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Prometheus
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Additional DVD options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
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October 9, 2012 "Please retry" | No enhanced packaging | 1 |
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| $7.45 | $2.02 |
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October 9, 2012 "Please retry" | — | 1 |
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October 9, 2012 "Please retry" | — | 1 |
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Genre | Horror/Things That Go Bump/Monsters, Science Fiction & Fantasy |
Format | Multiple Formats, AC-3, Color, Dolby, Widescreen, NTSC, Subtitled, Dubbed |
Contributor | Ridley Scott, Guy Pearce, Logan Marshall-Green, Idris Elba, Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron See more |
Language | English |
Runtime | 2 hours and 4 minutes |
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Product Description
Product Description
Ridley Scott, director of "Alien" and "Blade Runner," returns to the genre he helped define. With PROMETHEUS, he creates a groundbreaking mythology, in which a team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a thrilling journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.
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You want an alien world created anew, with wonders and horrors lurking in its furrows? You go to Ridley Scott, of course, spectacle maker and pictorialist par excellence. So Prometheus is bound to be eye filling, with fully wrought planetary vistas and occasionally jaw-dropping visual coups. And did we use the word alien back there? Yes, folks, Prometheus is a prequel, in a sideways sort of fashion, to Scott's 1979 Alien original--or at least it's a long-distant stage setter for that story. This one begins with a space mission that could reveal the extraterrestrial roots of Earth, although what's buried out on the planet turns out to be much more complicated than expected. In the midst of suspenseful episodes (and a few contrived plot turns), Prometheus reaches for Big Answers to Big Questions, in a grand old sci-fi tradition. This lends the movie a hint of metaphysical energy, even if Scott's reach extends well, well beyond his grasp. The hokier moments are carried off with brio by Michael Fassbender (the robot on board), Charlize Theron, and Idris Elba, and then you've got Noomi Rapace entering the badass hall of fame for a long, oh-no-they-didn't sequence involving radical surgery, which might just induce the vapors in a few viewers. Even if Prometheus has its holes, the sheer size of the thing is exciting to be around. Because this movie is gigantic. --Robert Horton.
A team of scientists journey through the universe on the spaceship "Prometheus" on a voyage to investigate Alien life forms. The team of scientists becomes stranded on an Alien world, and as they struggle to survive it becomes clear that the horrors they experience are not just a threat to themselves, but to all of mankind. - WellardRockard
Synopsis
A team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.
Meet the Characters
Elizabeth Shaw View largerShaw, an archaeologist, discovers a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading her and a team of scientists and explorers on a thrilling journey, aboard the spaceship Prometheus, to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race. Shaw and her team aboard the Prometheus are on nothing less than a journey to discover answers to some of life’s most profound questions. She is a scientist filled with faith and hope, but who transforms into a warrior when faced with the danger she encounters at her destination.
Michael Fassbender as David View larger Michael Fassbender as David enjoyed a phenomenal run of critically acclaimed performances in 2011 and 2012, garnering numerous accolades and awards. The National Board of Review awarded Fassbender the Spotlight Award, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named him Best Actor for his performances in Shame and Davide Cronenberg’s drama A Dangerous Method, in which Fassbender plays Carl Jung opposite Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen. Fassbender was also recently seen in Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class, as Erik Lehnsherr, better known as super-villain Magneto; as Rochester in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre; and as an assassin opposite Ewan McGregor and Gina Carano in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire. Fassbender is a graduate of London's prestigious Drama Centre. His breakthrough role came as Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson in HBO's epic, award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers.
David is an android creation of Weyland Industries. While David possesses extraordinary intelligence and other capabilities, his principal tasks aboard the Prometheus are servile. David is however far more “human” than one might expect of a synthetic person. He is jealous and arrogant because he realizes that his knowledge is all-encompassing and therefore he is superior to the human crew members. David’s allegiances are unclear, and he can be very bold in the decisions he makes.
