ALIEN / PROMETHEUS / COVENANT / ROMULUS - SPOILERS INBOUND!!

Very disappointed with Prometheus. Looked amazing & Fassbender was excellent as David. But everything else didn't really cut it. Okay, so the thing in the chair from Alien is a big blue humanoid dude. That's kind of disappointing enough in itself. But apart from that pivotal question being answered all this movie really delivered ........ is a shit load of more questions. That's what happens when you have Damon 'Lost' Lindelof as your writing partner!! Lost turned out to be total gob shite & sadly Prometheus hasn't faired much better after Lindelof's meddling.

Empire review pretty much sums it up for me;

http://www.empireonl....asp?FID=137119

........ and Hitler doesn't like it either;

Yeah its a faithful review (i saw the original one 2 days ago...). & i agree with the evil man :-)

  On 6/8/2012 at 10:03 AM, Dogboy73 said:

Very disappointed with Prometheus. Looked amazing & Fassbender was excellent as David. But everything else didn't really cut it. Okay, so the thing in the chair from Alien is a big blue humanoid dude. That's kind of disappointing enough in itself. But apart from that pivotal question being answered all this movie really delivered ........ is a shit load of more questions. That's what happens when you have Damon 'Lost' Lindelof as your writing partner!! Lost turned out to be total gob shite & sadly Prometheus hasn't faired much better after Lindelof's meddling.

 

Empire review pretty much sums it up for me;

http://www.empireonl....asp?FID=137119

 

........ and Hitler doesn't like it either;

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lol.

lol.

lol.

Poopmetheus.

Fuck this D.Lindork bloke.

He seems to be a right cunt.

And yes that Empire review is spot on./

uuuh, guys, i just walked out of the theatre. What to say? um..... hmm. let me think about this.... Did anyone else cringe hard at the opening scene with the dodgy cgi buff guy? what the fucking fuck was thaT? THATS THE SPACE JOCKEY? jesus christ ridley.

so basically Ridley Scott used Damon Lindelfag, a guy who has a gigantic ego to be a bullet proof vest for a clear scifi misfire of epic proportions.

Since when does a huge director like Ridley parade his fucking screenwriter around doing press junkets? Ill tell you when, when you are clearly not feeling confident about a creation under your name. Remember that part in the wire where Carcetti theorizes 'splitting the black vote'? Attach someone elses name to Prometheus, moreso than you did with any previous movie you made, so you can split the inevitable hate. between two people.

and no my statement at the beginning is not a spoiler, because you see the best 'money shot' of space jockey in the trailer when it doesnt show very much of him. You know the rule in movies of 'show not tell' well what happened to the rule of 'don't show very much, just a glimpse' goddam they ruined the mystery of the space jockey equally if not more hardcore than Annakin fagwalker in Phantom, fuuuuck

and i hate to say it but the leaked spoiler synopsis that ended up actually being either fake or an early revision (i was blatantly wrong) was FAR more interesting than what ended up in the final script. my god

I'm going to see this tomorrow, because who am I kidding?, and while I haven't read any real reviews/spoilers posted yet in this thread, I am now adjusting my expectations to: slightly more competent than AvP.

Do I need to adjust downward further? Getting pretty close to the filmic nadir, there.

  On 6/8/2012 at 10:03 AM, Dogboy73 said:

Empire review pretty much sums it up for me;

http://www.empireonl....asp?FID=137119

your agreement with the review isn't my target here, but the review itself. so don't take it personal when i say the reviewer was full of shit. snarky 'it's not alien....it's not what i loved. it's different. it's not alien.' shit he pulls and begins flooding the paragraphs with is sad and pathetic. he sounds like an 11 year old boy. a dumb childish one.

it's not alien by any stretch of the imagination. i can see now why Scott and everyone he had his hooks in went out of their way to make it clear to the millions of fans of the original Alien and/or its sequels that it is not the same movie and don't go in expecting it. you'll be disappointed, as this reviewer obviously was. the film had plenty of flaws (some of which he points out and i agree with) but at the end of the day, the review just came across as whiny and childish, and that's sad. boo that review/reviewer/points off to that site for publishing it.

  On 6/9/2012 at 1:22 AM, baph said:

Do I need to adjust downward further? Getting pretty close to the filmic nadir, there.

We're in trashbear territory? Should I just watch that movie with that blank and breathy human canvas from Twilight instead?

Seriously, my girlfriend is going to make me watch one of these.

