After the dust has settled, is Prometheus worth buying on disc.

I said:
I didn't see any connection with Alien, seriously. The claim is all fluff and nonsense.

It's a pointless film -no idea how it got made.
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My folks came over for the weekend and pretty much said the same thing. In fact, most people I have now spoken to have said it was a massive dissapointment.

I think I'm leaning towards just hiring it from Blockbuster or something. It's been scrubbed from wish-list.

(hastily replaced by the Looper and Dredd blu-rays :D )
 
It's a pointless film -no idea how it got made.
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I think it was along the lines of:

Alien - Sucessful, ooh we made money
Aliens - v sucessful - ooh we made more money
Aliens 3 - sucessful - hmm, we made money but not as much as we would like, try again
Alien Resurrection - Sucessful - ok, now that's not as much money as we wanted, going to have to think outside the box
AvP - Sucessful - hmm, not that much money, but still turned a profit, try again
AvP 2 (can't remember the other word in the title) - Sucessful - dagnammit, not enough money, what else can we do with this cash cow.
Prometheus - sucessful - yay, we made money and most people liked it (except for a small corner of the internet geek brigade (of which Chrons is part of))

So it is no surprise that they have done it, they used up all the Ripley they had, until she was being resurrected purely for the sake of a film (or as the plot goes, to get/breed the xenomorph) so they tried cashing in on two great alien franchises (predator being the other one) but that failed to rake in the significant amounts of money, so they did what all good hollywood studios do now, they ruined the end of a story beyond recognition, so they messed up the start of the story.
 
I'll be able to answer the question soon. Received a Blu-ray copy in the post this morning, as a present, so I'll try and watch it over the weekend and see*

Unless I receive something more enticing in between....
 
So we watched it tonight.

I'll let my thoughts settle before I say too much, but after the viewing I think it is a good film. Not excellent, but not bad.

I can see why it might have been as well received by people expecting a new alien movie, and there were some issues that made me raise my eyebrow a few times, but overall I enjoyed it.
 
I’m going to try and answer the question posed at the start of this thread:

When I first heard that Ridley Scott was working on something that might be a prequel to Alien, like so many others I was more than a little excited. And as events unfolded I could only wait to see just what he was going to come up with. Not really being able to see it in the cinema I knew I was going to have to wait until its DVD release.

Then the reviews started and suddenly all the excitement seemed tarnished.

Perhaps though that worked in my favour, after all the expectations were gone and enough time had passed that I could watch the movie as a film in its own right, but is it as bad as some people asserted, is it worth watching.

Well in a very tentative way, yes.

There is a good idea at the heart of the story, there are some good characters, some fine performances and the special effects are superlative.

But then we have the script, the meat of the story and the execution – oh and making it part of the Alien franchise. Some of it is appalling – I could start asking questions and not stop. Even bits I liked could not take too much scrutiny.

And it is all these things that make it much less than it should have been.

Is it worth watching? If you take it as a light bit of entertainment in its own right then you’ll really enjoy it. If you want a film you can analyse then don’t because once you start you won’t be able to stop, and not in a good way.
 
i watched it again and can see where this is getting a lot of grief. WHY NOT STEP SIDE WAYS INSTEAD OF RUNNING IN A STRAIGHT LINE?!?!?!?! i enjoyed it for what it was, but i honestly prefer to look at it as a stand alone movie that is not part of the Alien franchise. the connections are loose and stupid at best anyway. the space jockeys should have been left a mystery, these should've been different aliens all together. eliminating the link to alien all together would've allowed the creators of this film to service this film and not a whole franchise with 4 films and 2 crossovers.

i do love this movie, it was fun to watch for what it was, but the more i see it, the more i get the hate at times for it.
 
