@D0tti said:

@IBurningStar said:

I actually enjoyed the film and don't understand the amount of rage being directed at it. I can understand not liking it, but the pure hatred being thrown at this thing is a bit confusing to me. It wasn't a great film, but in no way do I think it is bad. In fact, this could be one of those Kingdom of Heaven scenarios where the director's cut of the film is so much better than the theatrical that it makes it almost seem like it is a completely different movie. There is also this thing I read earlier that I am going to copy for you all. I will say that some of it may be reaching a little bit, but it was still an interesting read non the less.
Original source: http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a lifegiver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.

Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.

Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: 'That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.'

Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.

And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'

So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.

Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.

The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.

And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.

From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.

If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:

Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.

So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.

So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.

The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.

Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable.

Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.

But some humans do act in ways the Engineers might have grudgingly admired. Take Holloway, Shaw's lover, who impregnates her barren womb with his black slime riddled semen before realising he is being transformed into something Other. Unlike the hapless geologist and botanist left behind in the chamber, who only want to stay alive, Holloway willingly embraces death. He all but invites Meredith Vickers to kill him, and it's surely significant that she does so using fire, the other gift Prometheus gave to man besides his life.

The 'Caesarean' scene is central to the film's themes of creation, sacrifice, and giving life. Shaw has discovered she's pregnant with something non-human and sets the autodoc to slice it out of her. She lies there screaming, a gaping wound in her stomach, while her tentacled alien child thrashes and squeals in the clamp above her and OH HEY IT'S THE LIFEGIVER WITH HER ABDOMEN TORN OPEN. How many times has that image come up now? Four, I make it. (We're not done yet.)

And she doesn't kill it. And she calls the procedure a 'caesarean' instead of an 'abortion'.

(I'm not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don't think they're clear, and I'm not entirely comfortable doing so. Let's just say that her unwanted offspring turning out to be her salvation is possibly problematic from a feminist standpoint and leave it there for now.)

Here's where the Christian allegories really come through. The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day. And this is a 'virgin birth' of sorts, although a dark and twisted one, because Shaw couldn't possibly be pregnant. And Shaw's the crucifix-wearing Christian of the crew. We may well ask, echoing Yeats: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards LV-223 to be born?

Consider the scene where David tells Shaw that she's pregnant, and tell me that's not a riff on the Annunciation. The calm, graciously angelic android delivering the news, the pious mother who insists she can't possibly be pregnant, the wry declaration that it's no ordinary child... yeah, we've seen this before.

'And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.'

A barren woman called Elizabeth, made pregnant by 'God'? Subtle, Ridley.

Anyway. If it weren't already clear enough that the central theme of the film is 'I suffer and die so that others may live' versus 'you suffer and die so that I may live' writ extremely large, Meredith Vickers helpfully spells it out:

'A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.'

Vickers is not just speaking out of personal frustration here, though that's obviously one level of it. She wants her father out of the way, so she can finally come in to her inheritance. It's insult enough that Weyland describes the android David as 'the closest thing I have to a son', as if only a male heir was of any worth; his obstinate refusal to accept death is a slap in her face.

Weyland, preserved by his wealth and the technology it can buy, has lived far, far longer than his rightful time. A ghoulish, wizened creature who looks neither old nor young, he reminds me of Slough Feg, the decaying tyrant from the Slaine series in British comic 2000AD. In Slaine, an ancient (and by now familiar to you, dear reader, or so I would hope) Celtic law decrees that the King has to be ritually and willingly sacrificed at the end of his appointed time, for the good of the land and the people. Slough Feg refused to die, and became a rotting horror, the embodiment of evil.

The image of the sorcerer who refuses to accept rightful death is fundamental: it even forms a part of some occult philosophy. In Crowley's system, the magician who refuses to accept the bitter cup of Babalon and undergo dissolution of his individual ego in the Great Sea (remember that opening scene?) becomes an ossified, corrupted entity called a 'Black Brother' who can create no new life, and lives on as a sterile, emasculated husk.

With all this in mind, we can better understand the climactic scene in which the withered Weyland confronts the last surviving Engineer. See it from the Engineer's perspective. Two thousand years ago, humanity not only murdered the Engineers' emissary, it infected the Engineers' life-creating fluid with its own tainted selfish nature, creating monsters. And now, after so long, here humanity is, presumptuously accepting a long-overdue invitation, and even reawakening (and corrupting all over again) the life fluid.

And who has humanity chosen to represent them? A self-centred, self-satisfied narcissist who revels in his own artificially extended life, who speaks through the medium of a merely mechanical offspring. Humanity couldn't have chosen a worse ambassador.

It's hardly surprising that the Engineer reacts with contempt and disgust, ripping David's head off and battering Weyland to death with it. The subtext is bitter and ironic: you caused us to die at the hands of our own creation, so I am going to kill you with YOUR own creation, albeit in a crude and bludgeoning way.

The only way to save humanity is through self-sacrifice, and this is exactly what the captain (and his two oddly complacent co-pilots) opt to do. They crash the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship, giving up their lives in order to save others. Their willing self-sacrifice stands alongside Holloway's and the Engineer's from the opening sequence; by now, the film has racked up no less than five self-sacrificing gestures (six if we consider the exploding Engineer head).

Meredith Vickers, of course, has no interest in self-sacrifice. Like her father, she wants to keep herself alive, and so she ejects and lands on the planet's surface. With the surviving cast now down to Vickers and Shaw, we witness Vickers's rather silly death as the Engineer ship rolls over and crushes her, due to a sudden inability on her part to run sideways. Perhaps that's the point; perhaps the film is saying her view is blinkered, and ultimately that kills her. But I doubt it. Sometimes a daft death is just a daft death.

Finally, in the squidgy ending scenes of the film, the wrathful Engineer conveniently meets its death at the tentacles of Shaw's alien child, now somehow grown huge. But it's not just a death; there's obscene life being created here, too. The (in the Engineers' eyes) horrific human impulse to sacrifice others in order to survive has taken on flesh. The Engineer's body bursts open - blah blah lifegiver blah blah abdomen ripped apart hey we're up to five now - and the proto-Alien that emerges is the very image of the creature from the mural.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that the genesis of the Alien xenomorph ultimately lies in the grotesque human act of crucifying the Space Jockeys' emissary to Israel in four B.C., but that's what Ridley Scott proposes. It seems equally insane to propose that Prometheus is fundamentally about the clash between acceptance of death as a condition of creating/sustaining life versus clinging on to life at the expense of others, but the repeated, insistent use of motifs and themes bears this out.

