Prometheus (2012)

[DJTommy]

Fassbender nomited for an oscar for prometheus? lol

[retablo]

Originally Posted by deltasun

No, they created Earthlings and left signs to find them. That's my whole theory, which I spoiler'd way up above. The signs were there to guide Earthlings to find the Engineers. My theory is that when the Earthlings are intelligent enough and have enough resources to be able to find those planets, that's the sign to the Engineers that Earthlings have evolved enough to a certain level and now they must be destroyed. It's like if you created a bunch of ants and the ants start getting to smart. You don't want them getting to your level and so you then destroy them. Earthlings have reached that level by finding that base (which the Engineers left clues for in those caves on Earth).

Or you can just go by what Ridley said, that

[Show spoiler]the reason they wanted to kill Earthlings is because we crucified Jesus, who was also an Engineer. All the timelines match... Not to mention Shaw is the "virgin Mary" who immaculately conceives the alien and gives "birth" on Christmas. It's all very ham-fisted.

[Nuova]

Originally Posted by poke smot

quick question:

[Show spoiler]if the engineer left his crashed ship to get shaw, then who is in the drivers seat in Alien?

Different planets

[wormraper]

Originally Posted by retablo

Or you can just go by what Ridley said, that

[Show spoiler]the reason they wanted to kill Earthlings is because we crucified Jesus, who was also an Engineer. All the timelines match... Not to mention Shaw is the "virgin Mary" who immaculately conceives the alien and gives "birth" on Christmas. It's all very ham-fisted.

lol pretty much. I was banging my head against the seat in front of me the whole time... it was annoying obvious but tried to be "more than it seems" at the same time.

[deltasun]

Originally Posted by retablo

Or you can just go by what Ridley said, that

[Show spoiler]the reason they wanted to kill Earthlings is because we crucified Jesus, who was also an Engineer. All the timelines match... Not to mention Shaw is the "virgin Mary" who immaculately conceives the alien and gives "birth" on Christmas. It's all very ham-fisted.

Someone else beat you with this response already.

[retablo]

Originally Posted by deltasun

Someone else beat you with this response already.

That's fine, it's pretty common knowledge, if you watched the movie. Apparently many people didn't.

[poke smot]

Originally Posted by Nuova

Different planets

ahh....and this whole time i thought the crashed ship was the one from alien. wouldnt that make more sense?

[Dead By Shaun]

Originally Posted by deltasun

Good summary. This was clear in the film. The question again is why did the Engineer want to destroy Earth?

I don't believe we're meant to completely understand that right now, even though there were clues hinting at a possible explanation. This is the reason why Dr. Shaw asks

[Show spoiler]David to take her to the Engineer's home planet at the end of the film. To seek answers. As the audience, we're meant to take that journey with her and discover those answers in the next film(s).

[deltasun]

Originally Posted by Dead By Shaun

I don't believe we're meant to completely understand that right now, even though there were clues hinting at a possible explanation. This is the reason why Dr. Shaw asks

[Show spoiler]David to take her to the Engineer's home planet at the end of the film. To seek answers. As the audience, we're meant to take that journey with her and discover those answers in the next film(s).

Agreed, but we can guess (see my brief explanation of why above: post 4023).

[ghostbobb89]

Originally Posted by DarkIDefender

Where is everyone putting Prometheus in their collection? With Alien? Before or after Alien? Or in the "P" section?

I'm an alphabetical freak, so it's going in the P's. This Prometheus film, as well as the next 2 to come after it is a prequel to the Alien franchise. They're kind of related, but they're kind of not. So I'd rather keep it separately. Not to mention, Prometheus belongs nowhere near my Alien Anthology.

[Mandalorian]

[Show spoiler]

[Agent Bond]

It is a rather simple story of man's basic and eternal questions about our existence.

Who am I? Why am I here? - YouTube

Why *did* Tony Scott kill himself?

He reportedly had inoperable brain cancer. I'm against people who take their own lives, but in this case, its understandable.

It just seems like Ridley is confused. Which might help explain the problems with Prometheus.

Even Ridley leaves himself open to interpretation!

[raygendreau]

Originally Posted by poke smot

quick question:

[Show spoiler]if the engineer left his crashed ship to get shaw, then who is in the drivers seat in Alien?

Per Scott, that is a

[Show spoiler]different engineer on a different ship that landed on LV 426 around the same time as the events that took place on LV 223 in Prometheus that led to the death of the Engineers around 2000 years prior to the prometheus mission

.

[Dead By Shaun]

Originally Posted by deltasun

Agreed, but we can guess (see my brief explanation of why above: post 4023).

Sure, we can guess...and I enjoy pondering such things. But I must point out a flaw in your theory. If the Engineers left the cave map behind as a sign post for humans in order to mark our evolution as a potential technological threat, then why did they originally seek to destroy us 2000 years earlier long before we even had the technology to fly?

[raygendreau]

Originally Posted by Dead By Shaun

Sure, we can guess...and I enjoy pondering such things. But I must point out a flaw in your theory. If the Engineers left the cave map behind as a sign post for humans in order to mark our evolution as a potential technological threat, then why did they originally seek to destroy us 2000 years earlier long before we even had the technology to fly?

I believe that the cave illustrations were depicting nothing more than early humans attempt to copy the Engiineer's graphical response to the question: Where did you come from? Lindelof in response to a question in a IGN interview:

IGN: Let’s get specific then – in your opinion, do these aliens want us to visit them?

