YES. The rich guy in Contact is who I was trying to think of when I was listing those guys. I knew there was someone who fit the mold a bit better.

I disagree with the "connecting the dots" bit. Damon has said in several interviews that the ambiguities in the movie are intentional, as they didn't want to spoonfed the audience all the answers, and didn't want the movie to end just where Alien begins, because, in Damon's words, "what's the point?" That's just the kind of writer he is, and I loved it. I love the fact that they can take it many different directions in a possible Prometheus sequel, and it won't necessarily be Alien. It could either be a "bridge" movie, or it could go off on a completely different tangent than runs parallel to the original Alien.

Just got back from seeing it and really enjoyed it. I enjoy the questions and keeping the discussion going after the movie is over.

A couple theories without reading all the other posts yet.


Black ooze turns humans into engineers or at least another step closer. Charlie seemed to be turning pale with the all black eyes like the engineers and the geologist (who was face down in the black ooze) had super human strength like the engineers. Maybe the engineers also farm the humans as a way of propogating their species as well as produce other species for different purposes (xenomorphs).

David spiked Charlie's drink as a test to see if it was the way Weylond could live longer.




Gripe: small boulder stops entire ship from crushing Ellie. Run perpendicular to large falling object not parallel in the objects path. This is a pet peeve in many movies and shows.



I liked the movie and will definitely see again. Really hope there is a sequel.

sharkenleo - Sorry, I didn't mean connecting the dots to Alien. I loved that Prometheus ended where it did / how it did. I meant connecting the dots within it's own story. Just stuff like spelling it out a tad bit more what David's motivation was for spiking Charlie's drink. Things like that. Trust me, I'm the first one to complain about spoon-feeding the audience, but I also think there comes a point at which being too vague/mysterious is a hindrance. It's that whole J,J. Abrams mentality of keeping things a secret just for the sake of keeping things a secret. It doesn't serve the story or your audience when you're being THAT vague.

Wife and I both thought it was terrible. Then again, we aren't fans of Alien, so that might be it.

I thought this movie was bad. So many stupid moments and shock scenes made it seem like it was attempting to be a campy horror movie.

Someone already mentioned the biologist wanting to touch the space snake. WE DO NOT REACH TO TOUCH EARTH SNAKES LET ALONE SPACE ONES!

The mohawk guy comes back as a really fast zombie with super strength and kills a few people. No one at that point questions why, and it wasn't referenced again. Everyone else seemed ok with this and didn't mention it again. Was he smoking bath salts in his suit? Is this a regular occurrence in the future?

Why did Shaw not bother to tell anyone "Hey, my infected research partner/lover impregnated me with an alien baby. I aborted it in the medical pod." No wonder God made her barren.

Between the stupid decisions made by smart characters and the shock value scenes, it felt more like Friday the 13th type slasher movie.



[This message has been edited by PMD03 (edited 6/9/2012 10:37p).]

the mohawk guy coming back as a methed out zombie (with zero explanation as to what was happening or why) and the "scientists" incredibly stupid decisions really did hurt the back half of the movie. i think it was pretty good overall and visually excellent, but definitely could have been much, much better

Question...so when David was talking on the phone (helmet with mask thing) was he talking to Weyland even though he was asleep on the ship?

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I thought this movie was bad. So many stupid moments and shock scenes made it seem like it was attempting to be a campy horror movie.

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Good god...run to your right or left for **** sake!

Why didnt the mapping probes, which supposedly stop at life forms, not find the worms that were a footprint below the surface?

I liked the movie overall, but felt that the writing team went over two hours and so started looking to pare down the script. Maybe that's giving them too much credit.

Great story. Terrible script. A++ production design and effects.

It's a shame because this one could have been really damn good. I still can't get over how bad the script was...what a mess.

I did like the mythology and ambiguity of the ending. If we're keeping score, I have not seen Alien though I have seen its sequel.

Saw it on regular 3D tonight. Thought it was a pretty good movie (closer to great than not).

I thought the Engineer who got his head smashed was committing suicide but maybe that was just me. It didn't seem entirely accidental that an advanced life-form would just keel over and put his head in a giant door's threshold. His reaction to being "awake" again pretty clearly showed that whatever it was that was morphing his head was NOT a good thing.

With that said I think that slightly discounts the "good" vs "bad" black ooze theory. This is something that will definitely have to be explained in the next movie, which I assume will happen.

Clearly some sort of accident happened on that facility which left over 4(5+??) ships stranded on the planet due to infection. I think the goop is the basic building block of the Xenomorph lifeform, in essence the perfect biological, adaptive weapon.

