If you could re-write Prometheus, what would your story entail?

Fewer characters, no holograms, more screen time for Engineer and Deacon Alien, deeper philosophy, and less (exposition) dialogue.

I was fine with the Engineers but i wish they would have done the following:

* Hinted at clues to an even more powerful ancient being that was in control or had influenced everything (just whispers or clues but nothing solid, something to play with the audiences imagination of what could be out there, that way they have something to play with for later movies)

* Retool a lot of the dialog between characters, it was awful at times and kind of wooden

* Keep the black goo idea but give it definitive properties, like how does it break down organic life or does it mutate organic life, or maybe just have it do one or the other, because from a horror standpoint its better for it be a mutation agent.

* Give Captain Janek more screen time, he was awesome but just had very few lines

* Cast someone else as Holloway as he was awful

* Increase the ancient cosmic horror, even though they found the Engineers it should have been only a gateway to more unimaginable things and horrors out there

* Defintely not retconned the Space Jockey into a Engineer with a suit, that was awful for me

While i like the movie a great deal, it has many flaws and angles that it could have and should have taken instead of the path it went with, also with certain characters being stupid and poor dialog at times, although i like it i felt it dissapointed me as a lost opportunity to really go with the cosmic horror vibe

While i liked Charlize Theron in this i felt she was wasted, having an actress of her caliber and really other than being dubious and getting crushed she offered hardly nothing to the movie 

They should have answered some Alien film universe questions but created more....for example in Alien they showed the juggernaut , the Space Jockey, hinted at the knowledge of the Company having knowledge but never explained why it was there, how old it was, how the eggs got there, why the Alien was what it was, how the Company had knowledge ...leaving little mysteries for me is best as it opens up our imagination and these elements are what has made the Alien film universe a lasting one. Understandably maybe having unknown mysteries doesnt work for many of the younger generation who must have everything be tied up with a bow or explained and just care about explosions or if something looks cool on screen, The Transformers is an example of "looks good but horrible storytelling"...i want deep concepts that provoke and terrify and leave us wondering and thinking. 

but myself i prefer to have some mysteries with a hint of something greater or some secret as of yet undiscovered.

I love Prometheus and probably wouldn't change much.....

Lets look at the first 4 Alien movies:

Alien : Humans struggle with a space monster.

Aliens : Humans struggle with several space monsters.

Alien3 : Humans struggle with a space monster.

Alien: Resurrection : Humans struggle with several space monsters.

Prometheus : Humans get infected, become space monsters and give birth to other space monsters.

Prometheus was actually a refreshing change...had it's problems...but I thought the premise worked...*shrug*

Thanks for the responses.  But I did not like the notion of an alien being the creation of us and then seeking out the creator to be aligned with the Alien series.  That could of been a separate movie such as "At the Mountains of Madness".  Even though humans battling against a creature has been the main theme for the majority of the serioes, Alien and Aliens told it best.

I felt that just having the Space Jockey was simply part of an Alien race that created the Alien monster and was wiped out from it.  I think that is where Alien Covenant is leading to but with the notion that we were part of that creation as well (David).  But then, other movies have done similar to show we were the problem all along (Planet of the Apes).

By the way, I am going to see the opening of LIFE tonight.  It is an Alien rip-off but the monster has some unique aspects to it unlike the Xenomorph.  I did re-watch Alien last night and I just realized that the Alien could survive in cold space because when he was jettisoned out of the shuttle; he was still fighting to get inside of the ship; instead of immediately freezing to death.

Yeah, I'm going to see LIFE tomorrow! Can't wait!

Alien/Xenomorphs surviving space is a very interesting argument...tons of varied opinions on this forum.

The Queen from Aliens should have survived if this is true!

The Engineers might also survive..the one in Prometheus survived the hostile conditions(dead in seconds if you're human!)as he sought out Shaw.

MonsterZero (I remember that Godzilla movie).  I am 51 years old so I know all the old school monster movies lol.  You made great points and is interesting to know what the Aliens are more capable of. 

-I would NEVER have used that makeup on Guy Pearce. It made him look ridiculous and was very insulting. I cannot believe he agreed to do it. I wouldn't have, and I'm not as pretty as he is!

-definitely would've cast someone else as Holloway. He was easily the worst "actor" on the set. I could've done a better job, and I'm just a community stage actor.

-I would've "dumbed down" the technology a bit. The Prometheus looked like it came from WAY in the future from the Nostromo, as opposed to the way it was supposed to be.

-The "mutations" would've been...well, different. The human ones just seemed stupid and not well thought out.

