prometheiomimus

[Endless Mike]

Spoiler:

I read about a plot-hole in the snarky review that was posted on Boing Boing, and although I don't usually think it's important to nitpick this stuff I thought this one was worth mentioning. The geologist and his pal who go wondering off alone? We don't know they got lost until everyone gets back to Prometheus. But the truck is gone. Like, the team gets outside the Structure and there's no truck, so you're like "Well they took it". And they have to take the quad-bikes back as they escape the storm. But then the truck is gone and we don't know who took it. It's like there was a significant rewrite and not everyone got the new script. Just, the "big ideas" aside, this was a seriously lazy movie. Avatar looks fucking watertight in comparison.

Spoiler:

Maybe I'm remembering wrong but I'm fairly sure the quad bikes were following the truck when they were outrunning the storm. I assumed the people who took the bikes were just a bit slower than the rest of the team that had left a little bit earlier. The truck wasn't really that far ahead of them.

Spoiler:

They took two trucks and two quads. When they got outside, there was one truck and two quads. So yeah, pretty big hole there.

Can we make a spoiler-zone discussion thread so we don't have to keep opening spoilers?

[Pez Dispens3r]

Can we make a spoiler-zone discussion thread so we don't have to keep opening spoilers?

Spoiler:

I don't know.

Spoiler:

Can we?

[Arrian]

Spoiler:

The other being, Aren't They Recording Shit? So you leave a couple of your people hanging to go get laid, alright, movie trope, I get it. But then, when you come back and start trying to get in touch with your erstwhile guys, why don't you just rewind the veritable tape to get to the screaming and dying part? Why on earth would you simply say "Well, I got no signal, so everything must be hunkey dorey!" You may need that ignorance to move the story along, but if you want to do that, at least cause them to lose complete communication earlier.

Spoiler:

Losing comms was completely expected because of the storm. He had no way of knowing that the comms were down for any other reason so there was nothing suspicious in it, why would he investigate what seems to be nothing?

Spoiler:

Yeah, now that I think about it, I think they mentioned spotty comms during the storm. But, having a scene where the captain is talking to the guys on the ground immediately followed by a scene of him making a booty call, is at best sloppy story telling. I didn't catch any reference to the comms being out at the beginning of the booty call scene, and spotty != completely gone. They could have made that point much better and not left me wondering why he didn't just hit rewind, by adding something as simple as "comms are still out" or "comms have been out since last night" the next morning, or any time in between. It's one of those things that bugged me, my suspension of disbelief can survive horribad science, but lack of common sense, especially by a grounded character, jumps out at me as sloppy story telling.

re Ridley Scott's explanations of the backstory:

Spoiler:

The whole "black goo as death ritual" and "humans killed Jesus who was an engineer so they're gonna wipe us out" thing just doesn't hold water for me.

If your death ritual requires Every Single Dying Person to calmly accept their death or spawn planet-killing-acid-veined-horror-monsters, you've either got a species where the most excitable person makes Buddha look like a crack head, or you've got a civilization that isn't going to last long... at all.

Secondly, if your death ritual has been going well for dozens of millennia, but ONE person throws it off, I can't think of a less likely person than Jesus. Seriously, Jesus had so many chances to get out of execution that he actively avoided, and then the whole "Father forgive them for they know not what they do thing," he certainly didn't act like someone in a situation where he couldn't calmly accept their death, especially given the previous point.

Yes, it's your world to build, but if you want to bring me into it and entertain me with it, try not to make it completely nonsensical. (Unless you're trying to create a farce like Alice in Wonderland or Xanth.)

By the way, has anyone read any of Fred Saberhagen's "Berserker" stories? I'm getting that kind of vibe, both with Prometheus and Skyline last year. Only, where technology in the 70s and 80s meant giant metal machines run amok, technology in the 'oughts would be bio-engineering run amok. It might just by my specific reading background, but the whole "society creates a super weapon which then goes bad and destroys it's creators and goes on to spread havoc throughout the universe" traces back to Saberhagen's Berserkers for me. That jumped out as a possible back story for Skyline, and really seems to be the back story for the Alien/Prometheus world.

