The Prometheus audio commentary by Damon Lindelof & Jon Spaihts has found its way online via an early copy of the film. In this extra feature, the Prometheus writers talk about pre-production, deleted scenes, Ridley Scott and more. Below you can find our quick summarisation of some of the things revealed in their commentary of the film:
- The Primordial ship was originally meant to be the Alien Derelict/Juggernaut ship in Lindelof’s draft, but Ridley Scott thought it would be cooler to show something else.
- The opening sequence was meant to be longer, showing a group of Engineers talking to each other in a proto-language.
- In most of Spaihts’ drafts, the black material that consumed the Sacrifice Engineer transmuted, flew away and bit a primitive woman/man. Their pupils dilated and you could see something change inside them. Another version included a salamander-like hand reach out of the water.
- There was a scene cut for financial reasons in which a submarine expedition are looking at a sunken city in the Mediterranean where they find a giant tablet with a star map on it. A different version of the script included an archaeological dig on Mars where they found ruins sharing similarities with ancient ruins on Earth.
- In some of Spaihts drafts, Holloway and Shaw went to visit Weyland in his private residence, a space station orbiting around Earth. Another one included the couple travelling to Mars and visiting Weyland in his home which had a view of the terraforming work taking place on the planet.
- Jon Spaihts imagined Holloway as an older person, perhaps inappropriately old for Shaw as a mate. Additionally Shaw was Holloway’s student at university.
- There was a scene were Milburn discovers a little worm and talks about how important this discovery is. Lindelof mentions that this would have kinda explained why he was so excited about his later encounter with the Hammerpede.
- Spaihts experimented with the idea that the Engineers saw in a whiter spectrum than human beings did. To David’s eyes, the ruins and catacombs showed interfaces that only he could see. Picking up clues that nobody else was picking up.
- In the script, when David breaks the Ampule open, they cut to David’s POV and showed the black goo at a microscopic level.
- 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.
- Lindelof mentions that there was a two page dialogue exchange between David and the Engineer.
- In Spaihts’ draft, the last Engineer died in the pilot’s chair. He had been infected and was carrying a Chestburster. It emerged from him while the Juggernaut was flying which caused the Juggernaut to falter on its path, allowing the Magellan ship to ram it. Shaw manages to eject from the ship just before the ramming took place. Then the Alien that just emerged from the Engineer comes out of the Juggernaut and the final action scene is Shaw being hunted by this creature.
- Towards the end of the film, Lindeof talks about a deleted scene in which Shaw asks David what it is that the Engineer said to him during their earlier conversation. David tells Shaw that the Engineer told him that they did not come from there [LV-223] but a place called “Paradise”.
Makes sense!
At least that would provide some kind of explanation. They are catastrophically stupid after all.
He say's there's a scene cut where it shows them getting lost.
One of Jon Spaihts favorite scenes in the script was when Fifield and Milburn argue so much that they ignore their tracking devices and get lost somehow.
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To me, goo + Engineer were the point of the entire story. That's what I wanted to see. Hell, the goo is already responsible for human life (in some form) and obviously also responsible for the Xenomorphs. That moves it from sci-fi trope to central plot hinge.
Don't want to muddle the thread, though. The Senate convening is a mighty fine idea.
Dat tea?
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I'm a little confused by that statement. Was Fox enforcing their confidentiality agreement by holding their family hostage?
My what? Dude, he seems like a nice enough fellow, but we don't talk and I don't have a clue who he is. I just come here for the drugs and free ass. And also discussion of scary science-fiction movies.
As for any claims of plagiarism, that sad old debate over the black stuff killed at least one big thread for pages and pages before the moderators clamped down on it for behavior and some unfortunate ragequit kicked in for people. Me, I don't see a point in revisiting it now for more drama. Suffice to say that I said my piece then, as did plenty of other people - to me, it's an old, old horror/sci-fi trope that goes way back which bears a few superficial similarities to the property you mentioned but does not, IMO, equate to the same thing in the final analysis. And I don't think the general public really thought that either. Some people disagree, and that's their business, but the last lockdown proved it wasn't something everyone would agree on, and that's okay.
There are no cold, hard metrics to prove a garden-variety Internet argument about a movie some people like and some people don't. The closest we could come, if we wanted to be lazy (I don't) is a critical and financial averaging - the film did well financially and did pretty decent critically, but reception was definitely divided nonetheless. So in the end we're back where we started. Some people like it, some people don't, and I doubt the Senate is going to convene a subcommittee over whether or not Prometheus is objectively a scientifically proven "good" or "bad" movie.
