Prometheus 33⅓: The Final Insult.

GET THIS BLURAY 1TS LIKE AWSOM

This is the third time I've posted about this production, and to be honest my opinion of it hasn't gone up since last time, in fact its probably dropped from my previous review.

Why continue talking about it if its so average?

Because to me and perhaps to you too, the issues with it are almost more interesting than the actual movie itself, and also I have no life, no life at all.  So open wide like a toothy, foof-faced squid thing that's been locked in a spaceship for hours with no one noticing until its required by the plot, and to quote Plinkett, lets dive right in shall we...

I'd hoped the home release would fix some of the obvious problems with this production. Apparently I was once again hoping for too much and it really hasn't fixed it at all, and much talk of late in the press about the studio execs, sinister like those of the Weyland-Yutani Corp itself, tampering with this officially mediocre movie and at least hinting that 'its basically all the studios fault'.

I'd group the errors under perhaps 3 headings; concept; story and editing. We could talk about the production design etc, which was mostly great, not enough Giger, particularly woefully short in the creature dept... But as Sir Ridley Scott pointed out in an interview for Alien, "it's all window dressing", meaning that doesn't necessarily make or break the movie, it to me is just disappointing but I can look past that if the fundamentals are right.  So lets concentrate on the important aspects.

It's very simple, we just want your money over and over and over again. It's what we call a trilogy. 

Concept: The initial concept according to the original scriptwriter as interviewed in empire was a proper Alien prequel, set on the same world as in Alien, with the same ship and everything. Clearly, based on Spaihts inteview, in order to facilitate the begining of a new-and-legally-distinguishable-from-Alien franchise, this had to be changed, on direct order from the higher-ups, above even the director and owner of the production company for the project - Scott Free Productions - Sir Ridley Scott.

So were higher-than-production-level decisions to blame for the problems in the following areas?

Story: Following the change in concept, Damon Lindelof is brought on board to help accomplish the script chages, I guess its what you'd call a shake and bake colo... I mean story.

While the studio allegedly initiated the changes, I really couldn't care less if its an Alien prequel or not and I and many others personally, largely blame Lindelof for many problems with the story, the stupid stuff that characters do, their poor decision making and lack of professionalism - just plain lack of common sense above everything else, that makes no sense. And other stuff that also makes no sense, which I detail with excruciating precision in my review, perhaps I'm being unfair but I can't help but draw comparisons between Prometheus' plot lines and those of Lost.  However without seeing what came before, its hard to determine exactly what idea came from where, and where problems really originated... In fairness the whole thing may have been completely broken from the start and Lindelof fixed it up as best he could, for all I know.

Lindelof of course proved his creativity with hit series Lost, which however was also a series that many (brave, brave souls who stuck with it until the very end) felt was ultimately unsatisfying, meandering and made up as it went along. I personally found its plots had complicated and interesting beginnings  but always leading to mediocre, rushed and uninspired difficult endings, endings that make no sense, which is the last hour of Prometheus to a tee.

These problems are largely compounded by the final factor:

Editing: I'm not talking about timing or anything minor, but like something really important happens in a particular scene, but after that the really important thing is never mentioned even once, I have a hard time believing that such experienced movie makers would mistakenly forget about that thread to move onto the next part as quickly as possible. Interesting beginnings leading to mediocre endings... Sounds like a line from the movie itself, how about non-existent endings, even?

It felt like the complete movie was not shown at the theatres, that to perhaps cut the movie down to 2 hours some really vital things were cut out.  Not the first time this has happened, but then consider the incredibly slow start: Was there nothing that could be cut from the introductory hour to make the meat of it make more sense.  I mean you can call it an artistic decision, but it's clearly at the expense of telling the actual story.  The story, the concept of Prometheus the movie is not really terribly complicated, yes we get it as our long time friend Erich Von Daniken would point out: IT IS NOT A NEW IDEA.  Why labour that point and leave so much else unanswered?   Alien had a long intro, but since the actual plot was straightforward and not a million different threads to begin, explore and resolve it could afford to do this.

Why, for example, did a scene that Lindelof wrote to explain the android infecting the idiot with the black goo get left on the editing computers hard drive? Eh? But I dunno, perhaps that would have still seemed like a dick move even with it explained - As I mentioned in my review, what kind of moron would run an uncontrolled experiment like that, which would be far more likely to endanger the ship, the crew and in effect Weyland, than provide him with eternal or extended life.  So Lindelof explains why something didn't make sense.  Unfortunately here even with the explanation I guess it still doesn't make sense.  Lindelof provides plenty of sorry excuses in this article right here.

So did someone forget they were meant to be telling a story here? Not likely given the calibre of people and money involved. Would I be too cynical to suggest that perhaps this was done precisely to put the scenes in later in the home release? or make them available to watch at least on the blu ray.  Ya know, the scenes that might make certain things actually make sense so it can be marketed as the thing that fixes this broken film.  Is this something that Sir Ridley, known for resisting studio demands or allowing his work to be watered down would even allow?

Am I unfair in suggesting there might have been certain money over art choices made there?  There was a time before directors cuts, where the theatrical release was the best thing that a creative team could condense into two hours or less. Over the last few decades since Alien started messing up cinema bathrooms, home releases are more important, its also more important to obviously milk those sales for as much as possible, movies have always been shrewdly marketed.

Extra value, extra scenes and / or run-time are expected, demanded in the home formats, and thats fair enough but perhaps this time it was ultimately at the expense of the original release, which may have been deliberately crippled, to add the value back in later.

If true, it's the movie equivalent of the reprehensible practice by games publishers of holding back video game content just to make it a downloadable add-on later... Where people are deliberately sold an inferior product that they will have to spend more money on later, to get the product as intended. But why do this, people aren't stupid, I won't be the only person asking this question, Erich probably has a few too, but he's locked away safely for the time being until The History Channel commissions a new series of the excellent and not stupid at all guff-fest that is, Ancient Aliens.

So there may be suit / money / marketing related issues with the editing, I can't say for sure, I am of course only asking questions.... But the other answer to these problems is that a director, whos work I've mostly enjoyed and who has made at least two really wonderful Science Fiction epics had made some awful mistakes with his latest work... I mean it's easy to pick a lone gunman and pin everything on him.

There are other problems with the movie too, but I bet no one at the studio strenuously insisted that the characters can only run in one direction at the end. I mean, I wasn't there, I don't know what happened but there are problems that are probably harder to pin on 'the suits' than others... From the Empire interview, its easy to get the impression that the problems were all due to decisions made from somewhere above the production staff, and I doubt that's entirely true, blame has to lie to an extent with everyone involved, its never just one person, so whether its Damon Lindelof, or Ridley Scott or faceless execs that cop the blame depending on who you talk to, perhaps there were problems at every level, which is the only way you can explain all the issues with the final product.

Its biggest problem, is that unlike its predecessors/sequels and, due to its many failings in many areas it fails to represent any sort of believable reality; often possessing all the cohesion of a free-forming dream more than a well thought out movie.  The hype over the home release being the saviour for many a confused movie-goer is just a distraction from the fact that the movie is basically broken and messed with too much at its core for any amount of extra scenes, extended run-time or alternative endings to fix. It was never going to live up to the hype, we expected loose edges, but at least the basics should have made sense.  Is this the final insult to an audience who expected so much?

