Prometheus. It was an incredible film.

I liked it back then and I like it even more now. I've noticed by listening to movie podcasts that it's being critically reassessed and that people who hated it are coming around on it. It's quite telling that it gets a discussion thread on DL about once a year, perhaps more than any other Alien movie. And you know what I'm about to say next...

That medical pod was one of the coolest things I ever saw at the time. I obviously wasn't alone because that visual contributed greatly to the current medbed craze in the QAnon community – they're convinced the cabal was teasing us plebs with that scene. As for myself, I'd just like to have an abortion or five inside that puppy, looks like so much fun.

I thought it was complete shit. I noticed it's on Netflix, added it to my queue to watch over the weekend.

It'll probably still be shit second time around but I'd really like it not to be.

This is a film created for the big screen. It doesn’t suit the small screen.

It was fun, despite the Guy Pearce awful ageing make up.

I liked the surgery chamber scene and that was it. Total piece of shit film, albeit beautiful-looking.

I was stoked to go see this when it came out but it really disappointed me. The most interesting questions in the plot are never answered. Turns out they are in deleted and cut scenes - they cut the best parts of the movie that tie the entire plot together just to save like ten minutes.

I liked it.

No, OP. Prometheus is a terrible film. One of the worst movies I've ever paid to see in theaters. The script was shit, the casting was bad, the acting was worse. It sure looked pretty, but no... it's fucking terrible and made no fucking sense at all. A truly stupid movie.

This is my favorite "discussion" of the stupidity of this movie:

It does lag in parts but it's certainly not the worst film I've ever seen.

OP, why do you think the engineer immediately turned murderous when awakened?

Nothing. In. The. Movie. Made. Any. Sense.

R9 This is one of my problems with the movie - I keep asking myself why. Why this and why that, but there are no explanations. Maybe for some this adds to the mystery but for me it just adds to some frustration.

That said, Ridley Scott always makes watchable films and this is one of them, even if it's not a truly great film. I find myself going back to it every couple of years because the visuals are so impressive and because it has some great set pieces, like the abortion scene.

R11 it's completely explained in cut and deleted scenes. the engineer has a lot of dialogue with the crew before he attacks them, I think he's provoked by something weyland says. the original cut also extended the opening scene, explaining a lot more about the engineers creating life on earth.

R11 youtube - deleted engineer dialogue

That's not how evolution works.

Not's not how ANY of it works!

The ONLY person I remember is Logan Marshall-Green who at the time was a Tom Hardy lookalike.

…said no one ever.

Thanks, R13. That was enlightening.

R17 here's the original opening too, very different. i can't understand why they changed it.

R13 I can see why all the heavy religious Christian references were removed. Better leave it all as questions than give such a pedestrian explanation which, by the way, denies the existence of evolution in favor of "the Martians created us and built the pyramids, oh and Jesus is Lord."

R19 it's still the canon lore though. it seems to me they cut it because they wanted to put out a sequel that answered all the questions but that didn't work out.

When you have to cobble together a bunch of outtakes to try to make a film coherent, you have problems.

Too much ersatz Matthew Barney. Or not enough ersatz Matthew Barney. Something.

This was my first time seeing Fassbender, who was stunning. And I always love Logan Marshall-Green. Theron was also hot, if you're into that. That's all I remember of this film.

Overwrought, confusing, and very disappointing.

I really want to like the film, because it has so many good things going for it, and it's beautifully shot. The abortion scene is amazing and intense; I rewatch it every once in a while.

But the last act of the film is incoherent and totally stupid. Why doesn't Charlize run to the side when the ship is falling over? Why does she run forward? It's so dumb!

Positives:

The Elizabeth Shaw character. She was cool.

Great soundtrack

The visuals in the David in the orrery scene. Beautiful

Idris Elba, also beautiful. I liked how his crew went out.

The abortion scene- kick ass. Movie needed more scenes like that.

Negatives:

Those two dipshit scientists- the geologist and the biologist. Absolute morons. God, they pissed me off

Logan Marshall Green’s attitude towards David. He was a dick. For no reason.

Charleze Theron not running sideways when the ship was rolling after her. What the hell was that, dumbass?

Most everything else. Even so, I watch this movie about once a year.

I take this back. Alien Covenant was overwrought and confusing. Prometheus was pretty good.

I liked Prometheus a lot. Covenant was bad, in my opinion.

The sequel to Prometheus was terrible. Truly.

Annalee Call!

The drop in the quality of the cast from Prometheus to Covenant was quite something.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo >>> that sullen woman from Fantastic Beasts

Idris Elba >>> Jussie Smollett

Charlize Theron >>> Billy Crudup

A supporting cast of award winning British character actors >>> Carmen Ejogo and some Americans

I don't think Prometheus is incredible, but it's very watchable despite its flaws. I find myself streaming it from time to time when it comes up, and I still enjoy it. The biggest obstacle that it never overcame is that people were hungry for another, more straightforward Alien movie, and it just isn't that. It's further damned in that Covenant is a movie more in the Alien vein but really sucks.