Meredith Vickers View larger Charlize Theron as Meredith Vickers demands the audience’s full attention as soon as she appears on screen. This South African captivated audiences as female serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the independent gem Monster. Charlize’s feature film debut was MGM’s 2 Days in the Valley, with Jeff Daniels. In 2001, Theron starred in the Warner Bros. tearjerker Sweet November alongside Keanu Reeves, as well as in Woody Allen’s Curse of the Jade Scorpion. In 2002 Theron starred opposite Patrick Swayze and Billy Bob Thornton in Waking Up in Reno, and opposite Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, and Dakota Fanning in the feature film Trapped, directed by Luis Mandoki.
Vickers is a “suit” representing the interests of the mega-corporation funding the Prometheus’ journey to a distant, foreboding world. Her perspective on the mission is at odds with the rest of the crew’s. For Vickers, this epic, two-year journey to a distant planet has been boiled down to economics. But as with so much else about the mission, there are deeper layers and mysteries to Vickers’ ultimate goals.
Logan Marshall-Green as Charlie Holloway View larger Logan Marshall-Green as Charlie Holloway ) appeared on the big screen in Devil, produced by M. Night Shyamalan. He is best-known to film audiences for playing radical activist Paco in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe. He has also co-starred in the films Brooklyn’s Finest, The Kindness of Strangers and The Great Raid. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch Graduate Acting Program and a prolific stage actor, Marshall-Green earned a Drama League nomination for his work in King Lear with Kevin Klein at the Public Theatre, and Greg Kotis' Pig Farm at the Roundabout Theatre off-Broadway. He earned Lortel Award nominations for his performances in Dog Sees God and Neil LaBute's The Distance from Here, the latter also earning him a Drama Desk Ensemble Award.
Holloway is Shaw’s partner, both personally and professionally, in a quest for answers to some of humanity’s most important questions. Like Shaw, Holloway is a scientist with a thirst for answers, but he thinks the end of their search will yield very different results from those Shaw expects. While Shaw is the heart of the search, Holloway is its guts. He is constantly pushing the envelope, going to the extreme in everything he does. He is driven by the thrill of the quest.
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Product details
- Aspect Ratio : 2.40:1
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : R (Restricted)
- Product Dimensions : 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.72 ounces
- Item model number : 5409819907
- Director : Ridley Scott
- Media Format : Multiple Formats, AC-3, Color, Dolby, Widescreen, NTSC, Subtitled, Dubbed
- Run time : 2 hours and 4 minutes
- Release date : October 9, 2012
- Actors : Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce
- Dubbed: : French, Spanish
- Subtitles: : French, English, Spanish
- Language : Unqualified (Dolby Digital 5.1)
- Studio : 20th Century Fox
- ASIN : B005LAIHXQ
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,740 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #2,899 in DVD
- Customer Reviews:
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Charlize Theron on Vickers
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One indicator of how incomplete things seem is that the very old billionaire, Peter Weyland, is played by a fine middle aged actor, Guy Pearce, but we never see him younger in flashbacks, which were probably cut from the final editing. Without giving too much away, the Peter Weyland character adds very little to the story aside from being the person who funds the mission.
I sensed something was seriously out of joint when the "away team" enters the cavernous artifact. After encountering something just a bit squeamish, the geologist Fifield (Sean Harris) and biologist Milburn (Rafe Spall) decide to return to the Prometheus (the name of the humans' interstellar space ship.) The remaining team does a fair amount of exploring. Among other things, they see a hologram of the intelligent giants, drawings of whom they found on Earth. they are seeking running from some unseen danger. I saw no clue to what triggered the hologram. Following the hologram, they find the decapitated head of one of the giants (as opposed to the 'aliens' we encountered in earlier films).
The captain of the Prometheus sends them a message that a serious storm is approaching. The team, with the usual annoyingly distracting side efforts which slow them down, reach the entrance and begin driving their vehicles back to the ship. But, and here the train falls off the track, never to return, we find Fifield and Milburn still in the artifact, when they said they were returning to the ship. They found some kind of life which intrigued the biologist. But why didn't the team returning to the ship notice that none of their vehicles were gone. Why did they leave the other two behind? Somehow, the two truants don't get the warning about the storm, or ignore it, so they become stuck in the artifact.
