I saw it on Friday night. I was actually really surprised how empty the theater was. We saw it in 3D at 8:30pm on opening night, but it was like going to see a movie that's been out three weeks on a Sunday early afternoon. Then again, the IMAX theater was right across and had an overlapping showing.
Regarding the movie itself, I agree with Pyro for the most part but came away feeling more positive than he did. The set pieces, digital or otherwise, are simply phenomenal. It is definitely one of the more breathtaking movies I've seen. But, as Pyro said, you already get that sense from the trailers.
The movie was mostly well acted, but I had issues with a few of the characters and some of the scenes. It is an overly long, and fairly slow-paced movie, but even with that I felt like they left out some important bits on the cutting room floor and didn't cut some stuff they should have.
Charlize Theron's character was a complete waste, though it's always nice to look at her in movies. One part that really surprised me coming from Ridley Scott was the whole "Luke, I'm your father" scene with Weyland and Vickers. First of all, it was really poorly executed. Everyone could see it coming a mile away. Worse still was that it basically was completely inconsequential. It didn't have any bearing on anything whether or not Vickers was Weyland's daughter, because Vicker's character was very wooden and undeveloped. And speaking of Weyland, he was a slightly less useless character. The supposedly posthumous hologram thing they did with him at the beginning , but then they reveal that he's actually in cryosleep on the ship. Again, the execution was poor. There wasn't a strong feeling either way about his character and so his physical, live presence just didn't really matter. He didn't affect the plot either way and his makeup was horrible.
In the end I'm very biased because Alien and Aliens are two of my favorite movies, but despite the movie's issues, I did come away being intrigued by Ridley Scott's new direction for the universe and wanting my questions answered.
I dug it. There were some problems, but no worse than anything else, really. Basically every character in Aliens was completely worthless except the ones who survived. The characters were paper-thin cannon fodder. A couple of the characters in the third film were halfway decent, but the movie itself got stupid after the first third or maybe the first half. The 4th was pretty much completely worthless, and if Joss Whedon hadn't redeemed himself by doing lots of great stuff since, I'd still want to crucify him for writing that monstrosity.
So yeah, I had my issues with the film, but it was still fun and the visual style was pretty great. The original Alien continues to far surpass all the rest of them in my eyes, and I do wish Prometheus had gone more that route, gone more for minimalism rather than tossing in a bunch of fairly gratuitous stuff, but it certainly was more on that side of things than any of the other movies. I didn't like the stuff Scott mentioned, and I thought the ending was sort of hackneyed, but enjoyed the exploration, the crazy creatures, and even the creature at the end—the alien, I mean, which I thought was kind of interestingly different and neat-looking
.
I was satisfied. If they dropped some of the poorly done or more comic-booky shit I'd have been a lot happier, but it didn't make so many missteps that a sequel couldn't take a more realistic/minimalist tone. Which is absolutely what I think it should do. Like I said, my favorite of all 5 films is Alien by a fucking landslide.
Scott: Mostly just the stuff you complained about, some of the too-obvious character stuff, or poor motivation, and the ridiculous idea of the old guy being aboard the ship
. Not that anything was really so awful as far as content, it was just carried out in this sort of silly and over-dramatic way most of the time.
I caught Prometheus (movie) on HBO tonight.
And yeah, I liked it - it was good and extremely well put-together (Especially on special effects and that stuff).
Like some of y'all mentioned...
some of the stuff was pretty predictable to me (seeing the old man hologram early on - my first thought was, "Yeah, he's alive..." and indeed, he was...)
;
and flat-out ridiculous & just completely unnecessary Vickers being Weyland's daughter
.
Despite some of its above missteps, the first hour was extremely intriguing w/ its ideas (i.e. going to find your makers); and the last hour turned more into a typical sci-fi action flick.
At/in the end...
...I couldn't help but smile, w/ the alien popping out at the end...
And oh, BTW...
That C-section scene was disgusting, hehe.
Bring on a sequel!