I think Prometheus had one of the best trailers ever. It was a disappointing film.

Agree r33. Fantastic trailer. So much so that i was angry at how shitty the actual movie was.

A very imperfect film, yet beautiful and mysterious, and that's more than enough sometimes.

Any scifi film will have untold detractors who despise it because of some illogical points or the ending or some tedious inconsistency, and Prometheus lays out all sorts of flaws and fodder for them. It does have the feeling of being cobbled together from bits scraped into a dust pan off a cutting room floor, but it's still a film with a great many striking scenes that stick in the memory.

I don't generally like scifi films, least of all ones weighted down with a lot of backstory and explanation and narrative logic. Give me something icy and cerebral and with mystery and beautiful and horror that cone from nowhere. Prometheus falls short in so many ways, parts of it are terribly wrong, and yet it's still a great film to watch and, at best moments, get lost in.

[quote]It does lag in parts but it's certainly not the worst film I've ever seen.

If that isn't a pull quote, I don't know what is.

[quote]The Elizabeth Shaw character. She was cool.

Are you fucking kidding me? She was the absolute fucking WORST. Utterly stupid, completely unbelievable as any kind of scientist, totally and annoyingly "woo-woo", horribly mis-cast, and a terrible actress. She was literally the thing I hated most about this awful, awful, terrible movie.

Covenant wasn't good, but it was infinitely better than this incoherent, illogical, ridiculous mess of a movie.

I cannot fathom how anyone can say Prometheus was better than Covenant.

I may like it better than Alien.

R35, you should watch the movie "Sunshine" then. It hits all the things you want, without having shitty acting, shitty writing, shitty plotting, an incoherent plot, and inscrutable motivations that you need half a dozen youtube videos diving into deleted scenes and scrapped scripts to scrape together.

No. Disappointing. Only the scene with the map is interesting

I barely remember it but it didn't make a lot of sense to me and I don't really know why they called it an alien prequel or sequel or whatever.

At least the aliens were hot.

I have no plans to watch it, but what does it have to with the creatures in Aliens ?

IIRC, that's how they got off their planet to go elsewhere. But I haven't seen it in years.

Thanks, R40. I have seen "Sunshine" and, indeed, it's my sort of sci-fi film. Gattaca is another and a favorite

I loved how the android was just as evil as the aliens.

[quote]Utterly stupid, completely unbelievable as any kind of scientist,

Compared to the brotard jock-doctor boyfriend she wasn’t.

Walter was the best thing about Alien Covenant. David went total psycho which was uncool.

The scene where the Engineer wrestles with the alien is very disturbing. I get the same vibes watching any mammal fighting with a snake or reptile. I think it's genetic.

Did the Engineers wear underwear because of modesty or because of practicality - they needed some support for their huge penis and testicles?

Yes, count me as one who thought the Engineer was hot.

Not the ones from Covenant, though.

Incredibly redundant of every other 👽 film, Covenant is worse.

The part in Covenant when the doctor and the other woman blow up the ship by accident is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. They were so incompetent it made me angry. The writers could have had them be not so inept and still die and get the ship destroyed. They did everything wrong.

And in Prometheus there is a ludicrous scene of Dr. Shaw outrunning a spaceship. Prometheus is available for free viewing on TUBI right now.

R50, this scene is most Dataloungers’ perception of vaginal intercourse.

Prometheus does have a haunted feel. Beautifully photographed. But the opening scene with the DNA and the bubbles was silly. The finale was great.

Guy Pierce’s rubber mask was not very convincing, especially in the early scenes.

Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce are barely in the film. What was the purpose of casting Guy Pearce as a corpse.

The "archive" clips of Guy Pearce made it obvious he was going to make an appearance so yes if course he was the "stowaway" and Charlize's FATHER was the most obvious line of dialogue in the movie.

This article explains a lot of the flaws.

Patrick Wilson was wasted. The Elizabeth Shaw flashbacks just reminded me of Jodie Foster in Contact. BTW Elizabeth Shaw is a chocolate brand in the UK who specialise in mint chocolate.

Wasn’t CGI aging around when Prometheus was made? Guy Pearce’s mask is laughable, like a cheap Halloween costume.

I didn’t see the film in the theater and watched it one day on tv and was mesmerized by the cinematography and loved the engineers. The film is not perfect but it’s beautiful and entertaining.

I haven't come around yet.

The gay couple was almost completely cut out of the Covenant. They made a big deal of it in some of the pre-release publicity but the final movie, it was completely absent.

There are no gays in the future

Prometheus had a great opening scene. I don't think it lived up to that scene, but I did enjoy it. Idris Alba summed it all up very nicely just before he made his exit:This was a military installation and they had to abandon it because it got out of control. Message in that.

Guy Pearce's acting was as wrong as his make up. Rapace is not a very engaging screen presence in any movie she's in. She has RBF.