Why NOT make it officially connected? There are now supposed ties to the Blade Runner verse, so why o why not just connect the dots for his fans and that would be that. To put space jockeys IN the film and then say it's not connected...well that's just rubbish. Does he want these forum discussions going crazy so he gets a fan base built through controversy? Still curious about the deleted scenes, though.
 
cyrusDCmonster said:
i honestly prefer to look at it as a stand alone movie that is not part of the Alien franchise. the connections are loose and stupid at best anyway. the space jockeys should have been left a mystery, these should've been different aliens all together.
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It would have been better if he had told the story of the engineer Jesus outside of the Alien franchise. I would have accepted it then, though there would still be multiple plot holes (I think a 7ft tall bleached white alien might have been recorded in the New Testament if that is how Jesus had looked.) I actually wanted exposure about the Space Jockeys, that is how the film was sold to us. It actually explained little, leaving the explanation for some further sequels. This was all about the money. Being part of the Alien franchise made it a must see for Alien fans. Laying the foundations for further sequels to keep us going back.
 
Personally, I think this is a classic example of how things can go wrong when a back story is filled in. What once seemed mysterious and intriguing when implied suddenly become ridiculous when applied to film. The Space Jockeys certainly worked better when they were part of a mysterious past. Now, the fascination is gone.

I never came to Prometheus looking for another Alien film, I came looking for something entertaining and thought provoking. Sadly, I found neither.

One last thing - I don't blame Ridley Scott - his visuals were superb as usual. The blame for this mess lies completely with the script writer.
 
Looking at the OP's original question, for me the answer is:
DVD (deleted scenes) - no
Blu-Ray (7 hours of stuff, inc. alternative ending AND alternative start) - yes
 
Dave - the reference to the engineer as an alien Jesus, is there a reference for this, I think I missed it. I just assumed that they visited Earth in prehistoric times and influenced evolution from there... but I'm not the most observant sometime and might have missed something.

I've got all the extras to watch, but will comment if the deleted scenes add anything, or change things.

I'm slowly coming up with an explanation for things, and might post that as well...
 
SPOILERS

Right this the a I've tried to explain so of what I saw last night, a fine indication of the way my mind works, or a pure sign that I think too much...


As mentioned previously when I looked at Prometheus as something with a bit more depth, loads of questions began presenting themselves, and some observations that spoke of how badly constructed the script was, or perhaps to be more honest how badly thought out the script was.

One of the things I kept thinking about though was the film being a prequel of sort to Alien, and how does it all fit together when there is not really an appearance by any particular part of the Alien creature, just things that seem familiar.

This is what I have come up with, and I just wondered whether it makes sense, and connects it properly with Alien.

At the start of the movie we see something happening in, presumably the distant past on Earth. One of the un-helmeted Engineers consumes a substance that affects him on a genetic level, causing his body to break up and dissolve into the planets ecosystem. This spreads outwards, altering the course of evolution, so the dominant lifeform becomes, if not the Engineers, something that is certainly genetically related. (As an aside is it possible that the Engineers engineered the extinction of the Dinosaurs in order to make way for their own progeny?)

Back in the modern day we get to see the Engineers running away from something. We have no idea when this happened, only that it was in the past – and if it was enough to make the Engineers run, it must have been something powerful.

Although the catacombs seem to have no life there are sporadic readings, and it seems to have a snake like creature that lives in the black goop. This turns out to be aggressive, close to lethal and when wounded bleeds acid – the first direct link to the classic Aliens, although nothing like them. It also goes straight for the mouth and worms its way inside the hapless scientist – again something comparable to the facehugger forcing an egg into its host, only the full creature goes in. We have no way of knowing what happens next as we never see him again.

Later the android David takes a sample of the black fluid and contaminates Holloway’s food, and later when he sleeps with Shaw he impregnates her (even though she is barren) and she starts gestating at a highly accelerated rate. (Again although nothing like the original Alien, it too grewat an exceptional rate).

When the ‘baby’ is removed it is certainly not human, looking more like a squid. We don’t see it again until it attacks a re-awakened Engineer, but when we do see it, it has grown to giant proportions, easily big enough to overcome the Engineer, which it does by forcing a tube down its mouth. The creature looks like a giant facehugger.

