** Official Prometheus Thread ** Spoilers inside.

[ELPOLLITO]

Love this type of shit but the movie left me with more questions than answers lol

 

[Kayne]

should one see the alien movies before seeing this?

You really don't have to but you should..

^^^^^^
it is prequel
but movie overall average at best, beside eye-candy effects, plot is just meh, no suspense or anything scary just typical pop-corn movie
this even didnt come close to original Alien

This is NOT a Prequel to Alien. In a way its connected to it because of the surroundings but the movie is its own. Don't want to take my word for it, hear it from Damon Lindelof who wrote the movie, in this hour long interview he speaks about it. They do speak about other stuff to (like LOST) but check it he explains what Prometheus is.

So prometheus leads directly to alien 1? From every review ive read it does not lead to alien 1 at all and if anything would lead to a prometheus sequel. Makes sense because I think Ridley Scott said it would be about 2 more prometheus movies before they put out a true alien prequel.

^^ True

here is the interview with Damon Lindelof i wrote about in the post above

[video=youtube;mSNTXHljeeM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSNTXHljeeM[/video]

 

[$migg Cant Rap]

so i was anticipating this movie ever since seeing the trailer months ago. it looked intense, & awesome.. but this movie fuckin sucked. i began to worry when i saw that it was getting mixed reviews before its official release, but saw it anyway cuz my girl still wanted to. this shit was bad. real bad. we laughed a few times at things that werent meant to be funny, but overall it didnt even come close to falling into the "so bad its funny" category. so, no redeeming qualities. huge disappointment. afterwards i found out that me & my girl were both thinking we should leave halfway through the movie, but neither of us said it until afterwards.

the whole thing just felt forced & half-baked. glad i had some gift cards & didnt waste my money on it.

 

[infinity]

just saw it today. another movie that looked great visually with an average-at-best storyline. some very annoying characters. i wouldn't pay to see it unless you're just a huge fan or something. 5 points for the visuals + 1 point for the story. 6/10 would not see again

 

[$migg Cant Rap]

6/10 is being positive. i'd probly give it a 4/10. you're damn right when you say theres some annoying characters lol. hella cliche 1-dimensional characters, a story with extremely forced elements (me & my girl both laughed when they randomly brought up that the bitch couldnt have babies lol..)

this might be the most i've ever felt burnt by a movie, since i dont often watch movies in theaters without knowing for sure i'll like them. my high expectations were crushed.

edit: the trailer is damn near classic though. way better than the movie.

 

[$migg Cant Rap]

within the 1st 10 minutes--- "i think they want us to visit them." ...the exact moment we looked @ eachother & knew we were in for some bullshit.

 

[Kayne]

What did you expected from the movie? This is an actual question.

 

[ELPOLLITO]

Just watched the first alien pretty much everything in this movie is the same

 

[$migg Cant Rap]

What did you expected from the movie? This is an actual question.

pretty much just expected it to not be utter crap.

 

[Kayne]

pretty much just expected it to not be utter crap.

This is not a expectation.

 

[$migg Cant Rap]

i expected an interesting movie with far less fundamental flaws. that was my expectation. if you happened to like the movie, thats cool. but there were several moments that just fell into the category of weak story-telling IMO.

i honestly cant get into it without throwing out a few spoilers, & at the same time the movie wasnt good enough for me to dwell on it & spend time breaking it down on here.

 

[Kayne]

I get what you are saying. I'm not gone try to change your opinion about the movie. I was just curious because after the movie i heard/talked to people and it was a lot of different expectations and opinions about it. In a way this movie kinda get exposure for a blockbuster movie when its really not. As a single movie I can get why people say it did not exceed their expectations, but as a part of something bigger i think its genius.

 

[rambo187]

I get what you are saying. I'm not gone try to change your opinion about the movie. I was just curious because after the movie i heard/talked to people and it was a lot of different expectations and opinions about it. In a way this movie kinda get exposure for a blockbuster movie when its really not. As a single movie I can get why people say it did not exceed their expectations, but as a part of something bigger i think its genius.

please enlighten me how this is not blockbuster movie and whats genius about it (please dont say special effects)?

Just watched the first alien pretty much everything in this movie is the same

what u mean by 'the same' as looks first Alien or its a prequel?

 

[Kayne]

please enlighten me how this is not blockbuster movie and whats genius about it (please dont say special effects)?

Special effects, no. Watching the trailer, what I thought was gone be some cool 3d scenes really wasn't. Well it can be placed in that folder depending on what you consider to be blockbuster? but the way I see it is. This movie creates a thinking process to it and brings conversations on a nerdy level afterwards, and with this being in the category of prequelish there should be a interest from the beginning of it/this/the whole picture, thats why I don't think its your typical blockbuster movie.


*SPOILER ALERT* (really not but just incase)
Why its genius? If I try to explain this as short as I can. Its the way it tells the story of two movies. It explains some things but leaves others to think about. And for this specific movie I thought it was a nice touch with the viral videos with Shawn, David and the TED talk by Peter Weyland.

