Time for a new Prometheus thread...

[IAMTHESYSTEM]

As we erewhile, astounded and amaz'd,
No wonder, fall'n such a pernicious highth. Paradise Lost; Milton.

Well I hope it will be a more coherent than the first Prometheus that seemed very confusing to me. Some have pointed out that Prometheus is too subtle for todays audiences and it's really about the old 'War in Heaven' trope with the Engineers in a civil War desperately trying to build the perfect weapon. However they realize that that their creations, Humans/Aliens will eventually saplant them in the future and decide their creations are now a danger to be exterminated. Okay, not the most lovable bunch of 8 foot, psycho white boys ever but you can see what people are getting at. Our creators/Engineers/ God etc are really imperfect so their creations will be flawed too.

Trouble is we've really seen the Alien as a biological creature. It was a parasite in Alien, an Ant like Army in Aliens, a hunting dog in Alien 3 and used as a Biological weapon in Alien 4: Resurrection. Biology is its heart yet Ridley Scott decides to re write it's origins turning the Alien into something created by a Master Race of Engineers, a biological construct. It just doesn't seem to wash with me. I guess Ridley wanted a clean break from the Alien series but even so it just seems weird to change the theme from Biology to the search for God or some sort of a creator. It's got too much bullshit creationism around it and that's why for me personally Prometheus was not so much Paradise lost as never even found to begin with.

[TordelBack]

Grandiose over-arching themes (and beautiful visuals) are no use when the story, characters and dialogue are nonsensical inconsistent drivel. Can't blame 'modern audiences' for that.

[Richmond Clements]

Some have pointed out that Prometheus is too subtle for todays audiences

More that is was appallingly written with characters that did not act in a consistent manner from scene to scene and a non-sensical script that couldn't decide what it was.

[Richmond Clements]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BWnTW4rL0U

[JPMaybe]

Well I hope it will be a more coherent than the first Prometheus that seemed very confusing to me. Some have pointed out that Prometheus is too subtle for todays audiences and it's really about the old 'War in Heaven' trope with the Engineers in a civil War desperately trying to build the perfect weapon. However they realize that that their creations, Humans/Aliens will eventually saplant them in the future and decide their creations are now a danger to be exterminated. Okay, not the most lovable bunch of 8 foot, psycho white boys ever but you can see what people are getting at. Our creators/Engineers/ God etc are really imperfect so their creations will be flawed too.

I guess I didn't think that was subtle at all; humans being created by god-metaphor-aliens is such old hat at this point, having been covered by so many Fortean Times reading hacks, that you'd have to put a really original spin on it for me to care. Prometheus's pretensions of profundity, coupled with its utterly cretinous treatment of basic concepts of evolution and biology, as well as the problems TordelBack mentioned above, utterly killed it for me.

It does make me think that Ridley Scott, like George Lucas, doesn't understand why his greatest creation is so good.

[Eric Plumrose]

PROMETHEARSE should (and could!) have been a lot of fun.

Instead, it's a shitty piece of stupid.

[ZenArcade]

The plot made Eric Von Danikein's works look like plausible exercises in reality. The writing as has been pointed out earlier in the thread is back of a fag packet standard. Instead of engendering a sense of mystery, the film was a badly paced plod through an unrealistic and unsympathetic morass. Z

[Keef Monkey]

Well, I liked it, and can say with all honesty that there wasn't anything in the film that left me scratching my head or confused over what had gone on, so it seems odd when the criticism I keep seeing is that it made no sense.

But anyway, I'll be watching this, should at the very least be interesting.

[TordelBack]

Well, I liked it, and can say with all honesty that there wasn't anything in the film that left me scratching my head or confused over what had gone on, so it seems odd when the criticism I keep seeing is that it made no sense.

Help me out then!

What the hell was David (or by extension  Weyland in instructing him) up to? Feeding alien marmite to Holloway, in the hope of what, exactly, then for some reason saving Shaw; saying something profoundly stupid to the Engineers (and what was it?).
What were the holograms about (and how did David know about them?)? The Engineers were running from something, but what? The goo? Something the goo created?
Why were the elite scientific explorers, and in particular the two geologists, such oblivious flip-flopping morons, and why didn't Captain Elba even try to help those two lost goons when he had a map in front of him? And how does he eventually work out the plot on his own when he clearly wasn't paying any kind of attention?
What did the goo actually do, and why did it have totally different effects on everyone and everything? Why don't the sensor spheres detect the worm-things until the goo mutates them? Does the xenomorph life cycle really depend on a goo-infected male having sex with an uninfected female?
Why did nobody notice that Shaw had cut herself open, or ask why? And how is she running about minutes after stapling herself shut?
When did the various human artists, from wildly different time periods, meet the Engineers, and why did the Engineers go to the bother of telling them exactly where their weapons testing ground was if the plan was to kill them in the end? They must have made numerous visits to Earth since whatever vastly ancient time they seeded the place, and known what leaving directions would lead to. Alternatively, they may have encoded this info in our DNA, which is "the same" as their DNA (wtf?), in which case why don't all the characters know this stuff? And how does this work for all the other terrestrial lifeforms, never mind other hominid species, that we share DNA with?
Why did Weyland pretend he was dead? Why did no-one seem to care?
Why is Charlize Theron in this film?

None of this confused you?

[Goaty]

[Pyroxian]

More importantly - why didn't she just run left (or right) when being chased by the giant Space Wheel of Doom (tm)

[Colin YNWA]

More importantly - why didn't she just run left (or right) when being chased by the giant Space Wheel of Doom (tm)

Yeah for all the other nonsense that Tordelback rightly mentions this is the one that really got me. I mean really just run to the bloody side will ya.

[Tiplodocus]

I actually don't mind that one. Even clever people do stupid things and miss obvious solutions in stressful situations.

The rest of it? Daft as a bag of frogs.

[TordelBack]

Heh, that too, but that's just one of the stupid sort of things movie characters do, like taking off their space-helmets as soon as there's a hint of oxygen, so I find it hard to pick on that one.  EDIT: Tips beat me to it.

What actually annoys me most about Prometheus is that it's such a magnificently pretty package that it's been stuck in my head ever since I saw it - despite the characters being woefully inconsistent scriptfodder, I remember their names (rather than those of their actors - with the exception of Theron, who I merely think of as Bitch, and Elba, who may possibly only have been called Captain for all I can dredge up about his name), and the details of the garbled biology, for all that it makes no kind of sense (the 'identical DNA' bit being the single worst offender). 

I want to like it and its lovely-looking characters and beautifully-lit environments, I want to understand it, but I can't because it's not a series of enigmatic motivations and subtle mysteries, it's just a load of makeuppy cobbled-together nonsense. 

It's the Piltdown Man of movies.

And yet... a sequel, you say?

[Richmond Clements]

but that's just one of the stupid sort of things movie characters do, like taking off their space-helmets as soon as there's a hint of oxygen, so I find it hard to pick on that one.

I saw it in the cinema, and everyone on the cinema actually groaned out loud at this bit - I have never experienced this level of disgust with a movie in the cinema before.