Prometheus - Ridley Scott's Alien 'prequel' *SPOILERS*

[ThePhillyExperiment]

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

Makes it sound like the Tower of Babel. I can't remember if this thread talked about that, or a possibility that every notated biblical or other religious disaster was caused by the Space Jesus (Jesi).

[copstache]

Every deleted scene I saw seemed better.

Most of it was compression for time. If they could have made a 4 hour movie, I'd sign up for that.

yeah the extended engineer escape/fight scene was especially good. i agree with scott in that it would have made for weird pacing but it's so much better in its extended form that i'm not sure i'd care.

the alternate, "angry," conversation with david scene made much more sense too. as did the extended "father" conversation. the theatrical version seemed so much like a clumsily shoehorned-in attempt at emotional impact, and the deleted version actually provided a lot of depth for both of those characters.

definitely some of the most interesting deleted scenes i've seen for a movie in a while

[Necrometer]

downloading this bootlegged extended cut is fucking tedious... the site it's on has a 1 file per 3 hours rule, and it's in ten parts... there's a premium mode I could get for $7 but in the process of signing up they asked for my phone number so they could text me something to verify that I owned my credit card? sketch central. anyway, I'm beating the system via downloading from a few different work computers in parallel I REALLY want to watch this tonight

fucking hell... I had everything worked out, using seven different computers to download the ten parts and just as I'm ready to take my victory lap I find that a fucking MAC was set to sleep after 5 fucking minutes so now I'd have to wait 2.5 hours to get the last piece... fucking FUCK.

I guess I'll watch with my girlfriend tomorrow night. So close. Total bullshit. Sleeping in the Spacehamper tonight.

[Steeb]

Fuck I hate mac's.

[Necrophilic Mallard]

Every deleted scene I saw seemed better.

Most of it was compression for time. If they could have made a 4 hour movie, I'd sign up for that.

yeah the extended engineer escape/fight scene was especially good. i agree with scott in that it would have made for weird pacing but it's so much better in its extended form that i'm not sure i'd care.

the alternate, "angry," conversation with david scene made much more sense too. as did the extended "father" conversation. the theatrical version seemed so much like a clumsily shoehorned-in attempt at emotional impact, and the deleted version actually provided a lot of depth for both of those characters.

definitely some of the most interesting deleted scenes i've seen for a movie in a while

Didn't like the "i hate you so much-lets fuck!" bit, though.
I really liked the Janek & Vickers scene, too.

I'm still kind of unsatisfied about the "space jesus" shit, though...it seems pretty obvious, that that wasn't the intent at all, but then why all the christian crap?

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

Makes it sound like the Tower of Babel.

huh?

[Blair]

...and just as I'm ready to take my victory lap I find that a fucking MAC was set to sleep after 5 fucking minutes so now I'd have to wait 2.5 hours to get the last piece... fucking FUCK.

[Necrometer]

I can't stop being pumped/confused about the alternate edition I saw. It is such a better movie, but why couldn't they have released that for the 3D IMAX experience I'll never have again? It does over-explain a bit, so I guess that version would have generated less sad losers, so I appreciate the theatrical version for that reason. The edit fixes two massively awkward scenes: when the biologist is friendly to the organism, and when Janek confronts Shaw with his big theory that they're at a bio-weapons facility. Both were set up with previous scenes that were axed for whatever reason. Buh.

I spent two days watching and listening to every extra on the disc, ha!

You mean the extras on the bluray? I guess there's an entire extra disc full of shit in the 4-disc edition... might need to buy that.

[Necrometer]

non-Lindelof on the original draft:

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

Great expectations
Screenwriters largely labour in silent anonymity. No-one's heard of the project
you're working on, and many of those projects vanish into the void the
moment you're done. By the time they do make it to market, you've moved
on. But with Prometheus there was an avid, eager and pestering crowd,
trying to find out about the project from the first moment it was
announced that I would write it. This was the first time I've ever
written something where there was an audience waiting for it.There
were so many people with opinions about how it should go. So many
people who wanted to know what would happen. I was conscious of my
laptop having a substantial news value if I were to leave it in a coffee
shop. The leak would have been rather disastrous. I felt like a Cold
War spy walking around with my briefcase handcuffed to my wrist.

