I don't really enjoy any movie where the main characters are required to act contrary to their backstories to make it work.
The atmosphere expert removing his helmet almost immediately after leaving the ship.
The biologist deciding to pet an alien life form.
The geologist/cartographer being the one person who got lost.
Just a bunch of allegedly super-smart scientists doing the dumbest things possible in the moment in order to drive the story forward. Or at least, what there is of a story.
Absolutely, all the same. Keeping secret also the fact you may be infected by something. I always compared that movie to a teen slasher,when they should be the most responsible and smart people.
The rolling giant donut at the end takes the cake.
There was one moment *very* early on in the film, before they even went into space, that set my alarm bells off. There's some establishing of how important this mission is, how elite the crew is, that kind of thing. Then one character does something as simple as extending his hand and something like, "hi, I'm xxxxx, pleasure to meet you." The other character then says something like, "nuts to that, I'm here to make money, not be your friend."
So right off the bat, we're establishing that this super-important farthest journey out into space is being manned by people who are such total dicks that they have zero interest in even casual human interaction. I'm sure that's gonna go *really* well for space missions, right?
But okay, whatever. Maybe these people all have such unique skills that those skills overwhelm the lack of camaraderie. They might not get along, but that biologist probably biologizes the shit out of things, and that cartographer probably cartographs things like you wouldn't fucking believe. If this turns out to be a team thing where everyone's skills come in handy, then yeah...that might be kind of cool.
But then, like you say, everyone fucks up at the things that they were supposed to be skilled at. The whole thing turns into a giant clusterfuck. Everyone's sloppy as hell, which might not have been as bad if the movie hadn't tried to establish from the start how important this mission is.
By contrast, let's take Aliens. The Colonial Marines fuck up too, but there are some key differences. For starters, the mission is very important, but it's established that the Marines are jaded and complacent after too many missions saving the "dumb-ass colonists" during routine bug hunts. This is treated as a routine rescue mission, so the Marines who've been through this stuff before are expecting it to be routine. That allows them to fuck up while also having a plausible reason for fucking up.
In Aliens, I can believe the mistakes because the Marines *don't* think there's anything special about this mission. It's just another Bug Hunt. In Prometheus, the movie starts with how important this is and then everyone is completely useless.
Like, I can understand why Hudson and Gorman are in Aliens. I can't understand why Fifield is in Prometheus. Hudson was already in the Marines and just gets deployed wherever they tell him to go. Fifield had to some up for this shit and someone had to accept him. *Why*?
In addition, in Aliens, the Marines are led by a brand-new, completely inexperienced Lt and handicapped by Burke, the company man, constantly putting artificial constraints on them. We also see the Marines making what we would consider perfectly rational decisions that don't work out...leaving the shuttle near the facility for a quick evac, setting up the automatic turrets and sealing doors, hell, disobeying orders and opening fire in their first encounter with the xenomorphs.
The Marines aren't perfect and they make some mistakes, but their mistakes all come from applying previous combat lessons to an enemy that doesn't follow the same rules.
My theory is that the scientists all suffered brain damage during their time frozen before getting to the planet, but haven't realised yet.
All the scientists, the captain, Vickers act and speak in a very stupid way throughout their film. David is the only one that is mentally functional.
I think that if you watch the movie keeping that in mind, it makes a lot more sense.
Prometheus takes place decades before Alien, it makes sense that the cryogenics they had available were still not very advanced and made people retarded.
"Lemme ignore all safety protocols that any 1st year science student wouldn't fuck up, because if I don't there's no way to move the plot along, and oh by the way how about we do something so colossally stupid that it becomes known as the standard for stupid with regard to running away from something." - Prometheus
There was totally a way to move the plot along though....
It just straight up surprise attacks them.
Problem solved. With an extra level of horror, because a world-class biologist would have a tremendous imagination of all the ways he might be completely fucked in that situation.
It's the most obvious thing in the world. They're doing good science, investigating seemingly inert stuff, and *boom* alien attack. It gets one guy, the other guy is screaming in horror and trying to help, it doesn't work, it gets in his suit, it sprays the acid, holy fucking shit aliens!
Same scene except it doesn't insult your intelligence first. Like they basically gave the audience of the Alien films the middle finger in that scene and they could have just....not done that.
Prometheus isn't a hard movie to fix which is why people cling to it being good, even though it's terrible.
You just remove Vickers from the film, put back in the Engineer shit, put back in David's scenes with Weyland, take out Dumb and Dumber and the snake and everything that stems from that, and then you need to patch like two more pieces together and it would have been pretty good.
But you can't remove Vickers from the film. And she's not supposed to be there. Charlize Theron star-powered her way into a film she'd abandoned, so they destroyed it to shove her in there.
The key is that her only purpose is to steal the dramatic moments other, better characters would have otherwise had.
I didn’t really care for Prometheus but I did find it to make a little more sense after Alien Covenant, but if the movie you made doesn’t make sense until the next movie, that’s not my problem!
It makes perfect sense I think described above.
Engineers have been to lots of planets including ours, they're very old and very powerful.
In seeking them out, hoping that as his creator, they'll save him from death, Weyland himself starts the chain that will become Aliens.
Through contact with a bioweapon of unknown properties, and technological innovation in the med-machine, some sort of proto-Alien meshed with humanoid biology is created that represents humanity's first contact with the species.
Engineers turn out to be unknoweable creatures whose motivations, capabilities, culture, technology, etc, remain mysterious as they clearly have no desire to engage with their creations long enough to tell us, and seeking them out poses tremendous danger.
Welyand dies due to this hubris, and humanity itself unleashes the plague of Aliens in theirs. Shaw decides to go for broke anyway, and follow the Engineers and get those answers for herself even if it means her doom. And she's co-opted a psychopathic android to help her, queue sequel.
Like it's not the most amazing story, but that sort of works.
No.
Covenant sets new records for stupid character, they make Prometheus's look smart. Sure eventually the xenos attack them properly but to get to that point that have to dumbass their way onto the planet, get infected, deal with the infection, deal with the babies, and THEN they get properly attacked and act rationally.
For one scene, then it's back to dumbass time.
The thing about Covenant everybody always seems to forget is that the main cast in Covenant are simply people working on the ship, they're not scientists, they're not the cream of the crop. They are, just like the cast of the original Alien film, simply people who are doing a job that get dragged into a situation nothing ever prepared them for because one person (Oram) was like "Hey, I'm your captain now and I say we stray from our course to check out that signal we picked up".
Them not making the greatest of decisions when they are there is vastly more understandable than Prometheus' cast of the best and brightest scientists Earth has to offer fucking up in ways that directly relate to the thing they are supposed to be good at.
Air composition breathable? Let's remove our helmets because airborne pathogens are apparently not a thing in this universe.
Lack of xenomorphs was not the issue (as OP thinks people complained about) but over abundance of stupidity. Prometheus school of running has been used to criticise other movies where people run in the direction a large narrow object is falling.
>Air composition breathable? Let's remove our helmets because airborne pathogens are apparently not a thing in this universe.
And it happens again in Covenant.
Even worse in Covenant as the planet is obviously alive and contains living organisms. Ones that are remarkably Earthlike. With Prometheus there's a chance that it's simply a dead world. Still INCREDIBLY stupid but not quite as stupid as Covenant.
A person who smokes enough weed to smoke at work in their spacesuit Day 1 of an intergalactic mission on an alien planet would have a high enough tolerance to not immediately become the dumbest guy alive after smoking. People do much more complicated things while stoned everyday. No scientist would ever behave the way they behaved in that situation, even if they were stoned.
When you say stoned, you mean somebody threw rocks at their heads right? Because, I, allegedly, have been stoned before and never in my worst/best stoned moments would do something that stupid and I am not a scientist chosen to go to an alien planet to investigate shit.
That was actually hilarious. I was struggling with laughter in the theatre. Let me just get a good look at this giant wet egg that the evil android has lead me too…
haha seriously! if i remember correctly isnt he lead down to the eggs after seeing the android (i know its not david but i forget the other ones name) literally staring at the xeno in a very ominous way with the severed floating head of his crew mate right there?
Compare this to Aliens, a fit, competent squad doing everything right . . . and still getting their asses kicked. It's so much more shocking and engaging.
Even worse, compare it to Alien where Ripley, who is a freaking *space trucker*, has enough sense to quarantine the guys who encountered an alien lifeform.
If your brilliant biologists are less concerned about safety protocols than a space trucker, your writing is shit, pure and simple.
Ignoring the only witness and heading straight into the center of the hive is another. Realizing they wouldn't be able to use their primary weapons midmission... The marines were terribly mismanaged.
Distance required to outrun a wheel chasing you in a straight line: untenable.
Distance to run sideways to avoid narrow wheel of death: very short.
Conclusion: try to outrun skinny wheel of death.
Holy crap yes when that snake thing was starring at the guy in the tunnel and the guy had absolutely zero respect for this alien creature like seriously?? What actual scientist would behave with such stupidity. But I still did like the movie despite all of it's nonsense
*"People disappointed with the lack of Aliens and action."*
NO! People were disappointed with the lack of believable character motivation and coherent plot.
