"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 like to go into a movie with as few expectations as possible and hear as little about it as possible. This has never bit me in the ass as hard as Prometheus. I don't like horror(?) movies, haven't seen any other Alien movies, and had assumed it was about Greek Mythology. 😆
The story and ideas were great. I loved the abortion. Michael Fassbender was appropriately creepy.
However, this is the movie where the Prometheus School of Running Away came from.
Prometheus is a great example of "what could have been". Great themes, fantastic visuals, some cool ideas, but... I don't know what the word/phrase is but the people, their motivations and actions are almost all just ridiculous.
To call it all off, they just abandon the interesting potential they set up by killing Shaw, all the engineers, and basically repeating the movie in covenant.
I still maintain that Prometheus was god enough, and hypes were still high for Covenant. And I liked the earlier concepts they had, but killing off whats her face before the movie even began and going in the direction they did made Covenant much worse than it could have or should have been. I still haven’t seen the new one.
I loved the abortion
I could not suspend reality enough to believe she would be up and running around and fighting moments after having her abdomen slit open. Have you ever helped someone recover from a cesarean?
I've had gut surgery, split wide open, couldn't suspend disbelief on later views.
But in the theater! LOL, my wife was pregnant with #2 and was seriously unhappy. "Why did you make me watch that?!" Uh, I didn't know?
Even better, she was pregnant with #1 when we saw The Mist and all the baby spiders exploded.
She always said she was gestating an alien. 🤷
For its first four installments, the Alienfranchise was most concerned with offering up a combination of horror and sci-fi action, and less concerned with delving into lore. Prometheus, however, goes in a different direction, and Scott uses the prequel to explain the origin of the Xenomorphs and the Engineers. Though the film earned generally positive reviews and has a 73% score on Rotten Tomatoes, these explanations demystified the franchise, a move that, in addition to a focus on David (Michael Fassbender), an android, proved controversial.
I’m in the minority, but I like the lore provided by Prometheus and the movie.
The Alien movies didn’t come across as mystique to me rather that they left me hanging too much on a lot of background.
I liked Prometheus, and I enjoyed the one after it a lot more. But they were both mixed bags, the horror was half assed and the im14andthisisdeep parts weren't thought provoking at all.
But yeah the lore is fine, imo.
I think the problem with the two movies (Pro. & Sequel) was mainly that it didn't give enough. So much lore was left unsaid or in 15-30 second scenes which while extremely carefully laid out and awesome, felt too divorced from the plot for the average viewer.
Wasn’t this supposed to be a trilogy? We got Covenant, where’s the third movie?
Monsters remain scary as long as the audience doesn't know much about them because the imagination is always scarier than the reality. Giving them a backstory was a dumb move, not helped by the writing being absolutely fucking abysmal, but that's always been Ridley Scott's achilles heel. Give him a great script and he's one of the best directors around.
That was one of the stupidest movies I've ever seen. It's very difficult to believe that it was created by the same person who created Gladiator.
Ridley did say he was asleep at the wheel when making this and the people around him who are supposed to be bringing to his attention how bad it was were also also at the wheel and no longer work for him.
Not sure if he was blaming them for it or just explaining what was going on when it was made