Hacker Cinema
Prometheus
2012 · Film · 124 min
Part of Prometheus Collection
Directed by Ridley Scott
A team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.
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Good stuff is hiding in https://github.com/Achint08/90210/blob/main/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-05-09-screenplay-to-movie-design.md
Challenge for HN (I'm going to bed): would be fun to test with a well known script, http://www.script-o-rama.com/ (no TLS, you'll get a warning) has a bunch. Opening scene of Prometheus would be fun. Will cost you about 250 bucks for best quality, see https://github.com/Achint08/90210/blob/main/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-05-09-screenplay-to-movie-design.md#15-cost--latency-model-calculated
just because it's an article about techie stuff doesn't mean all the photojournalism has to be color-graded like a Matrix movie.
.. but it's kind of funny to read the fluff PR about saving humanity while juxtaposing it against photos that look like they may as well be screencaps from Prometheus or Black Mirror.
see : two startled victims under a blue arctic sun - https://media.wired.com/photos/69f11cbf1b1015e12f65d23e/master/w_1600,c_limit/20260320-wired-eka-robotics-1198.jpg
I am starting to consider wearing one of those transparent space suit helmets with led lights inside ala prometheus movie. With gas mask grade air filtration considering influenza and people starting to burn their trash cause of inflation
Alien and Aliens were masterpieces, but I've been consistently disappointed by everything after.
Let's agree to ignore the awful VS Predator crossovers for a second. I'm not sure they are canon anyway, and they are obviously cash grabs and not made with the same care of even the worst Alien movies.
Alien 3, while it has a cool idea (prison planet), is a mess as a result of executive meddling (the story can be read online). And they killed Hicks and Newt... bastards!
Resurrection was awful and awfully badly acted. I like Jeunet, but this was a hard miss. It has some cool visuals at times, typical of Jeunet, but the movie itself was embarrassing.
Prometheus was atrocious. Badly acted, badly scripted (characters making the dumbest of choices at every turn, professionals who don't know their profession -- xenobiologists who pet alien snakes, geologists who get lots at the first turn -- this has been discussed countless times). And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works. Aided by technology, Scott "pulled a George Lucas" and forgot the cardinal rule of scifi horror/mystery: less is more.
After this, I exercised the good sense of avoiding Covenant (the plot summary seems bad), and Romulus, and now the new TV show.
I think overall the gravest sin is that the Alien universe was meant to be sketched in the broadest strokes, and details and mystery kept, not overexplained.
I wish they had let the first two awesome movies rest in peace.
Extended universes suck.
P.S. same applies to Blade Runner. Then again, I didn't even like the sequel, so I'm sure I'll dislike the upcoming show :(
Cameron doubled down on the aesthetic in Aliens, he just changed the genre from horror to action. Both films were "peak 80s" (Alien was '79) and just ooze with what must be the absolute pinnacle of science fiction vibes.
If you haven't seen these two films, you need to fix that this week. It'll change your life.
Scott tried to expand the aesthetics with Prometheus and Covenant. I felt the films did a great job of refreshing the look and feel while remaining faithful to the 80's. Unfortunately, the writing was trite and Scott's directing is averaging .200 at bat these days.
Romulus was not bad, though certainly not a masterpiece. At least it was better written and had better character arcs than Scott's recent films.
I'd rather have the performance of this series than whatever Jurassic Park or Star Wars have become.
Predator, oddly enough, has strangely been improving if you don't count Shane Black's entry.
I'm happy they keep making these, and I hope the writers and directors at the reigns keep experimenting rather than conforming to "safe" or "understandable by a general audience".
I can give you all other movies and admit that Ridley Scott made more than one movie in his career, but Prometheus and Raised by Wolves are exactly what I'm talking about.
>> Lets play with giant worms with teeth, as if in real life those things wouldn't scare the crap out of you even if they weren't alien.
I think the worm thing (I thought of it as a snake, which just goes to show) is the result of an even worse sin than bad writing. I think the scene was deliberately written this way to pander to a certain type of audience member who enjoys watching dumb movies just to point out how dumb they are and thereby feel really clever. It's fan service really.
I'm ... guilty of indulging in that kind of thing myself (calling out movie characters' decisions for being stupid) and I've often stopped to wonder whether I'm not being baited, after all. Sometimes I certainly think I am and in Prometheus the bit with the worm/snake was one such instance.
> Besides, what's wrong with mentioning how crappy these movies are (they really do suck) in a post that specifically names them?
Assuming you're talking about Prometheus and Covenant, I enjoyed them. Not quite as good as the first (1979) or the second (1986), but I did indeed enjoy the last two.
It's the Alien:Earth series that I stopped watching after 3 or 4 episodes. I did not enjoy that one bit.
Alien Romulus was also not enjoyable; there was no progression of the stories in the universe. At least Prometheus and Covenant attempted expanding the original story. A:E and A:R didn't even bother - with very few changes, those both could be about any alien-filled universe, not specifically about the one started with Alien(1979).
I'm curious what didn't work for you about those movies?
> They don't make a whole lot of movies where all the characters just follow the rules, cause it wouldn't be fun to watch.
Compare it to how they didn't follow the rules in Alien 1 then: they weren't supposed to let the facehugger victim into the spaceship due to quarantine rules. Ripley, acting as interim captain, tried to enforce that, but was overridden by Ash, the science officer [1]. A perfectly understandable action due to human empathy, but in this case, it is doubly justified since, as we later learn, Ash was an android, acting on secret orders to retrieve the alien specimen. Smart, reasonable actions from everyone involved, that didn't make anyone scream at the movie in frustration. And this was just a mining crew of ordinary workers, not the best scientific minds a multi-billionaire was able to assemble for a research expedition.
Meanwhile the only justification for sticking his face into that evil-looking alien snake in Prometheus is that the guy was just a moron because he had fancy science equipment??? Also, Prometheus was written by Damon Lindelof - who also wrote Lost. The same Lost where all those mysteries turned out by series end to have been just random nonsense, with no explanation or justification ever given. Another point in favor of the incompetent writer thesis.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8cEcaK4-qA
I know this sentiment but for me it does not apply to Scott. He made some great movies later in his career; Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, Prometheus and The Martian are all masterpieces imo. The Last Duel was also pretty good
I had the good fortune of seeing Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm in a theater and then going to watch Prometheus within the same two week span. It gave me a much greater appreciation for the movie [Prometheus], and what it was trying to do.
Alien: Earth was the dumbest addition to the franchise. Hybrid synths that can “talk” to the aliens… pffft. Off the rails.
The last few films were of similar ilk. Prometheus started it with their David narrative. Just terrible writing.
I do the same thing with Prometheus - I watch the Weyland TED Talk before the film and view the film as a man that considers himself a god trying to meet god.
I feel the same way about Prometheus, lots of interesting ideas and memorable sequences that are beautifully shot but aren't connected together in a coherent way leaving the motivations of characters unintelligible by the end.
I watched Romulus recently and its kind of just a fan service film with a few utterly ridiculous sequences. The only things that really offended me where the heavy nerfing of facehuggers and the controversial CGI character who looked bad. Mostly it was just kind of forgettable but started out pretty good.
The order of the movies as I understand is: Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Alien, Alien Romulus.
The technology of the ship user interfaces in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant seems much higher tech than what is presented in Alien Romulus. Alien gets a pass because it was made in 1979.
So David makes the Xenomorphs and then David uses the colonist and human embryos for further experimentation? So are the events of Alien a trap by David?
I haven't seen Covenant or Romulus yet. I saw Prometheus, and it was really bad, but in a complicated way. It wasn't a completely terrible movie that you can just dismiss as garbage like Battlefield: Earth and not think about again. It was beautifully shot, and a visual feast to watch. There were some really great scenes, like the robo-surgery scene. But the characters were frequently stupid, and the script was bad because it made the characters do idiotic, incompetent things that should only be seen in a B-grade horror movie. Ridley should have known better, and should have done a better job making sure the script he was working with made sense, so I'm very disappointed with him. He didn't do this with the first "Alien" movie at all.
Then he apparently did it again with Covenant: I haven't seen this one yet, but what I've read says he didn't really learn his lesson from Prometheus, and made another great-looking movie with high production values and a poor script. So I haven't been in a hurry to see it.