As a closing point, let me draw your attention to a very different strand of symbolism that runs through Prometheus: the British science fiction show Doctor Who. In the 1970s episode 'The Daemons', an ancient mound is opened up, leading to an encounter with a gigantic being who proves to be an alien responsible for having guided mankind's development, and who now views mankind as a failed experiment that must be destroyed. The Engineers are seen tootling on flutes, in exactly the same way that the second Doctor does. The Third Doctor had an companion whose name was Liz Shaw, the same name as the protagonist of Prometheus. As with anything else in the film, it could all be coincidental; but knowing Ridley Scott, it doesn't seem very likely.

Edit: Put it all in a spoiler box so as to not fill up the whole page with a wall of text.

Sorry for bumping a 3 month old post, but I just finished watching Prometheus and started searching the forums for your opinions and thoughts on the movie. Personally I found it to be ok, not bad nor good, just ok. But after reading what IBurningStar posted in that spoiler box, it kind of made me angry and in some ways filthy for watching the movie. Because if Ridley Scott's intentions were really to make some connections between god, jesus and religion in general with this movie, than UGH just UGH. I really despise movies like these, now I know some people may say "what were you expecting?" and "maybe you just don't like movies where everything is spoon fed". My answer to this is, I was expecting a horroirish movie, now I must admit the movies was kinda intense and intriguing at times, but juuuuust a little, the characters where really poor as many have pointed out, Fassbender was the only good charecter, but the digital effects were pretty good. I also enjoyed that caeserean scene and honestly laughed out loud when that first infected dude got burned too a crisp. But now i'm just rambling on, but reading through that spoiler box kinda made me angry and disappointet, because as far as I can remember about the first movie it was just a great action/horror movie with no real "meaning" or at least not like this.

It's about existence and where we came from, which we figure out, but interestingly it avoids answering the bigger question, where life in general came from, but that's OK. Also, you're not supposed to watch this like Alien exactly. Prometheus was a fantastic film for the most part, but it seems like some scenes, such as the c-section scene, didn't get enough attention after it had happened, which was a bit jarring and disjointed. I advise everyone to go read about everything you can on the film, 'cause that'll probably effect the way you think about it, and I hate seeing ignorant comments (and no, that wasn't pointed at anyone specific).

Edit - Oh, and the whole idea of not making it just another Alien film wasn't Ridley Scott's idea, it was Damon Lindelof's.

I actually enjoyed the film and don't understand the amount of rage being directed at it. I can understand not liking it, but the pure hatred being thrown at this thing is a bit confusing to me.  It wasn't a great film, but in no way do I think it is bad. In fact, this could be one of those Kingdom of Heaven scenarios where the director's cut of the film is so much better than the theatrical that it makes it almost seem like it is a completely different movie. There is also this thing I read earlier that I am going to copy for you all.   I will say that some of it may be reaching a little bit, but it was still an interesting read non the less.
Original source: http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a lifegiver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.

Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.

Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: 'That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.'

Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.

And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'

So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.

Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.

The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.

And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.

From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.

If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:

Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.

So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.

So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.

The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.

Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable.

Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.

But some humans do act in ways the Engineers might have grudgingly admired. Take Holloway, Shaw's lover, who impregnates her barren womb with his black slime riddled semen before realising he is being transformed into something Other. Unlike the hapless geologist and botanist left behind in the chamber, who only want to stay alive, Holloway willingly embraces death. He all but invites Meredith Vickers to kill him, and it's surely significant that she does so using fire, the other gift Prometheus gave to man besides his life.

The 'Caesarean' scene is central to the film's themes of creation, sacrifice, and giving life. Shaw has discovered she's pregnant with something non-human and sets the autodoc to slice it out of her. She lies there screaming, a gaping wound in her stomach, while her tentacled alien child thrashes and squeals in the clamp above her and OH HEY IT'S THE LIFEGIVER WITH HER ABDOMEN TORN OPEN. How many times has that image come up now? Four, I make it. (We're not done yet.)

And she doesn't kill it. And she calls the procedure a 'caesarean' instead of an 'abortion'.

(I'm not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don't think they're clear, and I'm not entirely comfortable doing so. Let's just say that her unwanted offspring turning out to be her salvation is possibly problematic from a feminist standpoint and leave it there for now.)

Here's where the Christian allegories really come through. The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day. And this is a 'virgin birth' of sorts, although a dark and twisted one, because Shaw couldn't possibly be pregnant. And Shaw's the crucifix-wearing Christian of the crew. We may well ask, echoing Yeats: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards LV-223 to be born?

Consider the scene where David tells Shaw that she's pregnant, and tell me that's not a riff on the Annunciation. The calm, graciously angelic android delivering the news, the pious mother who insists she can't possibly be pregnant, the wry declaration that it's no ordinary child... yeah, we've seen this before.

'And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.'

A barren woman called Elizabeth, made pregnant by 'God'? Subtle, Ridley.

Anyway. If it weren't already clear enough that the central theme of the film is 'I suffer and die so that others may live' versus 'you suffer and die so that I may live' writ extremely large, Meredith Vickers helpfully spells it out:

'A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.'

Vickers is not just speaking out of personal frustration here, though that's obviously one level of it. She wants her father out of the way, so she can finally come in to her inheritance. It's insult enough that Weyland describes the android David as 'the closest thing I have to a son', as if only a male heir was of any worth; his obstinate refusal to accept death is a slap in her face.

Weyland, preserved by his wealth and the technology it can buy, has lived far, far longer than his rightful time. A ghoulish, wizened creature who looks neither old nor young, he reminds me of Slough Feg, the decaying tyrant from the Slaine series in British comic 2000AD. In Slaine, an ancient (and by now familiar to you, dear reader, or so I would hope) Celtic law decrees that the King has to be ritually and willingly sacrificed at the end of his appointed time, for the good of the land and the people. Slough Feg refused to die, and became a rotting horror, the embodiment of evil.

The image of the sorcerer who refuses to accept rightful death is fundamental: it even forms a part of some occult philosophy. In Crowley's system, the magician who refuses to accept the bitter cup of Babalon and undergo dissolution of his individual ego in the Great Sea (remember that opening scene?) becomes an ossified, corrupted entity called a 'Black Brother' who can create no new life, and lives on as a sterile, emasculated husk.

With all this in mind, we can better understand the climactic scene in which the withered Weyland confronts the last surviving Engineer. See it from the Engineer's perspective. Two thousand years ago, humanity not only murdered the Engineers' emissary, it infected the Engineers' life-creating fluid with its own tainted selfish nature, creating monsters. And now, after so long, here humanity is, presumptuously accepting a long-overdue invitation, and even reawakening (and corrupting all over again) the life fluid.

And who has humanity chosen to represent them? A self-centred, self-satisfied narcissist who revels in his own artificially extended life, who speaks through the medium of a merely mechanical offspring. Humanity couldn't have chosen a worse ambassador.

