Aliens - 1986 movie (was Dog Soldiers)

[Raellus]

Saw it yesterday. I was pretty thoroughly entertained but left feeling a little unsatisfied. There were a couple of significant loose ends, I felt, and, IMHO, it was made a little too complicated at times. Alien and Aliens worked so well because they were pretty simple, plot-wise. Overall, though, I found it to be incredibly suspenseful and visually stunning to behold.


SPOILER ALERT:

My wife, who was 28 and pretty fit at the time, had an emergency C-section with our first child and there's no way someone who's just undergone that procedure is going to be running and jumping around just minutes afterwards. Even if she was all drugged up and pumped full of synthetic adrenaline or whatever, your abdominal muscles are shot for a few weeks, at least. Not happening.

[Webstral]

Having waited for others to say something positive, I'll weigh in. I want my $14 back. My time could have been better invested seeing The Avengers again or just staying home and writing. Apparently, I'm a hater.

[Raellus]

You're entitled to hate. The studios really hyped it up the last couple of weeks- too much, I think- and the final product didn't quite deliver. I'd like to see it again to see if maybe I can pick up something I may have missed the first time.

I saw the Avengers in the theater also and I had some of the same problems with it that I did with Prometheus. The plot was too complicated by half and the baddies were so much canon fodder (a little of that goes a long way, IMHO, and Avengers ran with it for a good 20 minutes). Avengers did make me LOL a few times and I do like Whedon dialogue but, overall, I thought it was pretty overrated. Given the choice, I would see Prometheus again. My wife, who saw both with me, would go with Avengers.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I don't particularly like the superhero genre, too overblown for my tastes so I haven't seen the Avengers but I'm also one of the people completely turned-off by the fact that it's a Whedon movie and so I most likely never will see it. I think Whedon's incapable of writing a mature/sophisticated/complex script and falls back on the same plot points in everything he's written.

As for Prometheus, it seems it is absolutely one of those movies that you either like or hate. It doesn't spoon-feed people the answers (which is all too common in movies these days and something I utterly despise) and probably it's one of those movies that rewards the "initiated", i.e. those who know a lot about the other Alien movies and Scott's other movies (specifically, BladeRunner). It also ties in with the H.P. Lovecraft tale At The Mountains Of Madness and specifically with the legend of the titan Prometheus.

[Targan]

Ah, Prometheus. Saw it today. Much to love, but much not to love also. The future tech, the spaceships, the special effects, all good. The script writing, the behaviour of most of the characters, some of the basic science... utter crap. Any RL archaeologist seeing how the two married "archeologists" acted on archeological sites in the movie would want to slap them into unconsciousness. The lemming-like need for a bunch of the characters to throw themselves into life-threatening danger was breathtakingly frustrating.

*SPOILERS*

Hopefully a sequel will answer some of the big questions raised in the film. Like where the Predators fit in. I suspect the Engineers created the black ooze and other bioweapons as part of an ongoing war with the Predators. One thing that confused me was that the Engineers had near enough to identical DNA to modern humans. But some of the contact on Earth with the Engineers was 35,000 years ago in Scotland. There were no Homo Sapiens in Scotland at that time so the contact must have been with Neanderthals, and Neanderthals would have DNA with some pretty distinct differences to modern humans. So how does all that work? And how does it work that we have a fossil record showing the evolution of non-human primates all the way through to Homo Sapiens? For me it's pretty clear that humans evolved here. Did Engineer DNA spark the evolution of primates but early primates had spectacularly mutated Engineer DNA that slowly evolved back into modern human/Engineer DNA? Cough*bullshit*cough.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

** TOTALLY SPOILER **

Three things I'd like to throw in,

1. Prometheus is a sci-fi B-movie replicating an earlier Ridley Scott sci-fi B-movie (using the same plot points, including killing off all the crew until only one lone woman is left, and even the same camera angles/shots in some cases). And it's seriously funny - the man seeking eternal life creates artificial life and then gets beaten to death with the head of the "man" he created! It's hilarious!

It deals with "things man was not meant to know", just like H.P. Lovecraft writes in his Cthulhu stories - there are Elder Beings in the universe, some have motives that are utterly unknown to us and will never be know. The first movie dealt with a Lovecraftian horror, it can't be killed without risk of killing yourself, it's completely alien to us and it cares not one whit about us. It's for exactly this reason that Guillermo del Toro decided not to push ahead with his film version of Lovecraft's story "At The Mountains Of Madness". He considered that Scott had beaten him to the punch because "Prometheus" follows the same story.

"Prometheus" is not a "hard-science" movie, it's a sci-fi B-movie harking back to the 1950s with all the fears of atomic science unleashing giant ants, giant gila monsters or Godzilla to punish us for playing with the metaphorical fire. Just like the title hints at - play with fire and you will get burnt, play with the gods (or try to be god) and you will get burnt.

2. The movie is not going to give answers to everything, not to the characters in the movie nor to the audience watching it. One of the themes is that there are some questions you will never know the answer to, you must accept what you have and accept it on faith. All the people who saw the movie and are seeking answers are doing exactly what the characters in the movie were doing. Scott has given you no answer, just like the characters in the movie received no answer - you're interactively part of the story.

3. The Predators are highly unlikely to feature in any sequel as Scott does not consider them part of Alien movie lore despite the Predator movies hinting that there's a connection.

[Targan]

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

3. The Predators are highly unlikely to feature in any sequel as Scott does not consider them part of Alien movie lore despite the Predator movies hinting that there's a connection.

It's a helluva lot more than a hint. And once you've let the genie out of the bottle you can't cram it back in.

There's no reason you can't combine hard science and good science fiction. Heck, the original Alien film was fine as far as hard science goes. Same with Aliens, pretty much. Prometheus is what you get when a series of different writers go to work on what was probably a pretty reasonable script to start with and slowly give it the death of a thousand cuts. And it's also highly symptomatic of what you get when you've got a nice, fat, juicy budget and a target audience with a highly tenuous (if that) grasp of genetics, chemistry, ancient history and paleoanthropology.

I'm firmly of the belief that the best films (or TV programs or whatever) educate at the same time as they entertain.