  On 6/9/2012 at 1:22 AM, baph said:

I'm going to see this tomorrow, because who am I kidding?, and while I haven't read any real reviews/spoilers posted yet in this thread, I am now adjusting my expectations to: slightly more competent than AvP.

 

Do I need to adjust downward further? Getting pretty close to the filmic nadir, there.

dude, it's not bad. it's not Alien. not in the least. tone and characters and story are just entirely different....comparing the two isn't relevant. AvP was a monster beat-em-up, with a thrown together story to set up the fighting, we all know that. Prometheus is much more about revelations and origins and intellectual/psychological things that happens to be drenched in blood and monsters. emotions are few and far between. there are flaws but it's not bad. just go in as open-minded as possible.

it's bad, I wish it was never made.

The more I read and think about Prometheus, the more the script sucks. Lindelof is a talentless hack and Scott is dumb for going with it. If an extended cut of the movie isn't going to sort out some of the disjointedness, weak characters and plotholes then it must be the numerous re-writes that made it a mess. At some stage in the script development it had the Space Jockey literally being Jesus Christ and him being crucified is why they want to destroy Earth. I mean if even such a dumb idea was even seriously entertained then what the fuck.

just watched it and, wow, i have a lot to say.

god bless you all. i'm not going to think about this another second for the rest of the week. or at least the times it does emerge in my mind will be more like flutters of the time i once did consider visiting the movie theater. mere flutters. haha.

  On 6/9/2012 at 1:40 AM, auxien said:

dude, it's not bad. it's not Alien. not in the least.

You got that right! Not in the same league by a long shot!

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Tone and characters and story are just entirely different...comparing the two isn't relevant.

Agreed. Alien was a really good film, Prometheus isn't.

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Prometheus is much more about revelations and origins and intellectual/psychological things that happens to be drenched in blood and monsters. emotions are few and far between. there are flaws but it's not bad. just go in as open-minded as possible.

It's much more about ..... what the hell is it about!? It's pure Lindelof Lost style cock teasing! Questions answered with questions & more questions. Nothing makes much sense. You have to interpret the story however you see fit. So you leave the cinema totally perplexed & wondering what the hell it was all about. There is zero satisfaction from this film beyond the breathtaking visuals. Characters are dull, weak & then dead. The story is all over the place & it can't make it's mind up if it wants to be an Alien prequel or a complete new movie. In the end it's neither. It's a friggin mess of epic proportions. Most disappointed with a film I think I've ever been! It's like Phantom Menace/Lucas syndrome all over again. Except this is worse because this is Ridley Scott with his third film in a genre he really did define with Alien & Blade Runner.

lol at everyone

biking in to say that i saw it.

it has it's flaws, the most glaring of which is that character development is pretty poor. The film could've done with being 45mins-1hour longer, so that the characters could've been fleshed out a bit more.

the film didn't tell us anything more than we Alien fans had already theorised / been told anyway, with pertinence to the Alien mythology. But then, the film isn't supposed to be about Alien anyway, according to Ridley Scott.

  On 6/9/2012 at 10:42 AM, Dogboy73 said:

  On 6/9/2012 at 1:40 AM, auxien said:

dude, it's not bad. it's not Alien. not in the least.

You got that right! Not in the same league by a long shot!

It's not trying to be Alien though. It's a sci-fi flick set in the same universe. I doubt it will be as important 30 years from now as Alien still is, but I'm honestly not sure there's ANY movie released these days that will have the impact of something released before the 90's. when there was an explosion of films pouring out of Hollywood. but that's a whole other discussion.

  On 6/9/2012 at 10:42 AM, Dogboy73 said:

 

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Prometheus is much more about revelations and origins and intellectual/psychological things that happens to be drenched in blood and monsters. emotions are few and far between. there are flaws but it's not bad. just go in as open-minded as possible.

It's much more about ..... what the hell is it about!? It's pure Lindelof Lost style cock teasing! Questions answered with questions & more questions. Nothing makes much sense. You have to interpret the story however you see fit. So you leave the cinema totally perplexed & wondering what the hell it was all about. There is zero satisfaction from this film beyond the breathtaking visuals. Characters are dull, weak & then dead. The story is all over the place & it can't make it's mind up if it wants to be an Alien prequel or a complete new movie. In the end it's neither. It's a friggin mess of epic proportions. Most disappointed with a film I think I've ever been! It's like Phantom Menace/Lucas syndrome all over again. Except this is worse because this is Ridley Scott with his third film in a genre he really did define with Alien & Blade Runner.

