Intro... skip for plot specifics for movie description
i am really really really amazed and in shock most of u guys seemed to like it. i read the whole thread these past two hours after watching prometheus and I really cant explain how i feel about it and if i flatout hate it, cause in a way i really do, but i feel most of all, cheated, that this was a shameless money grab and that it was a big f**k u to alien fans and audiences in general.
That this was a movie that should never been made period.
I was afraid i was gonna go like "this guy is too old for this shit", ridley i mean, i love alien and blade runner (2 of my fav films of all time) i like legend and i like black hawk down a lot. Gladiator has been too long since i seen it and I fell asleep in the theatre watching kingdom of heaven i literally thought it was the most boring f**king movie ever. and what i heard from robin wood didnt make me wanna see it. and btw i love hearing this guy talk in the extras and i had a lot of respect for him but well not anymore it seems. And how that connects to my love of "Alien" 1 i think is what enraged me the most... details furthrer on.
Now then i wasnt gonna write too much as i normally do specially when frustrated and by what i already wrote i thought id be going absolutely mad on a rant rage... if ur still reading prepare for a synopsys of my day, its a description of how i felt the whole day jinxing my hype and replacing it with a sort of "i knew it" till i finally sat down to see the damn thing, cause it makes sense in the context of evaluating the FUN o meter in this movie. Yes i watched avp1 at random today i didnt even knew i was gonna watch prometheus today...And i guess i might offend a lotta people tastes cause ill say also which movies i saw earlier these last few months starting with the thing remake and how i thiink they fared against this. I already said too much i hope someone replies... cause otherwise heres my rant about it without trying to touch on things everyone already said unless i find necessary.
oh crap where to start? well it was sorta of a crappy day to begin with and this movie was the punch line. that and avp and how i felt both were so similar and empty. i was uber pumped since the last 2 weeks or so but then i started watching trailers and analazing the movie trying to put the pieces of the trailer in place. The last time i did that or ever was in cloverfield and i was so happy this movie seemed it had so many mysteries to tackle. I was dead wrong. and btw ive seen alien close to a 100 times with no exageration. There were whole months that all id see before sleep was either alien or aliens. i know each ones flaws imo like the back of my hand. and now im gonna watch prometheus again (a screener online) so i can really put the final nail in the coffin. that also didnt happen to me in a loooong time... having to watch the movie a second time just to be sure of my negative reaction of it.
PLOT specifics and yes of course SPOILERS
well when the movie started i was going like cool this planet seems like earth tho, i thought, then now i read that it wasnt the planet, that that was earth. i was thinking it was trying to mean something deep like this planet seems like ours, strange isnt it? well its earth but im still not sure of that... still it was like terminator salvation i was like this isnt how i pictured the f**king planet that i see in alien1 kinda like when u see t4 and think the whole war on the future should be blue like aliens and kinda like alien. I was going like hmmmm this isnt the intro i wanted tho i already knew that was the intro reading online and then the aphex of that feeling was seeing the blue guy and i was like... shit doesnt look cool at all. then he dies in a kinda cool way but i wished he didnt fell into the water fall and that u could see the decomposing a bit better, felt kinda offscreen and btw im not a morbid gore fanatic. still it felt kidna omnious and full of mystery but Alien and Aliens intro was way better imo... Predator1 n 2 intro also seemed cooler to me and so did avp2. Those were way sillier for sure but they set me up for what i got and made me pumped just with music and a letter font. This intro kinda did too but it ultimately seemed to mean nothing when the movie was over so i wouldave sticked with the old cool logo in space or the cliche EVERYTHINGS GOING TO HELL, we'll show u how much later on, or just the old like "some hs before the incident" and then u go back to how they got there. The logo was also cool with the whole dna thing made me think they were gonna go deeper into that... AND MOST OF ALL... i think it shouldnt be broad daylight and THEY SHOULDNT show u the lamo imo engineers right from the get go.
