more like plotholetheus or portentous, amirite? nonetheless, it held my attention. michael fassbender is a delight, channeling o’toole as lawrence of arabia. idris elba has some moments and the set design is beautiful. all else is crap. the lack of explanations at the end was nice, but i fear that this was done a) to set up the sequel, and b) to force fanboys to watch it over and over to come up with theories of their own. still, it’s rare to see a summer blockbuster that is willing to leave so much ambiguous and open to interpretation, even if it seems that this may be a byproduct of a shoddy script.
I don’t disagree with any of your judgements, Arnab, though I did like it more than you. The inconsistencies and plot holes are so numerous as to dominate discussion with my kids for an entire 30 minute car ride home, but I loved the look of the movie and the fact that it maintained enough of the horror element of the original Alien (though down in the alien tunnels rather than on a ship); I was afraid, from the opening minutes, that it would become some sort of Jodie Foster Contact-type meditation on divinity and the origin of the species. The little snakes were scary as hell. I actually liked all the acting, though Fassbender was the standout.
To a certain extent, count me as a fanboy for this movie. It is the one movie (along with Dark Knight Rises) that I have really been looking forward, and the anticipation was such that I did spend way too much time dissecting it and trying to figure out how well it fits into the Alien time line. I forgave it more that I should probably.
SPOILER ALERT:
Surely the sequel (prequel sequel) cannot just be Shaw hanging out on the alien world?
we didn’t stick around for the end of the credits. was there something there?
my sense is that this takes place parallel to the events preceding alien: not the same planetoid/moon, not the same space jockey/engineer, not the same aliens. the goo presumably creates different versions/mutations of the aliens depending on what creature/environment it passes through.
the puzzling thing that some have noted is the question of why all the cave paintings point to this moon that seems like some sort of research station. this, i think, can be plausibly explained in a way that’s in keeping with the sinister nature of the space jockeys: they’ve seeded the universe and are waiting for advanced lifeforms from all these worlds to develop the ability to find them and then arrive at the research station to be experimented on further and take new dna back to their worlds. seems like a terribly inefficient plan, but my experience of alien plans involving humans is that they’re always over-elaborate.
No after credit scene. Just that Shaw tells David that she is heading to the space jockey planet, and the next thing you see is a ship taking off. So we have to assume that is where she is heading. That does not sound like much of a movie to me.
There is just too much about the space jockeys that is unclear. Why create humans on earth, then plan to kill them off, or at lest mutate them horribly? How does David know so much? Why would he want to infect Charlie and Elizabeth (how does that help Weyland)?
charlie–in the running for douchiest scientist ever–tells david that humans created androids because they could. david’s messing with the goo of life, and his infecting charlie, in particular, is i think his response: he does it because he can and just to see what might happen: it is his way of creating life. and the implication, if you hold with this, might be that the space jockeys similarly are doing whatever fucked up thing they’re doing just because they can. maybe they’re just running some tortuous long-term lab experiment (a million years may be to them as a year is to humans–who knows?).
and i think david knows so much because he says that in the years that everyone was asleep on the craft he researched all human languages back to their common roots and may have figured out a key to the original alien language. this presumably is why he can read the glyphs and operate the doors at the installation. i did like the continuity in his fate: all androids in these movies get ripped apart.
I’m struck that in a year that has not produced many really great movies, there have been three great genre movies: Prometheus; Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall. None of them transcend their genre (sci-fi, superhero, action), but they are especially polished, even thought-provoking, examples of their respective genres.
Anyway, I know this is a little geeky, but the original script for Prometheus appeared on the Internet a couple of months back, entitled “Alien: Engineers.” It is much more clearly tied to the earlier Alien movies and it has the merit of being a good deal more coherent than the movie version. I just read the script, after downloading it a while back, and liked it a lot. I was going to post a link to the script, but it seems to have been removed from websites. If anyone would like it, just email me and I’ll send along the PDF.