[Izawwlgood]

Sacrifice:

Spoiler:

I don't think we're supposed to think about it logically. I mean that seriously; we're not supposed to consider how a civilization of self-sacrificers would work, or how a weapons planet would be eradicated but maintain biomatter for 2000 years, etc, etc. We're supposed to think of the tale as an allegory, as everything as metaphor. The singular Engineer sacrificing himself in the beginning isn't what EVERY Engineer does on command, it's the embodiment of an ideal they hold dear. When Charleze Theron says to her father, "A king has his reign and then he dies, blahblahblah", she's reminding him and the audience of this mortal cycle that the Engineers hold as sacrosanct.

Or, purportedly do anyway, because they sent us Space Jesus who is really the embodiment of immortality, physically and spiritually, and have superior hypersleep technology, which is again, the physical manifestation of longevity. I dunno, it seems like Scott had a couple ideas he wanted to play with and threw them all into the film without considering how they actually fit or how to actually execute them

[Pez Dispens3r]

Spoiler:

On Jesus, I agree that it doesn't make sense. We have figures from myths going back a lot longer than 2000 ya that closely resemble Christ. If we did kill an alien, it's a massive coincidence that he would just happen to be the one Western audiences would most easily recognize. And, fuck, is not like dating techniques are even that precise where you could just say, "This alien appears to have been dead for between two and eight thousand years: we'll have to run this in the lab to get a better estimate".

In terms of hard philosophy, history and science, I think we could safely retitle this film YAWNFEST 2012. In terms of cinema-craft, of course, it's fuckoff gorgeous.

[eSOANEM]

Spoiler:

Yeah, now that I think about it, I think they mentioned spotty comms during the storm. But, having a scene where the captain is talking to the guys on the ground immediately followed by a scene of him making a booty call, is at best sloppy story telling. I didn't catch any reference to the comms being out at the beginning of the booty call scene, and spotty != completely gone. They could have made that point much better and not left me wondering why he didn't just hit rewind, by adding something as simple as "comms are still out" or "comms have been out since last night" the next morning, or any time in between. It's one of those things that bugged me, my suspension of disbelief can survive horribad science, but lack of common sense, especially by a grounded character, jumps out at me as sloppy story telling.

Spoiler:

They specifically said something about how the comms were likely to go down.

Then, Charlize Theron turns up on the bridge and the captain's all "you want to bang".

Then booty call.

The booty call did not immediately follow him talking to the guys on the ground and the spotty comms didn't need to be mentioned at the start of the scene because it had already been established as something which will probably happen at some point due to the storm; mentioning it again would have been patronising storytelling.

The next morning, cap wakes up to no comms/signal so he assumes the storm messed it up. This wasn't explicitly mentioned because really when you think about it, the default assumption for a grounded character like the captain should be that something ordinary has gone wrong rather than "one of them got attacked by a penis-vagina snake and the other one fell in a pool of ancient alien bioweapon" and having him assume something weird's going on would be repeating the hackneyed horror trope and that would have been the lazy storytelling

[folkhero]

Spoiler:

As far as the black goo changing due to psychic energies, it seems infinitely more probably to me that the black goo at the beginning and the black goo the crew interacts with aren't the same substance. Similar tech perhaps, but created for entirely different purposes. If you see a character in a movie use a white powder as an ingredient in life sustaining bread, and then another character uses a white powder to poison someone, do you assume that the two powders are the same, but with different psychic energies?

My pet theory for the engineers is that there were two separate regimes or worldviews. The optimistic/reckless regime that spread life across the galaxy. We can speculate on their motivation: hubris to be like gods and create life, genetic colonialism, scientific curiosity, a moral belief that living worlds are better than dead ones. Mush later their is a change of regime or perspective and the pessimists take over. They believe it's much to dangerous to have panoply of life out there that is potentially dangerous and that has signposts leading right to you. Perhaps they have very good reason to believe this as one of their other creations has returned only to declare a war on their creators. So the engineers transform the moon that was the hub of the seeding effort into a weapons center to destroy all the life that they created. After all, if the moon was the seeding center it would already have the cartographic and logistical infrastructure to get ships to all the seeded planets. Then, of course things go wrong and their bio-weapons break loose against them. Maybe some remnants of the optimists attacked them damaging the surprisingly fragile containment systems for their weapons.

As far as general plot holes: one of the writers was Damon Lindelof of Lost fame, I feel like sometimes he prefers open questions that keep people talking to a a tight satisfying plot. Which would be OK, except that a lot of times those open questions verge on being outright plot holes.

