Prometheus Writers Audio Commentary Preview

Started by ikarop, Sep 23, 2012, 04:33:02 PM

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Prometheus Writers Audio Commentary Preview (Read 71,577 times)

Highland

Sounds like something a fan would come up with AFTER seeing Prometheus.

Anything different applies = insert Alien and or facehugger.

I can see how people who didn't like Prom would like it though because it just replaces anything Prometheus with something Alien.


Ash 937

 
Quote from: ThisBethesdaSea on Sep 24, 2012, 01:38:09 AM
I prefer the convoluted wonderful and risky mess that is Prometheus as opposed yet another film featuring aliens and facehuggers.

The Lindelof script isn't really anything original.  It is "yet again" another mish-mash film of strange creatures encounters by poorly developed characters in an under-developed story.  I can name you about a dozen sci-fi films just like this.  Also you gotta keep in mind that Aliens and Alien3 were also films "featuring aliens and facehuggers" that we pulled off quite nicely by many fan accounts.   I think that if Scott had directed the Spaihts version, we would've gotten another good Alien film.  Instead, we got the "mess."

SpeedyMaxx

SpeedyMaxx

#47
Some of it's quite interesting - like the Holloway age angle or the Weyland scenes, and the Millburn scene - but the whole facehugger/chestburster dynamic is tired.  And as "just an Alien prequel" I think it would've turned the film as was into something on par with the terrible The Thing prequel, which just retrod old ground and was absolutely banal at best and dreadful at worst.  Sheer "insert Tab A into Slot B for fanboy jizz" filmmaking - except no one cared exactly how that fire axe ended up in that door in John Carpenter's movie.  We've seen the classic alien kill people like this over and over - facehugger, chestburster, alien grows and kills everyone.  That's nice.  I didn't need to see that.  I prefer what we got onscreen in that area.

I also think that, while a great, visceral sequence in concept, the whole "Shaw runs back to the ship with no helmet by holding her breath" would've been savaged by viewers everywhere.  Especially here.  And I think the original draft has David being far too overtly nefarious - here, the character is far, far more ambiguous and fascinating, leaving the dynamic between him and Shaw intact, and wonderfully tenuous, for future films.

I also think that explaining the derelict outright in this film would've been a bad mistake.  I'm glad they didn't.  The inference is simple and obvious in the finished film - the Engineers lost control of their material, an outbreak occurred, many died while trying to escape.  It's likely one such ship is the one in Alien.  Done, and leaves a lot more room for both imagination and future films.

I'll tell you what would have been really weird and risky - showing some sort of proto-alien hybrid of one of the humans which still retained some sort of intellect and/or speech.

Also, allegedly, Vickers had next to no role in the original draft.  She was a company drone there to antagonize and die.  I think her revised character onscreen actually adds a great deal to the dynamics in the classic Alien fashion, simply by performance and inference - she's a favorite of a lot of people, myself included.  So while I am the first person to take fault with Damon Lindelof in most other works, I feel he and Scott really heavily improved on a lot here.  And I am also quite a fan of much of Spaihts' unfilmed writing.

Darth Vile

Darth Vile

#48
Quote from: RaisingCane on Sep 24, 2012, 03:05:11 AM
But that's only because we've been inundated with trite and unsatisfying movies that didn't advance the alien mythos in any meaningful way.  A movie that actually showed what we've been wanting to see without all the Ripley and Predator distractions would be welcome.
Not for me. I don't want to see another xeno movie just like I don't want to see another Michael Myers and or Jason V movie.


Quote from: Ash 937 on Sep 24, 2012, 05:31:35 AM
Quote from: ThisBethesdaSea on Sep 24, 2012, 01:38:09 AM
I prefer the convoluted wonderful and risky mess that is Prometheus as opposed yet another film featuring aliens and facehuggers.

The Lindelof script isn't really anything original.  It is "yet again" another mish-mash film of strange creatures encounters by poorly developed characters in an under-developed story.  I can name you about a dozen sci-fi films just like this.  Also you gotta keep in mind that Aliens and Alien3 were also films "featuring aliens and facehuggers" that we pulled off quite nicely by many fan accounts.   I think that if Scott had directed the Spaihts version, we would've gotten another good Alien film.  Instead, we got the "mess."
Alien and Aliens - yes. All the others were a toal mess (IMHO).  I'd rather get a flawed movie trying o do something different with that world/ universe, rather  than more of the same...