-The Engineers would've been better "made". They simply looked like CGI. They should've been larger. 

-This may come to pass, BUT I DON'T WANT THE "SPACE JOCKEY" TO JUST BE AN ENGINEER IN THE SUIT!

-Showing Charlize Theron's legs was a bad idea.

-The whole pregnancy/self abortion/trilobite thing was just stupid.

-Having Vickers die from a "rolling Juggernaut" just seemed stupid. In fact, a "rolling Juggernaut" just seems stupid.

More Engineer time

I just saw life and in my opinion, it is a better movie than Prometheus lol.  I doubt it will make the same money as Prometheus did but nevertheless, it is an entertaining movie.

Starlogger,

Many made the same observation about Guy Pierce as an age old Weyland.  Some critics stated they should have simply used an older actor to play the role.

I would want characters I cared about- it wasn't fair to have Fassbender do all the heavy lifting. I get there were religious themes and I came to terms with it but I can't stand zealots like Shaw. I need to stop before I start having a tizzy fit.

Cast the Character Milburn as a exo-biologist not a clown that goes patting life forms he obviously does not believe exists.

this is a good topic...would like the hear others' ideas.

I doubt that I am a writer like that but I can give examples of what I would do different.

I would remove Shaw or at least make her more rational.

Most of the characters would either be removed or rewritten. I would make their motifs clearer and I would fill in most of the holes that Prometheus had, this depends on if I would keep the character. Scenes that are dumb would be removed.

Janek should have more scenes because that is a character that was good.

There would be more everyday dialogue, which would be an attempt to make the characters more like human beings rather than some archetypes. For example instead of “I am in it for money” it would be like “I need money because I have a family to support (and so on)”.

My draft would focus more on the Xeno. Since Prometheus is a prequel it wouldn’t have Xenos but more Xeno related monsters. The Zombie Fifield would be totally removed (because it sucked), leave that to the zombie movies and I would use the Xeno Fifield.

Since I am kind of goofy at times I would put in some lame jokes because if it is a serious movie then we need some balance. This could be difficult since my type of humor is silly but someone could tell me when there is too much goofiness. For example I would have a space bathroom with big neon letters where it says Space toilet/space shitter. LOL!

The Engineers would have been given a bit more background and it would be better explained why they would like to see humanity eradicated. I think that they would rather have 80% genes in common with mankind instead of being an exact match.

Eventually I would have the Xeno as something that the Engineers found and made into a super-weapon, that the Xeno would be a purer form of something else. The origin would be kept a secret because it would be more interesting that way. One of the things that made Alien work is that everything wasn’t obvious, I like that.

Prometheus had many interesting ideas it is just that it was executed in a lame way.

Personally, I would have written out Peter Weyland and focused more on the Yutani side of the company.

I would have rewritten the scenes in the Chamber with the urns/big head. For starters  I'd given the team more time exploring the mural with the deacon/xenomorph, giving the audience something to wonder/think about.

Second I'd change the whole Fifield/Milburn debacle. That was just wierd. Having them act as intelegent scientists, confronted with an alien species for the first time. I also never understood the Fifield yelling at Shaw, outside of the chamber. That felt somewhat misplaced...

More Engineer time. 

As Thoughts_Dreams stated, more of Idris Elbas character, as I really think he is a gifted actor and it was a role that could have been developed a bit more.

Delete the squid. I hated it. The C-section scene had potential, but for me became a WTF-moment when the bubble bursted... That allmost ruined the whole film.

I'd make the deacon smaller and more fierce, more Gigeresque(not necessarily more alien like, though). Smaller because I allways thought that it was to big to fit inside the Engineer. And not CGI. That was a shame, really.

@Parkerparrot Good stuff. Agree nearly completely.

@Parkerparrot

I agree with what you stated about more time with the characters exploring the urn room and mural. For a bunch of people that just discovered an alien race of beings they didnt have the sense of awe and wonderment that i felt they should have. If done properly on screen that sense of awe and wonderment is amazing especially if they film it in a way to where the film makers puts the audience in the same shoes as the characters on screen. 

When discovering an ancient race of aliens whether they are alive or dead, scientist or not would have some grand sensation of awe, and that was not captured in Prometheus and i feel it missed a great opportunity of that.

Sort of like the sensation of when Dallas, Lambert and Kane discovered the chamber with the Space Jockey you could almost feel the bewilderment and excitement and tension that discovery posed to the characters on screen. There should have been something like that in Prometheus.