There are loose ends aplenty with the alien fauna on this desolate world. My expectation coming in was that the film would explore the origins of two creatures, the "Alien" and the race of the giant pilot discovered by the crew of the mining ship Nostromo in "Alien". We meet the giants soon enough, but we also encounter at least three other life forms which have a passing resemblance to THE Alien, but their connection to the life cycle of the Alien is never explained.
I'm entering dangerous "spoiler" territory now, so I will not discuss any more of the plot except to say that there are a number of unexplained events. Mysteries are great in the middle of the film, but one expects most of these to be wrapped up and revealed at the end of the picture. Many are not, leaving a huge jumping off point for a sequel to "Prometheus".
Part of the special attraction of this story is that the audience knows full well what will eventually happen, so there is a lot of mental "don't go there" and "don't do that" moments, because we already know what things that look like that can do. The problem with that is that there is too much "quoting" from "Alien" for my tastes. Most of it is done relatively well, but it becomes more and more obvious as time goes on, and increasingly annoying. There is also ample quoting from other major Sci Fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (both in situations and in dialogue). There are also some subtle cinematic (visual) quotes from "Avatar" and "Jurassic Park".
One of the bright spots, aside from the imaginative, well done CGI and cinematography, is the acting, which I always thought was a weak spot in "Alien". The crewmen, such as Captain Idris Elba, are spot on (unlike Yahpet Kotto in "Alien"). Instead of the strong Ellen Ripley character, we have the physically smaller and less imposing archaeologist, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) who sports a convincing English accent as the lead character. Charlize Theron's character is restrained and unlikable. Like both Scott and Cameron's "Alien" and "Aliens", this movie has an android (artificial person) as a principal character, in a role much fuller than in the earlier movies. The only thing which distinguishes 'David', Michael Fassbender's android from Scott's earlier android Ash (Ian Holm, Alien) and Cameron's Bishop (Lance Hendrickson, Aliens)is that David is ever so slightly stilted, somewhat like Data from "Startrek, The Next Generation."
I will give this the benefit of the doubt for now, but I found a strong disjoint in the rationale between two early scenes and the climax. I sense Scott wanted to leave plenty of meat on the bone to support a sequel. (In contrast, Avatar is almost totally devoid of preparation for a sequel I suspect I will need to revisit this review after seeing the film again. If my suspicion about gaps and disconnects is born out, I may have to lower my rating to 3 stars.
We enjoy watching the Alien series in its chronological order and mixing it into the Predator series in our ways and have become accustomed to watching these movies quite a bit. It's funny to go back and forth between modern-day cinema and cinema from the late 70s-80s and see how different everything is even in these series.
Still very entertaining and will continue to be a tradition in our home.
In 2089 C.E. (or A.D. if you prefer), two archeologists, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), a true believer of the Judeo-Christian time, and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), Shaw's colleague, lover, and the skeptic to Shaw's believer, discover 35,000-year-old pictograms on an island off the coast of Scotland that seemingly confirm their theory that aliens visited different civilizations in the past. Shaw and Holloway believe the aliens influenced or otherwise directed cultural and possibly biological evolution, an idea that seeped into the pop culture mainstream forty-four years ago when Erich von Däniken published his factually challenged bestseller, "Chariots of the Gods." The pictograms contain a star map that Shaw and Holloway interpret as an open invitation for renewed human-alien contact. Shaw implicitly believes in their benevolence. Holloway doesn't seem to share Shaw's optimism, but doesn't completely slip into negativity either. Shaw's optimism proves woefully unfounded we're in the ALIEN universe after all).
Shaw and Holloway's evidence proves sufficient to convince Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), the octogenarian CEO of the Weyland Corp., to fund a trillion-dollar expedition to the star system where Shaw and Holloway hope to meet the aliens and get the answers every child or teen asks once or twice: Who are we? Why are we here? Who made us? And to what or for what purpose? Shaw answers, somewhat naively, with religion, but she's still a scientist and as a scientist knowledge, regardless of whether it conflicts or not with religious belief, takes precedence. Holloway is far more the skeptic, the empiricist, the non-believer, but he's just as eager to meet the godlike beings that presumably created us. The science vs. religion debate isn't really a debate, not in a film with a $150 million dollar budget. It's just enough to suggest depth without in fact providing anything approaching depth.
