Prometheus

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This film really dissapointed me. I remember when we first got some trailers for it. It..looked..insane. Ridley Scott making a triumphant return to sci-fi I thought, how cool is that. The movie was just a slightly above average sci-fi action flick. I am very worried for Blade Runner. Very worried. Ridley Scott has lost it.
That's normal. It's statistics: it's like hoping for the next movie Spielberg directs to be as good as A.I. or Schindler's List, while there is a 5% chance of that happening that's not enough for you to expect anything great. That's why I am not worried about Miyazaki retiring, for instance, because I know that the probability of him making a movie as good as Princess Mononoke now is less than 5%.



Finished here. It's been fun.
^I agree. But I'm especially worried about a Blade Runner sequel because it's not necessary whatsoever. It would in a way tarnish that film's legacy, kind of like what Prometheus did to Alien(1979). BR is a cult classic, and it's obvious that if Scott releases a new BR film it will be catered to general audiences and will end up being some sorta generic summer blockbuster in the vein of that piece of crap Total Recall film. I can't think of any BR fan who actually wants a sequel or prequel.



^^ Blade Runner already has two sequels... Soldier with Kurt Russell and Prometheus.

If you check certain details, they're connected to Blade Runner.



Finished here. It's been fun.
^Lol wut. So if Prometheus takes place in the same universe as BR, then it takes place in the same universe as Alien. WTF. Ridley Scott just needs to stop, he's messing up his legacy and ruining the image of his classics.



Like Asimov, who tried to unify all his fictional universes into a single fictional world, now Scott is tying everything together, from the 2nd century AD of Gladiator to the year 2019 of Blade Runner and the 22nd century of Alien and Prometheus.



Finished here. It's been fun.
^ I'm gonna be outright and say it. That's an awful,awful idea by Mr. Scott. Maybe for somebody like Tarantino it could work, all the films existing in the same canon and all. But come on though. I'm supposed to believe that Blade Runner is now basically a prequel to Prometheus. Huh?



It's what I heard anyways. There's the connections that Soldier was originally written as a sequel to Blade Runner anyway... and even though it hasn't really officially been tied, it has been said it takes place in the same universe. The genetic Soldiers in Soldier are a branch of the Replicant family but using Humans and genetic testing instead of fully automated Robots.

But Prometheus has apparently been tied to Blade Runner through similar means. David, the droid in Prometheus... has been said to stem directly from the Replicants in Blade Runner with David in turn being a precursor to Ash and Bishop.

There's also a few shots in Prometheus with background props and stuff that directly mirror Blade Runner too.

With Prometheus officially tied to Alien and with Soldier tied to Blade Runner... and each of them being written as side stories, it's fully probable they all tie together somehow.

The way Hollywood works these days, the marketing received from such an idea is too rich to pass up.



http://www.slashfilm.com/is-promethe...nner-universe/

Get that. According to Prometheus, Eldon Tyrell was the mentor of Peter Weyland.

There are also shots in Alien that mirror Blade Runner too.



Finished here. It's been fun.
Well. I just died on the inside a little bit. So if replicants were the early versions of the androids we see see in Alien/Prometheus, then how come all androids have that stupid white milky blood rather than human looking blood in BR? So wait, does this also mean that those crappy AVP films are also canon, as well as Aliens and Alien 3? Smh Ridley Scott is very similar to George Lucas. He craps on his own franchises.



“Sugar is the most important thing in my life…”
I re-watched this for the first time since the theater run. Did a search on the meaning behind the movie and got directed to a reddit.

WARNING: spoilers below
barring what I may have misunderstood/ misinterpreted...Scott implied that Jesus was created by the Engineers and decided to destroy us after he was crucified. There were other ideas brought up as well...the goo being affected differently by each host...LV-223 = Leviticus 22.3...


The person that wrote that did a great job, but I think it's a wee much to swallow. It seems to ask a lot for the average moviegoer to connect all these dots...from a massive summer tentpole.



Welcome to the human race...
Well. I just died on the inside a little bit. So if replicants were the early versions of the androids we see see in Alien/Prometheus, then how come all androids have that stupid white milky blood rather than human looking blood in BR? So wait, does this also mean that those crappy AVP films are also canon, as well as Aliens and Alien 3? Smh Ridley Scott is very similar to George Lucas. He craps on his own franchises.
Presumably, it's because the scientists realised the folly of making fake humans that were indistinguishable from actual humans and so their new designs deliberately used fake-looking white blood so as to help humans distinguish between the two types. Kind of like how Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the first version of the Matrix was a perfect world but none of the humans accepted it because it was too perfect for them.
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



“Sugar is the most important thing in my life…”
This is the reddit I was referring to, which was lifted from the article referenced.

WARNING: spoilers below

This post goes way in depth to Prometheus and explains some of the deeper themes of the film as well as some stuff I completely overlooked while watching the film.

NOTE: I did NOT write this post, I just found it on the web.

Link: http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a lifegiver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.

Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.

Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: 'That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.'

Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.

And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'

So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.

Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.

The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.

And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.

From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.

If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:

Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.

So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.

So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.

The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.

Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable.

Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.



Does anyone buy this? It seems a stretch to infer all this.



Oh, absolutely. Heck, the quote included from Scott basically confirms it, anyway. The broad themes are downright explicit. I'm less sure of the more granular, specific stuff, though.



prometheus---- its ok, i rate it 5/10 movie



Does anyone agree that this film gives a different and better meaning after each viewing?
I saw it three times and i think every time i was liking it more...and u need to definitely watch the unrated director s cut for that