YMMV / Prometheus

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • David and exactly how much emotion and free will he really has. Fan opinions seems to range from him being entirely emotionless and simply following Weyland's orders to being entirely sentient and deliberately seeking out loopholes in his programming. Sound familiar?
  • Did David infect Holloway because Holloway was the most convenient target, or because he was the human who had been the biggest jerk to David? Also, since Word of God confirmed David had something of a crush on Elizabeth, there is a third potential motivation.
  • Vickers decision to leave the moon and return to Earth, despite being told about the Engineer ship's genocidal capabilities can be read in two ways: Vickers is a coward and is willing to put the lives of everyone on Earth at risk to save her own skin OR Vickers is trying to save the lives of the remaining crew and will try and figure out a plan to stop the ship later. The scene happens so quickly that it's impossible to tell what was going through her head and she lingers for several seconds after Janek announces his plans for Heroic Sacrifice and tells her to Abandon Ship, looking upset but not trying to force him to abandon this plan.
  • The deleted scene where the Engineer speaks to David and Weyland makes his motivations a little bit fuzzy. He doesn't immediately attack the crew, instead he asks why they are there. He also seems somewhat interested in what Shaw is asking him before being beaten down. It's only after Weyland has David arrogantly tell the Engineer that they're there because Weyland wants to live forever and then gets really up-close and personal, talking about how they're both "gods" that the Engineer actually becomes violent.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Before the film's release, a supposed early draft of the script was leaked. It contained a lot of religious weirdness (even more) and changed the setting's name from LV-223 to Zeus and the Engineers' to Terraformers, and for a while it was thought to be true, until Lindelof swore it was a fake. Still, some believe it to be authentic.
  • A mistake that is often brought up is that a character says they're only half a billion miles from Earth - which would put them only as far as Jupiter, never mind another solar system. But this ignores the context- namely, Vickers using it as informal shorthand for "miles away from anyone else" rather than an official measurement.
  • As noted below under Only the Creator Does It Right, the movie was heralded as Ridley Scott finally returning to "his" franchise, despite the fact that he didn't create the story for Alien (the screenplay was a done deal before he came on board to direct), and the few ideas he did come up with himself were roundly rejected by the studio.
• Designated Villain: Meredith Vickers is presented as an antagonist and technically is related to the villain's scheme. But she really has nothing to do with anything bad that happens throughout the film, tries to talk Weyland out of his plan and is one of the only people making rational calls throughout.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation:
  • Many fans did not like this answer to the question raised by the Space Jockey. One of the main points was the reveal that they look like humans and not the elephantine alien beasts thought until then, despite the fact Ridley Scott had stated endlessly (back since The '90s, actually) it was their suit which gave them that shape. Even fans familiar with that bit of Word of God were still rather miffed at the Human Aliens reveal, since they had preferred the appearance to stay a mystery.
  • When the full script of the film was leaked on the internet, it was revealed the reason why Engineers wanted to destroy mankind was because they killed Jesus, who was an Engineer harbinger himself. This is still implied in the film, both in the timelines shown in the Engineers' archives and in a deleted scene where the Engineer sees Shaw's cross, but it is ultimately left ambiguous. Many fans prefer it that way, considering the original reason trite and uninteresting.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Cuddles/Squidbaby/Shaw Jr." for the creature that Shaw extracts from her abdomen.
  • "Assflower/Proto-burster/Penis Snake" for the Hammerpede, the snakelike creature that attacks Milburn.
  • "Cloaky" for the first Engineer seen.
  • "Basketbike", for the sport David invented.
  • "Black goo", for, well, the black goo.
• Fanon: People tend to believe Fifield is supposed to be Irish, as his actor is from the United Kingdom and he generally looks an awful lot like Sheamus. However, nothing about his background has been officially released.
• Fanon Discontinuity: A very considerable portion of the fanbase has come to see both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant as just below Alien³ as films they do not want to acknowledge as part of the Alien franchise, in large part due to the fact that the Xenomorphs origin as a bioweapon is recent, or that it ignores the fan favorite acceptance that at least some Xenomorphs are natural species living on different worlds.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Prometheus was initially titled Alien: Engineers, since the original script was released online, there has been no shortage of fans furiously declaring that it has far better mythology gags, action scenes, and plot developments than anything that made it to screen.
• Funny Moments: Fifield, Milburn, and the alien cobra. What?! The scene was pure slapstick!
• Genius Bonus: One of David's scenes prior to the arrival of Prometheus at LV-223 shows him studying Schleicher's fable, an artificial story written in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language in 1868 (and updated over the decades as our best guess as to the vocabulary of PIE evolved). David's (presumably virtual) instructor was an actual linguistics professor hired by Ridley Scott to create the Engineers' language and teach it to the actors.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In a less significant but still worth noting thing to mention, a lot of David's friendly interactions with Shaw becomes this considering that he kills her in Alien: Covenant.
• He's Just Hiding: With all the Fridge Logic about how Vickers could have gotten out of the way, it’s not completely out of the question that she actually did, off-screen.
• Ho Yay:
  • The crewmen who have a running bet with each other throughout the movie, Ravel and Chance. While they are more likely just friends or at least on familiar terms with one another, the duo did have an awful lot of significant glances and nearly all of their screen time was with the other.
  • Millburn toward Fifield. He seems to be laughing at his comment early in the film in a way to gain his approval.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A major weakness of Prometheus is how similiar it is to Alien. In particular, Alien was revolutionary for having its protagonists be Space Truckers, but here, when the characters are well-financed and highly motivated elite scientists, they still act like unprofessional dabblers and look like they have never been in a field research (or even a field trip, for the inconvenience).
