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One of the things that is getting me about Critic's reviews of Prometheus, is that they were expecting something different than what they got, and I think the mistake is that they were looking for the wrong thing.
First off, the crew. A lot of people looked at this huge cast of 17 people and expected them to be characters... but there were only 6 characters in the end. Maybe 7 if you include the Bug Out Duo (They count as one). That means your characters are, in order, the Archeologists, The Android, The Executive, the Captain, and the Old Man. And the Bug Out Duo. Every other character, from the pilot and navigator to the random security dudes, they are Set Dressing. They are meant to be set dressing, and if you were expecting them to be characters, you were highly mistaken, and don't really understand the kind of film you went out to see.
Secondly, the expedition was not a First Contact mission. It was an Archelogical Dig. They seriously didn't expect any living civilization to be out on some ancestral memory piece of dirt. It's actually a wonder why the Old Man took himself along for the ride, but I figure he'd be giving Follow the Breadcrumbs type answers till the crew found what they were looking for, anyway. By Flame Thrower if nessecary, because, you know, The Weyland Corporation is Evil.
We will give the fact that there are some plain stupid things the Characters do. The "Let's wake up a dead head" to "Why are the Archeologists not questioning any of the artifacts in the room from the giant skull to the Mural with the freaky monster on it?". I personally find this forgivable, as the movie has a lot of ground it needs to cover, and it feels like it has Studio Pressure to come in under X minutes, and inside budget, and the Director does well to keep his film inside the confines. You can literally feel parts of the film hit the editing room floor, particularly when you think about the chain of events a little too much. There is a lot of moments in the film where you go "What? What order did what happen?" when you get to the end of the movie.
...
The movie asks the question "If the Proginitor Race was ready to wipe out humans, why didn't they?". I think that answer is really self explainitory, and if you think about it just a little, you know why. They generated this huge weapons of mass destruction, designed to turn the population of a planet against themselves, and of couse, it either got out of control, or they used it on themselves. The Xenomorphs that we see in Alien Trilogy are the end product of that civil war. The Xenomorphs are the Proginators. Which means, in the end, the Xenomorphs are what *we* were meant to become.
It's actually pretty clever, and if anyone even thought about it for a second, they'd be able to answer this themselves.
...
Ultimately, I got every answer that I wanted answered from Alien from this film, and I feel the people who are upset about the film and the 'answers', really were just asking the wrong questions.
...
As a sidenote, the Lovecraftian Society members are upset at Prometheus because it echos Mountains of Madness a lot. Which I feel is fine. If you're going to steal a plot, might as well make it a good one.
One of the things that is getting me about Critic's reviews of Prometheus, is that they were expecting something different than what they got, and I think the mistake is that they were looking for the wrong thing.
First off, the crew. A lot of people looked at this huge cast of 17 people and expected them to be characters... but there were only 6 characters in the end. Maybe 7 if you include the Bug Out Duo (They count as one). That means your characters are, in order, the Archeologists, The Android, The Executive, the Captain, and the Old Man. And the Bug Out Duo. Every other character, from the pilot and navigator to the random security dudes, they are Set Dressing. They are meant to be set dressing, and if you were expecting them to be characters, you were highly mistaken, and don't really understand the kind of film you went out to see.
Secondly, the expedition was not a First Contact mission. It was an Archelogical Dig. They seriously didn't expect any living civilization to be out on some ancestral memory piece of dirt. It's actually a wonder why the Old Man took himself along for the ride, but I figure he'd be giving Follow the Breadcrumbs type answers till the crew found what they were looking for, anyway. By Flame Thrower if nessecary, because, you know, The Weyland Corporation is Evil.
We will give the fact that there are some plain stupid things the Characters do. The "Let's wake up a dead head" to "Why are the Archeologists not questioning any of the artifacts in the room from the giant skull to the Mural with the freaky monster on it?". I personally find this forgivable, as the movie has a lot of ground it needs to cover, and it feels like it has Studio Pressure to come in under X minutes, and inside budget, and the Director does well to keep his film inside the confines. You can literally feel parts of the film hit the editing room floor, particularly when you think about the chain of events a little too much. There is a lot of moments in the film where you go "What? What order did what happen?" when you get to the end of the movie.
...
The movie asks the question "If the Proginitor Race was ready to wipe out humans, why didn't they?". I think that answer is really self explainitory, and if you think about it just a little, you know why. They generated this huge weapons of mass destruction, designed to turn the population of a planet against themselves, and of couse, it either got out of control, or they used it on themselves. The Xenomorphs that we see in Alien Trilogy are the end product of that civil war. The Xenomorphs are the Proginators. Which means, in the end, the Xenomorphs are what *we* were meant to become.
It's actually pretty clever, and if anyone even thought about it for a second, they'd be able to answer this themselves.
...
Ultimately, I got every answer that I wanted answered from Alien from this film, and I feel the people who are upset about the film and the 'answers', really were just asking the wrong questions.
...
As a sidenote, the Lovecraftian Society members are upset at Prometheus because it echos Mountains of Madness a lot. Which I feel is fine. If you're going to steal a plot, might as well make it a good one.