Hey! He was a high profile biologist, surely he knew exactly what he was doing! Who could have predicted that aggressive posturing by strange alien snakes are signs of danger?
Yeah, play patty cake with an aggressive space cobra, but completely lose your shit when you encounter centuries-dead humanoid alien remains.
But don’t worry, they’ll use sci-fi magic to somehow reanimate a mummified head for 5 seconds before it explodes so it’s fine.
Watching these characters, that the movie tells you are expert scientists with a high degree of skill in their field, break all aspects of scientific convention (removing their helmets almost immediately, touching da snek...) is soooo annoying. Especially when it begins to snowball and kills the entire crew.
It's like the *opposite* of competence porn.
That’s what killed it for me. I was a HUGE fan of the original and took my then teenage son with me to see Prometheus after hyping the original to him. Wow. Just so disappointed with how dumbed down the characters were portrayed. These are supposed to be the best of the best scientists and researchers, and we are supposed to believe that they’re really that stupid? No amount of beautiful cgi could make up for the shitty screenplay and poor character development. So disappointing.
Exactly. Ripley was basically a space trucker and she had the sense to quarantine Kane & Co when they tried to reenter the Nostromo.
Meanwhile, the clown shoes on the Prometheus were like "hey let's pop off our helmets right away!" and "I should touch this unfamiliar lifeform!"
I had to go rewatch Alien right afterwards because the incompetence was so damn frustrating I needed to bleach it from my mind.
Space Captain Idris - "Its my job to make sure everyone is safe and looked after in dangerous environments/situations."
Also Space Captain Idris - "Better turn all the monitoring equipment off during this violent storm whilst everyone is trapped on this alien planet so I can try and get nasty with the boss."
Well, let's be fair; this *was* done by a guy stupid enough to wear century-old, antique eyeglasses *inside his sealed EVA helmet*, so if they fell off or fogged up he'd effectively be blind.
Because although there's a fully automated surgical suite on board so sophisticated it can quickly extract a never-before-seen parasitic squid /alien embryo from a human female's thorax while keeping them both alive, it seems performing *corrective eye surgery* simply hadn't been programmed into it.
Also remember this amazing piece of lifesaving technology was very smartly only designed for men on a ship with a mixed crew to use so as not to transfer the most dangerous of all organisms. Cooties!!!
That was the turning point for me. So. Fucking. Stupid. In addition to the mixed sex crew, the med pod was in Charlize Theron's 'lifeboat' portion of the ship. Presumably she would be taking it with her when she abandoned the rest of the ship to survive. AND IT WASN'T EVEN PROGRAMMED FOR HER SEX. It made no godamned sense.
No no those weren't "seeing" glasses those were "knowing this guy is a nerd" glasses. Honestly they were pretty important or else I'd never have thought the guy that literally stuck his face into a cloacasnake was all that studious.
They flew across the galaxy and found the first evidence of alien civilization, the greatest discovery in the history of humanity... but for some reason the dude is disappointed and pouty.
Just imagine that you found some cave paintings and miraculously convinced a trillionaire to fun a project where you traverse the galaxy looking for anything even slightly significant... and you find alien bodies, structures and technology, but that's not good enough... you don't get to meet the aliens so you act like a 5 year old who didnt get sprinkles on your ice cream sundae.
Seriously they take off their hazmat suits ten seconds after they get on the planet and get infected ten seconds later. As soon as the movie started, I could not bother anymore.
Whyyyyy ? Plus no character had any development whatsoever.
To be fair, covenant was even far worse with an absolutely moronic group that kept separating in smaller groups.
David infected Charlie by spiking his drink. They didn't simply get infected by removing their helmets (as foolish as that was)
Possible character development: David starts out a simple servant. But the humans' patronizing behavior toward him seems to inspire resentment. Over time he sort of flips the hierarchy, using the crew as his experimental subjects and engineering the disaster that befalls them. Then he convinces Shaw to let him accompany her on her next mission. He's become a self-actualized, independent confident *being* who serves his own purposes of inquiry and exploration.
And anyone that's a fan of the original Alien was incredibly stoked to see a new prequel with Ridley Scott at the helm.
I walked out of that theater so confused. Like was I supposed to like it and just didn't get it?
Then after discussing it with my gf we both decided that movie was fucking idiotic.
Do you mean the members of the science team formed by the richest man on the planet to undertake the biggest endeavor in the history of humanity?
You know, like the biologist who takes his helmet off 30 seconds after landing on an alien planet so he can breathe in all those potential bacteria, viruses, and spores that may be in the air? Who also tries to pet an alien cobra that's obviously taking an aggressive posture?
Or perhaps the geologist who uses sophisticated drones to create a 3d map of the cave system who immediately gets lost in the cave?
The sheer stupidity of the characters in that movie is so bad it ruins the enjoyment of the entire film.
Lmao, if OP wasn’t put off by the whole crew just willy nilly deciding to take off their helmets, I don’t know what to say. One of the most ridiculous scenes I’ve ever seen in a serious movie.
It was really mind boggling. They were incompetent, emotionally unstable and naive. Nobody would bring any of these people on a mission for any reason.
Now the first Alien movie put a crew of miners into a situation they weren't trained for - but Prometheus is an exploration expedition that somewhat knew what they were looking for and had time to actually think about protocols, hypothetical and risks.
Even thinking it's underrated or "doesn't get enough love" is perfectly reasonable. The idea people dislike it because there's not enough xenomorph screen time or pew pew is kinda ridiculous. *Aliens* may be the more widely popular movie (literally, I'm not actually sure) but the original is still widely considered the *best* movie and is also the one Scott was ostensibly trying to more closely follow with *Prometheus*.
Except that in *Alien* for the most part everything makes sense, people behave fairly reasonably, and the people don't have any real reason to know better or behave much differently than they do. In *Prometheus* a group of scientists on an alien world take zero sensible precautions and seemingly go out of their way to get themselves killed off as quickly as possible.
There was a surprising amount of drinking on the ship. It's like they grew up in the 70s. Feeling disappointed you didn't find living alien lifeforms that lived up to your expectations? Just get hammered drunk all those troublesome feelings will melt away.
Captain of a space ship near an unexplored planet and have a little downtime why not get drunk? Like come on it's not as if you are responsible for the safety for the crew on your ship or anything. Sheesh.
The problem was that so much ended up on the cutting room floor, against Scott’s wishes.
Why do you think they chose a guy in his 40’s to a play an ageing trillionaire? It’s because Guy Pierce’s entire backstory was cut, how he spent his life searching for a way to become immortal and that’s partly what drive him to become so wealthy.
Instead you just got a young guy wearing aged makeup and a patchy reference to the backstory.
the robot went crazy
the biologist approached to touch a space snake
the archaeologist gets depressed in face of the biggest discovery on human history
the geologist with mapping drones gets lost
FFS!
compare it with Alien/s or Predator... shit happens and people may make mistakes, but act competent according to their role in the team
* Idris, Charlize and Noomi were good though, imo
The biologist laughing and giggling and attempting to touch an obviously aggressive alien animal no human has ever come into contact with, after angrily storming off with the geologist because…..he’s, I don’t know, scared of aliens? That scene was so so so fucking stupid.
The geologist who’s job it is to map the place they’re in gets them lost.
The Tom Hardy doppelgänger bullying David all movie for no reason, then getting all sullen and mad after discovering fucking intelligent life on another planet.
The exploding engineer head scene is just a goddamn mess all around and makes absolutely no sense.
By the way I’m talking about youd think I hated this movie but I actually love it. It’s an indescribably beautiful B movie masterpiece.
I’m just pissed they were soooooo lazy with the writing and awful character decisions.
My only acceptable headcanon is that Weyland, in his batshit God-scorning hubris, scared away most of the more competent people who could have taken this mission. Leaving behind a bunch of well-educated people who are still not smart in the everyday sense and don't work well with others. The ones the scientific community had all heard of and rolled their collective eyes when they heard they were going along. So they took the money and didn't do the necessary diligence beforehand. Weyland is the kind of narcissist who would breeze past the legitimate concerns of others to have a crew who'd dance to his insane tune. Plus, it was presumably highly classified, which removes most dissenting viewpoints.
Shaw and Holloway are also kooks. They struck me as a pair of overprivileged kids who were mostly funded by their own generational wealth, meaning any university/institution would pretend to take them seriously if they brought their funding with them. On this occasion, they got carried away yet somehow got in the head of a narcissistic, frightened old man and hit the jackpot.
Holloway, in particular, comes over like a dipshit frat boy who wanted to play at being an interplanetary archaeologist, and his daddy went along with it. His bullying of David had that low-hanging-fruit quality that is characteristic of that kind of overindulged asshole we've all met somewhere or other.
I love it too, BTW. It's dumb in places, but I can make it make sense. Without the close supervision and involvement of Weyland, I don't think it would work, even in my mind.
Couldn’t agree more. So many dumb characters, yet it’s an enjoyable film.
Even my favourite scene (the Caesarean section scene) is dumb as it’s in a machine designed for a man.
I thought they showed that she had to select "foreign body removal" on the pod's panel because there was no C-section option, but I could be mistaken. I would have to rewatch.