It's hardly surprising that the Engineer reacts with contempt and disgust, ripping David's head off and battering Weyland to death with it. The subtext is bitter and ironic: you caused us to die at the hands of our own creation, so I am going to kill you with YOUR own creation, albeit in a crude and bludgeoning way.

The only way to save humanity is through self-sacrifice, and this is exactly what the captain (and his two oddly complacent co-pilots) opt to do. They crash the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship, giving up their lives in order to save others. Their willing self-sacrifice stands alongside Holloway's and the Engineer's from the opening sequence; by now, the film has racked up no less than five self-sacrificing gestures (six if we consider the exploding Engineer head).

Meredith Vickers, of course, has no interest in self-sacrifice. Like her father, she wants to keep herself alive, and so she ejects and lands on the planet's surface. With the surviving cast now down to Vickers and Shaw, we witness Vickers's rather silly death as the Engineer ship rolls over and crushes her, due to a sudden inability on her part to run sideways. Perhaps that's the point; perhaps the film is saying her view is blinkered, and ultimately that kills her. But I doubt it. Sometimes a daft death is just a daft death.

Finally, in the squidgy ending scenes of the film, the wrathful Engineer conveniently meets its death at the tentacles of Shaw's alien child, now somehow grown huge. But it's not just a death; there's obscene life being created here, too. The (in the Engineers' eyes) horrific human impulse to sacrifice others in order to survive has taken on flesh. The Engineer's body bursts open - blah blah lifegiver blah blah abdomen ripped apart hey we're up to five now - and the proto-Alien that emerges is the very image of the creature from the mural.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that the genesis of the Alien xenomorph ultimately lies in the grotesque human act of crucifying the Space Jockeys' emissary to Israel in four B.C., but that's what Ridley Scott proposes. It seems equally insane to propose that Prometheus is fundamentally about the clash between acceptance of death as a condition of creating/sustaining life versus clinging on to life at the expense of others, but the repeated, insistent use of motifs and themes bears this out.

As a closing point, let me draw your attention to a very different strand of symbolism that runs through Prometheus: the British science fiction show Doctor Who. In the 1970s episode 'The Daemons', an ancient mound is opened up, leading to an encounter with a gigantic being who proves to be an alien responsible for having guided mankind's development, and who now views mankind as a failed experiment that must be destroyed. The Engineers are seen tootling on flutes, in exactly the same way that the second Doctor does. The Third Doctor had an companion whose name was Liz Shaw, the same name as the protagonist of Prometheus. As with anything else in the film, it could all be coincidental; but knowing Ridley Scott, it doesn't seem very likely.

Edit: Put it all in a spoiler box so as to not fill up the whole page with a wall of text.

I finally managed to watch Prometheus and I thought it was okay. I do have a few problems with it that a few of you are having. I totally understand that these scientists are curious, but that is a piss-poor excuse for their stupidity. There's curiosity, then there is stupidity that writers use as an easy method of keeping the story going.

Also, I'm trying to understand the significance of the first scene. Why did the albino alien guy drink that crap and what did he reconstruct into after falling in the water? I assumed that that would be explained in the film, but there was nothing that touched on it.

Like someone else stated, David should have remained his self when his motives are revealed; I'm sure there is a better way for them to show the audience his bad intentions without taunting whats her face about her boyfriend and dad. I thought the attitude change was thrown in there so incredibly simple people understood what was going on with David.

I initially thought that David was acting on his own accord when he "spiked" that one guy's drink. The movie covers brings up creationism; David was created by humans and I was under the impression that David wanted to be a creator.

It was stupid that no one brought the pregnancy up after the abortion (besides David). Notice how these scientists were running around doing stupid shit out of curiosity, but they conveniently forget that the woman was 3 months pregnant from having sex less than 24 hours ago.

The theme of a creator or creators killing creations kind of had a religious feel to it. In Christianity, it is believed God will make a new world after the events of the Book of Revelations; the aliens planned to swipe the slate clean and try again. It just seemed like the writers used this instead of developing something interesting that intrigued the audience. I was expecting more out of this.

And it is possible to make a brilliant Sci-Fi film that provides well-thought out explanations without sacrifice the survival horror element. It's just that Hollywood knew they could still bank off of the film without fixing the plot holes.

I just saw it and I more or less enjoyed it, though I can't think of any other movie that has ever tried so hard to make me not like it. Too little is explained and I think that detracts from the themes the film wants to deal with. It's not that I need every little thing explained to me, but the plot relies too much on being vague.

One thing that irritated me was that a goddamn career archaeologist knows how to use super high-tech equipment. They even said there were about 10 of those operation pods in existence, but Noomi Rapace's character just hops in and gets it to work. She also seemed to know a lot about reanimating severed heads. Even those spacesuits seemed to have a lot of tech on them, and everyone knew how to use it.

The movie was challenging and interesting in a way that most Hollywood movies aren't, but there were too many plot holes.

I didn't realize the guy who wrote Lost was involved but that would explain a lot. I see this stuff going on in Lost and thought it was poor storytelling and explains why a lot of this movie left me unhappy. The movie plays with a lot of profound ideas, which are awesome for story and entertainment, but calls too much attention to irrelevant details like it is a big surprise and never acts on them.

Most characters acted like morons, but it was necessary to move the plot forward. If everyone was reasonable and actually took precautions, there would be no movie. Worst of all was the Weyland reveal. It was amazingly obvious. Merely having David check separate stasis pod in the beginning would've been better in my opinion.

There was quite a bit of good acting though. Mostly the main characters, really. Then again, they were the only ones who were actually given an opportunity to act. Noomi Rapace didn't do anything for me as Shaw though. Something about her was just boring. Then again, perhaps that's the point. Fassbender was great as usual and I like seeing Idris Elba in more movies.

Just saw it and yeah I don't know what to think about it. I love all things Sci-fi so I was expecting to like the movie at least. There are a few things that I like which are mostly David's scenes as Fastbender acts so well in the movie. I just don't like any of the characters in the film. I don't get any time to really care for anyone and the main characters from the movie are either insane or jerks. I just don't care for the movie that much at all. I guess since the guy from Lost wrote the damn thing he accomplished his goal? It looked great though.

I think that the majority of the people complaining about this film are victims of high or misplaced expectations more than anything. No, it is not as good as Alien. Or Blade Runner. But it is by no means bad.

Went in totally blank and ended up liking it quite a bit. Offered some good tension and cringe-worthy moments (that operation...man). I admit to not having the hugest attachment to the Alien franchise and there were a few questionable aspects - knowing things were going to go bad at some point I kept thinking 'put your helmets back on' a few dozen times - but it was well shot, interesting, and subject of some good conversation and interpretation with my friends afterwards. Enjoyable, at least in my opinion.

