Be Excellent To Each Other

At the time of Alien's release, the viewers knew that the crew of the Nostromo were a bunch of rag-tag commercial starship workers, so it made sense that they had no idea what they were getting themselves in for. They were underprepared, underequipped, and generally outclassed in every way. That's fine.

So why, then, is the Prometheus largely crewed by incompetents? It's even said in the film that it's a trillion-dollar expedition, so why would they hire a geologist with a scant disregard for authority, a scientist who shows the a tremendously high level of stupidity when faced with an alien creature, and a captain who (despite getting a rather bad-ass sendoff) leaves the bridge/comms room unattended while two crew members are left stranded out of the ship, thus effectively cutting off their communications?

The only other thing that bothered me was that when Holloway discovered his infection, instead of telling people and going straight to the medical bay, as a normal person would, he instead decides to try and hide it and ends up killing himself.

The "caesarean birth" scene was rather uncomfortable to watch, not at all what I was expecting. Not necessarily a bad thing, though.

Weyland's makeup job made me think of Vigo from Ghostbusters II.

Charlize Theron has a nice butt.

Why did David infect him at all? Clearly it was his intention to take a specimen home, right? But who told him to do that. The whole mission was apparently to save Weyland's life, right? So what did a specimen have to do with it? I mean, androids don't make those sort f decisions for themselves, do they? They do as they're told - by their "master" at least. So if the whole mission was to get Weyland access to an Engineer, what was that about?

I was also bothered by how he didn't tell anyone he was infected, and also bothered by how Ripley wannabe didn't seem to tell anyone "hey, I just cut a fucking alien out of my gut!" when she came in contact with the first person she saw. She just sort of quietly got on with it... Anyone care to offer an interpretation? Or was it just a plot hole?

I've just read on another forum that Weyland ordered him to do it. I never thought that at the time? I can't see where the evidence for that is mentioned either.

It wasn't that Weyland told him to do it as such, it was that he wanted to see if the "infection" would have good effects rather than bad, i.e. give eternal youth or whatever, so that he could give it to Weyland.

There's also the suggestion that David wanted to be able to create life.

Whilst it's clear that David is capable of independent thought, the idea that he was told to do it seems more plausible in my mind, but his mission is clear in that he will do anything to assist Weyland's plan so giving the virus/black tar as his own experiment might also fit.

And here's a few thoughts I want to get down:

The suicide crash: As far as the captain is concerned, no more alien shit is getting on board. When a great big space craft appears in front of him he immediately takes his own life crashing into it. I can sort of see why this would make sense but it's done in such a hokey fashion that it annoyed me. The New Ripley, whilst not the worse actress in the world, was really struggling to emote with any passion what was aboard. I wanted her to scream with venom IT'S GOING TO EARTH! THEY'RE GOING TO KILL US ALL! or summats; just enough to convince the captain and the cinema goers that the ship had to be stopped. It didn't work for me.

Plus good old Captain was putting in his best Luther performance when he should have been putting in his The Wire performance. Did he look shaken? Was this a man on the edge confronted by an alien threat? He certainly didn't look it to me. Maybe he wasn't given enough air time, which seems a misstep given that he alone becomes responsible for saving earth.

Then the whole spaceship-rolling-around-thing was just stupid. The amount of people who moaned that the two girls should have been running sideways as I was leaving the cinema was enormous. Yes, it might not dawn on you in a panic etc but it's such a daft sequence there's no need for a rolling spaceship in serious fiction when an audience would be just as happy with a nice crash, boom, explosion.

And then the last sequence seemed hurried. The engineer bursting in, getting face sucked etc etc etc. It hurtled by like an afterthought. "So she escapes right?" "yup" "What about the engineer?" "Dead?" "Nah, he could chase her and get eaten" "Fine, but hurry up cause I've got Pilates to go to in an hour".

That'll do. I still enjoyed it though. Especially the Caesarian even though the clamp looked more like one of those grab the prize machines at the fair despite the ludicrously advanced technology.

The holographic projections of the Engineers running through the tunnels only to die, and the projections of them using the navigation computer.

I get why they were a part of the film, for the "wow" factor (they seemed to serve little purpose other than that) but I can't reconcile why there were actually there on the ship. It seems absurd that the ship be able to record accurately the last movements of the crew and then play it back like that, especially given the prior knowledge that all the crew of the Nostromo had to go on (when visiting an identical ship) was a simple radio signal.

"I don't like the way they've renamed them. They're Space Jockeys, not Engineers!"

I hated that part of the story. I didn't mind the suicide but to then have a bunch of cave paintings mapping the way to, what, a military facility of some kind? Not impressed. It suggested that the engineers had come back over the years just to point out where they store the good shit. I'm sure they could of thought of something better to motivate them to look for the meaning of life.


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Thing is, the engineers weren't what you expected, really. They work in mysterious ways, so I'm not sure the cave paintings have to make logical sense to us.

So the crashed ship looks totally like the one they find in Alien... But it can't be the same planet and ship, can it, as there'd be the pod from Prometheus, etc. and that ship had an space jockey in the seat, and the space jockey engineer guy who I have to say I didn't warm to at all (he was a dick) got chest busted with his helmet on whilst sat in the cockpit gun thing on the bridge of the horseshoe Ripley etc found. But if, as this and all the other films tell us, the aliens evolve according to hosts, how come the alien at the end looked like the alien from alien?

The thing about the original Alien is that the extraterrestrials in it (both the xenomorph and the space jockey) are so utterly, well, alien. We don't know where they came from, or why one of their ships crashed on this remote dustball of a planet, and we don't know why it carries a whole bunch of horrible eggs that produce horrible monsters. Moreover, I always had the impression that whatever the space jockeys' motivations were, they would be beyond the comprehension of human minds.

So, in Prometheus, it turns out that those creepy, inhuman space jockey faces are just helmets, and that they actually look like comic-book humans underneath. Those horrible eggs? Bioweapons, just like the ones those stupid, petty humans use. And the ending of the movie hints that whatever questions are left are going to be answered in the sequel. It just takes away so much of the mystery and inhumanity of the creatures in Alien.

Also, while it's great as a stand-alone piece of SF, as an Alien-series film it's far too similar to Alien. All the flamethrowers and secret incubation within a crewmember and shady corporations and androids and so on. Too many disposable and forgettable crewmembers, too. Oh, and the forced religious theme was a wet fart.

Hulk going at Loki like a dog with a dead squirrel. Have to agree that "mewling quim" was a bit dodgy, though. I'm told Whedon was just seeing if he could get it past the censors, but as an insult it's still deeply misogynistic (essentially standing in for "cunt").