Lindelof: That’s an excellent question and one that I’m not going to answer. But I will say that there’s something fascinating about humanity where we perceive it as an invitation. You look at a cave wall, there’s somebody pointing at some distant planets, and one interpretation is “This is where we come from” another is “We want you to come here.” Where are we drawing that from? I think another thing that’s interesting about the system that they visit is that the moon the land on in Prometheus is LV 223. And we know LV 426 is where the action takes place in Alien, so are they even in the right place? And how close are they to the place that these aliens on cave walls were directing them. Were they just extrapolating “This is the system that has the sun with the sustainable life.” So there’s a lot of guesswork. There’s a small line in the movie where David and Holloway are talking about David’s deconstruction of the language based on Holloway’s thesis, and he says “If your thesis is correct” and Holloway says “If it’s correct?” and David says “That’s why they call it a thesis Doctor.” And the reason we threw that in there is that we’re dealing with a highly hypothetical area in terms of who these beings are, what, if any invitation they issued, and who is responsible for making those cave paintings. And did something happen in between when those cave paintings were made - tens of thousands of years ago - and our arrival now, in 2093, 2,000 years after these things have perished. Did something happen in the intermediate period that we should be thinking about?

[videohead]

Originally Posted by poke smot

quick question:

[Show spoiler]if the engineer left his crashed ship to get shaw, then who is in the drivers seat in Alien?

That's what I have been saying! The ship in alien has a sleep chamber with one or more engineers in there!

[raygendreau]

Originally Posted by videohead

That's what I have been saying! The ship in alien has a sleep chamber with one or more engineers in there!

Sorry, but there is only one very dead engineer (space jockey) and no stasis chambers in the derelict ship in Alien.

Alien (1979) most strange scene in HD - YouTube

[42041]

Originally Posted by Gremal

Talking about "believable" in a sci fi film is a slippery slope. The scientists acted like humans--that is not in question. The question is why they acted like stupid, self-centered humans, which is not the usual stereotype of scientists. And the answer is because the entire narrative sets up faith to trump empiricism.

I think you're reading a bit too much of your personal views into it than the film actually bears out. If that's what the narrative sets out to do, then for me it fails, since the characters' behavior can hardly be described as rational or well-reasoned most of the time, and is in fact characterized by loony leaps of faith that tend to be deadly.
Now I don't have a problem with characters doing dumb stuff in horror films, but let's not pretend the transparent efforts of the screenwriters to get the characters to the next gory setpiece have any deeper meaning than that. And in a movie that is evidently trying to be "smart" sci-fi, such characterization sloppiness is very unfortunate.

[raygendreau]

Originally Posted by Dead By Shaun

I picked up my collector's edition last night and won't have time to watch it until this weekend, but I did see this film twice in the theaters. I may be a little foggy on the details, but perhaps I can shed some light on this.

The mission of Prometheus (the crew and the ship) was not a secret. The fact that Peter Weyland was on board, however, was. In fact, nobody even knew he was still alive (much less on board) aside from his daughter and David. If you recall, in the beginning the crew are briefed about the mission by a holographic message supposedly taped by Weyland before his death. As far as the crew, or any other public relations are concerned, Weyland funded this trip as a scientific expedition based on Shaw and Holloway's discovery. Weyland's true motivations for the mission, however, were strictly selfish and self-serving.

This was a man with extreme wealth and endless resources who was approaching the end of his life and looking for a way to cheat death. His final hope lay in the slim possibility that Shaw and Holloway's discovery was indeed true and that they could inadvertently lead him to meet his creator. Who better to grant him immortality than the beings who supposedly created the human race? This covert mission to extend Weyland's life was being carried out solely by David. The rest of the crew were basically there as window dressing and completely superfluous to him in accomplishing his real goal, which obviously was to prolong his life. Taking all of this into account helps provide insight, not only into David's actions and motivations, but also the crew's lack of experience and professionalism...with the exception of Dr. Shaw, whom I suspect Weyland (as well as David) had some small amount of admiration for.

You and I are on the same page with the exception of the mission secrecy aspect.

[Show spoiler]As you noted, the fact that Weyland was on board was known by David and Vickers only. Share with me why you believe that fact was kept secret? If you believe that the departure of the Weyland Corp Flagship Prometheus was known, that is true. However, the mission was classified and the pseudo scientific crew were not informed about the mission until they were revived from stasis at the destination and met the others on the mission for the first time. The meeting with the holographic Weyland was their first exposure to the cover story mission. That took place on the ship after they came out of stasis. It was not explicitly stated that the mission was secret in the film, but I didn't think that was necessary. In addition on the Fox Weylandcorp.com web site, the information on the Classified nature of the mission was noted months before the movie was released in theaters.

In fact, given that Scott wanted to maintain some continuity between Prometheus and Alien, if the mission had been publicized, how could there not be some reference to a mission to discover our 'makers' in the Alien film? Don't you think that would have been raised when the Nostromo arrived at LV-426? Add to that, the revelation that Weyland passed on investigating the signal detected from LV-426 as shown in the Prometheus BD extras.

So, you see, they had to keep the cover mission a secret as well to keep Alien canon intact.

[moviecriticsonline]

Check out the creepy smile on David's face at the 1:11:56 mark lol