Romulus seems to have good reviews so far, and a different director, so I'd like to give it a chance. I just haven't had a chance to see it yet, but it is high on my list of films to watch soon, along with the new Quiet Place movie.
The fresco in the Prometheus goo chamber showed a Xenomorph creature before David had a chance to work with the goo.
I don't mean to nitpick there, it's more a comment on continuity in multiple movies.
I'm an old school Aliens appreciator; I recognize as canon Alien and Aliens, and the Dark Horse comics of the early 90s (80s?). It's easier on my old brain than juggling plots from 20 different people.
Should we gather the "just to clear it up" statements all in one place?
"Xenomorph" is not any sort of official in-universe term for these things, though I believe Alien: Romulus at least does have scientists calling it "xenomorph <some number>" indicating it has been catalogued. Xenomorph is just a generic term for a non-humanoid alien, though, what PFC Hudson called a "bug" when the term was introduced as Lt Gorman was briefing the other Marines about what they might expect. This wasn't their first time encountering hostile life and they called a lot of it by this name.
The xenomorphs (as fans have taking to calling it) are not silicon-based, but rather some blend of organic and inorganic. They're bioengineered superweapons, not naturally occurring. As far as we can tell, they don't eat at all, at least in their adult form, as they grow to full size in a matter of hours without us ever seeing them consume anything. They only seem to need hosts in their larval form. This is also why they mostly don't kill the humans they attack unless they have to because they're under threat. They instead attach them to a resin they secrete, where they are used as incubators for more larval forms. Their entire purpose seems to boil down to multiplying as rapidly as possible. I believe Ridley Scott has suggested they consume electricity or radiation in general directly, rather than extracting energy from food.
They were not actually created by the "engineers," as Shaw from Prometheus called the space jockey guys. They were created by David, the first synthetic sentient android created by Weyland, when he and Shaw hijacked an engineer ship. He returned to their home world, released the black goo and killed everything, and experiments with its ability to create multistage lifecycle semi-organic lifeforms, which he eventually managed to turn into the xenomorph as it was seen in the original Alien.
The black goo itself seems to have been some sort of quasi-religious experiment thing the engineers developed billions of years ago that has the ability to dissolve organic matter, attach itself to DNA, and rewrite it to become some kind of more "advanced" lifeform. The beginning of Prometheus shows them doing this on earth, with a sacrificial engineer dissolving himself into primordial water to seed what would eventually become all earth life. This doesn't imply earth-life is genetically similar to the xenomorph, but rather to the engineers, who were humanoid. So Ridley Scott (or Damon Lindelof or whoever) is implying earth life was meant to eventually become humanoid all along, like we're the ultimate end of an experiment in engineered evolution.
However, back on their home planet, they didn't just stop doing new things for four billion years. The black goo of the present in Prometheus was similar to the original used to seed earth, but seemingly had changed at that point and specifically created more xenomorph-like things, now by infecting other lifeforms and incubating in them, rather than dissolving them into free-floating DNA.
All of that addresses whether xenomorphs are "related" in any biological sense to life on earth, but either way, I'm not convinced arthropods are the right analogy. The reality of their size and movement is obviously confounded by the fact they're played by humans wearing costumes, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have endoskeletons. Ridley Scott has stated the original intention of the creature design was to invoke armor. They're insect-like in appearance, but arthropod exoskeletons are not really armor. In fact, arthropods very rarely grow as large as humans, with the only examples all being extinct, and they had paper-thin exoskeletons, in part because molting something that large is difficult and expensive. To me, I think they're more similar to certain types of dinosaurs with hardened exterior armor. That said, they are clearly shown molting, but the fact they have claws and teeth seems to suggest they probably also have bones. I suspect this is mostly just confusion on the part of the designers or the simple fact they aren't really trying to make something that is biologically coherent or plausible so much as a nightmare made flesh.
I don't think it's ever made clear what the engineers were trying to do. The timelines are a little jacked up, but the derelict the Prometheus crew discovers can't be the same one discovered later by the Nostromo, because the one of the Nostromo has actual fully-realized xenomorphs, which the narrative eventually makes clear were created by David after the events of Prometheus. The derelict in that case was simply carrying black goo, but a weaponized version, and carrying it to earth, apparently intending to destroy all life there. Why is never explained, nor does it seem to be the case that this was some civilization-wide decision, since the mission failed and no follow-on was ever launched. This could have been some rogue faction that weaponized black goo and attempted to destroy life that had earlier been created by the non-weaponized older version out of disagreement with the larger historical goals of their own people.
Weyland-Yutani corps by the time of the mainline films seems to not understand what they are dealing with. They understand they have found some substance that can meld with organic life and create a stronger version of it that doesn't need food and can survive in a vacuum. Romulus seems to suggest that the goal at that point was to create a race of hybrid mine workers that would survive the harsh conditions better than humans. They don't seem to have ever realized that David had created the xenomorphs as they existed at that point and his goal was not to create better humans but to destroy all other life completely and replace it with xenomorphs.
Considering all I've written to this point, I'm amazed at how silly the mythology of this series eventually got after starting as a simple great horror flick that needed no explanation or backstory.
SPOILER ALERT WHAT'S SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN
Much regard heaped upon 2001's effects, including the zero-G sequences, but if you just watch the people, they are so obviously carrying their own weight and the weight of objects: the posture and movement yells 1-G at you from the screen. When the stewardess reclaims the floating pen, she's balancing her weight with each step and touching the seat backs for support, then stoops and leans. In the ship crossing to the moon, the stewardess is walking and her hips sway to her weight with each step and her feet compress. The food trays slide out of kitchen console by gravity. When the trays are delivered to the flight staff, one reach out his hand under a tray to steady it from below. When an officer visits crew in the cabin, he comes up from behind their seats, leans in to talk and rests his arms on the seatbacks. As food is sipped through clear straws, it rises and falls with G pressure. Floyd stands with his own weight in contemplation before the long instructions for the zero-G toilet. In the Discovery, spacesuits hang from the wall and the crew sit at the table to perform the antenna-module diagnostic.
The toilet instructions are a static print on plastic with a backlight. The joke about the length of the instructions is now lost to absurdity of the display.
On the moon, the excavation of the monolith is surrounded with floodlights that reveal a distinct atmospheric haze.
The camera used at the excavation site is beautifully retro. That it's used to take a group photo is quaint, especially when you consider more modern ideas like the survey "pups" deployed to map the site of the Engineers' spacecraft in the movie Prometheus.
While 2001 has been one of the most affecting movie experiences of my life— I first saw it by myself in a nearly empty large auditorium in 1972 at the age of 10 and have seen it maybe 10 more times since 2001's effects seem more prosaic with every viewing and my mind wanders into disbelief about the entire mis-en-scene. Eroding amazement is replaced by a fascination with how quickly a fantasy about an amazing future has become retro in its fashion.
The Stargate crossing seemed like one of the weaker elements in the movies heyday, but to me it's holding up better than most other design elements. The ape costumes are holding up uncannily well, as do the intro landscapes. Other elements are quirky: the mule painted like a zebra, the vastly over-complicated landing pad on the moon with the pizza-slices retractable dome, the clouds of dust swirling at the landing, and the absurdly ornate elevator than descends beneath the moon surface. Hal's memory closet with arrays of keyed optical modules that slowly eject to inconsistent extents. The oddly opaque schematics and diagnostics for the Discovey's "malfunctioning" antenna unit. The external air supply hose for the space suit. The extendable pads for the pods. The chain of blocks design for the Discovery, with the large off-axis mass of the antenna. Why is a pod needed to reach the antenna? Etc, on and on.
The ultimate movie about the future of mankind is now a beautiful relic.
With every viewing of 2001 I recall with more appreciation Andrei Tarkovsky's lament about what he might have been able to achieve with his Solaris if he had access to the kind of wealth available to Kubrick.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
The Crow
The Machine (if you like Ex Machina, try it)
Alien
Prometheus
Fight Club
Secretary
Casablanca
Kill Bill
The Emperor's New Groove
Star Wars Episode IV - The original goodness, not the CGI horror-show.
Star Wars: Rogue One
American Beauty
Dredd.
