Mission to the Mars and Prometheus... similarity or something else?

When you think about those two movies, don't you get to the conclusion that Ridley Scott for the Prometheus gets so many ideas from the Mission to Mars:

Sandstorm makes people lose connection with each other...
The alien structure that is explored by humans...
Aliens to create all life on the planet earth...
Aliens to be taller than humans...
Turn on the alien machine with music...
Architectural big face of alien...
Hologram of the galaxy...
Someone takes an alien spaceship to meet them - actually our creators...

I mean Ridley Scott was so creative by stealing those ideas?
What do you guys think?

It's just a pet theory that I think some people have, about life being "seeded" by aliens. It was/is kinda in vogue in some Hollywood circles. It's kinda a gnostic thing, really. I think he just finds it interesting and keeps exploring it.

But he copied it together with other things from the same movie.

It's a fair critique, though I think at least some of the similarities are unavoidable when exploring the topic.

My bigger gripe is that it's kind of a pseudo-sophisticated explanation with quasi-religious undertones, and yet it doesn't really answer any fundamental questions about existence. It just inserts the middlemen of aliens, ultimately prompting the same questions about them and their intelligence that it's purporting to answer about ours.

It's a sci-fi theme, based on some speculative science and some actual observations. Presumably since Mars is smaller than earth and had less heat generation from radioactive decay than earth, its internal fires cranked down many millions of years before ours will. Not having volcanic and tectonic activity to generate an atmosphere and having less gravity, Mars is well ahead of earth in its devolution to a dead rock, the fate that awaits us. In addition, because it cooled more quickly after formation, life would have started earlier than earth and intelligent life may have had many millions of years to evolve while our presumably intelligent life form has only been around for a couple hundred thousand and is barely past using bashing rocks as tools.

It's gotta be tempting, as a sci-fi writer, to speculate that, being a dead rock, whatever intelligent life form was on Mars would have evolved long ago, perished with the planet and left behind artifacts that our explorers find. Personally, I prefer Klaatu as a Martian life form, the dapper English accented Martian from the first Day the Earth Stood Still, but that theme of going there and discovering the remains of what it once was is too tempting to resist. I'm surprised that there hasn't been more movies on that theme.

Mercury and Venus are way too hot and the outer planets, being gas giants, don't have much to stand on, so a temperate Mars with an atmosphere and water is the one to pick if you're looking for "life as we know it", especially if it looks like us and not like an intelligent slime mold.

Martian?

Somewhere in that vicinity. He implied that it was a "planet", though un-named, which narrows down solar system options to one that is inhabitable by "humans" (and a giant robot). He uses terrestrial air quite well, is OK with our temperature and is OK with earth gravity. He buys his suits at Brooks Brothers, or at the very least, Men's Wearhouse.

That pretty much rules out any other planet in our system and he never suggests that he has superluminal travel speeds. Even if he did, we would be no threat to any distant star system with our chemical rockets and meager speeds, even though we do have nukes. He didn't care what we did to our planet as long as we pose no threat to others, so that pretty much restricts Klaatu to the solar system, where our meager technology could infect other planets.

Yep...in the script or not, he's a Martian, probably living in a cave where they have trapped some air so they can live on that dried out rock. I don't envy Klaatu, even though he does have a giant robot.

I thought that he was part of some organization of a wide variety of alien races from all over the galaxy.

I think it was more based on the work of Moebius

Yeah, but he was a local guy. I don't think the script writers did much deep thinking about space travel.

Chalk it up to Jungian Crap-o-types floating in our collective meme-conscious.

The script writers could have mentioned he was a Martian if they wanted to. They were very fashionable in those days. But all of the other alien races whose federation Klaatu was representing clearly were based on other planets and moons, and likely not confined to the solar system. I assume there's some travel technology involved that maybe Klaatu, wisely, didn't feel like sharing with a barbaric technocracy.

My vote's in for the theory that Klaatu = Jesus. He came down from the heavens, put on the clothes of a man, a Major Carpenter at that, went abroad in the world as a beneficent ambassador, was apparently killed by a soldier but rises from the dead for a short time and returns to the heavens. Indeed that's further than Mars. So....is Gort actually God? At some point, "Carpenter" has to recall Gort because "there is no limit to what he could do". None of that sounds good....vengeful God stuff.

https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/in...view/1309/1708