Prometheus – Special Edition

This review is not aimed to offend, just to give my honest opinion. Agent 9's fanedit is the highest rated Prometheus edit so my expectations were high, even higher after watching the very long but otherwise excellent Giftbearer fan edit. The amount of work put into this edit is evident, I commend the creator for their efforts, however...

My enjoyment was completely ruined by the misuse of tracks to influence the viewer's emotion or convey character intentions in some scenes, incorrect audio levels during scenes with dialog, looping snippets of tracks from tracks intended for other scenes, bizarre audio effects added/manipulated to the existing score and lastly shoehorned tracks from the other Alien movies that do not fit the tone of the film nor the film's score that was left intact. It's a great idea, but it was poorly executed, key scenes were spoiled. Scenes intended to unravel before the audience are given away by new score elements that remove the suspense and reveal the plot surprises, these scenes should have been left untouched.These problems occur throughout the movie from title screen all the way till the end credits roll.

It's very unfortunate considering how much effort went to this. It would have benifited from critical review prior it's fanedit.org official release. The audio aspect of this project would have benefited from the collaboration of someone with strong audio editing experience.

Other than the above I have no complaints with the visual editing, there are certain scenes I would have prefered to see but I won't criticize the creator's choice considering what they had to work with and their choice how to tell the story. The movie's narrative is much more cohesive, there are lots of small edits that make a lot of difference.

Being a big Alien fan the theatrical release of Prometheus was a disappointment, on second viewing I enjoyed it more, probably due to my expectations being somewhat lowered.

This edit improves on the theatrical release for me and I certainly enjoyed watching it.

The movie flows better and the inclusion or removal of certain scenes make more sense. I liked the color correction and the excellent work on bringing the deleted scenes up to release quality. The use of original Alien theme music was also welcome although overall I found the music soundtrack to overwhelm the vocals in several places.

I've watched it twice now and can say for sure this is my favourite version! This is what it should have been!
I love how you've effectively cured most of the silly scenes and made others better flowing either by making them shorter with slight rearrangements, or with more effective music to suit the scene. Not to mention I loved the Alien music integration! Why Ridley left those scenes out I'll never know...they work so well! They gave more gravitas to Weyland's presence on the ship, the "love" between Charlie and Elizabeth that much more acceptable. David's motives becoming clearer. There were a couple of little gripes (nit picking really) - thought when Fifield says "I'm out of here" then walks off, there was silence which made it feel abrupt. As they were walking away Charlie could have said "pull yourself together" with the addition of an Alien "clunk" (the one you used upon landing). The Alien music just before the text appears when Prometheus is travelling through space near the beginning could have been filtered out less abruptly or even left to play through whole scene. A suggestion (though it may not fit well) would be when Charlie gets incinerated the screen goes bright white...could maybe have Ellie have a flashback to the engineer crumbling at the beginning of the original, fragmented. Reinforcing the theme that progress/evolution does not come without sacrifice. Would have ended the movie just when the "deacon" explodes out of the engineer revealing the back of it's head and used more sinister music when credits roll replacing Chopin. I love your use of colour correction - the look and feel of the movie is now in a more Alien vain. 9.5/10

There's not much more I can say that hasn't already been said. It's a solid edit that greatly improves upon the theatrical release. Characters behave less silly, the mystery preserved, and a tighter thriller simply through reorganization.

I did knock a point off the visual editing since there was a brief moment when the Adobe Media Offline image popped up. It was only 12 frames or so, but something that should have been caught prior to final build. There may also have been a couple black frames between scenes, but I watched the BR converted to MP4 on my TiVo so it's possible something in the conversion and/or transcode caused those. In my albeit quick scan of the MP4 on my computer I couldn't spot those, so I'm going to go with a transcode problem. I'll update if I encounter the problem on a closer inspection of the file. That said, I don't feel right knocking points off until I can confirm it wasn't something on my end.

In the end this is a very good edit, one that you should consider watching. It definitely improves Prometheus and makes it a much more enjoyable film.

This edit is nothing short of a triumph! It takes a deeply flawed film which polarised it's fan base and repairs and realigns some very dodgy plot holes and character motivations to make a much more coherent and more less maddening experience. Yes, the film still has it's problems, but Agent9 has created the best available version of Prometheus, one which I believe even Ridley Scott would enjoy.

Before I get into some of the editing choices here, let me first discuss the presentation. Simply put, this is the most professional and polished fan edit I've ever seen. From the a/v quality, the execution of the changes to the movie and the BD menus, this is gold standard work.

The colour timing of the the deleted scenes, for the most part, is indistinguishable from the finished film. And the new 5.1 mix created especially for those scenes is stellar work.

Moving on to the editing choices, most of which improve the film considerably and do away with nearly all of the annoying sloppy writing plot holes and idiocies. An odd side effect of that is that Agent9 has thrown a light on a couple of things that I never considered before. Take Holloway's wiggly eye worm. He makes much more sense in this edit with the reinsertion of some of his scenes so I caught myself wondering why would a trained scientist on an alien world ignore such a thing? When he trips and stumbles later he tries to brush it off then almost immediately he's shitting himself asking if there is something wrong with him. I couldn't help think how all of that would make more sense if the eye worm scene was gone and he didn't know there was something wrong with him until he asks Shaw what she sees.

Another thing I wondered about is why Weyland is no longer a "ghost" in the hologram. It neither hurts nor fixes anything for me so I was wondering why the editor made that choice. Maybe that is a point that other fans have problems with and Agent9 has taken their wishes into consideration.

Also I wondered why Elizabeth was lying on her back saying she can't go on, only to have the deus ex machina of David speaking to her from his detached head. Because this edit improves so many things I thought about that moment for the first time. I would have cut her bleating and started with David speaking to her.

The biggest question I have about the editing choices is the beginning TED scene... although it is nice on it's own and it gives us more of a sense of who Weyland is and why they put Guy in makeup, I still think most of that speech has little baring on the film or even spoils some of it. I loved David quoting Lawrence of Arabia but now he's just mimicking Weyland. I really think the point to cut out of that and go to titles is after he says "What have we done with it?"

And one final thing, why is Shaw not dead from drug and alcohol abuse? LOL! She sticks that morphine thing in herself so many times then goes straight for the Vodka (which incidentialy has the UK alcohol unit pink stamp on it that they use today).

This is an incredible piece of work. The end scene with Shaw and the Engineer is very exciting and edge of the seat stuff. The wire removals, added sound and colour timing here are a perfect storm of Fanediting prowess.

If anyone is a fan of Prometheus or is interested in Fanedits, PROMETHEUS - THE SPECIAL EDITION is for you!