Kol

i don't know if anyone of you actually heard this commentary, but there are MANY, many things that makes spaihts draft the better story arc.

although the commentary made clear that not lindelof was (fully) responsible for the mess prometheus became, but ridley scott w/ his last minute decisions.
i am absolutely for not having regular eggs, chestbursters, facehuggers, xenos; but that's what we got, but with a disappointing design...

so the movie has parts of spaihts draft in it, but with the best parts being removed and the good decisions that had been made are desultory executed.

fiveways

"In Spaihts version of the story, Holloway awakens a Facehugger while he is exploring the pyramid. He is implanted with an Alien, the "classic model". The "Alien" burst out of Holloway during the love scene between Shaw and Holloway.

Spaihts' draft included a cargo hold filled up with Alien eggs, David discovers this area. This scene revealed the purpose of the Juggernaut ship which was on its way to Earth to undo the human experiment. When Shaw follows David into the vaults of the ship, he deliberately infected her with a Facehugger. He also took her helmet so she couldn't run back to the ship and save her life by using the med pod. She still makes it back there by holding her breath and using compressed air.

In the earlier draft by Jon Spaihts, a kind of classic chestburster is extracted from Shaw's body during the med pod scene. The chestburster is then expelled from the pod and Shaw stays in there while it heals her. As she wakes up, she can see the monster grow up. Eight hours later the monster is full size and she's watching it kill people through the glass."

If I had read a "leaked" script with these points in it, I think I would have thought it was fake.  The alien bursting while making love is so amateur.  I have a feel a lot of people around here might also have thought it was fake. 

The compressed air bit just reminds me of the episode of intervention where the girl is addicted to huffing that stuff.  All I can imagine is shaw totally wasted on compressed air.  So bad.

http://www.youtube.com/results?client=safari&rls=en&q=compressed+air+intervention&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=w1&gl=CA you can pick your own video.


acrediblesource

"insert Tab A into Slot B for fanboy jizz" lets make a T-shirt!  :laugh:


Ash 937

Ash 937

#52
It seems odd to me that there a lot of fans on this forum that justify Prometheus and claim that their reason for this is that they are sick of seeing Alien sequels with facehuggers and xenomorphs.  If done correctly, there is still a lot of goodness to be had with those creatures. 


Nightmare Asylum

Quote from: Ash 937 on Sep 24, 2012, 03:44:48 PM
It seems odd to me that there a lot of fans on this forum that justify Prometheus and claim that their reason for this is that they are sick of seeing Alien sequels with facehugger and xenomorphs.

I don't think its really people saying that the're sick of the old stuff, just that they welcome change, and that maybe the Alien that we know and love wouldn't have been a proper fit in Prometheus.

Personally, given the nature of Prometheus's story, I'm happy we got the creatures we did. The traditional Aliens and Facehuggers, as described by the writers, at least, wouldn't have worked as well, in my opinion. They seem a bit...forced, if you will.

Ash 937

Apparently, we had a good, original script that could have served us well but rather than give us a newish director (which has always been a staple of the series), the producers wanted Ridley and the writer from Lost who both seem to have big egos based on their past successes.  What resulted from this is the thrashing of good script in favor of bad ideas backed up by a general sense of "expertise" that wasn't really that grounded to begin with.  Enter Prometheus in its current state; a film that had everything going for but somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Sure it was a financial success but so were films like Transformers 3 and Twilight....so I don't think that's really any logical way to back anything up and say that Prometheus is actually a good film.

Nightmare Asylum

Quote from: Ash 937 on Sep 24, 2012, 04:07:12 PM
so I don't think that's really any logical way to back anything up and say that Prometheus is actually a good film.
The only thing it takes to call a film good is an opinion.


But anyways, prior to the movie's release, Scott was the logical choice for a director from both the fans' and the studio's perspective. And Scott wanted Lindelof, so obviously Fox was going to let him have him. It was Scott's film, and he was free to alter it as he saw fit. No one was going to tell him otherwise.

fiveways

Quote from: Ash 937 on Sep 24, 2012, 04:07:12 PM
Apparently, we had a good, original script that could have served us well but rather than give us a newish director (which has always been a staple of the series), the producers wanted Ridley and the writer from Lost who both seem to have big egos based on their past successes.  What resulted from this is the thrashing of good script in favor of bad ideas backed up by a general sense of "expertise" that wasn't really that grounded to begin with.  Enter Prometheus in its current state; a film that had everything going for but somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Sure it was a financial success but so were films like Transformers 3 and Twilight....so I don't think that's really any logical way to back anything up and say that Prometheus is actually a good film.