It was meh

I remember reading somewhere(sorry i don't have a link) that Ridley Scott was interviewed saying that the derelict ship from Alien is already on LV-426 while Prometheus is taking place. If thats so, I think the engineers were killed by an escaped Xenomorph experiment.

A poster above had a theory that the goo was meant for creation and the Xenos where meant for destruction, maybe they already prepared a ship with the Xenos on board, one hatched and killed the space jockey that we see in Alien, and one got loose on LV-223 killing them as well.

Also, how do we know the engineer in Prometheus was heading to earth, we only assume that based on David's findings, what if he was just retreating back to his home world.

I think this video will greatly enjoy the TC...

@MarkWahlberg:

I can't disagree with any of your critisicms. While I did enjoy the first half of the movie, I didn't enjoy the second half nearly as much (lots of why / what / how questions). Still, overall, I liked it.

@Bobby_The_Great said:

@boj4ngles said:
I think you're giving WAY too much credit to the writer for holes that you yourself are filling in and wanting to believe. The movie in your head is obviously better, but what was on screen was not the culmination of the subtly you are describing.

This was a deep film, I'll give it that, but it was not particularly smart.

Also, I love horror movies and I love the Aliens franchise, yes even the 3rd and 4th films. And I was aware this was going to be a horror movie, but I was hoping it would be smarter, like I said above. I was hoping this wouldn't be trite and cliched with the typically "horror" movie tropes and settle for "oh it's a horror movie so these things are justified," I was hoping for something with a little more though, ala the first Alien film, which I'm totally justified in comparing it to, and other space/sci-fi movies like Sunshine and such. I just think I had my expectations too high.

It isn't so much making things up he wasnts to believe as it is that they are the logical conclusions to make. It refreshing when a film lets the audience fill in the gaps themselves without having to speak down to the audience spelling out every little detail.

Do you really think a director as talented as Ridley Scott spent years on the film to see it released and go "well I guess I never thought of that" to all of these things that are not spelled out? Or do you think it might be that he thought he told us enough to let us work it out. Maybe that was a mistake but even if so it is a mistake of not revealing enough and not because there were never answers there at all.

@Bobby_The_Great said:

@MarkWahlberg: I totally agree. I feel it was a B movie with a $100 million budget. The first half of the movie was pretty good and intriguing, despite the characters, namely Charlize Theron and Geologist guy, being as 1 dimensional as a line.

And seriously, for a TRILLION dollar project, the people chosen are the dumbest scientist/military/whatever I've ever seen:

- go to new alien planet, take helmet off just because oxygen levels are okay.

I think it's important to remember that when Holloway (the first crew member to remove his helmet) embarks on the mission, he is expecting to make first contact. To him, it is inconceivable that the engineers will be anything but an intelligent, advanced race with an interstellar civilization and probable fore-knowledge of Prometheus' arrival. When they enter the pyramid, and realize that in-spite of the laws of nature, this place is hospitable to humans, this confirms every secret wish he nurtured during the voyage. For him, the act of taking off his helmet is similar to the act of removing a mask. It is not just about breathing air, it is about saying here I am. Your son has returned. When he realizes that there is air to be breathed, his instinct is that he is meant to breath it. His creator intends it. Our creators would not call us across the galaxy to make us sick via air-born pathogen. That is unthinkable. Of course this is in contrast to other members of the crew who are skeptics, but Holloway is a believer, and when he shows that he can breathe, he converts them.

As an audience, we know that this is a horror movie, and that bad stuff is going to happen when characters' fatal flaws are revealed, but that is just part of going to the movies.

- see new alien species that CLEARLY resembles something like a cobra, try to get close and talk to it in baby talk to "soothe it."

If the characters are scientists as you say, then they would have no reason to suspect that just because something looks kind of like a cobra, then it shares its lethal properties. Also, most snakes are not poisonous and that little worm thing looked pretty small. As I said earlier, this is a horror movie and the audience knows that something bad is going to happen because they are familiar with the genre. Part of being able to appreciate a horror movie (or any movie for that matter) is being willing to suspend a certain level of disbelief. Maybe you just weren't in mood for a horror movie when you walked in to the theater.

- take new alien head into a confined ship just to study it, and blow it up because you try to reanimate it. (this one really pisses me off because taking a foreign ANYTHING onto a ship was the whole ordeal of the first Alien film!? How did Ridley not remember this which was his own basic protocol!?)

Are you trying to say that that Scott, the director, should have known better than to bring a foreign object on board because he already knows of the dangers from his first film? I don't know if that's what you're trying to say but your question kind reads that way. If so, then you are asking him to, well, look it just doesn't make any sense. If what you're trying to say is that the characters should have known better, then all I would say is that they seemed to have taken the necessary decontamination protocols. But regardless, this goes back to the post I just made. In horror movies, you can't expect the characters to have the same omniscience as the audience.

- touch unknown alien goo with hands, just because.

Well if I remember correctly, only David did this right? He's an android so he's not going to have to worry about poison and germs the same way we do. I don't know, maybe he was just curious? Besides, this shouldn't be a problem. Goo is awesome, and all the Alien movies have tons of goo.

- don't bring any weapons of any devastating kind, just a few pistols and flame throwers. Obviously oblivious to possibility of hostile or dangerous beings on the moon they are on...

I explained earlier (and the movie explained too) how their mission is to make first contact. It is meant to be a peaceful encounter. All of their research has suggested that the engineers have invited them to show up. If you were going to meet some distant relative for the first time, would you bring a shotgun with you when you walked in the front door? Ok, bad example. But think about this, if they are going to meet an advanced alien species that has bio-engineering and interstellar travel, then it might be a bad idea to come armed with devastating weapons because that could send the wrong signal and they might just blow you up before you get a chance to talk.

- I could go on and on about the dumb, idiotic things this "experienced" and "chosen" team shouldn't have done, and I have nothing but a bachelor's degree in Journalism, not a doctor's degree in whatever respected field would be necessary to be chosen for a journey and discovery like this.

About the time they revealed what the "space jockey" was I checked out, I was severely disappointed in what they were. The dialogue and character designs were terrible, and everything happened just "because." The scientist (forget his name) who gets infected by David putting that strand of DNA in his drink, who is burned and then turns into a zombie-monster for no reason? That was bullshit. Squid monster in Noomi's character? Dumb. Final confrontation with space jockey and squid monster filling in fan service for a Xenomorph was the worst afterthought ever.

It sucks because the movie had parts that were intriguing, but the rest is absolutely lackluster and makes me not think of it as ANY part of the Alien canon.