Ugh Ahm.... Th' Lugh: "Dredd" - The Preview

I'm not Dredd-ing this September as much as I am December 21st, but what did the Mayans know anyway?

Borag Thungg, Earthlets! It's Summer 1995, and a slightly smaller, way less hairy version of your beloved reporter, after a day of endangering innocent beach-goers lives with a surfboard is attending a cinema in Newquay to see a movie based on one of the UK's most enduring cult comic characters - Hammerstein, the noble leader of the ABC Warriors.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRN-X74VVK4&feature=fvst for a shakey, digitised from VHS episode of Film '95 which details some of the production, thx Bazza!

Also featured in the movie was Sylvester Stallone, performing a passable impression of another 2000AD character; Judge Joseph Dredd, infact it proved to be more about him than anyone else and was even named after that character, but who could forget that scrotnig ABC robot?

Now a full 17 years later, perhaps to the day, my 2000AD subscription lapsed more than a decade ago, but despite this crushing blow to the publishers, I'm surprised to see the franchise is still running strong.

So much so that with Hollywood's constant plumbing of comic book material they have once again looked across the rad-soaked wasteland of what used to be Middle America, past Mega City One which occupies what used be New York and a big chunk of the surrounding Eastern Seaboard. Before setting off over the Black Atlantic ocean (wait, was that Judge Dredd, or Syndicate on the Amiga?) and landing firmly in Brit-Cit One. There, out of hundreds of great characters they've once again predictably chosen to base a film on the most widely known and marketable character, Judge Dredd.... Just call him Dredd... Ain't got time for the "Judge" part these days.

And so I'm watching this exact trailer as magically interlinked above^, thinking wow, this is zarjaz, even though it has no ABC's, no Judges of Death and the whole thing kinda reminds me of Robocop 2 somehow but at least there's no Rob Shneider cracking jokes. (aww c'mon Fergie wasn't that irritating was he? Remember the servo-droid? hehehe, the popcorn? hehehe, the fireball up my ass? hehehe - Rob)  

But still... I could nitpick a bit: Given all the other vehicles are just normal vehicles - as opposed to the sumptuously designed futuristic vehicles littering the streets of the Big Meg in Danny cannon's '95 production - the futuristic Judge bikes here look over designed. I might go as far as to say maybe even a little uncool and silly because they're really looking out of the usual scifi context of slickly designed flying cars and so on.  Specifically  the over-designed kinda old fashioned looking curving bodyshell and the red trim really remind me of something... Can't remember what for the life of me however... Infact the latest, tragedy laden Batman series seems to do ridiculous vehicles much more plausibly. 

Nananananana-na, Judge-man, Judge-man, Adam-Wesssssssst.

Though in fairness, I haven't seen a "Lawmaster" design yet that didn't look overwhelmingly silly and impractical. Silly and impractical works far better in a comic strip than in a movie, and pleasingly really everything about the design of this movie is the grittiest and most realistic seen yet out of, erm, this and the other one.

A typical Vehicle of 1995's Judge Dredd... Dredd 2012 takes a more "relaxed" approach to the production design

Its impressively different to the '95 version, which tended to look a lot like the comics - a lot of campy gold bling on the uniform for example, but the ridiculous looking Lawmaster at least looked in place. So in terms of production design, the more toned down everything is, the better it all fits that environment (and the less it costs, too), of course if its too toned down it loses identity, there's a certain lack of personality in the costume design.

Whatever the design, you could still question the practicality of having basically your entire front line police force out on motorcycles and thats something that has been with Dredd from the early days of Pat Mills and Carlos Ezquerra.

Silly, yes.  Impractical, yes. More terrifying without the helmet than with? Yes. 

I guess in-keeping with the toned down nature of the production, out of all the infamous, elaborate and imaginative foes Judge Dredd has battled over the years our bad guy is a fairly normal looking woman, but she's got a scar so you know she's maybe been in a car accident or something and is on an NHS waiting list for reconstructive surgery, maybe they could have given her a beard and a German / British accent?

Nuke or perhaps another serving of that primordial soup from Prometheus again... Either way Kane finds it delicious.  BTW Did I ever tell you about the Klingon proverb that says that primordial soup is best served slightly chilled?
Enjoy responsibly, it's moreish.

Don't drink primordial soup and drive, folks... Our villain after shooting up some heroin(e) - some clever word play there...  

The upshot of all this is as I have accurately deduced from the trailer is a terrible traffic problem on the corner of Abbot and Costello, and the Judges are dispatched to deposit some tickets on the offending vehicles. After attempting to return a stray cat to an old lady they become trapped by oddly tattooed and heavily armed drug people, who aren't impressed with the concept of Prohibition and are addicted to a substance that perceptually slows time, so their crappy lives seem to take even longer to live out, a trip to the benefits office could take a whole perceptual week for instance, AFAIK, this is the only thing that it does, no actual dizzying high or even a mild giddiness.  

If you want to slow down time, I'll tell you how, go and get a regular day job and you'll see time slow right down to a crawl, esp on a Friday afternoon, works great.

Essentially the movie seems to be set in a single building for the most part, with Dredd and 'a Rookie' attempting to escape a Drug Lord-ette's (lordette, really?) heavily armed manor full of people from Delta City looking for more irresistible Nuke after Robocop destroyed the lot in the sequel to Paul Verhoeven's excellent movie. As with John McTeirnan's also outstanding Die Hard, the restrictive environment of a single structure could be a good thing to keep the action and the script tight.

So while the story deals with everyday inner city problems like, double parking or stray felines, there's also a sub plot about illegal drug use. But will that have any relation to actual real world urban decay, will the story be as realistically realised as the visuals? Or In a Frank Drebin inspired approach to law enforcement, are the clouds of combusted soup material gushing from a plebeians mouth merely an indicator of whom one should shoot? Classic comic book Dredd with his somewhat cavalier approach to law enforcement would certainly approve.

 

"Ma'm put the gun down, we've found your cat."

"I inhaled, deeply and frequently, that was the point." - B Obama.

One of the best things about Judge Dredd (based on several hundred 'progs' of 2000AD collected during my youth) is that everything is so over the top that the Judges cause as much havoc as the bad guys, you're often left wondering who's worse. Will there be any depth, any blurring of the lines of good and evil, shades of grey, or really will everything just be a series of things that happen in conceptual black and white to get from one explosive, gory set peice to another? Dredd himself in the comics is really an anti-hero, as an over the top authoritarian he's scarier than the bad guys. 

For a citizen of Mega City One, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time can lead to a lengthy time in the slammer with no chance of parole, at worst, on the spot execution. Its harsh frontier law with rules dictated by fascist bureaucrats (the council of the judges) and executed (literally) by their subordinates.  In a resource starved and overpopulated world, its apparently the only way that works but its never been something that anyone was intended to approve of or applaud so I hope the Judges are not overly glorified in this production, again they aren't clear cut good guys as such, having been brainwashed from an early age to defend the fascist state. 

Anyway, I'm kinda running out of things to say, and other Sci-fi things to reference... Oh apart from the thing that will TOTALLY RUIN THE MOVIE FOR EVERYONE!*

Because the first time I watched the trailer I had no audio, it was late so I couldn't use the whopping great Jamo speakers I annoy my neighbours with during the day, headphones destroyed in a terrible accident with an office chair and my replacement cans hadn't turned up yet.