[Izawwlgood]

Spoiler:

I think it's funny that you take issue with speculating that the black goo which induces harsh biological change vaguely in line with the mindset of the individual is the same throughout the movie, but have no problem speculating that there were actually two distinct engineer societies...

[folkhero]

Or just one society going through a change.

Spoiler:

Mostly I just hate the sci-fi trope of a futuristic/alien substance that magically does whatever the plot needs it to do at the moment. So I'm going with an interpretation that makes the most sense to me and isn't annoying.

[Belial]

Spoiler:

Personally, I also took folkhero's theory, because I'm sick of science fiction constantly doing the "one species, one culture" thing.

Gee, why did this one human help me, and this other human is trying to kill me? Have I done something to anger *all of humanity*? or is it possible that one of them is a buddhist missionary and the other is a spanish conquistador? Man, I bet it's that first one.

[Izawwlgood]

Spoiler:

I don't think the notion that Engineers have different competing cultures is entirely unreasonable, it's just based on nothing in the film. Based on what Scott had to say about the black goo, and what was present in the film, assuming that it is some kind of 'psychic manifester' isn't unreasonable.

Although that said, the Engineer that got it's head cut off seemed to be chasing two others, so, maybe it was an evil engy, and getting infected with the goo made it violent?

[Pez Dispens3r]

Spoiler:

I'm with Izzy. I want to believe the filmmakers wanted to avoid the tropes of monoculture aliens and science-tastic liquid plot-device, but I think they were just lazy or didn't care.

[AvatarIII]

Spoiler:

I don't think the notion that Engineers have different competing cultures is entirely unreasonable, it's just based on nothing in the film. Based on what Scott had to say about the black goo, and what was present in the film, assuming that it is some kind of 'psychic manifester' isn't unreasonable.

Although that said, the Engineer that got it's head cut off seemed to be chasing two others, so, maybe it was an evil engy, and getting infected with the goo made it violent?

Spoiler:

being infected by the goo would possibly explain why it exploded too
I think the competing cultures could easily be taken from the film by having robe wearing egg flying self sacrificial creator engineers, and biomechanical suit wearing, horseshoe flying, WMD manufacturer engineers. Although having said that, there being 2 cultures or their culture having changed over billions of years are equally valid assumptions going by what is seen in the movie.

[ShootTheChicken]

Spoiler:

Who the fuck starts their computer with a flute?

Someone explain the holograms.

EDIT: And the remarkable structural integrity of the alien ship. Prometheus can ground it by crashing in to it, but none of it breaks upon contact with the ground? Noomi Rapace certainly picked a good small rock to lie next to to avoid death by spaceship.

[ShootTheChicken]

Also,

Spoiler:

The two scientists who get spooked and run off? One of them is the guy who's mapping the entire site, and he has a readout on his wrist. How did they get lost? All the communications between the scientists were monitored from the ship, so presumably someone on board heard them say "we're gonna gtfo", but then didn't help guide them back to the ship? Even when the two guys realized they were lost, they never radioed the ship to ask for help getting back? It's only once everyone else is pretty much aboard Prometheus the captain brings it up? The whole script reeks of poorly-justified convenience for the screenwriter.

EDIT: Also,

Spoiler:

The engineers DNA is 100% identical to human DNA... IANAB, but shouldn't that mean they look exactly like humans? And isn't that less engineering and more colonizing?

[cephalopod9]

I like how many times they used the word "contamination" without any apparent understanding of what the word means.

I can't really see being angry at the film's logic, or "science". It so very much did not care.

Spoiler:

In the first 2 minutes you have air-bubbles forming on DNA strands. Bubbles. On a single molecule.

Even on really basic levels, there was a lot of illogic and nonsense.

Like David and Vickers looked alike. Enough so that it looked like foreshadowing that Vickers calls Weyland "Father"
But David bleaches his hair.
And he's a robot.
He doesn't need to breathe, but apparently has roots that need touching up.

The Xenomorphs as manufactured weapons kind of worked for me. Like the bizarre mutations, and the weird infection progress, It's like the process of learning to use human DNA to...
Who am I kidding? No one in any connection has any understanding of DNA.
She used a microscope to laser the DNA strand
and then the computer beeps put it together with the other DNA

It's kind of like pieces of 5 or 6 unrelated short stories stuck together in a confusing mosaic.