I don't consider myself an expert on anything, anywhere, but I did take exception to the tacky belittling of the guy, and the allegation that anyone who would dare like the movie or its plot is just a philistine who does not understand art, film or hard work. Because that's just not so. And honestly, it's just not that serious. Like Hitchcock said, "Ingrid...it's only a mooovie."
Fantastic!
I'm talking about storytelling basics, here. Rookie mistakes that can be pointed out by anyone. They require much less than an expert surrounded by experts such as yourself.
It's a trend to want to avoid overt plagiarism, especially when your Director and the marketing around your film are toting it as some second-coming for science-fiction. It would be different if it were some secondary plot device, but it's the main crux of the entire film and could well end up being the origin of both humanity and the Alien.
Pretty big deal to me, and I'm obviously not alone.
I do write for a living and work hard in the industry, I do write for film, and yet I liked it. As did my boss, who is a filmmaker, and plenty of people I know. So it's not just the bean town rubes, hmm? There's no need to paint anyone as vacuous know-nothings who don't understand true art. Let's calm down and take another series of deep cleansing breaths, shall we? Would you like some tea?
People that create give a shit. Writers give a shit. Filmmakers give a shit. The thousands of people struggling like hell to market their own wildly creative and well-made products give a shit.
You don't, though, do ya? Don't give a shit that the two biggest points of the film, one being the mystery goo that was both ripped-off while being unexplained to the point of absurdity, and the other being the Engineer whose very soul and meaning were cut from the final film, were totally empty and ineffective for what everyone thought the film was trying to convey?
BethesdaSea don't give a shit!
I do find it funny how one person's opinion about the X Files comparison puts so many in a tizzy. Who gives a shit? The person in question loathed the film. That one device didn't sink the film for them. This should come as no surprise that the ammunition is unending.
Personally, I loved it and disliked it. The portion of the film that was derailed is impossible to side-step and it dumbs down (for me) so much of the good that is lost. But, the beauty of art is the opinions it culls, none right, none wrong.
Black Goo of an alien origin enters through the mouth and turns people into zombies.
there is another one that I have in my mind that I remember form childhood. Black goo running down that walls.
EDIT: It's Amityville horror.
This is too meta for me bro
In all seriousness, yes, there was such a time. And Bogart and Bacall were and are a legendary Hollywood couple despite an age difference that is still a tad unseemly - I think she was just out of high school. But the teacher/student dynamic is a different kind of take on this relationship. And as expressed in the early draft here, and when explored in film or television, it's generally done so in a way that highlighted the disproportionate power balance which the student - usually the woman - has to overcome. One example off the top of my head, Julia Roberts in The Pelican Brief loses her lover/mentor and foundation and most forge ahead on her own. But that's the most benign take I can recall. Almost invariably it's presented as being a somewhat negative relationship that the heroine/student must emancipate herself, either violently or organically, from to truly come into her own. I suspect it would've been done much the same in Prometheus with Shaw and an older Holloway. I personally have no problem with that, and think it would've been an interesting dynamic to play out within the film. But I never had much of a problem with Logan Marshall-Green either. He did the job.
Was also a time when avuncular characters were a mainstay of TV, before such relationships started to be portrayed as creepy, probably thanks to alt comedy trying it's hardest to ruin convention in the 1980s.
I hope you got some credit for that Cvalda.
Really, Val? Really?
That...product seems to be pretty popular around here.
©Cvaldaware2012 - The Leading Product in Cult of Personality Programming
I do agree with zuzuki that the final film significantly opens up the franchise to possibilities. I also think that a lot of hard bottom line calculations were made re: screening allocation, ratings vs. time compromises, and the future of the series. And in the end, I think even after what was clearly some violence done to some of the better scenes for the sake of this math, Scott found the correct equation for that end result. I really loved the final film, but I'm definitely looking forward to a longer cut.
The Weyland yacht scene still sounds so incredibly batshit and sublime. I wish there'd been a way to do it without spoiling the plot twist for most of the general audience.
Main problem is scary varies so much for different people. I can't honestly remember the last time a film scared me. Things like Blair Witch or Seven I found incredibly tense, but I don't know if I call them scary. Bits of Prometheus were tense and the abortion scene was uncomfortable to say the least, but again I wouldn't call it scary.
My wife however, isn't a fan of horror flicks so when she does watch one, she'd call it scary.
Scary is shit that gives me nightmares. Which only happened with a couple of films a very long time ago as a kid.