Hellboy (directors).
Blade Runner (theatrical).
Chocolat.
Noise (Australian film, 2007. Love that one).
I try not to watch films too many times in quick succession. The repetition dulls the experience for me.
Prometheus. It's way better as a film than people think. It's a perfect greek tragedy.
I don't think it matters much either way. There's been lots of movies made with "from scratch" scripts that were excellent (and a lot of stinkers too obviously), but there's also been plenty of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters with absolutely terrible scripts, when there should have been more cross-checking. Just look at the last few "Alien" movies, especially Prometheus.
Given that he made Prometheus, I don't think that Ridley Scott is scared of exploring Christian topics.
Then again, the whole Jesus-was-an-Engineer subplot that was dropped from that film but still alluded to also makes me doubt that Scott's take would have been particularly "nuanced".
Well BR2049 was made by the same director and probably a lot of the same crew so I'd be surprised if it didn't look similar.
Prometheus and Interstellar look nothing like these movies though. The production design is completely different even though there might be similarities in the color grading.
I give you that the super washed out colors has been a very common aesthetic in the past 15 years or so but I wouldn't say all scifi movies adopt it. Some examples: District 9, Avatar 1 and 2, Inception, Tenet, Ex Machina, etc.
Ridley elevated Alien to ridiculous heights but then got absolutely everything wrong in Prometheus. Which bothers me to no end.
The only conclusion I can come to is that he's an expert visual storyteller (none better) with amazing craft, but can't recognize the difference between a great story and a mediocre one.
Maybe he doesn't care, he's just happy to put the next film in the can?
But it seems to me that he doesn't entirely care about telling a great story, just about telling a story extremely well.
> We might say there are two Ridley Scotts, expressed in the colour palettes that have come to dominate his later films: a Ridley Scott of greys and blues, of toil and depression and the cold and hostile northern landscapes of Prometheus and Alien Covenant, (..)
Great article, but IMO it's missing the aspect of Ridley Scott apparently being increasingly less interested in story than in visual presentation, which I believe explains especially the varying quality of his more-recent movies.
As someone who was really looking forward to Prometheus and the continuation of the Alien franchise, the final product was quite a disappointment. Not visually but in terms of the overall storyline. Later seeing the making-of [1] of Prometheus clearly illustrates the problem: Ridley Scott, certainly a master of visual storytelling, shaped the story based on the images he wanted to see. Scriptwriters then ghastly had to make these images happen in the story.
The same can also be said to some extend about his later views on Blade Runner, where he destroyed the storyelement of ambiguity whether Deckard is himself a Replicant by blatantly answering it.
--
However, it might as well be that some stories actually don't captivate him as much, so he ends up "making the spectacle happen" instead of crafting story and presentation into one coherent piece of film.
[1] https://youtu.be/Emj_-Bx6Qdw
I should have replied sooner but distractions...
> Covenant was even slightly better than Prometheus. ...
The thing that bothered me a lot was no one really questioned the droid when he changed his appearance to exactly match that of the crews own droid. Did they just think it was cute or something? WTH? And general ignoring the creepy as fuck robot and falling into its traps. Just ... stop it already. It's like those old ed wood horror films where the actors clearly throw themselves into the monsters mouth and flail about screaming. They just kept walking into the jaws of death. The dumb scene where the stereotypical "fat stupid southerner" captain childishly risks all lives on board for his wife and had to be stopped by other crew - ugh WTH, dumb scene.
They tried to tie the two together with a grand story that never really coalesced - but it could have provided better writing. Alien was a great unseen monster suspense horror - in space (no one can hear you scream) The crew was just a regular . In Aliens the marines were competent fighters but had no idea what they were up against, were massively overwhelmed and a brutal fight for survival ensues. And it was that rat-fuck son of a bitch Burke. Whereas Prometheus left me angry at the crew's own stupidity and general incompetence with corporate greed framing the whole thing. They also continued the brutal "kill the previous film's survivors" trope from Alien 3 which was depressing (a good description for Alien 3 really - depressing.) I wish those two could get a do-over with a more solid story and truly suspenseful action. 8 meters... 7 ... 6 - cant be that's inside the room - its read'n right man look (beeping intensifies) I love that film.
> Prometheus was, as you said, a combination of incompetence (in film) and some steange views on evolution and the source of life (out of film). Especially the latter rubbed me in the wrong way,
"I'm a gruff expert in mapping - watch me two balls map this place out, yeah!" next scene: "fuck mate, we're lost!" Me: "HOLY SHIT, YOU JUST MAPPED IT OUT! LOOK AT YOUR FUCKING ARM!" Another adjacent scene: "I'm an exobiologist: watch me cosplay Steve Irwin and taunt this CLEARLY VICIOUS sharp-toothed snake alien thing in the water while repeatedly warned by the guy who is smart and clearly backed away ... fuck I'm dead." Everyone dies by folly but the crazy android and the woman who escapes in a flying croissant - advanced space faring pastry technology?
Unlike the alien trilogy there's no hero to root for throughout the series - the seemingly new heroine who survives the first film is dead before the second film. Only the shitty man-child droid survives and wins in the second film - twice. Eh. I guess experiment with a villain? But you don't care for him at all, its not like he's the lovable or relatable anti-hero type, he's creepy AF and you want him dead. I guess we have to wait for the third installment for him to finally get killed, unless he's already dead by the films starting point. No cat to outlive the crew either -lame.
> And hell, that the planet was literally a neighbor of LV-426, really? Just why?
This one really made me laugh. Like oh wow, right next door to your dead rock planet colony destination was the blooming origin of life on earth and other planets. Talk about a serendipitous find. I guess the astronomers they hired to scout potential planets to terraform were frauds or blind.
> Oh, and the black goo. Still no idea what that was good for anyway. Create or destroy life? And if so, why? It did serve as the basis for a really well written RPG adventure, Chariot of Gods. One I'd love to see as a movie actually. Or Destroyer Of Worlds, also a good basis for a script.
I dunno what that black stuff was either, a mutagen? A macguffin of sorts. I think it somehow ties into the origin of life theory, like it was their bio tech crap that spawned life here on earth and other planets? Maybe there was more to the story but couldn't be adapted to film or wasted too much screen time with back story and was cut.
> Heck, I liked AvP and AvP 2 better, at peast the last one could have easily been set in space, with the smallntown being some unsuspecting colony in the Amercan Arm or so. And Predators woupd be such a nice explanation why you find Xenomorphs all over the place, once the Engineers went extinct.
I have never seem them. I'll have to give them a go. Predator 2 was kinda half crap, but 80's over-the-top cheesy good. I remember seeing it as a kid and while some of it was fun I also remember being bored at times whereas I really liked Predator. You got the into to the gruff commando crew and their personalities, watch them complete their mission, then something goes very wrong and one by one the commandos are killed by an unseen specter until the strongest - ARNOLD FUCKING SCHWARZENEGGER - kicks its alien ass - then it goes nuclear suicide. I kinda miss those over-the-top 80's actors and films. Thank cocaine I guess.
I hate 3 largely because it felt like killing Newt really shouldn't have been on the table.
The last act of Aliens was all about saving Newt, sort of a redemption story for Ripley. Sort of the mantra of "the Aliens could kill all these people but I will be damned if I let them take this child". By saving Newt, Ripley wins the only battle that actually matters in the movie.
I feel like having it so that Newt is killed five minutes after Aliens ends really cheapens it. Ripley isn't redeemed, the Aliens did win the only battle that mattered .
Prometheus was pretty horrendous. Every character in there is a moron and we're supposed to be rooting for them.
Covenant was even slightly better than Prometheus. At least the drpid was a nice adition, experimenting like an obsessed crazy scientistbtrying to re-create the xenomorphs. And ending up with his own human colony to continue experimentation was nice, new touch.
Prometheus was, as you said, a combination of incompetence (in film) and some steange views on evolution and the source of life (out of film). Especially the latter rubbed me in the wrong way, because it was just unnecessary for the plot. And hell, that the planet was literally a neighbor of LV-426, really? Just why?
