Quote :

"Why does David poison the dude in the first place, yet is all about helping Shaw at the end of the movie?"

I didn't take it as "poisoning" as much as it was "experimenting"...which is why he asked him how far he would go to learning the truth of it all before he gave him the drink

6/9/2012 11:48:32 AM

yea his directive was to find the engineers/something to help his 'father'. at the end, that directive was no longer necessary, ha.

6/9/2012 11:50:16 AM

This has probably been the best write-up about Prometheus I've seen.

http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1


Answered the few questions I was left with.

6/9/2012 12:18:33 PM

The only way that I can rationalize the ending is that the space jockey's ship and a hull breach and his space suit was damaged and thus he had to chase after Shaw to get some oxygen.

Also, no mention of the Virgin Mary yet? I don't know why they threw that in their that she was sterille, it just make the squid thing more difficult to understand.

[Edited on June 9, 2012 at 12:19 PM. Reason : ds]

6/9/2012 12:18:40 PM

one thing that really annoyed me was the biologist character. How stupid do you have be to get that close to that thing. You know there were living, sentient beings on the planet that are now all dead. You know that some life form is being picked up - which you're completely terrified of. Then when you finally see a living thing, with that location specific knowledge, and your knowledge that there are many dangerous animals on our own planet, you get right up next to it and completely ignore warnings from other people to stay away from it.


For page 8 since i think it's interesting and want to see what others think:
And that brings up the most interesting thing about this movie. Why did they create the humans.
All of the cave drawings led the humans to that specific planet. If we created something and wanted it to find us, we wouldn't point it to weapons plant that was so dangerous it needed to be on a completely different planet than our civilization. We would point to either our true home, or more likely a welcoming "station" of some sort.

That specific planet was a bio-weapons manufacturing plant. They're suggesting that the humans came from that planet. That then begs the question, imo, were humans the original or another bio-weapon of the engineers? Maybe earth itself was one of their manufacturing sites? Now that is an interesting plot device and idea to me. And it could even be construed as commentary of some sort.

Or maybe they weren't saying humans came from there, but that's where they wanted them to go if they ever had the ability. That still isn't very welcoming.

Granted, that may not be the case at all. but it's a question i left with.

6/9/2012 12:23:54 PM

The way that he is shown alone, dressed in cloth and robes, makes me think that he may be an outcast of some sort or is a rouge space jokey. Thus he creates the life out of some rebellious ambition.

6/9/2012 1:27:22 PM

Quote :

"The only way that I can rationalize the ending is that the space jockey's ship and a hull breach and his space suit was damaged and thus he had to chase after Shaw to get some oxygen. "

wasn't shaw walking around in there without a helmet when she was retrieving david's head after the jockey was killed?

6/9/2012 2:47:45 PM

^ Because the Engineer's ship had its own atmosphere.



Also, they said that the atmosphere of the moon was 3% CO2 and you could only last about 2 minutes in it, that's probably how the Space Jockey was able to make to to Shaw's ship.



Also, I reasoned that the Space Jockey didn't go immediately to a new ship and take off was because he didn't want Shaw to ram it with her life boat and in the process perhaps killing him.

[Edited on June 9, 2012 at 3:55 PM. Reason : edit.]

6/9/2012 3:53:10 PM

yes i know that, i was responding to the theory that the ship had a hull breach, which is why he was chasing shaw. obviously if the hull is breached, the self-contained atmosphere would also be breached

6/9/2012 3:55:52 PM

The Engineer's ship was pretty damn big. It probably locked down the breach from reaching the whole ship.

6/9/2012 3:59:19 PM

I wonder if Time Travel is going to come into play at some point in this story line. Because, it is difficult to rationalize how the engineers planted the first human life (what 40,000 years ago?) and have stood by this whole time while we develop the technology to have a space date with them, yet they haven't technologically progressed at all? The same black goo and the same space travel? It doesn't make any sense to me for their to not be some aspect of time travel going on.

