Leftovers from Spaihts' Promethus draft will be used for AC

I have it book marked and have yet to read it but i know the general plot line thanks to reading a synapse.Its definitely one of the better ones.

It's definitely worth a read. Some of the dialogue is truly poetic. The language used was very descriptive and really called things into the imagination. I was actually surprised at how similar it was to what was in the film. There were mostly minor changes and some things removed.

I am pretty sure a lot of the spaghts ideas will find theyr way into AC and its sequel. his cript is a better ad for an alien fan but I like Prometheus and lindelloffs script as it served its purpose to kick start the journey RS is taking us on. had its flaws like any other but I feel IMO he/it r undervalued

Not only Spaihts' screenplay concepts, but a lot of the original concept artwork has been used or even recycled as well. 

I read that script through last year.  Honestly I thought it was a great launching point.  It is easy to throw Lindelof under the bus, so I'll do that.  Lindelof screwed it up.  Instead of taking things further and digging further into the story, Lindelof wanted to leave more mystery across the board.  In my mind, this is a copout.  As a fan and as a moviegoer, I was looking forward to Prometheus answering some questions.  Instead, it provided very few answers.  (I have been lurking here for quite a while btw.)  Prometheus was a great film but it provided very little in terms of answers.  Even the extra scenes do not provide any real answers.  Lindelof loves mystery, and that killed Prometheus.  Spaihts started with a great idea.  If he and Ridley had dived further and setup even more aspects of the series, it would have been a much better film.

Hello Drake,i noticed your new.Welcome.About your Lindelof comments,i did a big thread on him and your opinion really matches up things said there.

a lot of people throw him under the bus and I do understand, but u have to remember ridley scott did NOT want an alien movie and always intended on sequels to elaborate on the story more so IMO we got what ripley wanted. a jump off point which got the old questions going along with some new ones. it has holes ofcourse but its the director that paints the picture. im a Prometheus fan and as a read, the spaights script is better, but that's an alien script and Prometheus is not an alien movie. ridley should never have said he was making an alien prequel to begin with and maybe the film wouldv gotten a better reception. I was disappointed he changed his mind but now I want to know more about the engineers and theyr connection to the xeno. I hope the AC sequel is less alien and more Prometheus themed. only my opinion though

ali81

I agree with you as far as it being better for Ridley to spread the story across several films. I will say one thing on the fact that Prometheus is not an Alien movie. 

I believe Lidelof made some good moves for the film in spite of his flaws. I think part of these flaws lies in squandering opportunities for using subtle foreshadowing. This could have been done without bringing in Alien elements.

If they had chosen to include more scenes depicting holograms of the engineers or if  we were to get an expanded look at aspects of their facilities and their purpose via David interpreting, the film would have benefited.

Too much time was spent on scenes that felt out of place such as Vickers and Janek hooking up. Even a scene like the sandstorm incident could have been shortened. We could have done without some of Shaw and Holloway's exchange before they get busy. The scene with Milburn and Fifield wandering around could have had a minute or two nibbled away.

I'm not anti-Lidnelof but there are definitely things I wish he'd done differently

The use of the Spaights material seems to be a compensation for how much of the ideas that he had that was cut out of Prometheus. I wish that they would have had a lot of more of his ideas in Prometheus but at least we will see some of them. Limited amounts of Spaight’s ideas will be interesting but I hope that it will mostly be based on a new draft.

Lindelof destroyed the draft by his re-writing but Fox is more responsible for the mess that became Prometheus. I agree with Drake that Lindelof put too much mystery into Prometheus without any real answers or answers that you had to find out by reading extra material from different pages before you went to the movie theater and watched it, that was lame.

It will be interesting to see how AC will be like.

didn't Fox force them to cut a lot out of the original story line of the movie because of time constraints?

I believe ridley has more control over this than what people think. iv heard he and fox discussed doing something a while back and ridley was onboard aslong as he got to do it his way, which I wouldn't blame him for, this is after all his baby. it was ridley that wanted Prometheus to be what it was, that's why he hired lindeloff. RS, like so many of us, has admitted to having so many questions and now he has the platform to answer them for us but knows it will take several movies and to me, the spaights script gave a bit too much away and as a jump off point, that isn't good for sequels.

queenelizabeth

I totally agree that we couldv seen more about the engineers in Prometheus, that's the only post that actually makes sense with the complaints with lindeloff. we got what ridley wanted, he has stated there r answers in Prometheus, maybe just not 'smack u in the face' obvious. but then again that's the whole beauty of it all. look at the anticipation surrounding AC. the questions, the theories. like it or not the movie has had the desired effect and has wet our appetite again for answers.

