Forums > General Chatter > The unexpected Prometheus forum thread at HonestGamers

This is a convenient thread for discussion about the movie Prometheus, a helpful sort of thread that isn’t supposed to be a review feedback topic for an unrelated game.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

Stop calling my bluff.

For us. For them. For you.

Hey, I'm just trying to be helpful!

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

I know that movie got some pretty poor reviews and had all sorts of plot holes, but I did enjoy it and probably will see any sequels.

I can avoid death by not having a life.

It's the movie king of plotholes! It had so many, that even the established plotholes ran for so long as the norm that they, in turn, developed their own plotholes. It's the new horizon in plotholing. It's like it's trying to single handily evolve them into their own stand-alone art form. If a plothole was an underprivileged minority, then Prometheus would be Ida B. Wells. It tirelessly and selflessly forgoes itself to advance the betterment of plotholes in normal society.

Oh god, this is going to happen, isn't it? I'm going to do have to do this rant and Jason has won. Fine. To be continued.

For us. For them. For you.

Prometheus was originally written by a gentleman by the name of Jon Spaihts who you’ve probably never heard of, because he writes critically acclaimed scripts that are then never produced. This is starting to change, and he’s going to sink or swim based off the Black Hole remake he’s doing for Disney, but let’s ignore that for now. Back when Prometheus was being touted as an out and out Alien prequel, it was Spaiht’s script, and the film was written as such. I’m explaining this because so much of the film’s problems stem from the fact that they decided to walk a bizarre line between completely changing the entire underlying structure of the film while also keeping it exactly the fucking same. At some point, they decided to try and distance the film from Aliens while still kinda sorta not doing this at all. To do this, they bought in Damon Lindelof. He’s the gentleman responsible for that Lost finale everyone hated.

This is going to degenerate into a ranty list. I know because that’s how Prometheus rants go for me. It’s a practised subject so I’m going to quickly interject that Lindelof did an awful, awful job – there’s no getting away from that. But he was put in a really unrealistic position and, honestly, there was no way his script was going to come out unscathed. He was then aided by bad direction, wooden acting and piss poor editing that he had no control over. Important scenes that go some ways to explain some of the four million plotholes were left on the cutting room floor (if you believe the conspiracies, to sell blu ray editions of the film to people who had already bought cinema tickets) while others where left over from the original script as was with no transition work. And some of it, dear reader, was just plain shit.

Christ, where to start.

So, the film opens up with the Engineer alien eating black goo and becoming water dissolvable. Honestly, though this bit is peg marked as a big plothole, I got that it was supposed to be how the primordial soup deal that kickstarted life on Earth came about, and I begrudgingly appreciate the lack of condescending hand holding. To the shock of none, this was made clear(er) with a deleted scene that was still pretty non-invasive. I mean, yeah, sure, that would mean that their DNA would be in, you know, everything and not just in humans. And it’s not. Like, at all. But let’s skip over that one. It’s a minor misstep in comparison. For instance…

Do I treat myself and tangent to black goo rant here? I think I will.

That black goo, eh? What a wonderfully convenient plot device that is. Why, it has all kinds of miraculous properties that don’t share any common link or similarities to each other at all! It turns buff albino aliens into the Wicked Witches from Oz (water.. melting… it works!), if worms get covered in it, they turn into pale vagina cobras (oh, I’ll get back to you later!), if the world’s most emo scientist ingests it, he impregnates infertile females with Cthulhu’s bastard son and if hard rocking stoner geologists get their face covered in it, they turn into ninja zombies with a DLC of suck.

Am I getting ahead of myself? I’m getting ahead of myself.

Before the goo, the film lets us meet the cast, each as underwritten and poorly characterised as the last, who have, to a man, thrown away over two years of their life to travel to an alien planet for reasons that aren’t explained to them until the second they get there. This is finally explained by grumpy Charlize Theron once she finishes waking up from cyro sleep and not being Sigourney Weaver in her pants and, in the dumbest casting choice yet, Guy Pearce made to look 108. Look, I love Pearce, the guy’s done some awesome stuff, but is there any reason not to just, you know, cast an older guy then old him up a bit more? Also, here’s a freebie protip: if you want a character you’re trying to sell as a cameo make a surprise appearance later in the film as a pivotal character, don’t advertise that character as being played by a marquee actor. Pearce is known for solid cameo work (Please see: Hurt Locker, The or Road, The) so it could have worked had he not been given the third ranking star spot beneath Roomi and Fassbender. In this part of the film, he’s a hologram recording addressing a room of employees. Despite the fact that he’s a pre-recorded message filmed in a wildly different location, he knows exactly where to look when addressing everyone. In fact, why tell everyone you’re dead if you’re planning to saunter out and meet everyone at some point anyway? Why is he being Theron’s father treated like a plot twist when it achieves exactly nothing at all? Noting about the character makes sense or ties up with anything. It’s not alone.