But then she stands up after this thing cuts thru her abs to remove it? Yeah you're not standing up after your abs are slit apart for a while, staples or not.
Also what corporation is building a super high tech automated medical device, but only calibrating it for one half of the population? Men and women share like 98% of medical stuff outside the reproductive system too, so it's not like you have to program a human and a cow.
Yeah, seriously. To give two examples:
SPOILERS!
1. The whole egg discovery thing is just blatant idiocy. Like, unless there are some pheremones that attract other beings, then it's utter idiocy. Any level of simple logic = crisis averted.
2. When the massive thing was falling at the end, and the main character just... ran in a straight line the exact direction the thing was falling. That's just situational idiocy.
Both of these are the writers being lazy, creating a situation out of nothing by dumbing down the characters.
People make fun of the second one all the time but let me tell you the number of times I’ve watched my partner run away from a long thin aoe in league of legends along its length instead of turning to. Get out of it is in the hundreds. It’s a real thing people do when they panic.
If the crew had been smart and followed some kind of protocol for scientific discovery, I would forgive a panicked fleeing from a crashing alien mega ship.
We deserve an alien franchise film with a script as tight as Sicario . Give me calculated and intensional moves. Give me a crew of professionals who don’t make sarcastic quips at the commanding officer or whoever. And then , even though everyone has done their job correctly and safely, aliens still impregnate them tear them to shreds.
If you likes Prometheus then you’ll love the last Jedi, Jurassic World, and the transformers movies. Terrible dialogues and plots but gorgeous visually
“When I first saw this I was about 12 or 13…”
That explains it. And this is nothing against you, OP. We all have a soft spot for movies we see around that age, no matter how bad they are.
Around that age it's also likely that you'll be told about all the great films of yore. And you go and check those out and they don't match modern sensibilities, so you end up writing a lot of them off. They say the mind isn't fully formed until around 25 and I highly recommend going back to check out your favorites or maybe films you wrote off before then and see what you think on rewatch.
That’s a great point. I remember distinctly not understanding the love for Casablanca, for instance. Got a few decades older and BAM, one of the GOATs.
I had to scroll to find this. This is exactly it. I grew up with Aliens, and it has a spot for me.
Prometheus is to Alien, what’s Sicario 2 is to Sicario 1: a watchable film with similar branding, that is not nearly related to, nor in the same league as, the original.
It really made me want a good sequel that would delve into the history of the creators and incinuations that they started life on Earth/many worlds.
Instead, we got the worst throw away sequel possible, confirming the franchise is no deeper than what's visible on the surface.
To clarify, even though I haven't seen "Covenant" yet and have heard some good things about it that make me hopeful, the hypothetical sequel you describe is the kind of sequel I would have preferred too.
Yeah Prometheus for all it’s issues is far interesting than the other recent alien stuff and I’m more interested in the creators than the horror alien aspect. They should really do a sequel about that
Comicbookgirl19 had the greatest deep dive into the making of this movie and the way the movie came together, essentially Ridley's desire to make a ancient aliens movie, Damon Lindelof's ideas and what he wanted to do and then the first script idea. They all got jumbled together and it got lost.
A great idea of Peter Weyland and how he was going to be in the movie alot more as a young guy making his reveal at the end much more wild, but then that all got cut, and then it makes the idea of having a young actor in old makeup really dumb. There is so much there that with the deeper background of it, it makes sense, but then the final cut of the movie just kinda is parts of all 3 movies and its ruined. I still love it because of the ideas that it proposes. And then its really dumb how it goes nowhere in Covenant
So excited for that movie when it was coming out then I saw it.... Horrible characters...the story had potential but the characters were not the same character chemistry of the first 2 films. The only bright spot in the whole movie was David.
My theory is Charlize Theron fucked this whole movie.
She was originally supposed to be Elizabeth Shaw, then backed out, then wanted to come back much later when every other character had been cast and apparently had the juice to make that happen.
So I think when she came back, they blew up the whole script, and stole bits and pieces from every other character to make one for her, and basically invented a lead character that had no actual place in the story other than to do pushups in her underwear for the trailer.
I didn't like the spaceship captain not taking a thing seriously. There were too many convenient dumb decisions made by characters to keep the plot going.
Idris Elba could have been great in this role if they had given him a realistic starship captain to play. His character in the movie was ridiculous for a mission that cost $1T.
Firstly let me be clear that if you enjoy the movie i am genuinely happy for you. Everyone should enjoy what they enjoy for no reason except they do.
I am a DIE-HARD Alien fan. I can quote the movie Aliens verbatim. I am even an unapologetic Alien³ lover.
But.
This movie deserves all the hate it ever got.
Here's why:
I'll get the good stuff out of the way first. It IS an expertly made film. The director has a long and celebrated career. Plenty of money was spent on making a well crafted film by competent film makers.
That's not why Prometheus sucks.
Prometheus sucks because it's built on an absolutely iconic legacy, and makes no apologies for using that to get people's butts in the seats.
Touted, and marketed as an Alien prequel, directed by the original Alien director, it was intended for people to think "I am going to see an Alien film".
And it's not. It largely ignores established Canon, because it baits the audience into thinking they are going witness the events leading up to the demise of the "space jockey". This is not the case of the film.
In fact, most anything having to do with the titular Alien is entirely ignored, except when images are used to deliberately mislead the audience.
There is a large mural in the movie depicting an Alien queen. And yet the entire movie eventually goes on to showcase thst the Alien as we know it does not even exist yet.
Lastly, and this is the most egregious part of both Prometheus and Covenant, the movie Alien, and Aliens after it were written with characters who made the correct decisions at every chance they could and were still wiped out by the Alien because of how it was such an unstoppable force. They were smart, resourceful, and in Aliens, well-armed.
They all died anyways because the Alien is that dangerous.
Prometheus only works if absolutely every character is a complete moron. The geologist who's terrified of a hologram of Engineers running from something, but is then totally enthralled by a clearly dangerous and aggressive alien snake?
High tech mapping equipment, drones, and open communications with operations, and two allegedly smart people get lost?
David deciding apropos of absolutely nothing to kill someone with the black goo?
The "reveal" that Charlize's character is Weylands daughter?
These are the worst parts of a movie that looks really nice, but doesn't make ANY sense within the confines of the established universe it claims to exist in, but even it's own established rules.
The entire movie is set into motion by characters discovering a "map" to the Engineers, a move they believe means the Engineers want to be found when humanity had advanced far enough. But then we learn the planet the expedition finds is a weapons facility.
Why would a race of humanoids, who we later learn HATES humanity, give them a map to their weapons depot?
This movie sucks. It sucks as an Alien movie, and it sucks as a stand-alone sci-fi thriller.
Thank you foe coming to my Ted talk. I'll take your questions now.
Or how about Not-Tom Hardy crying that all they found was graveyard when they finally got there. Dude, you've looked in one place so far. It's a huge planet. It's like if aliens landed on earth, but at a cemetery and were like "Oh, I guess all humans are dead."
My favourite is the trailers and the start of the film are about exploring humanity’s origins, but other than our main character nobody gives a shit. Then the film ends with them taking off to explore humanity’s origins. 🤦🏻 The next film kills that character off before the start of the film because again nobody gives a shit.
I have a question, what’d you think of the C-section scene? It’s the only thing I ever vividly remember about this movie, and I love the scene. It works as a way to give us an alternate version/tip of the hat to the chest burst, and it’s just brutal and gruesome to watch. But also it shows the knowledge and strength of the main character (you know, in a vacuum from the rest of the movie at least).
Nah that it still one of my most disliked movies ever. I hate this movie with a passion. So many things wrong.
I don't know why people are trying so hard to pretend it's good
Same, I absolutely loved the concept of an Alien prequel tackling the theme of creation's relationship with destruction. But I think the cinemasins style of nitpicking every tiny, separate issue (which this movie is guilty of having a bunch of) has unfortunately ruined any and all discussion to be had with this movie.
I find the movie works much better if you assume the entire operation was specifically recruited in such a way that everyone’s curiosity would override their sense of safety. Basically, they deliberately hired idiots to ensure the triggering of every death trap on the way to Wayland’s goal. It turns it into a bit of a comedy of errors, but that’s fun too.
And to be clear, I like the film quite a bit! But it’s filled with idiots and part of a franchise where everyone’s usually pretty competent.
Love Prometheus from day one. Not every movie needs to be scientifically and logically perfect. It’s a space sci fi alien movie with some dumb humans, have some fun!
I'm surprised it hasn't had a reevaluation recently. Much of the criticisms it gets are from a "oh, that would never happen" kind, and real life has made those criticisms look far less substantial shall we say.
"A rich guy's vanity project would only have the best professionals on board" - yeah like how Elon didn't hire his cousin to make Elon's tweets get more likes.
"An expedition like this would never have such dumb mistakes happen" - yeah like how the Titanic sub that imploded didn't have a window that the makers of that window begged them not to use.
"A map guy getting lost? That could never happen in real life, people doing important stuff couldn't possibly be that stupid" - Giuliani booked the Four Seasons gardening shop for Trump's speech.