Weyland sends Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), a cold, calculating corporate executive with her eye on the CEO's chair (when Weyland passes into the great corporate beyond, of course), to keep tabs on the expedition. The ship's 17-member crew fulfills its primary function in the ALIEN universe: As fodder for the inevitable outbreak of something or other that decimates the crew. The script gives the secondary and tertiary characters names, but they could be easily called Generic Character No. 1 through Generic Character No. 10 or 11. Even worse, the characters that are coded as "smart" (because they're scientists) make fatally idiotic decisions at the worst possible times, presumably because Spaihts and Lindelof ran out of ideas and decided to rely on standard horror-film clichés. Only a few characters make any kid of impression. That's less to do with the screenplay and everything to do with the actors, like the Prometheus' captain, Janek (Idris Elba), who gets minimal screen time or character development, but whose actions suggest a heroic, self-sacrificing nature.
With his dyed blonde hair and mannerisms lifted from his favorite film, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and a secretive, ambiguous agenda (again typical of androids in the ALIEN universe), David (Michael Fassbender) easily emerges as PROMETHEUS's most compelling character. He's first introduced watching over Shaw in her sleep chamber, picking through her childhood memories, a choice that's simultaneously creepy, because it's voyeuristic and a violation, and comprehensible as an expression of David's loneliness. David isn't supposed to have wants or needs, but he evinces them in practically every scene. He also evinces a dry, droll sense of humor that's often misunderstood or ignored by other members of the crew. They treat David less as a valuable member of the crew than a personal valet or even worse. When David makes consequence-heavy decision, he's simultaneously following Weyland's orders and engaging in payback for real and perceived slights.
David, however, can't carry PROMETHEUS alone and either can Shaw as a proto-Ripley action-heroine. While Scott gives Shaw one of the most disturbing, squirm-inducing scenes in the ALIEN mythos, one that easily rivals a similar scene in ALIEN, she doesn't charge in any noticeable way until late (very late) in the film. Rapace's slight stature doesn't help, but Scott could have worked around Rapace's physical limitations with a script with a stronger focus on Shaw. Vickers exists primarily as a link to her predecessors (or rather successors) in the ALIEN universe, as embodiments of the amoral corporate ethos critiqued strongly in ALIENS. Vickers serves another function, but to say more is to spoil one of PROMETHEUS' few remaining surprises. It feels superfluous because, in fact, it is superfluous.
PROMETHEUS suffers from the failure to meet the outsized expectations of ALIEN fans that expected and wanted, if not a carbon copy of the first film in the series, then something substantially similar, yet uniquely different to ALIEN. ALIEN centered on the crew of the Nostromo, a commercial freighter in the not-so-distant future. After the Nostromo's crew responds to a non-human distress beacon, they discover a long-dead, non-human pilot, the Space Jockey, and derelict spaceship's deadly alien cargo. ALIEN's lone survivor, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), appeared in three subsequent films of uneven quality. Only James Cameron's ALIENS matched ALIEN's ambitious scope and scale. Both films are justifiably considered genre classics if not outright genre masterpieces. Returning to the ALIEN universe and answering the questions surrounding the Space Jockey, the derelict spaceship, and the mystery surrounding the ship's cargo spurred Scott, working with Spaihts and Lindelof, was always a problematic, even controversial choice. Was answering the questions surrounding the Space Jockey worth exploring or answering? On the strength or rather weakness(es) of PROMETHEUS, the answer is, at best, a qualified one.
PROMETHEUS, however, doesn't offer any ideas, intellectual, metaphysical, scientific or otherwise, that could be described as fresh or original (because they're not). Arthur C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END, Nigel Kneale's QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (among many others) all posited alien visitors for more than just cultural tourism or anthropological explorations of primitive cultures (ours), but also to prod cultural and sometimes biological evolution (ours, again). It's a pity then that Spaihts and Lindelof, following Scott's lead, don't develop the idea beyond the merely functional (to setup sequels to the prequels), but it's hard to blame them or Scott too heavily if PROMETHEUS, a film made by a Hollywood studio specifically to kick off a new, hopefully commercially lucrative franchise, fails to provide narrative or emotional closure, but instead tapers off into an semi-satisfying, sequel-ready ending.