So, boring details of my audio setup aside, I assumed certain things; as Karl Urban's lips moved I kinda heard Stallones mangled version of what Dredd might sound like pouring out of his mouth, which if anything was appropriately naturally deep, as that actor has a naturally dark timbre. Today I saw it again, but with audio and something wasn't right, quickly pinning it down to Mr Urban's vocals, I honestly laughed out loud as Karl immaculately annunciated Dredd's catchphrase; "I am the law." - A phrase utterly mangled by his predecessor.

Because although to his credit as an actor he can actually pronounce words, Karl Urban doesn't have any natural depth to his voice, he sounds incredibly strained and unnatural.

It reminds me of a weedy looking comedian pretending to be a superhero - think Simon Pegg trying to sound hard, it just doesn't work as anything other than comedy. Urban also perhaps somehow just looks too small, maybe its the diminished shoulder pads. Even though Stallone is a relatively tiny man, barely 3 foot 4 inches in height, thanks to smoking a healthy three packs of flavor country's finest a day for the entire 80's he has the voice of a much larger person and an orange crate or two deal with height issue. While Urban's take on the character is far more serious in tone due to the scripting, I think I might struggle to take his character seriously if the voice isn't right -like you might struggle to take a real law man seriously if his voice sounded all fake and ****.

Apparently Christian Bale's version of Batman has also received similar critique, so if it didn't bother you there it might not here - though it makes more sense with the dual character of Batman. 

Honestly, I haven't seen anything Batman related since 1989, well, at least nothing after that whole Joel Schumacher effort, so it was amusing to find a video on Youtube of Simon Pegg discussing the exact thing I was just talking about.

All is not lost however, maybe they will overdub him with James Earl Jones... Or maybe the whole thing will be so great that no one will care, or will I giggle through the entire thing and have an inadvertently great time anyway? - Like watching a terrible horror movie thats hysterical, like Prometheus. 

Splundig Vur Thrigg!

-Steve the Mighty.

*or not.

Prometheus - spoilerific embarrassingly nerdy review!

Prometheus looks great, we already knew this from the trailer, I won't dwell much on the visuals  - as you would expect it reeks of quality and class as with all of Sir Ridley Scott's productions.  It's almost enough to gloss over some of the problems and the numerous flaws it has at its core but as you watch, those won't be obvious straight away; it starts well, and builds slowly following a familiar pattern from 1979 but once things start to happen it really unravels and suffers from a lack of focus.

This is really exacerbated by the large cast consisting of 17 people who nearly all have to be killed in the last hour, most in the last half hour and a distracting back and forth between locations. It feels quite disjointed at times, you might sometimes feel that you've missed a scene as events don't quite follow on as they should.

Quite honestly it feels about an hour too short, just to get to the unsatisfying and moderately silly though exciting climax.  I fully expect extra footage will be used to make a directors cut of this which will be much longer but I'm clearly getting ahead of myself.  If you haven't seen the movie so far, probably best to go no further - I'll say this, go and see it, its an OK Sci-Fi movie overall, a worthy spectacle for the big 3D screens but behind that glossy metallic finish and carefully applied vinyl's, you might be left wondering what's really under the hood.

Forget about the "sequels". This really is trying to do something different, at its best keeping away from that franchise as much as possible, its a story far grander in scope, which ultimately should make the Xenomorphs look like a genetic mistake, along with the Humans.  If you like Sci-Fi then its worth seeing, esp considering how poor and shallow these films often are. It's better than say, the mindless wasteland of Battleship,  Cowboys and Aliens or the last Indiana Jones movie, all widely regarded as turds.

I'd take it over the Star Trek from 2009 or even Avatar (can't stand smurfs) and definately over the Star Wars prequels -  I'm still washing off the guilt just for accepting the DVD's one Christmas - I just took them and feigned polite enthusiasm, they knew I liked the old star wars as a kid, even today so of course I'd like the new ones but just because it has a label on it, doesn't mean its good. First world problems, no?

Anyway, like my umm, tongue in cheek preview from a few weeks ago that no one read, there's a lot which doesn't make sense.

"Once its off, its off..."

Lets start with the behavior of certain members of the expedition:

One character removes his helmet for no good reason in an entirely alien complex on an alien world, then everyone else chooses to jump off that same cliff, just because he hasn't died within ten seconds. While I can understand the need to get the actors out of the helmets as much as possible wouldn't they really have waited until knowing more than just the gaseous composition of the air in the chambers?  Even after returning to the ship from this exposure they're allowed to mingle freely with the other members of the Prometheus crew.

No one on board seems to care about micro-organisms, infections, quarantine, or even taking basic precautions when ramming electrodes into a goodness-knows-how-old misshapen human head which as one of the cannon fodder points out is unbelievably not decomposed at all and comes to life, for no reason whatsoever after being electrocuted. No life support is attached to it, like those grim soviet experiments on decapitated dogs and monkeys in the '50's but I think we're supposed to assume that its alive and aware to drive up the horror factor.  It then explodes for some reason, and also somehow the experimenters seem to know its going to explode even though there's no obvious signs that's going to happen other than the head seems to be in a lot of discomfort.

No real precautions are taken at all in this sequence, the room is packed with several people, one is even busy getting drunk (our protagonists idiot boyfriend, the one who decided to smell the dank tunnels earlier) and only a couple of people are wearing as much as a protective mask while this ancient living human/alien electro head is gurning on the table right in front of them, it's obviously meant to shock but its mostly shockingly daft.
 
This would surely have been a job for the Robot, being inorganic and wipe clean but as with the other movies that this isn't a prequel to, the Androids often have a sinister side or maybe he just wasn't interested in this multi-millennia old head of the very thing his 'Father' was looking for all along.

In this case our plastic pal has behaviours and motivations that are often confusing and inconsistent. For example, the scene where he takes some of the ooze to infect one of the Human characters (whos life the Robot saved just a few scenes earlier) seems to come from nowhere and is one of those times where you feel as if you've missed a scene.  We are perhaps left to assume that Weyland instructed him to do it, or it was some interpretation of pre-existing orders (aren't these things ever 3 laws safe?)  why anyone, even unspeakably evil would want to conduct an uncontrolled experiment like that in this dangerous environment seems to defy anyone's logic.

You might assume that this would all be worthwhile as it would lead to an emotional payoff but even though the victim is the significant other of our central character and one of the characters we should care about (but we don't because he's the idiot drunk tunnel sniffer from earlier) he's despatched fairly clinically and very quickly.

It points to some of the pacing and script issues where a lot of important stuff is rushed through and as much as I like the graceful build-up, given the need to keep a movie under a certain length for the purpose of profits I wonder if the tradeoff was worthwhile.  With the larger scope of this movie as opposed to another film I'm trying very hard to not draw any comparisons to, its still following the pacing structure of that older production, at least by broadly splitting the production into two parts - one with action preceded by one without.