The scene with alternate Firfield was cut it seems not because of the monster cgi design, but because it ruined the pacing of the movie and the scene where shaw finds weyland on the ship.
The reason why the weyland -yacht scene was cut was not because of budgetary reasons but because they didn't want to reveal that weyland was on the ship too early in the movie. the water scene that was cut because of monetary reason was the one with the submarine and the city ruins in the sea.
There are a lot of cool things, and my impression is again that the script wasn't bad at all, but the edits done in post production spoiled the end result. Either way i still enjoyed the movie and i would rate it as 7.5 or even a 8.5 considering all the stuff that was cut. Hopefully we will get after a few years a extended cut, and the sequels will add more to this new mythology
And another thing. The alien prequel was more expensive to make( just look at all the concept art with all those massive rooms and scenery). And it would have been a direct prequel to alien. This way the movie goes in another direction and starts a whole new franchise- big money here, 3 movies instead of one
I doubt that they'll just swap out the old monsters for the new ones. I think they know that's not feasible. I think it's more likely they'll just keep making more weird shit, more new monsters. Which is fine with me. The giant trilobite in particular strikes me as a bit of a one-off - or you only bring it out for Christmas, that is to say, the third act.
The best possible outcome really. If only all disagreements could end in such a way.
The concept of the scene was chilling, but had I been in charge there would have been no music. Just the close, intimate sound of the struggle and suffocation. I do agree with you that the reverse audio left a lot more to the imagination. And mine imagined something a lot more creepy than what we ended up with.
I just thought the insect pit scene was awesome. Scary never entered my mind. I suppose for a younger audience member, sure. I did love the slow, hopeless consumption of Lumpy the cook. It was disturbing because it made you feel what it would be like. Credit to the actor and the effects team ... and for having the balls to go in close and linger on the proceedings. The music also was low key and hauntingly serine for what was unfolding on screen. By and by I thought both scenes were sufficiently chilling but again, I can't say either was truly scary.
It could have been bloodier. I especially liked the calm, inquisitive "it's finally out" beat ... where it seems mostly a benign little tumor thing ... then the sac breaks and all that amniotic fluid splashes down into the gaping incision in her belly. Alarming and nasty to say the least. Again, the concept of what is happening is just perfectly insane and a welcome addition to the other iconic scenes through out the series.
But you can always trust Ridley to be Ridley on the subject of the crazy things that quite frequently come flying out of his mouth. He is almost a carnival barker. He's trying to get you to go into the tent. He's also writing checks against Alien and having to deal with the scare conversion between 1979 and 2012 audiences.
I was never convinced that Ridley felt the original Alien design worked as a man in a suit. The way he shot the creature worked wonderfully because he didn't want to show too much. I have no idea what he was thinking with Deacon. It worked for me because it was just enough an alien ... yet not at all.
I felt there was enough reason for the change. There were no eggs to be found. No facehuggers. So it stands to reason that the very unique process that led to the Deacon would result in such a unique creature.
I'm actually more worried for future episodes where Trilobites and Deacons will be the new facehuggers and Aliens. I hope the film makers honor what feels like an intentionally different looking beast and not fall back on them as 'the new normal.'
What alarms me the most is that the Deacons cry at the end is virtually the same as the cry we heard in the tunnel right before we saw the holographic video images of the Engineers running for their lives.
Neither have the teacher/ student thing, and Lost... starts to veer into the sordid and therefore unhealthy because she has a husband already.
Fine.
Lost in Translation > A relationship where both characters grew.
Shelter > Mentor/student type relationship where the younger character grew and they ended up together.
As Good As It Gets > A relationship where both characters grew and ended up together.
Relatively mainstream films depicting relationships with an age gap in a healthy/positive light.
A short one would suffice.
I really think you'd struggle to portray a teacher/ student relationship as healthy, because it's still viewed as something of a taboo even among consenting adults.
It's pointless to argue with you when you're set on believing otherwise.
That's why I'm not going to bother taking the time to type out a long response.
You call BS on what?
I call BS.
The thing is, the film was not just made for us fans (nor did most of the general audience dissect the promo material the way hardcore fans did). And I think that scene is a real show-stopper - it certainly knocked out my theater - but that the whole film is also vastly superior overall.
I write in a different aspect of the field BTS these days, but thanks for the compliment.
It was a solid scene but hardly enough to put it above Alien 3. And... it was mostly expected. Which greatly lessened the nightmarish factor.
Trailers: Few glimpses of Shaw in pain. Medpod scanning.
TV Spot and 1 trailer: Shaw's stomach swelling.
