Red Letter Media Talks About Prometheus on DVD

Willers question answer beed?

1.) Characters acting illogically or foolishly to advance the plot

2.) Writer/director trying to recapture the fright and grit of Alien’s misled space truckers, apparently forgetting that *these* characters are trained, paid and informed scientists

3.) Contradictory, inconsistent sci-fi elements that suggest a hazy overall concept instead of a complex mystery

Exactly.When you need to bring a whole goddamn encyclopedia to the cinema to make sense of a movie there must be something fundamentally wrong with it.

Their impressions of overmedicated mental patients is priceless

AvP movies are even worse than Prometheus.

Home Run! That one is still bouncing among the bleachers!

1) Yes it was a constellation. Constellations are just group of stars. That constellation contained a star, that had a planet, which in turn had a moon that could support life – which was the moon (planet) Prometheus lands on. There is nothing complicating here, if you really try to think about it.

2) I agree to a degree. Elizabeth seemed irrational as a scientist who clings to god. I mean, you (hopefully) and I can understand that science is based on facts – the world is what it is. Belief does not factor into it, at all. Science simply describes the world, as opposed to religion which makes unsubstantiated claims that are meant to be taken on faith. But there are scientists like her out there. Scientists who are rational thinking human beings when it comes to their profession, but who disregard that rationale when it comes to their religion. Though there are only few scientists like her, they do exist.

3) Yep, Neil was right.

4) The movie wasn’t concentrating on a particular religion (though it was a Christian cross, that she wore), but rather on taking things on faith, and believing in things one possibly cannot fathom. Elizabeth (and Holloway) believed that they would find some mellow creators, who would then sit down and explain why they created us. Instead they found a race that considered humans nothing but an incomplete experiment. It is safe to claim that the Xenomorphs (aliens) were the ones that Engineers wanted to create – humans were sort of a byproduct. So you can see how someone who vehemently believes in one thing and discovers something completely different, in the process this ends up destroying her faith.

5) That space jockey was not the same space jockey that was in Alien. Different space jockeys, different ships, different planets, etc.

6) The “black oil” was a chemical toxin, a biological weapon, created by the Engineers to alter the DNA of the infected. In large quantaties it caused rapid mutation (Fifield, earthworms, and the decapitaded head of the Engineer). In small quantities (why David gives just a drop to Holloway) it was meant to affect the sperm of human males and once they had mated, the females would give birth to a parasitoid creature resembling the face-hugger – which is what Elizabeth had in her womb. One could presume that the purpose of that biological ship-of-death was to drop its cargo into the oceans of Earth, where it would infect the human and animal population and give rise to Xenomorphs.

“all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor would have made the idea that “The Engineers” seeded the Earth with DNA that would EVENTUALLY become human”

THIS.
It is exactly what the movie suggests. Since you do not see any animals running around the Engineer or fish swimming aroung in the water (once he drinks his goo), it is safe to presume that you described exactly what the movie seems to suggest. All life on Earth was created (engineered) by the Engineers. They saw that somewhere down the line, evolution would lead to humans – physically similar creatures to the Engineers – and then the time would come to infect all life on Earth with the bilogical weapon that would create the Xenomorphs.

I’m feel sorry that you are getting caught up on Mike and Jay’s act and not realizing what this movie actually hints at. That confusion, sadly, can only be attributed to the pills that you didn’t take.

Boobies.