Idris Elbra, ladies and gentleman, is a very, very good actor. He’s won awards and such, so it must be true, but his portrayal of a starship captain is a depressingly joke. See, the film wants you to believe that he’s a bit of a maverick, a bit of a light-hearted whimsical rebel but they put this across as lazily as they can. Important ship-wide meeting? No time! Got to decorate a Christmas tree because…. Wait, what? Can’t get a mission statement because he’s hungry; can’t spend time worrying about lost crew because he’s got an accordion to play and Theron to randomly plough. That last bit deserves more mocking, but no time! Captain Elbra decides to land the ship on an alien planet, but only asks about the potentially fatal atmosphere conditions once he has started entering the potentially fatal atmosphere conditions. He has the magical ability to predict exactly how long a storm will last, but it unable to detect it on his science ship until it is right on top of him. He throws his life away in a moment of uncharacteristic heroics based on one static-filled chat with someone who has been exhibiting all the signs of extreme insanity for the last few hours.

Here’s something to keep in mind – everyone in this film is supposed to be a genius scientist who is the best in their field. That is why a huge corporation has hired them for this super-secret important several year mission. But every single one of them is a moron and an absolute dick. There’s barely a shred of professionalism among them. There’s a geologist who smokes pot through his helmet and has these cool floating orbs that map out cave interiors. These sound fantastic; you should totally use them to map out huge underground caverns before you explore them – that would save so much time and make things so much safer…. No? Not going to do that? Going to do all that as you explore the cave yourself making it more or less obsolete? Well, okay. At least if you splinter away from the group, you have a cool 3D map and you’ll never get lost. Even if you get panicked by a fucking corpse and flee in terror. I’ve just caught up with myself – you’re totally going to get lost aren’t you?

Here’s a bit of script explanation. In the original script, the two redjacket guys get spooked by an Engineer hologram recording that shows them running away in terror from an unknown threat that’s still in the film and is still incredibly spooky. But, nah; that shit’s cool. It’s that corpse. That’s been dead for centuries. That should be the scientific find of a generation. That they should be super stoked about. That will make them historic figures in the fields. No? None of that? Just unexplainably horrifying? Okay.

Woah, back up a sec. Did I mention that they all randomly take off their space helmets because one of them thinks the air is probably breathable? Even if it is and they survive the very real chance of their faces imploding, those helmets act as filters for all kinds of alien virus and bacteria which will kill you dead. Did they not read War of the Worlds? Cold kills the Martians. And they’re on a planet which is literally used as a space-age nuclear weapon arms dump dripping with bio-chemical weapons. This is basic realism sodomy that can shatter your suspension of disbelief effortlessly.

So, the redjackets run off. They are established as cowards. They get lost. One of them is the guy who is running the mapping orbs, but they get lost because…. Yeah, they just get lost. They go into a chamber that has what seems to be a thinner facehugger-type snake which can adequately be described as nightmare fuel. It’s bloody terrifying. The already-established coward who wets his pants at the sight of a harmless corpse then starts trying to dry-hump it while cooing at it like it a fucking kitten. They die. Of course they die; the script degenerates into nonsense to splinter them away from the group for no reason, get them lost despite being the people specifically hired to not get them lost, then have their character’s shoddily rewritten to have them ignore blatant, blatant, peril. How did this pass any kind of quality control? It’s so mind-blowingly amateurish and dumb. As a quick aside, when one of them comes back as a ninja zombie, it was edited out of its original place in the script, which explains why so many key characters that should have been around were not. Why? No one knows. Seriously. No one.

The surviving cast find alien shits that points towards there being aliens on this alien world filled with alien stuff. As such, they don’t really care for their missing colleagues, check any of the future gizmos they’re loaded down with and all, instead, get busy getting driven into the ground. We’ve dealt with poor Idris’ level of suck, so let’s have a little scroll through the rest. Lead male scientist has a name, but demands so little attention no one in the world knows it. He’s been the driving force behind the mission for years and now he’s found undeniable proof all his theories were correct and his life work has been validated, he immediately – immediately – goes super emo and spends the rest of the trip getting drunk and being curtish. Know what would teach him a lesson? Poisoning him with black goo. Yes, friends, black goo – for all your lazy plot contrivance needs, just add black goo.

So, there’s this android called David played by Fassbender who effortlessly knocks that shit out of the park. And, while I get that androids are dicks in Aliens canon (aside from Bishop. Never you, Bishop), David is the biggest dick of them all. He has exactly no reason to poison the guy. He’s on a ship expressly set out for exactly this kind of experiment where he can safely replicate whatever randomly reaction that day’s writer decided the black goo would have on human tissue. Instead he thoughtlessly endangers everyone and contaminates a key expedition member for, essentially, kicks and giggles. There’s no good explanation for this. Believe me, I’ve heard a lot and none of them work.

