17 replies to this topic

[Shadow]

Surprised nobody made a topic on this yet...ah well.
For those of you who don't know, this is the long awaited new Alien movie directed by Ridley Scott, director of the original. A movie that is in fact, a prequel to the first and is all about those mysterious Space Jockeys!




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHcHYisZFLU

Viral Vids

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3eW4MihnIY

[MistressAli]

Saw a trailer of it today. Looks good and creepy... will definetly go see it.

[Shadow]

[Speedy_25]

Ok, it's official,Shadow.....your pic of Sally is hot, and if I was Sonic,I would definately TAP that!! (yes I know it's off topic, but SOMEONE had to say something)

[Shadow]

You just decided to say something about that now?

[Shadow]

Well since the movie is still fresh in my mind I figure its time to do a review. There will be some spoilers to this so if you don't want to be spoiled I suggest skipping this one.

Alright, it's been eons since Ridley Scott did a sci fi movie. We all loved him for Alien and Blade Runner, and made a few decent flicks outside of that genre. But what got me most excited for seeing this was knowing HR Giger was behind it. If none of you know who he is, he was the main artist behind designing the sets and establishing the Xenomorph for what it is today. So him on board would be a true return to form.
I avoided spoilers like the plague so it wouldn't spoil the plot for me so I could go in blind and not be overhyped. Now, straight away I will say that this is not like the other movies. There is no horde of mindless bugs pouring out of caverns with guys with big guns shooting from all sides. What follows is basically a different movie altogether which stands on its own separate from the Alien franchise. The problem however I felt, is that it didn't have enough time to fully explain everything that was going on. The story itself is rather simple. People go to alien planet in hopes of finding answers for their creation. How its followed up at times can be very confusing and would require a second or third sit to fully understand it all. The Space Jockeys who are now called Engineers are not the big elephant people we originally imagined them to be but gigantic albino looking humanoids in space gear. At first knowing this disappointed me since their was such a mystery behind them shown in the original film. But when you think about it, it really does make sense in mistaking an elephant trunk for an oxygen tube like with airforce pilots. I do have to nitpick that the Engineers are in no way as large as you see in the original film, I don't know why. I assume its just an artistic aesthetic, or maybe theirs another story to be told about that one.
Without spoiling everything, I found the story was abit hard to follow sometimes but it was definitely good nonetheless. I hope their is a extended cut that reveals more because it felt like their was alot missing. Things not totally explained. I think what makes this film so good is that it can stand on its own as its own thing and you don't have to see any of the Alien films to know what is going on. That being said, you do see the Xenomorph appear at the end but it isn't quite what your expecting.

My rating: 4.5/5

[randomizer]

I saw this film today, and to be honest I wasn't all that impressed. It didn't really have much of a climax, but rather had bits of action and suspense dotted throughout the entire film. It was also quite predictable, more so than its prequel nature should require. Probably the strangest part of the film was the first 5 minutes. It seemed as though they had time to kill and just wanted to shoot some nice scenery. It had almost no connection with the rest of the film.

I agree that it stands on its own. It's really only a prequel chronologically.

[Shadow]

Still better than Avatar

[randomizer]

That's barely even a compliment

[Gojira007]

Saw this last night and I've gotta say, while it looked beautiful, and there was some good tension here and there, and Michael Fassbender was fantastic as he kind of is in everything he does, I found myself thoroughly underwhelmed on the whole.


