The Prometheus had holograhpic displays, David even acces to the crew's dreams. The ship wasn't just more advanced than the Nostromo but the Sulacco as well and that ship came close a century later. It's clear the movie went back and forth between being an Alien prequel and an original movie. Which in reality is the movie's biggest fault, either make it one or the other and in the end it was a prequel.
Alien5: It's a Bug Hunt (pre-release thread)
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The Prometheus had holograhpic displays, David even acces to the crew's dreams. The ship wasn't just more advanced than the Nostromo but the Sulacco as well and that ship came close a century later. It's clear the movie went back and forth between being an Alien prequel and an original movie. Which in reality is the movie's biggest fault, either make it one or the other and in the end it was a prequel.
Think back to the mythology.
Then think to why the Engineers were running.
Then think to the opening sequence.
There is a ton of sub-text going on.
Christ, it's like the people arguing about whether or not Deckard is a Replicant, an interpretation which is entirely due to subtext, refuse to apply that same approach to Prometheus.
They weren't told what they were in for until they were practically on the ground, and then Holloway insists on going out to the 'temple' immediately. These people were in cryosleep mere hours before, their last conscious memories before that back on Earth. And, as already noted, these weren't nearly the 'experts' they'd probably b.s.'d themselves to be. They hadn't even begun to process what they were in the middle of. In their shoes, I'd have probably panicked.
How long had Headless been dead? "2,000 years, give or take." Would you leave a 2,000 year-old corpse lying around? If anyone else living was indeed around, that corpse wouldn't have been. And Holloway wanted - needed - to meet and talk to a living Engineer almost as bad as Weyland did, for very different reasons. Holloway was an atheist. He already knew his God was dead, because he didn't believe in one to begin with. And he was trying to convince his very Christian girlfriend of the same, by hearing it from the very lips of her supposed 'God.'
"You saw that face, underneath that helmet. They. Are NOT. Gods. We're just some experiment, and the Earth was a goddamn Petri dish. That's IT. But we're never gonna prove that with a bunch of 2,000 year-old mummies." - Deleted dialogue from alternate bedroom scene
In the opening, an Engineer drinks the black goo and then disintegrates or whatever. What happens after that is left to our imagination.
When Weyland & Co. finally meet an Engineer, the Engineer's immediate reaction is violent hate. It's pretty clear -- and this in the text, not subtext -- that the so-called Engineers see humanity as filth, an abomination. It ties in with the myth, that humans needed to be ruled and governed. Or destroyed.
Ok. Thank you. That rather confused me, too, honestly. But I see what you're saying.
And the common demonator for Blade Runner and Prometheus is Ridley Scott. Both movies has at least two different versions and in Blade Runner's case it has five.
It's odd that we see the hologram of the Engineers running but odd enough not what they were running from, why didn't the ship pick up that little detail as well?
And no it's not all a matter of context, Scott added a different ending to Blade Runner to reinforce his idea that Deckard is a Replicant. But yeah Prometheus is a movie that went back and forth between being an Alien prequel an original movie.
My point is that Holloway gave up after finding a single tomb. They were in cryo for years, and Holloway finds an empty building and gives up. For someone who desperately needed to talk to these Engineers, he sure didn't look that hard to find them.
We still discover mummies and tombs here on Earth. That doesn't mean that all humans are dead.
I'm just saying that, the way it's filmed, he gives up way too fast. I mean, hell, the very next day David wanders back inside and finds a living Engineer...in the same damn building!
I don't really mind the other characters' reactions that much -- they were hired for an unknown job and didn't know what they were getting into -- but Holloway bugs the crap out of me.
I thought it pretty obvious that the Engineers started life on earth. You see him break up and some new DNA is created from his break up. But if the Engineers thought humanity needed to be governed, destroyed or ruled they could have done it already.
How much air and food did the Prometheus have? If it's anything like the Nostromo, not much - a week's worth at most. I'll be generous, let's say a month. Granted, the crew could hop back in the ship and fly around the planet searching for other possible spots. But those are long odds, considering no transmissions, no energy emissions, no other signs of advanced life are being picked up by the sensors. And if nothing else worth setting down for is found, or if it's just more tombs? Even if Holloway knew which planet to look at next (which he doesn't), the Prometheus (which, after all, still has to make the return trip to Earth) probably doesn't have the nuclear fuel to get there. He already knows he can't trust anyone on the ship (outside of Shaw, Janek and maybe David) to know what they're doing, and Vickers is looking for the first excuse to pull the plug on the whole thing. From his POV, one shot's all he had, and he missed by an inch.
