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Several Deleted Scenes From 'Prometheus' Feature A Grotesque Fifield

As we eagerly await for Twentieth Century Fox to unload all of the details for the official Blu-ray release of Ridley Scott's Prometheus, Cinefex Magazine got their hands on some of the deleted plate effects work for Fifield’s undead character which are spread out below.

Could this revelation mean that there will indeed be a rash of information forthcoming that will add some much-needed depth to the vague sci-fi horror? It certainly looks that way.

"To mutate Fifield beyond what was posble ung practical makeup effects, Weta Digital generated a digital character with elongated limbs and an engorged, transluscent head, incorporating a semblance of Harris’ face,” writes the magazine. “Scott filmed the sequence both with the actor in makeup and without, providing clean plates that would allow for the insertion of the digital character. The final cut featured mostly makeup effects, which Weta enhanced with digital wire removal, bullet hits, and one shot of the digital creature’s body blended to the actor.”









Prometheus, starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Sean Harris, Guy Pearce, Kate Dickie, Rafe Spall, Logan Marshall-Green, Benedict Wong, Emun Elliott, Patrick Wilson and Ian Whyte, is expected to street on Blu-ray and DVD on October 11th.

Source: B-D

Replace "vague" with "didn't try to insult the intelligence of its audience by spoon-feeding it answers".

One thing that Americans need to realize is that standard cut and dry narrative story telling is only one (low brow) way of conveying meaning in a film. Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example. The "story" is apparently thin on the surface if that is all you are looking for, but the expanve world created by Kubrick through images and sound sparks endless interest and potential for discuson, thus creating a richer, more immerve and overall satisfying experience than if the filmmaker laid all the cards on the table, so to speak.

Like paintings, the best films transcend a collection of entertaining images and become an intellectually engaging experience that provokes thought and reflection in the viewer. Ridley Scott understands this with films like Blade Runner and Prometheus but it looks like a majority of American audiences do not.

If I remember correctly, this was the geologist, right?

I can't help but feel like they should have used the effect. I like these shots a lot more than what I saw back in June. Seeing him turn into something resembling a xenomorph would have at least felt a but less out of place than him just turning into a raging zombie*. And I don't say that out of some need for this to be "more of an Alien prequel". I don't need that. I just wish the movie was coherent enough to resonate with its audience. The movie of course has its fans, but far and wide it has been seen as a grand disappointment. His whole attack/death scene felt completely off, like it belonged in a different film. I don't want to leave the theatre with every question answered, but I want to leave with some questions that are worth answering. So yes, I would have preferred something closer to a xenomorph transformation.

As many have said, one of the film's biggest problems was that the "black goo" didn't seem to have any sort of constency in its effect.

We've all seen that chart making the rounds on Facebook and various blogs...

This:

Sure, it's a mplification, but it has a point. I don't want to leave the theatre knowing everything about the stuff, but you can't just write an absolute mess and call it art. There need to be connections, whether your audience makes them in the theatre, or at home after a lot of thought.

Plus, those pics above are some of the ONLY visuals I've seen from this film that are actually interesting. For me this film was a visual bore. It's just Mass Effect with a bunch of leftover Giger paintings thrown in for fan service. This is generic science fiction. I don't think anything in Prometheus hasn't already been done in an XBOX game, except for maybe the "birth" scene.

I think the main reason for all the disappointment surrounding this movie is that Prometheus never offered anything worth pondering. It's full of cheap, pop-philosophy that barely goes beyond the paragraph on the back of an Ancient Aliens DVD case. I remember watching that show and thinking, "Damn, Ridley Scott has so much to work with." But nope. The script was lazy and uninspired. I read all the articles that popped up after the movie came out, explaining the links to Christianity and immaculate conception and whatnot. I've read articles like this...

http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html

...and all I can say is that is some of the most obvious, heavy-handed, uncreative shit ever. Bringing Christianity into this? Seriously? I can't find words for how much I hated reading this article. Ridley Scott, you are an extremely talented man. Please tell me there is more to your creative mind than this contrived bullshit.

I'm still hoping that a director's cut (or sequel) will save this mess of a film. It has some proming moments, and I honestly want it to be good. But theatrical cut they released in June is a really half baked movie. And sorry Preston, but I completely diagree with you on this one. I have no problem with the movie being vague and not spoon-fed, but it has to be good. I love mystery and I love walking away from a movie and figuring out its puzzle. In fact, that describes some of my favorite films. I loved 2001, and many others that fit that description. But Prometheus?

Two intelligent, educated women who are somehow too stupid to run left or right. One of those women is running and jumping and climbing, all with a few staples holding her guts in after surgery. A geologist in charge of mapping the ruins, who promptly gets lost. A biologist who finds the ngle greatest biological discovery in the history of human existence, and runs away in fear, but then all of a sudden his fearless

curioty compels him to touch the watersnake. That isn't vague mystery. That is sloppy writing.