• Jerkass Woobie: Vickers is kind of icy and a bit self-motivated, but doesn't seem to be bad person beneath it all, and was dragged onto the crazy mission to find immortality, and is traumatized after being forced to kill Holloway. By the time things are over, she wants badly to go home, but can't due to the threat the Engineer ship poses and is forced to abandon ship (seeming both frustrated about this and concerned for the others), then run for her life to keep from being crushed to death but doesn't move fast enough.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • A lot of images have been made comparing the Engineer to Handsome Squidward.
  • The scene where the Engineer gets incapaciated by the Trilobite has been infamously compared to tentacle hentai by many.
  • In Brazil, the wordplay "Prometheus e não 'cumprius'" got commonly used in a joking way to criticize the film among its detractors due to it not living up to expectations, as in Portuguese the name of the deity from Greek myth Prometheus sounds similar to "prometeu" ("promised"), thus giving the idea to make a pun with the sentence "Prometeu e não cumpriu" ("It promised and it didn't deliver").
  • The way Meredith tries to run away from a rolling ship by running along its rolling path rather than away from it is a famous subject of ridicule on the Internet.
• Mis-blamed: Damon Lindelof used to bear the brunt of the hate for this film by people who didn't like it, as now it's known that he turned the script from what was originally known as Aliens: Engineers into the first draft of Prometheus, so the blaming does have a basis. However, his treatment didn't end up being the final product either: as it was revealed when the script became available online, Ridley Scott actually cut tons of scenes that were instrumental to understanding the film, therefore opening plot holes and ambiguities left and right, all while Lindelof futilely tried to caution him against leaving so much unexplained precisely because of the bad reaction to the finale of Lost. With Scott's decision to turn the sequel into Alien: Covenant, the weight of the duology's unpopularity has switched mostly from Lindelof to Scott.
• Nightmare Retardant: Sean Fifield's mutated form is simultaneously horrific and disgusting to look at... Until you see this production photo of his actor, Sean Harris, in full make-up sitting next to Noomi Rapace, Shaw's actress, and smiling.
• One-Scene Wonder: A proto-xenomorph shows up only for the last minute of the film, and was a huge hit with the fanbase.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: This was the overwhelming reaction pre-release, but ultimately subverted in two different directions: The polarizing reception of both this film and Alien: Covenant is about on par with that of Alien³, which undermined the "does it right" part, while the "creator" part is incorrect because Ridley Scott did direct the original film, but he did not come up the original story, characters, or title creature from Alien. That honor belongs to the screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.
• Paranoia Fuel: David can access the memories of the crew while they are in stasis. They've been in stasis for over two years. Furthermore, entrusting your life to an amoral synthetic for that length of time is unnerving.
• Questionable Casting:
  • It seems odd to cast Noomi Rapace as an English scientist considering she uses her own Swedish voice. The real 'WTH' moment comes with casting an obviously English child actress to play the young Elizabeth. The character being English isn't necessarily vital to the plot, so it would have been less jarring to just have Elizabeth be Swedish like her actress.
  • As mentioned below, Guy Pearce's old age makeup looks so awful one wonders why they didn't simply cast a more age-appropriate actor as Weyland, especially since the only footage involving a younger Weyland that would justify this was included in a promotional video as opposed to the movie itself.
• The Scrappy: Charlie. He's a douchebag scientist who acts like a complete idiot (even in comparison to everyone else), acts childish when he assumes the Engineers are dead (after partially exploring one structure), is abusive towards David for no reason and uses his girlfriend's infertility to pressure her into sex. However, his death scene is meant to be tragic, when a lot of people liked that he died, because he was just so hateable.
• Special Effects Failure: In a film that is by and large astonishing to look at, Guy Pearce's terrible aged make-up really stands out, the result of prepping a design on the fly during a then-tighter schedule. One could explain it in-universe as side-effects of Weyland trying to extend his age, but it can still be jarring.
• Spiritual Adaptation: This film can be viewed as modernized adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. This is due to the fact that much of its first-act material was taken directly from Dan O'Bannon's original Alien script, which was essentially a rework of that story (the version we're familiar with was a root-and-branch rewrite by David Giler and Walter Hill). O'Bannon (like his friend and onetime collaborator, John Carpenter) was a major Lovecraft nut and would eventually direct The Resurrected, an adaptation of Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
• Squick: Elizabeth is forced to perform an emergency c-section on herself to remove a monstrous fetus from her womb. The operation is completely uncensored.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Though the film's premise is that humanity finally uncovered clues that could lead them to the aliens who spawned life on Earth, nothing is revealed about their motivations or culture, since the only Engineer the heroes meet turns out to be an aggressive killer who hunts them down for no apparent reason.
• Vindicated by History: The films remains divisive, but after Alien: Covenant was released as a massively divisive sequel to it, fans have started re-evaluating Prometheus and seeing more of his good points.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Save for Guy Pearce's faulty makeup (which, as mentioned, can be explained in-universe), even those with a negative opinion on the film can agree that it looks incredible, especially in 3D. Some examples include but not limited to would be the opening shots of the waterfall and the world, The Engineer's sacrifice, and the Starmap.
• Vocal Minority: While certainly not perfect, this movie scored a respectable 73% ("Certified Fresh") critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes—far higher than Alien³, Alien: Resurrection or either of the two Alien vs. Predator movies—and its audience rating was almost as high. Still, to hear some longtime Alien fans talk about it, you'd think this film was a complete disgrace to the franchise with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

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