Don't.
Given a choice between this and any other movie, choose the other movie. Given the choice between this and two hours of quiet introspection, introspect away. Given the choice between this and watching paint dry... well, that's a tough one, but you should take a minute to carefully consider the artistic merits of paint.
Prometheus is cheap science fiction at its absolute finest, the physical manifestation of Sturgeon's Law. I can't even think of where to begin critiquing it.
Spoilers ahead, as if it matters.
Since it could broadly be classified as an attempt at sci-fi horror, let's start with the monsters. The most menacing thing in the movie was an oozing metal urn. Seriously. At that point, there was an air of mystery, and the unknown is inherently scary. At that point, the movie seemed to have genuine promise.
Then, having blown his entire special effects budget on fancy computer GUIs, the director opted to use some old props from some closet on the movie lot that had last been opened in the '80s as his "monsters".
Seriously, Ridley, an oligodactylous squid? A squid? And then (spoiler alert) a bigger squid? Wow, really pushing the boundaries of horror there.
In about twenty seconds of bad surgical procedure, Mr. Scott manages to turn a suspenseful, tense, dark, eerie movie into a joke. If I hadn't been wincing at the aforementioned surgical stuff, I would have laughed.
Speaking of which... It's sci-fi. We don't expect exacting realism. But you could have done so much more with that surgery scene. Iron Man sold itself almost entirely on techporn - little pieces of metal buzzing and clicking and doing other little-piece-of-metal things. And you managed to make an emergency surgery scene with a piece of surgery equipment that is acknowledged by characters traveling on a frikkin spaceship as being insanely rare high-tech equipment boring. How?
On the general topic of realism: Once again, it's science fiction, I get it. Realism is always, and should always remain, secondary to enjoyment. But can you at least Google the size of the solar system before putting in a throwaway comment about distance that instantly rips any educated viewer out of suspension of disbelief.
On that same topic: DNA. So Engineer DNA is identical to human DNA? You do realise that humans have an extraordinary amount of genetic variation, so much that there is no agreed-upon "human DNA", and, more importantly, if they had the same genetic code as us, they would look like us. Because that's how DNA works.
It wasn't like it was essential to the plot. Having DNA would make them our precursors, barring a ridiculously unlikely chance occurrence which I would have to put down to the universe having a sense of human. Hell, having even vaguely compatible biochemistry (as evidenced by the fact that their bioweapons work on us) would relate them to us. But no, you had to throw in a "fact" that could be debunked by anyone who understands high-school genetics.
On to the characters: The only character with any apparent depth is a robot. And to be entirely honest, I'm not even sure that the robot's depth isn't just because whoever programmed it set it up to randomly do evil things as a prank. It half seems like what David does is just in there because the director was futilely attempting to add more plot.
In fact, there are a lot of things in the movie that are entirely random: take the dead Engineers seen in the first half of the film. We never find out what killed them. We know that if it was their bioweapon, they would have been turned into more bioweapon-y stuff, and that the bioweapon would still be around. And then the Engineer at the beginning of the film. What happened to him? No clue. Why? No clue. It looked cool, so they threw it in.
Then you get zombie-dude, the first real monster. We don't notice any zombifying effect of the bioweapon at any other time. It's a random one-off that, like most of the rest of the film, tries and fails to be scary.
And of course we have the Engineer. You know, the member of a higher species that managed to genetically engineer an entire ecosystem, culminating in nothing less than the human race? A member of that same higher species who, upon being woken up by the remaining crew of the Prometheus, is suddenly a pointlessly rage-filled horror monster who not only literally tears the crew apart on sight, but deliberately tries to hunt one of them down. Why? Bad hair day, I guess.
I'm only willing to waste so much of my time even on critiquing this film, so I'm gonna wrap up with a comment on the ending. The end of the film, while dramatic, is an attempt to shoehorn the film into an existing franchise, in what I assume is an attempt to give it some kind of credibility by association. But the attempt at franchise-merging is maybe thirty seconds of footage throw in at the end of the film - right at the end; shoehorn and roll credits - and a company name.
More importantly, an attempt is made to make Prometheus an Alien prologue, Alien being the first part of a franchise in which absolutely no mention is made of the world-shattering events of Prometheus, and which, as I said above, shares a company name and about thirty seconds of bad special effects with this mindless attempt at a movie.
Drying paint is sounding more and more attractive by the minute. At least the fumes arguably provide some kind of mental stimulation.
No comments:
Post a Comment