ellmo
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Registered: 04-03 |
Okay, so I didn't see any thread about this move after it's premiere, there's only that one in which everybody gets their hopes high up - just the way I did before I watched this movie.
The following synopsis will most likely contain spoilers, but there's actually nothing that surprising and revolutionary in the main plot of the movie.
First of all I'd like to say I hated this garbage, every minute I hated it more because I was still hoping for some kind of a redeeming bit, but nothing came even close (well maybe Charlize Theron in a tight suit). The fact is that I find the main story not-half-bad. It doesn't kick ass, but with proper execution it would actually fit as Alien (1979) prequel. Unfortunately this movie includes extremly high density of unacceptably absent-minded characters, half of which are supposed to be scientists sent on a trillion dollar operation. I guess the operation itself was so expensive they could only afford a bunch of complete idiots and ignorants as the ship's the crew.
That said the "AvP" movie still makes infinitely more sense as a beginning of the franchise - even if it's not canon.
Technology
- For every single prequel to classic movies - they always do this - they portray much better technology than in originals (and Alien movies have a combined plot-span of 250-300 years). I know Alien was made in the late seventies and the way people pictured future technology back then always makes me smile - but also they gave some honest thought about how things work, what is possible and what isn't.
There were motion-detectors, auto-turrets with limited amount of ammo, orbital space ships with atmosphere-landing smaller vessels on board, Power Loaders used for loading heavy ordnance and medical examination was conducted by performing a medical examination, not by a oversized Tricoder and an android.
In Prometheus everything is so advanced that you don't need to worry your pretty head over it. IT JUST WORKS OKAY?, unless the script tells it not to work, then it doesn't. I don't expect every single bit of make-believe technology explained to me, but you can't decapitate an android and have it operate like nothing happened and communicate over god knows what kind of wi-fi. In Alien when Ash was decapitated they had to plug him back to energy source and press a few buttons just to ask him a few simple questions. And that was 30 years in the future, or so.
Prometheus' David is the shit. He watches old movies, he's evil and then he's not, he knows (by heart) the language of the Engineers we have never met, he can fly alien ships, he can show the main character where the aliens live and he can operate wihtout his torso...
he can't handle Charlize Theron grabbing his android throat tho'
- And do't get me started on the geologist's hound-spheres. THEY JUST WORK, ok? They fly and scan everything, so that none of the crew's scientists have to do anything sciency - for their own good, because they seem to completely suck at it.
- btw. space suits were again made with one purpose in mind - make female crewmembers look hot.
Characters
Oh god where do I start. Maybe with the five disposable characters that didn't serve a dick of a purpose:
- hipster biologist Millburn - I like his cool glasses and his anti-mainstream comment about rejecting the theory of Darwinism, but the highlight of his role is when he gets in contact with an alien life form (which is long dead, but still... it used to be a life form) - he runs away. On the next chance of meeting a new life form - as directed by Captain Janek's information about picking up life signals (I love how they just pick up life signals. Do they have a heartbeat detector with 10 mile range, that works on all life forms in the universe?) - he decides not to meet anything alive on the planet, for the same reason all the scientis have been evading their duties - they might come in contact with a target of their specialization and then they would have to use difficult, sciency words. And all those geeks in the audience would expect those words to make sense.
The script remedies that by simply killing the silly fucker. He dies killed by a mutated earthworm that - of all the things encountered on this planet - would alone make me scream like a little girl and forget that I was a scientist for a while. That would be the moment where I run.
Millburn calls this abomination "beautiful" and talks to it, like it was a kitty-kat.
- badass tattooed geologist Fifield - For a second there I thought I'm going to like this guy, but he was so off, that I knew he's on the soon-to-die list. He's a geologist who has flying spheres do the work for him. He releases them and they scan the environment.
There.
His sciency role is complete. We never see him proble a single rock, he never even describes anything in the cave, never uses a name of a mineral - and a highlight of his life, shared with dr. Milburn - when he decides to get back from the cave to the ship, he's immediately lost. Couldn't make heads or tails of this rocks and caves and shit.
Just another discount scientist on a tirllion dollar mission.
- that yahoo-attitude male archaeologist, that was supposed to be important, but whose name I don't care about - this guy is even worse, because he's supposed to be a true believer, he claims (like everybody else) that the Engineers created humans, but as always there's not a single bit of information (I stopped hoping for anything of a proof long before, but an information would still be cool at this point) why would anyone think so. All that doesn't stop him from ordering the captain to land on a fucking Nazca-Line, that could give a valuable archaeological information.