Although, to be honest, I don't think I found Alien all that cerebral or sophisticated in its handling of its subject matter.

[Angua]

Can someone tell me where they are getting some of the back story for this movie from? I just watched it, and thought it was terrible and didn't explain anything. So how (I've got these from reading the thread) do we know:

Spoiler:

that the Engineer at the beginning was anything more than the test subject for the first black goo bio weapon.

That Jesus was apparently an engineer and the reason they want to kill us.

That the engineer's believed in self sacrifice otherwise they'd turn into black goo things.

Personally, I found the whole movie terrible. Maybe it's because I wasn't invested in the alien franchise, but a lot of the characters seemed to be holding the idiot ball at many points.

Also, this bit from a supposed 'scientist' at the beginning really didn't put me in a great frame of mind for the rest of it

Spoiler:

'What evidence do you have to go against the last 300 years of Darwinism'

'I don't have any, that's what I choose to believe'

Seriously - they could have easily been unrelated aliens that just came to talk to us. I don't see why they jumped to 'these are so obviously our creators'

[D.B.]

Most of those theories come from here. It's not a long read, so it's probably better just linking it rather than me trying to summarise it and getting things wrong. The author even links to other people who disagree with them (for good reason) at the bottom of the webpage, which is nice and even handed.

[Izawwlgood]

Basically, Angua, I feel 'just because' is the answer to everything you asked. Including 'why did this movie suck so much?'

[Angua]

Thanks. It would be nice if these things were more explicit in the movie itself though

[quantumcat42]

Basically, Angua, I feel 'just because' is the answer to everything you asked. Including 'why did this movie suck so much?'

Relevant.

[SurgicalSteel]

Personally, I found the whole movie terrible. Maybe it's because I wasn't invested in the alien franchise

No, that's not it. It really just isn't a very good movie. Which hurts even more if you are invested in the Alien franchise.

[Tyndmyr]

Bottom line... worth watching once?

No. Good cinematography, but absolutely crap for plot, coherency, or anything else. If you occasionally like looking at pretty pictures, better slideshows exist for free online.

*mild spoilers ahead, if this movie can actually be spoiled*

No lead-up for anything. There isn't any groundwork, foreshadowing, or any of those other standard storytelling devices. You just get people saying or screaming things for no reason.

Things don't go anywhere. That whole religion motif? Entirely pointless. The sibling rivalry? Also pretty pointless.

Magic black goo. There's no consistent rationale for the stuff whatsoever. It literally goes from a lethal toxin to creating all life on earth in about a second. It also apparently makes things change or...stuff. Zombies. Alien babies. I have no idea. Regardless, everything plot related is the fault of the black goo that never has the same effect twice.

The initial premise is stupid. It's needlessly complex to go to every civilization on earth and teach them about the planet in order to get us to go there a few thousand years later. I'd forgive this if it were only a brief illogical premise to get things started, but they revisit it occasionally, even though nothing whatsoever is gained from it.

Everyone acts insane. All the time. Seriously, a biologist goes from running and screaming at shadows to petting a huge, fanged penis-monster in about two seconds. The protagonist punches out the crew to get into the med-pod, then, a couple of minutes later, she joins an expedition to the place of obvious badness she was JUST saying they were wrong to go to. The expedition has some of the people she JUST punched out on it. They're all suddenly amnesiacs, apparently.

The whole Ridley Scott "it's not a prequel" thing is kind of subverted by the alien at the end. It's kind of obviously intended to be the beginning of the Alien series, which just makes all the incongruousness frustrating.

Spoiler:

No telemetry != flatline. Lack of signal is going to read 'NO SIGNAL' not 'Dead because there's a motherfucking alien in his esophagus'

Spoiler:

1. Depends on the system. The simplest system for transmitting a heart beat would not distinguish between no signal and no heartbeat.

2. Did we see the telemetry giving a flatline? As I've said before, it's a common trope for signals to mysteriously stop shortly after people die.

This is actually solidly established from Aliens. The type of readout is clearly a reference to that movie, and thus, we know the expected behavior of the readout when people die. There's no trouble in that movie establishing death at a distance due to signal.

In addition, the livejournal interpretation is seriously lacking in some respects. We caused the cataclysm on the alien world? How? Did we have space travel then? Did it magically just happen? I'll grant that there's some symbolism in the movie, but symbolism is not an acceptable substitute for a plot where things make sense.