I don't believe my draft has been released into the world. There was talk
for a while about my final draft being included in the Blu-ray release
of the film. But I've recently heard that there are legal complications
around that and it may not be happening. So I talk a bit on the Blu-ray
about the creative process, but I'm not sure the draft is on there.

I had gone into Scott Free for a general meeting, because they'd liked a
script of mine. Late in the meeting, the head of the company brought up
the notion of an Alien prequel and asked if I had any thoughts on it. I
hadn't prepared for that and hadn't developed a story, but I found in
the moment that I had a lot of opinions about it. I thought there was
only one way you could go. So I started riffing in the room and held
forth for 30 to 35 minutes on what the shape of the story should be and
what kind of things we could do that hadn't happened before.


The medpod scene
The medpod sequence is one of the reasons I got the job in the first place.
It's one of my favourite scenes and it's visually realised in an
extraordinary way.

One of the things I realised was that we hadn't seen anyone
survive a classic Alien chest bursting. And I was really intrigued by
the notion that a character might be infected by the parasite and know
that it was coming, know they had a timeframe of a few hours, and that
we would have set up previously a nearly omnipotent medical device,
designed to extend life for explorers in foreign places. Our heroine
would have a short time to get to the machine and extract the thing
inside her. It was a very gory sequence and it plays out very much like
the sequence in the film. The main difference is in choreography. At the
end of the sequence as I first conceived it, the heroine manages to get
the creature extracted from her and it is expelled from the pod and
she's sealed inside, whereas in the final film it goes the other way.

Then she lapses in and out of consciousness for a number of hours as the
machine puts her back together. As she comes back to consciousness, she
sees the thing growing in the cabin outside and even killing people. So
by the time she emerges from the pod eight hours later, the thing is
abroad in the ship and big enough to be a huge danger. That was the
original conception of the medpod scene.

In the final film,
obviously, that monster has been de-Alien-ised and become something a
little more new and hybridised. And it's trapped inside the medpod while
she rolls out, and it grows into something dangerous that's pushed to
the end of the film.

As for how she recovers from her surgery so
fast - well, it was more of a protracted process in my original notion.
My script underwent a number of major evolutions as we were working on
it, and then Damon came in and made further changes still. But that
sequence and its place in the story was one of the anchors.

The ever-changing xenomorphs

I wrote five different drafts of the script, working with Ridley very
closely over about nine months. And even as we were working, we were
constantly toying with the closeness of the monsters in the film to the
original xenomorph. You can see an interesting balance, even looking at
the movies in the Alien franchise, between homage and evolution. In
every film you'll see that the design of the Alien shifts - the shape of
the carapace, the shape of the body - and some of that is to with new
technology available to realise the monsters, but a lot of is just a
director's desire to do something new.

And so he was always pushing for some way in which that Alien biology could
have evolved. We tried different paths in that way. We imagined that
there might be eight different variations on the xenomorphs - eight
different kinds of Alien eggs you might stumble across, eight kinds of
slightly different xenomorph creatures that could hatch from them. And
maybe even a rapid process of evolution, still ongoing, in these Alien
laboratories where these xenomorphs were developed. So Ridley and I were
looking for ways to make the xenomorphs new.

We did a bunch of
things that are still represented in the final film. We toyed with the
notion that the xenomorphs might have a soft carapace like a
soft-shelled crab, and be flexible and able to squeeze through cracks;
that they might be pale rather than black; that they might retain inside
some gelatinous cowl some resemblance of the human being in whom they'd
incubated. We played with a lot of ghoulish notions like that.

Different head shapes - we toyed with a peaked head shape that you actually see
in the creature that hatches from the Engineer at the end of Prometheus.
And Ridley is a great and ghoulish collector of horrible natural
oddities, real parasites and predators from the natural world. He had a
tremendous file of photography of real, ghastly creatures from around
the world - they're chilling, some of them! He would tell these tales
with relish, of wasps that would drill into the backs of beetles and
plant larvae, or become mind-control creatures. Terrible things happen,
especially the smaller you get. As you get into the insect world or the
microbial world, savage atrocities are perpetrated by one creature on
another. And Ridley was thrilled with all of them. They inspired a lot
of the designs and a lot of the ideas we tried.

