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Originally Posted by realdealblues
I always watch movies as "stand alone films" so that they get a fair opinion. The story itself was fine but like most movies today, I was left not caring about most of the characters. Most of them are "fodder" and other ones are either too stupid or mean spirited enough that you want to see them get killed anyway.
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I have to reluctantly agree that supporting characters aren't strong in the film, an attribute which I blame the script writer on. Really memorable supporting characters come from strong scripts (
Alien, Aliens, Predator, From Dusk Till Dawn, etc.) so Lindelof did let everyone down there. That being said, the main characters were all strong - Shaw, David, Vickers, Holloway, Janek, even old man Weyland was depicted and written well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by realdealblues
I also didn't really like how a grey octopus looking creature mixes with a body builder looking pale man to come out as a black "Alien" style creature. I didn't really care for the look of the Engineers themselves. Why body builders with 6 pack abs?...lol. They looked like comic book superheroes or supervillians. I did like their exo-suit, but their actual design I thought was cheesy.
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The moon, LV-223, was a base for the Engineers' experiments. The pyramid housed some of their successful and some not-so-successful ones (like the Hammerpede). Needless to say, the continuous experimentation and the dumping ground of the sub-planet (or moon) had some very curious stuff contained in the cargo area of the underground ship. Goo in the containers looked similar but behaved differently.
I suspect Holloway was mutating into something else (maybe even into an Engineer) after getting infected by David. And what kind of DNA strands did he pass into the sterile Shaw which resulted in her getting pregnant and giving birth to that monstrosity within 24 hours? Which means there exists a connection between the early xenomorphs and the Engineers, probably to be shown in the sequel. That could also explain the "altar"-ish scene of the xenomorph inside the pyramid's inner chamber (the one with the face).
The look of the Engineers was clear - they were shown to be a superior race than man, a "super-man" or super being of sorts, hence the close resemblance to humans, yet the super-sized, beefy, body structure. I wonder if the title
Prometheus refers to them now, instead of the humans - the ones who stole the "fire from the gods" (ability to give life) and now, pursued to be prosecuted/punished by "the gods", are forced to take their "gift" away. The early script (and story) had this angle covered pretty strongly, but after it got leaked to the press they were hard-pressed to make changes to it which made all the connections seem a lot more subtle. I personally loved the original script (which you can check here -
http://www.horror.com/forum/showpost...5&postcount=56)
Quote:
Originally Posted by realdealblues
The whole philosophical ideals of the film were fine. The effects with the spaceship were great and virtual map of the cave was neat.
But it didn't really offer me anything new. After a half hour I knew the girl and the android would survive. I knew the old man would be on the ship after they played his hologram. I knew the engineers wouldn't be friendly. I knew the engineer wasn't dead after the spaceship crashes. I knew the octopus looking thing was still in the lifeboat. I was never really left "wondering" what was going to happen. It was really pretty straight forward.
Like I said, it's not a bad movie. But I also don't think it was anything I hadn't seen before.
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Admit it, how many films have we seen till now which have the main character(s) killed off before the end? Only
Alien hints at this, with Dallas taking center stage (and Tom Skeritt getting first billing and being more recognisable than Sigourney Weaver back then) and getting killed mid-way through the film. It's pretty easy to deduce who are the main characters and who might survive till the end (although David isn't exactly a survivor, seeing as he's only a decapitated head controlling a spaceship by the end of the film).
David was reporting back regularly to someone, and that someone wasn't Vickers. Safe to assume Weyland was in the equation, somewhere. No surprises there.
The surviving Engineer didn't attack the crew rightaway. What David said to it made him behave the way he did. What did David say? Still a matter of speculation, but presses report that he said (on behalf of Weyland) "This man here (Weyland) believes you can give him the blessing of life immortal" which instantly made two things clear to the Engineer - 1) David wasn't human, or he would have asked for immortal life for himself, and 2) Humans had finally made it to their star-mapped destination but not to meet their creators the Engineers, but in a selfish quest for eternal life. That could be an explanation for it's hostility, and it's renewed conviction to destroy life on Earth.
The alien spaceship was a pretty sturdy and strong craft. Even after Prometheus collides head-on into it and crumbles into a gigantic explosion, we see the alien spaceship suffer minimal/no damage as it nose-dives towards the surface. And the Engineer was pretty well-strapped into his control chair/pod when the spaceship started lifting, so it's survival (even when one side of it's face had suffered damage) was a given.
Obviously the alien squid was inside the surgical chamber. It was taken out of Shaw (and possibly stored in a container or something) and it grew into large proportions, just like the original Alien xenomorph. My grudge with this is something else - upon detecting an alien being which came from Shaw's abdomen, the computers of the ship should have quarantined it immediately. Either this facility was not present in that surgical pod, or the computers failed to recognise it as an alien being, seeing as how it came out from a human's body. But still, it was a glaring flaw in the continuity, since we are led to believe that the technology of that time was very, very ahead, almost on par with
Alien's timeline.
The film is pretty strong technically and direction-wise. Where it lacked was a slightly more refined script and treatment of the minor details. But that can be attributed to hasty changes made (by Damon Lindelof) to the initial script written by Jon Spaihts which got leaked, and which ended in this treatment which we see as this final product. Still, the deleted scenes (of over 45 minutes) which will come packed into the DVD/BD release of the film should add a bit more explanation. And Scott himself has promised "answers, and a better, taut, tight treatment" for
Prometheus 2: Paradise, so let's look forward to that as well.
Check out this thread -
http://www.horror.com/forum/showthread.php?t=61116