So could we have dispensed with some of that earlier buildup? Expressed it in a less time consuming way perhaps.  As there is so much to pack into the later part of the movie, its not merely seeing the crew being dispatched one after another, there's a lot more to take in and explore but its all packed into a small amount of time, it really for me seems the root of the problems. For example did we really need to see the old 'waking up from hypersleep' cliche again?  And OK, we learn a certain amount about the Android as he bicycles around the Gymnasium shooting hoops and watching a classic movie, but there's no payoff for this as the character just becomes muddled later on. Other than quoting a line or two from Lawrence of Arabia, what was the point? He's not the central character and his character constantly appears to shift so why invest so much time there?

Making a disjointed leap back to more things that don't make sense:

While the ship is parked on this stormy alien world there is a time when everyone is asleep or on downtime.  Not only leaving their only return ticket unattended (2 years before you could even hope for a rescue, folks!) but  also leaving two members of the expedition who have been isolated in the structure by the bad weather completely without support from the ships crew or sensor systems - during this time of course they are conveniently killed. Bit of a shame as they're really the only two supporting cast members with some personality and humanity and the movies invested quite a lot of time in them before they become the first to die, leaving the non entities to carry the rest of the supporting roles.

Shouldn't at least the Android have stayed up to monitor them?

Were none of the scientists interested in the intermittent lifesigns that were mentioned by the Captain?

Tactically its a poor decision, the place seems dead but do we take it for granted? Clearly some really ****ed up stuff had happened there before.  Also really harsh on the people you're just leaving out there, who are already completely freaked out by spending the night alone in the haunted house. I guess no one on the ship really gave a sh*t about these characters.  So when they do eventually die of stupidity no one has a clue whats happened - another instance of gross, systemic incompetance on the SS Prometheus expedition.

You're left wondering if they're just stupid or infact drunk too, and thats probably not far off as to be fair the people on board seem to on the whole, like a drink.  It's like the vacuous sex obsessed teenagers who in those tedious formulaic horrors go everywhere they shouldn't go and do everything they shouldn't do. The ones who get high, get sexed up and then destroyed in every slasher movie - except these aren't bad stereotypes of teenagers, or even corporate spacers dropped into a situation at the deep-end with no exploration skills, and as such and you're always left thinking these people should know better... Why all the stupid rookie mistakes and incompetance?

Prometheus expedition before leaving to investigate the alien tomb

While not every expedition is run with expert efficiency - things go wrong and people are stupid in real life too, but there are so many deaths of helpless stupidity in this production it really is akin to a much more shallow genre of movie making.  Nearly the entire cast is made of pointless redshirts who you won't care about, have little personality and when they die you'll be lucky to even remember their name or what profession they represented.  Even the meeting of Weyland and his 'maker' is entirely disatisfying, not only does the creature look just like a big man - very much like Lurch from The Addams Family, or the monster from the classic version of The Thing from another world; it also says nothing or  does nothing intelligent at all, it just attacks right from the off like a mindless drone. Despite being a 'God' its just a brutal, physical animal and a pretty stupid one at that. At least those Gods from Stargate had some class.

Note the armed security guy is there for the entire scene in the 'bridge' of the alien ship, takes about five minutes (slight exaggeration) after The Thing twists the Robots head from its body to actually think of doing something. Maybe he was just scared or something but the guy was definately an a**hole, having just rifle butted a wounded woman on her umm, wound just to shut her up.  I really think he'd have started firing the second stuff started going wrong, perhaps even cutting his own employer and that Scottish non-entity in half with his shells in his enthusiasm to save his own life. No matter how big, the things head didn't look particularly bullet-proof but he just shoots the armour instead, shots bouncing off like bb's.. Managed to rattle off all of two shots before dying, way to go... I've played enough FPS's to know that a couple of blasts from the shotgun usually wont do it, when attacking the big monster, keep shooting until its head is a mass of pulp don't stand there in shock that you've not killed it with one shot, as if waiting to exit the movie on cue.  Again this is a character (barely deserving of the term) who on the one hand would attack an injured woman without question, but moments later bravely step in to rescue another, wasting valuable shooting time.

After more than 30 years we finally see what a "Spacejockey" really looks like!

I have to wonder why they'd even let our protagonist in there with them in the first place, after all she's just been betrayed and ****ed over in the worst possible way by the Android and presumably the rest of the crew.   For example, no one cared where she came from a few scenes earlier when she stumbles into a room where weyland is being revived, If it were me I'd have gone to the stores, grabbed a gun and walked right up to that Robot and blown its head clean off its shoulders, who would have stopped me? no one because no one was paying any attention to anything other than reviving Weyland so we can get to the next scene.  surely someone must have realised she might have some kind of issue with what everyone seemed to want happen to her... And why does she take it so well anyway? I mean shes just gone through something horribly traumatic and she's like super cool about it - but lets not resolve that, there's no consequences so lets just carry on with the movie.

Things happen to these characters which should obviously cause some reaction, like getting angry, but it just doesn't happen, too many times these characters act as if they aren't real Human beings.

Also, did no one wonder or care what had happened with her 'baby'?  OK we're supposed to assume its dead but its in there growing, in basically a habitated part of the ship, why didn't Weylands daughter realise what was growing inside her own cabin? The med chamber used for the abortion was just off from her living quarters as shown in an earlier scene and it's in there for some time, enough to go from small squid to a umm, much larger squid.  Even if she hadn't just popped back in to change her underwear occasionally surely the ship itself would have noticed there was another passenger. I mean given that it can detect tiny life forms through meters of rock  and metal some kilometres away, does nothing monitor the inside of the ship?

And compared what you might be expecting, there's a real lack of imagination with these creatures overall. Disappointingly I don't see much Giger in them and really nothing in common in association with his famous bugs - there's no lineage here at all, I suppose its all window dressing really but if you were just to see these things out of context, you'd probably just laugh at what looks a bit like something from a second rate video game, Gigers original Necronome / Xenomorph and even some of the bastardisations that followed is beautifully lean and threateningly awesome whatever the situation.

The most the creatures in Prometheus can conjour up is a sense of revulsion, and that's mostly just because first the squid is torn out of a living human body and anything parasitic is nasty and scary, and later because it has a toothed Vagina face and we're not really allowed a good view of the overall form, which seems like its mostly a shapeless vaguely Octopus like mass of nothing... So its really only due to the skill of Ridley and the production crew that makes them anywhere near scary by use of context, shot and scene structure.

(The creature threats that the Humans encounter are:

Mutating Oil / Ooze, its a bit like the black oil that our Reticulan chums from the X-Files (who also created us in that show) use to mutate us into something useful to them, or the Ooze that made the Ninja Turtles Domino's Pizza's best customers.  Seems to be used to do lots of things.

Alien Snakes, like a snake crossed with a fluke or some type of worm, capable of breaking a mans arm or shooting down his gullet, has acid for blood.

Alien Squid, Extracted from one of the crew - foetal stage of a larger creature

Alien Octopus, Larger stage of the squid, approx 20 times the size of the baby version and capable of besting the thing from another world, grows this big in a few hours at most.)

A bigger problem is that important events like the untimely birth of that tentacled squid thing happen in this movie that seem to have no consequences unless called for by the plot or are simply forgotten by the supporting or main characters.  Again leading to a feeling of detachment from the story and like something has been missed or not thought through properly, As I said earlier I think there is a certain amount of cut footage and there's a version with less untidy edges somewhere.  I'm reminded of Dune while watching it: Simply too huge and too epic to make sense in a movie format that could make money at a theatre though I wonder if it would totally make sense even with an additional hour.