Narrative problems and shortcomings have been more the exception than the norm in Scott's work and while PROMETHEUS is no exception, it's also another example of Scott's strengths as a visual stylist. Scott always seems to have a clear vision of what he wants to achieve cinematically and PROMETHEUS is no different. To that end, Scott shot in Iceland to capture the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the alien moon. Scott's longtime production designer, Arthur Max (BODY OF LIES, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, BLACK HAWK DOWN, GLADIATOR, SE7EN), and his cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski, bring a palpably believable, not-so-distant future into the present, a present made all the more credible thanks to subtle, immersive 3D. It's clean, pristine, and antiseptic, filled with the floating transparent screens filled with colorful data streams that AVATAR made de rigueur three years ago. The alien structures owe a great deal to H.R. Giger's seminal contribution to ALIEN, expanding on Giger's design work organically, if, at key times, no less repulsively. Scott fully embraces PROMETHEUS' R-rating, crafting several unforgettably repulsive scenes that would make even David "body horror" Cronenberg simultaneously recoil in disgust and applaud in appreciation.
Cross-posted at VeryAware.com.
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Y que decir de las imágenes de magnífica calidad!!
Solo el cd 2 no se a qué se refiere..ya q mi equipo
Nol pudo leer
Images impeccable
van de verkoper ( uiterst tevreden )
:-):-):-)
This is no new idea, but it first gained cultural traction with the 1968 publication of Erick von Däniken's bestseller, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, a work of staggering psuedoscience and blatant anthropological chicanery. If completely bonkers and without any actual evidence, the book still makes for an imaginative flight of fancy, and its key, "ancient astronauts" concept serves well as the basis for Prometheus, director Ridley Scott's magnificent-but-flawed return to the sci-fi genre. Despite what you may have heard, the film is a prequel to Scott's 1979 classic, Alien, although not necessarily a direct one. It's better to think of Prometheus as a semi- distant relative, twice or thrice-removed. The two movies aren't immediately narratively linked, but they share much of the same DNA.
And Prometheus is all about DNA. The pre-title sequence takes us over a barren, lifeless landscape, and up to the top of a turbid glacial waterfall, where an alien protohuman—who looks like a buff, living marble reproduction of Michelangelo's David—stands by the shore, holding a cup of black goo. This is an "Engineer," as they'll later come to be called, and he's here to seed what we can presume to be Earth. He downs the viscous caviar-like substance in one gulp, and immediately his cellular structure begins to break down, causing his skin to rupture, his bones to snap grotesquely, and his body to fall into the water, where it dissolves, spreading genetic material downstream. Et voilà! Life. Eons later, in 2089, we cut to a pair of anthropologist lovers—the believer Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and the atheistic Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green)—as they find a 30,000-year-old cave painting on the Isle of Skye, depicting an Engineer-ish-looking figure pointing to a cluster of stars, an image that's been found in numerous archeological sites around the globe. Shaw believes it's "an invitation," and soon enough they're aboard the spacecraft Prometheus—funded by the supposedly dead industrialist Peter Weyland (Guy Pierce)—zipping toward the distant moon LV-223, hoping to find answers to humanity's deepest existential questions.