Later the Engineer is ripped apart from within, and something that has some similarities to one of the classic aliens emerges. Different, but recognisable.

The only other fact we are presented with which is important to my thought process, is that the Engineers have apparently decided to wipe us out, and by the end of the film we do not know why.

Right, now this is where I attempt to string this all together:

In their time the Engineers were one of the most advanced forms of life in the Universe. For whatever reason they saw it as part of their mission to make their type of life the most dominant in their Galaxy and travelled to countless world seeding them in a manner that meant the most dominant life form was based on their genome.

As stated the way this was done was to dissolve their genetic structure into the planets ecosystem. This was done using a rather painful method that was started by taking a small amount of a black goop.

I'm going to guess that this 'goop' is some kind of artificial biological compound that interacts with physical life forms, not only breaking it down but connecting to new forms and aggressively altering it to become the dominant force, setting in motions that persuade evolutionary paths to follow the ones that lead that planet's species to become as close as they can to the Engineers.

At some point in their countless travels the Engineers picked up a parasite, which was accidently carried into their main supply of goop. Instead of dying, the parasite, which was particularly aggressive adapted to the goop, and its DNA began to evolve at an unprecedented rate. The parasite grew into creature that adapted to become the most perfect hunter of whatever dominant species was nearby, in this case the Engineers.

As it became apparent that the new lifeform was evolving to deal with any threat the Engineers might have become they were wiped out... hence the stampede as a supremely powerful species found something they could not control.

With its connection to the goop the lifeform continued to adapt, becoming the most pure form of what it was: a lethal killer whose biological imperative was to destroy.

When it comes into contact with humans it begins to evolve again, it's gestation in Shaw allows it evolve into something that will better deal with humans, but taking on the most lethal traits from the parasite, the Engineers and humanity.

Thus following through the human gestation cycle (at an enhanced rate) it developed a process that it could inseminate the human (facehugger) and emerge as a rapidly growing deadly creature.

Because the Engineer was bigger it came out larger than it would from a human, but recognizably as a proto-Alien. A little refining and the Alien's would be happily waiting for the Nostromo years later - especially if the 'Alien' we saw at the end was a Queen, ready to start laying eggs (or did the canisters get changed or used in the first instance).

And why do the Engineers want to kill humanity?

Perhaps Earth is where the virus that became the biggest threat they ever faced came from...
 
(SPOILERS BELOW!! WARNING!!)

Well, I finally got round to watching it this week. Thanks for the warnings, folks, it made it more bearable.

IMHO I actually liked it - until, that is, I began to think about it, and then it all unravelled like a poorly put-together Christmas jumper. The visuals were brilliant, the acting was okay, but the script - good grief - that was terrible. The story was a fair one, but I guess not all that original. If the script had been handled better, it would have been a fine film. It had all the makings.

There were just so many sloppy moments, such as Wayland's involvement, not exploring the role of David enough to make him menacing and logical, and the lack of sympathy with the characters as they get picked off one by one. In all honesty, after the dust has settled, I didn't care who survived or not, or even why they went there in the first place.
And that's an unforgivable crime by the script-writer(s).

Worth watching, yes. A repeat watching, maybe in a few years time.
Worthy of being in the same canon as Alien?
Well, you know that's the odd thing about Prometheus. After watching this I then watched Alien, and you know, it was all the more unsettling. Thinking that perhaps the Alien was somehow a natural thing, just not indigenous to that planet, was creepy enough when I first watch Alien. But to think that the Alien was bio-engineered by "God", like a cancer created in a laboratory, made it all the more uncomfortable, and quite horrific. Not sure if that's a good thing or not, and whether the purity of "Alien" has being soiled irreparably will improve the film, but I can't argue against the impact of the flawed Prometheus on the rest of the series.
 
Prometheus - defining the difference between a horror movie, and a horror of a movie.
 
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