I could go on with nitpicking more and more, like the one or two lines of soul destroying exposition uttered by the Captain at a late stage that spells everything out for those who have been having a hard time following whats going on.  The line just feels like something tacked on to help the audience along.  How about snake thing shooting into a guys mouth - just to kill him? nothing seemed to pop out of him (other presumably than the same snake, which exits the same way it went in) so its just put in there as a needless nod to certain existing texts.  Also, why didn't the things have their own weapons? They're apparently breeding hostile life forms there, even the alien ship is apparently unarmed and unable to prevent a vastly inferior Human ship from colliding with it, even though we're under no illusions that this is nothing but a military outpost due to the painful exposition outlined earlier.

I guess I did go on a bit, but rejoice dear reader, we are not through yet! This is the point where I will completely ruin the ending for you..

Jumping straight into it, after many pointless and stupid deaths we're treated to a few more, thats a large cast to shove off to Valhalla so bear with us.  In an effort to stop The Thing from taking off and completely ruining the Earth all three people who could drive the ship are now driving it to its doom even though two of them could have escaped. We don't care about any of them though so **** it, lets off them all too with barely any reasoning as to why this is the only option or even why it should work at all. (Had those Gods just packed a couple of missile launchers, or perhaps just moved slightly to the side....)  No alternatives are discussed, no opposition, no drama, just a cue from an athletic but perhaps not too smart scientist (who all the same is probably the smartest of this bunch) telling them they all need to sacrifice themselves and they basically jump at the opportunity  with barely any consideration, it is a good day to die indeed.

You might even wonder if you've seen the two co-pilots before as with so many of the minor characters if you yawned at the right time in the first couple of acts you'll have easily missed them. They certainly aren't involved in any action until they're just about to die (as with many characters they only seem apparent in the story just moments before death) and their cheerful irrelevant banter in earlier scenes does nothing to set them up with a plausible death wish. I'm left wondering if their sacrifice is even required anyway (as we find out later on it's meaningless) how does our leading character really know that the alien ship is really going to Earth at this point, how does she actually know that they don't like Humans and really want to wipe everyone out, based on info from the tricky Android who clearly can't be trusted - OK the audience is shown that The Thing is targeting Earth but none of the characters see this.

Seems all she could actually prove is that they made us from the DNA analysis of the head, and don't like being woken up to be asked a lot of stupid questions from an elderly example of a  lower order of primate whos just scared to die.  Maybe this guy is the one that went postal and killed all the others or is suffering from PTSD or something. We're not actually shown what kills the rest of the things as their attackers are curiously missing from the beautifully rendered holo-recordings. In another scene though, with our first bloods stuck in the haunted house though its implied that its some sort of Xenomorph incident. 

It could seem like she's basing her ideas on a lot of suppositions and second hand info from an unreliable, manipulative source. Like the fringe celebrities who queue up to appear in episodes of Ancient Aliens and the content of the book Chariots of the Gods which interprets various aspects of ancient civilisations as having close ties with Extra-Terrestrials, which seem a clear inspiration for this work.  But anyway, lets not take off, follow the ship and send a warning to Earth, lets ram the ships into each other to make for a more exciting ending, eh, fair enough, its technically a great scene but very cold and unemotional, after all throwing away 3 more characters that we barely know is just par for the course at this point.

After the epic collision that's completely spoiled by the trailer from over a month ago only the two main female characters appear to have survived. Now running for their lives amidst falling debris from the collision. One (the lesser character) suffers yet another pointless death, simply crushed under the ship after it slowly rolls onto her in a scene reminiscent of someone trying to outrun a train by running along the track in front of the train, rather than simply going sideways to get out of its way.  Again it settles briefly with perfect timing having killed the first victim right at the end of its first roll,  and after having so expertly homed in on its first victim it begins falling remorselessly in just the right way to now squish our hero. Two rolls, two targets and its dead on both of them - like a 3D animator at the whim of his director is influencing this ship to stretch the sequence out and add tension and excitement, you can almost see the hand of god nudging this thing and placing people - God is really trying it's hardest to kill everyone in an obviously contrived way.  And if you look closely you can see that the geometry of the scene is all wrong, the first victim would have had to run about 60mph at least to get to the point where she was actually squashed, and our hero, who we think is the second victim apparently stunned and unable to move, would have had to teleport a few hundred meters to have been right under the end of the arm, yet more evidence for our hero that God exists perhaps?

Fantastically and not predictably at all, our hero is surviving by the thin film of plaque covering her teeth! Having been fortunate enough to be protected by some rock or something, leaving just barely enough space for her to keep on breathing - though nearly out of oxygen.. Fear not though, something tells me she'll find a new supply just barely in time as the tension inducing computer reads off the time she has left.

And so we are left with our protagonist to re-discover her baby, which has lurked on the ship with otherwise zero consquences for the entire last act and was cleverly ejected before the collision along with the entire penthouse suite of Prometheus. (hopefully the vodka remained intact)

Now that the no doubt hopping mad pilot of the alien ship is storming over for a drink and in a scene like something from The legend of Overfiend, except without the schoolgirls and me vomiting quite so much, like a B-Movie Battle Royale, our hero skillfully utilises it to dispatch The Thing from Outer Space. (Bet he wished he'd brought a gun, eh?) We have no warning really that this is going to happen, just a radio call from a disembodied Android head just seconds before this final engagement begins - I guess the Robot, even though he'd have seen Lurch getting up out of his chair and leaving in a huff presumably some time before thought it would add more drama to the movie its in to wait until the last second before speaking up.

But as well as The Thing appearing from nowhere, again there is no consequence for this, we don't see the creatures being trapped or any steps taken to neutralise them, what if baby just kills the thing and starts right back after its mum?  (btw friends, do not take your pregnant girlfriend to see this movie - everthing I said about not seeing certain things due to demographics, well I was pleased to see I was mainly wrong.) Its just another loose end that is not dealt with, clearly an ongoing situation but we turn the other cheek and just get on with the rest of the story like it never happened at all. I assume this somehow is tied to the dead, exploded from within, Elephant faced man in the film which shall not be named. Or is it, hold on wait, is this even the same plan.... I mean moon?

Anyways, whatever.... Presumably the baby is free to roam wherever it wants (but just doesn't want to) and the Jockey crawls back to its knackered ship to die in its control chair and wait to be discovered by another crew thirty years ago, or not depending on whether this is a prequel or not perhaps.  While our noble survivor tenderly packs the head of the souless robot that just screwed her over into a bag - suddenly for no reason they have some sort of understanding that's not revealed or even makes sense - and they find a new ship to sail off into the sunset. Literally cutting from recovering the android and being really nice to it for no reason ( Again, I'd have dismantled the toaster the easy way long before then) to another Jockey ship taking off, erm, presumably despite literally everything else going wrong, that all went without a hitch.

It's lucky these big goons left so many more undefended ships sitting around and even luckier, they can be easily started by playing a simple tune on a Flute, thats right, a Flute... The wind instrument that's easy enough for a small child to play, which is not only left laying around right in the bridge itself but precisely what to play is left recorded on the ships holographic system, which plays back for the first person who walks in after thousands of centuries.