SPOILER SPACE, JUST TO BE SAFE

SPOILER SPACE, JUST TO BE SAFE

SPOILER SPACE, JUST TO BE SAFE


Simply put, these characters are awful. Seriously. Whether it's David's inscrutable motives, bits and pieces of which make sense but none of which ultimately add up to a meaningful whole when looked at in the long view, or Captain Janek swerving in intelligence widely from being able to instantaneously figure out that the planet is in fact an Alien Testing Ground just based on the fact that the black mutagen is dangerous to deciding to sleep with Vickers while two of his men are off-ship in the middle of a dangerous storm (to say nothing of opening the door for the Fifield Zombie despite having every reason to suspect how badly this would go), not a single member of this crew displays much in the way of human intelligence most of the time, and it is absolutely crippling to the overall film. The fact that they choose to end the damned movie on just such a note (why the heck would a trained scientist not return to Earth to re-stock on supplies and better prepare for the Mission she wants to go on, especially when the visit to this planet went so disastrously?) makes it all the more infuriating and impossible to ignore. By the time we get to Millburn and Fifield's Scooby-Doo antics in the Black Goo chamber (I literally laughed out loud at Fifield getting a face-full of acid only to then trip into the Goo like something out of a damned Three Stooges film), it's just impossible for me to get invested in anything that happens to anyone.

It doesn't help that the actual plot feels remarkably thin when you get right down to it; the original "Alien" got away with this because it was ultimately a small-scale Drama overall. "Prometheus" tries to make that same approach work at a far larger scale, and the result is a Movie which literally does not click on any Dramatic level. The Big Ideas about Creation, God, etc? They wind up feeling, at best, kind of tacked on, and at worst just sort of ignored (can anyone tell me what the point of the opening Prologue was? It's fascinating as an Enigma, but it is ultimately pointless to the overall story). The vague Sibling rivalry between Vickers and David goes pretty much nowhere, as does Vickers' resentment of Papa Wayland; it's there, they show it to us, but it could just as easily not have been there and precious little about the overall film would have been lost. Even the Engineers, around whom the whole plot feels like it should revolve, wind up being kind of superfluous, with the frustrating implication that the actual answers are coming in a Sequel. That kind of tease pissed me off in "Captain America: The First Avenger", and it pisses me off here.

The movie's not without its good points. Like I said, it is INTENSELY pretty. The crisp cinematogrpahy and Ridley Scott's unmistakably strong Directing, as well as the overall Art Design, really do make the Movie visually engaging. There are also some very well-done Scare Scenes, especially involving Shaw's attempt to excise her unwanted Alien Baby. But they're small potatoes in comparison to the larger problems looming all over the rest of the film.

So yeah, sadly, not a fan.

[fishtheimpaler]

Gojira, concur on most. Should have checked those writers going in. Sean Catlett later told me that the chief screenwriter was Damon Lindelhof, formerly head writer on Lost, and hence an expert at finding ways to have eye-catching individual moments happen while nonetheless not needing to have the overall plot make any sense. Fassbinder's robot is key to that here; plot-wise he serves primarily as a way to let things happen without having to bore the audience with showing the characters figure anything out for themselves (or to waste any cycles on Lindelhof's processors worrying about the explanation for events, for that matter). Don't worry, he'll work all alien technology without explaning why he's doing it and provide untranslated communications with the actual aliens.

(Lindelhof was assisted by John Spaihts, most famously responsible for the absolutely retarded The Darkest Hour.)

Way too much feeling like it was okay to ape Alien without noticing the differences that the setup required. In Alien, a bunch of miners on the Nostromo, with no training in exobiology or the like, went down to a planet against their will and got exposed to the xenomorph. It makes sense that they wouldn't wind up learning too much about it or the planet--although, it should be noted, they manage to keep things together shockingly well when confronting a potential first contact situation, and even have a touch of the curiosity that anyone would feel when confronted with such a momentus situation. (John Hurt: "Well we have to go on. We have to go on, right?")

In Prometheus, a group specifically assembled for a first contact mission by one of the wealthiest and most powerful organizations on Earth knowingly heads into a first contact situation. In less than an hour, they're breaking quarantine for no reason and just wandering around all over the fucking place in an alien ruin. Your Scooby-Doo comparison with the geologist is particularly good. Dead alien bodies? Zoinks, who would have expected that?

There's really no reason that the great, scary parts of Promethus--a thirty minute period in which I don't know who could predict what kind of mayhem is going to happen next--can't come after a believable, say, week or month or so of careful, measured exploration by a trained first-contact team that doesn't come across as stupid

[Shadow]

(can anyone tell me what the point of the opening Prologue was? It's fascinating as an Enigma, but it is ultimately pointless to the overall story).