[Edited on June 9, 2012 at 4:31 PM. Reason : iuh]

6/9/2012 4:09:43 PM

^^ you realize we're saying the essentially same thing right?



[Edited on June 9, 2012 at 4:12 PM. Reason : essentially, not exactly]

6/9/2012 4:09:49 PM

Quote :

"Because, it is difficult to rationalize how the engineers planted the first human life (what 40,000 years ago?) "

I think it was longer than that. The cave painting in Scotland was dated 35,000 years ago. Did I miss something in the movie that said we were only 40,000-ish years old?

6/9/2012 5:06:06 PM

^YEAH I was basing that off of the dating in the movie.

6/9/2012 5:15:15 PM

spoilers

The painting was 35k years old. Said nothing about human life. The sequence at the beginning could have been at any point in the past.

I love that the ship in this movie isnt the ship in alien (it doesnt fall correctly, and the planet is completely different.)

I love that the alien is a more primitive version.

I love that the creation of the alien species was an accident through human reproduction, and then again through implanting an egg in the super human alien. Makes it so much better than if the aliens were designed as a weapon by some ancient species.

It looks like to get to the alien in the first alien movie, some time needs to pass and the alien from this movie needs to get off planet and/or on one of the other ships and impregnate one of those super humans supposedly in sleep mode. This is how we get one of those ships onto the first movies planet.

Good movie, will see it again hopefully.

[Edited on June 9, 2012 at 5:19 PM. Reason : fsdfsd]

6/9/2012 5:18:38 PM

Quote :

"I love that the creation of the alien species was an accident through human reproduction, and then again through implanting an egg in the super human alien. Makes it so much better than if the aliens were designed as a weapon by some ancient species."

This has already been argued: There were mural paintings or xenomoprhs already on the set before the Alien that we see.

6/9/2012 5:39:56 PM

Yeh, the Xenos definitely weren't first created at the end of the movie. They seem to have been around for a good while, at least long enough that the Engineers feared them / Knew about them

6/9/2012 5:56:45 PM

Quote :

"I love that the creation of the alien species was an accident through human reproduction, and then again through implanting an egg in the super human alien. Makes it so much better than if the aliens were designed as a weapon by some ancient species."

what makes you believe that the aliens were not the actual weapon they were designing/delivering? How do we know that that the alien is not what they intended and everything required to get to that point, is simply what is required to get to that point. It's a lot easier to manage the ooze than what the ooze ultimately created in this film. You could basically just drop that in the atmosphere and let it do it's thing.

[Edited on June 9, 2012 at 6:16 PM. Reason : .]

6/9/2012 6:06:37 PM

I think it makes pretty good sense. After a queen is born it can produce eggs, facehuggers, etc (the normal reproductive cycle of the alien).

Without a queen something else has to generate the alien. The ooze could contain the genetic material of the alien and also has heavy mutagenic properties (the snake things and Fifield and Holloway (I believe he was on the track to become another Fifield)). Sexual contact somehow initiates the genetic material in the ooze and results in a life-form (Queen facehugger?). There is a question about Shaw being sterile...still thinking through that one.

6/9/2012 6:31:25 PM

More gaping holes than goatse.cx.

6/9/2012 10:36:44 PM

Quote :

"This has probably been the best write-up about Prometheus I've seen. http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1"

seriously - that's a great write-up. I want a 2nd viewing even more now having watched that. if you haven't read that, I really don't care to hear your opinion on the movie

6/9/2012 11:16:51 PM

makes religion and science fiction sound like less odd bedfellows than before

6/9/2012 11:45:17 PM

I think if they had made the plot more like that of At the Mountains of Madness it would have been better. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed the movie and I will see a sequel if they make it (I'm guessing Prometheuses will be the name).








********************Spoiler alert************************

I was hoping that the xenomorphs were going to be a slave race that rebeled against the space jockeys. I did think it was pretty cool that they came about because of human intervention.

