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Prometheus and Plan 9 From Outer Space
Jun. 27th, 2012 10:15 amSo, I've been thinking about the recent movie Prometheus, and I realized that it's our generation's Plan 9 From Outer Space. Allow me to explain.
Plan 9 is one of the most famous bad movies ever made. Yes, it has cheesy special effects, but only moderately more cheesy then any of a hundred other B movies of the era. No, what makes Plan 9 so memorably bad is that, for nearly every scene, anybody with an IQ above room temperature can come up with ways to make that scene better. I don't know that you could have made Plan 9 a great movie, but it would have been okay.
Thus unto Prometheus. For example, consider the series of scenes where the biologist and the map-tech spend the night in the alien structure. Rather than have them freak out and get lost, we could have had them decide to stay. Maybe the map-tech needs to fix the remote rover they would have sent in, and the biologist decides to stay and run some tests on the dead aliens. In that scenario, they pitch a tent (because they leave their helmets on) and the snake-thingee gets into the tent. Same basic plot, we still end up with two dead dudes, but it makes sense! Again, not sure that Prometheus would be a great movie, but it would have been a lot better.
Plan 9 is one of the most famous bad movies ever made. Yes, it has cheesy special effects, but only moderately more cheesy then any of a hundred other B movies of the era. No, what makes Plan 9 so memorably bad is that, for nearly every scene, anybody with an IQ above room temperature can come up with ways to make that scene better. I don't know that you could have made Plan 9 a great movie, but it would have been okay.
Thus unto Prometheus. For example, consider the series of scenes where the biologist and the map-tech spend the night in the alien structure. Rather than have them freak out and get lost, we could have had them decide to stay. Maybe the map-tech needs to fix the remote rover they would have sent in, and the biologist decides to stay and run some tests on the dead aliens. In that scenario, they pitch a tent (because they leave their helmets on) and the snake-thingee gets into the tent. Same basic plot, we still end up with two dead dudes, but it makes sense! Again, not sure that Prometheus would be a great movie, but it would have been a lot better.
