Prometheus

Propelled to the forefront of potential great summer entertainment by admittedly brilliant promos, PROMETHEUS arrived with a lot to live up to. Thought of in selective terms, Ridley Scott was similarly heralded for merely returning to the genre that made him famous. ALIEN is admittedly, a fucking masterpiece, and BLADE RUNNER has its charms, but past those two films, and especially in the 2000's, Scott hasn't had much to support the claim that he's a great director. What should have been a warning for what happened with PROMETHEUS: his previous film, ROBIN HOOD, was similarly paraded about in promos, which, like the PROMETHEUS ones, were stunningly gorgeous and textured, and showed the most exciting master-shots and score-swells. But ROBIN HOOD was overlong and under-loved (justifiably so), with a slew of forgettable fare like BODY OF LIES and KINGDOM OF HEAVEN going all the way back to his overrated oscar-winner bore: GLADIATOR. But 12 years of not even mainstream acclaim should have been another warning for what PROMETHEUS was to be, which is, to get to the point: a very pretty, very under-thought bore. Beginning with some Malick-reminiscent, hyper-digital, CGI shots of lakes and primordial earth, a long take brings us to a Lord Volemort-faced alien donning a jedi knight's robe, standing at the edge of a waterfall before ingesting some alien-goo and disintegrating into the water. Scott's beginning, followed by a group of scientists off to explore our genesis in space, is basically a rip-off of the beginning of the great sci-fi movie, 2001. Noomi Rapace, breathtaking future-tech, and a brilliant Michael Fassbender's android: David listening to opera and learning linguistics, breeze us through the following scenes, which all fit into a similarly soft and lulling tone, which, oddly, comes right after an alien exploding into a waterfall. Herein lies the fatal flaw of PROMETHEUS, which is that it has small sets of scenes that work well together, and then jarringly jolt into a very differently toned set of scenes. When Scott then pulls all of the puzzle pieces together, he's pulling together a million different tones, and we get a mess of goo similar to the opening scene's conceit. The film is, like ALIEN, strongly rooted in the thrills of aliens who are out to get the explorative scientists, but Scott has so many different set-ups or separated characters, that each death is catered to with special care. This would seem like a good approach to veil slasher-movie sensibilities, but in fact it undermines common sense: with too many storylines that are nullified with the deaths of they seek to set off. For example, there are around three different aliens in the film that off somebody, although they're all vaguely related, there's an agent that the android infects a scientist with, and yet another scientist who, after being apparently killed by an alien, comes back in zombified form to be offed with the arcs of a flameflower against the towering CGI mountains. When the jarring death scenes aren't pulling the film down, Scott fills empty space with trite storylines of corporate-greed which are nothing more than a rehash of that exact same greed he established in the original Alien film that made everything go wrong. But rather than have his prequel set up the companies desires and considerations about the alien civilization, they seem to have already been decided on exploiting everyone they can, which is more lazy than cynical. Similarly lazy is the grating Creation vs. Evolution debate, which is surfacy, clichéd, and weak, with revelations like: if the aliens created humans, who created the aliens acting as the endgames to conversations. Essentially, the films a big, lazy, failure with a few scenes that work well on their own, but then remind us that they're connected to a feature length story. Of especially good interest: an abortion scene with a, easy-bake oven-esque surgery machine. Past that, it's not much.

2/5 Stars