Her bf had resting bitch face worse than her.

R2 here again.

It's still total shit, but lovely to look at. Idris Elba's accent..? Noomi Rapace's accent, where she's sometimes a Brit and sometimes Scandinavian? And as someone said ^ before, a crew of people - intelligent, science-y people - making the dumbest decisions.

One thing I hadn't noticed before: when we see a close-up of David's finger and a drop of the Evil Virus Liquid of Death, his fingerprint has the corporate 'W' in it. That was pretty cool (but not enough to save the movie from being tripe).

Noomi Rapace was absolutely miscast and absolutely terrible, and I cannot even fathom how anyone can defend her or her performance as anything but awful.

So many things are wrong with the film. The plot is dreadful. The characters are often ridiculous. The casting is curious at best, to be charitable (it would have been better to make the film largely with unknowns and a couple of star names.) The background info inserted to make the viewer "understand" the scope of the narrative is mostly a useless distraction (did Kubrick need to explain his monkey scenes to death? his strange French room?) The archaeology scenes were very poorly over-handled, to give just one example. The old geezer and the evils of greed was similarly over-wrought and over-explained, and, again, why Guy Pearce in a cheesy Six Flags geezer mask? Who allowed the film try to explain the fuck out of everything?

It comes down to a film that has some extraordinarily beautiful and scenes and a lingering, sometimes intense mood of creepy cold and fear, and moments of seeing something that doesn't quite have a shape and is all the more horrifying for it. When it succeeds, it's a gorgeous enveloping thing. For me it's a film I'm happy to have watched for having done a few small things brilliantly and having wasted so many opportunities otherwise. A film that could have been great is always more interesting than a film that did everything moderately well, so I defend it on that basis.

This thread inspired me to download and watch one of the fan cuts that inserts the deleted scenes into the movie. It vastly improves it though it still has many issues.

The audience laughed when the alien/creator ship started to roll. Very unintentionally funny. We were glad to have something to laugh about instead of yawning or smh.

R72 And where did you find that?

“an incredible film”?

OP here. I stand by my remarks with the one exception: the scene where the two scientists are killed by the aliens (because they STUPIDLY considered them cute creatures even though those two specific characters hated the mission) was absurdly ridiculous to watch. I hated those characters.

But I even loved the stupid character played by the woman who played the queen on GoT who got tossed into a moon window.

But that earlier described scene? Cringeworthy.

Theron was excellent in this.

[quote]OP here. I stand by my remarks with the one exception: the scene where the two scientists are killed by the aliens (because they STUPIDLY considered them cute creatures even though those two specific characters hated the mission) was absurdly ridiculous to watch. I hated those characters.

Prometheus followed a team of scientists landing on a remote planet in hopes of discovering the origins of mankind, only to meet their unfriendly makers. It's an ambitious, visually rich sci-fi adventure, but it was let down by dumb characters and bizarre storytelling choices. The movie also cut out some great sequences, many of which would help alleviate some of its issues. For example, one of the most commonly critiqued scenes involved biologist Millburn (Rafe Spall) attempting to pet a very dangerous alien creature, but there were two Prometheus deleted moments building up to this where he first discovered a tiny worm - which he's excited about as it's proof of alien life - and later its shed skin.

They were supposedly high on pot too, to explain their behavior. But... the same guys that were so terrified of a dead body playing "here kitty kitty" with an unknown snake-like creature? PLEASE. Not even THC can explain that.

It's probably been too long since I saw it (only once, at the theater) for me to discuss its details intelligibly, but I was rather put off by its attempt to explain mankind's existence in terms of having been 'created.' It seemed to me to be attempting to restate the premise of the Abrahamic religions in science fiction terms, feeding yet another 'Watchmaker', or teleological argument (and breathing new life into the old one). Tiresome.

Not long after seeing it, I subsequently read that it had been Ridley Scott's intention to postulate Jesus Christ (!) as having been an Engineer, and that in response for mankind having killed him, the Engineers intended sending that shipload of xenomorphs from 'Alien' (1979) to Earth to wipe us out in retaliation. For me, that seriously jumps the shark, and has soured me on the whole franchise. I acknowledge 'Alien' (1979) and 'Aliens' (1986), but have no use for any films in the franchise after those ('Alien III' and 'IV' were crap on their own merits, and I was never interested in the 'Alien/Predator' combinations).

Christianity ruins everything.

Prometheus was like a "very special episode" of Ancient Aliens.

Wow, R79, I had no idea about the religious aspect. But I do agree with a lot of what you say. I enjoyed I II and III, with II being the weakest, but that's where it ended for me. That 4th one was stomach churning. And Winona Ryder? No. the A vs. P franchise was just plain awful. As for Prometheus, I found it visually stunning, and some of my favorite actors, Idris, Charlize, Michael Fassbender were in it, but the story seemed confused, convoluted bullshit. The old Science Fiction monster movies from the 50's had better plotlines. LOL!

R81 here. I meant to say III was the weakest, not II..