Serious Science Fiction

That's like leaving your car unlocked, using a whistle to start the ignition and the song you have to whistle loaded into the stereo, as well as actually inviting people to come and steal it.  Not to mention, if there's lots of these ships laying around then why on Archeron (sorry) wouldn't Lurch have simply gone to one of those and carried on with his mission instead of needlessly rushing to beat up on a woman half his height? I guess that would have made the sacrifice of the flight crew and the entire ship seem pretty meaningless though...

Again right at the end we're robbed of a coherent story and left only with assumptions and questions, so many loose ends its nearly impossible to have any sort of emotional reward.

As a final word, can I mention it directly once and not appear to be the Alien fanboi I could easily appear to be? I'm really judging it on its own merits and the problems are nothing to do with its not being like its heritage I wanted to see something new, I don't care about a new Alien movie - if anything Prometheus perhaps has too many nods toward Sir Ridleys first sci-fi epic. Alien was a perfect self contained story, as was 'A New Hope' but they also left things open and unresolved for possible sequels, our heroes survived, Ripley was safe, signed off and heading home and Luke and Leia et al had a party, (of sorts) even the Sasquatch got (sod all infact- thanks Matt!) and the immediate threat was over.  Alien wasn't exactly a 'feel good' ending in the classic sense but probably brought a great deal of relief to the audience that the ordeal was now over.

Prometheus totally ends with a feeling that the ordeal is just beginning, which might be awesome if I could watch the sequel right now, but there's no guarantee it will even be made.

So ultimately as an audience participant, you're really robbed of any sort of satisfying ending as a standalone piece - It's desperately and deliberately begging for a sequel even, whilst Alien and A New Hope, both which spawned at least 2 half decent sequels each were also happy to end it there if needed. I dont think that Prometheus is a really bad movie or anything, particularly when compared to the dross that is projected against cinema screens on a daily basis but its just one that was cut too brutally and maybe just didn't have a great script - I never liked Lost as it just seemed aimless, as does this film in a way, so maybe I just don't dig what that guy does.  I hope there is a directors cut sometime soon which is somewhat longer and flows better but I'm not sure what's going to fix that contrived empty ending, perhaps that won't seem so bad with a sequel, one where we actually get to see a real alien planet and see Prometheus as just the first act of a larger work.

Prometheus - Ridley Scott's new / old Epic?

I've been waiting for this for a long time, another good scifi horror in the vein of seminal classic: "Alien."

Is this movie going to live up to expectations? - Probably a near impossible task but at least the right name is at the helm.

First the above roughly 1 minute long trailer was released, quickly followed up by several more, I count at least 4 distinctly different trailers (though showing much the same thing)

"Imax" version

We also have the "international" version, which shows a few more extra snippets and is probably the definitive version of the trailer so far.

Warning: Conjectural spoilers Ahoy!

I've noticed one or two comments about whether this is the real movie, I guess there is always the chance it could have been some (VERY) elaborate fake to highlight some unknown FX team, and maybe that says more about the quality that amateurs and low budgets are capable of attaining with CGI  than anything, but there is something a little minimalist about it.

Maybe a reason why some commenter's found it a little unconvincing is that there is perhaps something a little in-congruent about the visuals combined with the more minimalist style of the first trailer:  The landscape in particular, Archeron's moon and Furina were the settings for the first 3 Alien movies; with the formers twilight cold and twisting (albeit plaster cast and matte) landscape and the latters fiery junk-yard, they maybe don't hold up so well today, but really looked like another world.  Much of the Prometheus trailer appears - as in [I]classic [/I]Dr Who style - to be set in a quarry, abeit a very large quarry.

A shot from the upcoming eagerly anticipated sequel to Joss Whedon's Serenity featuring a much larger Firefly mk2... Oh sorry, I mean Ridley Scott's eagerly antic... 

After years talk about another movie,  about going to the planet the Xenomorphs / Spacejockeys came from, and with the wonders of digitally extended sets and CGI; I had some crazy preconceived notion of an actually alien looking world, and perhaps other viewers were also expecting something a little more un-earthly?  Even the atmosphere looks earth-like, with a blue-ish tinge that gives away its apparently earth-like composition and clearly enough pressure to support cloud formations, which appear to be water vapour... Makes you wonder why the crew even need full suits... Perhaps they are merely being used as environment suits and there's nothing really stopping them from taking off the helmets and breathing, it really looks like that... So is it deliberately made to look Earth like for reasons of plot?

I'll be honest I'm really disappointed that I probably wont be feasting my eyes on a fully realised Giger designed world of epic scale with fully realised bio-mechanical cities.  This is all of course merely dressing, but part of the spectacle that make the classics so memorable.

What we can perhaps glean from this with regards to the story is that as well as looking a little bland in comparison, it perhaps indicates that the planet is simply an outpost, infact it may be Archerons moon / LV-426 - the planet on which all the trouble began in 1979.   Contrary to this analysis, the colour of the air and so on don't seem to indicate that planets 'Primordial' atmospheric soup, and there are lots of other things to suggest that its not quite the same place.

A shot of Prometheus (spacecraft) above the atmosphere of presumably the films destination planet.  Note the large planet partially occulting the systems star, indicating that our heroes are flying over a moon of a much larger planet.  Does this support the notion that both planets in both movies are the same? LV-426, the planet landed on in Alien and home to the crashed derelict from the first two Alien movies is also a moon of a gas giant type planet.  

However you perceive the location, seemingly on this quarry planet we have nothing other than an underground base / space-port, and perhaps one that has been long shut down.  Since the creatures that built it probably would have prevented the humans from breaking in or even landing in the first place, had they been awake. So perhaps the inhabitants are just sleeping as the humans do, to travel large distances or perhaps to await the results of an experiment started long ago.

I hope that not too much is set outdoors as the interiors and sets look fantastic, holding true to Alien in just the right way and clearly suggest this is the real deal.  In the human spacecraft, the layout of the soft cushioned panels and lines of the bulkheads are evocative of the Ron Cobb designed set, originally built at Shepperton studios in the late 1970's and long since destroyed.  The alien interiors are equally loyal to Giger's original concepts built for the Alien movie, and indeed for this aspect they may just be illustrating the exact same ship, or at least the same class of craft as that found derelict on LV-426 - if our quarry planet is the same place then its likely the same ship.

If it is the same place then the crew of Prometheus are far better equipped than the explorers who came later, whether these vehicles shown below will have the same kind of lasting appeal as the classic designs like the Colonial Marine vehicles from Aliens remains to be seen - or perhaps I simply can't see a thing behind my near opaquely rose tinted welding goggles.

Mostly looks like the set of  Bladerunner... Mostly. 

A beautiful backlit shot of a spectacularly seamless effect, but a very Earth-like world is revealed from behind the cargo door, also, needs more Giger.... 

Interviews with Ridley Scott from decade old alien DVD extras perhaps reveal some of the overall plot of this new movie. In particular his comments that the derelict spacecraft in Alien is in essence a 'bomber' or a 'carrier'.  Both military terms for a weapon which will drop the eggs to infest and destroy potentially competing civilisations.  The Xenomorphs that are produced from the infected population are  presumably just the right size to both deal with that population and also fit the structures that the population created;  your genetic weapon is useless if it doesn't fit through the target civilisations doorways. Crucially, the Xenomorph as an imperialist weapons system, like a neutron bomb or a biological plague, leaves those doorways and other infrastructure intact. Though if using that infrastructure is important, who then exterminates the bugs so that it becomes usable?