Finding a new menace
The creature did change in some pretty dramatic ways from draft to draft.
But the most dramatic change was the removal of the xenomorph from the
film. That was a shift that happened at the same time as I stepped off
the film. A lot of that push came from the studio very high up; they
were interested in doing something original and not one more franchise
film. That really came to a head at the studio - the major push to focus
on the new mythology of Prometheus and dial the Aliens as far back as
we could came down from the studio.

So one of Damon's major jobs
when he came onboard was to replace the menaces of the xenomorphs with
other things. Largely the other menaces in the film were present in my
drafts as well - there was a black mutagenic compound that could change
people in unpredictable way, Fyfield did morph into a monster and become
a real danger in his own right, and of course the Engineers, the Space
Jockeys, proved to be terribly dangerous creatures. In my draft, as
well, we did resurrect one and he tore off David's head. Much of the
mayhem of the final film was present in the drafts I wrote, but the
xenomorphs were the major change, as well as the stockpiling of this
black liquid as opposed to Alien eggs.

I did have facehuggers in
my original draft. David, as he began to get fascinated by the science
of the Engineers, doesn't deliberately contaminate Holloway with a drop
of black liquid. Instead, Holloway hubristically removes his helmet in
the chamber, is knocked unconscious, facehugged and wakes up not knowing
what had been done to him, and stumbles back into the ship. In my
draft, he returns to his cabin, is embraced by Shaw, who is delighted to
see him having feared that he had died, and the two of them make love.
And it's while they're making love that he bursts and dies. So that
lovemaking sequence echoed my original lovemaking sequence where he
explodes! It was messy.

Subsequently, David, fascinated by these
creatures, begins delaying the mission and going off the reservation on
his own, essentially because he thinks he really belongs with the
Engineers. They're smart enough and sophisticated enough, great enough,
to be his peers. He's harboring a deep-seated contempt for his human
makers. So at one point Shaw goes to stop him and David ties her up and
deliberately exposes her to a facehugger. He caresses an egg open and
out comes a facehugger. David doesn't smell like a person - his breath
isn't moist - so he can handle the thing like a kitten. It doesn't want
him; it's not interested. But then he exposes it to her and it goes for
her like a shot. He toys with her for a bit and then lets it take her.
That, in my draft, was how Shaw was implanted with the parasite that she
had to remove with the medpod sequence.

David and Shaw
In my draft David was a little more bloody-handed and the scene with his betrayal was a little more baroque.

I left the two of them on the surface of that planetoid. It was plain
that David and Shaw were going to have to work together and deal with
one another if they were to survive. That one shot of the ship taking
off in the finished film really focuses you on a particular outcome,
whereas my ending was much more open as to what was going to happen
next. But it was very much about this shattered android and this scarred
woman being left with no-one but each other to carry on with.

I
did have a plan for multiple films and the conversations I had with
Ridley was about a new franchise, from the beginning. We talked about a
possible trilogy, or a duology, but more often as a trilogy. And I did
have pretty broad notions as to how we were going to get from this world
to the original Alien - the baton pass, closing the circle, if you
will. So yes, I did have plans for two other films. I came up with an
even more twisted sequence than the Medpod, but I cannot tell you what
happens...

My vision of the trilogy would have involved the
arrival of the Yutani Company and a couple of other major plays around
the Engineers themselves: the revelation of an additional grand Engineer
design, and the possibility of seeking an Engineer homeworld. That shot
of the ship flying at the end offers a lot of creative ways to play
with this. But it feels like it brackets you into the search for the
Engineer homeworld and home civilisation. That's an interesting
challenge.

[Ray]

^ so much

[Necrometer]

I love the idea of David rolling around with an indifferent facehugger as a pet, though it makes him more of a blatant villain.

[fallbacktostone]

In my
draft, he returns to his cabin, is embraced by Shaw, who is delighted to
see him having feared that he had died, and the two of them make love.
And it's while they're making love that he bursts and dies. So that
lovemaking sequence echoed my original lovemaking sequence where he
explodes! It was messy.

