Well, just watched
Prometheus.
Yeah, it wasn't good. Yeah, I gotta agree with the naysayers.
My summation of the plot:
Alien drinks liquid and dissolves himself for no reason.
Spaceship lands on a planet and finds an alien fortress.
Crew go into the fortress. They leave the fortress. Bad things happen.
Crew go into the fortress. They leave the fortress. Bad things happen.
Crew go into the fortress. Shaw leaves the fortress. Bad things happen.
Shaw flies away on an alien ship. The end.
I'd rather take
Sunshine with its terrible third act over Prometheus any day of the week.
The more I think about Prometheus, the more I'm reminded of the first Alien vs Predator. This is not a good thing.
The Prometheus crew is completely forgettable. You're just sitting there
watching and waiting for them to get knocked off like red shirts, just
like the silly crew in AvP. Good scifi movies make you care about the
characters, but other then Shaw and Idris Elba, I couldn't have cared
less. And then those two weren't great.
The opening exposition scene where they show murals from a dozen
different civilizations all with the same design really reminded me of
AvP's stupid exposition about Aztec, Cambodian, and Egyptian languages
all combined into one on the temple. Anybody remember that? Yeah, it
sure sounded dumb, didn't it?
Not to mention that there's no logical reason any of those civilizations
would've gotten that mural. Where is the evidence that the Space
Jockeys showed them this star cluster? The only thing we see is a Space
Jockey drinking some liquid at the dawn of time, and dissolving away in
an ocean, which presumably will lead to the beginning of human life.
Then the Space Jockeys, having seeded Earth, leave in their spaceship.
How the fuck does this lead to all those civilizations drawing murals of
giants pointing to star clusters? Where did this shit come from?
Something is missing to connect A to C, isn't it? I don't get it. Does
anybody have an explanation for this? I'm fine with exposition at the
beginning of the film to launch us off, but I'd like it if the
exposition made sense.
Of course, it doesn't make any sense that the Alien DNA would match
ours, since we don't look like 9 foot tall giants with bald heads. If it
was an exact DNA match, then we'd be identical, right? If the glove
does not fit, you must acquit.
Though the space jockeys in this movie didn't even resemble the space
jockey in Alien. The one in Prometheus is about... 9 or 10 feet tall,
I'd say? It looked big, but it still fit quite comfortably through the
corridors of the lifeboat. The space jockey in the original Alien movie
looked absolutely gigantic, like around 18-20 feet tall.
Of course, we get the expected body horror scene with Shaw getting a caesarian section:
So she smacks two of the crew and they're completely incapacitated while
she's running around the ship looking for the medical bay? Really?
She's that strong?
Wouldn't you be completely disabled after going through such a traumatic
experience? I know she kept jamming medical hypos into her leg, but
come on!
And right after the whole procedure, everybody just seems to be cool.
Nobody raises a fuss or anything. And of course, nobody goes into the
medical bay to try and see what she just had pulled out of her? They
don't care about the baby squid? It just gets to sit inside there until
the very end of the movie? Really? They just take her word that it's
been sterilized and everything's cool? Huh?
And of course, right afterwards... we get the conversation between her
and Idris Elba where he suddenly out of nowhere declares that this is a
WMD facility? Huh? It really felt like a scene in between was cut out.
How did Elba come to this conclusion? He seems so gosh darn sure about
it.
I was also bothered by the fact that the computer displays and readouts
in Prometheus looked way more advanced then the ones in Alien, despite being a prequel.
Charlize Theron was totally wasted. You think there's something
intriguing and secretive about this cold, heartless corporate executive
woman, but then the end of the movie comes and... you find out nothing
more about her. Well, except that Weyland's her father (either
biologically or mechanically). Which just didn't do anything for me. I
don't care. She ultimately just turns out to be this bitch. Where was
the turn to her character? In Alien and Aliens, Ash and Burke had
revelations about themselves. We found out that no, there's more here
then meets the eye. Nothing with Vickers. Theron's given a nothing role.
Another problem I had was with the sacrifice by Idris Elba at the end.
The whole thing just came off as sloppy and unemotional. Here are these
guys deciding to commit suicide and crash into the alien spaceship to
save Earth, but... I felt no real emotional weight. Plus, they were
cracking jokes like "You're a shitty pilot, Capn" when they're about to
die. Like, really? Would people giving their lives without any notice
really behave like this? It felt shoddy and inconsequential and I just
couldn't really buy it. Contrast this with the crew of the Icarus in
Sunshine. There, you could feel the weight of sacrifice on them. They
know they're going to die in order to save humanity, and you can feel
the burden. Here, Idris Elba just decides in a split second after Shaw
gives this hysterical plea... and they're off, and we get jokes. Is it
really that easy to convince a Captain and his crew to commit suicide?
What I want to focus on is the whole religion topic that the movie
seems to be touching on. You get the sense that the movie wants to make
you think about religion and God and aliens. But... I didn't really feel
like anything was really there to think about, other then just having
the question posed. Shaw says she still believes at the end. Well, why?
Was there something in the movie that gave her faith to keep believing? I
can't detect what that was. Am I the slow one here?
Now, contrast this with the movie Contact. I really like Contact. I know
there are people out there that don't, they might argue it's a bit
heavy-handed or whatever, but I feel Contact did a great job of
addressing religion and science and delivering something substantial
about the tension between those two. It broached the issue, and then had
something to say. There was still some mystery and some air of
otherworldliness to the whole affair, but I felt satisfied by the
treatment of the issue at the end. It delivered, and I give credit to
the screenwriter for that.
I'm not saying Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott needed to give us Contact
2, but they could've given us something. I didn't feel they really had
anything to say about religion, because whenever I was wondering about
the issue, all they did was launch another bloody monster chase scene.
5/10
