Why Alien Is Awesome (but Prometheus Is Probably Not)

[aztecravemonkey]

Anyway, rounding out my "God I hate everything" period, I'd like to spend a few minutes being annoyingly pretentious again by going "SCI-FI FIIIIIILMS." It's also the launch of my brand-new tag, analysis, which is apparently going to be filled with whatever pretentious writing that can be passed off as critique of some kind on fandom or literature

Comments

[aztecravemonkey]

Why not? Computer display screens have been effective in science-fiction television and movies for years before the upwards trend of "LOL SHINY DISPLAYS MEANS SCI-FI." In fact, by not overusing displays, you avoid the continuity pit of trying to explain why the original Alien movies seem less futuristic than the movie supposedly taking place years before them. "But Jax!" you might exclaim. "1970's special effects weren't capable of producing mid-air holograms!" At which point I motion to the fact that non-CGed special effects were kinda kickass back in the day, so they actually could have pulled it off with enough creativity. They just didn't because that wasn't really the point.

Also, to go back to something I said earlier, Ridley Scott establishes that this is a prequel that explains where that ship in the original Alien movie came from. So, yeah, it's connected. How closely it's connected to the other movies is up to speculation, but the fact is that it's part of the canon timeline and is, essentially, meant to be part of the spirit of the Alien universe.

As for lumping it in with the claims about Twilight, I never said you had to read them and understand the inherent problems within them. I said that you have to read or otherwise understand the inherent problems within them. Slight difference there, and here's why. You can still have an educated opinion about a book without having read it so long as you've done your homework in the meantime. (Interesting fact: This is how a lot of college-level literary criticism works if you're an English major. Professors don't actually expect you to read a work all the way through and analyze the entire shebang with intense depth. They typically expect you to read enough to have an understanding but use supplemental material and discussions within a class to further your grasp on the work.) I've never read the Twilight books (past half the first one and snippets of the others), but I understand what's wrong with them by reading excerpts and analyses from both sides of the argument. I'm able to pass judgment on them, then, just because I know enough about what happens in them (as in, I know the plot, the characters, and the writing styles from both samples of Meyer's work and thorough lit crit) to get why they're problematic. It's pretty much the same principle here. I know enough about modern movie trends to know that I don't have high hopes for a summer blockbuster, and I can tell from both summaries (as I've said in my post, I've seen stills, but I've also read reviews) and the trailer that it's not going to be something that I think would fit with the Alien franchise.

[diddy106]

I remember reading that Cracked article and yes you are right that you can achieve some pretty cool stuff without using CG. It's just my opinion that if the technology was there to present these scenes in this manner, there's no point in not doing it. You might say that this presents a continuity problem, well you said it yourself, the ship in Alien was pretty much a Tow Truck. Prometheus is a scientific exploratory vessel, understandable that a ship like that would have better tech than a Tow Truck.

Computer screens and other methods have been effective in the past, sure. But I prefer watching Michael Fassbender wander around a holographic map of the universe and looking at what's important. I prefer the characters grouping around a scanned map of the building/pyramid thing to get a better look at it's structure. I've not heard anyone complain about the same stuff in Iron Man/The Avengers and that's supposed to be set in a universe that (whilst a little more technologically advanced) is still pretty much the same as ours but with super powers. Prometheus at least has the ability to say, "Lol, future."

Also, I seem to have a problem of getting the gist of what you say, but not quoting you quite so perfectly xD My bad. I still think you should go see the film (or at least wait until it comes out on DVD or god forbid, watch it online) As glass said, it might suitably impress you.

I also wasn't aware of the extent of the links between the two films, so I apologise for my misinformation on that point as well.

Alien is a great film. Everything you said about it in the post was true with all of the chest bursting what-the-hell-ness, the perceived calm, the atmosphere, the build-up. And I'm sure if I ever feel the need to procreate, I'll have fun giving my children nightmares by showing them what films were like "back in my day, but not really 'cos I was born in 1990". It stands up well today as a Sci-Fi/Horror film.

...but, there's a part of my brain that just doesn't like it when people insist that old things are better because they came first, (unless of course there's a clear decline in quality, the Duke Nukem series being one of them). People who say Pokémon Red/Blue is the best game annoy me, yes it's got the nostalgia factor, but it is not a better game than Gold/Silver, which isn't as good a game as Ruby/Sapphire, which isn't a better game than Diamond/Pearl, which isn't a better game than Black/White. The pokémon series has seen a clear increase in quality in terms of gameplay, balancing, graphics, writing, features, ease-of-use etc. My personal favourite game is Emerald, but I can clearly admit that it isn't a BETTER game than White.

And whilst that personal rant only applies to some situations (and doesn't transfer so well to film) it still kinda irks me, even though I know you aren't holding one of these opinions.

It just kinda saddens me that you don't even seem to want to prove yourself wrong, and that maybe you don't want to prove yourself right either. I am clearly not the right person to say or suggest this, being the poster child for procrastination and indecisiveness, but I think you should give Ridley Scott the benefit of the doubt and see for yourself whether it's an Alien film truly worth adding to the universe. I learned a long time ago that internet reviews and critics can be stupidly dense at times (One going so far as to say that "Drag Me To Hell" was a wonderfully scary and suspenseful film that was fun to watch) and that trailer honestly does not do the film any favours.

Also, Noomi Rapace is a damn fine woman.

Anyways, to end of this annoyingly long and probably-should-be-ignored-and-deleted reply, have a club remix of the Fly Away song from Panty and Stocking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ltvCuci4TM

[aztecravemonkey]

Except that the tow truck came centuries before the Prometheus, so why would the Prometheus show that it's got better tech than the tow truck? Sure, it's a scientific vessel, but saying that it's more advanced than anything that came several centuries later is a lot like saying the labs of the seventeenth century have shinier gadgets than the average house of the twenty-first. Aforementioned tow truck didn't even have a navigation system that's quite as advanced as anything that showed up in the Prometheus, and why wouldn't it have at least one bit of tech that's equal in power?