Prometheus should have just been about the discovery of another race ( engineers) first and foremost..the crew could have entered the Juggernaut and activated footage of their species/ home / mission etc. I think a few scenes from the film should have stayed but the film should have mostly been about WOW we've found another race and their DNA is a match to ours...WHO are these beings/WHERE are they from..

They should have had David translate from murals etc...then at the end of the film they found one alive as in film but after bringing him out of stasis he could of just about to speak and gets chest bursted... Ensue chaos and black out with to be continued

"Second I'd change the whole Fifield/Milburn debacle. That was just wierd. Having them act as intelegent scientists, confronted with an alien species for the first time. I also never understood the Fifield yelling at Shaw, outside of the chamber. That felt somewhat misplaced..."

Who said they are intelligent?

David 8 is the intelligent character...having multiple 'super men' would diminish David.

Intelligent Millburn- "These seem to be a dangerous Riftia pachyptila, perhaps we should leave...?"

Intelligent Fifield- "I concur, we should leave the cave immediately.."

Boring.

Having all your characters be super-intelligent supermen(smart unerring scientists) ...Would turn them into hero like characters(Dudley do rights/infallible) .......the characters would then demand, by popularity with the audience, more screen time and a bigger role in the plot.

You need disposable characters in a haunted house flick. 

I think that the engineers and the Belugamorph would've been enough of a tease for Alien for the first film. Would've saved the Deacon for the second film 

@Starlogger - Thank You, must be a inteligent guy (smiley! )

@Grinning & Dropping Linen - That is exactly what I was thinking, I totally agree.

@MonsterZero - That really made me laugh! And You'Re right! Who would like to se more of Fifield? (God forbid) Though behaving rational don't make You a superinteligent superhero, but I get what You mean. Your post made my evening!

@Pakerparrot.

Thanks!

If the Prometheus crew were really intelligent...they would have stayed back on Earth relaxing in hot tubs...waiting for David 8 to return from LV223!!

Darn right, MonsterZero! The only way to be sure...

Excellent topic. I share most frustrations.

Get rid of Shaw, Holloway, Fifield, Millburn, and the lady with a Scottish accent.

Make Charles Bishop Weyland the central character, and his quest to seek out humanity's destiny among the stars.

Don't don Guy Pearce in appalling make-up -- in fact don't make Guy Pearce Weyland at all! Save him for another role, and use an actual old guy i.e. Lance Henriksen.

Give Janek and his 2 lieutenants more airtime, and make better use of Charlize Theron.

Tear out every engineer and make the space jockeys a bona fide extra terrestrial.

And definitely no damned black goo!!!

Finally, my outline of a story would be that the humans find an ancient artifact which they realise is instructions on how to build a faster-than-light craft. Weyland builds it and brings together a team to journey in it. The craft is self-piloting and takes them to a mysterious world where they discover the space jockeys -- as we have always imagined them to be. But the humans soon realise it's all a ruse and they've been lured to this place as a source of fodder for the space jockey's war machine: the xenomorph. Fortunately, the surviving humans manage to turn the space jockey's deadly weapon against them and infect them before they head for earth. The last space jockey tries to escape but is chest-bursted by the first queen. And the rest is history.

@Stan... I TOTALLY agree about the Black Goo. I REALLY don't like the concept, and think it is just too "generic", I guess. They may do something wonderful with it, but so far, count me as one to think they could've done COMPLETELY without it. Genetic splicing and cloning and "induced" mutations are already part of our scientific repertoire, and in the future "Engineers" would damn sure be able to make any creature they wanted without it.

Well, it's a hard question because the initial premise, the engineers seeded life on earth, feels like the first wrong step, but that's what took us to Zeta Reticli. So you'd have to take a whole other approach. In a way, I wish A. The space jockeys were what they appeared to be, aliens with elephant trunks. If you told the story without any humans at all, just these weird aliens and how they initially encounter and deal with the Xenos, that's a more interesting movie: 

the black goo, for example, isn't an improvement on the life cycle of the alien, if anything it's just another version of ambulatory infection/host/chest burst, but lacks so much of the elegance and horrificness of the Giger alien. To be honest, it's more like the tons of Alien knockoffs that came out after Alien. 

Another shortcoming of Prometheus is the characters are boilerplate. Parker & Brett, Dallas, Hudson & Hicks great & memorable characters - who did Prometheus have? Honestly, Fifield was so weirdly antagonistic and the biologist was such a dipshit, who wasn't cheering for them to be first kills? I agree the actor playing Holloway was a terrible choice, but to be honest, every scene he's calling Shaw babe or looking at her meaningfully, we get it, you're a couple but real couples don't broadcast like that, it made him seem creepy, who doesn't want to see him die. 

