SPOILERS
“We were so wrong!” Exclaims Noomi Rapace as her character realises that she and her team of dangerously non-multitasking astronauts have travelled across the galaxy with high hopes of making first contact with an apparently benign alien race only to end up on a deadly bio-weapons storage facility.
We were so wrong, too, in turning up to see Prometheus with high hopes of seeing a decent entry into the dwindling Alien franchise only to realise it was a trap. Ridley Scott and his team, however, were right - this is not a prequel/sequel/reboot, in fact it feels more like the fruition of a brain-dead sci-fi body horror script that was laying around a production office for years that nobody wanted to touch, but after realizing they needed room in the script archive they took it out, dusted it off, slapped some explicit references to Alien on it and brought in Ridley Scott to direct.
That’s obviously not what happened. but I’m trying to paint a disgruntled picture here.
When I regrettably saw The Da Vinci Code in the cinema when it first came out I could tell even from the very first few shots that it was going to be bad; not because I’m particularly observant or a trained film theorist but because there seemed to be fundamental flaws in the way the film was laid out and constructed. It was illogical and amateurish. I had that same sinking feeling when Prometheus began and its placid opening credit sequence got under way and its unnecessary prologue started. Even the “Fanfare for the Common Man” flavoured main musical theme seemed cloyingly upbeat for such a movie as if it really belonged on a period war epic.
And that’s it. The film starts off on the wrong foot and never recovers, only to reveal more and more problems as it goes along.
If you’ve ever watched Paul WS Anderson’s Aliens Vs. Predator film, which is stunning in its mind-boggling stupidity but fun in a so-bad-it’s-good kind of way, then you’ll notice that Prometheus follows many of the same opening beats, even down to one character challenging another about why they need to take defence measures with them out on their risk-free scientific expedition. It’s a staggering series of oversights/coincidences that will surely end up as a fan-made mash-up video.
There are logical flaws strewn about the place in Prometheus that become irritating even if you only have half a brain that’s semi-functional. Unlike the work of Christopher Nolan – which just omits logic explaining exposition that can still be found and answered by the viewer if they think (or drink) hard enough – Prometheus and its characters just come across as dumb. For instance, why would you take almost twenty people out on a two year space mission (and why would they agree to go?) when you’re not going to tell them why they’re there until you’ve all arrived; wouldn’t you have done that back on Earth? Why would you enter a strange planet’s atmosphere without undertaking some sort of geographical survey first to find out where to land? Why would you bring booze? Why would you get a young(ish) actor to don old-man prosthetic makeup when you never show him as a young man?
The gaps in logic continue and never end, a list which I’m sure is catalogued in full elsewhere on the internet.
But the film somehow passes the blame for much of its stupidity onto its characters, which has become the source of much of my ire. In Alien the characters were blue-collar slobs with attitude problems, but you genuinely cared about them after a while and didn’t want to see them die. Nearly every character in Prometheus is so obnoxious, vulgar and dim-witted that you feel like cheering after each elaborate death sequence. Even our main character deserves a dispatch that sadly never comes. So for 124 minutes you find yourself following the adventures of a bunch of people you’d probably cross the street to avoid in real life. Yes, it’s basically Big Brother In Space.
The only film experience I’ve had recently which comes anywhere close to confusing my sense of compassion in such a way is Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which I’m still half convinced was meant to be a slapstick comedy.
Oh well, maybe the only hope for a decent Alien film in the future is if David Fincher decides to go back and remake Alien 3 now that he has more clout in the industry… but then we’ll lose all those fine performances that made 3 more watchable than it should have been.
But I sincerely doubt he ever will.
Well, like Ridley Scott’s own noble Nottingham project which took a u-turn during development into being just a second rate Robin Hood movie, Prometheus might have been so much more had it been retooled into not being set in the Alien universe and its characters rewritten into being a little more likeable.
On the upside, though, Idris Elba is charming and charismatic as the ship’s captain and remains the only character in the entire film that you don’t want to slap; the film is beautifully crafted by the art department and visual effects team with background plates that would look nice framed as pictures on your wall; and there was a funny commercial that was shown before the film started in the cinema (but I think that constitutes “scraping the barrel” for compliments).
But that’s it.
Watch Prometheus just to satisfy your curiosity but be prepared to feel pretty miserable and annoyed by the time it finishes.
I did.
2/5
