Prometheus [2012] // Sci-fi / Horror

Grade: C
Stars: 7.0

"Prometheus is a reboot prequel-that-isn't-a-prequel-we-swear-but-we're-going-to-hype-it-that-way-anyway-in-a-desperate-attempt-to-break-even-on-our-grossly-overblown-budget-because-we-know-this-movie-has-nothing-else-going-for-it" to Ridely Scott's Alien. The movie is still gorgeous to watch. That's about it. It's pretty."

Gosh, this movie was a disappointment. I actually prefer the trailer to the film itself. The coherent narrative was at least refreshing, but to be honest the themes, and even genre felt mismatched and schizophrenic. Was this sci-fi, horror, chiller, philosophical, action, and just an overly self-indulgent smorgasbord board of bullshit from our lovely friend the writer / director / religious zealot Ridley Scott.

My god it couldn't possible have been anymore trite. Scratch that. Mel Gibson could have probably made it worse....or better. See, that's my gripe. It was so borderline between pretentious pseudo-science pseudo-philosophical bullshit, and actually passable horror sci-fi that I felt betrayed. You can't do both Ridely. You got lucky once, and no amount of CGI is going is going salvage this bullshit.

Perhaps I'm being unfair, since he was upfront and honest about it NOT BEING AN ALIEN film, but that doesn't excuse the sheer amount of red-herrings and "in world" homages to the original. It either is an Alien film, or it isn't. This wasn't.

Now, I'm not going to rip into Scott that much, but let's be real here... Prometheus, compared to what it s/could have been, was a disaster. The characters were extremely weak to say the least, and all of them felt incredibly forced, if not outright fake. Notwithstanding the main character, an actress who did a great job (although her accent was a bit obnoxious), every other character felt as cliche as the movie did holistically. It was absolutely a sum of its parts and its parts were broken, uneven, mismatched and straight up confusing.

So, despite being "not a prequel" we did get another look at the xenomorph (THE Alien) and unlocked some secrets about the "SpaceJocky" (can't explain it, go google it) but did the movie really NEED to include either? No. Not at all. In fact, the "Alien" featured in this movie was little more than an homage / tribute to the first film. It served as nothing more than a distraction, or a weak attempt to veil the fact this movie had literally no plot. And you know what, that pissed me off. It was gimmicky.

This movie had such amazing potential to do something unique and engaging, but instead it opted for "super profound!" and fell way short. We should have been given a genesis film. Alien Rising. We were given a cop out that masqueraded as something it wasn't. There was more cogent plotting in A.V.P. I shit you not.

By the time the fucking Zombie-With-Literally-No-Plot-Explanation entered the picture, I had already written this off as a catastrophe.

Yeah, we can go on several web-forums and see what the self-proclaimed experts take on all this bullshit is, but if I have to resort to getting my answers from an external source (Donny Darko exempt) then I can't help but write the movie off for reasons like: poor editing / writing / story-boarding etc.

While we're on the topic of "things that shouldn't have been in this movie", why the fuck was Guy Pierce even in this? It's so utterly pointless. They dressed him up to be an old guy, but did so in a way that made him unrecognizable. I was the only one out of the 4 people I saw this with this even recognize him. I just don't understand this choice.

Alright, so without giving away spoilers of the (shitty) plot, onto the good stuff, because this movie was not a total disaster on every front (just where it counted).

Visually, this movie is breath taking! I saw this in theaters and damn was I impressed. From the moment that giant space ship touches down on pseudo-earth we know we're in for a serious ride. The visual effects are equally impressive, as I'm sure much of the story's cogent writing team was sacrificed for Ridley Scott's nonsense and a large CG budget. Yes, CG. The lack of aniamatronics greatly disappointed me, but at least the CG was decent enough to salvage it. None of that flashy lens flare J.J shit either.

To wrap it up, this movie is a still an interesting and unique experience, but that doesn't really mean much in a vacuum. As soon as CGI gets better, this will be par the course. I wish it had kept to a genre and stuck to it, or kept to a character and stuck to them, but it opted for "DO EVERYTHING!" and accomplished nothing. It wasn't balls to the wall or overly brutal, the way Pandorum was. It did at least resemble Alien, even if it didn't capture anywhere near the emotion that Alien did.

I'd recommend this movie to just about everyone actually, although it doesn't come highly recommended and you're probably not going to enjoy it. It's just a decent sci-fi 'horror' film (I think) and it opens a lot of interesting philosophical questions (where did we come from....where are we going etc). The issue is, it failed abysmally to answer or even hint at answers and that's what we wanted. That's what Alien universe needs.