The early scripts to me sounds alien vs predator bad and nearing AvP:R bad.  Chestburter during a love scene?  That is something out of a dark horse alien comic.  Just bad.  That would have been an eye roll on near the AvP:R level.

And in the end, like anyone at fox cares about making the hardcore fans happy.  There are 16800 members here.  If every member registered went to see it once, at average canadian ticket price, it is $168000.  That to fox is the cost of running ads for a few evenings.  It's nothing.

SpeedyMaxx

I doubt there's anything I or anyone else could say that would cause people who don't care for the film to agree that we have "backed anything up" that a film they dislike is good.  However, plenty of people did like it, and the heavens remain above us.  I will prepare my annotated references later.

I don't think the original script would've been a surefire hit at all.  I'm not sure how The Thing prequel did last year, but it certainly was no critical success.  A lot of it just feels very much like more of the same to me with the same old alien, and in many ways a lot of fanboy box-ticking - a facehugger!  A chestburster!  And yes, between the oxygen scene and the chestburster sex scene, it could easily become a cartoon (the first question anyone online would have is, 'how the f**k did she not get killed when the rabid chestburster emerges from the guy who's on top of her?').

Some of what was in the Spaihts draft is fine.  And if he did initially set the course back to the space jockey, then he's very much to be commended for that.  I've always found his unfilmed work to be great, and a lot of his general framework for the story - Engineers, expedition, Shaw/Watts, David, Weyland - is excellent and holds up well for the final film.  But he also had a specific brief when he first came onto the project, which was to make a very standard "Alien prequel".  And that's what his script is - just a prequel.  Jockey, alien, crash, end.  And that's simply not that interesting overall, at least not in what I'm reading here.  It might make a Best Buy on-sale item in six to nine months, but it wasn't grabbing anyone on its own the way veering away from the standard tropes does, for better or worse.  By refocusing even more on the space jockey and getting away from the alien proper vs. new monsters, as well as keeping characters like David more ambiguous, leaving the question of the derelict a bit more open, I think they opened up much more possibility.

I like Jon Spaihts, and I don't blame him for a lot of this bog-standard Alien stuff.  He was given a simple job to prequelize the films, and he did it; his larger pitch, though, the bigger idea of the terraforming, life-creating Engineers was unique and sprawling, it hewed to Ridley Scott's original conception of the jockey and led to the film we got.  It's in the nuts and bolts of the script and the storyline that needed to be bolder, and that call only came down to a writer after Scott could make it himself.  And I'm glad it did.

Bat Chain Puller

Quote from: Xenomorphine on Sep 24, 2012, 01:00:44 AM
Quote from: Bat Chain Puller on Sep 23, 2012, 10:56:06 PM
Chestbursters and facehuggers would have been too familiar and not as weird/scary.

But nothing we ended up seeing was scary.


I find nothing is as scary since being an uninitiated pre-Alien young person. But there are plenty of hipster-larva out there that are unable to hide their squeamishness caused by seeing a vagina/penis eel infiltrate the security of a space suit and orally rape it's occupants. Same thing with the Med-pod scene. Pound for pound there was more iconicly creepy/disturbing scenes in Prometheus. It's the perceived success rate per individual fan that calls into question whether it worked or not. (and deconstructed ad nauseum online.)

And Cvalda: There is nothing new under the sun. And that X-Files television show was the banner waving weekly embodiment of that notion.


Quote from: fiveways on Sep 24, 2012, 04:41:08 PM
The early scripts to me sounds alien vs predator bad and nearing AvP:R bad.  Chestburter during a love scene?  That is something out of a dark horse alien comic.  Just bad.  That would have been an eye roll on near the AvP:R level.

It's tough to see how that scene could have worked. It does seem like a rather obvious pre-teen Alien fan wish fulfillment sequence. And borders on the silly notions dreamed up for something out of a Species direct to DVD sequel.

But I think in the hands of a group of uncompromising genius, renegade film makers the scene could have worked.

I prefer how Holloway went out in the film we got. Well done.

Spoiler

And the deleted scene afterwards would have made it even better.
[close]


SpeedyMaxx

Hardcore fanboys would've squealed at it.  But I don't think there's any way to make a chestburster love scene (the very phrase is hilarious) seriously work.  I do think the medpod scene is pound for pound the best in the series in terms of sheer visceral horror or tension since Jim Cameron.

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