Heck, I liked AvP and AvP 2 better, at peast the last one could have easily been set in space, with the smallntown being some unsuspecting colony in the Amercan Arm or so. And Predators woupd be such a nice explanation why you find Xenomorphs all over the place, once the Engineers went extinct.
Oh, and the black goo. Still no idea what that was good for anyway. Create or destroy life? And if so, why? It did serve as the basis for a really well written RPG adventure, Chariot of Gods. One I'd love to see as a movie actually. Or Destroyer Of Worlds, also a good basis for a script.
Thinking of it, one thing I like about good RPGs is the world building. While movies canbget away with whatever they want, consistency be damned, RPGs, the good ones, need some consistent and good bavkgrpund universe to work. And Alien has, with its RPG, a good basis for that. Pretty sure so, that none of that will be used for the future films.
Dave Feloni and Jon Fabreaubdidba great job in bringing in the good elements of the Star Wars EU, now Legends, into the new canon with Rebels, Mandalorian and Boba Fett. Heck, we get Thrawn's return at the same time (9 ABY) than in the orginal Zahn novels. When you know the old Westend Games stuff, d6, on Tatooine, you see similarities as well.
> A part of me hates Alien 3 so much that I just pretend it doesn't exist.
Agreed. Though I still count it as part of the original Alien trilogy. It felt like the story was a poor mix of the preceding two. The setting was confusing - a desolate forgotten prison colony that were miners or metal workers - a mill of some form? Worst one of the three BUT I will watch it any day compared to the next three turds which become more and more painful to watch. It was boring.
Resurection was forgettable - I dont remember much save for Ripley is bought back from the dead, captive aliens escape from their inescapable pens (tired trope), Film finishes with Ripley fighting a hybrid human-alien on the space ship made from her DNA (it has a ma ma moment) and must have been made of boogers as it gets sucked out a little hole by a modest pressure differential. Basically another boring remake of Aliens.
Then there is Prometheus and Genesis. I can't even begin to explain the seething hatred I have for these two - genesis being beyond infuriating. Basically the plots of both films are moved along by all the characters being awful at the jobs they are experts in or completely oblivious. But, hey at least the visuals were "breathtaking" or at least that's what the critics said... I wish these two steaming piles never existed.
I loved this theme in the movie Prometheus.
> the Prometheus trailed spoiled the whole movie by revealing a major action from the last 5 minutes of the movie
Which one? If we're talking about the same trailer (TED 2023), it spoiled nothing for me, leading to a rather awkward cinema date. More details elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315367.
I took my then-girlfriend to cinema for Prometheus, convinced by the "TED 2023" trailer that it's going to be a nice transhumanist sci-fi. I didn't lose the girfriend that day, but I did lose my sci-fi cred - the name of the speaker in that trailer, Peter Weyland, should have rung a bell.
(For those who, like me then, don't know the reference - that's Weyland as in Weyland-Yutani, the evil megacorp that sent the ill-fated crew of the Nostromo to their deaths in the movie Alien. Yes, Prometheus turned out to be an Alien prequel.)
I'm with you, the Prometheus trailed spoiled the whole movie by revealing a major action from the last 5 minutes of the movie, I was so angry.
On the other hand, there's a hilarious counter example where Alfred Hitchcock "spoils" the whole movie in a 6 minute trailer and I would still want to see the whole movie. It would be awesome to see trailers like this for a recent movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTJQfFQ40lI
It is kind of interesting, it looks like the Weyland timeline is kind of a mess. They apparently ignored the Alien vs Predator backstory when writing Prometheus.
https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=45645.0
So Prometheus has Weyland Corp from 2012. AvP has Weyland Industries, which the folks on that forum think is supposed to be founded in the 80’s. So hypothetically there could be an AvP/Stranger Things crossover.
But I think a more likely explanation is that a character in the Stranger Things universe is a fan of the Aliens series, since the first two movies came out in ‘79 and ‘84. Hopefully the world will be sufficiently diverged from the real life timeline by the upside-down, and they will be spared the horrors of Alien 3.
> I was not holding out much hope when "Damon Lindelof producer of Lost, decided what we really needed was for him to create a new TV series in the Watchman universe"
Well, Lindelof was also the showrunner for The Leftovers, which was a profoundly moving and well-made show. He also co-wrote the Alien prequel Prometheus. I wasn't too surprised that his Watchmen show was good!
Anyway, as for Neuromancer... Graham Roland was showrunner for Dark Winds, which was pretty solid, so maybe that bodes well. On the other hand, his writing work on Lost was entirely just on the final season, which was a nonsensical mess, so who knows.
There are still reasons people might want to go to the theater (and they do since there are some movies like Top Gun and Wakanda Forver have raked in money). One is you don't want to wait. Another would be that you like going to the theater, particularly if you have a nice one nearby. It's an afternoon or night out. A third would be that some movies you want to enjoy with a crowd. End Game or Avatar come to mind.
There are also dates, and it's a place teenagers can hang out, and you something for your kids to do away from the house. The socializing stuff you might not get as much of at home.
I went to the theater a couple months ago because Smile looked like a good enough horror movie that I wanted to see it when it came out. I enjoy the theater experience for certain movies. Dune was a really nice theater experience. There's been a few that were great to see in IMAX 3D, like Prometheus or Tron: Legacy. Infinity War and Endgame were magical becuase of the audience reactions and just they incredible excitement around them across the globe. Granted, that was pre-pandemic, but maybe the latest Avatar recaptures some of that.
I'm the poster the parent replied to and I appreciated the comment, and yours. I don't know why it would be modded down
I've just been trying to remember the movie Prometheus, the discussion between David and Weyland at the beginning where Weyland explains he is David's creator - this, I believe, sort of touches on the same idea - learning someone created you, maybe not very deeply; I'll need to watch it again
Might be fun to re-watch with the director’s vision in mind. I changed my mind about Prometheus after reading a long online post about how it’s an allegory to Jesus, and what implications that has on all the plot points and characters. Watching the movie cold I nearly walked out I thought it was so bad, seeing it again after having updated information made it a better experience for me.
Ridley Scott isn't a director that just does contemplative movies all the time. A lot of his stuff flat out just average (Prometheus for example) and he even does raw action blockbusters like gladiator that are very far away from being as thematically engaging as BR.
If ridley scott did Gattaca, there'd definitely be more of a budget on the sci-fi setting. It'd be more grounded and gritty with less of an 80s aesthetic.
As for whether it'd be as good as Andrew Niccols' version well... that's hard to say given Scotts hit or miss track record.
I really enjoyed the aesthetic of it, I enjoyed the tone and even many of the major story elements but I found it so hard to track the story.
It's unfortunate because the show had the great thematic elements (Mithraic vs atheist war -- mother as a godlike angel etc) and had amazing small details but lost itself somewhere in-between. Why was there a giant worm and why did everyone forget about the giant worm in Season 2 ?
This might be a Ridley Scott problem, because, everything I said can also apply to Prometheus.
Of the symbolic markers presented in the article the spikes and thorns one seems the best to me too.
I think it’s very likely that modern designers could come up with some really good ideas that would better convey the danger than anything presented on the wiki page.
I’m not arguing that it’s impossible to come up with a good approach…I’m arguing that the approaches presented seem unserious about achieving the stated purpose.
Take the “forbidding blocks” concept. It honestly reads like something from a low budget sci-fi horror movie: “A space crew lands on planet, finds the crumbling remains of forbidding blocks. One crew member warns that the blocks look forbidding. The warning is ignored and bad things happen.”
And what I just described is strikingly similar to the plot of the Alien series movie Prometheus :) [0]
The space crew disturbs the Alien bio weapon facility and unleashes a proto-Alien.
So again, my “complaint” (so to speak) is that the wiki article makes it sound like the amount of effort spent here was comparable to the effort spent on a mediocre sci-fi film script. It just doesn’t seem to me like a truly studious attempt at a framework to warn future generations.
I think I would probably say that it’s a serious attempt at making the case for the need for such a framework though. The people who did the work are clearly very intelligent people but some of the ideas presented just seem so fantastical.
For instance “The plans included a suggestion that the building be designed so as to create a ‘dissonant and mournful’ whistling sound when wind blew through it, acting as a Level I message.”
Would this whistling still even work right after 1000 years of weather and crumbling? Would a future culture have the same sense of dissonance and mournfulness that we have?
