posted
Mars, I have since seen that "missing scene" online- which begs the question of "where is it?" later on- I always wondered as much of the obvious chestburster from the original alien....I also think Scott has some disdail for the Cameron and later Alien franchise movies as nothing in this can work with those later films- no Alien Queen laying eggs, etc.
Why a fully grown alien emerging from the Engineer? That's too stupid- I mean..'comon Ridley Scott! People KNOW it's an goddamn Alien movie already- no need to dumb it down further by not making what burst out a 'you know, chestburster. It's only one of the most memorable scenes in movie history....and YOU MADE IT!
Also, since my long winded rant, I have talked about this train-wreck of a movie wih another friend an she pointed out that, as with most sci-fi/horror movies, they set the ground rules at the begining- and where good movies stick to them, bad movies break them. In this case, they say very clearly that the atmosphere outside is unbreathable, yet Theron's character boldly walks outside with a goddamn flamethrower to kill the infected Professor Moron. They even go to great lengths to show that no, she was not an android, just cold and bitchy.
My friend said the crew made all the "Scary Movie" horror movie cliche' mistakes- splitting up,having sex, etc- in this case it's more the android David that plays the villian but that's no different than movies where some monster or machine or haunted house is used as a weapon to kill everyone off.
Still, NOTHING is worse and more blatantly ignorant than David being able to speak and pronounce the engineer's language. I mean...fuck's sake...are moviegoers really so stupid? Is Ridley Scott? Did he suffer head trauma sometime in the past few years or something?
Nim's right on Fassbender's voice- a great vocal match for the other androids- I'm sure he studied their performace. Such an interesting voice too- I'd buy any audiobook he nararated.
quote:Originally posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim: I agree with and share many of your criticisms about the film, but I would point out one thing: it doesn't take place on the same moon of Zeta Reticuli as Alien and neither of the ships we see are the one from Alien. The film takes place on LV-223 and Alien takes place on LV-426. But the movie went way over the top with the "RECOGNIZE THIS FROM ALIEN" moments so I don't blame you for not realizing that.
I dont buy this argument- I'd go so far as to think that the change is in fact an error on the moviemaker's part- it's WAY too much coincidence that the Engineer ship crashed exactly like the one in Alien- same everything- even the damage looks to be a match- and I've built that goddamn model.
quote:Nim Wrote: Despite the fact that there are species on earth that live their lives without eating, just working with the sustenance present in their bodies at birth, growing quickly from birth has been an Alien staple since the first Alien-movie. None of the Xenomorphs eat, the reach adult size in one or two days and their anatomy is silicon-based! Any earth biology preconceptions can be left at the door.
First no nothing anywhere ever grows without consuming mass- I know that in the original Alien movie (but not book) it does not seem to eat anything but we also dont see it for most of the movie, but by way of mouth and teeth, it obviously consumes something- something living, if you can scrap Promeheus' idiotic premises and view the Aliens from Cameron's movie as a unique and self sustaining species (even if modified or engineered long ago). Also, if the alien-squid-baby was made by the black goo changing the DNA of a carbom based daddy and a carbon based mommy and then "facehugs" a carbon based Engineer (and he'd certainly have to be to have seeded life on earth) then how would we get the scilicon-based critter from the 1978 movie? Senseless. even for "it's a popcorn movie" kinda Chronicles of Riddick" kinda movie, which I expected this would be better than.
Despite my snarky posts prior to seeing this movie, was was pretty psyched to see it- friends were over and I had sold watching this over my bootleg copy of the Avengers or something else. But we had fun anyway- in a MST3K kinda way.
I still blew ten bucks on this disapointment though.
quote:ALSO by Nim: The eggs and the cylinders are not the same objects. Alien queens lay eggs, the containers just stood in an antechamber. The eggs of "Alien" were laid in another ship's cavernous cargo hold or similar room. The biosensitive field covering the eggs wasn't a laser field, it was just created by lasers by the film crew, most likely it was a bioluminescent pheromone field or such, floating above ground due to being lighter than the gas surrounding the eggs. Lots of animals on earth create perimeter sensors in their habitat, allowing them to notice a change in air pressure or scent and attack the unlucky stranger.
So the laser was not actually a laser now? tha's a pretty huge stretch (and reminds me of the old -and lacking- "laser is not a laser Deathstar Laser defense)- and it being a laser tripwire that "alarm" for the eggs made alot of sense- to alert the crew if anything escaped or was not secured- say in a crash. Too bad the crew was busy being dead, but hey.
SO, to be clear- your supposition is that there was in fact an Alien Queen somewhere else on board, and an egg chamber, but it's...just coincidence that the thing that burst out of the Engineer looks just like a blue Alien?
Okay, I'll do your movie defense for you here and say that the Engineers capture naturally occuring Aliens from somewhere and distill the Alien's essense to use as a bio-weapon: possibly the black goo is some kind of "royal jelly" secretion that naturally makes an asexual or bi-gendered drone into a Queen when no female eggs are present to continue a hive (to bring Earth bees into the comparison). That would kinda make sense- and would explain the general shapes of the giganto hugger and final Engineer-alien.
But daaaamn that could have been easily shown! They could have had the initial search pass through a chamber with an alien queen, dead and dried out, along with dozens of eggs on a conveyor of sorts leading to some extraction device and the chamber with all the cylinders... That would have taken up what? Five minutes? I guess they needed to show the sex scene with the two idiot doctors more than anything story related.