 

[rambo187]

^^^^^^
well for me it is blockbuster movie typical (whatever it means) or not they put so much effort into sfx so people want to go to see it just because of it (and im excluding Alien fans cuz they have other reasons) and very weak story so imo average movie goer will not necessarily reach further and will watch rest of the Alien movies. i from curiosity rewatched first one and can say Prome. is fuckin crap in almost every aspect compare to that old one, which i think means a lot - and i know many people think the same

sorry but i fail to see genius in it this movie is from start to end sfx eye candy nothing genius about it, and i am just hoping they will stop on this and it will not be any more prequel, prequel's sequels cuz i can see right now it gonna be even more retarded than AVP movies unless they will put real effort into story. going to see it i didnt expect anything cuz last Ridley's movie was a let down to me so i went open minded and i didnt even cared if this movie answer questions from first movies or not, i even prefer when its not cuz than it makes u think 'what if' but this one answers some but those unanswered i couldnt give a shit about cuz i can see why they did it

 

[BROWN GUERRERO]

I think to truly enjoy this movie you really have to think outside the box.


SPOILER***************************








An Engineer sacrificed himself to create us. They watched us grow and develop, leaving behind clues and information on how to find them once human were advanced enough to do so. 2000 years ago something happened that made them decide they were going to destroy our race, but everything went wrong for them and ended up whiping them out. Funny that they sacrificed themselves to create us, yet the hidden agenda of the prometheus ship was to have a selfish old man find his maker and ask for immortality. Also ironic that the old man was knocked over the head and killed with the head of the droid, a product of man's creation. I read a crazy article that will blow your mind on all the hidden undertones, links to mythology, the religious symbolism and links that writers and produers of the movie inserted. Basically they sacrificed to create us, we became powerful, corrupt and greedy so they were going to kill us, but somehow the ooze they used to create us became a weapon, backfired and killed them. The movie is crazy deep if you really get into it. Very different from the alien series which was so cut and dry. Promotheus created man, gave man fire and it backfired on him. Think about just that itself.

The common consensus among Alien nerds way before promotheus came out was that the engineers/space jockeys created xenomorphs and they used them as weapons. This is why the eggs were on that space jockey ship in the original alien. While this still seems pretty logical, promotheus just blew everything wide open.

 

[BROWN GUERRERO]

If you really want to appreciate the movie you have to read this.

Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About
This blogpost contains many and frequent spoilers for Prometheus, so if you're planning on seeing it, I recommend you don't spoil yourself.



Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a lifegiver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.

Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.

Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: 'That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.'

Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.

And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'

So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.

Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.

The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.

And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.

From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.

If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:

Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.

So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.

So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.

The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.

Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable.

Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.

But some humans do act in ways the Engineers might have grudgingly admired. Take Holloway, Shaw's lover, who impregnates her barren womb with his black slime riddled semen before realising he is being transformed into something Other. Unlike the hapless geologist and botanist left behind in the chamber, who only want to stay alive, Holloway willingly embraces death. He all but invites Meredith Vickers to kill him, and it's surely significant that she does so using fire, the other gift Prometheus gave to man besides his life.

The 'Caesarean' scene is central to the film's themes of creation, sacrifice, and giving life. Shaw has discovered she's pregnant with something non-human and sets the autodoc to slice it out of her. She lies there screaming, a gaping wound in her stomach, while her tentacled alien child thrashes and squeals in the clamp above her and OH HEY IT'S THE LIFEGIVER WITH HER ABDOMEN TORN OPEN. How many times has that image come up now? Four, I make it. (We're not done yet.)

And she doesn't kill it. And she calls the procedure a 'caesarean' instead of an 'abortion'.

(I'm not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don't think they're clear, and I'm not entirely comfortable doing so. Let's just say that her unwanted offspring turning out to be her salvation is possibly problematic from a feminist standpoint and leave it there for now.)

Here's where the Christian allegories really come through. The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day. And this is a 'virgin birth' of sorts, although a dark and twisted one, because Shaw couldn't possibly be pregnant. And Shaw's the crucifix-wearing Christian of the crew. We may well ask, echoing Yeats: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards LV-223 to be born?

Consider the scene where David tells Shaw that she's pregnant, and tell me that's not a riff on the Annunciation. The calm, graciously angelic android delivering the news, the pious mother who insists she can't possibly be pregnant, the wry declaration that it's no ordinary child... yeah, we've seen this before.

'And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.'

A barren woman called Elizabeth, made pregnant by 'God'? Subtle, Ridley.

Anyway. If it weren't already clear enough that the central theme of the film is 'I suffer and die so that others may live' versus 'you suffer and die so that I may live' writ extremely large, Meredith Vickers helpfully spells it out:

'A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.'

Vickers is not just speaking out of personal frustration here, though that's obviously one level of it. She wants her father out of the way, so she can finally come in to her inheritance. It's insult enough that Weyland describes the android David as 'the closest thing I have to a son', as if only a male heir was of any worth; his obstinate refusal to accept death is a slap in her face.