Fuck it - let's land in the middle of it.
Holloway's (I believe his name was) greatest dream is to discover the race of giants once worshipped on Earth. But as an archaeologist he couldn't care less about all the hieroglyphics around the alien-made caves, nooooo! All he cares about are living alines.
Finally he finds a (as in a single) alien carcass, which of course leads him to believe that they're ALL DEAD - but you can trust him, he's an expert.
He came here for answers and he wanted those answers served on a silver plate from an alien, preferably speaking English. I wonder why they didn't send an immigration officer, instead of this mindless, pre-puberty expert. At least he died in flames.
- Peter fucking Weyland - THE Weyland. A Guy (you get the pun?) with make-up soooooo shitty, it makes you wonder has Ridley Scott ever seen an elderly person. Biff from Back to the Future 2 looked better.
It's a crying shame that the whole movie at some point unravels itself to be a story about Weyland's search for immortality, only to have THE WEYLAND killed with severed android's head a few minutes later.
What was the purpose of this? Did you really need to include one of the two most important names of Alien franchise, just to have him killed in one of the most random encounters? Whatever, I don't care about this old fart, because the only Weyland I accept is Lance Henriksen.
- the woman with funny accent who probably is a medical officer on board - I'll sum up her entire role, by saying that she was one of the two characters involved in connecting the invaluable fossilized head of a dead alien species to a car battery, just to find out what is going to happen.
OF COURSE it exploded, audience loves exploding severed heads!
- the man who opens the hatch to see if the twisted, infected body of geologist Fifield was okay. It wasn't.
Which led us to a scene with mutated Fifled jumping around like an ape (I think it was supposed to be scary) and random people shooting him with handguns. I'm pretty sure the scene was included because the movie staff wanted to shoot stuff on the camera.
- sweet Meredith Vickers - *SPOILER* Weyland's daughter *SPOILER* - I hope you haven't read the spoiler, because it's imperative to understanding the plot.
Not.
It's a completely random fact serving no purpose and having no continuation.
Meredith is some kind of an officer... I think. Not sure, because it seems she doesn't have any authority over the captain (and why would she, he's the captain) nor the scientists. I think she's there to look hot and to have a chat with the captain about getting laid, so that the 15-year olds in the audience have something to fantasize about.
The higlight of her life is undoubtably the scene whe she runs from a falling spaceship. I thought people running in one direction to avoid objects falling in precisely THAT direction can only happen in cartoons, but no. It seems like some people really are completely uaware of the concept of left and right.
- Captain Janek - there are four dick-worth scientists on board and in the middle of the movie Janek enter's main-female-character's cabin with all the answers they never came up with. That's bascially it. There's nothing wrong with this character apart from the fact that this bastard must've sit down and engaged thinking mechanisms, when everybody else was running around like headless chickens.
UNACCEPTABLE BULLSHITTING AROUND
- This is Alien's prequel and uses the same model of Engineer ship and it's crew. It shows the birth of a Xenomorph (possibly the first one ever)... why does it dick around by not happening on LV-426 (the setting of the original Alien and Aliens movies) ? What purpose does it serve to tell the story before Alien, on a similar planet but not the same one. Hell, they even made effort to crash the ship EXACTLY as shown in Alien, but alas, it's just an incredible coincindence, that somewhere else an Engineer ship with Xenomorphs on board has crashed exactly like this one.
I think they've changed the setting of the movie post-production, so they wouldn't have to explain why Nostromo's crew 30 years later finds a dead Engineer (okay, okay, Space Jockey) in the pilot's seat and not in a crashed Terran vessel right next to it.
- So why didn't they start? With all the stupid sub-plots in the movie I almost forgot that the alien race was about to start the ship and deliver death to Earth. So? Why didn't they?
Because the only pilot got his head cut off by a door? What was this guy in the sleep-pod doing then? Was he just a passenger? Why is he the only one alive? Did he fucking doze off while everybody else was getting infected and apparently throwing themselves on the various walls and doors?
When they wake him up, he sits down at the control panel (but not before he had his morning dose of killing homo sapiens, mind you), opens the pilot's seat and starts the ship - so there's only one crewmember required to do this and apparently it's easier than Tetris? What does this tell us about Space Jockeys? That despite their incredible technological advancement and supposedly superior intellect, when it comes to using a biological weapon to annihilate a planet, their decision making leaves something to be desired?
I think it tells us it's time for Ridley Scott to put down the camera.
Last edited by ellmo on 07-27-12 at 12:45
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07-27-12 12:31 