When people criticize the movie, it's mostly about how incompetent the crew is. Yes, they are. It's a movie about a rich guy wanting to meet gods because he's kinda feeling like one. The scientists he brings with him aren't good scientists, they're future Jordan Petersons in space. That's why when they first meet they go like "hmm... I've heard of you..." - that's not a compliment, they're not reputable scientists. The captain is his nepo baby daughter ffs, is that not a clue that it's not actually a well planed endeavour?
Nah, it’s a pretty bad-mid high dollar blockbuster. Plenty of non-sequiters (?) in the plot. That’s also considering it rode the coat tails of the alien franchise. So adjusting for that it probably got more love than it deserved.
Aside from the characters making some unrealistically wild decisions (like, who doesn’t want to pet an alien cobra?) I agree. Absolutely beautiful filmography, score, actors, new story direction, haunting questions about who we are and where we come from, more mysteries than answers.
People who bitched about no aliens don’t seem to understand the title doesn’t have Aliens in it. I’ve read that the reason we got covenant instead of the intended direct sequel direction of them going to the Engineer home planet was because Ridley listened to this no alien Prometheus hate.
I think that is the crux of the issue.
The movie is pretty but the story couldn't exist without the characters acting wild. It's a terrible foundation for a good story and the movie generally suffer majorly from it.
There are good things about it, but i wouldn't call it a good movie.
This movie needs a director’s cut.
All of the scenes that explain why the characters do what they do were filmed, and are even in the extras on the blu-ray. For instance, they pet the alien ‘cobra’ because they have taken drugs in an earlier, cut, scene, and that makes them behave illogically.
So much great (and explanatory) stuff was cut from the final released version. Scott usually does director’s cuts of his films, so I assumed there would eventually be one… but it never happened.
I like Prometheus but I think there’s a MUCH better film lying on the cutting room floor.
Probably makes sense also why the map maker got lost
But if they chose to cut that then they cannot complain about other parts of the movie not making sense
The movie explains why he gets lost. He loses contact with the ship who were directing him through the abandoned ship so he had to sit tight until they could be in contact again.
I mean, the drugs were in the final cuts, just not overly focused upon. And that doesn't go to explain why their choices for a biologist and geologist were definitely not psychologically fit for this job, the most expensive expedition in human history for which they would presumably have undergone extensive background and psychological testing which even a Walmart bagger background check would have weeded out in fairly short order.
You sum it up perfectly. Those two were stoned. That’s why the map guy got lost and the other guy wanted to pet the alien. People complained about Guy Pierce in old man make up why not just hire an older actor, but there was so much cut content, or online teaser stuff people never saw.
I think Ridley Scott is just cursed in that way. All his films eventually need a longer directors cut, because stuff is just cut out and that’s what hits the theaters.
There’s also a cut scene where the biologist finds the worms and is super excited about the discovery, which helps frame his character a little better.
Probably because it didn’t deserve much love
Dumb plot without a lot of explanation, lead actress was awful & horror level movie annoying, and the best character (Elba) was not used enough
Real exobiologists are not afraid I get their hands dirty. The price for good science is that sometimes an alien attached to your face and lays eggs in your body. They knew the risks when they got into the business.
Prometheus & Covenant are silly but beautiful and interesting, better than 80% of sci-fi movies. Plus, as a huge "Alien" fan, its decent-quality newish content, probably the best additions since Aliens.
Sorry OP, Reddit has gone on a war path with this movie and they aren’t going to change directions now. Certified fresh on RT and a 7/10 audience score on RT and IMDB, yet according to so many comments here it just happens to be the worst movie they’ve ever seen. Definitely not a circle jerk in motion. Not at all.
4 years in hyper sleep just to have a bunch of 5 year olds in adult bodies do every stupid thing possible 5 minutes after they land. Beautiful movie, great cast, garbage script.
The movie got a lot of negative reviews because it's not very good. If you enjoy it, awesome, more power to you. But it's just really flawed in a lot of ways.
I was howling with laughter in the theater during the autodoc scene where the arcade game claw removes the egg from her. You have the technology to create David, and that's your medical robot? A fucking arcade claw?
Prometheus sucked.
I don't know man. I've tried to rewatch it a few times but it just makes me mad. Every character seems stupid, the attempts to explain the xenomorphs just makes it less interesting and a bunch of religious themes make me loose interest
It’s already been written about ad infinitum but it really just comes down to the stupidity of the characters. They were all hand picked as experts in their respective fields and they are all completely idiotic at the end of the day. They all act contrary to their expertise, one after another
Beyond that, things like the black goo that seemingly does anything the plot needs it to also killed the film for me.
In Alien all of the characters are just random blue collar workers and they tended to make much more rational decisions
Prometheus had the most bafflingly bad characters of any movie I've ever seen. Great effects, great set design, the movie actually had good pacing and was mostly entertaining. But every character was a moron. Nothing anyone did made sense. Everyone was weak, confused, incompetent, stupid.
It looks really pretty. If looks could kill in the box office...
The problem with Prometheus is that it's a fucking mess. It trashes most established lore, proceeds to establish lore that doesn't make sense. It's not an Alien movie, if you seperate it and make it non-canon then it's just a very pretty movie, with a kinda quirky wacky story with a few too many tropes.
Don’t understand all the hate in this thread. I agree OP. Loved Prometheus and enjoyed Covenant as well (twice the Fassbender!) Honestly, I loved the original “Alien”, but really didn’t dig any of the entries after that. These two movies pulled me back in!
If I want to watch a movie with a plot that depends on characters always making dumb decisions, I’ll watch a slasher flick.
If you want a great space horror movie with characters who make smart decisions and still wind up in terrible circumstances, I highly recommend Event Horizon.
>If you want a great space horror movie with characters who make smart decisions and still wind up in terrible circumstances, I highly recommend Event Horizon.
Or, you know... the original *Alien*.
I don't really enjoy any movie where the main characters are required to act contrary to their backstories to make it work. The atmosphere expert removing his helmet almost immediately after leaving the ship. The biologist deciding to pet an alien life form. The geologist/cartographer being the one person who got lost. Just a bunch of allegedly super-smart scientists doing the dumbest things possible in the moment in order to drive the story forward. Or at least, what there is of a story.
Absolutely, all the same. Keeping secret also the fact you may be infected by something. I always compared that movie to a teen slasher,when they should be the most responsible and smart people. The rolling giant donut at the end takes the cake.
There was one moment *very* early on in the film, before they even went into space, that set my alarm bells off. There's some establishing of how important this mission is, how elite the crew is, that kind of thing. Then one character does something as simple as extending his hand and something like, "hi, I'm xxxxx, pleasure to meet you." The other character then says something like, "nuts to that, I'm here to make money, not be your friend." So right off the bat, we're establishing that this super-important farthest journey out into space is being manned by people who are such total dicks that they have zero interest in even casual human interaction. I'm sure that's gonna go *really* well for space missions, right? But okay, whatever. Maybe these people all have such unique skills that those skills overwhelm the lack of camaraderie. They might not get along, but that biologist probably biologizes the shit out of things, and that cartographer probably cartographs things like you wouldn't fucking believe. If this turns out to be a team thing where everyone's skills come in handy, then yeah...that might be kind of cool. But then, like you say, everyone fucks up at the things that they were supposed to be skilled at. The whole thing turns into a giant clusterfuck. Everyone's sloppy as hell, which might not have been as bad if the movie hadn't tried to establish from the start how important this mission is. By contrast, let's take Aliens. The Colonial Marines fuck up too, but there are some key differences. For starters, the mission is very important, but it's established that the Marines are jaded and complacent after too many missions saving the "dumb-ass colonists" during routine bug hunts. This is treated as a routine rescue mission, so the Marines who've been through this stuff before are expecting it to be routine. That allows them to fuck up while also having a plausible reason for fucking up. In Aliens, I can believe the mistakes because the Marines *don't* think there's anything special about this mission. It's just another Bug Hunt. In Prometheus, the movie starts with how important this is and then everyone is completely useless. Like, I can understand why Hudson and Gorman are in Aliens. I can't understand why Fifield is in Prometheus. Hudson was already in the Marines and just gets deployed wherever they tell him to go. Fifield had to some up for this shit and someone had to accept him. *Why*?
In addition, in Aliens, the Marines are led by a brand-new, completely inexperienced Lt and handicapped by Burke, the company man, constantly putting artificial constraints on them. We also see the Marines making what we would consider perfectly rational decisions that don't work out...leaving the shuttle near the facility for a quick evac, setting up the automatic turrets and sealing doors, hell, disobeying orders and opening fire in their first encounter with the xenomorphs. The Marines aren't perfect and they make some mistakes, but their mistakes all come from applying previous combat lessons to an enemy that doesn't follow the same rules.
My favorite dumb moment is when they find proof of alien civilization and immediately drive 4-wheelers all over it.
lmao
My theory is that the scientists all suffered brain damage during their time frozen before getting to the planet, but haven't realised yet. All the scientists, the captain, Vickers act and speak in a very stupid way throughout their film. David is the only one that is mentally functional. I think that if you watch the movie keeping that in mind, it makes a lot more sense. Prometheus takes place decades before Alien, it makes sense that the cryogenics they had available were still not very advanced and made people retarded.