No offense, but it sounds kind of like you just weren't in the mood for the kind of movie this is. Sounds like you wanted it to not be an Alien movie. It's not deeply intellectual, nor is it an action film. Most of its ideas or "messages" are being conveyed in symbolism rather than discussions. Anyways, I think it's better than people are giving it credit for.

My biggest issue with this movie was the fact that 90% of the "problems" they encountered wouldn't have happenend if these supposed scientists weren't some of the dumbest motherfuckers I've ever seen in a movie. A real life group of average Joes would have done better and made it through with more survivors in the situation they were in.

I actually enjoyed the film and don't understand the amount of rage being directed at it. I can understand not liking it, but the pure hatred being thrown at this thing is a bit confusing to me.  It wasn't a great film, but in no way do I think it is bad. In fact, this could be one of those Kingdom of Heaven scenarios where the director's cut of the film is so much better than the theatrical that it makes it almost seem like it is a completely different movie. There is also this thing I read earlier that I am going to copy for you all.   I will say that some of it may be reaching a little bit, but it was still an interesting read non the less.
Original source: http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html

I loved it, but I appreciate it has many flaws.

A lot of the character motivation is purely in aid of the plot contrivancies, which is a huge shame and tarnishes the great work that some of the other support put in. Particularly Fassbender, Elba, Theron and Green. Rapace was something of a mixed-bag: she went from moments that were totally believable to others that were poorly delivered in a questionable accent.

The first two-thirds of the movie ask some big questions, and tease us with themes of faith, creation and destruction and parenthood, but none of them are fleshed out fully enough. Yes, there are plenty of allusions and mythic-come-religious symbolism, but by the time the third act comes around they are totally discarded and we're left with something of a hollow monster-movie. Prometheus is too concerned with, and obviously self-conscious about, its ties with Alien that these ideas aren't given the room to breath that they require. The Lindelof argument is well-worn at this point, but had the script dealt with these elements more resolutely (because, let's face it, the birth scene served a single purpose and that was to aid in the Engineer's quick demise), then the film would have been tighter overall. This is my biggest gripe: the last act is far too muddled and rushed to really have much effect at all. It feels like a cut of a longer, better film, with particular scenes jarring painfully. Should we see an extended cut, I'd wager that it would be a definite improvement over the theatrical cut (obviously the problems at script-level can't be helped much regardless of length).

For all that, it sounds as though I didn't take much away from it at all, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I've already seen it twice and plan on a third viewing shortly before it leaves cinemas.

What worked? Prometheus is basically state-of-the-art in marrying digital wizardry with gorgeous practical effects and sets. It is a complete knock-out in that regard, and I doubt a single person will come away without specific images burned into their memories. On approach to the moon LV-223, for example, the Prometheus is a spec against the enormous backdrop of a ringed-planet. On an IMAX screen, sights like this are genuinely breathtaking.

As I mentioned above, the support was excellent. Of course, Fassbender stole the show, but I actually thought Holloway's short arc was a triumph considering his relative lack of screen-time. Elba and Theron did well with the small parts they had to work with, and if what we've heard with regard to cut scenes is true, their characters will be better served in the longer cut.

Looks and thesps aside, the film absolutely oozes atmosphere. The brooding score, while ineffective at times, does its best to convey the marvels that the crew comes across. The first scene of the film, a wistful fly-over some incredible terrain before our first encounter with the alien race that apparently birthed us, is lifted with a beautiful musical flourish and genuinely had me in awe. The repeated journeys to the temple (granted, a little meandering on the script's part), gradually uncover more mysteries and wonders. There wasn't a moment where I didn't feel, at the very least, intrigued with what I was seeing. In its finest moments, Prometheus really does have you feeling like one of the crew.

Edit: going to flesh this out and post it as a blog.

@MarkWahlberg said:

@wmaustin55 said:

I really liked the movie, but your rant made me laugh. Good job. The only thing I was confused about was what were David's motivations? Still unclear on that and it's bothering me

That was one of the few things I kind of liked, or at least liked my interpretation of it. The whole time we're wondering just how much he actually hates everyone else, and what sort of instructions he's getting from Weyland. But by the end, it's pretty clear he's largely incapable of rational independent thought and is taking orders from a man who hasn't the slightest idea what's going on. That's why he puts the goo in the drink, because neither he nor Weyland truly understand the situation. Noomi Whatserface ends the film by basically calling him an idiot, and I think that's kind of a clever twist on the 'mysterious robot who's smarter and more capable than everyone else' cliche. Which I suspect is just me giving the screenwriters more credit than they're due for a poorly written character arc, but still.

I don't think you're giving them more credit than they're due. One of the clunkier bits of dialogue (why does Weyland feel the need to start his mission briefing by telling them all David has no soul) points exactly at this. Throughout the film other characters catch themselves confiding in David before reminding themselves that he's an android, and he even says that some of what he does, he does so people forget he is a robot. We, as an audience who have seen Blade Runner and Star Trek TNG and Aliens and whatever else, are primed to think the best of him. He does some of the stupidest shit in the whole film and makes it seem like he is an innocent, curious child. Except, of course, he isn't, he is doing everything under the orders of a heartless, egomaniacal billionaire who only cares about preventing his own death. By the time this becomes apparent, we might feel a little silly that we were basically told this near the start of the film, but didn't necessarily believe it. However we have some redemption in Weyland's death, as David becomes free to follow his own agenda. His arc, I think, is about how androids go from Ian Holm to Rutger Hauer.

Of course, it's undercut a little bit by the fact that David does start to act like a total bastard once he reveals his true motives (particularly taunting Noomi Rapace about her dad and watching her dreams) because it kind of says "oh look it should be a surprise because he is bad because look now that you know he is he's acting like a right bastard" when it would have been more effective for him to remain inscrutable. It's also annoying because assuming you buy this theme and character arc, it renders Charlize Theron's character largely pointless - although you might say she acts as a sort of "key" to David's arc. She of course has no arc; you work out that she is Weyland's daughter as soon as you realise Weyland is on the ship in the first third of the film, a fact she then tells you in another dialogue clunker, and then she tells you exactly what her motivations have always been - to see him dead. Finally, the mechanics of David's redemption are a little too unclear for that aspect of it to have much bite. I'm no programmer but when Sid Meier dies I'm fairly sure Civ V will still do the same stuff - am I just being obtuse here, I think I might be

I think this video will greatly enjoy the TC...

@Bobby_The_Great said:

@MarkWahlberg: I totally agree. I feel it was a B movie with a $100 million budget. The first half of the movie was pretty good and intriguing, despite the characters, namely Charlize Theron and Geologist guy, being as 1 dimensional as a line.

And seriously, for a TRILLION dollar project, the people chosen are the dumbest scientist/military/whatever I've ever seen:

- go to new alien planet, take helmet off just because oxygen levels are okay.

