Going to see it in one hour. Excited! Of course, I'll let you all know how it goes after!

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Best fucking sci-fi film in years! :awesomex/10

Great script, great camera, great sets and, of course, uber-great directing!

Really good acting by all the Cast, Ridley really inspires the best out of them.

Good God, Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron were amazing.

Music was really great and classic Ridley in some scenes.

First 3D film I actually enjoyed for being 3D.


First spoiler has no plot, just some basic stuff that could be grasped from a trailer and rumours.

Spoiler

SFX were awesome and the tech was really exciting. More near-future than far. Laser probes, holographic charts, automated surgery, cool plasma guns. I really liked the vehicles and spacesuits. Nice stuff.

OK, interstellar-ship and AI robot was far future.

I think that Ridley did a great film about human yearning to find its origin, to what lengths we go to try to find the answers to the really Big Question of Life, The Universe and Everything and the possibility that the answer might be something that we'll not like at all and it might even bite us in the ass.

Second spoiler = prequel?

Spoiler

Definitive yes for Half. We still don't have the whole story.

Third spoiler = plot.

Spoiler

Naturally, not everything is as it seems with the Prometheus mission and it isn't as one dimensional as the scientists want it to be - find our creators, the "Engineers", and get answers.

Really creepy robot, David - Michael Fassbender gives a brilliant performance, fulfilling secret orders from Weyland, who is on board right from the start and wants to cheat death, accelerates the plot to some really great scenes and twists.

What they find aren't answers but an alien, Mala'kak = "Engineers", military installation researching bio-weapons which the Engineers planned on using on their wayward project on Earth - us. Not everything went according to plan and the Engineers there died except for one survivor who David wakes up, acting on Weyland's impatient orders, and it attempts to finish the project.

Shaw and Captain Janek save the day with style. Along the way though, Shaw gives birth to an alien (David's doing and squid rather than Volde-baby) which grows and in the end kills the survivor Engineer. She then sets out to find the other Engineers with David, who is now quasi-free from his tyrannical creator -Weyland, to find the answer to why they changed their mind about us.

In the end, we get a short view into how the Aliens originated, by crawling out of the now dead Engineer survivor, which was implanted by Shaw's baby.

So exactly, half-prequel.

Charlize Theron was human and daughter of Weyland. :S

 

Good to see it's as awesome as expected. Can't wait to see it myself.

 

That review is definitely what I was hoping to see for this movie. I have really really high expectations for this, and I really hope that it doesn't let me down.

I'm planning to see this in the imax, so yeah.

 

Spoiler

Despite what Euro's said, reviews have been generally mixed - from both audience and reviewer.

I honestly think that Ridley was far too ambitious with this project, and while it is a great film, it falls short terribly in many, many ways. The fact that many, if not everyone, knew that Prometheus was originally a pure prequel to Alien, which evolved into something else, tainted many peoples' views straight off.

It's sort of a disappointment, especially with the alien (both the xenomorph and 'Engineer/Mala'kak') angles - they, in my own opinion, were handled very poorly, and in very cliched ways.

On a personal level, the whole "Shaw was the xenomorph species' grandmother" pretty much fucking ruined the alien, in my eyes; it takes away...something which made the alien....well, alien.

Literally holding off on half the story (you know which bits I mean) in the hopes of being given the green light for a sequel, to explain the missing bits? Not cool, and it's kind of a douchy move. Something I would have expected above Scott.

His stance that everything (which includes movies and the expanded A/U) prior to Prometheus' internal chronology isn't really 'canon' is also fucking annoying; I know the two Aliens Versus Predator films were fucking terrible, but you can't just ignore them completely, unless he's tries to use the whole 'a new, parallel evolution of the aliens' angle (which is sort of implied by the xenomorph wall statue), which in itself is a very overused trope.

It could have been great, but at best it's merely good, mediocre at worst.

 

I found the film completely stunning. Definitely worth seeing in 3D for the opening scene. That one scene topped all of Avatar in terms of raw natual beauty, for me.

So much more to say, but I'll hold off until people have seen it.

Fassbender. <3

 

I WANT TO SEE THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS

EDIT: So I just found out this opens August 24 in Japan. Avengers. Prometheus. Why. WHY.





...At least we get the Amazing Spiderman world premiere :/

 

Saw it again the other day. Just as epic.

Best abortion scene in the history of film.

 

Saw it last night.