Much of it seems so rooted in the present for something intended to be so timeless.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(2012_film)
The rate of progress in this field -- reverse rendering -- has just been phenomenal. It seems like groundbreaking research is published every couple of months.
Something I have mentioned in other similar forums is that up until recently, computers were catching up to mathematics. The algorithms we use are often centuries old, but didn't have widespread practical applicability until computers could realise them.
The movie Prometheus (2012) made me realise that we had crossed a threshold. In one particular scene[1], some scientists throw up some drones up in the air. The drones zip down curved corridors, mapping them in real time using spinning lasers (LIDAR). At the time, that was science fiction. It was "future tech" that appeared to rely on not-yet-invented computer power.
But the computer power was available! GPUs of the era were already able to put out multiple teraflops, and should have been able to process that amount of data.
What was missing was the mathematics. We had the substrate, but not the code to run on it.
I doubt anyone had noticed that the tables had turned. That things had flipped over to the other side.
Since then, high-end workstations are rapidly approaching a petaflop of computer power. Suddenly the maths is catching up. This paper is a wonderful example of that happening!
Or to put it another way, I like to challenge computer scientists with this thought experiment:
"Imagine being given a workstation with 1024 CPU cores, a terabyte of memory, and a GPU to match. Could you fully utilise this machine to solve everyday problems in your speciality? If not, why not? What are you missing?"
-- more often then not, the answer is now "the code".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO-eduvo904
I just pre-ordered the movie (digital copy). I hope it is released soon. I like owning a few movies like Prometheus, Ghost in the Shell, etc. even though they are widely available on streaming services we subscribe to.
A new friend who is a director and his wife are coming over for lunch today (I got up super early this morning to rewatch two of his movies) and it would be more than great if Everything Everywhere All at Once were to be released in the next four hours so we could watch it together.
The main character in the 2012 movie Prometheus was a trillionaire but he did a Jeff Bazos and spent it all on a spaceship.
I'll try and write some thoughts on this so maybe you can understand where I'm coming from.
I feel that a lot that makes Prometheus a good movie in itself is how it's paced and the graphical effects, albeit it still suffers from bad writing in a lot of places. The story per-se however is a complete dumpster fire because it changes and retcons the Alien universe lore to fit a story that perhaps didn't need to be told. At the same time there were deleted scenes that literally would have added 10-15 minutes to the run time and would have made it at least a 20% better Alien movie.
What makes a good movie and what makes a great sequel/prequel/movie in an established universe are two different sets of things. A good movie can be a good moviein itself but at the same time an absolutely terrible sequel/prequel/movie in an established universe. If you're working on an original idea then all bets are off, but if the work you're doing is in the exact same universe as preceding works then it needs to follow the lore of that universe - or at least NOT contradict previously established things. And you have to ask yourself - is the story that you're telling belonging in this universe? Does it enrich it? Does it bring something new? And by this you answer if the movie is worth actually making from an art point of view.
Would you like to see a modern version of the Mona Lisa painted in 3D on a computer? What if this art would have a blonde woman in it? With curly hair? And skimpy clothing? It can be a great work of art in itself, but has no business piggy backing on the Mona Lisa original.
As another example, there is a school of thought to subvert expectations by writing really dumb stuff, whereas you could subvert expectations in a manner that fits the universe. Star Wars VII, VIII, IX, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant and a lot of other works basically step all over established lore to tell submediocre stories, thus harming the universe in the process. I mean with Star Wars there's a whole 'nother can of worms - they literally made a huge part of the universe that exists non-canon. Why would you discard a lot of good stuff just so you can push your sub-mediocre stuff is beyond me, but hey, it's their IP, they do with it what they wish. I just can't be over the moon about it.
For what it's worth, I watched Prometheus before watching Alien and loved it.
I think it's a great film on its own, and the people I've met who didn't like it expressed sentiments similar to yours (ruining the Alien universe").
<Prometheus spoilers>
Prometheus had some good pieces - I particularly enjoyed the travel to the alien world and its vistas. Arguably this is 90% special effects instead of talented directing, but worthy of my time nonetheless. The movie does fall apart when they start exploring, though...
Alien is my favorite movie of all time. I'm still made about Prometheus. Mostly for the plot, but the CGI is painful as well.
> No, this is not correct, read the link. It literally says Prometheus was built on reverse engineered systems.
It’s a fan page of a TV show, not a technical manual. so I’m not going to take their use of technical jargon literally.
I distinctly remember them using the term “retrofitted” over and over again in the show. But maybe they did also say then second design was “reverse engineered” and I overlooked that. It’s all just make believe anyway so it’s not like it really matters who’s right :)
> * it passed the Matrix test. (1. I want to watch the original Matrix. 2. I searched for the Matrix and clicked the result. 3. It streamed the Matrix to me.)
This Matrix test is a great one, I'm going to apply it to a bunch of services and see what I get.
I think I might just have a bit of a hangover from how many times HBO Max logged me out and made me log back in via some contorted system with my cable provider that has caused me inertia with renewing it. Also, now that I think back, another problem that caused me to avoid it a bit was that the HBO Max app sometimes just seemed to freeze up on my Roku in the middle of navigating through shows. Certainly possible they have improved the app over the last year, and will respect my time more if I pay them $15 + taxes per month directly instead of through a shitty cable subscription.
In any case, I freely concede that HBO Max probably does have a higher-quality backlog of content overall – my main point is that a simpler interface can actually make up for lack of content in some cases.
> * that crazy Ridley Scott series with those shrieking harpies that fly around asploding the hell out of atheists
Raised by Wolves? I think the creepy sci-fi vibe of Scott's stuff is just not my thing – everything in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant both just made me uncomfortable instead of interested, even though they had visuals that were technically impressive. The trailer for that series seemed similar when I watched it.
> Edit: reworded so I only use the adjective "fucking" once when referring to ad-based streaming services
I think you were right the first time. Ad-based services these days always remind me of the 15 Million Merits Black Mirror episode.
David tried this in the movie Prometheus, didn't work out well.
That's what David⁸ did in Prometheus T10m58s and he enjoyed the film so much that the next two Alien movies were about a robot imitating T.E. Lawrence.
Yes and no :)
Yeah, they got vented into space et cetera, but I'd say in the first 2 movies humans actually failed to kill the xenomorphs (eggs on LV-426 and aboard Sulaco). At the end of the third movie the newly born xenomorph queen clearly dies. However, in the fourth movie the xenomorphs are again brought back through cloning.
Also, in "Prometheus" and "Alien: Covenant" it becomes apparent that the original crashed ship on LV-426 in "Alien" was not one of a kind, there were tons of ships carrying the gooey secret sauce of xenomorphs.
Also, at the end of the second movie the queen xenomorph was simply vented into space, but whether it died or not was not very clear. I mean, the xenomorphs seemed to be quite resilient and not too picky about things like atmosphere and cold temperatures.
Or they did want it and used it for seeding more complex life so they could eventually create homo sapiens. Like the start of the film Prometheus.
Pretty much all our mythology and fairy tales, including the Tolkien's world, Harry Potter and many movies are based on what I'd call the "occult records". Those records were made partially public at least two centuries before Tolkien was born, so it can't be a coincidence that so many elements of his world match 1:1 with those records. Whether those records are true is a separate question.
Using occult chronology, Tolkien's world corresponds to the Atlantis period (the same Atlantis described by Plato). Tolkien took most of the interesting bits from different epochs and compressed them into one short story. The tall people (2x taller than us) in his story are the atlanteans, Saruman and Gendalf must be Narad and Asuramaya and orcs are creatures made by the evil faction during the late Atlantis when the civilization was on decline. The records say, though, that the bad guys won at the end and the atmosphere during that final chapter was shown in the Prometheus movie. All movies and books, though, present a rosy version of orcs and other evil stuff from the records - an accurate picture would be unthinkable even in the book format.