Unlike the Nostromo, Alien's dingy blue-collar mining craft, Prometheus—named after the mythological fire-stealer—is a state-of-the-art research vessel, carrying scientists from pertinent fields, including spectacled biologist Millburn (Raff Spall) and punk geologist Fifield (Sean Harris), along with a substantial crew of ancillary characters. The ship is captained by former military man Janek (Idris Elba), but the real leader of the expedition is Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), a stone-cold Weyland Corp. employee who makes it clear to everyone—Shaw and Holloway especially— that they report to her. Also on board is David (Michael Fassbender), an 8th generation android who's obsessed with Lawrence of Arabia—he even dyes his hair to look like Peter O'Toole—and ironically becomes the very soul of the film, a grown-up Pinocchio who can never become a real boy. Not to demean the rest of the cast, who are generally decent-to-excellent, but Theron and Fassbender are the two acting powerhouses here, the former all icy secrecy and the latter effete and guarded—think a more refined C3PO crossed with Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In a way, Prometheus is a more pop, "genre"-oriented version of 2001, both concerned with evolution, artificial intelligence, and the notion that something out there gave the fire of human consciousness its first spark. Where Kubrick's film is a slow-burning intellectual exercise, Prometheus becomes a tension-ratcheting affair where the big ideas are couched in stylish big-budget sci-fi/horror action. When the ship lands on LV-223, which is not the moon from Alien, the crew quickly—too quickly to believe actually—spots and enters an enormous pyramid complex with reniform subterranean tunnels and a chamber that houses a monolithic human head and dozens of cylinders filled with that DNA-altering black goop. Nearby are the piled up bodies of several long-dead "engineers," who were obviously trying to escape something but didn't make it. Without getting into spoilers, it's safe to assume to that one or more team members become "infected," and you can also expect to see some aggressive lifeforms that have never before appeared in the Alien franchise, although they share the phallic/yonic, H.R. Giger-inspired qualities of the facehuggers and xenomorphs of yore. There are grotesque mutations, frantic firefights—one involving an actual flamethrower—and even an emergency alien fetus c-section, the film's most white-knuckle, squirm-inducing scene.
Does the original xenomorph monster show up? Well, sort of. Let's just say it has a fan-appeasing cameo. Written by Jon Spaihts and Lost's Damon Lindelof, Prometheus expands the universe of the series and unravels a few mysteries from the first film—yes, the "space jockey" in that pilot's chair was an "engineer"—but it also raises a host of other questions that it doesn't have time to answer. (Why do the engineers suddenly want us dead? Why leave us a star map guiding us to what's essentially a biological weapons depot? If the engineers created us, who created them?) With a sequel already in the works, I don't consider the lingering ambiguities a problem—and I love the post-viewing discussions that naturally arise because of them—but Prometheus does have other shortcomings. There are small potential plot holes, and a few scenes that feel forced—inserted for narrative convenience or just to ramp up the action—but the most noticeable issue is that characters sometimes simply don't act in believably human ways. They contradict earlier established behaviors. They make choices only a soon-to-be-slaughtered teenager in a slasher movie would make. They don't express nearly enough awe at the fact that they're not just on another world, but making discoveries that dramatically alter humanity's assumptions about its own origins.
Prometheus probably could've used another script revision to tighten everything up, but the pacing flows well—even when some of the events don't exactly make sense in retrospect—and there's no doubt that the film is an experience, the kind of grand-scale, high-concept science fiction that's unfortunately rare. (Although, between Looper and Cloud Atlas this year, sci-fi seems to be making a comeback.) I don't really get the small but rabid cult of haters that's sprung up to deride the film, but I blame the internet hype machine, which skews expectations impossibly. If you're anticipating the be-all-end-all Alien movie, with mind-melting twists and non-stop horror, then yes, Prometheus might be a bit of a let-down. But this prequel really is its own entity and deserves to be seen and evaluated on its own terms. Personally, I think it's a terrific reboot of a franchise that had grown ridiculous long before the dopey Alien vs. Predator movies. Ridley Scott directs the hell out of this thing, the scope is immense—check out those real, predominately non-CGI sets—and call me a heretic, but damn if Michael Fassbender doesn't make a better android that Ian Holm or Lance Henriksen ever did. Onto the sequel, I say, and if Scott isn't going to do it—he's only listed as producer, and he'll probably be busy revisiting the world of Blade Runner—I nominate David Fincher, whose Alien 3 got bungled by the studio, and who definitely deserves another shot at the series. Anyone second that motion?