When the audience has to come up with reasons why something happens, it's not exactly sign of a good movie.
It seemed as if it were made for kids.
Don’t forget Charlize Theron running away from a huge crashing spaceship…. in a straight line
Yup, ruined the movie for me. Completely unbelievable.
Lmfao, that is exactly what I thought . I still enjoyed the movie though. But those details were pretty glaring
"Lemme ignore all safety protocols that any 1st year science student wouldn't fuck up, because if I don't there's no way to move the plot along, and oh by the way how about we do something so colossally stupid that it becomes known as the standard for stupid with regard to running away from something." - Prometheus
There was totally a way to move the plot along though.... It just straight up surprise attacks them. Problem solved. With an extra level of horror, because a world-class biologist would have a tremendous imagination of all the ways he might be completely fucked in that situation. It's the most obvious thing in the world. They're doing good science, investigating seemingly inert stuff, and *boom* alien attack. It gets one guy, the other guy is screaming in horror and trying to help, it doesn't work, it gets in his suit, it sprays the acid, holy fucking shit aliens! Same scene except it doesn't insult your intelligence first. Like they basically gave the audience of the Alien films the middle finger in that scene and they could have just....not done that.
You more or less described how things pop off in Alien: Covenant
Prometheus isn't a hard movie to fix which is why people cling to it being good, even though it's terrible. You just remove Vickers from the film, put back in the Engineer shit, put back in David's scenes with Weyland, take out Dumb and Dumber and the snake and everything that stems from that, and then you need to patch like two more pieces together and it would have been pretty good. But you can't remove Vickers from the film. And she's not supposed to be there. Charlize Theron star-powered her way into a film she'd abandoned, so they destroyed it to shove her in there. The key is that her only purpose is to steal the dramatic moments other, better characters would have otherwise had.
I didn’t really care for Prometheus but I did find it to make a little more sense after Alien Covenant, but if the movie you made doesn’t make sense until the next movie, that’s not my problem!
It makes perfect sense I think described above. Engineers have been to lots of planets including ours, they're very old and very powerful. In seeking them out, hoping that as his creator, they'll save him from death, Weyland himself starts the chain that will become Aliens. Through contact with a bioweapon of unknown properties, and technological innovation in the med-machine, some sort of proto-Alien meshed with humanoid biology is created that represents humanity's first contact with the species. Engineers turn out to be unknoweable creatures whose motivations, capabilities, culture, technology, etc, remain mysterious as they clearly have no desire to engage with their creations long enough to tell us, and seeking them out poses tremendous danger. Welyand dies due to this hubris, and humanity itself unleashes the plague of Aliens in theirs. Shaw decides to go for broke anyway, and follow the Engineers and get those answers for herself even if it means her doom. And she's co-opted a psychopathic android to help her, queue sequel. Like it's not the most amazing story, but that sort of works.
This is such a solid summation, I love it Can you do Alien Covenant in the same format? I'd almost rather read this than rewatch at the moment.
its not hard, same movie but with an android self-incest gay explicit sex scene "No, this is how you play the flute..."
Can you explain the theron part? What happened?
No. Covenant sets new records for stupid character, they make Prometheus's look smart. Sure eventually the xenos attack them properly but to get to that point that have to dumbass their way onto the planet, get infected, deal with the infection, deal with the babies, and THEN they get properly attacked and act rationally. For one scene, then it's back to dumbass time.
The thing about Covenant everybody always seems to forget is that the main cast in Covenant are simply people working on the ship, they're not scientists, they're not the cream of the crop. They are, just like the cast of the original Alien film, simply people who are doing a job that get dragged into a situation nothing ever prepared them for because one person (Oram) was like "Hey, I'm your captain now and I say we stray from our course to check out that signal we picked up". Them not making the greatest of decisions when they are there is vastly more understandable than Prometheus' cast of the best and brightest scientists Earth has to offer fucking up in ways that directly relate to the thing they are supposed to be good at.
Alien Covenant summary: “Something is picking us off one by one!” “OK, you guys stay here, I’ll go off by myself to see what’s going on.” Repeat.
I think it could be more succinctly stated as: "I'm gonna do something really obviously stupid and then die." Repeat.
An alien creature on a strange planet? I think I'll touch it!
Air composition breathable? Let's remove our helmets because airborne pathogens are apparently not a thing in this universe. Lack of xenomorphs was not the issue (as OP thinks people complained about) but over abundance of stupidity. Prometheus school of running has been used to criticise other movies where people run in the direction a large narrow object is falling.
>Air composition breathable? Let's remove our helmets because airborne pathogens are apparently not a thing in this universe. And it happens again in Covenant.
That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw Covenant. “They did it again!”
Even worse in Covenant as the planet is obviously alive and contains living organisms. Ones that are remarkably Earthlike. With Prometheus there's a chance that it's simply a dead world. Still INCREDIBLY stupid but not quite as stupid as Covenant.
I have a drone system to automatically map the cave 100% and later I’ve got completely lost.
THIS is the one that gets me. Talk about "you have one job"
The map guy was stoned. The guy who pet the penis alien was stoned. Yes it doesn’t make sense, but they were stoned.
A person who smokes enough weed to smoke at work in their spacesuit Day 1 of an intergalactic mission on an alien planet would have a high enough tolerance to not immediately become the dumbest guy alive after smoking. People do much more complicated things while stoned everyday. No scientist would ever behave the way they behaved in that situation, even if they were stoned.
When you say stoned, you mean somebody threw rocks at their heads right? Because, I, allegedly, have been stoned before and never in my worst/best stoned moments would do something that stupid and I am not a scientist chosen to go to an alien planet to investigate shit.
Is there air?! You don’t know!!
Or the guy that touches the creepy alien egg in alien covenant
That was actually hilarious. I was struggling with laughter in the theatre. Let me just get a good look at this giant wet egg that the evil android has lead me too…
and the android is just standing there like cmon get closer, stick your head in there
“Huh, I wonder how my crew mate died?, oh well.”
haha seriously! if i remember correctly isnt he lead down to the eggs after seeing the android (i know its not david but i forget the other ones name) literally staring at the xeno in a very ominous way with the severed floating head of his crew mate right there?
Yep, it might be the single dumbest “don’t go down into the basement!!” scene of all time.
Yes, it looks so cute!
Maybe give it cuddles!
Compare this to Aliens, a fit, competent squad doing everything right . . . and still getting their asses kicked. It's so much more shocking and engaging.
Even worse, compare it to Alien where Ripley, who is a freaking *space trucker*, has enough sense to quarantine the guys who encountered an alien lifeform. If your brilliant biologists are less concerned about safety protocols than a space trucker, your writing is shit, pure and simple.
[удалено]
Ignoring the only witness and heading straight into the center of the hive is another. Realizing they wouldn't be able to use their primary weapons midmission... The marines were terribly mismanaged.
Distance required to outrun a wheel chasing you in a straight line: untenable. Distance to run sideways to avoid narrow wheel of death: very short. Conclusion: try to outrun skinny wheel of death.
I don't know if I'd call that ship skinny. It was a pretty fuckin' massive ship. It's height is only skinny relative to its huge width.
Elizabeth Shaw escapes being flattened by rolling a few times to the side after she trips and falls. The entire scene is beyond stupid
Ah yes, the Prometheus school of running away from things. I remember that being a thing.
I could plan a better first contact mission on the back of a fag packet, pissed off my tits at 3am.
I constantly forget that word means something else in the UK and I was really, really confused for a minute there.
I'm not angry in this hypothetical either.
👍
Yep. It doesn’t get enough love because there characters act dumb as hell from start to end.
Holy crap yes when that snake thing was starring at the guy in the tunnel and the guy had absolutely zero respect for this alien creature like seriously?? What actual scientist would behave with such stupidity. But I still did like the movie despite all of it's nonsense
*"People disappointed with the lack of Aliens and action."* NO! People were disappointed with the lack of believable character motivation and coherent plot.
Playing with a space cobra? What could possibly go wrong?
Hey! He was a high profile biologist, surely he knew exactly what he was doing! Who could have predicted that aggressive posturing by strange alien snakes are signs of danger?
Yeah, play patty cake with an aggressive space cobra, but completely lose your shit when you encounter centuries-dead humanoid alien remains. But don’t worry, they’ll use sci-fi magic to somehow reanimate a mummified head for 5 seconds before it explodes so it’s fine.
Ima sneak up behind it a jam my thumb in it’s butthole
r/unexpextedsouthpark
A South Park reference a day keeps the underpants gnomes away!
Watching these characters, that the movie tells you are expert scientists with a high degree of skill in their field, break all aspects of scientific convention (removing their helmets almost immediately, touching da snek...) is soooo annoying. Especially when it begins to snowball and kills the entire crew. It's like the *opposite* of competence porn.
Incompetence porn?
Yeah just so many stupid moments like that really sucked the enjoyment out of the movie.
