message but were so random and bizarre (and often illogical… why the mural of aliens that can only be created by an infected human impregnating a human who then gives birth to a creature that plants an egg in another human which then bursts open with the end result? If thats how Aliens are created then how do eggs get on LV426?) that it ended up feeling like a magical plot device that made the whole thing feel kinda contrived. It doesn't ruin the actual point of the film (or what I thought the point was) but by not contributing to the point as it could have and instead just creating a bunch of fridge logic moments, it hurt the film.

I've heard tell that the movie's point was actually intended to be something paradise lost-esque. The SJ's are fallen angels, jealous of the species they helped created, as the actual creators who originally controlled the SJ's are unseen and used the SJ's to create life that they liked more (humans) by not making them commit suicide to make more life. Ultimately this fits what we see but it also includes a lot that we don't see. Still doesn't explain the black goo and its creations and why there are murals to the aliens and all that… all that does is provide a reason for our relationship to be antagonistic with our creators-- because the creators are jealous of us. Whatever. One is left wondering why they want to kill us, but there are more interesting answers, IMO, than this one. It does seem to fit the David-Weyland-Vickers thing, but it feels a bit like an oversimplification.

Don't know about anyone else, but I thought the crash scene kinda belonged in the "raiders" or "pirates" movies, ship crashes starts rolling…………. and as for who survived that scene……. I just hope there's a directors cut.

I do kinda wish they had opted to reduce some "spectacle" scenes like the crash, and given us a bit more development for characters that do some seemingly impulsive things. I'd have liked to know more about the captain, for example. The 2 knuckleheads that get stuck in the pyramid during the storm don't seem much more than plot devices.

2001: A Space Odyssey is my all-time favorite, so clearly I don't mind movies that don't give you all the answers (and what they do give you is wildly open to interpretation.) So that isn't it.

Blade Runner is another favorite, even though it has a number of characters whose motivations (in the director's cut at least) are not entirely clear — so that's not an issue either.

And Alien is still one of the best slasher/monster movies ever, where a everyone gets picked off one by on, sometimes because they make poor decisions. Again, no problem here.

But Prometheus has all of those things and fails, and it is because Ridley Scott obviously didn't know WHAT movie he wanted make. It feels like 3 different movies mashed together mostly because it really IS 3 movies mashed together. And maybe, just maybe, a 5 hour director's cut, that gives us all 3 of those movies together just might work.

Jape77 totally agree with your comments, I think with hindsight we could've predicted how Prometheus would turn out, initial announcements were "alien prequel" then "in the same setting/universe" to "it's got alien dna" they obviously kept evolving their ideas and sadly it shows. I think the "proto alien" is only there to try to satisfy "fans" but it looks tacked on.

It isn't just that the seams show, its that this is clearly a movie where Scott was locked into certain things because of early decisions that, and wasn't able to alter course enough in post-production to make a difference.

Case in point: why hire great actor Guy Pearce, and then bury him beneath unconvincing old man make up? Why not just hire a great old actor? Turns out there was a whole part of the movie set in the past — our immediate future — when Weyland is young. But it got ditched after the studio objected, and Scott changed his mind about the storyline.

Sometimes a director can make use of happy accidents to make a better movie. That didn't happen this time.