Weyland, preserved by his wealth and the technology it can buy, has lived far, far longer than his rightful time. A ghoulish, wizened creature who looks neither old nor young, he reminds me of Slough Feg, the decaying tyrant from the Slaine series in British comic 2000AD. In Slaine, an ancient (and by now familiar to you, dear reader, or so I would hope) Celtic law decrees that the King has to be ritually and willingly sacrificed at the end of his appointed time, for the good of the land and the people. Slough Feg refused to die, and became a rotting horror, the embodiment of evil.

The image of the sorcerer who refuses to accept rightful death is fundamental: it even forms a part of some occult philosophy. In Crowley's system, the magician who refuses to accept the bitter cup of Babalon and undergo dissolution of his individual ego in the Great Sea (remember that opening scene?) becomes an ossified, corrupted entity called a 'Black Brother' who can create no new life, and lives on as a sterile, emasculated husk.

With all this in mind, we can better understand the climactic scene in which the withered Weyland confronts the last surviving Engineer. See it from the Engineer's perspective. Two thousand years ago, humanity not only murdered the Engineers' emissary, it infected the Engineers' life-creating fluid with its own tainted selfish nature, creating monsters. And now, after so long, here humanity is, presumptuously accepting a long-overdue invitation, and even reawakening (and corrupting all over again) the life fluid.

And who has humanity chosen to represent them? A self-centred, self-satisfied narcissist who revels in his own artificially extended life, who speaks through the medium of a merely mechanical offspring. Humanity couldn't have chosen a worse ambassador.

It's hardly surprising that the Engineer reacts with contempt and disgust, ripping David's head off and battering Weyland to death with it. The subtext is bitter and ironic: you caused us to die at the hands of our own creation, so I am going to kill you with YOUR own creation, albeit in a crude and bludgeoning way.

The only way to save humanity is through self-sacrifice, and this is exactly what the captain (and his two oddly complacent co-pilots) opt to do. They crash the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship, giving up their lives in order to save others. Their willing self-sacrifice stands alongside Holloway's and the Engineer's from the opening sequence; by now, the film has racked up no less than five self-sacrificing gestures (six if we consider the exploding Engineer head).

Meredith Vickers, of course, has no interest in self-sacrifice. Like her father, she wants to keep herself alive, and so she ejects and lands on the planet's surface. With the surviving cast now down to Vickers and Shaw, we witness Vickers's rather silly death as the Engineer ship rolls over and crushes her, due to a sudden inability on her part to run sideways. Perhaps that's the point; perhaps the film is saying her view is blinkered, and ultimately that kills her. But I doubt it. Sometimes a daft death is just a daft death.

Finally, in the squidgy ending scenes of the film, the wrathful Engineer conveniently meets its death at the tentacles of Shaw's alien child, now somehow grown huge. But it's not just a death; there's obscene life being created here, too. The (in the Engineers' eyes) horrific human impulse to sacrifice others in order to survive has taken on flesh. The Engineer's body bursts open - blah blah lifegiver blah blah abdomen ripped apart hey we're up to five now - and the proto-Alien that emerges is the very image of the creature from the mural.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that the genesis of the Alien xenomorph ultimately lies in the grotesque human act of crucifying the Space Jockeys' emissary to Israel in four B.C., but that's what Ridley Scott proposes. It seems equally insane to propose that Prometheus is fundamentally about the clash between acceptance of death as a condition of creating/sustaining life versus clinging on to life at the expense of others, but the repeated, insistent use of motifs and themes bears this out.

As a closing point, let me draw your attention to a very different strand of symbolism that runs through Prometheus: the British science fiction show Doctor Who. In the 1970s episode 'The Daemons', an ancient mound is opened up, leading to an encounter with a gigantic being who proves to be an alien responsible for having guided mankind's development, and who now views mankind as a failed experiment that must be destroyed. The Engineers are seen tootling on flutes, in exactly the same way that the second Doctor does. The Third Doctor had an companion whose name was Liz Shaw, the same name as the protagonist of Prometheus. As with anything else in the film, it could all be coincidental; but knowing Ridley Scott, it doesn't seem very likely.

EDITED 10 JUNE 2012: I'm amazed that so many people are reading and discussing this. I'd like to make some sort of response to your various comments here and elsewhere, but it may take a while as there are loads. Feel free to follow me on Twitter ( R @rubbberart lorn) and tell me your thoughts in the meantime, if you like.

 

[[-KoRp$-]559]

I havent watched movie but I think the people who arent enjoying it dont know shit about aliens franchise or science fiction in general.

 

[smeezy]

I havent watched movie but I think the people who arent enjoying it dont know shit about aliens franchise or science fiction in general.

Pure conjecture lol, stop talkin out of your ass. Watch it then say something.

****SPOILERS****


I liked storyline for the most part, but wanted MOAR ANSWERS!
Alien prequel or futuristic zombie prequel? Black goo that makes the host super strong with rage? GTFOH LOL.
I expected more action, and futuristic high powered weapons not fucking flamethrowers as the primary weapon of choice.

 

[BROWN GUERRERO]

There's a reason it was a flamethrower bruh. Look at the title of the movie, all the hidden undertones and connect the dots. Also in alien 3 there's talk about fire, how humans have had it since the stone age and how aliens fear it. I feel you on the answers tho.