> Movies like The Thing, Terminator, Alien, Aliens, etc. Don't really have a political message other than some vague politics as window dressing.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a34518538/john-carpenter-2020-interview-coronavirus-trump-they-live-the-thing/
https://gen.medium.com/the-scariest-thing-about-alien-is-how-real-it-s-become-fa2182d2207e
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2012/06/13/the-politics-of-ridley-scotts-blockbuster-film-prometheus/?sh=60c077293e6a
https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/terminator-james-cameron
> Give me the politics of Tetris, Pong, Super Mario, Donkey Kong
You got me. Let me rephrase it as any culture with a message.
I think much of the hate towards Prometheus was unwarranted and overblown although it was flawed. You could easily point to plot holes and dumb decisions by characters in Star Wars or any other classic sci fi.
And it was still better than 95% of films released that year or since.
> I'd seen post docs cry after endless work for grants.
People knock the recent Alien films but you know the scene where the android is leading the team through a theater of charred bodies and you think "holy shit, this is a HINT, how do you not see it?"
Well, when I got home, I realized that the disgruntled postdocs around me -- some of whom were smarter and worked harder than me and still got thrown out like so much trash because their thesis didn't pan out -- were also a HINT. How did I not see it before?
Thanks, Prometheus. You weren't a great movie, but you had a very important impact on my life.
If you're into Proto Indo European, check out Ridley Scott's Prometheus - David the android is learning PIE from a computer program at the beginning of the film, and Peter Weyland speaks to the Engineer in PIE.
I wouldn’t recommend it as an exploration of the topic but the movie Prometheus touches on this theory.
As an absolute fan of Blade Runner, I disliked BR2049 and I really think it was a mistake to film a sequel of the original. I don't think the original needed a sequel, the open ending and unanswered questions were perfect, and in fact most of the "tied loose ends" of the sequel kind of run contrary to the original for me. They undermine their characters and make it all some sort of silly experiment/conspiracy that simply doesn't do it for me. I dread the thought of Ridley Scott now saying he has more stories to tell... especially if they are of the "quality" of his Alien/Prometheus sequels.
I think I would have enjoyed BR2049 better had it been an entirely new movie and not a sequel to something. And if it didn't have Jared Leto overacting, of course, but I suppose that cannot be helped.
The title reminds me of this promo for the movie Prometheus. The fictional company made an ad for their latest generation robot, with new emotional features. They claim it will work much better with humans.
https://youtu.be/qgJs7uluwlU
> Just watch Prometheus
or watch some movie with lots of space stations where things are great, and draw the opposite conclusion!
fiction isn't evidence of anything.
It’s been said that in order to become a space faring species access to space, rocket launches, must become routine, common. Hats off to Bezos. He has certainly made it boring.
You can put stuff on top of it! There is a club! The presentation opened with the most uninspired call to inspiration. And then pivoted to a call to fear. We’re gonna have to ration due to energy shortages! In a couple hundred years. Fusion? 1) It’s gonna be raw resources and real estate, not energy, that we run out of first. 2) Amazon, the company, is doing all it can to reap profits at the expense of the environment with seemingly no regards for the health of the real Amazon and other natural treasures. 3) Amazon, the company, is a primary driver of some of the “immediate” social problems Bezos opened with such as poverty, so that argument falls flat. Not to mention the whole presentation managed to avoid mentioning SpaceX explicitly and ended with a self-referencing “Big things have small beginnings” photo of Bezos, kinda sadly insecure.
I for one don’t want to live in a “manufactured” world that is “manufactured” by Amazon. My head just kept going to “Amazon Prime Planet”!! My god it will be efficient, cheap, on time, and chock full of externalities that we can all ignore because instead of being off-shored and hidden in warehouses, now they’ll be off-planet. This is how we get the dystopian future none of us deserve or want.
(edit: Also, did Bezos just rip off the tag line from Prometheus, a movie whose central thesis is the inherent dangers in attempting to engineer life and worlds!? Bezos: “Big things start small.” Prometheus: “Big things have small beginnings.”
This is partially what it was implied David from Prometheus was doing at the start of the film (although he appeared to be working back from modern pronunciation to earlier proto-languages too)
I greatly enjoy AI startup press release bingo.
- .ai domain name - No mention of how they use or define AI - "AI + Humans" - Banner picture from science fiction film (Prometheus)
(Disclaimer: I used to work at an AI startup and am generally interested in how companies market themselves)
Was this the mechanism at work in the movie "Prometheus"?
If Prometheus and Alien Covenant aren't horror movies, there are other movies that are indisputably horror movies that are, uh, disputable.
The movie Prometheus was also somewhat famous in linguistics circles for attempting to use either reconstructed PIE directly or potentially a modified proto-Sanskrit for the Engineer.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4008
This reminds me of a quote from the movie Prometheus - "God doesn't build in straight lines"
Meaning, if you see intelligent stuff being done. Objects moving up and down, left and right in perfect angles. Or if some one wrote up "Hello, World" on the skies its very unlikely its a natural phenomenon.
Lately I find the experience of sitting in an auditorium for several hours profoundly unpleasant. The (to me) nauseating smell of popcorn, the sticky floors, uncomfortable seats, and painfully loud speakers are just not worth it for so many forgettable movies (to say nothing of Prometheus). I took my whole family to see the Force Awakens, though, and none of us were noticed any of this because we were so enthralled by the film. But that's a rare exception to the rule these days.
> no, the flick is not bad because of that scene
The thing is, most of the criticisms of Prometheus that I have read cite that scene as a reason for its purported badness, which is why I drew comparisons to scenes in movies that are widely regarded as good, and pointed out that those scenes are not criticized.
Suspension of disbelief only works when the world presented is believable and the story interesting. I find myself able to suspend belief on Nolan films, for example, because of their engrossing story and style.
With your example of Prometheus, no, the flick is not bad because of that scene, but the scene is an indication of the overall laziness of the plot. All the nit-picking, as you put it, is because there is nothing else to hold on to, which is not true of Alien at least (I don't particularly like Aliens).
It seems to me that people are a lot harsher on movies now, less willing or able to suspend disbelief [1]. I see scathing assessments of sequels, but with examples of the imagined problems being problems that have reasonably close equivalents in their predecessors which no one had a problem with when those were released.
Here's a concrete example: probably the most commonly cited 'problem' I hear about Prometheus is that near the end of the movie the heroine "tried to run away from a wheel in a straight line", and therefore it is a bad movie. The general criticism I take from this is not that she took the reasonable general action (running away) but the specific course she took (running in a straight line so the wheel just followed, and not noticing it was following).
The thing is, I think that both the main previous movies in the series, Alien and Aliens, have comparable incidents which no one complains about.
In Alien, near the end of the movie when she was the sole remaining survivor, we had Ripley delaying her escape in the shuttle in order to scuttle the ship - an entirely pointless action. If her plan of escape in the shuttle had worked, it wouldn't matter whether the alien were still alive. What did she think it would do, learn how to fly the Nostromo and pursue her? Scuttling the ship both increased her risk of dying at the alien's hands (it could have easily snuck up on her when she was engrossed in the scuttling procedure), and also nearly caught her in the explosion.
In Aliens, we had Ripley delaying her escape with Newt from the processing plant in order to exterminate the room full of eggs which posed no immediate threat to her (especially those still in the egg sac). Further to this, she did not bother to spend even one bullet or grenade on the queen herself. Ripley expended virtually all of her ammunition on this task, not reserving any to cover her retreat, and she apparently did not bother packing a spare magazine despite being given the resources of a fully-stocked armoury when she was preparing to go get Newt. If she had not exterminated the eggs (pointless, given the impending explosion) the queen would not have had reason to personally follow her and cause all the subsequent grief. Needless to say, those problems could also have been averted by simply shooting the queen along with or instead of the eggs. Again, no one complains about this.
Note that I am not complaining about the above aspects of Alien or Aliens. I love both those movies, and think the examples I gave above are nit-picking. The thing is, I think the criticism of Prometheus is also nit-picking, and directly comparable.
My tentative hypothesis for this recent nit-picking is that, unlike the earlier movies which were from a pre-internet era, it is easy for people to congregate in online communities to pick apart inconsistencies in movies they were personally disappointed in, and then anyone who looks at discussions of a movie they just saw will read all of this stuff they might have otherwise just overlooked. Further to the particular example I chose above, lots of people were disappointed with Prometheus particularly because it was not what they wanted: another formulaic Alien or Aliens movie, so that gave them extra incentive to pick it apart.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
My 12 yo daughter loves sci-fi movies and we just started watching the Alien franchise in preparation for Alien: Covenant this weekend.
