Prometheus, The Movie 2012

I'm leaving the house right now to go see it.

Alamo Draft House.

I'm back. When we got there we saw that the 3D was offered at 4pm.
We traded in our tickets for that, and will go back then.

I didn't like Inception. But that's just my personal opinion, I know a lot of other people did.

However, I would note that so far Inception hasn't seemed to have made any type of memorable mark on the scifi landscape. Movies like Alien and Terminator and Matrix definitely did, and those are in my mind much better scifi films.

I agree. And what's really annoying to me is that a good story should be the cheapest part of a movie to fund. There are lots of creative people out there who should be able to put together a decent 2hr screenplay. And I don't think you really need an *All Star* cast either. I think there are lots of decent young actors who could do a great job. And even average special effects are pretty decent these days, so I don't think they need to spend so much on making each new film State Of The Art. I think they could take all that money they save and hire a good scifi writer to come up with an idea and then get some screenplay specialists to mold it into a film and then give it to a guy like Ridley Scott to add some ambiance.

I really don't know why they aren't doing this every time. It doesn't seem that difficult. Perhaps they just don't see it as making enough money. I think a lot of scifi films are modified too much by formula by the film producers to maximize profit while ignoring the artistic endeavor. I think this situation could also be improved by dropping the costs of super-effects and super-stars in favor of a super-story.

But that's just me. I'll get off my soap box now.

I agree with this completely. When John Huston was getting ready to make the movie Moby Dick, he had just read "The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury, so he hired Bradbury to write the screenplay for him. In the 30s, people as talented and diverse as Aldous Huxley and William Faulkner. Those days are long gone, more's the pity. 2001 is a classic, and always will be. It had fewer than 70 special effects.

Stories are hard!

I'm doing a sci-fi-ish sort of story right now, and so I'm realizing that afresh. I started from a position of "I could do better than that," and after wrestling with it for a bit I am definitely more respectful of the hacks (and more in awe of the ones who pull it off).

The trickiest line, I find, is being original while also satisfying. So many stories have already been done. Usually they've been done for a reason -- if you stray too far away, it can be really hard to reel things in and make it satisfying and not just "Series of Unfortunate Events" or "Lost" silliness.

So I vacillate between "ugh that's too much like [insert storyline here]" and "but that makes no sense."

I started out just going ahead with hackness (lots of echoes of other storylines, but it held together), that was going easily but then I started to like elements of the story and the characters too much and decided not to sacrifice them to hack. Then things got WAY harder.

Anyway, interested in Chai's review.

By the way, 2001 was based on the short story "The Sentinel," by Arthur C. Clarke.

True. We really enjoyed a smallish Sci-Fi movie, Chronicle, that was made on a tiny budget ($12M) and has already grossed about what it cost to make Prometheus. Didn't recognize any of the actors, but they all did a great job with a very entertaining story. CGI was good, too, we thought.

I liked Chronicle as well. And now that I think about it, I liked it a lot better than Prometheus.

The only thing I didn't like about Chronicle is the "first person" camera filming technique, which I consider to be completely obnoxious and tiresome. Other than that, Chronicle was great.

Another decent low budget scifi was "Monsters". It's weakness was a near total lack of special effects. But it's premise was fantastic and if they had the budget to flesh out their aliens and the alien affect on the environment (with a bit more CGI) it would have been a smash.

Trollhunter is also an interesting story, but again that amateur camera crap drives me crazy. I feel that technique is just a crutch for people who can't figure out how to tell a story from third person perspective and make it seem realistic.

The first I heard of the movie, and what attracted me, was tsar's initial clip.
That's not even in the frickin' film.

I didn't care for it one way or the other. Nothing special. Ending was predictable and throughout it was the usual "if you were really a scientist there's no way you'd be touching/picking up that thing, going in there, etc. etc.

Plus, how did Theron sleep for 2 years, and only have less than a weeks worth of black roots?
That bugged me.

Well, I enjoyed the film despite the continuity problems between this film and the first Alien movie. The acting was solid and so were the film's technicals. Plus its open ending definitely (and obviously) indicate the possibility of further sequels that won't encroach or overlap the original Alien series.

Yep. The flaws of the storyline were predictable but overall I enjoyed the film.

Fun look at screentests. Noomi/Sigourney...Ellen Ripley/Elizabeth Shaw...





(They liked Noomi's test so much they embellished it to use in promotions).

Have some questions about this movie after seeing it. Hopefully some of you can answer them..

1) What killed the Engineers on the planet? (we see a load of dead bodies but it's never explained what happened to them).

2) Why the Engineers would leave a 'star map' on Earth pointing to a planet where they store their biological weapons they're stockpiling to destroy Earth?

3) The motivations of David don't seem to make much sense, why did he infect Holloway with the black goo when he doesn't even know what it does?

4) How the scientists don't realize there's more than one ship on the planet. Didn't they think to explore the surface before going straight into the first pyramid they see?

5) Why Shaw would want to go to the Engineer's homeworld when it's clear they want to kill us all?

6) How Shaw and David's head manage to hijack a second alien ship without any problems?

7) How did Fifield/Millburn get lost despite having a 3D map of the area and comms system?

8) Why did Millburn thinking it's a good idea to stroke an alien snake that looks like a cobra?

9) Why did Weyland say he was dead in the video briefing then hide himself on the ship? There's literally no logical reason why he would need to do that.

10) Why the two crewmembers Shaw attacks after she wakes up from David's anesthetic not bothering to chase after her or alert anyone?

11) How Shaw managed to get into the medical pod room, considering it was in Vicker's private quarters?

12) No one noticing there's an alien squid growing on their ship?

13) Why Weyland thinks the Engineers will be able to prolong his life?

Sadly, there are no answers to those questions. I think you're just supposed to watch the pretty pictures and assume that over zealous editing has removed the 90% of the film that would have been necessary to explain all the idiocy.

Short and sweet.

And it only took that other reviewer 50,000 words to basically make the same point.