Then the avp1 feeling started to show up... all i could think of was the italian guy pulling the pepsi cola cap. less chessy, yes but felt outta place having the characters find some mumbo jumbo on earth for 1 minute. I dont think the alien series should ever show u how earth is and and i was already getting afraid about the whole mood of the movie, the color pallete, if it was too desaturated like movies are these days and how these two characters from the get go seemed so much more interesting in the trailers, and how they seemed to me right from the get go very bland and generic. Like avp.
Moving on to the the explanation of the mission once again very much like avp1 and then the ship at last. The ship is awesome but not nearly as awesome as nostromo or the colony in aliens. same goes for the rest of the planet and ships. The prometheus reminded me of avatar but lot less cooler tho it seemed more colorful in a way. I also couldnt get much past the point how pristine it was compared to nostromo considering this was earlier but well that was 30years ago and this is now but still i thought the ship shouldave looked scarier. Still one of the coolest sets ive seen in years but not used as it should. I thought it just tried to go the uh... "Halo" route in a way. The helmet the replicant was using was pathetic and the space suits were kinda cool but felt like B movie ish in a way and tron like too. Which for me would be a good thing but i thought they could be much cooler. Daft punk still look cooler than them in those space suits and so did every character in tron.
But it was a nice setup there with the robot which i already knew from the viral that he was messed up in the head and that loneliness implied by having him watch the movie alone, have a crush on noomi (kinda like ash for ripley) the ball court in a bicicle. it all felt like a nice variation of the crew waking up in alien. Still nowhere as cool but almost there. It killed the mystery of the character in the way, by watching that u knew that he was gonna do something stupid and bad somewhere. And the flashback somehow killed it for me in terms of thinking her character was gonna be deep. Its always the old my dad my mom my brother got me into this obcession about this. Im kinda sick of that explanation of things in movies its like old kung fu or shit... We gotta fight cause hes my old brother. Im really sick of ppl thinking adding dead family members alone can add anything deep for the motivations of any character... unless its done in a good way. I dont think it was. Then the crew... more unmemorable than any bald guy in alien3 with no names (btw i love alien3).
After a while they land on the planet like it was nothing after for what i understood it was a 2 year sleep and the jock points right there at the light rays like they land on the f**king planet and they are already on top of the find literally, how lucky was that? Then they go inside the cave. Well it had some cool sets but still no where as cool as any of the sets in prior alien movies. Actually imo the worst. Its a f**king cave. Almost no bones or tech on it just like black rock for a few exceptions. The planet itself also looks like shit its bland, should be at night i think, and there should be a icon of what they find there and for me that fat guy that was rejected for the original dune didnt cut it. I was like awesome they finally got that concept art somewhere but it wasnt such a cool design to begin with and not the best thing to look at when u arrive and want to be in awe. A dusty fat round buddha with no detail at all. The tubes or urns arent anywhere as cool as facehugger eggs and that room while it was cool and there was a wall there that was pretty giger like and awesome (or was it in other room) i dunno and once again that huge face that isnt all that cool and its a bad reveal of a bad designed character. The room looks cool yes but wouldnt u feel it was forced if there was a room with a giant xeno face in the first one? A xeno face would look way cooler but still, it woulda revealed the character too soon for A SECOND TIME. on a cooler point tho it seems like a sorta micheal myers thing, like u know a blank face, pale and devoid of emotion which is what the xenos kinda are and the engineers were also portraied like that, there was something human about them and that in a way was what made them scarier. anyway if u wanted to show something show like a huge engineer mask. it would look cooler in posters in the set and it wouldnt spoil the fact that these guys are like the aliens in stargate or that pink guy in green lantern.
Then shit starts to happen and oh is it underwhelming. worms. great. mutated worms. U got the most iconic and original monsters ever and u start with f**king worms. then the movie cut off for a break i went for a cigar and when i came back the thing was already jumping out someones eye socket that i dont remember who it was.
Ah heck this is pointless... to keep describing such an unmemorable movie... but ill digress further.
By this time the whole sense of mystery i love so much in alien and aliens and in all predators was gone. The whole like "wtf is going on and what is going to happen". The characters never said they were afraid minus the later to be zombie guy, they never have this feeling of forebodding and neither does the movie. It doesnt have the looking at both ships in utter sillence (or wind) like in alien1 or the wtf happened here like when u get to the colony in aliens or something like the skinned corpses in predator. You know the whole piecing the elements of what is about to bump out in the dark, how it operates what does it do to people and so on. It didnt have the typical scene where dallas says the origin of the signal is unknown or billy in pred going like this doesnt make any sense. That whole act that is supposed to make u go OOOOOH ur in some deep shit and u have no ideia why and how. That was what i loved the most about the mystery in those movies was how the characters reacted to those situations They going like what do u think it is that caused this...These guys on the other hand seem like they have a deathwish all the f**king time. And btw when characters die u totally dont care. When Kane died you barely saw him but somehow u cared, and u cared for all the others and u kinda got sad you were seeing a good character die. It can be said they arent that deep in the first movie but they are well defined. Which isnt exactly the case here imo.
Well skipping to the "birth" scene i thought it was one of the highlights of the movie, i thought it was suspenseful and creative, actually the only scary part in it or the only "edge of your seat moment" in it. well i got scared 4 times i gotta be honest. Right at the begining when the engineer screams, the exploding head, and i cant recall the rest sorry. The birth scene wasnt scary but it was suspensful and intense. It was so intense imo that till it ended it made me forget how easily the replicant let her go and how she operated that shit easily and it seemed no one else was on the ship at that time. And shit im gonna talk of the end of the movie... It sucked. There was no action at all in the movie, all plot points seemed irrelevant specially with the plot holes, u had so many ppl to die, only to die uninspired deaths, and damn i hated the engineers. IT WAS ONE OF THE WORST designs i saw for a character ever. at first i was like ok a bit but the more i think of it the lamer it seems. First of all they shouldnt look human tho i get why they made em that way. Second they should be as we remembered, like a boney space elephant. They should always have the masks on and if not those masks should be their faces. it wouldave been even cooler if they could disguise as humans or the engineers on that planet were that way, more human, cause of some weird experimentation they did on themselves and therefore they were cut and isolated from the rest of the race cause they were seen as freaks. Then at the end the noomi engineer fight the more i think of it the more i think of jason X. less cooler. A lot less. Its like a dumb blue dude with some tech armor on. Its like really, u have leatherface, myers, jason, freddy, pinhead as those types of still human slashers... and then this. Of all of those i can surely say counting pinhead out, this design seemed to had a lot more effort than those i mentioned. But it was all it seemed to me a douche bag jason voorhees without a mask and some generic gears of war armor. U got squids, worms, infected people and engineers and they all look very uninspired. And u have all this shit that could be used as a threat but they never ever do. They show up once to just have their forgettable moment and theyre never used again. So many monsters and so little action HOW THE f**k IS THAT POSSIBLE? Maybe director is a snob or maybe the script is just flatout unfinished. anyways their designs werent bad but when u got xenos and preds as the benchmark and the original space jockey its like... is this the best u could think of for monster designs? some really generic shit with overproduced values?
Then there is no climax at there isnt a fight, there isnt an escape like alien or aliens for 20 mins, there only lots of exposition that leads to nothing but a ending that reminded me of avp2, say some chessy corny shit and look into the sky...Credits. NAWT... BUT OH WAIT WHAT COULD IT BE? a xeno. a proto xeno or whatever it is. U HAD A WHOLE f**kING MOVIE and in the end u tease me with a xeno BUT its still like ridley is afiraid of going back knowing it couldnt match the accidental genius of the first so... Its a new type of xeno so he can just say ITS NOT THE ALIEN i told u this wasnt an "Alien" movie. UR DEFINELTY RIGHT IT ISNT.. the new alien well, I thought it looked ok... looked kinda like some mignola hplovecraft creature. AND DAMN ME if i didnt know that was the end of the movie. I thought if they do that the movie is kinda saved for me... if they show a xeno right at the end that would be a great punch line...but by that point i was already like "i dont give a shit" SO DAMN I got a lotta shit to read here before i post, i hope it isnt the longest review out here and final thoughts on this piece a crap before i go watch it again or alien3
It looked ok, but i dont see what is there so much special in visuals of it... i mean i do, but the designs of both monsters and sets are ur typical sci fi stuff. Avatar looked better to me.
Story didnt make much sense so much stuff u could pick up to give awesome twists throughout the movie AND NONE were f**kING USED, i could make a list all night about all that stuff, why did wickers need that medlabshit, how does that squidhugger thing work bla bla bla
Many pointless scenes, characters, mysteries, and addition of lotsa crap for no aparent reason that doesnt add shit and actually imo takes away some of the mystery and why the xenos were cool in the first place. Why have some many new monsters when they are WAAAAAY worse than the previous creatures and most of all they dont have any importance to the story. felt like filler but so did the whole movie.
There's no action, no mystery therefore no fun.
THE WORST ALIEN MOVIE I SAW TO DATE. I love the first 4 and now that i saw this im gonna say ALIENS is my fav.
Alien is the best in mystery and suspense,
Aliens is the best in action and visuals
Alien3 is the best in characters and drama,
Alien4 is the best in being all out comic book in ur face style, the least subtle of them all.
and now for the contorversial part... AVP1 n 2 are waaaaaaaay better than this shit
i saw underworld4 and the thing remake some months ago i left the theatre mad AND STILL they were less offensive than this. They had way less depth in concept and execution AND STILL were way more fun that this.
i know some of u will say this guy is dumb all he wants is monsters and blood. Well wrong. But not having that for the sake of trying to be something....snobbish or pretentious is just... its like the first movie was trying to get away from the B movie cliches and it was somewhat low budget from what i know. i find it ironic. I also find ironic how can it mimic avp1 so much and still do worse.
This piece a shit PRETENTCEUS is a flat out b movie, and its not unlike shit id see on sci fi channel.
The biggest flaw it has? ITS f**kING BORING. You have so much going for it and they render it all useless it f**ks up the canon AND MOST OF ALL bottom line the reason im the most upset with this movie is....besides being more shallow than avp1 and 2 combined (those two are dumber if u will but they are fun and they in a way do what they set out to do)
this just shits on the canon, shits on ridleys reputation, stains my notion of genius of Alien and its like... if fans f**ked up the avp movies THE FATHER of alien f**ked alien himself. If the original director f**ked it up what hope is in this franchise? for producers and the likes... I mean theres lotsa hope still... Cameron i think could still deliver. self-Assumed b movies with lots of action could still do something for it. Creature features as u will... cause this was what this was... a bad one.
U dont try to explain what happened prior after 30 years, f**k it all up, f**k the canon, f**k ur reputation that bad and add lots of confusing things that have no point existing in this universe. If people were concerned avp was some godzilla vs kingkong stuff... well then... what is this? ppl go into a planet silly monsters attack that have no depth at all minus engineers and still they were SO SO f**king shallow compared to what they couldave been, they made those guys into some other slasher that isnt memorable like those old 80s slahsers cause everytime he was on screen he had no personality whatsoever. What they thought for them as a race is still cool but when u see it walking around being an asshole, MORE THAN AN ASSHOLE than the preds in avp1...well...this was for me the biggest fox f**kup ever. Its worse than the starwars prequels, worse than avp1 (cause i do like avp2 in its slasher campy way and ill be damned if i cant say that the last 30 mins of avp are much more entertaining then this crap always in a rush to be totally pointless). When i walked out of avp1 in 2004 i was angry as shit... when this movie ended today i was just like... broken. At least theres a good point about it. it made the avps seem like masterpieces in comparsion. and unlike avp even if the movie was bad i could buy the toys... this... i dont even know if id like a proto xeno figure. Predators to me is my dream sequel so far in terms of sequels i thought id never see.
RR signing off... going to my criosleep where this movie doesnt belong to the series... and where im no longer a survivor of the nostromo... only hadleys hope from now on to me since this scar will take years to heal so i can watch blade runner and alien again with the same eyes i did before i saw this revival that almost killed it for me.
P.s sorry for long rant, i had to get it out of my system and theres so much i didnt cover belive me.