Yeah. Spoilers. If spoilers keep you from seeing a movie, keep reading.
I still remember the review I read of Alien from 1979 — Richard Schickel in Time? That part I don’t remember — wondering if the movie was supposed to be a thinly veiled satire of corporate life, because the ship’s crew members were so interchangeable and personality-free and we just didn’t care when the Alien ate them.
I wonder what the same reviewer would make of Alien in comparison to Prometheus, because the former is a finely-crafted character study in comparison to the latter. It’s a finely-crafted everything in comparison to the latter.
Prometheus is a bad film. Not everyone in my household believes this, but Darin is just wrong this time. Ridley Scott clearly had a huge budget and he forgot to spend any on writers — of course, as Darin says, “Did you miss the part where it said ‘A Ridley Scott Film’?” Okay, he makes a fair point. Characters are not Scott’s forté.
Going by this movie, the only thing that is Scott’s forté is lens flare.
From beginning to end, this movie makes not a goddamn bit of sense, either on a macro story level, or an a micro individual-scene level. The characters are crap (what there is comes solely from the actors and not a bit from the dialogue or what the characters actually do). The tension varies between boring and someone’s-going-to-die, only I don’t care that they’re going to die because everyone’s acted like an idiot up until this point.
Case in point: We have an extended sequence in which two horrible things are going on: the leader of the scientific expedition has been impregnated with an alien and has to do a grisly self-surgery on herself to get it out, and a former crew member, reanimated by Something Awful, has come to the ship and starts killing people. On a ship of 17 inhabitants, 3 or 4 get dispatched during this scene. I’m going to assume that for a deep space expedition, millions of light years from home, that every person you bring with has a goddamn purpose. You’ve just lost 3 or 4 of them.
The surgery is dealt with. The zombie has been dealt with. What’s the next thing the people on the ship do?
- Get the hell out of Dodge and warn the people of Earth never, ever, ever to go anywhere near this verkakete planet again, or
- Suit up and take everyone, including the ship’s captain, to the place where the zombie came from.
On the macro level, though, the movie is even more offensive. There’s a whole theme strand about religion: the leader of the scientific expedition wears a cross, which is the lazy filmmaker’s way of indicating she’s wants to find God. Primitive peoples all over the world have led her to this place — a plot thread that, given what they tell us about the aliens from this world, makes no damn sense whatsoever either — where she’s going to find the Engineers (an unbelievably pretentious title) who made us. Except the film has nothing to say on any of these elements. They’re just thrown out there, as though mentioning them is an adequate substitution for taking a stand on them.
I loved this quote from Ben Owen at Parabasis blog in his fabulously titled “Gay British Androids Monitor Your Dreams: Some Thoughts on Prometheus”:
Having your characters talk constantly about whether they have faith or not doesn’t mean your film has anything interesting to say about theology.
(Actually, his entire entry about the film is marvelous and correct and I won’t hold it against you if you go read him instead.)
I’m glad Prometheus is finally in theaters so I don’t have to suffer through its migraine-inducing flashy-flashy trailer again. But this movie is a stinkin’ pile o’ poo.
By the way, in our theater, after the final scene (in which the familiar HR Giger alien makes its first appearance), people laughed. If that’s happening a lot…oops. Bad call, Ridley.