Ridley: "I want to keep it a secret but there's a scene that rivals the chestburster scene in Alien. Lulz, I bet you can't guess what it is. Is my hint not obvious enough?"
A lot of fans knew what to expect just by seeing the trailers.
Your writing above was better than the entire film's dialogue in Ridley's "director's cut."
Why are you doing it then?
Name some, 'cos I can't think of any. Closest I can think of is Jurassic Park, but there's no mentor/ student dynamic there despite the undetermined age gap with Alan and Ellie. They're equals. We always end up with the older man who comes off as creepily lusting after the young student, who treats her with condescension and she ends up being treated better by someone nearer her own age. Not terribly to clever to paint a target on Holloway as 'Marked For Death' in the first couple of minutes. And similarly paint a woman who you want to be intelligent as emotionally weak.
Sums up Aliens too.
I do think they mismarketed it a bit, at least in the press quotes (the trailers were masterful and awed a few old hands in the business I know, though I think a couple ultimately showed too much). It's less of a scare factory and more of a science-fiction adventure film with horror elements. It's not simply "Texas Chainsaw in space," which was the brief on Alien. There is a haunted house of sorts, and a chamber of all sorts of weird horrors - and I think they were right to get away from the same old series iconography, simply because this adds so much more future variety and possibility, as well as the fear factor that even hardened fans had no idea what the f**k was going to be in that chamber or that ship or coming out of Shaw's belly - but overall the movie is more broad and dreamy in its scope, more of an exploratory thing. (I also think that there was plenty of plot reason for them to be different, other than the above audience and future film issues; it demonstrates that the Engineers were profound biogeneticists, experimenting with a variety of different lifeforms and monstrosities, and that the alien we know is just one of many dangers.)
The music, the tone is often very different, deliberately so. It's a larger cosmic story. There's the horrific elements juxtaposed with the space-age romanticism, or the identity politics and ongoing enigma of someone like David, and that's what fascinates me about the film. It's just a very, very different piece of work. And so I agree up to a point that it was misrepresented as, say, "Alien plus." But for me it's perfectly okay that it wasn't.
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Handy tip - it's not good to generalise. Did I once say that all films portray relationships realistically? No.
I was simply saying that just because you haven't seen films with a big age gap in a relationship being portrayed as healthy, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
They may be in the minority but the point is that it doesn't mean Prometheus has to be like that if hypothetically it did go the other route with Holloway.
So because you have seen people in real life where a relationship with a bigger age gap than you're used to seeing, that's exactly the way they're generally portrayed in film?
Handy tip - we're not talking about real life.
We're clearly going to have to agree to disagree.
Hammerpede stuff was brutal, but I go to watch a 'Predator' film for brutality. I go to see an 'Alien' film for nightmarish viciousness. Ultimately, the famous advert with the reversed audio on it turned out to sound a heck of a lot more disturbing than what we actually got - which I think I predicted would be what might happen. Either way, I didn't find it scary and the sight of it going in the mouth cuts away relatively quick. It looks like instant death.
Compare that with, say, the insectoid pit in the remake of 'King Kong'. Remember how the guy dies by being gradually consumed by giant maggot-like creatures? There was a whole bunch of stuff in that scene which was scarier by several magnitudes than anything we saw in 'Prometheus' - and that goes for the Hammerpede scene, too. It's violent, yes. Not disturbing/scary.
The 'abortion' scene was better, but again... Relatively clean. It wasn't nearly as tense as I thought it might be. The most alarming thing about it seemed to be the precarious hold of the robotic device on the creature, rather than the removal, but nothing happens with that.
But as I've written elsewhere, none of this would have necessarily mattered if the production team had been honest and said they were just going to try and do the best they could. Instead, Ridley Scott warned in several interviews that there would be things which would make Lambert's death pale by comparison, said he was going "to scare the shit" out of us and that there was supposedly no way to make the original Alien design effective - with HR Giger, himself, on set - only to apparently perceive that the Deacon looked miles better.
That's why 'Prometheus' ends up being a bit of a disappointment on the horror film front - which is precisely what it was being hyped up as (when not having the emphasis placed on how supposedly revolutionary, epic and full of hard science it would be).
This is not to say that the film doesn't have its positive points. It certainly does and I really liked a lot of the visuals. It just doesn't succeed in the scare department for me, that's all.
Like I said a few posts back, the changes from the original Alien to other creature designs could have made sense if there was a legitimate plot reason for that, but it honestly looks like the reason for that was change for the sake of itself. They broke the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it rule.
Interesting...