New Prometheus trailer (here be rage)

[gorfias]

Odd that the main corporate type appears to be a woman. The Alien movies were supposedly a metaphor for male aggression. (The Alien implants it's off-spring to a host, the off spring kill the host. The first one to burst out of John Hurt even looked like a woody.

 

[CAPTCHA]

I'm with the OP. The new edgy tech ruins the tone. The original film used its tech to subvert the future. It wasn't showing us as a enlightened spacefairing race and we weren't all powerful thanks to the wonders of technology. We were reliant on that technology however. It was the only thing that that could keep the crew of the ship alive, yet it wasn't enough to save them from the alien. No level of technology could, that was where the horror came from (as well as the rape horror). If the alien race they found at the beginning, who was so advanced it was more tech than man couldn't beat the creature, what chance did the crew have. The same logic can be applied to the second film as well, but here trust in the strength of the military and the higher authority is thrown into the mix.

The trailer for Prometheus shows all these gadgets and examples of future tech and the message it sends is "we've progressed". How far have they progressed? Who knows? You might as well start calling it magic, since the director will be able to pull any in a situation to get the cast through. Deadly space monster ripping through your bulkhead? There's an app for that.

 

[AngleWyrm]

I might just pay real money to see this movie in a theatre. It looks like they worked hard on making it both pretty and atmospheric.

Plot? Well you know, we go and we find bad monsters. Just like that world famous horror movie, Alien.

Characters? Little early to tell.

 

[the clockmaker]

Personally, I love the new look, as the use of tech that is concievable to the time of the audiance really helps to ground the people in the world. The sterile, clean world also lends itself well to the sort of primal survivalism that pervades the alien series. Think about it for a moment, when you look at the way the whole premise is set up, the prometheus is very much a product of our time, it is staffed by the best and brightest and is sent on a mission to discover the new and exciting parts of the universe.

Now take that and lay it into the way that science is progressing now. We are cushioned by our comfertable lives and the franly amazing tech that supports us. We, think that there is nothing that our science cannot overcome, no problem that we can't simply puzzle out. When you introduce the alien into the mix it and those sterile walls become streaked with blood it can be effective in smashing that delusion of safety by showing that all these amazing things are nothing in the face of the truely unknowable.

When I watch this trailer, I pretty much see a movie version of an Alistair Reynolds novel with all the inhibitor, blood spire, melding plague and clockmaker horror that that holds.

Or you know, things like plot, characterisation, themeatic underpinning, direction, scripting and soundtrack could be irrelevent in the face of the set dressing.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Odd that the main corporate type appears to be a woman. The Alien movies were supposedly a metaphor for male aggression. (The Alien implants it's off-spring to a host, the off spring kill the host. The first one to burst out of John Hurt even looked like a woody.

I believe this is the original image by HR giger on the basis of which he was hired to design all the alien concepts (I could be wrong). But assuming I'm not it might give you a different perspective.

Spoiler

The screenwriter actually said that he wrote the alien as a way to make rape imagery personally frightening to a male audience. Thus, I don't think the alien is male at all, I think it's deliberately ambiguous, because that makes it more unsettling. Heck, the costume was basically an elaborate dominatrix outfit with a big shiny black dildo for a head.

On topic. Seriously, can you not suspend disbelief for a minute? That stuff was the height of technology in 1979. It wasn't selected for kitschy stylistic purposes, it was just the stuff which was available.

 

[RJ 17]

Edit :
Dafaq i recognize on his shoulder ?
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6iW29w0sMV4/TjV9SN4SeBI/AAAAAAAAApo/QKNhN84aMlU/s1600/space-jockey-alien.jpg

LoL, Prothean with a Shoulder Cannon.

Anyways, I can see that you've got a valid point in the "This is supposed to be a prequel, why is there better tech?" category...however I really don't think it's that big of a deal.

 

[ToxicPiranah]

I think the major problem is with the consumers as much as the advertiser's. As a consumer you want the bang for your buck, so advertisers give us a large chunk of the story and in some cases give away the plot or make it possible to guess easily, however they only do this so that you have more of a clue of what the films about and so you want to see the whole thing.

Compare it to say picking a book up in a book shop, you'll read the blurb and then you might flick to around half way to 2/3rds of the way through the book and pick up a significant piece to the story, it makes you want the book so you buy it. That's all it is. However could you imagine the shit storm that would have been kicked up if AVP2's trailer had been just like the 1979 trailer for alien? You wouldn't help but think that they'd done you over.

I personally am psyched about seeing Prometheus as even though I can try to guess what's going to happen from the trailer I still want to see it glued together as a whole.

Also people mentioning CGI, I think directors rely to much on them now days and not the bare bones of film making such as proper lighting and the right camera angles. The original alien film relied heavily on this, I quote Scott himself "I've never liked horror films before, because in the end it's always been a man in a rubber suit. Well, there's one way to deal with that. The most important thing in a film of this type is not what you see, but the effect of what you think you saw". CGI eliminates the "man in a suit" problem but means directors get "creative" going for big shots.