Why did the containers break open with the storm?

Did the bugs indicate that the xenomorphs started as bugs that came into contact with the silver liquid?

6/9/2012 11:52:09 PM

Questions:

What did David say to the Space Jockey? How did he know his language without ever hearing him talk?

What caused the Jockey to react the way he did? I understand they want all humans dead, but what does killing a handful that crossed the universe to talk to you do? Did David possibly say something along the lines of 'we're here to kill you'?

What caused the re-enactments to happen (Jockeys running, sitting in control chair, etc)?

6/9/2012 11:58:58 PM

Quote :

"What caused the Jockey to react the way he did? I understand they want all humans dead, but what does killing a handful that crossed the universe to talk to you do? Did David possibly say something along the lines of 'we're here to kill you'? "

Someone posted earlier that David told him they were from Earth and that's when he started killing them. Since it never said what he told him I think it's a guess but it fits.

Quote :

" What caused the re-enactments to happen (Jockeys running, sitting in control chair, etc)?"

David understood their language and symbols and pressed the right buttons to start the re-enactments. This was also how he learned how to fly their ships.

6/10/2012 12:10:12 AM

that livejournal article was actually a good read


provides theories that answer some questions I didn't even think about

6/10/2012 12:25:13 AM

awesome movie! i try not to read too much into entertainment, shit ain't real...

6/10/2012 1:17:47 AM

Just left the theater. I would say that parts of this movie are comically bad. I found myself laughing or otherwise eye-rolling in certain scenes. (Seriously, you don't think to run perpendicular to a falling object when apparently you can just stop and roll 3 times to avoid it?) It repeatedly seemed to me that the characters in the story weren't paying a fucking BIT of attention to what was going on around them.

"Hey, we've got 2 guys from our expedition who are stranded on a hostile planet. Maybe we should constantly monitor them... Naaaaaaaaaaah, they're big boys. They'll be OK."

"Hey, we lost contact with our two guys. Let's go find them. Oh, and let's leave our weapons on the ship. Surely nothing bad happened, so we won't need them."

"Hey, Dr. Shaw, you just assaulted 2 med techs and then disappeared... but we're not going to ask what happened. It's all good."

6/10/2012 1:43:13 AM

The moon they land on in this film isn't the same one they land on in Alien, right?

Also, I guess Weyland-Yutani doesn't ever figure out about this moon, or something... or they don't tell the crew of the Nostromo, because that crew just landed on that planet with no weapons or anything and no knowledge of the engineers or the dangerous tech or anything.

When the space jockey got into his chair, I was all "Okay here we go, a setup for Alien, he's just gonna die like that and that's what the Nostromo is going to find."

but then they decide to throw that shit out the window... I don't even know.

[Edited on June 10, 2012 at 2:09 AM. Reason : ]

6/10/2012 2:08:45 AM

no, it's not the same moon


so i read that write up and get why the engineers might be pissed at humans, but don't get how the humans created the xenomorphs.....or at least, how they got back to the engineers and killed them like in the hologram

6/10/2012 9:02:50 AM

Quote :

"I wonder if Time Travel is going to come into play at some point in this story line. Because, it is difficult to rationalize how the engineers planted the first human life (what 40,000 years ago?) and have stood by this whole time while we develop the technology to have a space date with them, yet they haven't technologically progressed at all? The same black goo and the same space travel? It doesn't make any sense to me for their to not be some aspect of time travel going on."

There is evidence of progress, the ship we see at the very beginning is not the same as the ring shaped ones we see later

Quote :

"This has probably been the best write-up about Prometheus I've seen. http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1"

That is a good article, but i don't like his idea that the black goo has a psychic link to the moods/intentions of the people around it, in my mind the stuff that the dude drank at the beginning of the film is not even the same black goo we see later in the film

6/10/2012 11:11:19 AM

Thats the article I was talking about earlier, the one with space jockey jesus. I think its an interesting read, but it reads waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to far into the movie and is seeing shit that just wasnt there. If the movie was really going for that theme, they failed pretty badly about trying to explain that or even hint at it. I am all for having to think about a movie, and not having everything spelled out, but the movie has to give you some basis to read into it. this movie did not.

