Prometheus – Special Edition

I'm one of the people who actually liked Prometheus when it came out, although I certainly wasn't blind to its flaws. The story was told in a very convoluted way, but my main issues have always lain with the lack of character development. Anything else that gets fixed is a bonus.

Visual/audio quality - Visual was good, audio was mixed. Deleted scenes, although well integrated visually, were often noticeably lower audio quality, and sometimes when the volume ramped up it felt like the mix was struggling to breathe.

Audio during the Ted Talk, specifically, was phasery - particularly during applause.

Visual editing was fine. I didn't notice a single (visual) cut.

Audio editing was mixed. One cut was jarring, most of the rest of my qualms were with the rescoring. All of the soundtrack references from other films were noticeable and distracting. Although it's a nice idea, I don't think it worked. The score would often fight for dominance over the dialogue as well, which isn't ideal.

"ok then, on with the show" - felt too sudden, having had dialogue removed prior to it. The removal of "never had to follow a dead guy" was a bit awkward as well.

Narrative - I watched this with a friend who'd seen the theatrical before and found the story confusing. He felt the edit made things much easier to grasp, and I would agree. The story flows better and some character motivations make more sense. Pacing also benefited.

Some of the tiny cuts, particularly towards the beginning, I wasn't a fan of. They felt awkward and robbed characters of little chunks of development. Some examples:

Fifield's "I'm outta here" was rushed and random. No follow up from the other characters. He just leaves without anyone batting an eyelid. I get people don't like his tantrum, but that's his character. Better a bad character that makes sense, than an underdeveloped one whose actions are unclear.

Deleted scene with the captain in blondies quarters (post-flamethrower murder) makes little sense since them sleeping together was cut. The last thing between them was him asking her if she was a robot. If they had slept together then there would be a degree of intamacy and her letting him into her personal space would be more believable.

On a positive note, I thought the running in a straight line was very well handled. It never bothered me before as I thought the shot was cool, but the new sequence worked really well and was more logical. I was also happy to see the extended final fight with the engineer make it in.

Overall, a good edit, but I would still watch the theatrical over this, chiefly because there was a lot that took me out of the film audio-wise. This was mostly on the right track though and I intend on checking our other edits that tackle similar aspects of the film.

I'll have to re-watch the Prometheus Unbound edit to see if it's still a more favorable edit than this as I originally pegged Unbound as the near perfect edit, but narrative-wise this feels like a close call.

This edit has a ton of re-working done to [mostly] seamlessly remove not only the larger issues, but nearly all of even the small things without affecting the original narrative. While I'm not happy that the TED talk made it in here as well (I seriously don't get why people think it belongs), everything beyond that is pretty smooth. There are some minor issues with audio editing where it clips in, as well as some of the 3rd act editing can get a bit choppy but nothing that stands out too much. Ultimately, the narrative here is smooth and I'm glad it didn't include any of the Earth/excavation scenes, and the Fifield departing from the crew bit - actually the whole Fifield subplot - worked very well.

Outside of the narrative, my only issues are with audio and video editing and [take this with a grain of salt] the video quality of the 1080p release that I happened to watch. It was very blocky, blurry, and just looked like it was encoded with a low bitrate even though the bitrate is 11mbps. Maybe it's just my source. I don't remember where I got it from to be honest, but if the version I watched is an official release, it looks upscaled. Regardless, it's a great edit and potentially in the run for best edit out there... I recommend this and Prometheus Unbound. Both are great edits.

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

Just finished watching the edit.
The technical side of it was certainly very strong. The cuts, the integration of the deleted scenes (save for Vickers/Janek intercutting with Shaw/David), the colour correction, the cleaned up FX were all flawless. The audio was pretty good as well, even if there were some mixing problems from time to time (dialogue mixed in the front channels, the score turned up too loud). All in all, brilliant work.

The only problem was that the movie felt a bit disorganised. I can't quite put my finger on it but I think the film flowed a bit better when I last watched the theatrical version. That said, I remember feeling the same way when I first watched it at the cinema, so perhaps it's just a question of repeated viewings.