Well, I finally got to see Prometheus at 12:01 a.m. on Friday. The reason I just had to see it at midnight on the day of its release was because I read on Facebook that they were going to give out limited edition posters (the one above) to everyone who saw Prometheus at that time. So yeah, I saw it.
(Spoilers Below)
I admit that when the movie was over, I was kind of disappointed. The guy sitting next to me probably was too. He just said, "What the ----." (I'm pretty sure you can guess which four-letter word he used.) I mean he didn't say it in a kind of serious way. Not like an "I waited thirty-three years for a prequel to Alien and this is what I get?" way but more like an "It could have been somewhat better" way. He didn't even seem to be very old anyway.
I just told my sister that Alien was better.
After thinking about it for a bit, however, I realized that I would never have thought that Prometheus was better. I'm one of those guys for whom nostalgia is a huge factor in rating movies. I mean, a lot of people might think that J.J. Abram's Star Trek was a lot better than any of the other movies in the series but I strongly disagree. It would have to be sixth in my list:
1. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
3. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
4. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
5. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
6.Star Trek
7. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
8. Star Trek: Generations
9. Star Trek: Insurrection
I admit that I never watched First Contact or Nemesis just because after watching Generation and Insurrection I realized that I didn't like The Next Generation.
Yeah, I'm not very old but for some reason I have nostalgia for things that are much older than I am. Like Star Trek: TOS. And Alien.
I decided to watch Alien when I read a review of it on IMDb. The review said it was awesome, basically. "The Mother of All Movies." ???? Here are the last sentences from that review:
So, what else? I urge all young directors to watch this movie a zillion times, as I've already done, and take notes all along. But not in order to rip off from it, as many others have done, but to learn, learn, learn, learn, and learn how a movie should be done. 'Casablanca'? You must be joking.
Oh, I almost forget! There's a lovable cat in it.
Rating: 10
????
Oh, by the way, that was all copied straight from the review on IMDb, punctuation and all. Read the full review here.
I do agree that Casablanca is very overrated. I mean, it's just a wartime propaganda movie. It's nothing special like cartoons that parody it might make you think.
But I don't think that Alien is "The Mother of All Movies." I'm guessing that "Mother" (Hey get it? MOTHER??? Alright, I'm pretty sure that was unintentional.) in this context means "The Best." So yeah, it's not the best in my opinion. That would be Blade Runner, another Ridley Scott-directed film. But Alien is easily in my top 10.
But wait, what? The cat was lovable? That stupid cat was the reason Brett got captured by the xenomorph.
So the thing is, it's kind of unfair to compare Prometheus to Alien. After I stopped thinking of Prometheus as the prequel to Alien (yes, I know it's not the prequel but I don't feel like mentioning over and over that it's not a prequel and that it just takes place in the same universe so, just for the sake of efficiency, I'm going to call it a prequel) I realized that it wasn't all that bad of a movie. In fact, it's actually kind of good.
So Prometheus is about the crew of the Prometheus, who are on a scientific expedition that has the goal of finding the makers of humans, who they call Engineers. The main character is archeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), who is kind of like this movie's Ellen Ripley. The other major characters are her love interest, Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), who is also an archeologist, and the android David (Michael Fassbender). There's also an executive of the Weyland Corporation (which presumably undergoes a merger, before the events that occur in Alien, to become the Weyland-Yutani Corporation), Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), and the captain of the Prometheus, Captain Janek.
So they land on this one planet that actually isn't the one that the crew of the Nostromo land on in Alien. They do find the Engineers but they appear to have been long gone. Anyone who's watched Alien can figure out that the Space Jockey from that movie is an Engineer when they find a disembodied head of an Engineer.
And throughout the movie, everyone but the main characters dies in various ways. One is attacked by this one alien that is kind of like a facehugger, one gets mutated, some get killed by this one guy who gets mutated, etc.
Now, about the dude who gets mutated. He's kind of like the Kane of this movie. And here I can explain the biggest difference between Alien and Prometheus. In Alien, all seven of the crew members have some charisma. You feel sorry for the six who get killed and happy for Ridley when she manages to blast the xenomorph out of the exhaust vents of the Narcissus. I think I only felt sorry for two of the seventeen crew members and they were the guy with the mohawk and Vickers. All the others just act kind of stupid, even though they're not scientists. I mean, really, how are you supposed to feel sorry for the guy who gets killed by the facehugger-like alien when he reaches out and touches it? When you see something like that, everyone knows that you try to avoid it.
And then there's the guy who gets mutated, yeah he's the Kane of this movie. Vickers doesn't let him back on the ship because she doesn't want anything happening to anybody else. This is, of course, like when Ripley doesn't want Lambert and Dallas to bring Kane back on the Nostromo. But in Alien, I felt pretty sorry for Kane. I mean, was anyone not glad that Ash didn't open the door and let them in? I was pretty glad when Vickers blasted Holloway (who is the guy who gets mututed) with a flamethrower and halfway kills him. I mean, he wasn't very nice to David and he was depressed and drunk and all. Not that I liked David either.
I thought all the actors were good. Now, I can't really judge acting. I never took a theater class or anything. All I can say is whether they were good or bad. So did they or did they not make me forget for a few hours that they were real people and instead make me think that they were their respective characters? So, it's the characters I disliked. Other than the guy with the mohawk and Vickers. I mean, Vickers is the only one with any common sense. I didn't think that this would turn out to be like Alien where there is a sole survivor of the ship. Near the end it became obvious that only one of the crew members would survive. Oh wait, I just remembered that David also survives. But anyway, I kind of wanted Vickers to be like Ripley and be the one to survive. But no, she gets killed when the alien ship rolls onto her. If only she ran to the side instead of in the direction it was going.
What I thought was really annoying was when Shaw wants to visit the Engineers' home planet (because the planet (or rather, satellite) that they visit is only a military base for the Engineers). Seriously? In half a minute one of the Engineers just managed to kill a few crew members and rip off David's head and she wants to go their planet? She was pretty brave. I mean, she gets a c-section without proper anesthesia and still manages to evade that same Engineer while she's recovering. Still, all the sympathy I ever had for the character was gone in the last two minutes of the movie. Or the second to last, because she's not there in the last minute.
The last minute of the movie is arguably the best. Remembering it now, I think I'll want to see the sequel in theaters. I was disappointed when no xenomorphs were showing up. It turns out that Ridley Scott already said in an interview that there wouldn't be any xenomorphs in Prometheus. Well, you do see a precursor to the xenomorph at the end: the son of Shaw. I decided to call it that because in the original, I think it was Ash who called the xenomorph on the Nostromo "Kane's son." Or maybe it's her grandson, because she gives birth to this alien that turns into a giant facehugger that attacks the Engineer that was pursuing her and inserts the egg into him.
So yeah, I'm very interested to see how the xenomorph eggs eventually end up on the planet they visit in Alien. I hear that they are making a new trilogy. I hope that in the last movie of this trilogy, they show the seven crew members of the Nostromo again. I hope that Sigourney Weaver's in that movie. Maybe she'd be too old to play a young Ripley but it would be cool to see her as someone in that future film.
Man, this review was all jumbled up, I admit. I was just using the stream-0f-consciousness technique and just tying whatever came to mind. Anyway, after all that, I think Prometheus gets 8/10 stars from me.
Can't wait to see the Blade Runner prequel.