Quote :

"Just left the theater. I would say that parts of this movie are comically bad. I found myself laughing or otherwise eye-rolling in certain scenes. (Seriously, you don't think to run perpendicular to a falling object when apparently you can just stop and roll 3 times to avoid it?) It repeatedly seemed to me that the characters in the story weren't paying a fucking BIT of attention to what was going on around them. "

agreed

6/10/2012 11:24:12 AM

Agreed but I dont think they could monitor them Bc of thestorm.

6/10/2012 11:49:28 AM

Quote :

"That is a good article, but i don't like his idea that the black goo has a psychic link to the moods/intentions of the people around it,"

Yeah, I don't see any basis for the "mood" thing at all.

Quote :

"Also, I guess Weyland-Yutani doesn't ever figure out about this moon, or something... or they don't tell the crew of the Nostromo, because that crew just landed on that planet with no weapons or anything and no knowledge of the engineers or the dangerous tech or anything."

I'm not sure they were reporting anything back to the company. Weyland himself was on the ship. The heiress (vickers), was on the ship. And the only people who knew what happened and lived were Shaw and David. And they were heading to the home planet of the Engineers, not earth. So I'm not sure there's any reason to think the company ever finds out. And even if they did, I'm not sure they would tell everyone.

Quote :

"When the space jockey got into his chair, I was all "Okay here we go, a setup for Alien, he's just gonna die like that and that's what the Nostromo is going to find." but then they decide to throw that shit out the window... I don't even know."

I thought the same thing at first. But Ridley Scott has said in interviews that this is not a direct prequel to Alien. It simply exists in the same universe. I think that was a little tease/ at least showing you that that person is the pilot of the ship.

6/10/2012 11:53:36 AM

THEN WHY THE FUCK IS THIS MARKETED AS A PREQUEL

[Edited on June 10, 2012 at 12:28 PM. Reason : ]

6/10/2012 12:28:30 PM

i didn't know it was. but then again, i went out of my way to not see trailers once I knew i wanted to see it.

If that's the case, my guess is that that was a decision from the studio. The Alien franchise has a built in market, it makes sense to tap into that market to help with sales. But Scott said early on in the production that this would not be prequel. That being said, I think it is safe to say that this happened before the events of Alien. So it is a prequel (and not entirely false advertising), it just doesn't directly lead to those events.

6/10/2012 12:56:42 PM

i think i'd be more okay with the other plot holes and ambiguity if the black goo wasn't so hand-wavey. first it does this, then it does this, then it does this, depending on whatever the screenwriter needs.

6/10/2012 1:23:32 PM

Assuming it was the same goo, it broke down the DNA of the engineer in the very beginning and started rebuilding into something else, and very quickly (he drank a lot of it, relatively).

Howell? (shaw's bf) had just a drop, and it appeared to be doing the same with him, sort of breaking down his DNA.

The worms got into the goo and they were mutated to those snake/worm things (in other words, it broke down their dna and combined with it to make something similar looking, yet different).


I'm don't entirely remember the geologist getting go on him, just the stuff from the worm. But maybe he did. I have no clue as to why he went nuts and was all folded over and what not. I can't figure out how that fits. It seemed really out of the blue when it happened and then it was never addressed again. Howell didn't react like that at all.

6/10/2012 1:37:10 PM

like I said before, I don't think the stuff the guy drank in the beginning is the same as the later black goo, I also thought while watching that every container in the room didn't necessarily contain the same type of goo (may look the same but has different purposes/effects)

[Edited on June 10, 2012 at 1:42 PM. Reason : $$$]

6/10/2012 1:39:32 PM

don't think they would have two identical-looking black goos

6/10/2012 2:07:26 PM

Quote :

"Agreed but I dont think they could monitor them Bc of thestorm."