Ali81: I am not sure if it was mostly Ridley or Fox that wanted to move away from the but I bet that Ridley had a say in it. If he was one of the reasons that they removed a lot of the Xeno related material then he is also to blame for the failure that was Prometheus. Ridley wasn’t alone in creating Alien because you also have O’Bannon and so on so it isn’t only Ridley’s creation.

Scott might have a lot of questions but that is not to say that I will find most of them to be interesting. I believe that they could have used Spaight’s script as the beginning but I agree that it makes it more difficult if they had planned to do more movies but as a stand-alone Spaight’s script would have worked fine. As far as seeing more of the Engineers in Prometheus well I am not sure if I would have found that to be so interesting even though they should have explained them better than they did. My main interest is the bio-weapons that the Engineers did and maybe their military (how it is organized, what the purpose is), not what kind of clothes they have or if they go swimming during the week-end.

Like I have said before my interests are:

1. The monsters
2. The Engineers

What is a must is well written human characters that we (the audience) care for, there were not too many in Prometheus.

As far as the answers, well if you got to read many web pages, watch the commentary a lot of times, and pay extra attention to details to find out answers then sorry but then the movie is a failure because many people don’t have time or interest to do so. This is to expect too much from people IMO. Hopefully there will be better answers in AC that are not too obvious but not at the level of absurdity that Lindelof made them to be which almost required some sort of archeology digging to be found, a movie like that is a sort of failure because a lot of people don’t bother to look them up. For me AC is an opportunity to correct the mess that Prometheus made.

dreams

yeah I get u r saying. according to an interview with weaver, it was RS who asked blompkamp to put his movie back so he could get AC done first. the fact ridley is producing alien5 gives him a bit of control aswell. a bad script can be made into a classic and a great script can be a flop, depends on the director and cast. I dont think Prometheus has a strong cast and some of the acting, with the exception of Fassbender, r weak. I would have liked to have seen more regarding the engineers but I dont feel Prometheus is the flop people r saying. it all really depends on what ridley has in mind, his vision. he always stated he wanted to do more than just 1 movie and if ur doing a trilogy, such as ridley is doing, u dont want to show all ur cards straight away. he may feel that showing more in Prometheus gives to much away which may explain why spaights' script was dropped. the sequel to AC may, hopefully, be more engineer based and much less alien movie and this could be down to following davids character more than anything else. show him as a destroyer now he is free before his redemption in the next movie. until we have the full trilogy we can only speculate as to why:

1. spaghts script was dropped

2. there were few answers in Prometheus and more questions

I have faith in RS and I know he wasn't the creator of alien, that was O'Bannon and schusset but it was ridley who gave us the movie, it was his vision so its his baby as much as anyone elses IMO. alien or starbeast, only got made because of the face hugger and the chest burster, the rest of the script was perceived as weak, having read it I tend to agree, and therefor was gutted, which ridley had a hand in changing some aspects of the script himself

ali81

"we got what ridley wanted"
I imagine that it's possible Lindelof shared his broadstrokes with Ridley before completing the script and that Ridley approved. I am not certain Ridley was 100% happy with how all those ideas came together on film. Though I do think Ridley probably isn't THAT upset because the film made the cash it needed to in order for the story to continue.

"that's the whole beauty of it all. look at the anticipation surrounding AC. the questions, the theories. like it or not the movie has had the desired effect and has wet our appetite again for answers."
I agree with this. I myself am not too disappointed with the film other than what I've shared.

Thoughts_Dreams

"My main interest is the bio-weapons that the Engineers did and maybe their military (how it is organized, what the purpose is), not what kind of clothes they have or if they go swimming during the week-end."
I agree. When I originally mentioned the engineers, this is exactly what I had in mind. I think Prometheus primarily lacked some of the explanation that we get from David in Spaihts script on why the engineers did what they did and what they were making (see the scene where he's restraining Shaw in the cargo hold).
Of course you'd have to remove the context of Spaihts script where David is sharing this information (saving his darker aspects for AC.)

I believe this could have been done by conveying the information in other holograms or engineer logs (which David could have discovered and shared on-screen while he was still working in the service of the initial expedition team.)

Maybe the best way to sum up the ideal (for me anyway) would be if Prometheus gave more screen time to David slowly learning about engineer's intentions/motivations in a way that answered more questions about them and further set the stage for David to become something dark in AC (as Spaihts wrote him in Alien: Engineers.)