there's definitely some Lindelof cock-teasing going on. i enjoyed about 1/4 of Lost, i personally think a lot of it was shit television. there's a LOT of stuff that makes sense. there's a LOT of story that is shown in this movie. there's also a lot that wasn't revealed, which is fine by me. the (what we now know is an) Engineer in Alien was never explained, never touched on in all the sequels. huge bit of information that is left unanswered. how the hell was there a face-hugger that impregnated an animal AND Ripley in the events before Alien 3? who knows, it's one of the many mysteries left unanswered, and is most likely unanswerable. they're just horror/sci-fi flicks man...they're enjoyable, and whatever needs to happen to keep the story going happens. whatever the director or writer wants to happen will happen. Prometheus is just a fun decently done movie that is a vehicle for the story, unfortunately. the characters fell to the wayside, and there's nothing we can do. it's done, the movie is still good despite it, in my opinion.

i think a lot of what the reviewer (and you, it seems) has problems with are preconceived notions. it doesn't have to be an Alien prequel or an entirely new movie; it can be both. i think it succeeded in that regard. there's an entirely new feel and storyline and atmosphere, and it overlaps with the Alien universe. and in my opinion it works.

sucks you didn't like it, but i don't work for Fox or Scott, so i don't really care. that 'review' was shit though. that's my point. reviewer went in biased and walked out unhappy. going into a movie like that with preconceived notions will guarantee disappointment. unfortunately, the film was flawed despite my going in with an open mind, but that's okay. nothing's perfect, i still enjoyed a lot of the movie.

  On 6/9/2012 at 8:41 AM, Hoodie said:

just watched it and, wow, i have a lot to say.

 

 

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first off, the pacing was atrocious. we barely get any exposition with the characters before people start dying off. way to cheapen the impact of those deaths, you know?

 

the characterization was also very, very poorly done. we're supposed to empathize with shaw and her boyfriend, but i found myself frustrated with their cocky, retarded attitudes. first, whatever-his-name-is (you can see how well the characters stuck with me) takes off his helmet in an area with potential biological contaminants. i admit, everyone else follows suit, so this is more poor writing than the character being frustratingly stupid. this brings me to another point: why is it that 90s tv has scully and mulder following contamination protocols better than supposedly high science fiction written and directed by INDUSTRY VETERANS? you don't have to respond--i know the answer. these writers aren't as good as they think they are.

 

anyway, back to my point about shitty characterization: let's keep using holloway as an example. what are the ways that his character is revealed to us in the film? the major points that stand out in my mind are the helmet removal, trashing david for just being a robot, and refusing to tell shaw that he saw a fucking worm in his eye (this is unbelievably stupid, no one would be like "welp, off to work" after seeing that). at no point is this character sympathetic, outside of his romance with shaw. so when he bursts into a ball of flames, i can't help but feel... nothing at all.

 

this is a systematic flaw in the film. the only characters i liked were david and the captain. vickers was ok too (at least she follows contamination protocols, goddamnit).

 

but besides the atrocious characterization, the thing that really stood out in this film for me was the plot holes (better known as "plot stupidity" in this film). they're numerous and exciting.

 

1. what's with the mission briefing in the beginning of the film? did these people really sign up for a two year trip into space without knowing what they were doing? i understand that the ship's crew would be kept in the dark, but the geologist and other scientist bro? what scientist is going to go on a two year mission to some random planet for reasons unknown? i know that this was an excuse for exposition, but why couldn't they have set the exposition prior to the mission? like shaw and holloway proposing the mission to weyland or something. would've made more sense, imo.

 

2. why did the geologist and other scientist guy stay behind in the ruins when they said they were spooked and wanted to go back to the ship? this wasn't very clear to me. also, if they were so afraid of alien lifeforms, why did they try to play with the proto-facehugger?

 

3. so, that dust storm. why couldn't the ship see a dust storm of that size while they were landing? moreover, why did the scientists refuse to leave the alien ruins? tomorrow is another day. rather than risk being stranded overnight in some inhospitable environment that possibly has alien lifeforms on it or, on the other hand, risk being caught in the storm by leaving at the last possible minute, the scientists simply could've said, "yep, will do, vickers," and packed up with time to spare. the alien ruins have been undisturbed for at least 2,000 years. they weren't going anywhere (well, technically they were).