I think it's important to remember that when Holloway (the first crew member to remove his helmet) embarks on the mission, he is expecting to make first contact. To him, it is inconceivable that the engineers will be anything but an intelligent, advanced race with an interstellar civilization and probable fore-knowledge of Prometheus' arrival. When they enter the pyramid, and realize that in-spite of the laws of nature, this place is hospitable to humans, this confirms every secret wish he nurtured during the voyage. For him, the act of taking off his helmet is similar to the act of removing a mask. It is not just about breathing air, it is about saying here I am. Your son has returned. When he realizes that there is air to be breathed, his instinct is that he is meant to breath it. His creator intends it. Our creators would not call us across the galaxy to make us sick via air-born pathogen. That is unthinkable. Of course this is in contrast to other members of the crew who are skeptics, but Holloway is a believer, and when he shows that he can breathe, he converts them.

As an audience, we know that this is a horror movie, and that bad stuff is going to happen when characters' fatal flaws are revealed, but that is just part of going to the movies.

- see new alien species that CLEARLY resembles something like a cobra, try to get close and talk to it in baby talk to "soothe it."

If the characters are scientists as you say, then they would have no reason to suspect that just because something looks kind of like a cobra, then it shares its lethal properties. Also, most snakes are not poisonous and that little worm thing looked pretty small. As I said earlier, this is a horror movie and the audience knows that something bad is going to happen because they are familiar with the genre. Part of being able to appreciate a horror movie (or any movie for that matter) is being willing to suspend a certain level of disbelief. Maybe you just weren't in mood for a horror movie when you walked in to the theater.

- take new alien head into a confined ship just to study it, and blow it up because you try to reanimate it. (this one really pisses me off because taking a foreign ANYTHING onto a ship was the whole ordeal of the first Alien film!? How did Ridley not remember this which was his own basic protocol!?)

Are you trying to say that that Scott, the director, should have known better than to bring a foreign object on board because he already knows of the dangers from his first film? I don't know if that's what you're trying to say but your question kind reads that way. If so, then you are asking him to, well, look it just doesn't make any sense. If what you're trying to say is that the characters should have known better, then all I would say is that they seemed to have taken the necessary decontamination protocols. But regardless, this goes back to the post I just made. In horror movies, you can't expect the characters to have the same omniscience as the audience.

- touch unknown alien goo with hands, just because.

Well if I remember correctly, only David did this right? He's an android so he's not going to have to worry about poison and germs the same way we do. I don't know, maybe he was just curious? Besides, this shouldn't be a problem. Goo is awesome, and all the Alien movies have tons of goo.

- don't bring any weapons of any devastating kind, just a few pistols and flame throwers. Obviously oblivious to possibility of hostile or dangerous beings on the moon they are on...

I explained earlier (and the movie explained too) how their mission is to make first contact. It is meant to be a peaceful encounter. All of their research has suggested that the engineers have invited them to show up. If you were going to meet some distant relative for the first time, would you bring a shotgun with you when you walked in the front door? Ok, bad example. But think about this, if they are going to meet an advanced alien species that has bio-engineering and interstellar travel, then it might be a bad idea to come armed with devastating weapons because that could send the wrong signal and they might just blow you up before you get a chance to talk.

- I could go on and on about the dumb, idiotic things this "experienced" and "chosen" team shouldn't have done, and I have nothing but a bachelor's degree in Journalism, not a doctor's degree in whatever respected field would be necessary to be chosen for a journey and discovery like this.

About the time they revealed what the "space jockey" was I checked out, I was severely disappointed in what they were. The dialogue and character designs were terrible, and everything happened just "because." The scientist (forget his name) who gets infected by David putting that strand of DNA in his drink, who is burned and then turns into a zombie-monster for no reason? That was bullshit. Squid monster in Noomi's character? Dumb. Final confrontation with space jockey and squid monster filling in fan service for a Xenomorph was the worst afterthought ever.

It sucks because the movie had parts that were intriguing, but the rest is absolutely lackluster and makes me not think of it as ANY part of the Alien canon.

No offense, but it sounds kind of like you just weren't in the mood for the kind of movie this is. Sounds like you wanted it to not be an Alien movie. It's not deeply intellectual, nor is it an action film. Most of its ideas or "messages" are being conveyed in symbolism rather than discussions. Anyways, I think it's better than people are giving it credit for.

@EXTomar said:

@GunslingerPanda It isn't that people hate the movie because it fails to wrap everything up but these are points the writers/director/etc went out of their way to point out then don't give a satisfactory explanation on why they pointed something out let alone explain it. It is a risky way to tell a story because it can easily backfire because using "...isn't that a mystery" isn't good storytelling when they use it as a conclusion instead of a introduction.

And often times when a movie raises issues and fails to address them it isn't a failure of the audience "getting it" but instead it is a failure on the production side "getting it".

...

Yeah.... Sorry but I had to go there.

@DeeGee: The point is that all of the ships had different biological weapons. Those were just one of them. Xenomorph's were probably on another one of those ships.

@MarkWahlberg said:

If they had established a little earlier that this was, like, a bio-weapons lab that was filled with different projects, they could easily have turned it into a batshit insane Jurassic Park kinda thing or something, where every 5 minutes there's some new crazy monster. As it was, though, we're so busy trying to figure out what's going on that it was just hard to figure out how any of these things was related to each other, or even how they work in the first place. Mouth Rapist worms and alien zombies that never are referred to again are just frustrating. If they had put the zombie scene before fake Tom Hardy got infected, his being burned would have made much more sense, and probably help us understand what the goo does.

That's you problem right there. If you want space Jurassic park then this film is not for you. What you get is the most thematically interesting sci-fi film since Blade Runner.

@xer096 said:

@mandude said:

@betterboulder said:

@ichthy: It seems David's only motivation was nothing other than curiosity. He was probably also a bit pissed that the male scientist was kinda making fun of him.

I got the impression that it was because he was bitter at humanity. Everyone treated him like a tool (literally) because he was only a robot. Even his creator mentioned the fact that he was different because he didn't have a soul.

I was thinking it was because Weyland(?)'s reason for even funding the mission was to get the engineers to give him eternal life, or at least cure him to live longer. I figured that David poisoned Tom Hardy partly because he was being a dick and out of curiosity of thinking that the black goo was a cure for the old man.

Hmm, I figured that since David could read all the alien writings that he was leading them to their doom from the start intentionally.

Well, I suppose what really went down is open for interpretation and it is encouraging discussion, which is why at least IN MY OPINION, it was a pretty good movie.

