 |
| Hey, Übermensch, where are the dinosaurs? |
OK film fans... for several months now I've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012). Early trailers showed glorious snippets of new spaceships, worlds, and implied terrors. It also flashed images of the Space Jockey (SJ), the SJ's ship and other ominous icons of Scott's Alien (1979), an amazing sci-fi/horror genre mash-up initiating summer films to the wonders of haunted houses in space (a formula since repeated countless times). I couldn't wait to see how Scott would incorporate and build on the ideas of Alien. Then, as the months went by, something bad happened. The trailers begin to show more and more of the film, until they begin to reveal so much I would turn the channel or leave the room, not wanting to spoil film. In retrospect, I should have paid attention. Usually getting that much information out of commercials is a bad sign... someone in Marketing was worried about the film's prospects.
Shot in 3D, rather than being transferred to it later and thereby creating a darkened mess, with a budget estimated anywhere from $130 to $200 million, its crystal clear and wondrous visuals should be no surprise. Especially from the man who brought Blade Runner to the silver screen. However, that's all Scott provides. The script, primarily attributed to Damon Lindelof, the scribe of the painfully predictable western/sci-fi mash-up Cowboys & Aliens (2011) and the slow, nonsensical unraveling that was Lost, seems to have lost (see what I did there) what made the source material a classic. In the words of NPR's Howie Movshovitz (and a professor of mine at UCD) "it's one of the most soulless movies I've ever seen."
Unlike most critics, Howie notes Prometheus follows the tenets of a genre film as noted by film theorist and professor, Thomas Schatz (he also nails Hollywood's continual gay coding of non-human characters like Prometheus' David (Michael Fassbender) - who probably should have been coded based on this). Those connections are the least of its problems, though, as it's paint by numbers approach omits joy, excitement and, most surprisingly, tension. Prometheus is all narrative and iconographic cues, rehashed plot devices and cheap haunted house scares. The imagery is shiny, but the assembly provides nothing as original as Alien.
Spoilers Ahead!!!
The biggest problem I have with Prometheus, beyond those mentioned in the video, is the very theme of the film. Numerous critics (including my guru) have gushed about how smart a film it is for asking big, important questions about the search for the origins of humanity, who made us, what's our purpose and on and on and on. Fail. This film is the cinematic equivalent of drunken sophomore philosophy majors arguing evolution vs. creationism, science vs. religion. It's about as deep as a Fox News report. Interesting questions are broached, but nothing of value comes from it. The film is almost completely devoid of any logical thoughts or actions, which eventually kill any hope for the suspended disbelief required for any sci-fi film. Even worse, many of the most important actions that drive much of the plot come from David, whose motives are at best simply attributed to programming based on the ulterior motives of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Ultimately, they don't make any sense. It's a cop-out, enabling the screenwriters to link big ideas without having to actually provide something to connect the dots.
It's hard to make an interesting film that's been populated with characters that are either unimportant or lacking clear, reasonable motives and most of the characters in Prometheus are both. The intent of the story is vague, as if they had no idea of what they wanted or where they were going with the film. I have no problem with open-ended questions and ambivalent endings, which are typically antithetical to the Hollywood Blockbuster Summer Machine. But by the time I got to the end of Prometheus, the staggering amount of unanswered questions and things that make you say, "WTF was THAT?" seems only to serve the next installment of the series. Which, because I have a screw loose, I'm already eagerly awaiting.
