Prometheus
Aug. 16th, 2012 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
von_geisterhand(This is spoiler-free as much as possible but I do talk about the film. If you've seen the trailers, there should be no surprises here for you.)
I was disappointed, plain and simple. Yes, it looked gorgeous, as you would expect from Ridley Scott, but the story was absolutely rotten. I imagine that there will be an extended Director's Cut before long, which will undoubtedly make the film better. As it is in cinemas at the moment there is a very strong sense of the finished product having been assembled from three not-all-together-bad films to form an unsatisfying whole:
1) The "Alien"-prequel: "Prometheus" has plenty of elements that hint at the original films, most of all at "Alien". You will have gathered as much from the trailers and the promotional material. Now, personally I can live without having Word of God tell me how the derelict ship and the Space Jockey got where the Nostromo found them (except that it obviously doesn't, as it is a different planet) but I realise that this is one of the main attractions of a prequel, and as a possible explanation, it is okay.
2) The film with the deep message: As Mark Kermode likes to say "SciFi and horror films should be about ideas." and "Prometheus" certainly is. It just doesn't do a lot with these ideas.
The theme here is basically a search for your creator/parents and their approval, to be found in the main mission as well as in the android David and some of the other characters. The problem here is that everything that David has to say about asking your creator why they created you are things that were already dealt with in more detail in "Blade Runner", adding nothing new.
3) The probably most expensive B-movie ever, with lovely body-horror, a squirm-inducing symbolic bit and a fair bit of Lovecraft. In 3D! Until Senor Del Toro finally makes "At the Mountains of Madness", this will be the closest you will ever come to big-budget shoggoths. On that level the film succeeds and you can even forgive some of the absolutely clichéd and inane dialogue.
The only glimmer of hope is that the sequel hook is quite interesting and that, as mentioned before, the Director's Cut might well be able to rectify some of the problems I had with the film.
I was disappointed, plain and simple. Yes, it looked gorgeous, as you would expect from Ridley Scott, but the story was absolutely rotten. I imagine that there will be an extended Director's Cut before long, which will undoubtedly make the film better. As it is in cinemas at the moment there is a very strong sense of the finished product having been assembled from three not-all-together-bad films to form an unsatisfying whole:
1) The "Alien"-prequel: "Prometheus" has plenty of elements that hint at the original films, most of all at "Alien". You will have gathered as much from the trailers and the promotional material. Now, personally I can live without having Word of God tell me how the derelict ship and the Space Jockey got where the Nostromo found them (except that it obviously doesn't, as it is a different planet) but I realise that this is one of the main attractions of a prequel, and as a possible explanation, it is okay.
2) The film with the deep message: As Mark Kermode likes to say "SciFi and horror films should be about ideas." and "Prometheus" certainly is. It just doesn't do a lot with these ideas.
The theme here is basically a search for your creator/parents and their approval, to be found in the main mission as well as in the android David and some of the other characters. The problem here is that everything that David has to say about asking your creator why they created you are things that were already dealt with in more detail in "Blade Runner", adding nothing new.
3) The probably most expensive B-movie ever, with lovely body-horror, a squirm-inducing symbolic bit and a fair bit of Lovecraft. In 3D! Until Senor Del Toro finally makes "At the Mountains of Madness", this will be the closest you will ever come to big-budget shoggoths. On that level the film succeeds and you can even forgive some of the absolutely clichéd and inane dialogue.
The only glimmer of hope is that the sequel hook is quite interesting and that, as mentioned before, the Director's Cut might well be able to rectify some of the problems I had with the film.