So, being a biochemical hazard and reeking of fresh tears, failure and whisky obviously make you desirable to women, and he bangs his infertile girlfriend who is instantly impregnated. Then he’s burnt alive with a flamethrower. Because….. yeah, because it’s a thing now, I guess. So, she knocks out various colleagues in order to get to the magical medical McGuffin to perform an ad hoc caesarean who never mention again that she smashed them over the head with a blunt object and hi-jacked a medical coffin that specifically built only to deal with males just to provide an excuse to make the caesarean extra specially painful. She later goes on a mission with these people, in obvious pain, and they make no reference to it or seem the least bit annoyed that she tried to cave their skulls in. From her womb she pulls some kind of gross squid thing, which she makes no attempt to kill or report or report to be killed. She just leaves it there and wanders off to spend the rest of the film holding her stomach in pain when forced to stand, but still being able to jump off shit, or repel down sheer drops, or run the hell away without complaint. Until she stops for a bit and then, ow, ouch, my tummy is in terrible pain! It’s at this part of the film that every awkward and poorly thought out plothole meets and try to cannibalise each other in what can only be described as an epic battle royal of stupidity.

In my awesomely non liner fashion a lot of this has already been covered. Dead Pearce is not actually dead and is Theron’s father prompting the questions whit bother telling everyone he’s dead, and why should we care if he’s Theron’s father. He then wanders into the Alien cave to find a live Engineer in a status tube and demand he be cured from being old Guy Pearce. Instead, the Engineer flips the fuck out at how bad the script is and rages around killing everyone. He tries to fly off in a ship, and this would make 100% sense as this is planetLV213. What’s that? That’s not LV417 which is the planet in Alien? Why, hello fellow nerd – you’re right. But, hey, a crashed ship has to show up somewhere, somehow on that planet, right? And maybe he was in status because he’s been alien’d. And maybe he’s so pissed because he’s been un-statused while alien’d. That’d make sense, so that’s exactly what doesn’t happen. At all.

Elbra kamikazes’ that fucker down and it lands back on the planet in just a way that it starts rolling on its side because it’s handily coin shaped. The two remaining character then start running away from this ting as it rolls after them when taking a few sidesteps to the left or right would see it roll straight past them. I cannot put into words how stupid this is – it kills Theron who’s portrayed throughout the film as more or less the only person with any common sense. Noomi only manages to survive because while running away from the stupidly rolling ship that ignores even the most basic laws of physics, she falls over and rolls of to the side. Clumsiness saves her.

Noomi’s all that’s left, and she decides to head back to the ship where the Engineer has gone to wait for her despite the only explanation of him getting there so fast is to teleport like Nightstalker. Here, squidbaby makes his appearance except he ain’t no baby no more. He has, in fact, grown about twenty times his previous size and is now a giant squid monster that attacks and impregnates Engineer. Noomi wanders off, and fan service is offered when an approximation of Grigor’s alien bursts from the dead Engineer’s chest. Raising the question of how the hell the Engineers have pictures of a queen alien already is the species have yet to actually exist.

Did I miss anything? Yes, actually, tons. But that’s enough, right? I’d hoped to find an old post or something that I’d written previously, found nothing and did all that from memory. I refuse to watch the film again to add anything else. Refuse!

For us. For them. For you.

Wow. That just sounds ridiculous. I still want to watch it, though. :/ Even if it is disappointing. I honestly have no idea where I heard it was good, but oh well.

Also, aside from Theron, I haven't even heard of any of those actors. At least to the best of my knowledge.

[Eating EmP's brain] probably isn't a good idea. I mean... He's British, which means his brain's wired for PAL and your eyes are NTSC. - Will

EmP, I just wanted you to know, I only read about a third of that post.

I can avoid death by not having a life.

And thus the reasons I had for trying not to write this (TWICE!) become clear.

For us. For them. For you.

But I read it all, so that, like, totally nullifies Jerec's post.

[Eating EmP's brain] probably isn't a good idea. I mean... He's British, which means his brain's wired for PAL and your eyes are NTSC. - Will

Nullify this!

I can avoid death by not having a life.

!siht yfilluN

There, successfully nullified.

Your girlfriend's name ends in .jpg

OMG, Emp... let's call this, Ultimate tl;dr Alpha.

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

Oh my god, I just read through this thread. EmP's analysis of this film is pure gold, hurried spelling errors n' all. Prometheus is a hot pile of garbage, and yes, EmP did not even scratch the surface of all the problems inherent with it. It was basically a montage of random horrific events and imagery stitched together by the thinnest threads possible.

My biggest problem laid was the fact that none of the characters - none of them - Acted like actual humans with motivations that made sense. It was like it was written by robots.

And what was with the overlying theme of "wanting to kill your parents"? Did you notice that? You probably did. Were we, as the audience, supposed to relate to this somehow?

Sorry to be a thread necromancer, but this was just a hilarious and entertaining read.

placid like acid

Almost six years later I don't remember anything about this movie.

I can avoid death by not having a life.

And that is because it sucks.

placid like acid

It might have found some redemption in the Alien film that followed it, but that was awful, too! There's nowhere to hide for Prometheus.

Special props to everyone who read all that. That's... a lot of words. And as Nightfire says, it's not even half of it!

For us. For them. For you.