You can see the possibilities of dropping this type of goop on a planet, having full storage rooms aboard Ship #1 makes it apparent that some type of full-scale weaponization is going on.

It's gotta be some sort of DNA weapon that simply latches onto a host in a parasitic relationship before reaching full maturity.

The 2000 year reference was pretty blatant but we'll see how far they're able to take that.

The mural with the familiar Xeno does throw **** off though because they could have omitted it and made a WMD DNA weapon more feasible. As it is we have a near-carbon copy of the Alien on an Engineer ship at least 2,000 years before Christ.

I DO think that the worms were natural occurring life-forms on the moon, seeing as they were just hanging out in the soil around the ship and were relatively hamrless pre-ooze.

As far as I can see the black ooze is the key.

Its some sort of parasitic WMD that adapts to its hosts (humans, worms, engineers) which can infect its hosts through a variety of methods (liquid, impregnation, forced impregnation across species). This makes it a bit easier to understand why the Xenos in this movie were so varied.

1) Worm Xeno that looks like a dong (seriously, we took 3 chicks and they all thought it was a ***** reference)

2) Straight Ooze infection into human, Holloway commits Seppuku for all intents and purposes

3) Human infected to Human impregnation, creates a big ass Facehugger

4) Human facehugger embryo to Engineer spawn Xeno

If the black goop is an incredibly reactive DNA weapon, all the different Xenos can be grouped together through infection vectors.

The symbolism post was fairly interesting but I think too many lines are being connected.


[This message has been edited by tremble (edited 6/10/2012 3:51a).]

If the black ooze is a WMD, then why is it used to crease life at the beginning? Was that some sort of live test of the weapon that accidentally put DNA on the planet?

Why did the engineer head explode when they probed and shocked the locus coeruleus? Were there worms in there? It seemed to look more like what was happening to Charlie Holloway and the geologist.

So whether youre infected by the worm/snake or by the black ooze, you turn into that zombie thing but when you have sex with a zombie you give birth to a primal version of a face hugger but only if the face hugger mouth rapes an engineer will it finally give birth to a xeno.

So in order for a xeno to have come bursting out of the chest from the space jockey in the Aliens movie, all those sequence of events will to have reoccur... Hmmm

[This message has been edited by Bio man (edited 6/10/2012 11:50a).]

Saw the movie yesterday and I have to say I liked it.

In the case a of whether or not Vickers is human or android, I have to say the fact that she is so human means she is an android. In this I feel that is why Weyland rejects her. He created her before David and she was too human and wanted to be self aware and not obedient to everything Weyland wanted. He keeps her though as she was too valuable an asset to destroy. As for being so human, there are many signs of this. You see this in her desire to be accepted by Weyland or "Father", her "lifeboat" with all the essentials of survival and living for humans, her wanting to be in stasis sleep (even though it was mentioned on here that she did this to maintain a charade of being human. It works both ways.), her working out and being a tough human when all others were weakened by the stasis, her sleeping with the captain after saying why would a women be obsessed with sex if she travels so far away from so many men (it's like she does it just to prove that she can.), her obsessive curiosity of what David was told and almost jealousy that he was not told, and finally (I'm sure I missed some things) her self preservation of wanting to survive (even though it would of only been, so the captain told her, two years of rations on the life boat) when the captain was going to sacrifice himself and the Prometheus.

I think all this points that she very much is an android and a somewhat failed creation of Weyland. Failed because he wanted a butler/maid and not a self aware disobedient child.



[This message has been edited by Ag_B_10 (edited 6/10/2012 12:17p).]

But she drank vodka.

Again, another attempt to be human!


[This message has been edited by Ag_B_10 (edited 6/10/2012 12:21p).]

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Great story. Terrible script. A++ production design and effects.

It's a shame because this one could have been really damn good. I still can't get over how bad the script was...what a mess.

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Wife and I both felt the ending was rushed, like they tried to wrap everything up too quickly. This is an instance where an extra 30 mins of run time would have helped IMO.

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If the black ooze is a WMD, then why is it used to crease life at the beginning?

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As I've thought about the movie since yesterday and read all these comments, that's the thought that keeps returning to me, too.

The more I think about this movie the more I hate the fact that all the "scientists" were idiots. Most of these "experts" on the biggest mission in Human history are just there to get killed and serve no other purpose.

The geologist should have done geologist type things like use a rock hammer to look at the rocks and say things like "that rock outcrop is awesome, I'm going to check that out".

The biologist should have had some kind of lab kit or tackle box with jars to take specimens of everything he found.

What happened to the biologist after the worm went in him? Did anything ever pop out of his chest. I don't remember seeing him in the chamber when Charlie started getting "sick" and the geologist was found face down.