Gorgeous. And that's about all you really need to know. But for the sake of completeness, let's get into what makes Prometheus' 1080p/AVC- encoded Blu-ray transfer so stunning. Using Red Epic digital cameras mounted to 3ality Technica Atom 3D rigs, the film was shot almost entirely on Pinewood Studio's famed—and enormous—007 lot, allowing Ridley Scott and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski complete control over the lighting of the magnificently detailed sets. The combination of a great camera system, high-quality Zeiss lenses, and precise manipulation of the direction and degree of light makes for an image that's often terrifically sharp and nearly noiseless at times. Camera noise does spike a bit during the darkest scenes, but it has a granular quality that looks almost filmic up close, with no digital harshness or chroma artifacts, and it isn't really noticeable from a normal viewing distance. It should also go without saying that there are no compression issues or encode errors on this top-tier release; even scenes where you might expect to see some banding or splotchiness—flashlights cutting through darkness, volumetric clouds of dust rising into the air, fine color gradients—hold up under pixel-peeping scrutiny. The level of clarity is exemplary for a live-action film. Fine detail is ever-present in the textures of the actors' faces, the fabric of their clothing, and the intricacies of the props and set design. The film's distinct color palette is handled with ease too. The inky depths of the pyramid, the yellow LED lights inside the explorers' helmets, the cool fluorescence inside Prometheus, the spatters of blood, the skin tones—everything has a satisfying density and presence.
And then we come to the film's use of 3D, which is some of the best I've seen outside of all-CGI movies. If you saw the 3D version of Prometheus in theaters, you'll already have a good idea of what to expect on Blu-ray, namely, lots of depth and little-to-no projection. That is, you'll spend a lot of time looking into your screen—which becomes a kind of portal through which to view a 3D diorama—but you won't find any leap-out-of-the-TV-and-jab-you-in-the-eye gimmickry, which may work in horror films or cartoons, but would only cheapen the experience here. And because there are no objects jutting out towards you, you don't have to worry about the roughly 2.39:1 frame cutting anything off. (No, there's no 1.78:1 "open-matte" version available.) There are a few longer landscape shots where no dimensionality is apparent, but most of the time there's a clear and natural-looking distinction between foreground objects and their backgrounds. There are definitely some "showpiece" 3D shots, like the landing sequence, the silica dust storm, and the engineer holograms, but the 3D effect is most impressively used to add a degree of realism to some of the more mundane scenes, like when Holloway stares into the mirror of his cabin, noticing there's something unusual in his eye. Or Shaw lying on the all-white operating table. Clarity and color both hold-up well, and there are no unusual 3D anomalies to report. Of course, the effect will be better on bigger screens—and the amount of ghosting/doubling you experience will depend on the quality of your TV/projector/glasses—but in general, Prometheus' 3D Blu-ray replicates the theatrical experience rather well. Do note that all screenshots are from the included 2D Blu-ray.
Turn off the lights, crank up your receiver, and settle in—Prometheus's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround track is one to savor, particularly if you've got a home theater setup capable of bringing the aural goods. This mix just doesn't quit; from start to finish it delivers room- quaking dynamics, pristine clarity, and polished, realistic, puts-you-right-in-the-middle-of-the-action sound design. From the opening scene on the barren planet Earth we get deep sub-woofer engagement, the lapping, crashing, and bubbling of a massive waterfall, and the thunderous rumble of an alien ship overhead. The sense of all-surrounding immersion is near-constant from here forward. Bleeps and bloops and the hush of processed air aboard the Prometheus. Sirens wailing in the rears. Dripping rain. Convincing cavernous reverb. The whipping of a monster's tendrils. Debris from an explosion rocketing through the soundscape. Silica dust clinking furiously as a storm blows across LV-223. Fifield's mapping "pups" as they zoom off through underground corridors. There's not a scene where the audio isn't lushly and thoughtfully arranged. Just take the actors' voices, which—besides being well-balanced and easily understood—always reflect the acoustics of their surroundings, flatter aboard the ship, slightly muffled inside their helmets, echoing and wet inside the pyramid. All this is backed up by Marc Streitenfeld's enormous-sounding orchestral score, which alternates between quiet uneasiness and sheer bombast.
Note that the 3D disc and the 2D disc have slightly different dub and subtitle options.
3D: Includes descriptive audio, and Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, Urdu, and Tamil dubs—in Dolby Digital 5.1—along with English SDH, Span, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Port, and Swedish subtitles.
2D: Includes descriptive audio, and Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telegu, and Ukranian dubs—in Dolby Digital 5.1, except for the Russian DTS 5.1 track—and English SDH, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian subtitles.