 

4. why does david expose holloway to the contagion? listen, the most inefficient way to examine a substance is to stick it in a human being and see what happens. you're telling me an android, which most likely prides itself on being efficient and perfect, would want to do something like that? why not examine that stuff under a microscope and run some high tech chemical modeling programs in his high tech brain that can simulate what would happen when human tissue is exposed to it? on the other hand, it could be that david just hated holloway and thought he was a dick (who knows what david saw in his dreams). in that case, it's not a plot hole, just poor writing that doesn't make david's motivation clear.

 

5. shaw gets pregnant with a proto-facehugger. alright, that's plausible. i have a couple of nitpicks with the scene where the doctor chicks are trying to put her into stasis. they check to see if shaw is unconscious by pinching her cheek. this does not mesh with the high tech nature of prometheus. they have a machine that can see people's dreams. it can literally read their minds--and they don't have unconscious, alien-bearing shaw hooked up to some kind of machine to monitor her vital signs (which would reveal whether or not she is unconscious)? this makes no sense. some more problems come after this. shaw knocks the two doctors out and runs through the halls of prometheus and into vicker's medbay. why is vicker's room not locked? why is no one running after shaw? it takes shaw a very long time to successfully "abort" her alien baby. i'm surprised that no one found her by that time.

 

6. why is everyone so nonchalent around shaw when, moments earlier, she had an alien abortion? why does it seem like vickers has no idea that there's an alien-baby-thing in her med bay? also, CONTAMINATION PROTOCOLS. simply aborting the alien fetus/baby/thing does not ensure that shaw no longer has biological contaminants in her body. it seems like at some point the crew members just stopped giving a fuck about being exposed to infectious alien mutagens.

 

7. why is it that the captain doesn't put prometheus on autopilot when driving it into the alien's ship, so he can save himself and his crew? he says they have "one shot" and need to navigate carefully, but i'm missing the part where it's difficult to crash a space ship into another giant space ship. they just had to damage it sufficiently so that it couldn't take off and reach earth. that's actually pretty easy to do--you don't have to obliterate the entire thing. anyway, a sufficiently advanced on-board computer could've done it easily. i mean, it did pilot prometheus for two years by itself.

 

8. how does big alien guy survive and how does he immediately know where to find shaw? actually, scratch that--why is he so hell-bent on killing her? i guess this isn't a plot hole but more like a thematic question (why do the creators want to destroy the creation?), but it boggles my mind that the first thing this guy thinks of after his ship explodes is that he must find and kill shaw. his violence towards humans is not a lapse in logic or plot, in my opinion. i actually liked that concept. maybe he was disgusted by shaw's screeching and how the guards used violence and hit her. they may have seemed primitive and annoying to him. think about it: what if you woke up from a two-thousand year stasis to have tiny monkeys screaming and yelling at you, hitting each other? ok, you might not hurt them, but imagine that you were a space trucker with a deadline to make and planets to seed. you'd probably just swat them away. this concept, however, is entirely ruined by the alien's subsequent mission to annihilate shaw. why is she so special? why does he just have to kill her?

 

there are probably a couple of more, but it's late and i'm tired. these are just some immediate thoughts that i've had after watching the film, so pardon me if they're a bit unorganized and nonsensical. one more thing though: shaw's attitude toward david during the last scene upsets me. he asks her why it would matter why the creators want to destroy their creation and she tells him that he couldn't possibly understand because he isn't human. i hope david piloted her stupid ass into a star after that quip. such arrogance, even after seeing that humans aren't some special gift from god but rather primordial slop thrown onto the earth and made to grow.

 

also, i want to note that the plot holes in alien and aliens didn't bother me very much. you know why? because there were so few and they were so inconsequential that i could suspend disbelief. couldn't do that with this film.

 

i am now prematurely sickened by the blade runner sequel.

 

pacing was a little jumpy. that's exactly the kind of mistake Scott shouldn't make. it wasn't terrible, but i noticed it.

characterization was the biggest problem with this film. everyone knows it (all the positive and negative reviews i've read all call it out) so i don't know what the hell Scott was thinking in not recognizing it and fixing it. the fact that it made it to the final cut like this makes me think it may have been an editing room concession for the sake of time...but Scott should've known better. if it was writing though, it wouldn't surprise me. Lindeloff doesn't usually strike me as the best writer, particularly with making me care about his characters.

1. the mission briefing thing is sorta just part of the Alien franchise...not that it makes more sense because of that, but anyone familiar with the other films kind of expects those 'we're just doing this for the money/because it's our job' characters. it's kind of commentary on the future of exploration i think, but it's most likely rooted in just bad writing throughout the Alien universe.