[Honky Kong 64]

page rules

[Necrometer]

[Ray]

i'm glad they used real fifield instead of CGI fifield, but everything else they should've left in. the extended engineer stuff was way better and less cheesy than i thought it would be... so i guess i'm just saying the same thing everyone else has.

[Necrometer]

doesn't sound the same as:

FUCK ZOMBIE FIFIELD

[Ray]

yeah i guess the only drawback is the whole beaten-to-death zombie shit, but it's got nothing to do with zombies anyway and only with the alien within, man.

[Necrophilic Mallard]

the extra disc on the 4-disc version is basically just interviews w/ the makers, where they describe ideas for alternate scenes, set design, etc etc etc...a few neat nuggets.
Non-Lindelof writer is one of the first that gets interviewed, and he basically explains that he was too small-time, and that right up front he knew that a big-time writer would be in to "help".

Also, they do a voice over commentary together that I haven't watched yet.

[spacehamster]

Finally saw this today. It's... pretty? 5/10.

[Ray]

eurofag has stupid europinion

[spacehamster]

eurofag has stupid europinion

Okay, fine, Charlize Theron looked hot in that costume, and of course the tentacle monster c-section is awesome. But everything else?

I'd post a longer "review", but this thread's 30 pages long and I suspect everything I have to say's already been talked to death. What bothers me more than anything else is that Prometheus takes a truly genre-defining IP and marries it to one of the oldest, lamest sci-fi tropes - humans were created by aliens, and now they're coming back to kill us. Maybe I read too many comicbooks and play too many videogames, but I've lost count of the number of times I've seen that one.

That, and the fact that the climactic scene is two girls running away from a giant horseshoe, with one of them getting killed because she's running in a straight line. I half expected a "meep meep" sound as a space Roadrunner dashes past her.

[spacehamster]

But yeah, Mike: this movie really might have introduced a LOT of people to the "humans were created by aliens" idea. I'm definitely getting that feeling.

Maybe. Doesn't really matter to me either way.

As far as expectations go, I actually saw this now, weeks after all of the hype had blown over, still somehow knowing nothing at all about the movie, and I really don't think I had unfair expectations. Halfway in I even still sort of liked it. Most of the design work is really, really beautiful and I enjoyed all the little winks and nods toward the original movie for what they were. That just isn't enough if the script is such a jumbled mess that it isn't even enjoyable at the dumb Hollywood flick level.

[Necrometer]

They really butchered the movie for the theatrical release - they definitely filmed all the stuff necessary to make the story coherent and less tonally frenetic. I don't expect this to be any consolation, of course...

[Ray]

eurofag has stupid europinion

Okay, fine, Charlize Theron looked hot in that costume, and of course the tentacle monster c-section is awesome. But everything else?


That, and the fact that the climactic scene is two girls running away from a giant horseshoe, with one of them getting killed because she's running in a straight line. I half expected a "meep meep" sound as a space Roadrunner dashes past her.

I was kidding, I'll use any excuse to call you a eurofag. I agree with you about the "aliens created humans" aspect; I said earlier in this thread that they got carried away with that part. All that considered, though, they did it beautifully.

And that wasn't the climactic scene for me, it was the very last one

[spacehamster]

They really butchered the movie for the theatrical release - they definitely filmed all the stuff necessary to make the story coherent and less tonally frenetic. I don't expect this to be any consolation, of course...

Actually if they had taken their time in the second half and made it come across as less of a random parade of monsters that appear for five seconds and then vanish without leaving much of an impression, it would've worked a lot better. So I'd actually be curious to see an extended cut.

I agree with you about the "aliens created humans" aspect; I said earlier in this thread that they got carried away with that part. All that considered, though, they did it beautifully.

With a Dr. Manhattan action figure drinking a magic potion in the opening scene? I dunno, man. But yeah, if nothing else, that angle gets too much attention. I'm guessing the problems started when they decided to no longer make the movie about the Xenomorphs and focus on this instead. It didn't need to be in the movie other than as a motivation for the expedition and maybe a nice source of irony (starry-eyed explorers looking for our benevolent creators and getting eaten by slimy tentacle monsters instead), and now it's really the core theme of the movie.

[spacehamster]

Mike, what did you think of The Thing remake?

Haven't seen it yet. Why?