So scrap all the humans, send the space jockey ship to one of the moons, the first third of the movie is just taking in their weird ship and culture, like one of the joys (still) of Alien is that it's so fucking alien, things we've never seen before, so go with that, it's a cop out to have them using holograms and technology we'd use ourselves, go crazy, push the technology as part of you angle, make it gross and fascinating - finally, we assume(d) the Xenos were part of a evolutionary process so dire it created the ultimate living/killing machine, so go to a world that hellish and show us what it's like... they crash or what have you, encounter eggs, facehuggers, then when the aliens start getting born, based on what we know about aliens taking on characteristics of their hosts, make some badass aliens based on space jockey variants. 

That's how I would fix Prometheus

If I could rewrite Prometheus, I'd make it so Dr. Ford survives. Shaw would still be a main character in the story, but I would unexpectedly let Dr. Ford live and play a bigger role in the end.

In my version of it, we would see Dr. Shaw freeze up after the Engineer rips off David's head, while Dr. Ford would be the one who eventually uses the Trilobyte against the Engineer (and ends up stuck on the planet).  IMO it makes the next parts of the story easier to swallow if David uses Dr. Ford.

Prometheus was really just the start of David's "adventure."  It wasn't all about Dr. Shaw, but the writers couldn't make an android the male lead or co-protagonist at that point.  I'd make it clear that David is perhaps a more important character to the future of the series, as he'd be a main character in his own right.  We don't need to empathize or sympathize with Shaw, because David doesn't feel much when he does what he does.

It potentially makes more sense to use Dr. Ford as part of David's next "experiment."  Ford was willing to help David put Shaw back to sleep after she learned about the creature growing inside her.  David chooses to use Dr. Shaw as his test subject, while Dr. Ford is simply asked to "assist" David... 

With the way things play out, the company appreciates Ford sending them data on the Trilobyte in her secret transmissions to them.  It turns out that Dr. Ford was looking out for Weyland corp's interests the whole time, as she knew Sir Weyland was aboard the ship.  This is partially why Ford shows little reaction when Dr. Shaw stumbles in on them tending to Mr. Weyland. 

I would basically focus on David more, make the writing far less ambiguous, and have it be apparent that Dr. Ford was part of Weyland's secret agenda all along.  If Ford is able to survive, and we find out she was "in on it" the whole time (sort of like a Burke character), it's easier to use her as part of David's later experiments.  There are some who like the Shaw character and don't want to see her suffer a tragic fate:  this could allow Dr. Ford to be used as a plot device instead.

One thing to consider is whether or not the Engineer actually killed Dr. Ford or simply broke a number of her bones when it tossed her aside.  There's a chance that David lost track of Dr. Ford's body while he was worrying about his own body being tossed around inside the Juggernaut.  He assumes that Dr. Ford is dead when he tries to contact Shaw but detects faint signs of life from Ford's body.  The Engineer is heading to Shaw's location in a hurry, while Ford is stuck crawling out of the wreckage with a bunch of broken bones and many injuries. David decides not to tell Dr. Shaw that Dr. Ford is still alive.

Ford is pissed off at the android for leaving her for dead, but her medical knowledge allows her to fix herself up enough that she manages to survive -- just barely.  Shaw's transmission makes the company think there are no other survivors left on the planet.  We would see that Ford and a security officer are stranded alone on LV-223 after David and Shaw leave. The Deacon eventually tries to attack them, and they work together to survive until the company finally shows up about 3 years later.  The company takes so long to rescue them that it forces them to leave the relative safety of the life cabin, where Ford is able to patch herself up (before running out of air at the 2 year mark).  But that's a whole different story for another time.

Smarter Scientists.

After the outbreak (as shown in hologram) we see a flash back of another surviving Engineer take flight only to crash land on near bye LV426, crash landing into an Engineer outpost crushing it into its subterranean complex.

The Engineer pilot's chest erupts and a Xeno (large, fully formed and large) chest burster falls to the floor of the pilots chair. It's blood burns a hole through the ships floor and down'through dark levels into a huge silo like expanse.

The Xeno moves down into the dark expanse where it matures.

The Juvenile finds and kills the few Engineers who escaped the crash.

The Juvenile becomes a Queen and lays eggs. She grown old over millennia and dies.

2000 years later we see a ship landing........

Flash forward.

No silly octopus fleshy creatures.

Only Gigeresque creature design.

No giving the plot away in the trailer.

We get a quick glimpse as to what is chasing the Engineers in hologram.

That'll do it......