My plan was to show her Alien, Aliens, then Prometheus. I hadn't even planned to watch Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection (or any of the spinoffs like AVP). But after reading this, maybe we should at least watch Alien 3.
Any suggestions?
It's funny how Gibson's screenplay was marked "not innovative" but now The Master himself, Sir Ridley Scott, is basically churning out the same movie over and over again (Prometheus and Covenant). In the end, Hollywood franchises will go on no matter what.
There's that right. But not all stories are about the corporate world or something like that. A lot of stories are about relationships or Adventures or fictional stories completely. In The stories of our lives, representation is mixed and balanced. So I don't think on-screen world does represent the real world... outside of extending say, inequality present in the corporate world, through narrative, to other Realms where it is not present or not as present. So I think that's a form of bias creation and misrepresentation that doesn't work to promote equality... Or reality.
Secondly, movies are fictional worlds so they can represent whatever their creators choose them to represent. They could be representing more equally. They're not.
To me the misrepresentation of reality and the bias representation of the fictional world in Hollywood movies is a really clear example of sexism.
Just one example and I'm a huge sci-fi fan of the Alien series and Prometheus series. But I was shocked that in the trailer for the new Prometheus movie not only is pretty much everybody white but pretty much everyone he's a man. And I'm like come on it's the future surely the creators can imagine that things are going to be more equal.
I did mention that we're supposedly going to get some big-budget sci-fi movies this year, but that's only just this year, and also this year has only started, so there's no guarantee it'll happen. Where have all these movies been for the past 15 years or so? The only ones I can think of are a couple of Tom Cruise movies (ugh), Prometheus (based on 1970s franchise), and The Martian. Given the easy availability of CGI, it's really curious why there's been such a dearth of space-based sci-fi, and personally I think it's because our society has basically lost all the optimism it had back in the 60s-80s.
Forget the action movies and funny comedies, where are the sci-fi movies??? And I don't mean some stupid movie about a guy living in what appears to be the modern world sans display screens and talking to his earphone, I mean movies with spaceships (and especially spaceships with elaborate corridors). The 70s and 80s were chock full of these movies. And no shaky-cam back then either. So far, all we've had is Star Wars--blah (yet again, Hollywood milking an old franshise), and Prometheus in 2012 (again, milking an old franchise).
Supposedly we're going to get a few spaceship sci-fi movies this year, including "Passengers" which looks promising. But we've gone quite a long time now without much in the way of sci-fi.
It varies a lot. E.g. the Transformers movies are poster-children for overdone 3D for the sake of making the effects look cooler, while in Prometheus the 3D looks fantastic but is subtle enough that they don't become the focus of any of the shots.
Chaplin fought against sound in movies on a similar basis.
Not an absolute rejection, but a concern that it took focus away from other parts of the story-telling and wasn't necessary.
He supposedly sabotaged attempts to add speech to Gold Rush (1925) after the actors pushed for it.
City Lights (1931) was basically his ode to silent movies, famous for its endless retakes of the initial meeting with the blind flower girl [1], while he tried to figure out how she could mistake the Tramp for a rich man without words. In the end the solution was simple, and both funny and provided motivation for the Tramps desire to help her: The Tramp walks through the car of a rich man to avoid passing a police office, and so when he stands before her she has just heard him slam the car door. He accidentally knocks the flower he's purchased out of her hand and realises she can't see that he has picked it up. As he hands her his money, the owner of the car comes and drives off and the girl thought he had left without his change, and he didn't want to break the illusion and so walks off without money he badly needed for himself.
It's one of my favourite movies because it masterfully made his point that you can tell a complex story without it feeling like you're missing something because you can't hear dialogue.
He added speech in his next movie - Modern Times - but his character still didn't speak dialogue (but did sing).
It was first with The Dictator (1940) that Chaplin himself spoke on screen: Finally he had something where the speech added clear value by conveying more than he knew how to convey with just pictures.
In the same way I think we will see more and more movies eventually come out in 3D as the industry gets enough experience with it to see where it adds clear value and leave it low key other places, rather than add it to make a spectacle of it.
I think one of the first to do it well was Prometheus. A friend saw the 2D version and afterwards told me elated that it felt like it was made as a 2D movie - no weird camera work solely to make 3D effects stand out etc.. Meanwhile I'd seen it in 3D and been blown away at how good it looked in 3D. The effects were clear and beautiful but not in your face. Crucially they didn't alter the visual language noticeably.
[1] http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/378808/City-Lights-Movie-Clip-Wait-For-Your-Change-.html
This is an interesting concept and has been explored in fiction before, most recently (to my knowledge) in Prometheus. Not the best film, stunning cinematography but lacking good writing, but had a similar premise.
Reminds me of the opening of the movie Prometheus.
Given that it's new technology and the applications that could make use of this don't exist, I think you have to give them a little more leeway with their marketing material. I agree that most of the "apps" are likely custom-built just for this demo (I'm basing this on the appearance that the apps are interactive rather than just canned videos projected into space) but that doesn't mean it's invalid to showcase those as possibilities.
What would have been really neat is to have the Everest map fixed in space and the user could walk around it and lean in to zoom. Sort of like how many sci-fi movies have 3D mapping projections (Avatar, Prometheus, etc. etc.) that the characters can walk around and sometimes physically interact with. That would have been a good demonstration that it's not just canned video.
A few decades ago, someone would have been considered totally correct to say that no one is going to be streaming live video over the internet as it's just not efficient or practical. As bandwidth, storage, and processing power tend towards infinity, all those impractical ideas suddenly become possible. Imagine being able to search the entirety of the internet instantly as you type each keystroke. Impractical? Maybe Google will crack that some day.
> Alien & Primer are excellent counterexamples.
Oddly, Prometheus was an excellent example. It's like Ridley Scott documented all the different ways you can make a character totally uninteresting and loathsome, and made sure to include at least one example of each in that movie. What a turd.
I watched it on TV, late at night, as a kid. I remember barely being able to fall asleep out of fear, and I think it took a week for the effects of this movie to wear off. I'm older now and I've seen enough sad, scary and disrupting movies that it doesn't affect me anymore, but I'm pretty sure that if I tried to show it to my SO, I'd have my own Event Horizon right there in the apartment.
EDIT: I also had the "next time I'm picking the movie" moment after I took my then-girlfriend to see Prometheus. The TED2023 trailer looked so cool and I didn't realize it's a prequel to Alien...
Yeah, such profiles can certainly be used for skin rendering. I know that SPI used the method you mentioned on a few movies. There will be visible flaws though. The skin and especially the lips will look too waxy when using gaussians or bicubics. Weta Digital used Quantized Diffusion on Promotheus for this reason [1]. Pixar has an upcoming talk on a simple, yet highly accurate BSSRDF profile this SIGGRAPH, so let's hope the folks at Blender will implement that in Cycles.
[1] http://www.fxguide.com/featured/prometheus-rebuilding-hallowed-vfx-space/
I watched Aliens with my 10-year-old daughter a few weeks ago. We had watched Alien a few weeks before. She had wanted to watch a real horror, but couldn't make it through the first few minutes of Scream, so we settled on Alien. She thought the alien bursting out of John Hurt's character was really funny. And it is. She thought the beginning of Aliens was too slow and it wasn't all that scary for her, but she enjoyed the film overall. I don't know if I would watch Prometheus with her - I'm sure she'd agree that film was terrible.
Taking a cynical view of the paradox, saying that not having already detected ET means that ET couldn't exists, opens a new paradox. What if every intelligent civilization looked at the same problem and reached the cynical point of view: why bother looking?
And what's to say we're not aliens ourselves? That Prometheus movie hinted at the possibility, so did Star Trek. Both point to an original creator that uses simple biology and knowledge of evolution to seed planets with life and let it grow. Modern astrobiology, as documented in the recent Cosmos reboot, thinks that life has already been traversing the galaxy on space rocks; crashing into planets in an ice ball and taking hold where it can. While not intelligent by human standards, it still spreads ET life. With the time scales involved, it seems like space rocks with simple life on them might be spreading ET fairly evenly through our galaxy and beyond.