I really wonder what the test audiences were like on this- what kind of feedback was given...or if anyone watched the movie prior to it's release at all.
[ August 16, 2012, 09:09 AM: Message edited by: Jason Abbadon ]
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
quote:Mars, I have since seen that "missing scene" online- which begs the question of "where is it?" later on-
Script and dialogue says that LV-223 is not LV-426, whether you like it or not. Barring a return to LV-223 in a future movie, we're probably not going to see that particular individual again, the scene was just a courtesy for us, an expensive bonus scene to make us fans happy, and most of us appreciated it.
quote:Why a fully grown alien emerging from the Engineer? That's too stupid- I mean..'comon Ridley Scott!
You're wrong, it is not fully grown, it's a newborn chestburster, just larger than human-spawned equivalents. It's still stunted and lacks a tail. If you are going to continue claiming that the Prometheus-alien is too developed to be a newborn, here's the newborn Rottweiler/Cow-alien from Alien³.
quote:I also think Scott has some disdail for the Cameron and later Alien franchise movies as nothing in this can work with those later films- no Alien Queen laying eggs, etc.
It's obvious that the "queen" role in Prometheus is filled by Shaw, negating the need for an egg stage in that particular incident. Shaw-facehugger/engineer-protoalien. That doesn't preclude future queens from other sources.
quote:Still, NOTHING is worse and more blatantly ignorant than David being able to speak and pronounce the engineer's language.
You have no way of knowing that. What we saw was David using his best guesstimate and approximation in a foreign language he'd studied on paper and in theory, then getting his head ripped off. Whether he insulted the engineer's mother, we'll never know.
An aside: that scene, gritty as it was, would've been 150% better if David's head, when all action was over and the room quiet again, had said "Whoops".
quote:if the alien-squid-baby was made by the black goo changing the DNA of a carbom based daddy and a carbon based mommy and then "facehugs" a carbon based Engineer (and he'd certainly have to be to have seeded life on earth) then how would we get the scilicon-based critter from the 1978 movie?
I'm gonna take a stab and say that the black goo provides the silicon blueprint/framework, which laid dormant until needed. The black goo is the macguffin, (see "Heisenberg compensator"), it does whatever is required of it, and is so far removed from calculable, measurable data as to be indistinguishable from magic at this point.
quote:Jason has the NERVE TO CONTINUE: So the laser was not actually a laser now? tha's a pretty huge stretch
Not at all, you beast. Kane calls it "a thin layer of mist, that reacts when broken", not a forcefield, not an electric barrier. To audiences of 1979 (go Nim!), laser-smoke effects were still a pretty big deal, but it was just meant to be funky. I think it's organic, you see smoke puffs coming from the floor (to make the beam visible, of course, but narrative-wise could be emitted from the dormant eggs). Hell, you have a primitive version of that covering your own skin, a few centimeters above the surface. Sit in a draft and lose that layer for long enough and you'll sneeze. Coincidentally, Kane did say it was "like the goddamn tropics in here". I say it's an organic biosensor, perhaps so the egg doesn't attack tumbleweeds?
quote:SO, to be clear- your supposition is that there was in fact an Alien Queen somewhere else on board, and an egg chamber, but it's...just coincidence that the thing that burst out of the Engineer looks just like a blue Alien?
No, I never claimed any queen or egg(s) exists in Prometheus' engineer ship. Quite the opposite, the intricate and bewildering mode of development in Prometheus precluded an egg stage, except for the one Shaw provided from her own broken babymaker.
quote:Okay, I'll do your movie defense for you here and say that the Engineers capture naturally occuring Aliens from somewhere and distill the Alien's essense to use as a bio-weapon
No, don't! That's oversimplification, the movie leaves it ambiguous which is chicken or egg or invented egg in "Prometheus". The canister-room has a mural depicting an Engineer "harnessing", sculpting or subduing an alien-like creature (without the Giger-headpiece), suggesting the engineers either stumbled upon them , made them or are their cousins, in some Jekyll/Hyde relationship. I prefer to think they scratch-built them, since the engineers are shown to be able to break themselves down into primordial soup at will. Even if just to get away from the office.
quote: possibly the black goo is some kind of "royal jelly" secretion that naturally makes an asexual or bi-gendered drone into a Queen when no female eggs are present to continue a hive (to bring Earth bees into the comparison).
That would kinda make sense- and would explain the general shapes of the giganto hugger and final Engineer-alien.[/quote]
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for hypotethizing about these kinds of things, that's Flare at its best to me. In the case of the goo, it's a macguffin and does whatever is needed of it, otherwise they would've stuck in a scene where Shaw and David looks at a holocomputer and discusses the goo in detail, other than the sweeping "it reacted to our entering the room" statement, which is kind of exotic to me anyway, almost sexy.
No, if Scott wanted to pander to the uber-fans he would've released a flow chart with goo-parts, obviously he doesn't put as much importance in that element of the mythos, any more than George Lucas indulges fans who ask how the lightsaber "blade" actually works (hint: Lucas calls them laserswords in work lingo, that's his level of commitment to that piece of the saga). I don't blame Lucas for some of his stances. I would punch any fan who came up to me and asked what Luke's favorite genre of "jizz" would be, if he had any?
But back to Prometheus. I think it's great!
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic
