For more signal less noise check out GavRovs blog. He not happy with Ridley, as designer of Moon should know something. http://www.gavinrothery.com/my-blog/

I've seen other people bring this up, and I tend to disagree with the comparison.

For starters, the Blade Runner that people love now is pretty significantly different from the Blade Runner that was released theatrically, and I just don't see a Prometheus director's cut being such a radical departure that it would suddenly make it into a masterpiece (though I hold out hope it will make it at least a solid genre movie).

More importantly, I would say that Blade Runner is a vastly more subtle movie, both in terms of theme, character, and dialogue, which makes it easier to be re-assessed with a different interpretation.
Not being born when it came out, I can't put my self into the frame of mind of an audience that disliked it, because I love the ever-loving shit out of the movie, but I would guess the criticism would be that the movie takes it's time, is kinda vague in places, and the lead character is pretty unlikable (which is the whole point of the movie, but I digress). Prometheus' problems are very different and almost opposite. It's not a subtle movie at all, characters constantly re-state all the supposed themes, and more importantly there is lots of pretty bad dialogue that immediately jumps out at you. These are the kinds of obvious fundamental issues that don't go away with time and re-interpretation, unless the movie is meant to be a satire of bad science fiction movies (which I've actually seen people try to argue).

Frankly the comparison makes me cringe, I mean christ, this movie ends with a fan-service shot of an alien crawling out of a bald dude. Blade Runner ends with the villain rescuing the hero, both physically and psychologically, and lamenting his mortality as he dies.

Lets not go crazy here people.

Last edited by bullet3 (2012-06-12 17:41:49)

My memory, as a (I think) thirteen year old SF fan when Blade runner came out, was that it was that flop only "real" fans got, and most of us forgave the flaws due to the awesome visuals. Also, you know, if you don't understand it it's because the film is just so deep! It was the anti-Star Wars, really, and gained a following for that as much as anything else.

Last edited by Invid (2012-06-12 22:36:33)

He's an old man in his mid-70s. Cutting-edge artistic creativity peaks in the 25-40 age range, and drops off rapidly.  None of Ridley Scott's later efforts have been great (basically anything this century).

Fincher was in his 30s when he did Fight Club. Cameron did Aliens when he was 29. Orson Welles did Citizen Kane even younger.  Kubrick did Dr Strangelove in his 30s.

As Woody Allen, George Lucas, etc has shown, there's a bell curve of creativity which tapers off with age. Although one can always think of the occasional exception, it's more likely that your best work will be before 50 rather than after 50. In the sciences, age is even more crucial. Darwin, Newton and Einstein were in their 20s when they had their radical intellectual breakthroughs. The brain starts to calcify after 30-odd.

The bottom-line is that my expectations of Blade Runner 2 by octogenarian Ridley Scott are very low.

Given you're saying this the week the new RUSH album comes out, I'm going to have to respectably disagree.

Most of those directors probably don't have an army of people questioning everything they do now, either. If there's anything Lucas has taught us, it's that surrounding yourself with people who will kiss your ass all the time is the worst thing you can do. That and when you're young and only have a few above-average movies under your belt, your actors are more willing to work outside your expectations as well. If some film making legend like Woody Allen tells you how a scene goes, you probably just do that, cause the guy's Woody Allen. Who the fuck are you to question him? But that's often how the best performances happen. Achieving that legendary status probably makes people afraid to stand their ground on things like that.

With this flick, I think it was more a case of people being impressed with the performance of Star Trek and Lost and the desire to get the guy who wrote those to write this flick as well. From interviews I've read, I can only assume that the script they started out with was maybe decent, but relied on the previously established Alien lore. It still had all of that weird space jesus stuff in it where the engineers created life, it just dealt with it while adhering to the previous films' rules. Lindelhof got a chance to read the script and wrote an e-mail that basically said "That's great, but here's how I'd do it:", and then he pulled a bunch of bullshit out of his ass to make an impression. Then he got the job and had to actually write all that bullshit and... well...

... Prometheus.

That age thing better be wrong, tho, or I'm completely fucked

Last edited by Squiggly_P (2012-06-15 03:19:53)

If you've become an established legend, then surely it's more likely that you've got complete freedom in choosing any project. It's no longer a case of 'what you get handed'. Sure, if you're starting out, there's hack- work, without final cut or cast-approval or even script-approval (e.g. Fincher on Alien3). But by the time you've got some big commercial successes & critical acclaim under your belt, you have more creative freedom. You can't blame late-period duds on studio-interference or poor material.

That may be the reason, although I'd go further and say that even if they did try (and surely there must be plenty of directors that want to recapture the glory days of youth), they find it harder to come up with something radically new. Happy to be proved wrong - would love Blade Runner 2 to NOT be Crystal Skull or Phantom Menace or Prometheus.

About that life capsule thing:

Let's do some math. There are three dudes piloting the ship, there's Vickers, there's nongeologist and unbiologist that get killed, there's Shaw and Halloway. There's David. I think there's some asian chick or something? I can't remember. That makes, what... ten? What happens to asian chick? Does she get killed? What about the medical staff? The four or five guys that are helping the old man puppet put his slippers on. Did they all go into the alien ship at the end? Did the engineer kill them all? I only recall the engineer killing like three people.

Were those other people still on the ship when they drove it into the other ship?

It doesn't really matter much, just...  if they weren't on the ship or were in a buggy, like...  waiting outside for the old dude to finish having his body replaced or whatever the fuck he thought was gonna happen in there...  I dunno...

And, avatar, I really don't get how the critics out there can let this movie get off. This fucking movie may as well be called Transformers 2. It's so broken. All it has going for it are the camera work and effects and ... some of the acting, but the acting really doesn't matter. The characters are ALL either stupid or hopelessly broken themselves. Their motivations are all screwed up, their actions often make no sense at all... It doesn't even matter that they're performed well. I almost can't tell if they're well performed or not, cause I can't figure out what they're supposed to be doing / feeling / wanting / etc.

It's like instead of pandering down to people with fart jokes, racist humor and pointless scenes of cool over-the-top action, this movie is pandering UP to snobby arthouse critics by giving them pointless metaphor, bullshit philosophy and confusingly bizarre sequences that OBVIOUSLY have to mean SOMETHING...  right?

When the zombies attack (can't believe I'm writing this), don't some crew get knocked off? When the old man wakes up, he seemed to have attendants that we've never seen before, as if they were asleep with him. The background characters are so bland, you can't care. In Aliens who know have many marines there are and how many die in the first attack.

As one reviewer pointed out, not only was there a difference between mainstream critics and genre geeks, but between British (where it opened earlier) and American reviewers. The Brits were more likely to call bullshit on it ('was it shit or really shit?'), whereas the Americans started bending over backwards to confabulate theories that supposedly rescued it from clusterfuck to profound meditation on human nature.

From Ridley Scott's perspective (& the studio's), it's a success. Box office? Healthy. Mainstream critics on Rotten Tomatoes? Overwhelmingly positive. Forums are abuzz with discussion about what it means. That can only be good, right?. "Let's do another one".

Single most cringe-worthy line in the movie: "It's what I choose to believe"

I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim and didn't like Prometheus...where do I stand?