As smart as we are, we have only recently been able to hurtle some space junk out of our solar system and into deep space. The distances involved and the limitations of our current understanding of physics make it seem likely that we wouldn't be in direct contact already. It's taken 2 generations for Voyager 1 to travel that far.
Using ourselves as the perfect example, our own broadcasts haven't reached very far into our own galaxy. If we are typical and our understanding of physics is reasonably accurate, there could be numerous human-like civilizations broadcasting and sending out probes constantly and we just haven't waited long enough -- the distances are too vast for us to have heard them. Or worse, we're not intelligent enough yet to listen to the broadcasts that are being sent to us already.
I say we build these magical self-replicating probes and send them out and hope we don't accidentally create the Borg. The only way to beat the paradox is to play along. And if we don't find anything, then we'd better get to colonizing!
Anyone recall the mapping drones from the recent Ridley Scott film "Prometheus" ? (similar concepts in other films too I think)
Combine this with a small smart-ish drone and it could get very interesting.
This reads like an advertising campaign for a movie or video game. Aka "Prometheus" and "Deus:EX Human Revolution"
Like Prometheus, which was essentially an advert for another movie and a complete waste of my time and money.
This year seems to be the year of really really brilliant cinematography.
Skyfall was breathtakingly beautiful in terms of cinematography. It had a solid story too, unlike Prometheus, which while beautiful, falls short on story.
The Dark Knight Rises concludes the series very well. It was well shot, and barring a few continuity issues, it was by all means a very good movie.
Argo was fine as a story, also very well made and I liked it.
One surprise this year which I absolutely loved was Pitch Perfect. My partner had dragged me into an early viewing of the movie, and I didn't know much about it. So yeah, good surprise.
As for the rest, meh. I mean Spiderman and Avengers were fun, but it is not as memorable as the ones I mentioned above. So was Looper
These are some of the movies that I watched and liked in 2012:
The Grey
Prometheus
The Avengers
The Dark Knight Rises
Skyfall
The Hobbit
And these are some of the good ones I would like to watch:
Argo
Lincoln
Looper
Life of Pi
Zero Dark Thirty
Here[1] is the list of the highest grossing movies in 2012 thanks to Wikipedia. Among those top ten, the only one I saw was Dark Knight Rises and while it wowed me when I watched it, it is just about meh in hind sight.
Prometheus[2] was confusing as [redacted] but if you like the alien franchise[3], you should watch this one as well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_in_film
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(film)
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise)
If you enjoy these kind of brain modification technologies, check out the book The Brain That Changes Itself, which discusses neural plasticity http://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers/dp/0143113100. This is the science that led to the cochlear implant and may lead to other brain-interface devices.
Also, the part about biohacks and bio-weapons, reminded me of the movie Prometheus.
I'm an avid moviegoer (50+ theatrical releases a year) and I completely ignore movie reviews (and it's getting this way with Yelp reviews too) because they lack context. What I mean by this is that a thumbs up/down or star rating is useless unless I have some background on the person giving the rating. For example, for someone to give Prometheus 2 stars when they haven't seen any of the Alien movies is different from an avid fan. I'd like to see a list of other movies/genres the reviewer rated, and maybe some basic demographic info before I listen to their opinion. Not sure if you have that worked into your idea yet...
I dunno, Prometheus was pretty average!
It's a demo reel to test a projector, though. Not sure if it's going to turn into a full film?
Ironically, we just ended up not watching it that weekend, and as a consequence, we never ended up going out to see Prometheus while it was in theaters. Not out of spite or anything, just that watching the two movies in sequence had been our plan, and the plan had been broken. So the studio lost two sales resulting from a vain attempt to restrict one.
This isn't just HBO Go, or even just third-party apps – first-party video playback on iOS will, depending on hidden flags from iTunes store purchases, arbitrarily disable video over AirPlay.
A friend and I found this out the hard way one afternoon when we decided to rent Ridley Scott's Alien, in anticipation of seeing Prometheus. He pulled up the store on his iPhone, found the movie, selected Rent: HD, and signed on to my wi-fi network, my Apple TV appearing on his iPhone without a hiccup. So far, pure Apple seamlessness – until he selected the AirPlay output. The audio played back over my speakers, but the video remained on the 3.5" screen.
Thinking resourcefully, I suggested he try AirPlay mirroring. This, at last, gave us the "fuck you, consumer" from the studio in explicit form: a message appeared on his phone saying the AirPlay display couldn't be trusted.
We both resolved never to use the iTunes store for movies again.
When I first watched the movie Prometheus my first thought was that there is no friggin way we are going to be traveling planets and have that level of advanced technology by 2089. After listening to Elon Musk and seeing the types of steps he is taking, perhaps Prometheus was not as far fetched as I originally thought.
Not the best criticism of Prometheus I've read by a long shot, I'd probably recommend this one if you're really interested: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2012/06/11/whats-wrong-with-prometheus-a-partial-list/
The thing that actually annoyed me, though, was really at an allegorical level. The origonal myth of Prometheus was more something along the lines of "Progress is intrinsically dangerous", which is fair enough. But then the movie turns that into "Progress not paid for with sacrifice is evil"[1], and I found that rather annoying as a technologist who doesn't intend to die for his work.
[1]http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html
Have to disagree with this. It's an interesting attempt at criticism, but I think it's stretching too far.
What Prometheus is "actually about" is sucking dollars out of moviegoers' wallets.
For many years Ridley Scott resisted the calls to revisit the "Alien" universe, and when he finally gave in he produced a shallow, overly-marketed, slickly commercial film that looks great but lacks a soul. We've seen this before: the Star Wars prequels (which disappointed fans also tried to analyze and criticize into something more meaningful).
Prometheus was a dud; let's just accept that and go watch "Alien" on Blu-Ray.
I got the sense that things were left intentionally vague -- not so much to make the movie a mind-bending philosophical exercise, but more as a storytelling cop-out and a way to guarantee a sequel:
http://www.movies.com/movie-news/ridley-scott-prometheus-interview/8232
So I wouldn't count on understanding too much more on multiple viewings...
Yes there is a lot of depth to Prometheus, this makes me only hate it more. If Prometheus were just a silly horror film or a comic book movie then I'd be ok with it being mediocre.
Instead, they poured an immense amount of design skill into the sets and backgrounds to make a wonderfully beautiful movie. And they built up this tremendous premise and a fantastic universe. And they populated it with several truly deep and rich and wonderful characters. And they had those characters acted by outrageously talented actors (Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Guy Pierce).
And then they pissed it all away with a shoddy plot and incompetent direction.
Spoilers follow:
The engineer turns out to just be a dime store monster. Nobody's actions are interesting, meaningful, or seem to flow from any significant motive other than to conform to the plot. One of the most dramatic scenes in the movie (when Janek decides to commit suicide by ramming the engineer's ship) comes off as completely anti-climactic because it comes out of nowhere. Similarly, the major revelation of the movie of the planet being a biowarfare research station comes out of Janek's mouth but it is so out of place and out of character that you can almost hear the clanking boilerplate of dreaded exposition falling into position. Perhaps the most interesting character of the entire movie, David, remains nothing more than an automaton throughout the movie with only a gnat's whisker of a hint that he is anything more.
Prometheus the fictional spaceship is a "trillion dollar" mission which is unaccountably staffed by a handful of incompetents, fuckups, and pseudo-villains who throw away their lives for the silliest and least meaningful of reasons. It is an apt metaphor for the movie itself.
Prometheus seem to be that kind of movie you need to see several times to understand it.
They already are in quite a few circumstances. It hasn't collapsed the industry yet - there are other reasons to go to a movie theater than to see the movie.
As a concrete example, there are tens of thousands of seeders of Prometheus right now at a couple sites I just checked. And quite a few people I know, who know exactly how to use torrents, went to see it in the theater.
The Prometheus movie website has a blinking star that's showing Morse code as a hint to more teaser content. Take that animated gif, break it into frames, pull out the primary color from each frame's histogram, then requantize the time-variant signal into buckets to finally back out a clean Morse code sequence and then map that into letters and numbers. Fun!