How did the ships sensors not pick up the movement of the geologist walking/crawling toward them before he got to their freaking door step?

So many little things that would have made this movie perfect. The mythology is cool though and I look forward to part 2.

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There is going to be a prometheus 2, its pretty obvious. you arent SUPPOSED to have the answers to all the questions you are asking. Think of this movie as a prequel to the real prequel - at least thats my guess. Thats like saying that you should know exactly how the events in alien: resurrection came to be after only watching the first alien movie.

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I remember reading some interviews of some of the people who made the movie that confirms this, that there will be another movie or a whole trilogy.

http://enchantedmitten.blogspot.com/2003/12/reading-previous-entries-in-this-series.html

interesting

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Finally, just to get it out my system, since I'm on a tangent, another big problem I had was casting Guy Pierce as a 90+ year-old Weyland. I love Guy Pierce, but there was NO POINT in having him in sh*tty old-age make-up. If casting Pierce so they could use a "younger" version of him in the viral video was the only point in doing so, A) that's ridiculous, and B) just cast a different, younger actor. Have Christopher Plummer or someone play old Weyland, then just get another actor for young Weyland in the viral video that only a tiny, tiny portion of your audience is going to see. I loved the idea of cooky old Weyland - in the vien of Howard Hughes or John Hammond - basically spending his vast fortune to meet his maker, but every single time the camera was on old man Guy Pierce, it took me right out of the movie.

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this this this

My exact thoughts TCTTS. His makeup didn't look good, and I don't know why they had Guy Pearce play that role except for the fact that they wanted him as a younger Weyland in the Viral/Ted videos. Just didn't make any sense to me. Christopher Plummer would've been great, and you could have had Guy do the marketing anyway.

Just didn't understand that at all.

I really enjoyed this movie.

I was curious as to why David only seemed interested in Shaw's dreams. I think maybe David was ordered by Weyland to go though her dreams in order to learn more about the Engineers and in the process he became more interested in her himself.

It seemed in parts that David had more emotions then he admitted and I thought maybe he became more self aware during the flight to the planet.

Charlie was a dick to David from the start and I think David's new self awareness made him revengeful. Before David put the drop in the drip Charlie and David spoke about their makers. David asked why humans made him and Charlie replied "because we can". Then David asked Charlie what he would feel if his makers told him that. Part of the revenge was that David became Charlie's maker.

I think Shaw becoming pregnant was just collateral damage. Since he *liked* her, he didn't want her hurt, but through her dreams he had to have known there was a possibility of them having sex.

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it felt more like Friday the 13th type slasher movie.

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YES! This was exactly my conclusion as well. Despite the huge budget and hype, this movie was ultimately the most horrific movie experience I've ever had. The script was basically just a random collection of gross-out scenes.

One of the big problems with this script is precisely the lack of logical rules regarding the black ooze. In speculative fiction, readers/viewers need a consistent framework to understand the strange world presented in the story. It's frustrating when there isn't enough information given to figure out what the rules are.

If there is a Prometheus 2, I'll be skipping it. This was just too convoluted and poorly presented. (Cinematography excepted, of course.)

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Wife and I both thought it was terrible. Then again, we aren't fans of Alien, so that might be it.

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I don't think that's it. I am a fan of both Alien and Ridley Scott, and I thought it was a terribly written, ridiculous mess of a script.

I enjoyed the movie but agree that the script was garbage for the most part.

I seem to dislike everything that's ever been written by the Lost guys. They're not bad at setting up scenarios but they're absolutely garbage at resolving them.

Something else that bothered me, albeit a minor detail, but nevertheless a careless slip. The Prometheus crashes into the alien ship's core, resulting in an explosion, a crash dive into the surface, and an end-over-end roll before finally collapsing like a giant toppled coin. Yet when Elizabeth enters the ship to retrieve David, she finds his head and the rest of his body in the same relative position as before, and the interior of the alien ship is NOT covered in black goo from the thousands of ampules that would doubtless have smashed during the crash. Unlikely, at best.

My wife and I enjoyed it in 3-D.

The visuals were striking and from me get an A.

But the story, specifically the portion revealed in this offering, only gets a C.



Slight spoilers ahead:









The first 2/3s of this flick had a very good buildup,

But the ending 1/3 just wasn't as good, IMHO, and came as somewhat of a letdown for us.

Little real suspense, no audience terror, decent casting and acting, lots of questions put forth and still begging to be answered, good pace and, all in all, it is a well made sci fi movie.

However, seasoned, long time moviegoers like us could find it derivative, as we did, with almost everything having been seen before in a number of other films both related and unrelated.

Being derivative, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad if it is well done and here I thought it all was done OK but there was much that could have/should have been better.

