...and to think today you just have fangs
Rob Engh
BC, Canada
While I have to admit... nothing in the movie made sense, and it didn't look like the screenwriter had even heard of Alien. That being said, the visuals were awesome, the acting was good, and I kind of loved it!
I train to be better than I was yesterday. -F2S
I lost it at: "I was just chilling and playing with my accordion (no a real accordion, get your mind out of the gutter)"Originally Posted by peterb
Those two links make the case more eloquently than I can. This especially cracked me up in the YouTube link:
This was a visually stunning movie with one of the worst plots I can recall sitting through in a long time.A film with so much CGI, the visual effects department forgot to change anyone's heart rate.
I understand that movies can't have every character making perfect decisions at all times, but I have a problem when 90% of the characters are making obviously horrible decisions 90% of the time. Forget about the larger philosophical questions the film tried to give lip-service to; just the basic, fundamental plot devices made no sense whatsoever.
There were just way too many things for me to put aside or rationalize if I was going to think anything positive about this story. Every "answer" that came up in the movie only created 100 more questions. Even (the few) parts of the plot that tried to maintain a cohesive narrative ended up building a wacky tautology.
The endless errors of science might have been tolerable had the film presented itself more as a fantasy piece than Sci-Fi, but if you're going to make a Sci-Fi movie, it helps to pay attention to the Sci part. These errors were all the more frustrating because they were specifically presented to us under the guise of fascinating scientific discoveries [in the fictional world, I know]. For example, the entire DNA thing: give me a f'n break.
And I wish they had just avoided calling it a prequel. It wasn't. The last few seconds of the film were so unnecessarily tacked-on that I felt insulted.
But it was very beautiful to watch, and I can't complain about the acting. So there's that.
To echo what many have stated, the "science" element was sorely lacking. IMO, the last good sci-fi movie was Inception, before that, District 9. Not much else that I can think of within the last couple of years that was any good in the sci-fi department (though I have yet to watch Moon). I had high hopes for the movie, and while it wasn't all that bad overal (good acting, decent visuals), the incredible amount of suspension of disbelief involved, coupled with the largely nonsensical plot, made the movie rather mediocre overall.
If anything, the impetus for the expedition made little sense to begin with; I mean, what has happened time and again when a more advanced culture runs into a more primitive one? Yes, scientists have done a lot of dumb stuff before (as Ian Malcolm said before, they are often "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"), but the mistakes made here aren't just from hubris, but from sheer idiocy.
I rented it last night with extremely low expectations based on the discussion here.
You guys must go to a different cinema than me, because I didn't see it as any more silly than other movies of the genre (or most other genres either). Maybe it's because I grew up watching James Bond and Star Trek where the plot would never move forward if everything was done intelligently. But some of the criticisms, like the helmet coming off, I just don't get. I mean, their magical air quality index machine said the air was OK. So they took their helmets off. Doesn't that happen, like, in every single sci fi movie just about? Actors don't want to be on screen inside helmets. Didn't The Abyss spend a fortune developing those full face masks for their underwater scenes specifically because of that?
Sure the science has holes in it. Um, they went from Earth to some star system far enough away that it's not visible to the naked eye in less than three years. The evil creature monster has acid for blood. It requires a host animal to procreate but annihilates every living thing it finds rather than achieving equilibrium, thereby all but destroying its own chance for long term species survival. If you can suspend belief for all that, why not believe someone could make a goo that breaks down your body into component DNA molecules and "seeds" a planet?
It wasn't a great movie. But I didn't think it was as off-plot from the Alien franchise nor any more ridiculous in terms of rational behavior from actors as most action/scifi/horror type movies.
I think this is kinda where I am on it. I accept that it is unrealistic and silly and enjoy it as a cheesy sci fi movie that over did the Christian symbolism. I enjoyed watching it and when it got silly, I had some mystery science theater 3000 moments, which are fun as well.
Evil requires the sanction of the victim. - Ayn Rand
I wouldn't know, 'cause I don't watch that many sci-fi movies (largely because there's so little good hard sci-fi in cinema). But, taking off the helmet ain't hard to explain; they could have simply also added the fact that "also, the magical machine reads that the air is complete sterile and contains no lifeforms of any kind". But they didn't, so that they could have another throwaway line, the idea that maybe there were airborne pathogens that caused that dude to get sick (which they could just explain away as "maybe the machine missed something, and there were pathogens anyways").
Well, evil monster was never intended for long term survival; if anything, that would have been terrible for the Engineers, no? They wanted to destroy all life on the planets they targeted so they could use the planets themselves, and having the bioweapons self-destruct after cleansing a place of life makes clean-up a lot easier for them, right?
I guess that's my cue to not ever watch any of the Alien movies, eh.
But they don't. They essentially hibernate in little sacks until the next life form pokes them. They don't just destroy life, they create a system by which repopulation is violently challenged. I suppose that's arguably a valid tactic in terms of planetary scale warfare if you're concerned small pockets of survivors could rise up again in the future. From the standpoint of being able to reclaim the resources of the conquered planet, however, it's suicidal.
The little flies being used to help control fire ant populations use the ants as an incubator, too. If the flies wiped out the ants altogether and then went dormant until new ants appeared, that would be brilliant. But if instead the flies begin using every other living creature they contact as incubators, not so brilliant.
I dunno; I had assumed that the black goo stuff was still virulent because they had been in the containers still, and that if exposed to the environment, would eventually render itself harmless. Thus, after bombardment of a planet with said goo, all lifeforms would eventually kill each other off, while the goo itself becomes inert.
If anything, I think the underlying issue is that I was expecting a movie beyond a big, dumb spectacle movie. Going into, say, Alien vs. Predator, I know not to expect much in terms of intelligent characters; however, Prometheus seemed to have tried to bill itself as something grand and though provoking... and it didn't live up to the latter. Hence my disappointment, particularly since it did pull of the "grand" part relatively well, IMO. I suspect that some of the more critical board members had the same kind of unfulfilled expectation.
Last edited by Default.mp3; 10-12-2012 at 06:34 PM.
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