LV 426

Good work =) bold with the B&W. Will you ever do a colored one? Please! =)

Ah Prometheus, I have such mixed feelings about you. I remember being really excited for Ridley Scott to make another Alien movie, no matter how much he and the studio lied, saying it was NOT connected to Alien. The trailer was pretty awesome, had some solid stars in it (Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, and Idris Elba), and the trailer music was freaky cool! But then the movie came out and it was... fine, I guess. The characters make nonsensical decisions, Guy Pierce looks awful in old man makeup, and the engineers are just bizarre. Also having it be ANOTHER planet was really REALLY stupid. But thankfully The Man Behind The Mask decided to try and fix up what he could and tie this in better with the rest of the Alien series.

First off, editing the movie to omit any reference to this being a different planet was SMART. I mean we've got the engineer pilot with the chestburster EXACTLY like in Alien. You're telling me that's on a different planet? GTFOutta here! Good fix. The decision to make this in black and white was a bold move. At first I was kind of put off by it. Like the film quality is really high so being in black and white didn't make it seem like an older film. But given about 10-15 mins I started to like it a lot. I realized it helped desaturate against a lot of the excess color in the original cut while giving it it's own (non) color palette feel like how Alien was muted yellows and white (cool), Aliens was deep blues (sweet), Alien 3 was industrial molten steel red (umm, what?), and Alien: Resurrection was lime green (yeesh). So good on you for that!

The rest of the edit is a mix of fixing the character motivations, taking out excess engineer scenes with no true value, and keeping the pace going. I really like what was possible given the available footage. If I had my choice I'd prefer to recast some people (like discount Tom Hardy with yknow REAL Tom Hardy), rewrite half of the script, and have the spaceship NOT roll and crush Charlize Theron who should have JUST GONE TO THE SIDE LIKE 3 FEET... but beggars can't be choosers :) This is the best cut of Prometheus out there. Someone get it to Ridley Scott ASAP so he can fix whatever he's done with Alien: Covenant before it's out in theaters.

Director Scott apparently has less interest in a direct sequel to Prometheus, at least at this time.
Fear not! TMBTM has reedited Prometheus so that its place in the Alien chronology is specific to the first movie.
The tempo has been increased in this one, and there is more ambiguity, bordering on confusion at times.

Video - 1280 X 720p in well contrasted black n white. This is inside a m2ts container, which I worried my computer or player would have trouble with. I did have troubles, but not with the visuals. The editing is expert, as to be expected from TMBTM, including a grim surprise I won’t divulge. The black n white accentuates the Horror component, as well as echoing SciFi movies from the 1950s.

Audio - 320 kbps, 6 channel mix, as well as 2 channel likewise 320 kbps. My computer handled the 6 channel, my player could not. I created a workaround. The sound is robust, dynamic, but never clipped. SUBS? Yes, there were subtitles, French and English. Once again, my player could not render a file, this time the pgs subtitle stream.

Workaround for subs - I demuxed the English pgs subs, converted to srt. There were inconsistencies after the OCR process which had to be sorted. Several long lines had to be broken, typos fixed, and at least one very brief passage needed a longer timestamp. For those who might also have trouble with the pgs subtitles, my srt conversion is here - http://www.addic7ed.com/movie/122414

Narrative - Despite heavy cuts, the narrative holds together and works well. In the final act, the action is extremely compressed, though remains easy to follow. The plot twists are inventive. One passage, however, so befuddled me that I wrote TMBTM for clarification. His reply was lengthy and detailed. Suffice to say, characters make more assumptions in his version, than in the original. When their assumptions are wrong, there are consequences. These add to the ambiguity of the story, and left this viewer with an uneasy aftertaste - in a good way.

Enjoyment - The edit lacks the grandeur of the original, though the original is a disappointing failure of broad ambition mangled by sloppy, poorly focused writing. This is an edit I more appreciated rather than enjoyed primarily because the characters are as annoying as ever. In particular, the Abbott & Costello shtick of Fifield and Millburn abides. Other characters have the depth of Petri dish specimens (aside from David, who is better developed here than in any version of Prometheus I have watched). Nevertheless, as rousing B-movie entertainment, this edit, particularly the finale, is an adrenaline rush. This is a great late night ride. Strap in for high octane excitement.

Prometheus remains, for me, a film that's much more interesting to talk about how it could have been great than it is a film to watch. The original film has a very mismanaged 1st act that, in the hands of most faneditors, is greatly improved. However, the second act is so glaringly awful that it destroys all of the film's momentum that its half strong third act barely gets the film over the finish line. Giftbearer, Special Edition and my own edit - Prometheus Unbound - all try to minimize the damage done in the second act, but admittedly all us have failed. TMBTM is also unable to meet this challenge, but he does go a long way in both improving the original material and finding something none of the other edits have presented.

TMBTM has invented a new way to approach the material with more tricks up his sleeves than any of his predecessors have employed. Envisioning the film as a direct prequel to Alien requires some re-purposing of scenes, clever dialog juggling, and impressive visual effects work. While the original concludes with David and Shaw finding their own ship to head off to the Engineer's home-world, TMBTM has successfully ended the film with all of the characters dead, and a single Xenomorph left alive on the ship, alone on planet LV-426. His third act, especially in comparison to the endings of all of the other fanedits that precede it, is worth the watch in and of itself.

I was sincerely hoping that TMBTM could somehow fix the roadblock that is the second act, marked by the crew's entrance into the dome. However, each and ever clever edit he does to circumvent one problem is often accompanied by another moment of awfulness that went untreated. In this version, David accidentally triggers the hologram recording - which is a great improvement - but he still talks to himself with exposition-friendly lines like, "Impressive," "Sweaty," and "It's organic." This edit removes the senseless line of Holloway saying, "This is just another tomb," but it keeps in dialog like, "Just like home," and "This is just one small step for man." This edit successfully removes the awful sex scene between Holloway and Shaw, but keeps in the even worse exploding head sequence. I understand that, to one degree or another, I have preferences in these regards. However, I think there is a very strong argument to be made that despite removing 30 minutes from the movie - as impressive as that may be - there is still room to make it even more tighter than I ever thought possible.

Regardless, the second act of the original film is painful and so it goes with all of the edits, including this one. However, the third act is where this edit really shines. The momentum of the film finally starts to come back after the Cesarean/abortion scene. The surprises that follow, especially starting with the confrontation with the Engineer to the edit's closing shot, are totally unexpected and a drastic improvement over all of the versions of this film - including my own. While Prometheus will remain a deeply flawed movie, this edit goes a long way to create not only a more positive experience from the original, but something completely unique compared to all of the other edits that are out there. Strongly recommended.

Audio/Video Quality - I sense the choice to make the film in black in white is less about artistic purpose and more about making the deleted scenes and visual effects work appear seamless. The film was not shot with black and white in mind and a lot of shots suffer on account of it. There are no bitrate or pixelization issues to speak of.

Visual Editing - Nothing out of place here such as flash frames or obvious continuity errors. I am overtly familiar with the source material, and only a moment or two felt like something was missing. For example, the way Janek responds with, "I'll have you know this once belonged to..." without Vicker's first commenting on it didn't feel right. However, such moments will be completely missed by casual viewers. The added visual effects are successfully blended in such that few will complain unless they are expecting the ILM quality from a fan edit.

Audio Editing - There is impressive audio work that includes adding music and changing dialog that is completely unnoticeable to the casual viewer.

Narrative - The surprises in the third act overwhelm the challenges of the second act.

Enjoyment - I found this to be the most enjoyable edit of the film to watch, including my own.