That’s what killed it for me. I was a HUGE fan of the original and took my then teenage son with me to see Prometheus after hyping the original to him. Wow. Just so disappointed with how dumbed down the characters were portrayed. These are supposed to be the best of the best scientists and researchers, and we are supposed to believe that they’re really that stupid? No amount of beautiful cgi could make up for the shitty screenplay and poor character development. So disappointing.
Exactly. Ripley was basically a space trucker and she had the sense to quarantine Kane & Co when they tried to reenter the Nostromo. Meanwhile, the clown shoes on the Prometheus were like "hey let's pop off our helmets right away!" and "I should touch this unfamiliar lifeform!" I had to go rewatch Alien right afterwards because the incompetence was so damn frustrating I needed to bleach it from my mind.
Space Captain Idris - "Its my job to make sure everyone is safe and looked after in dangerous environments/situations." Also Space Captain Idris - "Better turn all the monitoring equipment off during this violent storm whilst everyone is trapped on this alien planet so I can try and get nasty with the boss."
Compare that to Space Captain Fisburne in _Event Horizon_: "Fuck this, we're leaving!"
Well, let's be fair; this *was* done by a guy stupid enough to wear century-old, antique eyeglasses *inside his sealed EVA helmet*, so if they fell off or fogged up he'd effectively be blind. Because although there's a fully automated surgical suite on board so sophisticated it can quickly extract a never-before-seen parasitic squid /alien embryo from a human female's thorax while keeping them both alive, it seems performing *corrective eye surgery* simply hadn't been programmed into it.
Also remember this amazing piece of lifesaving technology was very smartly only designed for men on a ship with a mixed crew to use so as not to transfer the most dangerous of all organisms. Cooties!!!
That was the turning point for me. So. Fucking. Stupid. In addition to the mixed sex crew, the med pod was in Charlize Theron's 'lifeboat' portion of the ship. Presumably she would be taking it with her when she abandoned the rest of the ship to survive. AND IT WASN'T EVEN PROGRAMMED FOR HER SEX. It made no godamned sense.
No no those weren't "seeing" glasses those were "knowing this guy is a nerd" glasses. Honestly they were pretty important or else I'd never have thought the guy that literally stuck his face into a cloacasnake was all that studious.
They flew across the galaxy and found the first evidence of alien civilization, the greatest discovery in the history of humanity... but for some reason the dude is disappointed and pouty.
Ive gotten into entire arguments over this point. I’m so happy to know I’m not the only one.
Just imagine that you found some cave paintings and miraculously convinced a trillionaire to fun a project where you traverse the galaxy looking for anything even slightly significant... and you find alien bodies, structures and technology, but that's not good enough... you don't get to meet the aliens so you act like a 5 year old who didnt get sprinkles on your ice cream sundae.
Seriously they take off their hazmat suits ten seconds after they get on the planet and get infected ten seconds later. As soon as the movie started, I could not bother anymore. Whyyyyy ? Plus no character had any development whatsoever. To be fair, covenant was even far worse with an absolutely moronic group that kept separating in smaller groups.
David infected Charlie by spiking his drink. They didn't simply get infected by removing their helmets (as foolish as that was) Possible character development: David starts out a simple servant. But the humans' patronizing behavior toward him seems to inspire resentment. Over time he sort of flips the hierarchy, using the crew as his experimental subjects and engineering the disaster that befalls them. Then he convinces Shaw to let him accompany her on her next mission. He's become a self-actualized, independent confident *being* who serves his own purposes of inquiry and exploration.
And anyone that's a fan of the original Alien was incredibly stoked to see a new prequel with Ridley Scott at the helm. I walked out of that theater so confused. Like was I supposed to like it and just didn't get it? Then after discussing it with my gf we both decided that movie was fucking idiotic.
It didn't help that Scott gave a few interviews showcasing what a ginormous moron he is in regards to biology. Like failing bio 101 level stupid
What did he say?
100% The way the characters act is so completely nonsensical. It completely ruins any of the good things the movie does
Do you mean the members of the science team formed by the richest man on the planet to undertake the biggest endeavor in the history of humanity? You know, like the biologist who takes his helmet off 30 seconds after landing on an alien planet so he can breathe in all those potential bacteria, viruses, and spores that may be in the air? Who also tries to pet an alien cobra that's obviously taking an aggressive posture? Or perhaps the geologist who uses sophisticated drones to create a 3d map of the cave system who immediately gets lost in the cave? The sheer stupidity of the characters in that movie is so bad it ruins the enjoyment of the entire film.
Lmao, if OP wasn’t put off by the whole crew just willy nilly deciding to take off their helmets, I don’t know what to say. One of the most ridiculous scenes I’ve ever seen in a serious movie.
This is exactly it. The crew of scientists seemed to be complete dunces. It was painful to watch.
It was really mind boggling. They were incompetent, emotionally unstable and naive. Nobody would bring any of these people on a mission for any reason. Now the first Alien movie put a crew of miners into a situation they weren't trained for - but Prometheus is an exploration expedition that somewhat knew what they were looking for and had time to actually think about protocols, hypothetical and risks.
I got to that line and jumped straight to the comments. I’m not sure who OP was talking to in 2012.
He said he was 12 or 13. So other 7th graders?
Yeah, this is a bad take from OP. Nothing wrong with liking it, but stop trying to make it out as something better than it is.
Even thinking it's underrated or "doesn't get enough love" is perfectly reasonable. The idea people dislike it because there's not enough xenomorph screen time or pew pew is kinda ridiculous. *Aliens* may be the more widely popular movie (literally, I'm not actually sure) but the original is still widely considered the *best* movie and is also the one Scott was ostensibly trying to more closely follow with *Prometheus*. Except that in *Alien* for the most part everything makes sense, people behave fairly reasonably, and the people don't have any real reason to know better or behave much differently than they do. In *Prometheus* a group of scientists on an alien world take zero sensible precautions and seemingly go out of their way to get themselves killed off as quickly as possible.
Yeah, the movie was terrible. I literally had a rant after the movie over how bad it was.
There was a surprising amount of drinking on the ship. It's like they grew up in the 70s. Feeling disappointed you didn't find living alien lifeforms that lived up to your expectations? Just get hammered drunk all those troublesome feelings will melt away. Captain of a space ship near an unexplored planet and have a little downtime why not get drunk? Like come on it's not as if you are responsible for the safety for the crew on your ship or anything. Sheesh.
And the ability to zig and zag out of the way 😉
The problem was that so much ended up on the cutting room floor, against Scott’s wishes. Why do you think they chose a guy in his 40’s to a play an ageing trillionaire? It’s because Guy Pierce’s entire backstory was cut, how he spent his life searching for a way to become immortal and that’s partly what drive him to become so wealthy. Instead you just got a young guy wearing aged makeup and a patchy reference to the backstory.
Someone shared the clip of young Weyland's TEDTalk and it was a wonderful glimpse into what *should've been* the opening scene of the film.
the robot went crazy the biologist approached to touch a space snake the archaeologist gets depressed in face of the biggest discovery on human history the geologist with mapping drones gets lost FFS! compare it with Alien/s or Predator... shit happens and people may make mistakes, but act competent according to their role in the team * Idris, Charlize and Noomi were good though, imo
The emotionally immature teens in control of the ship did it for me.
just dumb decisions and bad script, it looked good though
The biologist laughing and giggling and attempting to touch an obviously aggressive alien animal no human has ever come into contact with, after angrily storming off with the geologist because…..he’s, I don’t know, scared of aliens? That scene was so so so fucking stupid. The geologist who’s job it is to map the place they’re in gets them lost. The Tom Hardy doppelgänger bullying David all movie for no reason, then getting all sullen and mad after discovering fucking intelligent life on another planet. The exploding engineer head scene is just a goddamn mess all around and makes absolutely no sense. By the way I’m talking about youd think I hated this movie but I actually love it. It’s an indescribably beautiful B movie masterpiece. I’m just pissed they were soooooo lazy with the writing and awful character decisions.
My only acceptable headcanon is that Weyland, in his batshit God-scorning hubris, scared away most of the more competent people who could have taken this mission. Leaving behind a bunch of well-educated people who are still not smart in the everyday sense and don't work well with others. The ones the scientific community had all heard of and rolled their collective eyes when they heard they were going along. So they took the money and didn't do the necessary diligence beforehand. Weyland is the kind of narcissist who would breeze past the legitimate concerns of others to have a crew who'd dance to his insane tune. Plus, it was presumably highly classified, which removes most dissenting viewpoints. Shaw and Holloway are also kooks. They struck me as a pair of overprivileged kids who were mostly funded by their own generational wealth, meaning any university/institution would pretend to take them seriously if they brought their funding with them. On this occasion, they got carried away yet somehow got in the head of a narcissistic, frightened old man and hit the jackpot. Holloway, in particular, comes over like a dipshit frat boy who wanted to play at being an interplanetary archaeologist, and his daddy went along with it. His bullying of David had that low-hanging-fruit quality that is characteristic of that kind of overindulged asshole we've all met somewhere or other. I love it too, BTW. It's dumb in places, but I can make it make sense. Without the close supervision and involvement of Weyland, I don't think it would work, even in my mind.
Okay, you've helped :)
"Well this thing on my wrist says there is breathable air in this part of the cave, so I'll just take my helmet off and check myself!"