As far as new stuff, the mapping robots were cool as was that automated surgical module.

I thought a flame thrower was a little suspect as a first line of defense on a spaceship, but it turned out to be handy.

And all the away team members seemed way, way, way, way too much like clueless, unsuspecting victims (more stereotypical of a slasher movie) than the well-trained, cautious scientists they should have been.

Take off the helmets on your isolation suits just because the atmosphere of an otherwise unknown planet (actually, I believe, the unexplored locale is on a moon orbiting a giant, distant planet) is breathable?

Reach out to touch a live, threatening, alien, reptilian life form?

C'mon.

So, Ridley Scott, IMO, needed a better overall story concept, a better storyline and/or a better script to match up with his admittedly great talent as a visual storyteller.

Hopefully, this open-ended movie will be followed with a sequel that's a true and worthy prequel to "Alien" and "Aliens" which will bridge everything together.

The ending of "Prometheus" certainly sets up such a sequel and, if it is done well, any shortcomings here could probably be forgiven and forgotten.



Gig 'em, FAST FRED '65.

Before the world wide web, village idiots usually stayed in their own village.

[This message has been edited by FAST FRED (edited 6/11/2012 4:11p).]

Did anyone stay past the credits? What was the significance of 10.11.12?

Interesting.

They have a **** ton of viral marketing/build up for a 1 shot movie. IE: Its a big deal and there's a lot of groundwork being done for multiple entries.

http://www.weylandindustries.com/ was available pre-Prometheus release. Interesting on its own.

http://www.whatis101112.com/ has been found through post-credits sleuthing. Guy Pearce features in another TED timeline speech quoting Nietzsche.

Only one module of 5 is currently accessible on the site.

Great, in-depth article by Drew McWeeny at HitFix highlighting many of the problems with the film...

http://www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/prometheus-second-look-digging-deep-into-spoilers-and-questions

Honestly, the ways in which this film has polarized, and the discussions it's causing, are almost more entertaining than if Prometheus had actually been a near-perfect instant classic. In a strange way, this phenomenon that's exploded on the internet over the weekend of debating/analyzing its flaws has almost proved more enjoyable than if we were praising an alternate, better version of the movie. That's not to say I'm glad it turned out the way it did - I would have much rather been blown away - but I sure am loving the conversation.

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sharkenleo - Sorry, I didn't mean connecting the dots to Alien. I loved that Prometheus ended where it did / how it did. I meant connecting the dots within it's own story. Just stuff like spelling it out a tad bit more what David's motivation was for spiking Charlie's drink. Things like that. Trust me, I'm the first one to complain about spoon-feeding the audience, but I also think there comes a point at which being too vague/mysterious is a hindrance. It's that whole J,J. Abrams mentality of keeping things a secret just for the sake of keeping things a secret. It doesn't serve the story or your audience when you're being THAT vague.

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I agree completely. Too vague in critical details, and too specific in others that create consistency problems. There was one significant detail that was deemed to be so important that it was stated twice, maybe three times, and with CGI effects. Remember that the human/alien DNA samples were identical. Not just close, but a perfect 100% match. This detail just adds to the confusion and vagueness about how black ooze works. If our DNA is identical and the ooze is a DNA level weapon, it should affect both humans and aliens in identically consistent ways. And yet it does not. Indeed, why the need for black ooze to convert the alien DNA to ours to create human life, as in the beginning scene of the movie? Our DNA is identical, right? Moreover, human/alien DNA cannot be 100% identical anyway, or else we would look exactly like them with black eyes, translucent skin, and super-sized. Stupid on multiple levels.

[This message has been edited by G Martin 87 (edited 6/11/2012 5:34a).]

Sorry, but I guess I'm on a roll here.

Why do the 35,000 year old cave paintings on Skye show a map to a future alien WMD storage facility that won't exist for another 33,000 years rather than the alien's home world?

If the script were written by Douglas Adams, maybe this would be the equivalent of placing the notice for the planned hyperspace bypass through Earth on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."

[This message has been edited by G Martin 87 (edited 6/11/2012 7:29a).]

More gripes:

- This had to have been the most undisciplined crew I've ever seen in a exploration movie. For what was a trillion dollar project, you'd think they'd hire people smart enough to not a) take off their helmets, b) touch alien reptiles, c) leave crew members behind, d) adhere to captain's orders.

- Was anyone else annoyed by the fact that Elizabeth Shaw decided to go hunt down an alien planet on her own (well, with Fassbender's head along for the rid) after having watched her entire crew get slaughtered? She's barely standing after having self-aborted an alien baby and now she's going off on her own to who knows where in an alien ship with no weapons, crew, directions? WTF?