That was the Engineer creating life on earth by sacrificing itself.

[Gojira007]

(can anyone tell me what the point of the opening Prologue was? It's fascinating as an Enigma, but it is ultimately pointless to the overall story).

That was the Engineer creating life on earth by sacrificing itself.

Except how do we know that? The impression I got is that this Engineer was, in fact, being punished, left behind with what amounted to a Suicide Capsule. The problem is, both our interpretations are equally valid, because the scene is never revisited or plays any kind of real role in the story proper; we never learn anything about the Engineer who perished, or even if the planet he was on is Earth. There's just no concrete information on it given to us, at all.

[Shadow]

(can anyone tell me what the point of the opening Prologue was? It's fascinating as an Enigma, but it is ultimately pointless to the overall story).

That was the Engineer creating life on earth by sacrificing itself.

Except how do we know that? The impression I got is that this Engineer was, in fact, being punished, left behind with what amounted to a Suicide Capsule. The problem is, both our interpretations are equally valid, because the scene is never revisited or plays any kind of real role in the story proper; we never learn anything about the Engineer who perished, or even if the planet he was on is Earth. There's just no concrete information on it given to us, at all.

Well that's what Ridley Scott said. But of it being earth or not he said thats up to your imagination.

[Gojira007]

Well see, that's a problem. A BIG one, in fact. If the movie itself can't communicate its intent, and instead that intent has to be gleaned from an interview with the Director or some supplementary material from a website or Viral Marketing or tie-in book or whatever, then it's a flaw in the Movie, IMO.

[fishtheimpaler]

Wassamatter, not liking the Matrix sequels or Star Wars prequels? Why don't you like things that make money?

Not everything in a movie needs to be explained, though, fair enough. I like the opening because (a) if it's not Earth, who cares, we know that the Engineers are responsible for human biogenesis, so if it's not Earth, something like that probably happened on Earth, and ( it does a lot to suggest that the Engineers are very, very foreign to humans despite their superficial similarities. "Sacrificing himself to create life": why should that need to happen? Don't they have the technology to make humans from scratch without killing a sentient entity? I think the answer has to be yes, and that suggests that the Engineer notion of individuality is very, very different from that of modern humans, at least that their culture privileges the entirety of a society or some similar large structure over anything like what we would consider the individual. Either that or the Engineers in question are under some sort of external pressure that limits their capabilities--that ship doesn't look like the ships we see later. A war? Civil or otherwise? Both suggestive.

The problem to me isn't so much that the precredits sequence doesn't get fully explained, but that in an important way we never get to see the humans seriously or systematically engaging with the mystery of the planet. The captain draws a possible but possibly wild conclusion, the robot knows things but isn't revealing them except to motivate the next shock scene.

also

Edited by fishtheimpaler, 13 June 2012 - 07:51 PM.

[Gojira007]

It's true, explanation isn't always necessary. Hell, the original "Alien" quite literally lives off of No Explanation; what is the nature of the Ship the "Nostromo" comes across? What are these aliens they find inside it? What about the alien that attacks them? Answers are not terribly forthcoming. The thing is, while those questions are fascinating, and provide us a certain food for thought after the fact, they are not directly relevant to the story at hand, and the lack of information is in fact an important part of building the tension in the overall story.

That's the key, for me, and I think it's a bit like what you're saying, Fish; we never get to engage the Questions here, even though the Movie's story by its very nature would seem to make that a necessity. Lack of information/explanation is one thing, but it has to serve some kind of legitimate purpose that strengthens the story, and I don't think "Prometheus"' many unanswered (or unanswerable; there is just no explaining, like, 90% of the characters' behavior) questions do that.

[randomizer]

Except how do we know that? The impression I got is that this Engineer was, in fact, being punished, left behind with what amounted to a Suicide Capsule.

This is very close to my initial interpretation. i decided to Google about it and came across Ridley Scott's explanation as well. Black goo being used for seeding life is quite different to the captain's conclusion that it was a bioweapon, yet there was no way we could have come up with the former explanation because the events of the opening scene were never revisited at any point in the film.