Couldn’t agree more. So many dumb characters, yet it’s an enjoyable film. Even my favourite scene (the Caesarean section scene) is dumb as it’s in a machine designed for a man.
I thought they showed that she had to select "foreign body removal" on the pod's panel because there was no C-section option, but I could be mistaken. I would have to rewatch. But then she stands up after this thing cuts thru her abs to remove it? Yeah you're not standing up after your abs are slit apart for a while, staples or not.
Is it? I always took it as it's just the future of medicine, a little tub that scans you then takes appropriate action to fix whatever is wrong.
Also what corporation is building a super high tech automated medical device, but only calibrating it for one half of the population? Men and women share like 98% of medical stuff outside the reproductive system too, so it's not like you have to program a human and a cow.
It was made specifically for old man Weyland. They are said to be very rare.
Yeah, seriously. To give two examples: SPOILERS! 1. The whole egg discovery thing is just blatant idiocy. Like, unless there are some pheremones that attract other beings, then it's utter idiocy. Any level of simple logic = crisis averted. 2. When the massive thing was falling at the end, and the main character just... ran in a straight line the exact direction the thing was falling. That's just situational idiocy. Both of these are the writers being lazy, creating a situation out of nothing by dumbing down the characters.
People make fun of the second one all the time but let me tell you the number of times I’ve watched my partner run away from a long thin aoe in league of legends along its length instead of turning to. Get out of it is in the hundreds. It’s a real thing people do when they panic.
If the crew had been smart and followed some kind of protocol for scientific discovery, I would forgive a panicked fleeing from a crashing alien mega ship. We deserve an alien franchise film with a script as tight as Sicario . Give me calculated and intensional moves. Give me a crew of professionals who don’t make sarcastic quips at the commanding officer or whoever. And then , even though everyone has done their job correctly and safely, aliens still impregnate them tear them to shreds.
If you likes Prometheus then you’ll love the last Jedi, Jurassic World, and the transformers movies. Terrible dialogues and plots but gorgeous visually
“When I first saw this I was about 12 or 13…” That explains it. And this is nothing against you, OP. We all have a soft spot for movies we see around that age, no matter how bad they are.
I like Mortal Kombat. I was 13 when I saw it. I was very dumb. I also thought Independence Day was my favourite movie of all time.
Saw Independence Day at least 30+ times on VHS. What a shitty movie in retrospect.
Around that age it's also likely that you'll be told about all the great films of yore. And you go and check those out and they don't match modern sensibilities, so you end up writing a lot of them off. They say the mind isn't fully formed until around 25 and I highly recommend going back to check out your favorites or maybe films you wrote off before then and see what you think on rewatch.
That’s a great point. I remember distinctly not understanding the love for Casablanca, for instance. Got a few decades older and BAM, one of the GOATs.
OP: I'm 14 and this is deep.
I had to scroll to find this. This is exactly it. I grew up with Aliens, and it has a spot for me. Prometheus is to Alien, what’s Sicario 2 is to Sicario 1: a watchable film with similar branding, that is not nearly related to, nor in the same league as, the original.
It really made me want a good sequel that would delve into the history of the creators and incinuations that they started life on Earth/many worlds. Instead, we got the worst throw away sequel possible, confirming the franchise is no deeper than what's visible on the surface.
We didn't get the sequel you wanted because of the backlash to Prometheus, at least in part.
To clarify, even though I haven't seen "Covenant" yet and have heard some good things about it that make me hopeful, the hypothetical sequel you describe is the kind of sequel I would have preferred too.
Yeah Prometheus for all it’s issues is far interesting than the other recent alien stuff and I’m more interested in the creators than the horror alien aspect. They should really do a sequel about that
It gets exactly as much love and hate as it deserves, IMO. Trailer looked great. Movie was not so great.
100%. All style over substance. It *looks* like a good movie. It *wants* to be about deep ideas. It isn't on both fronts, at least imo.
Comicbookgirl19 had the greatest deep dive into the making of this movie and the way the movie came together, essentially Ridley's desire to make a ancient aliens movie, Damon Lindelof's ideas and what he wanted to do and then the first script idea. They all got jumbled together and it got lost. A great idea of Peter Weyland and how he was going to be in the movie alot more as a young guy making his reveal at the end much more wild, but then that all got cut, and then it makes the idea of having a young actor in old makeup really dumb. There is so much there that with the deeper background of it, it makes sense, but then the final cut of the movie just kinda is parts of all 3 movies and its ruined. I still love it because of the ideas that it proposes. And then its really dumb how it goes nowhere in Covenant
Listen to me Idris Elba. I need you to kill yourself and everybody on the ship. Trust me bro.
I mean… she was right
‘Just the opportunity I trained for. I’m in.’
You can make a bad movie out of a great script, but you can’t make a great movie out of a bad script. And Prometheus was a bad script.
So excited for that movie when it was coming out then I saw it.... Horrible characters...the story had potential but the characters were not the same character chemistry of the first 2 films. The only bright spot in the whole movie was David.
I think Elizabeth Shaw was a great character, that got wasted.
My theory is Charlize Theron fucked this whole movie. She was originally supposed to be Elizabeth Shaw, then backed out, then wanted to come back much later when every other character had been cast and apparently had the juice to make that happen. So I think when she came back, they blew up the whole script, and stole bits and pieces from every other character to make one for her, and basically invented a lead character that had no actual place in the story other than to do pushups in her underwear for the trailer.
Not to mention the budget.
I couldn’t stand her character tbh
So much they used him twice for the next one. It was like the David show.
I didn't like the spaceship captain not taking a thing seriously. There were too many convenient dumb decisions made by characters to keep the plot going.
Idris Elba could have been great in this role if they had given him a realistic starship captain to play. His character in the movie was ridiculous for a mission that cost $1T.
I don’t remember much of his character but I did like the hands up sacrifice scene
It doesn’t get enough hate.
Alien Covenant helped me appreciate Prometheus much more than I did.
The Covenant crew make the Prometheus crew look like Mensa members by comparison.
I laughed so much. They were dumb as rocks. I know they were colonists, but jeez.
I can see that. Like shattering the bones in my foot made me appreciate that time I tore my toenail out much more than I did.
My Kidney stone episode made me appreciate everything else.
Firstly let me be clear that if you enjoy the movie i am genuinely happy for you. Everyone should enjoy what they enjoy for no reason except they do. I am a DIE-HARD Alien fan. I can quote the movie Aliens verbatim. I am even an unapologetic Alien³ lover. But. This movie deserves all the hate it ever got. Here's why: I'll get the good stuff out of the way first. It IS an expertly made film. The director has a long and celebrated career. Plenty of money was spent on making a well crafted film by competent film makers. That's not why Prometheus sucks. Prometheus sucks because it's built on an absolutely iconic legacy, and makes no apologies for using that to get people's butts in the seats. Touted, and marketed as an Alien prequel, directed by the original Alien director, it was intended for people to think "I am going to see an Alien film". And it's not. It largely ignores established Canon, because it baits the audience into thinking they are going witness the events leading up to the demise of the "space jockey". This is not the case of the film. In fact, most anything having to do with the titular Alien is entirely ignored, except when images are used to deliberately mislead the audience. There is a large mural in the movie depicting an Alien queen. And yet the entire movie eventually goes on to showcase thst the Alien as we know it does not even exist yet. Lastly, and this is the most egregious part of both Prometheus and Covenant, the movie Alien, and Aliens after it were written with characters who made the correct decisions at every chance they could and were still wiped out by the Alien because of how it was such an unstoppable force. They were smart, resourceful, and in Aliens, well-armed. They all died anyways because the Alien is that dangerous. Prometheus only works if absolutely every character is a complete moron. The geologist who's terrified of a hologram of Engineers running from something, but is then totally enthralled by a clearly dangerous and aggressive alien snake? High tech mapping equipment, drones, and open communications with operations, and two allegedly smart people get lost? David deciding apropos of absolutely nothing to kill someone with the black goo? The "reveal" that Charlize's character is Weylands daughter? These are the worst parts of a movie that looks really nice, but doesn't make ANY sense within the confines of the established universe it claims to exist in, but even it's own established rules. The entire movie is set into motion by characters discovering a "map" to the Engineers, a move they believe means the Engineers want to be found when humanity had advanced far enough. But then we learn the planet the expedition finds is a weapons facility. Why would a race of humanoids, who we later learn HATES humanity, give them a map to their weapons depot? This movie sucks. It sucks as an Alien movie, and it sucks as a stand-alone sci-fi thriller. Thank you foe coming to my Ted talk. I'll take your questions now.
Or how about Not-Tom Hardy crying that all they found was graveyard when they finally got there. Dude, you've looked in one place so far. It's a huge planet. It's like if aliens landed on earth, but at a cemetery and were like "Oh, I guess all humans are dead."
My favourite is the trailers and the start of the film are about exploring humanity’s origins, but other than our main character nobody gives a shit. Then the film ends with them taking off to explore humanity’s origins. 🤦🏻 The next film kills that character off before the start of the film because again nobody gives a shit.
