I just finished listening to and taking notes from the two audio commentaries on the recently release Blu-ray edition of Prometheus. The first is with director Ridley Scott and the second is a mash-up of two commentaries with Jon Spaihts, who wrote the original draft when it was expected to be a direct prequel to Alien, and Damon Lindelof, who reworked Spaihts’ script into what was seen in theaters.
The trailers for the Blu-ray promised “Questions will be Answered” and I can honestly say listening to the two commentaries and watching the deleted and alternate scenes definitely brings closure to plenty of questions and several of the complaints people had regarding the movie. I will be touching on those in a much larger piece, which I am working on right now, but first I felt a couple things should be addressed.
I felt the following quote from Lindelof’s commentary speaks to the one great thing about Prometheus above all else, and why, even though some were frustrated with the film, we were drawn to discuss it.
“If you’re listening to my commentary it’s probably because you’re interested in what I have to say or you hate me. In either case, one of the things I love to do in my writing is not answer questions definitively. As frustrating as this is, I rely much more on the human imagination and your ability to theorize as to what you think may have happened. And although that might be frustrating it’s what makes people talk about movies when they’re over.
Movies that explain every single thing that happened in them and why are much less interesting to me than movies that don’t. I’m still thinking about Inception, and it came out almost two years ago from the release date of Prometheus, and I think it’s because while much was explained, much was not.”
Throughout the commentary, Lindelof recognizes the hatred so many have for him, especially from “Lost”, but even here he anticipates it since he recorded the commentary before the film was actually released.
It takes balls on his part to stick to his guns though even he frequently refers to himself as “pretentious” throughout the commentary, though I would consider it more as confidence than anything else. I have always said the best directors will be the most egotistical and I guess the same would apply to writers as well.
While I intend to get deeper into the answers the commentaries and deleted scenes supply in another piece, I also felt I should address the Blade Runner ties that recently came up and I commented on already.
In short, forget about it. However, Lindelof does add this nice little bit regarding what, if any, ties Prometheus has to Blade Runner:
“For me Prometheus was always about making a Blade Runner/Alien mash-up, using the best themes from both movies and dropping them all into the same world because when I was a kid I saw Alien and Blade Runner in very close proximity.
I think I saw Blade Runner in the theater. I think my dad took me. Then I think I saw Alien on HBO. But I just assumed they were sequels to each other. I didn’t know they were directed by the same guy. I was too young to understand, really, what a director was, but they just felt the same to me in the way they looked, in the way they were performed and obviously they both had crazy robots in them and the production design sort of seemed the same, the music seemed the same. I just thought they were the same and I just felt like Prometheus needed to feel like it was a piece as well.
Of course, it’s not related to Blade Runner, but thematically, we’re going after the same stuff.”
As for Spaihts recently commenting on how there were facehuggers in his original draft of the script, well, they were very much a part of the original draft as he describes it in his commentary.
In my upcoming piece, looking to explain the film using the commentaries, I will also detail several of his comments on the original draft of the screenplay.
Hopefully I’ll be able to put all of this together quickly. I’m looking to have it done by Monday, October 15 so stay tuned and if you haven’t bought the Blu-ray yet and are a fan of the film, don’t wait, you can be confident in buying it. If you like, help out RopeofSilicon and buy it through one of my links by clicking here.