@mandude said:

@betterboulder said:

@ichthy: It seems David's only motivation was nothing other than curiosity. He was probably also a bit pissed that the male scientist was kinda making fun of him.

I got the impression that it was because he was bitter at humanity. Everyone treated him like a tool (literally) because he was only a robot. Even his creator mentioned the fact that he was different because he didn't have a soul.

I was thinking it was because Weyland(?)'s reason for even funding the mission was to get the engineers to give him eternal life, or at least cure him to live longer. I figured that David poisoned Tom Hardy partly because he was being a dick and out of curiosity of thinking that the black goo was a cure for the old man.

Loved it. Been a long time since I squirmed in my seat at the theatre.

I totally agree with you man, well written blog I just got back from seeing it and was walking round the park in the rain having angry conversations in the rain with myself about how stupid so much of it was. It started well, and looked great but went seriously downhill.

The things that annoyed me most that you didn't mention were how they engineered most of the action/scares by having people just do totally stupid, out of character stuff. For example the two geologists that get left behind in in the ship near the start are naturally very scared at first, being left alone in a big gloomy, alien construction. Then they find a big pile of dead bodies which freaks them out even more. This is all natural and believeable but by the time they get into the main hall later and meet the alien for the first time it turns into a Harold and Kumar movie. These are fucking space scientists, you don't react to seeeing an alien speices by assuming its friendly and trying to tickle it under the chin. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

It just bugs me when they have to resort to getting suposedly clever characters to act stupid in order to put them in any dangers - opening the bay doors after Holloway.

I also enjoyed/hated the way she tried to use the operation machine and it goes 'sorry men only' and then she gets in anyway and somehow this super hi-tec piece of kit can't even tell she is female.

Lastly was the way she tells Idris Elba that they have to bring down the Promethean ship and without any explanation he just decides to plow on into it ending his life and his crewmates follow without complaint.

Shame really, but then it was probably an unnecessary film to make, however I could have taken a film of fan service if wasn't done so lazily.

@betterboulder said:

@ichthy: It seems David's only motivation was nothing other than curiosity. He was probably also a bit pissed that the male scientist was kinda making fun of him.

I got the impression that it was because he was bitter at humanity. Everyone treated him like a tool (literally) because he was only a robot. Even his creator mentioned the fact that he was different because he didn't have a soul.

To quote imdb. Directed by a professional, written by a 5th grader.

@ichthy: It seems David's only motivation was nothing other than curiosity. He was probably also a bit pissed that the male scientist was kinda making fun of him.

And the first guy who got torched was the male (poisoned) scientist. He wanted to be torched because he was risking the rest of the crew, including his girlfriend, not being let back onto the ship. The zombie was the mohawk guy from the alien worm scene who got his helmet burned off by the alien worm's blood and fell into the goo. He returned with a swollen head and attacked people. They torched him but finally killed him by running him over.

@MarkWahlberg: Because of all that I have a feeling it's a movie that might get better upon a second screening, or a movie that needs a sequel to truly explore the premise that's laid out, but yeah this movie just didn't quite meet it's potential. It was at it's best when it was evoking 2001.

I still don't understand why why David contaminated the guy's drink, unless it was just a plot device to set up a gnarly alien c-section scene.

Also I thought it was the guy who fell fast first into the goo that went crazy mutant zombie, not the guy they torched. Jesus that part was confusing.

@Tylea002 said:

Man, fuck Prometheus. It didn't have characters, the dialogue was simply people stating, in obvious prose, the themes which you were meant to be thinking about. There was no subtlety, no nuance and even more criminally all of the themes have been explored before, far better, by the same fucking director.

Fucking Starship Troopers is miles and miles above this film on how to convey subtext and themes.

Come to think of it, this film could learn a lot from Starship Troopers. Now that's a film.

This guy. This guy right here.

@wmaustin55 said:

I really liked the movie, but your rant made me laugh. Good job. The only thing I was confused about was what were David's motivations? Still unclear on that and it's bothering me

That was one of the few things I kind of liked, or at least liked my interpretation of it. The whole time we're wondering just how much he actually hates everyone else, and what sort of instructions he's getting from Weyland. But by the end, it's pretty clear he's largely incapable of rational independent thought and is taking orders from a man who hasn't the slightest idea what's going on. That's why he puts the goo in the drink, because neither he nor Weyland truly understand the situation. Noomi Whatserface ends the film by basically calling him an idiot, and I think that's kind of a clever twist on the 'mysterious robot who's smarter and more capable than everyone else' cliche. Which I suspect is just me giving the screenwriters more credit than they're due for a poorly written character arc, but still.

@MikkaQ said:

@DeeGee said:

It came to a point where I had no idea what was going on because there are like five different aliens all competing to kill the cast for reasons unknown.

I still don't get why the space zombie confuses people, he fell face first into the pool of alien mutant bacteria whatever after his helmet melted off. Same with the space-snake, they kept showing shots of worms in the chamber next to the pots that were spewing out the mutate-y stuff, I put two and two together and that shit is a mutant worm.

I actually didn't mind all that space-mutagen stuff, cause it gave a variety of horrible creatures while making some sense because of the bacteria stuff affecting different things. A movie just about horrible space viruses has potential. What I didn't like was the need to supplement all that with a traditional movie monster (the pissed Engineer) that stalks the cast around like a cheesy slasher villain.

If they had established a little earlier that this was, like, a bio-weapons lab that was filled with different projects, they could easily have turned it into a batshit insane Jurassic Park kinda thing or something, where every 5 minutes there's some new crazy monster. As it was, though, we're so busy trying to figure out what's going on that it was just hard to figure out how any of these things was related to each other, or even how they work in the first place. Mouth Rapist worms and alien zombies that never are referred to again are just frustrating. If they had put the zombie scene before fake Tom Hardy got infected, his being burned would have made much more sense, and probably help us understand what the goo does.

Not to mention, the whole zombie thing felt like it was ripped straight from The Thing. Super strength, screeching, flamethrowers, even that weird little spider stance he does when they find him. I mean, I would pay good money to see Alien Vs. Thing, but that's not what this movie was, unfortunately. Which is too bad, because setting up the Thing as their final bioweapon project would have been fucking insane, and totally work.

@Little_Socrates said:

I thought it was pretty awesome. As a horror film, it's not an exercise in innovation, it's an exercise in just how many things can go wrong at once. This, of course, peaks at the caesarian scene, which is one of very few things I never ever want to see again. Meanwhile, Fassbender was fantastic and recalled Rutger Hauer's iconic role in Blade Runner. I think people drastically overlook the quality of the scene where he first finds the Space Jockey room and walks through the space map and all that. That's possibly his best scene in the film! The cinematography was beyond gorgeous, the music was fantastic, and I actually really enjoyed that final space shot (before the Alien connection came in, when it's implied Shaw might just want to fucking RAM that Engineer war ship into the Engineer planet.)

