Prometheus - The Franchise Killer

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My favorite part of the movie is that the cartographer is the first to get lost, the biologist is the one that wants to touch an alien life form with no protective gear, testing or study and the leader refuses to lead. Absolutely beautiful.

Oh and don't forget about her having a c section with the abdominal muscles cut through and then stapled together. Then 5 seconds later she's jumping around like nothing happened.

I'll never get over how after Shaw has her episode in the surgery machine and is covered in goo and struggling to walk in the ship, no one asks her what the hell happened to her

The funniest moments in that thing is when the captain, facing a post prod added 3D hologram detailed map with shining dots corresponding to his crew positions, is first asking in his communication : "where are you ?"

Prometheus was a master class in meta horror. Watching a character you have emotional investment in die leaves an impact, but watching a beloved childhood franchise die is a whole other level.

When the cave scientist with cave-mapping robots got lost in that very uncomplicated cave, I lost faith in cinema as a medium.

"But then it all goes wrong and they both lie down for a while" in such a patronising tone never fails to crack me up.

Did anyone else notice that the Prometheus just happened to approach the planet exactly, precisely where the engineers were? What are the chances of that?

Legit feels like I'm being explained the plot by a guy at the end of the bar. Well done.

"Where a giant squid makes violent one-side love to the bodybuilder" The best line.

When I read that Ridley Scott was returning to direct another Alien movie I was so excited. I followed every bit of news about the production that I could find. And then I learned that Damon Lindelof had gotten involved in the writing, and I thought, "Oh no." But it wasn't just Lindelof's incompetence as a hack writer, it was sadly Ridley himself. I don't understand how you can go from directing one of the most successfully mysterious films about something truly alien and then return to dumb it all down, explain all the mystery, and worse--make it all so disappointingly human-centric. However, I do think the franchise started down this road with James Cameron's sequel. In the original film, we don't know what this alien thing is. We have no context for it, no explanation for it, no origin story, nothing. It's just this incredibly hostile, repulsive, strangely intelligent and apparently sadistic thing that humans unfortunately happen to stumble across. In Aliens, James Cameron starts us on this road of explaining everything by using the bug metaphor for the alien. It lives in hives, these things are just worker drones, they serve a queen--just like ants and bees! And just like that you've tarnished the mystery.

Damn, this movie and Covenant made me think of how smart the leader in Sphere was when he told the crew he wasn't sure about the atmosphere so the masks needed to stay on. And ironically I think the air in the ship they were exploring was actually safe.

The part where the biologist tries to pet the snake is where I mentally checked out of this movie. I don't care how dumb or learning disabled you are, if you come face to face with a beefy hissing space cobra, your first instinct is not going to be to pet it. I can overlook plot contrivances or character decisions made for the sake of keeping things moving, but when they're not even acting like functional human beings that's just too big of an ask from the writers for me to buy into.

Number-One Rule of Cosmic Horror: "A good mystery always trumps a lousy answer."

Prometheus will always be dear to my heart because it's the first movie I can recall getting angry at and screaming at the TV, no movie has done that to me before

It’s weird because the snake scene could easily have written it so that the snake attacked them without them aggravating it. They are trapped in the room, the snake appears first wriggling before the surface, they freak out when they see it and try and get out but the door is locked and it gets them. Much more scary and what would actually happen. Despite the flaws of the film I actually really enjoyed it for the visuals, tone, tension, score and the overall idea of the engineers, who they were, did they create us etc. it is weird that there is so much stuff that is either silly, makes no sense, creates more questions that don’t get answered. Even WEIRDER that covenant abandoned following up on most of the plot and just did a slasher film so we’ll never get answers to things that were set up. Very interesting to look back at retrospectively.

Then there's Covenant: "In space, no one can hear you cringe"

Ohh yes! The best kind of scientists in movies: the stupid ones.

The amount of times I watched this review is more than the actual movie (which is weird since I am a huge Alien fan)