Yeah, I think THOR marks the end of my personal drunk-on-mic era. I wouldn't want to not be able to give PROMETHEUS the focused reaming it deserves.

I think you're misunderstanding the objection. Just about everyone was down for a good old-fashioned thrill-and-chill without any kind of highbrow pretensions at all, but instead Scott and Lindelof decided to have the characters carry on about incoherent philosophies in between acts of blithering, unaccountable stupidity. The people who injected an inappropriate level gravitas into the franchise were the filmmakers, not the audience.

I know you're playing devil's advocate, but still.

You're right of course. The movie is indefensible. I gave it my best shot. It's up to Teague or someone else to step up to the plate and say want a classy movie it is.

My counter question would be does more stupid make stupid better?

If a screenwriter can rescue the Prometheus trilogy after the handicap of the first film, I'd shake his hand. It's like winning a marathon after arriving an hour late.
Scene 1: Shaw suddenly wakes up in a tent in Scotland. That was a bad dream.
Better to start again with a reboot.

'Dumbest' is a big word.

Here's a theory - Scott got so much mileage from the 'was Deckard a replicant' debate, that the lesson he learned from the sci-fi genre is to 'vague it up' so that the nerds will debate it incessantly for years. So he instructed Lindelof to stick in more questions than answers in the hope that it'll become this enigmatic classic that'll get everyone talking.

Because again, you could take this same exact script, and just by restructuring certain set-pieces to make more sense chronologically (have the med-pod surgery AFTER things have gone to hell and Shaw is escaping), and trimming out some of the dumber ideas at play (LETS COMMIT SUICIDE AND RAM THIS SHIP GUYS......SOUNDS GOOD TO ME), already have a pretty damn good sci-fi movie in combination with the visuals.

Part of the pissed off reaction is how close the movie comes at times to being the great sci-fi epic people want it to be. I firmly believe that a more competent writer could've taken the same exact input from Scott and delivered a great movie out of it.

EDIT: Actually really tempted to try to fan-edit this thing

Last edited by bullet3 (2012-09-28 21:45:05)

Damon Lindelof recounted his version of events of how he came to work on Prometheus.  Basically he had just wrapped Lost when one day his agent called and said," Hey Ridley Scott is going to call you in 10 minutes."  Ridley calls and says, "Hey, Im a fan of Lost, JJ recommended I get you to read the draft of my new Alien movie.  Wanna read?"  Lindelof says of course, and an hour later a PA comes to Lindelof's house with the script and says, "Here ya go,  Take your time reading it, but I'll be parked outside, just bring it back out when you're done."  Lindelof reads it and gives Ridley a call back.  Damon's notes were pretty basic:  It's a perfectly fine, updated version of Alien...and that's it.  It feels pretty much exactly the same as the first Alien, which is fine if that's what you want, but nothing new is covered, and it very much feels like you're repeating the same story beats.  Ridley agrees, and says that he wants it to stand on its own outside of the mythology, and that he wants to touch on some deeper, spiritual questions.  Lindelof comes on board, and with each new draft, the "sandbox got bigger and bigger," until one day, Prometheus happened.

That's what you get when you hire a guy who wrote for Lost. You're basically saying, "I'd like to introduce some totally inexplicable batshit insanity into my story with no rules or plan for how to make it make sense."

But still, Scott has the clout/seniority of final yea or nea over any of Lindelhof's ideas. So the buck stops with Scott. btw, listen to how Scott deals with questions and criticisms by listening to Scott's Prometheus commentary at the 32minute mark. Someone asks 'what are you doing this for?' Scott's reply is 'fuck off, I've got three movies in the Library of Congress'.

When an actor is miscast in a movie - do you blame the actor or do you blame casting? Take Kingdom of Heaven - do you blame Orlando Bloom for not having the gravitas to carry the weight of the role, or do you blame the people who approved his casting? Jake Lloyd surely is Lucas' misjudgement.

Lindelhof does what he does. His Prometheus script is not out of left field given LOST. So the film-makers (Scott, etc) can hardly claim to be surprised when he turned in that script.

What the movie needed was a science consultant - many sci-fi movies and TV series have them, but there didn't seem to be one here. Didn't anyone spot one in the credits?

Last edited by avatar (2012-09-29 11:23:11)

I read an article on the web that has a great theory about what the rhinoceros means.