It was fun and enjoyable. I think it was largely amazing due to the setting. We don't see enough sci fi that really get that atmosphere and epicness of being in space on another planet to you. I actually enjoyed Avatar for the same thing (despite the rest of the movie).

As for the rest of it, it was somewhat 'meh'. David was the only interesting character - the rest of the cast were utterly stereotypical roles in a story like this. The plotline was predictable and straightforward. It was what you'd expect from that type of horror - everyone getting fucked over by the monster(s).

So yeah, fun and a good way to spend a Thursday night with mates, but certainly not a particularly remarkable movie, nor one I'd watch again. I do want to watch Alien now though, since I've heard that WAS amazing.

 

This explains everything.

 

^ This.

It's a good movie, but I don't think the horror scenes were really very scary at all. The acting was fine, but even stellar acting can't completely redeem cliché characters, which were commonplace in this film.

Spoiler

The worst thing about this film for me is that I found myself extremely irritated that we never heard a word from the Engineer and he just started rampaging almost immediately after they woke him up. I didn't feel satisfied at all with the complete lack of answers.

Also, are the xenomorphs in Prometheus supposed to have evolved into the xenomorphs in Alien over thousands of years, or does their evolution into Alien's xenomorphs take place directly after Prometheus's ending? I was a bit confused on this point.

 

Again, I'm going to echo Jarik here. It's not a bad film by any stretch, but it's not brilliant either.

Fair's fair. Fassbender and Rapace were excellent, and Idris Elba was good as well. The rest of the cast? Barely noticable, to be honest. I'd say too many people/victims to care about, given that you just know it's all going to turn into a monster movie by the end, but then there's just as many characters as in Aliens, and they were handled far better there, so... It isn't so much that they're bad performances, they're just stock characters for the most part.

It looks stunning - the intro in particular was jawdropping - and the effects are extremely good. There's at least one all time classic moment of body-horror, and it does at least have ambition with the questions about who we are, where we came from.

Unfortunately, there's a fine line between ambiguity to prompt debate, and simply leaving questions hanging because you can't or won't answer them - and as Jorm says, there's a distinct sense by the end that many of the questions that go unanswered are in hopes of a sequel.

I think the main problem is that this is a film by Ridley Scott. Don't get me wrong, I like his films that I've seen - Blade Runner is my favourite film ever - but the problem is that he also directed Alien, which is pretty much the definitive SF/Horror film. You can accept a lesser film from another director, but Scott needed to at least equal Alien, if not better it. Sadly, he hasn't.

 

I think this article shares your concerns (at least on page 2) and paints a good picture on why it was done like that.

tl;dr: Origin of Life is mysterious, so Scott did a mysterious film underscoring the fact that many of our most common and basic questions about life never get answered to our satisfaction.

On another note, I think that the most common mistake people make when going to see this film, is that they expect an Alien or better because of the prequel aspect. They're gunning for the thrill of the hunt (both ways) and what they get is this mysterious, unanswered Creationist bullshit which ruins the film for them.

That said, I liked Scott's vision of Sunday School and I'd sign my kids up to it in a nanosecond.

 

Hey, I'm not saying it wasn't intentionally vague - just that, to me (and apparently many other people, in this thread and elsewhere), the final product came across in a more cynical way than was perhaps intended.

And yeah, maybe people are being misguided by it being an Alien prequel. But you know what? There wasn't a single thing in Prometheus that was any better for the Alien connection; it could have been done just as easily as an entirely stand alone film.

The vagueness is most frustrating because, in David, they pulled it off brilliantly.

Spoiler

Why does he poison Holloway? Because he's acting on secret orders? Is he just curious about what the ooze does and, being an android, doesn't have the emotional engagement to realise that what he's doing is messed up? Perhaps he does have sufficient emotion to recognise Holloway for what he is, and regards him as a bit of a douche who might arguably deserve what happens to him? Why does he want to get Shaw's foetus back to Earth?

You never quite know for certain what's going on with him, and there are several explanations, but there's enough that you can at least come up with a satisfactory theory.

The rest of it? They spend half the film trying to answer a question that the audience has had answered for them in the first five minutes or so, and then the other questions kinda get forgotten about in the rush of monsters. It's not just that it's vague - I can deal with vague; hell, The Fountain is one of my favourite films, and it's still not certain how many realities there are in that film! - but there's just no effort to even say "Well, who knows?" With the ending the way it is, it really did just scream sequel hook to me.

It's perhaps worth mentioning that I swiftly lost patience with Lost as well, and Lindelhof had a hand in the script for Prometheus.