Whether a movie is a “mystery” (which this was not, though it could have been written as), or whether it is not an “alien movie” or not is totally beside the point. There are BASIC THINGS that a movie must do. If it fails to do them, it is seriously flawed at best.
Any story of any kind must have an antagonist. You can write something with no protagonist at all, but you MUST have an antagonist, because this is the element that alters the status quo. The three classic plots of literature are Man versus Man, Man versus Nature, and Man versus Himself. In all of these plot types, there is some kind of discernible antagonist. In Prometheus we have; 1 black goo which does completely different, unrelated things every single time it appears in the movie, 2 worm like things that pop out of the ground and eyeballs, 3 snakey monsters that resemble genitalia, 4 a squid-baby/face hugger thing that demonstrates a logic destroying ability to increase 100 times in size and mass while feeding on thin air, 5 big white skinned guys who do random things that have no clear purpose, goal , or explanation, and 6 an old guy in a cryo tube.
Out of that list, can you name the antagonist that drives the plot forward? Can you list one single element that CANNOT be removed from the movie without destroying the story? For example, if we simply removed the old guy from the movie entirely, it would roll along exactly the same way. If we removed the alien thing at the end, any old monster would have filled his place. We could have just had the alien ship programmed to launch all by itself and somehow tell people it is headed to Earth. In fact, that would have worked better since then we could hint at the hubris of man interfering with stuff and setting it off, then regretting their arrogant meddling.
You cannot name one item from that list that is VITAL. You know why? No antagonist. This means the story is fatally flawed.
Alien wasn’t just a horror movie in space. Lots of horror movies in the 80s were really big and made money and even led to spin offs. We never saw Chuckie or Freddy graphic novels (that I am aware of) back when graphic novels were very rare. We never saw a Friday the 13th fan base involved in long, ongoing discussions of the Friday universe. We did see this with Alien. Why? It was a sci fi story as much as a horror movie. In fact, it was an extremely intelligently written movie.
In Alien, the story is driven by the ongoing discovery of a singular, brilliantly planned out and designed, fake organism. The changing nature of it’s various phases of the life cycle lead to constant surprises as the thing changes and we do not know what to expect next. We don’t expect it to pop out of the guy’s chest, we don’t expect it to suddenly grow, etc. Yet, because of the careful design work, this creature is so well put together that the life stages seem just believable enough for us to suspend our disbelief. Much work was done to achieve this, from real sheep guts in the eggs during the facehugger scene, to studies of insect biology, to actually not telling some of the cast that the prosthesis was going to pop out of the actor’s chest and catching their honest shock and horror. Prometheus could not possibly be driven along by an unfolding mystery because it’s aliens were so badly hastily, and illogically thought out. They do not have anything consistent about them. You get the impression that every alien in the movie is just play dough that can become whatever stereotypical thing the director thinks might draw a reaction.
We discover in Alien something bigger and deeper as we go. It becomes clear that they were routed to that planet intentionally, and we begin to realize that the corporation, through it’s tools on the ship; “Mother” the computer, and the robot, is intentionally setting up the crew for experimentation. We begin to understand that the alien itself is amoral. It is not an evil thing (like Chucky or Jason), it is just an animal following it’s instincts. Yet a far more serious and sinister evil is at work here; the evil in human nature as fellow humans USE the alien as a tool to screw over their own kind. This is a critical part of the writing of Alien and is a level of sophistication COMPLETELY lacking in prometheus. They stick an old man in a cryo tank in there like an illiterate retard aping the motions of a brilliant composer and demanding the same respect. The old man subplot in Prometheus is just shoehorned in, has no connections to anything else, and it ultimately unnecessary. It could be removed entirely, and it wouldn’t change the non-story in any way.
Movies are more than just stories, otherwise this would be a literary critique. Movies must SHOW us things. They cannot simply TELL us things. This is the crux of the director’s art. Good movies show us things in one picture that educate us better than volumes of words while bad movies use volumes of words to make up for failing pictures. In Prometheus, we are TOLD that our protagonist is a brilliant scientist, we are SHOWN that she is a retarded child. We are TOLD that the goo is a weapon via shoehorned and clunky dialogue. We are TOLD that the ship is headed for Earth by a character with no way to really know that. We are TOLD that it heading for Earth would be a disaster by a character with no way to know that. We are TOLD through dialogue that the captain has had an instant change of heart from a cold and selfish jerk who didnt care about his crew dying to a self-sacrificing hero in the space of one frame. We are told so many things that blatantly contradict our eyes that it becomes an exercise in mind-over-matter to even continue to watch.
In a good movie, characters must act in a way that is believable and logical based on their own nature (tough guy, bully, nice guy, whatever) and what they know logically based on the information we have seen them receive in the story. This is important, because while I can make a movie about firefighters or bank managers that will piss off those particular professionals, but pass muster for the rest of the population despite inaccuracies in the material; there is one thing I can never get away with, since the ENTIRE audience is expert in this. I can never get away with showing human nature inaccurately.
The characters in Prometheus do not act logically or consistently based on who they are and what they are supposed to be. They change dramatically depending on whatever the director wants in a particular scene. Xenobiologist becomes afraid of dead bodies of aliens (yet wants to befriend live and dangerous looking ones), asshole captain who leaves his post while team members die horribly suddenly becomes a self-sacrificial hero. Whatever. The only character that is played straight is the corporate boss woman; and she is one dimensional and uninteresting as a person.
In a good movie, the main character usually goes through an arc and changes as a person. Alien had plenty of logically acting characters who did what normal humans would do in that kind of situation and so enhanced believability rather than detracting as the characters in Prometheus do, but to really illustrate this, I would point you to Aliens. In Aliens, Ripley begins as a neurotic, traumatized, shut in (which makes sense given the last movie). She doesn’t trust humanity after being used as a guinea pig by the corp, and she is barely socially functional. She has to open up through the movie, interacting with, coming to care for, and ultimately helping to rescue other people. She has to confront her own fears, develops a maternal connection to the orphan Newt, and in the end, when she fights the queen with the power loader, it isn’t just cool action, we are rooting for someone who has now come full circle and is directly facing down her own worst nightmare. Secondary characters like Michael Beihn’s character change as well; going from a selfish vet who is looking after number one and keeping his head down to a man forced to take charge and try to take care of others. He grows into a leader trying to take care of the group, reaches the very limits of his own emotional endurance, and is helped by Ripley (who has to reach out) to overcome this and continue. This is great character work. This is wonderful writing coming out through good acting. This is a good movie.
Now back to Prometheus. …Hmm… yeah… nothing at all comes to mind as far as any character arc of any kind for any of the characters. They begin as cardboard cutouts and that is how they meet their various grisly ends.
So we are left feeling empty at the end. We watch a wonderfully pretty final scene with great big falling starships and we really, really want to reward this MASSIVE expenditure of money and time by actually caring what happens to any of these “characters”, yet we do not. We don’t give one flying fuck whether our protagonist girl or the ice queen girl is the one run over by the ship. We don’t really care WHERE she is going off to in her “search for answers”, because we could care less about that emotionless, robotic, inhuman creature pawned off on us as a main character. We would even forgive the obvious, BS, commercial trick of having our entire movie take place when they get to a planet to “look for answers”, find none, and move on at the end to go to ANOTHER planet to “look for answers” if the JOURNEY had been a story, an unfolding mystery, had shaped our character in some way or taught us something or highlighted something about human nature… anything. Instead we are numb, empty, and increasingly PISSED OFF that we lost our ticket money instead of just finding a pirated version somewhere on the internet.
For those of us who were fans of the Alien and Aliens movies, it isn’t that this was not “an Alien movie” it is that this was not a GOOD MOVE!!! This pain does not go away. This makes us want to f our cat and eat pizza rolls and drink bleach! Our frustration is only made WORSE when Jay gives this …thing… a pass and says they will do no plinkett review, for now we know there can be no catharsis, no healing, no cauterizing of the wound as we got with Phantom Menace. It must fester and seethe. And it will, for a very long time, on many comment boards all across the internet.