Paul the sparky wrote:

Just caught the ad for the DVD/Bluray which states the film has an alternate beginning and ending. Don't know what to make of that.

Now if they could just sort out the middle it might be pretty good.

That was Yellow Submarine.

Sounds better. FFS.

Better.

I picked up the special 4 disc version of this sight unseen last night. It came with 3D version and having not seen or heard anything about Prometheus, I put the baby to sleep, told the lady to go out and tucked into bed with my 3D glassed and a glass of water.

I absolutley loved the ride. From start to finish. 

I read g.man's initial post and while I agree with a few of his points, they just didnt bother me. It was a pure 'popcorn-fest' with an interesting message in the background.

This thread is massive and I think I'll spend some time going through this - but was the overriding theme for you  guys on why it was bad?

Plot holes did it in for me. Why did exposure to the black liquid do different things to the original engineer, Shaw, her bloke, the 2 guys with the snake thing, etc etc? No continuity. The same fluid makes an engineer disassemble into component DNA; does a similar thing but much slower to Shaw's bloke; transfers to Shaw but instead of doing that to her makes her instantly pregnant with an alien; it also turns the geologist into a killer crab zombie thing, rather than any of the above. 

The interview with the writer said he wanted to keep people guessing about what the black liquid did, so it'd become a conversation point like whether or not Deckard was a replicant. So he achieved that by making it  I lots of different things, rather than by doing anything good. 

Gman's biggest complaint sat with me as well. One conversation and the captain agrees to kill himself and his crew? No way; EVERYONE would have raced them back to earth and had a think about it on the way.

Yup, true. What grated is how easily we all thought of ways to plug them; like gman's plan, if David infected Charlize Theron instead of the other guy it would have made sense given all the "he's like a son to me" stuff. Then, when the captain nailed her, he would have been infected; giving him much more reason to consider a suicidal course of action. 

Likewise, the studio insistence to remove aliens as per the Empire interview above makes things more incoherent, but there still were ways to pull out a purpose for the black goo and make it a bit more explicable.

Kow wrote:

The black goo made different things in different ways each time. It was completely unpredictable and I think that was the point. Nobody knew what life it would come up with, which is why the engineers couldn't handle it and why David was fascinated with it - it meant creating something genuinely new.

So why'd the engineer drink it at the start?

It just seemed to be a suicide to me. Maybe it always effects the Engineers the same way.

But I'm with you, google. The film falls apart on closer inspection, but then so does Aliens, and so do most Hollywood films, it was still good fun.

Stills I've seen suggest it was some sort of life-giving ceremonial suicide.

Elmlea wrote:

Kow wrote:

The black goo made different things in different ways each time. It was completely unpredictable and I think that was the point. Nobody knew what life it would come up with, which is why the engineers couldn't handle it and why David was fascinated with it - it meant creating something genuinely new.

So why'd the engineer drink it at the start?

He drank it to seed Earth with his DNA.  Why is left for another film, I guess.  And that goo could very easily be something quite different (less advanced?) than the stuff the Engineers were messing around with on LV-223.  There is, after all, millions of years between the two instances.

Yeah there seems to be some frustration. I don't hear many people talking about Moon and saying wait, human cloning is impossible so this film is bullshit.

I had high expectations and while they weren't fully met, I thought the film was pretty good. Definitely enjoyable.

I would also have been the first to jump on it if it hadn't impressed me.

Raiziel wrote:

Elmlea wrote:

Kow wrote:

The black goo made different things in different ways each time. It was completely unpredictable and I think that was the point. Nobody knew what life it would come up with, which is why the engineers couldn't handle it and why David was fascinated with it - it meant creating something genuinely new.

So why'd the engineer drink it at the start?

He drank it to seed Earth with his DNA.  Why is left for another film, I guess.  And that goo could very easily be something quite different (less advanced?) than the stuff the Engineers were messing around with on LV-223.  There is, after all, millions of years between the two instances.

Yeah, I thought he was the seed for life on that planet; but if it did that with him, and with Holloway (was that Shaw's boyfriend's name?) albeit much slower, why did it do something else to Fyfield? The engineers have human DNA, so how could it behave differently?  The idea that it was some other, in associated lack liquid is just lazy on behalf of the writers.