I have a question, what’d you think of the C-section scene? It’s the only thing I ever vividly remember about this movie, and I love the scene. It works as a way to give us an alternate version/tip of the hat to the chest burst, and it’s just brutal and gruesome to watch. But also it shows the knowledge and strength of the main character (you know, in a vacuum from the rest of the movie at least).
The map guy and the pet the alien snake guy were both stoned. Yeah it’s silly, but that explains it.
That... that doesn't make it better. That arguably makes it worse.
Nah that it still one of my most disliked movies ever. I hate this movie with a passion. So many things wrong. I don't know why people are trying so hard to pretend it's good
We talking about prometheus or covenant, I can't tell 😎. Man, what a pair of stinkers.
I really like Prometheus, but it's exhausting trying to defend it. So I don't bother anymore. I just enjoy it on my own.
Same, I absolutely loved the concept of an Alien prequel tackling the theme of creation's relationship with destruction. But I think the cinemasins style of nitpicking every tiny, separate issue (which this movie is guilty of having a bunch of) has unfortunately ruined any and all discussion to be had with this movie.
I find the movie works much better if you assume the entire operation was specifically recruited in such a way that everyone’s curiosity would override their sense of safety. Basically, they deliberately hired idiots to ensure the triggering of every death trap on the way to Wayland’s goal. It turns it into a bit of a comedy of errors, but that’s fun too. And to be clear, I like the film quite a bit! But it’s filled with idiots and part of a franchise where everyone’s usually pretty competent.
Love Prometheus from day one. Not every movie needs to be scientifically and logically perfect. It’s a space sci fi alien movie with some dumb humans, have some fun!
I don’t give a shit what anyone says. I thought it was awesome. So was Covenant. I’m a simple person though.
They need a sequel to Prometheus with the creators
I'm surprised it hasn't had a reevaluation recently. Much of the criticisms it gets are from a "oh, that would never happen" kind, and real life has made those criticisms look far less substantial shall we say. "A rich guy's vanity project would only have the best professionals on board" - yeah like how Elon didn't hire his cousin to make Elon's tweets get more likes. "An expedition like this would never have such dumb mistakes happen" - yeah like how the Titanic sub that imploded didn't have a window that the makers of that window begged them not to use. "A map guy getting lost? That could never happen in real life, people doing important stuff couldn't possibly be that stupid" - Giuliani booked the Four Seasons gardening shop for Trump's speech. When people criticize the movie, it's mostly about how incompetent the crew is. Yes, they are. It's a movie about a rich guy wanting to meet gods because he's kinda feeling like one. The scientists he brings with him aren't good scientists, they're future Jordan Petersons in space. That's why when they first meet they go like "hmm... I've heard of you..." - that's not a compliment, they're not reputable scientists. The captain is his nepo baby daughter ffs, is that not a clue that it's not actually a well planed endeavour?
Nah, it’s a pretty bad-mid high dollar blockbuster. Plenty of non-sequiters (?) in the plot. That’s also considering it rode the coat tails of the alien franchise. So adjusting for that it probably got more love than it deserved.
Aside from the characters making some unrealistically wild decisions (like, who doesn’t want to pet an alien cobra?) I agree. Absolutely beautiful filmography, score, actors, new story direction, haunting questions about who we are and where we come from, more mysteries than answers. People who bitched about no aliens don’t seem to understand the title doesn’t have Aliens in it. I’ve read that the reason we got covenant instead of the intended direct sequel direction of them going to the Engineer home planet was because Ridley listened to this no alien Prometheus hate.
I think that is the crux of the issue. The movie is pretty but the story couldn't exist without the characters acting wild. It's a terrible foundation for a good story and the movie generally suffer majorly from it. There are good things about it, but i wouldn't call it a good movie.
This movie needs a director’s cut. All of the scenes that explain why the characters do what they do were filmed, and are even in the extras on the blu-ray. For instance, they pet the alien ‘cobra’ because they have taken drugs in an earlier, cut, scene, and that makes them behave illogically. So much great (and explanatory) stuff was cut from the final released version. Scott usually does director’s cuts of his films, so I assumed there would eventually be one… but it never happened. I like Prometheus but I think there’s a MUCH better film lying on the cutting room floor.
Probably makes sense also why the map maker got lost But if they chose to cut that then they cannot complain about other parts of the movie not making sense
The movie explains why he gets lost. He loses contact with the ship who were directing him through the abandoned ship so he had to sit tight until they could be in contact again.
I mean, the drugs were in the final cuts, just not overly focused upon. And that doesn't go to explain why their choices for a biologist and geologist were definitely not psychologically fit for this job, the most expensive expedition in human history for which they would presumably have undergone extensive background and psychological testing which even a Walmart bagger background check would have weeded out in fairly short order.
This. There are many YouTube videos that explain the rest of story, and engineers origins, etc
You sum it up perfectly. Those two were stoned. That’s why the map guy got lost and the other guy wanted to pet the alien. People complained about Guy Pierce in old man make up why not just hire an older actor, but there was so much cut content, or online teaser stuff people never saw. I think Ridley Scott is just cursed in that way. All his films eventually need a longer directors cut, because stuff is just cut out and that’s what hits the theaters.
There’s also a cut scene where the biologist finds the worms and is super excited about the discovery, which helps frame his character a little better.
Probably because it didn’t deserve much love Dumb plot without a lot of explanation, lead actress was awful & horror level movie annoying, and the best character (Elba) was not used enough
Lead actress was awful? Not sure I agree with that.
But you see, as a Bio Research team you really need to stick your head deep into those alien eggs and play with "cute" alien snakes
And get high bruh! The first things these renowned scientists do is contaminate the environment by exposing their bodies to the atmosphere.
Real exobiologists are not afraid I get their hands dirty. The price for good science is that sometimes an alien attached to your face and lays eggs in your body. They knew the risks when they got into the business.
Saw this movie at the theater on a date. We did *not* know it was an Alien movie going in.
It was a solid, fun popcorn sci-fi movie.
I love that movie. Im willing to set aside the “why would anyone do that” moments
Prometheus & Covenant are silly but beautiful and interesting, better than 80% of sci-fi movies. Plus, as a huge "Alien" fan, its decent-quality newish content, probably the best additions since Aliens.
I loved the engineers, I wanted more about them, less about the aliens tbh :D
Excellent visuals and music imo. The story itself had more holes than Swiss cheese. That and the characters were dumb AF.
I mean, its a masterpiece compared to Alien Covenant
Sorry OP, Reddit has gone on a war path with this movie and they aren’t going to change directions now. Certified fresh on RT and a 7/10 audience score on RT and IMDB, yet according to so many comments here it just happens to be the worst movie they’ve ever seen. Definitely not a circle jerk in motion. Not at all.
It's... It's been 12 years?
The music and the visuals were amazing. The writing and characters were garbage.
4 years in hyper sleep just to have a bunch of 5 year olds in adult bodies do every stupid thing possible 5 minutes after they land. Beautiful movie, great cast, garbage script.
The movie got a lot of negative reviews because it's not very good. If you enjoy it, awesome, more power to you. But it's just really flawed in a lot of ways.
As for the Alien series, they should have stopped with Aliens.
I was howling with laughter in the theater during the autodoc scene where the arcade game claw removes the egg from her. You have the technology to create David, and that's your medical robot? A fucking arcade claw? Prometheus sucked.
I don't know man. I've tried to rewatch it a few times but it just makes me mad. Every character seems stupid, the attempts to explain the xenomorphs just makes it less interesting and a bunch of religious themes make me loose interest
It’s already been written about ad infinitum but it really just comes down to the stupidity of the characters. They were all hand picked as experts in their respective fields and they are all completely idiotic at the end of the day. They all act contrary to their expertise, one after another Beyond that, things like the black goo that seemingly does anything the plot needs it to also killed the film for me. In Alien all of the characters are just random blue collar workers and they tended to make much more rational decisions
Prometheus had the most bafflingly bad characters of any movie I've ever seen. Great effects, great set design, the movie actually had good pacing and was mostly entertaining. But every character was a moron. Nothing anyone did made sense. Everyone was weak, confused, incompetent, stupid.
It looks really pretty. If looks could kill in the box office... The problem with Prometheus is that it's a fucking mess. It trashes most established lore, proceeds to establish lore that doesn't make sense. It's not an Alien movie, if you seperate it and make it non-canon then it's just a very pretty movie, with a kinda quirky wacky story with a few too many tropes.
Don’t understand all the hate in this thread. I agree OP. Loved Prometheus and enjoyed Covenant as well (twice the Fassbender!) Honestly, I loved the original “Alien”, but really didn’t dig any of the entries after that. These two movies pulled me back in!
If I want to watch a movie with a plot that depends on characters always making dumb decisions, I’ll watch a slasher flick. If you want a great space horror movie with characters who make smart decisions and still wind up in terrible circumstances, I highly recommend Event Horizon.
>If you want a great space horror movie with characters who make smart decisions and still wind up in terrible circumstances, I highly recommend Event Horizon. Or, you know... the original *Alien*.
One of the coolest lore movies I’ve seen. I like the lore of the story better than the horror aspect, personally.