The captain was the one who told them that one of the probes had picked up a life form due west, and they decided to go east because of that. It wasn't implied that there was any difficulty in communicating with them. More like no one was bothering. And then, guess what, several hours later, they lose contact with the 2 stragglers and have no idea why. And no one thought to go look at the video feed. And then they weren't armed when they went back for them. These people are written as quite possibly the least responsible and least cautious explorers in any sci-fi movie I've ever seen.

I'm pretty sure that the more I think about it, the more I'm starting to really hate this movie.

6/10/2012 3:15:25 PM

i vaguely recall the feed getting static-y as the captain tells them "yo you gotta wait the storm out." though later they are communicating without much issue (the spot you are talking about with the life pickup).

i just assumed that it was going bad and then later the storm had mostly passed and they were about to go out and meet up with them again. there was no major rush since they were going out anyway and they had no reason to worry at the time. just depends how picky you want to be with that.

of the many questionable acts, this wasnt high on my list. things like shaw completely ignoring her murdered hubby or sweet child seemed a bit more questionable, though you could always chalk it up to shock (if you want to go that route).

[Edited on June 10, 2012 at 4:15 PM. Reason : ^ i like it a little better after the write ups posted previously, but am pretty meh on it overall]

6/10/2012 4:14:31 PM

Those probes were probably one of the coolest part of the movie. I can actually see us making those and using them in the near future.

Seeing them patiently waiting at a found door, waiting for it to open before speeding off and continuing their mission, was cool

I think I read in an interview that the guy at the beginning was a 'gardener' of new life, sacrificing his own to build life on that planet

6/10/2012 4:43:32 PM

I think, like someone else said, the xenomorphs existed way before the movie. They were probably created by the engineers/space jockeys to be a slave race to build their cities. Whatever killed off the engineers had to be much stronger than they were, hence the pile of bodies where they were trying to escape. So they created the xenomorphs as slaves but they got out of control and killed off the ones who created them. Possibly a movite for the engineers wanting to return to earth to destroy humans. I don't know...too many questions.


The Jesus Jockey doesn't make any sense. The original jockeys were way bigger than humans and way stronger. I think the Jebus Jockey could have gotten off the cross if they could even manage to get him up there.

6/10/2012 5:07:22 PM

6/10/2012 5:33:16 PM

i feel like if the aliens were supposed to be slaves, the engineers (who are pretty intelligent) wouldn't have made them so damn strong and lethal. they'd have made one and been like, yeah, that's a bit too dangerous

6/10/2012 6:18:22 PM

one was all it took

6/10/2012 6:44:49 PM

yeah, i don't think they were slaves (at least not in the traditional sense). They were weapons. They clearly address the idea that the cannisters are weapons in the movie. And the cannisters ultimately lead to the creation of the xenomorph. On top of that, I'm all but certain that Ridley Scott has said that the xenomorphs are weapons in interviews.

[Edited on June 10, 2012 at 6:54 PM. Reason : s]

6/10/2012 6:53:39 PM

Quote :

"i feel like if the aliens were supposed to be slaves, the engineers (who are pretty intelligent) wouldn't have made them so damn strong and lethal. they'd have made one and been like, yeah, that's a bit too dangerous"

In AtMoM they were made to be strong but with no will of their own making them easy to control but over time they gained the need to escape but were brought back into submission but eventually won out destroying the race that created them. I really want to make Prometheus fit with AtMoM. I like the movie better that way. I think Prometheus wasn't meant to be a "one of" movie but they gave it an ending, no matter how unsatisfying it might be, just in case.

6/10/2012 6:56:09 PM

what is AtMoM?

6/10/2012 7:00:15 PM