Maybe these guys also made the Yautja to fulfill that very role (i really hope not;))

This is what I think gives a real purpose to the facehugger concept: Beyond the parasitic, sexual horror aspects it autonomously ensures that you can seed many worlds with the same weapon and have it deal equally well on a physical basis with all sorts of populations. Anything that we would typically consider a humanoid or animal species that a facehugger can wrap itself around and snake a tube down.  It seems apparent after analysis of the trailer footage that perhaps here we might see a different creature with a similar parasitic, reproductive purpose.  I have not spotted any Xenomorphs or facehuggers beyond a slightly suspicious looking pile of parts in one shot - a shot which otherwise appears to reveal nothing at all. And I think there are several reasons why they are not in this movie, and which might partly because related demographic concerns as much as anything.  It certainly seems that while the tone is very similar to the Alien movies, and certain elements remain, other elements have been quitely dropped or replaced with other, perhaps less offensive things... More about that later.

So the Space Jockeys (or is it Spacejockeys?) are considered (though never explained in canon) masters of genetic manipulation, and this has been a constant theme throughout the Aliens franchise.  Combined with this, the "Ancient Aliens" theme, much derided in the most recent Indiana Jones is apparently in full effect here, and the story will likely deal with issues regarding creation myths and perhap the realisation that Humans, Jockeys and Xeno's are more closely linked than had previously been suggested.

In the legend Prometheus defied the gods and drew their anger, with a theft of information as much as anything, Our Human participants in this story logically would occupy the role of Prometheus, so does that make the Alien Space Jockeys the Gods?  Note that in one of the scenes a large human face is built into one of the sets and its not just an excuse to put another giger designed set into the movie. The face is a set peice in a room filled with identical vaguely egg shaped canisters... Perhaps containing Human, umm, stuff? Or whatever that ooze is... something specifically meant for the humans? Clearly something was there, waiting to be found by humans (as one of the characters says in the extended trailer - "it's more of an invite")

It's pure guesswork but I think this subtly suggests the room has something specifically for the humans...;) Seems implied that this is the source of the infection that seems to grip some of the characters, and perhaps a small creature that fits inside those truncated vessels.  Also, Gigers artwork here makes for as powerful an image as ever.

Is this character manipulating one of the "creatures" from a sample container?  This container is about the same diameter as the truncated 'eggs' in the above screen.  These may be the same creatures seen slithering inside space suits in the international trailer, forget the 'ooze' I think its really these little beasties that fulfil the facehugger role here and the ooze is simply a secretion, and nod to the sticky gunk left everywhere by Xenomorphs. 

Perhaps the entire facility they discover really is an elaborate genetic trap, either to transform the Humans into something else (clearly there is some sort of disease at least represented and possible mutation) or kill them off entirely.  If the alien ship, already described as a 'bomber' is taking off and heading for Earth and the human characters have to stop it, yeah its an old cliche really, but it's obviously not going there for the health of humanity as we know it.

to sum up so far, for those brave souls who have ventured thusfar into this impossibly long winded post I now present the plot of Prometheus revealed! with pictures, and for extra fun, I'll turn to my good friend Erich "Ancient Aliens" Von Daniken. No stranger to speculation about the various otherworldly creatures who have visited mankind, remember he merely asks questions...

Has these alien species known to Alien franchise fans as "The Space Jockeys", masters of genetic manipulation; long ago created man or perhaps interfered with life on this planet?  - I ask the question and science does not respond. 

A Space Jockey craft lurking in the fog over this waterfall?  Is this Earth? There is vegetation visible in this shot (though barely visible due to lighting and heavy colour processing) 

Supporting this theories, at the beginning of the long trailer we see a large object, a Oo-FO type thing  with an apparently irregular but overall oval shape hovering over a waterfall, we also see a man, he must be a primitive man, perhaps twenty to thirty-thousand years old and science cannot disprove this.  He is unprotected with no visible technology or clothings standing  near the same waterfall with some strange 'things' crawling around under his skin. I ask the question that science refuses to answer; Do these things have relatings? is this the start of the genetic manipulations or some kind of software update for the DNA, like my laptop? It no longer works after apple update and SCIENCE insists it will not assist me in fixing it unless I switch to a real computer. 

 Up on the ridge visible in the previous shot, this appears to be earth as there is vegetation and running water in this scene along with a bald unprotected human male who is perhaps standing under where the spacecraft is.  The theme of alien creatures getting under the skin of the characters seems to play out later on in the trailer.

Was this perhaps to a create new weapons systems, or something that would benefit these aliens, or as we, as primitives would call them, the Gods who came from the skies.  

I suggest that which science will plainly not accept today; that they not only created us but left big clues behind to show *US*, where the ancient libraries may be hidden

Some kind of clue? A Scientist when stopped in the street and asked this exact question in a made up alien language refused to confirm, or even deny...

I ask the obvious question, is this the obvious trap? Science feels ostracised and misunderstood.

It appears that the planet is not the seat of their civilisation and never was.  For some reason this alien equipment was left there so that any race discovering it would be destroyed autonomatically and therefore would we would never be capable of threatening the Gods of our ancestors. They are fearful of us as science fears the truths! 

God? -  Erich

Once Humans awaken the facility everything for them seems to go badly wrong, is it a sign that we have become too advanced to be easily controlled by our gods? Or a sign that their experiment is concluded? Science again is timid and uncooperative.


The Gods have but one option: Destroy the Humans before it can infest the galaxy and undercut all their manufacturing industry. Science has tried his best rid the Earth of us, but still we the Humans exist, Ultimately the gods will do no better. The remainder of the movie deals with preventing the aliens from preventing our aforementioned ruining of the galaxy with our terrible ways.  


The final ramming of the ship of the gods with the Human ship indicates what science stubbornly resists confirming, that it is a very good day to die. 

In order to destroy the alien space craft it is necessary to manually shoot proton torpedoes into the small thermal exhaust port, right above the three main Vaginas.   Not sure if the damaged area is shown in Alien - if they are the same vessels then there might be some continuity between visibly damaged areas.  It also appears to land in basically one piece (as the alien derelict is shown in one piece), despite crashing down at an odd angle... I guess its just really, really strong.

(It is also revealed in the International trailer that the ship tips into its resting position as seen in Alien and the damaged section  - the hole punched by Prometheus would be more or less hidden in that position.) 

So, thanks Erich, surprised to hear you quoting the Klingon at the end there.

Prometheus seems to tell a tale of similar scope to 2001, perhaps the first movie to deal with the Theme of Ancient Aliens, but the outcome is not so much about expanding our perceptions through a spiritual transformation or merely alerting the creators, but perhaps just automatically killing the Humans for knowing too much or becoming too powerful. Or, possibly like 2001, rather than destroy the Humans with the bomber, its purpose is genetic alteration which also is clearly not desirable to the bulk of the films surviving characters at that point.  But really I'm not keen on the concept of luring humans somewhere, under their own power just to see if they can do it and offing them if they do, it would see at that point the cat is out of the bag anyway, so rather than destroy it implies a more complex relationship which ties back in with themes of genetic manipulation.

