"We Were Asleep At The Wheel": Ridley Scott Reflects On Divisive Alien Prequel Prometheus
"We Were Asleep At The Wheel": Ridley Scott Reflects On Divisive Alien Prequel Prometheus
Scott shares candid thoughts about the franchise.
I see people praising the film, I must have fallen asleep too and dreamed things like:
The man who made the maps getting lost (well, he had a weird hairstyle and screamed like a madman when he entered, it seems that he was not a very serious man, it is clear that they chose him for the most expensive and important mission in history because... who knows)
The biologist who panics and flees two frames later takes off his glove (!!!!!) and tries to touch a clearly threatening snake with his bare hand, it has been a long time since I saw such a satisfying death.
A strange liquid about which nothing is explained but which, depending on the scriptwriter's convenience, kills instantly, turns you into a zombie, turns you into a zombie but with a delay so that you can screw your girlfriend and she has some kind of proto-alien.
Ancient cultures painted the constellation of that planet, how did they know it? Why did they paint it? It's supposed to be a military base for the architects, not their home planet, painting the address to a random military base from their culture makes zero sense.
The movie is full of religious references that lead to nothing, they cross half the galaxy and just arrive on Christmas day, what a convenient convenience that leads the viewer nowhere.
... ... ...
Of course, the scriptwriter is Damon Lindelof, so it's obvious that all the inconsistencies of the script simply lack a coherent answer.
Enjoy it if you can because this movie only manages to piss me off every time I try to watch it.
Thank you!
Dear writers, if you need stupid characters, don't make them scientists acting stupid in their own field of expertise!
If you need your charachters to be scientists, don't make them act stupid in their own field of expertise!
You can always have the geologist touch alien biology with bare hands or have the biologist get lost in the cave, but not the other way around!! (I mean you still shouldn't, they are scientists after all, but it's the easier pill to swallow)
This entire movie was a big pile of garbage and demystifying the xenomorphs did not help the franchise at all. The numbers for covenant weren't bad (just) because covenant was bad, they were bad because prometheus completely killed any drive to sit through a sequel.
Hollywood needs to stop killing franchises with horrible writing, don't buy and kill a franchise for quick profit, improve it, expand it. Invest in good writing and less people will notice the audacious lack of creativity in creating something new.
The biologist's and the geologist's behavior is realistic, though.
Source: I'm a geo-ecologist, I'm working with both.Biologists in sight of a new species will completely forget all their surroundings and drop into a state of child-like wonder.
The geologist was probably drunk.Regarding the religious references, Scott's intention was evidently that the architects created mankind, Jesus was an Engineer sent to course correct our development, and then when he was crucified, the Engineers decided mankind was a mistake. The script states that they decided to wipe us out about two thousand years ago. He revealed his intention in an interview in 2012 after some people had connected the dots (as I did while watching it in the theater).
The earlier scripts were much more full of religious references, to the point where the Engineer at the beginning is given the black goo in a consecrated ceremony that started with "this is the blood of our Lord."
Honestly, the movie never really worked in any iteration, and was always a bizarre direction to take a space horror franchise.
Lindelof is one of the hackiest hack writers on the fuckin planet and deserves all of the hate.
One name for you: Steve Irwin. Yeah, sure, downvotes coming in 3, 2, 1.
But we were asleep at the wheel. My advisors, who frankly no longer are with me, were asleep at the wheel, certainly. And I partly blame myself, except I was busy making other films. And so it was let go and it shouldn’t have been. When you resurrect, you better put your nail into the wall.
Gotcha, Ridley. The directors for 3 and 4 fucked up the sequels, and your advisors are to blame for Prometheus, and there's a little blame for you except not really of course because you were busy.
I thought Prometheus was neat. Far from perfect but the premise was solid and I was interested in the direction it was going. It's more of a shame that Alien Covenant kept all of the bad parts and kept very little of the good.
Same, it was definitely a fun sci-fi movie. I enjoyed it a good bit even if it had flaws.
Honestly Prometheus (the first half) was really good, I enjoyed the parts that had nothing to do with Aliens. The rest of those movies are a jumbled mess that, while somewhat enjoyable, make basically no sense.
OK the black goo was used to create the Xenomorphs, it was made by the engineers who were almost all killed in that one flashback, they were the genesis of life on earth and.... Idk it just kinda all falls flat for me. I think the aliens are cooler when you don't know the giant half-human-half-alien starfish had to mouth-impregnate an engineer and some rogue robot was the reason basically any of the aliens exist.
Yeah, I actually really liked Prometheus
These movies have fallen prey to the contiguous need by people to explain things.
Don't make scientists experiment on them. It's a bad premise and implies that these things can be understood or manipulated. Don't give me 60 minutes of boring shitty backstory about the creators that are somehow also humanities creators but don't like humanity etc etc.. None of that is useful to me or to making a tight horror film. It just muddies the water. Also, don't have people act like absolute idiots for no reason so that your story can happen. The space truckers in the first movie were in over their heads and made realistic mistakes and the marines in the 2nd movie were overconfident going in and were gonna serve the company if they lived or died. Both was believable. The hand-picked crew of your trillion dollar expedition to make first contact with aliens being a bunch of fuck ups is not believable and makes your movie instantly annoying.
Arguably we don't need more of these movies at all. You won't recapture the lightning in the bottle a third time and all the attempts make the franchise worse and worse.
But if you do need to make another one (and we all know Hollywood is out of ideas): No one cares who made the aliens. No one cares why they made the aliens. I don't care about architects and their goo. Just tell me a tight horror story with a new twist on the Xenomorph. Like say an egg finds its way to some planet with alien fauna that gives the Xenomorph new powers and now the colonists have to escape before the whole-ass planet is overrun by them. Imagine dino-sized xenomorphs or something.
People who like understanding the bigger picture like knowing where and why major plot points come into being.
Example: Arachnophobia showed us where the giant, deadly spiders came from. There was a clear line of causality from jungle to mating with a house spider (easy enough to suspend disbelief) to infesting the town.
If you're introducing a biological monster, then having a backstory, an origin, if you will, adds the necessary layers of credulity for any reasonably critical viewer. Otherwise it may as well be the hand of god coming down from the clouds and making a tree, a deer, a bush, a xenomorph, etc.
I went in with really low hopes, but ended up liking the new Alien Romulus movie, due to some of the reasons you outlined.
It's not perfect and has its dumb choices (uncanny valley de-aged android from Alien, stupid callback lines). But the characters are generally all solid, and there's just enough world building without getting too expository. And there's a new twist on alien morphology that was interesting and straight up good horror.
I love Prometheus and Covenant.
People please, don't downvote this person because they're wrong. Instead, refuse to upvote them because they're wrong.
I upvoted you because you're right.
I hated Prometheus the first time I watched it. 5-ish viewings later and I love that movie.
Lol this is like an 8k hour playtime negative stream review
Prometheus was excellent. I was literally so stoked about the new direction Alien was going in, and it's execution, but Scott got freaked out by some bad reviews, pussied out, and in his cowardice undid and killed off all the parts of Prometheus which were so promising in Covenant which was dogshit. Romulus, dogshit on a cracker.
Prometheus may even be the best Alien film ever made.
At the time of its release perhaps the original Alien was more inventive, but I’ve watched both well over 13 times each by now, and Prometheus has everything you get from Alien and more. The story of the latest film of the franchise felt like a money grab, and would’ve probably been better if it was adapted for television than the big screen. Ridley loves to spend time on world building, so his ego was probably hurt when Prometheus went in new directions while failing to meet the desired expectations.