Mr Webber
Master Member
The Vickers/Shaw+Holloway scene regarding "agendas" could have been incorporated into a holo-table ensemble scene, as could the two co-pilots (who were they exactly???) goofing off about their bet, among others.
The fantastic economy in the scene in Alien when Dallas comes in to inform them that they're to deviate from their trip home is perfect in painting characters and anticipation and that's just relying on dialogue/acting. Prometheus had the benefit of a great idea in the revealing holo-map that would have made a great central device to keep cutting back to or play against a similar ensemble scene.
I couldn't help but feel the holo-map was strangely underused, perhaps the reason for it being purely that it would look great in 3d, certainly no-one seemed to take advantage of it except David, scoring some gossip about a life-form detected (a glitch!) - and I'm sure with his handy knowledge of the silo's inner workings he could have come across the Engineer anyway.
And while we're on the subject of holograms - why couldn't David rewind the footage of the Engineer's running and see what they were running from? Why did the footage only show the most questioning brief moment? And why would the Engineers need 'security' cams anyway? Break-ins??? And why is there a recording of them conveniently showing how to work their ship and plotting a course to Earth?
Obviously for convenience of the script!
That scene with Dallas was the first i ever saw back in the day, it was played on TV for a preview show, still love watching it. It is rather a long scene though and fairly essential.
We know next to nothing about the Engineers apart from them being capable of violence possibly even toward one another and they are carrying weapons, internal security is not a stretch, Earthlings use holograms eg Wayland why not them?
I can only think that the Engineers are running from a "spill" more than a creature, nothing for the cameras to pick up and why would they reveal them so early anyway?
Im still not seeing where big cuts would be made to fit in everyones ideas, yeah cut the goofy pilots, gives you about 40 secs to play with. Scotts attitude may change by the BRay release and we might see more than just deleted scenes. Lots of questions left behind, as there should be.