2. they got lost. who knows why they tried playing with the cobra-alien. stupidity that was rampant among all these 'scientists' i'd say.

3. the only thing i can say to this is 'dude, it's a movie.' ...you kind of have to expect that sort of shit. it's a modern Hollywood film.

4. the experimentation and conclusion to get a crew member to ingest the goo was most likely done by David off-screen. which is dumb, because if so it could've been alluded to in a literally 10 second shot. i'm of the camp that doesn't think David has true emotions. he does ask Holloway specifically 'what would you do to find the answers' or whatever, to which Holloway says 'anything' and that was the sign-off that David seemed to need. in the other Alien films the androids are said to have a program built in that does not allow them to harm or by means of secondary actions allow to be harmed any human being....so either David was pre-that command, or he had some rudimentary form of it and that's why he needed 'permission' from Holloway for the likely-deadly infection.

5. yeah, that part is all a bit silly. the shit is starting to hit the fan right around that time, but someone should've noticed something and been after Shaw. maybe David was misdirecting them all off-screen in order to allow Cuddles to be born in the interim, not thinking Shaw could self-abort the creature.

6. i don't think they knew about the alien abortion. Vickers never went back to her quarters, i'm guessing. otherwise she definitely would've noticed the blood and huge growing alien squid. i think since they were obviously all idiots about everything from the beginning, we're supposed to suspend our disbelief about them caring about protocol except when it matters to the film-makers (e.g.; when Vickers torches that pussy-ass geologist).

7. see my response to #3.

8. like you said i think that's more a thematic question than a plot hole. the rage the Engineer expresses towards humans after David first speaks to him implies to me that David may have really said some bad shit to the Engineer, but that's just my personal idea. how he found her though? i have a hypothesis that David told him. or maybe the Engineer could sense life-forms like that? who knows.

i liked the movie, despite the flaws. wish Scott had done some things differently, but what can ya do? i'll enjoy watching it again, for sure.

i'm not reading any of this shit cause i'm gonna see it tonight

  On 6/8/2012 at 10:03 AM, Dogboy73 said:

Very disappointed with Prometheus. Looked amazing & Fassbender was excellent as David. But everything else didn't really cut it. Okay, so the thing in the chair from Alien is a big blue humanoid dude. That's kind of disappointing enough in itself. But apart from that pivotal question being answered all this movie really delivered ........ is a shit load of more questions. That's what happens when you have Damon 'Lost' Lindelof as your writing partner!! Lost turned out to be total gob shite & sadly Prometheus hasn't faired much better after Lindelof's meddling.

 

Empire review pretty much sums it up for me;

http://www.empireonl....asp?FID=137119

 

........ and Hitler doesn't like it either;

That hitler vid was pretty spot on.

Characters didn't make any sense. The religious stuff was nonsense. It felt like a rough cut.

The only things I have to add are that some of it looked super "video-y" and they should have cut the whole Weyland sub-plot entirely. Btw, wtf. Guy Pierce? Come on. That makeup was atrocious. The story was way too over complicated.

Hoodie nailed so many of the fatal flaws in this movie, good job :). Yeah the technology was out of control in this movie, a machine that can see people's dreams shouldn't exist at least in my mind in a pre Space Truckers space movie. It was actually beyond stupid.

also what happened to characters having realistic reactions to seeing an alien species or structure for the first time in human history?

they acted super fucking laid back for having experienced such a thing. Especially the 2 scientists who should have been ecstatic.

and hoodie im with you on being sickened by a bladerunner prequel, in fact now i'm sickened by any prequel to any good movie. Why on earth does hollywood keep making prequels? They are all terrible, they really are. About the only prequel i can stomach is Temple of Doom. I dont count Batman Begins a prequel, thats a reboot and its ok.

prequels are inherently flawed and i think the people who think they are doing a service to the original movie have too big of egos to realize how devastating what they are doing is.

if i hear one more asshole say the reason the new star wars prequels look super clean and shiny is because 'the empire ran everything down' later on i will seriously punch that person in the throat.

edit: also did anyone find as i did that the mysterious varieties of 'goo' coming out of the vases at the first interaction with them, was far more 'alien' and creepy than any of the actual fully manifested alien creatures? Ridley promised 'biomechanoid' but we got clunky plush like white buff dudes and slimey alien Ressurection style proto xenomorphs varieties, the only biomechanoid aesthetic was in that goo, and then it was over really quickly

for the record, it's going to be a Blade Runner sequel, as stated by Ridley Scott himself in recent interviews