I mean, most horror films require Murphy's Law in order to even work. But it's never really clear what exactly is going wrong, either, and they basically ignore everything that's happened once Weyland comes out anyway. The Space Map scene was fucking cool (especially in 3D), I'll give you that, but I didn't feel that it had any emotional impact other than hinting at giving the robot a stronger connection with the Engineers than the humans had. Which could have been a really interesting direction to take, but they never really followed up on it at all. Fassbender was good though, especially the running gag of him doing a Peter O'Toole impression the whole time and no one noticing.

@RenMcKormack said:

Mike Fassbender is bad ass. I would have watched a movie of him playing basketball on a bicycle for 2 hours.

They told him he had no soul. But he had a dream. A dream to play the game. This December, watch as a man becomes more than just machine, in: Love & Basketball II: Android Hoop Dreams.

Sign my petition to have this film remade with more chasing down corridors, shooting big rifles down corridors, hiding in an air vent above a corridor while something creeps in the corridor below, almost sniffing the air for you before going off down a different corridor and maybe... ummm, zero g boobs in a space shower that uses oil instead of water?
 
edit: ps, that is the film I want.  I keep my thinking films and shootan films seperate.

I thought it was pretty awesome. As a horror film, it's not an exercise in innovation, it's an exercise in just how many things can go wrong at once. This, of course, peaks at the caesarian scene, which is one of very few things I never ever want to see again. Meanwhile, Fassbender was fantastic and recalled Rutger Hauer's iconic role in Blade Runner. I think people drastically overlook the quality of the scene where he first finds the Space Jockey room and walks through the space map and all that. That's possibly his best scene in the film! The cinematography was beyond gorgeous, the music was fantastic, and I actually really enjoyed that final space shot (before the Alien connection came in, when it's implied Shaw might just want to fucking RAM that Engineer war ship into the Engineer planet.)

However, the Alien connections are extremely frustrating because they make much of the film feel pointless. You're right that outside of David and Shaw, we don't really get any full characters. The supporting cast comes across as that of a James Cameron film, down to a couple of really goofy human "villains." I was really excited when Guy Pearce had come up in the credits because I really like Guy Pearce, but what a waste of your second-best actor! And the twenty minutes BEFORE Shaw finds David and prepares to pilot the other Engineer ship are predictable, rote, and disappointing.

It's these problems that make Prometheus such a difficult film. I really want to love it for all the things I think it does right. So long as I ignore many of the Alien connections, that's far easier to do. But it's still a flawed film even without them; I'm glad I'm not reviewing it.

@DeeGee said:

Why did he become a fucking space zombie? That's my biggest problem with this movie. You can't just chuck that in there and hope nobody is going to notice that a space zombie has nothing to do with anything in the film.

There was the space zombie, the space snake that the Geologist decides is a smart idea to stroke because why not, there's the Engineers, there's the squid baby, there's the proto-Alien ...

It came to a point where I had no idea what was going on because there are like five different aliens all competing to kill the cast for reasons unknown.

I still don't get why the space zombie confuses people, he fell face first into the pool of alien mutant bacteria whatever after his helmet melted off. Same with the space-snake, they kept showing shots of worms in the chamber next to the pots that were spewing out the mutate-y stuff, I put two and two together and that shit is a mutant worm.

I actually didn't mind all that space-mutagen stuff, cause it gave a variety of horrible creatures while making some sense because of the bacteria stuff affecting different things. A movie just about horrible space viruses has potential. What I didn't like was the need to supplement all that with a traditional movie monster (the pissed Engineer) that stalks the cast around like a cheesy slasher villain.

@GunslingerPanda It isn't that people hate the movie because it fails to wrap everything up but these are points the writers/director/etc went out of their way to point out then don't give a satisfactory explanation on why they pointed something out let alone explain it. It is a risky way to tell a story because it can easily backfire because using "...isn't that a mystery" isn't good storytelling when they use it as a conclusion instead of a introduction.

And often times when a movie raises issues and fails to address them it isn't a failure of the audience "getting it" but instead it is a failure on the production side "getting it".

@MarkWahlberg: Dude, you are completely right, that movie was bad. My overall issue with it was that everyone seemed too stupid to handle actually getting to the planet in the first place, that and the fact that once you walk about 10 feet away from someone they can't hear you screaming. Whole movie turned into boring horror tropes.

Actually it was really good. If people want to hate on the movie because it doesn't wrap everything up, why the fuck are you going to see a movie written by Damon Lindelof?

It was two hours of fun. But the writing was atrociously bad sometimes, I agree. And the fact that they obviously had some really cool ideas makes the whole thing extra sad.

@wmaustin55 said:

@DeeGeeThis too! Anyone know why the hell he just went aggro?

whole planet is an experiment in germ warfare. could be many different types or forms of attack.

be it incubation of aliens or aggro. its left largely to the imagination.

@MooseyMcMan: I didn't get that impression. They could have returned to Earth if they so wished, so as far as the scope of the movie goes, it seems pretty resolved. That being that they survived and made it through the whole ordeal.

Why did he become a fucking space zombie? That's my biggest problem with this movie. You can't just chuck that in there and hope nobody is going to notice that a space zombie has nothing to do with anything in the film.

There was the space zombie, the space snake that the Geologist decides is a smart idea to stroke because why not, there's the Engineers, there's the squid baby, there's the proto-Alien ...

It came to a point where I had no idea what was going on because there are like five different aliens all competing to kill the cast for reasons unknown.

I really liked the movie, but your rant made me laugh. Good job. The only thing I was confused about was what were David's motivations? Still unclear on that and it's bothering me

@mandude: No, I mean that it ends with Shaw and David flying off to into space. I don't really care about the "why did they create us" question, I care about the two surviving characters and the fact that there is no resolution as to what happens to them. The ending felt very abrupt to me, and very much like a "find out what happens next time" kind of thing, and I didn't like that.

I completely agree with the rant but still found the movie enjoyable at least just for visuals. All in all, it doesn't actually take away from/ruin the awesomeness of the Alien franchise so at least I can give it that.

I adored the movie and can't wait to see it again. I've been devouring all the theories that people have been putting forward since seeing the film. Loved the aesthetic, the mood. Just everything really. I saw it a couple of weeks ago (it came out early in the UK) and came out thinking 'this is going to be huge' and have been constantly baffled that so many people apparently hated it since. Sorry you didn't like it though! It's always crushing when you love a franchise and a new installment doesn't live up to it. Hello, Alien Resurrection.

Mike Fassbender is bad ass. I would have watched a movie of him playing basketball on a bicycle for 2 hours.