Ali81: I can’t say a lot about the actors in Prometheus since I haven’t seen most of them in other movies but I watched other movies with Rapace where she made a character that was a lot better than Shaw. She can make interesting characters if she gets good material to work with. The captain was interesting in Prometheus and also David but the rest were just “meh”.

Prometheus isn’t a total disaster but it could have been so much better because it has potential under the layers of garbage. I will give it a 2 out of 5, which means that it is OK. Maybe that but I think that showing a clearer connection to the Xeno wouldn’t make the rest of the movies unnecessary. Take for example the Xeno Fifield, it could have stayed because there might be more then one way to get the same result depending on the goo and how it is being used/under what circumstances if that makes sense. Maybe there are circumstances that can make the goo weaker or stronger what ever that would be.

You mention the sequel to AC and that it will hopefully be more focused on the Engineers. This could be a possibility but then they got to make the Engineers make sense. The way they made them in Prometheus showed them being mad at humanity for some vague reason (maybe with some hints here and there but with no real answer), I am sorry but that was lame. Another mistake is that made them too close in the DNA match, that just made it less interesting. If they had made them like 90% like us then we would have been left wondering what the other 10% would be about but to make it an exact match is just lame IMO. Prometheus screwed up the Engineers in my opinion. Maybe they can do another movie about the Engineers later but they got to make it a lot better than how they were portrayed in Prometheus with some answers instead of a million questions. Perhaps they will get better writers the next time because they could be made interesting but they got to keep the Xeno connection the way I look at it otherwise I am not sure if I would care.

Sure it would be interesting to see more of David in another movie but you got to have well made human characters also otherwise what will there to identify with?

QueenElisabethShaw:

I know what part of the script that you mean, something like that should have been kept in the movie but maybe that wasn’t mysterious enough for Lindelof, LOL! He probably wasn’t responsible for all the bad parts but he didn’t make it better.

As far as holograms and logs that is one of my complaints about the movie that it relied too much o details. A hologram is one of these details so I would have preferred it to be explained by dialogue or maybe a mix, but that is me. Maybe it could have worked what you said with David learning things about the motivations of the Engineers but I just think that they could have been less ambiguous about the answers.

Thank you ninXeno426!  I have been lurking here forever!  I feel like I am part of the family here despite never posting until recently.  I had one account on the old Prometheus site before it got combined etc.  Man this is a great place.

BTW, I think it is important to separate Spaihts work and Lindelof's work from the false plotlines that were being followed during Prometheus.  At one point I believe some friends of Ridley's or atleast someone at Fox, was posting wildly speculative plotlines as 'potential spoilers'.  The height was when someone had some very imaginative plotlines in which Prometheus was said to be a pinocchio/coming-of-age movie for David, in which he combined with the black goo, and basically turned into a biomechanoid creature... dot dot dot... space jockey... so forth.  There were so many great fan-driven theories and posts that COULD have been Prometheus.  So when the movie ended up being more simple, less insansity, less mutations, more questions than answers, everyone blamed Lindelof.

I do not blame Lindelof for failing to live up to the fan theories.  I just happen to think he removed some of the closure in favor of a less realized story.  I say this as someone who enjoyed Prometheus.  Several of my friends who are fellow hardcore A L I E N fans were very disappointed in Prometheus, one who walked out during the movie.  I believe the Hammerpede scene is where he couldn't take the idiot plot.  He eventually rewatched it fully and his opinion did not change..

Someone go interview Lindelof on this!

Thoughts_Dreams

Understood. I think we can agree on the ambiguity. For the Prometheus story, there was a fine balance that should have been struck between being overt and being ambiguous.

The final product failed to control the ambiguity. To be honest, I don't think Lindelof is unskilled in this regard. I think his choice to use such a high level of ambiguity resulted from a combination of his personal writing propensities and a concern that he could destroy a cherished film by ruining it's prequel.

I wouldn't be surprised if his potential insecurities about taking on such an important project led to a fear of locking the film(s) into a certain direction that would ultimately fail. This probably has a lot to do with why he (almost immediately) decided to walk away from writing the follow up. I'm sure his thought was something like

"I've laid the groundwork, and have left as many doors open as possible. Someone else should probably round it out in way I may not be able to"

It's well known in the field of psychology that some people are expert at starting projects, but not so good at bringing them to their full potential.

Perhaps Lindelof fits that bill