There is certainly an aspect of mutation implied in the trailer (duh!) of the characters physically becoming something different, clearly shown at several points it's likely that at least one Human is transformed into what has been commonly thought of as a different species, the Space Jockey, and therefore there might be an entirely different class of species running the whole show.

I wonder if there will be some sort of dialogue between the Human characters and what appears at one point to be an alive Space Jockey, are they the gods of this plot or simply a transformed human puppet?

A Navigation room, perhaps the same one as shown in Alien, with the scope of a partially deployed Navigation chair (the big phallic seat/scope thing from Alien that the 'Space Jockey' is seen residing) which rises, devoid of occupant,  from the centre of this space, in another shot this male is seen striding toward the empty chair.   I'm fairly sure those bio-mechanical features on the large males body are not the standard  Human-tech suit or any human tech at all.


Are all the crew infected? Presumably there is at least one survivor - I already hope it isn't Theron, perhaps unfairly so as she doesn't seem to do much in the trailer.  but there are no shots showing her in anything other than a perfect state of health. perhaps boarding an escape pod at one point, several of the characters, like the one below appear to be 'gonners' in the trailer already. 

Alien infection or  an application of Tan-in-a-Can gone horribly wrong?

What is the other alien looking humanoid that we only see from the waist down? Is this the same creature as depicted in this image sequence? Again I feel this is likely a transformed Human being - one of the crew of Prometheus, transformed by some parasitic intervention, rather than a distinct new species, perhaps the Space Jockey (pictured below) is not what it appeared to be in Alien (see captions)  but time will tell I suppose.

The dark almond shaped eyes and hint of a nasal trunk bear a striking similarity to the 'head' of a Space Jockey, it looks slightly formless and empty like flexible leather helmet, like the ones George Lucas keeps in his underpants drawer. 

A mutated Humanoid strides toward an empty navigators seat.

Perhaps following from the above shot, is this a bona-fide "Space Jockey" a Human, or modified Human in a suit? Note how structures like the large ribs  that appeared to be all part of the same creature in Alien all appear to be part of a seat restraint system instead, which in motion appear to be closing in on the humanoid... Earlier in the trailer a human seems to be standing near a deploying version of a empty 'navigators chair'  If this sequence is taken at face value it is to be expected then that this production might re-write some well established rules and preconceptions of the Alien-savvy audience.

Perhaps the Xenomorphs that terrorised Ellen Ripley over the course of 3 good movies and one **** one (To save arguments I'll leave it to the viewer to decide which was the **** one) don't even exist at this point in the aliens universe history. Which would certainly explain their complete absence in this trailer, perhaps the efforts of the Prometheus crew somehow created the Xenos as a side effect, or maybe thats what it was all about, all along, a plan laid out by some smug higher being.  I would certainly like this to be true as it would totally scupper the back story to those awful AVP movies.

Despite any reservations about how it fits with other stuff, the possible cliches in the plot, the trailer clearly represents a mystery and the movie will hopefully enrich a classic franchise while not really being a part of it, or something.  I just hope there is a really interesting story as Prometheus so far looks like the grand adventure, more than the "Seven Little Indians" of Alien but seems to tread some of the same ground, albeit in a slightly different form.   I've had no doubt all along  that this movie would be very closely tied with the Aliens films and perhaps Ridley being somewhat evasive (and even continuing to be) about this is more political than anything or he's simply having some fun.

I hope that with solving some of the mysteries surrounding the Jockey ship as the movie appears bound to do, it doesn't detract at all from the earlier sequels by spoiling what remains of the air of mysticism that has always surrounded the series.  Alien is an important movie and quickly became part of our modern culture, its slick style and slogans like: "In space, no one can hear you scream" emulated by all sorts of imitators. One of the great enduring things about it, keeping the orginal movie relevant as with 2001, is that not all is explained and discussions between fans of what the creatures really are and where they really come from will perhaps be eroded or obliterated by a new reality imposed on the audience by this movie.  Many preconcieved notions of these creatures origins by long term fans will have to be thrown out of the window as it inevitably narrows a wide range of possibility into one definate mythology - indeed already has with the recent trailers.  This aspect has been completely untouched in the canon for as long as the franchise has existed, safe from the fumbling hands and strange ideas of the incompetants who were involved in making the later movies the low rent souless movie trash that they truely were.  Fitting then, that if this has to be done; if the gods of studio economics feel the world is ready to cash out to see such a work, that it is the seminal director for Alien who will now expand upon on these ideas that he originally helped to craft and who will finally be held responsible if it turns out to be awful.  I also feel that Sir Ridley Scott offers the production considerably more weight than any other director could possibly give it, which should improve its acceptance with the long term fans who seem to be enthralled with how this is developing.

Ultimately I think its something that most fans of the Aliens series will want to see even if just to learn more of the backstory to Alien, but then if you're all the way down here in this post then you already knew that, what are you; desperate for a decent sci-fi movie or something? Well its not like hopes have been dashed before about a prequel movie... *cough* Phantom Menace *cough* I'm not being too cynical when I say the movie is being crafted to make money, it is being crafted to suit a much wider audience than Alien, thats just logical, movie making in hollywood is a business so it stands to reason that investors want a large return on their investment.  I'm sure no one really knew how Alien was going to turn out and the studio mostly thought it would flop, how wrong they were.

As suggested by retired Fox executive Sandy Lieberson in one of Dennis Lowe's excellent "Alien Makers" documentaries, back in the late 70's, movies were not crafted so much by demographics as they were today. Even large budget "A" feature movies were apparently still created as more of an art than a science.  Infact as it turned out, while a popular franchise, even the most popular editions of the Alien saga never attained universal popularity as Star Wars or other less edgy productions because certain demographic groups utterly hated the entire series. I'm pretty sure this is one great reason why we wont see any face rape, explosive birthing fatalities or overtly penis headed monsters in this movie: Facehuggers with suggestive features are now worm like snakes that burrow under the skin and instead of skinny tall aliens with ribbed wang shaped craniums we are apparently presented with mutating Humans, which presumably aren't going to end up looking like the Xenos in shape for the aforementioned reasons.  But these things still perhaps fill roughly the same sorts of roles as the earlier entities.

Of course there is that thing apparently built into a wall, but even that has had the shape altered and is clearly not a Xenomorph, but like the Xenomorph, follows the same 'Necronom' pattern, as developed by Giger prior to working on the first movie.

As movies have sought to cast a wider and wider net over the last few decades, and how to do this through analysis of demographics and focus groups over an additional 30 years (of successive topping of box office records) they have perhaps naturally become dumbed down, in order to not offend a particular group or appear off putting.  Now more than 30 years later, can Prometheus tick all the demographic boxes needed to pull in a fresh audience, make it successful for the studio while also satisfying the fans and not completely ruin the back story to a popular pre-existing series backstory in the process? Should you or science care if it has the "Aliens" or not in it? No, not a bit as that aspect has already been done to death, cloned from some skin cells and after several failed attempts is now reborn as Ripley Eight Prometheus.

I'll finish with a link to trailer of  the 1979 classic Alien, back from the era when extra stuff was shot just for the trailer it seems, including what resembles an Ostrich or Dinosaur egg on a cracked plaster moonscape which looks nothing like the actual thing in the movie.  No doubt to keep the actual egg it fresh for when you actually paid up (hope they put it in the fridge! ho ho ho).