Character problems ade, a movie like Prometheus needs to present an interesting mystery that is worth unraveling. And vague or not, it has to present a good story. This film did neither, and that is where it fails. The characters were poorly developed and the plot was laughable, but if it offered any sort of mystery that was actually compelling and didn't rely on obscurity, I could actually ignore those things. This movie isn't high art, it's sci-fi schlock with a more expenve coat of paint. A friend of mine who loves the movie pointed out how much he loves that it feels like one of the old corny c-fi films of the AFI days, Roger Corman's glory days. And he's right, it definitely feels like one of those old movies that was written one week and shot the next. It's The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra with a summer tentpole budget. But his reason for loving it is my reason for hating it. It could have been great. It could have carried some bold ideas. So bravo Prometheus for not spoon-feeding us, but you should of just focused on offering us something worth eating, spoon-fed or not.

And come on Preston, there's nothing worse than assuming that someone's dislike of a film has to do with some sort of "American" ignorance. No need to be pretentious. I'm glad you like the film. I'm still hoping that with a director's cut or a sequel I can like it too.*I use the term "raging zombie" because of how milar it was to 28 Days Later.

Bolsv...

I greatly appreciate your thoughtful response. It is refreshing to actually read a reasoned response that is deeper than "you are wrong, idiot!" While I do not entirely agree with you, I can understand where you are coming from. However, it seems like you and many of the other intensely dissatisfied viewers were expecting way too much from this film. Is it the deepest, most epic film of all time? Absolutely not, but it was certainly much more ambitious intellectually than your average multi million dollar sci fi effort (see Avatar for an example). When you conder how the major Hollywood studio system of green lighting multi-million dollar projects works, that is probably about as good as it is going to get these days.

On the surface, I really do not see how Prometheus has any more depth than a film like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which is now (justly so) heralded as a clasc and preserved by the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Ridley Scott is a director that likes to SHOW and not TELL in his approach to Sci Fi and I greatly respect and appreciate that. I teach Blade Runner in my Culture of Film course as an excellent example of dystopian science fiction and I guide my students to recognize how the viewer is never directly told what is going on in the future, yet the clues are plentiful (the constant rain in LA, the advertisements for off world living, the scarcity of animals, etc). I obviously do not think that Prometheus is in the same league as Blade Runner at all, but if you want to look at it superficially, I really do not see much difference and therefore do not think a lot of the criticisms being leveled at Prometheus are fair unless you also want to attack Blade Runner for the same things. Both films deal with very mple themes (Blade Runner - human mortality, Prometheus - where do we come from?) and use science fiction and action/adventure elements as an entertaining way of exploring them. You can probably search through Blade Runner and pinpoint characters behaving certain ways or saying certain things that don't seem to fit, but that would be misng the entire point of the film. Scott tells concept based, not character based, Sci-Fi stories. His movies are not about the minutia of the characters (you could probably argue that Dekkard is more underdeveloped than most characters in Prometheus), they are about the big ideas and it is totally within the artistic right of the director to make that choice. Thus, I would say that picking apart the running scene in Prometheus (if you want to hold that up to real life, high pressure tuations do not always result in logical actions) is not fair or important in regards to the overall goal of the film.

I will agree with you that the scene where the creature comes out of the goo and attacks the two scientists comes off as very improbable. However, I felt that might just be good old Ridley tipping his hat to the clasc horror roots that the film was built upon (he always describes Alien as nothing more than a "haunted house" movie) and, from that perspective, I can forgive that scene. One scene that I could not forgive, however, is when all of the scientists took off their helmets once inde the tunnels. Unless the film had earlier established that they had some damn near infallible air analys devices, there is no way any scientist would ever remove their helmet in that foreign of an environment. The risks would mply be far too great. Plus, it really did nothing to serve the story. The only justification I can think of is that, from a filmmaking perspective, it was more satisfying to see the faces of the actors more clearly for 20 minutes than if they were wearing the bulky helmets.

As a non-believer, I also agree with you that the Christian elements were tired. However, I have to remind myself that Christianity has been so beaten and raped into Western society for most of history that any form of entertainment is inevitably going to have some relationship to it. Despite that, I felt that the film used it more of a plot point rather than a message and did a good job of balancing science and religion and not really taking a definitive stance either way (this was brilliantly touched upon in the scene where Noomi's boyfriend tells her she can take her cross off).

Obviously, I liked Prometheus a lot and was able to enjoy it on a surface level as well as a deeper conversation topic with friends well after it was released. I am willing to bet that years from now it will be thought of much more highly than it is now.

As far as my "American" ignorance comment, I do agree that is a gross mplification, but it is not far off the mark. Look at the types of entertainment that are most popular in America. Read some of the ridiculous responses people leave on IMDb message boards. Look at the way our news media tells us what to think. Trust me, as a teacher I see direct evidence every day that we are long our ability as a nation for creative and critical thought or reasoning and it is has much more frightening implications than whether or not an audience gets Prometheus. But that is a different post and topic all together.