It's neither text, nor subtext; it's an interpretation. I found it's action's cold, almost clinically efficient. My interpretation is that (for reasons not explained) the engineers decided humanity is to be destroyed--the same way a microbiologist might decide to sterilise a bacterial culture. It did so in as direct and efficient a way as was available to it (i.e., bare hands.) I didn't see any particular hatred or disgust in his attitude, despite the brutal violence.
I think the shooting script clarifies this scene somewhat. IIRC the basic gist of how the scene was written and shot prior to editing was that Weyland tells the engineer that he wants to it to make him live forever and be a god like them because he also has created life (David.) To whit his response is something like "we are not gods" *commence android head-ripping*.
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The quest to find the Engineers was Shaw's not Holloway's, she was the driving force of the movie and the quest. And really once the story was done with Holloway and he had gotten Shaw pregnant he wasn't needed anymore and was killed off. It's still amazing to me that they were able to convince Weyland to spend a trillion dollars to send them to another planet without any real proof of their claims.
He's the richest man in the Solar System (a trillion dollars to him is nothing), he's 103 years old and in the final stage of one of the few forms of cancer (pancreatic?) his company hasn't cured, and (unlike Walt Disney) he has cryogenic technology to buy him time for a cure. He also has an ice queen of a daughter that wants the CEO's chair and wouldn't think twice of unplugging him if she gets the chance, certainly before any medical advances on Earth can do him any good. Plus, if Shaw and Holloway are right, Weyland gets the added bonus of boldly going where no man has gone before and finding proof of alien life (at worst), becoming the first man to talk to an intelligent alien, our Creators (at best). And if they're wrong...well, it won't matter to him at that point because he won't be around for the aftermath. What's he got to lose?
But there was no proof that Shaw and Holloway were right. And after spending money like it's no wonder Weyland was bought by WalMart.
And I kind of doubt that even for him a trillion dollars is nothing.Interesting; very interesting. I wonder how Scott feels about this.
Here's hoping Alien3 and 4, neither of which I've seen nor care to, are revealed to have been one big hypersleep nightmare.
Also, Bring Back Newt!
Hallelujah !
I've been desperately wanting to unwatch Alien 3 since my mate and I adjourned directly from cinema to pub, crying into our beer 'How the **** could they do THAT to Aliens ?'.
Alien 3 was nonsensical - where did the eggs on the Sulaco come from, let alone the facehuggers ?
How did they get into the cryotubes ?
Why render the whole dramatic thrust of Aliens impotent by killing Newt ?
Why the **** would you write Hicks out ?
God I loathe that ******* movie.
We shared a brain in 1993 (or whenever that abortion came out - I can't muster the desire to care).
It was just...............
Me too.
It's a form of cognitive dissonance that results in mental back flips to justify an irrational stance based on an EXTREMELY poorly conceived movie.
It just seems like Holloway was expecting some Engineer welcoming party to greet them as soon as they landed, like they were sitting around for thousands of years just waiting for humans to decipher their cave drawings with nothing better to do. "Ah, humans, you finally found us!" For a supposedly learned scientist, it just seems like he had absurd expectations for what the mission would actually entail.
I just think the movie should have been maybe 20-30 minutes longer to flesh out some plot points. The pacing is its ultimate failing because there's barely time to register what's going on. Holloway's reaction may have been justified, but it would have been a more realistic if we had actually seen him try to do his damn job.
A lot of the character arcs felt just as truncated or lopsided IMO. I suspect this is mostly an artefact of the multiple script writers and Ridley drastically cutting the film for pacing at the expense of characterisation and plot.
But yeah, a lot of the actions and reactions of the crew were just damn strange. "I'm a biologist, I'm only interested in living alien life!" I mean really? Show me ONE biologist that wouldn't give their right arm for just a *glance* at alien tissue under a microscope, dead or otherwise!
I mean I get that these guy were supposed to be just canaries for Weyland, but you'd think he'd want at least half-way competent canaries, no?
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