Also, I'm not saying any of this for nostalgia factor, either (like you said, actually, but I'm just saying this to clarify on a general level). I'm saying it because the two movies do not seem to be connected in terms of spirit. This isn't like comparing Pokémon generations. I'm saying this is like what would happen if you took the Pokémon games and then turned them into the Sims for some reason. I'm not saying that it's comparable to the Iron Man/Avengers movies (which are in the same universe but still not meant to be the same technically); I'm saying that someone took the first Inspector Gadget movie and turned it into the second. I'm saying that the two are not alike, period.

In short, I'm saying that what Ridley Scott appears to be doing is taking a well-known franchise and attempting to revive it by glitzing it up and feeding it to the population. The problem with this is that he's attracting the wrong crowd. So you're going to have the equivalent of the Gen V folks who refuse to give the Gen I games a try because they're too boring, and you're going to have the equivalent of the Gen I folks wondering why they're looking at a trailer for the Sims.

It's also not unheard of for directors to take a nose-dive in terms of quality, especially when they get famous. Shyamalan, anyone?

My point is that I have my apprehensions about the movie, and I have reasons why I don't want to see it. I don't get why people keep being so astonished that as an Alien fan, I just don't care about seeing a movie that's advertised as a generic sci-fi. No, I'm not going to be spending my money to support crappy Hollywood trends of any kind, including trailers that clearly pander to audiences and insult their intelligences. The entire reason why I wrote this post was to express those feelings because literally everyone I know offline (and some on) is wondering why I don't want to go see it. Prometheus, to me, is not a workable extension of the Alien franchise, so why would I want to bother wasting my time and money on something that I already know isn't going to be what I hoped would come out of bringing the Alien franchise to the twenty-first century (outside AvP, which doesn't count)? Trailers are meant to be the first snapshot of a film, the advertisement that draws in a crowd. If it just looks generic and boring to me, why would I bother? That would be like someone hating the Twilight trailer and going to see it anyway. I don't have time or money for that kind of thing. If anything, it saddens and frustrates me that no one seems to want to respect any of this paragraph, which is basically the main point of this post.

By the way, who would pay attention to one critic and be done with it? I'm talking about considering critics as a whole, and frankly, not everyone was thrilled with it.

[diddy106]

I suppose I dragged this discussion out due to my own personal views. Perhaps I just don't want to see you as doing something that might annoy me.

My deal with critics is that there are some things about them that I can't understand. I look at the Star Wars prequel trilogy and see a set of fun films with boring romance parts which is helped by the great action. Critics see the Star Wars prequel trilogy and see a Lovecraftian Horror staring back at them. I'm all well and good with a critic having their crafted opinion, but sometimes it's like they watched a different film.

I watched Prometheus and I can't understand why anyone with an interest in Sci-Fi films would actively avoid it. I watched it with my dad, he's a Sci-Fi fan and he really enjoyed the film. Your wishes, however, are your own and I fully respect them.

I apologise if anything I said seemed forceful or antagonistic, I was merely confused.

[aztecravemonkey]

Sorry for being antagonistic myself. I really don't mean to be incredibly close-minded here. It's just that I am pretty selective about the sci-fi romps I go to see. There's just a lot of things that Hollywood's been doing lately that I just don't particularly care for. For example, would've loved The Hunger Games. It had a brilliant story and characters that I actually cared about. (I nearly cried at Rue's death. Nearly cried tears of awesome.) It's just that I fucking want to punch whoever thought those cinematography techniques were a good idea. I don't normally get nauseous while watching movies, but the five minutes of shaking cameras in the beginning almost literally made me throw up. Then, some of the better action was obscured partially or completely with shaking cameras or weird, ~artsy~ angles. Would've loved to see what was going on in the climactic battle between Cato, Katniss, and Peeta, but nope! Never mind that it was very much a movie designed for people who have read the books (because things were left out that would've been nice to know, like why the Hunger Games were happening), but that's a minor complaint compared to the literal headache I received while watching the damn thing.

For another example, I'll be frank. While I thought Captain America was an okay movie... it was just okay. Just... the characters. The only ones I thought were seriously cool were Howard Stark, Bucky, and the practically nameless strike team the Cap led. The others were the generic love interest, the generic bad guy, and, well, the generic hero (but those last two are somewhat forgivable because that was part of the point, but still). Then, you have films that only looked pretty but actually told a trite or anvilicious story full of characters that outright sucked (The Last Airbender, Avatar, Alice in Wonderland). Or films that might've seemed awesome on the first time through but on the second or third time through, I've started to notice rather annoying bits about the characters or plot (Star Trek).

So I guess the short of it is that I don't really have that much faith in modern sci-fi/fantasy these days. Not the mainstream, Hollywood-produced stuff, anyway. There's a few titles out there that I liked because they made no pretenses of being anything other than full of camp (Men In Black III, The Avengers on a level, Iron Man thanks to its titular character), but basically, if it's meant to be taken seriously, it seems like these days that's code for "either fill it up with the trendy questionable filming techniques or unlikable characters running on a disjointed plot." I have a lot of reasons why I feel like Prometheus falls into the latter category (reviews, stills, the trailer, the mixed bag of Scott's latest film endeavors -- see Robin Hood and The A-Team), so... yeah.

If someone offers to show it for free, I might watch it while doing something else (the way I wound up seeing Avatar... by gaming at the same time and having it as background noise), but I really, really don't care to throw my time and money at something that I don't really have any heart to go see.