Prometheus, Dog or Not?

Scott Tortorice

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Re: Alien Prequel Killed by Prometheus

So Kawaiku and I have been having one of our regular sci-fi confabs again and this dog of a movie came up. :D While looking up some stuff, I came across this spot-on review. Now, I will warn you that the reviewer has a way of speaking that can be a bit exaggerated at times, but his deconstruction of everything wrong with this movie is well worth watching. It can be hilarious, too! :D Like he said: this movie just makes no sense on any level. The plot is just incoherent.

Part 1

[video=youtube_share;iKyZ0BF7gcE]http://youtu.be/iKyZ0BF7gcE[/video]

Part 2

[video=youtube_share;c3AYzX919TM]http://youtu.be/c3AYzX919TM[/video]


My only disagreement with the reviewer is how he rejects the idea that Shaw clings to her faith despite the events of the film. Shaw wears a cross, so as a Christian she would be well acquainted with the Christian concept of the "Suffering God" even if such a concept is a relatively recent and isn't accepted in all Christian circles. Regardless, even a basic knowledge of scripture would reveal many faithful who endured real suffering in life and still persisted in their faith (Job, for example). So the idea that Christianity is a sunshine and lollipops religion, and idea often expressed by those with no or little understanding of Christianity, is a false one. If anything, I find it completely believable that Shaw would grasp her faith all the more tightly after experiencing the (entirely nonsensical) horrors of this movie. If hell is the impossibility of reason, than Shaw was most definitely in hell, and the only possible way out would be for her to bear her cross all the more closely.

Be that as it may, this touches upon a problem Ridley Scott exhibits time and again. His movies often touch upon issues of religiosity, as seen here and in the equally incoherent Kingdom of Heaven, but it is clear that the man never bothers to pick of a book on theology, so he sort of wings it and projects what he thinks religion and faith are all about. As a direct result, movies that should shine all the brighter because of their religious ponderings either flounder as with Prometheus, or just come across as cynical and superficial, as with Kingdom of Heaven.


BTW: I love his t-shirt. Have to get one of those.:smoke:
 

Dr Zaius

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Re: Alien Prequel Killed by Prometheus

But here's the thing about Prometheus that made it so aggravating to watch. It wasn't that it was just another bad movie, as there are tons of those released all the time and they're quickly forgotten. The problem here is that Prometheus had oodles of raw potential.

Even when it becomes clear that there were some serious problems with the whole story, I couldn't consistently repress the feeling of being interested in what was going to happen next. Even now that I've seen the entire movie and am well aware of its shortcomings, it's still intriguing because there is a lot of good here. It's just that the good stuff is disorganized and mixed in with an incoherent plot and a tremendous amount of completely inane behavior on the part of the characters. Thus we're left with a a movie that's generally intriguing, but almost unwatchable.

That's the kind of thing you sometimes get with indie projects that had flashes of brilliance, but were ultimately brought low by budget constraints and the lack of experience on the part of the director/producer. In other words, they had great ideas, but were simply overwhelmed by their own ideas and didn't have the money or talent to pull it off. Mad Max would be a good example of such an indie film. However, Prometheus certainly didn't suffer from those problems, because it boasted a huge budget and a dream team of production staff. In short, this movie SHOULD have been epic. And it wasn't. That's frustrating.

Which is why we're here talking about it. We wouldn't be talking about Prometheus at all if it were just another Hollywood disaster.
 

Scott Tortorice

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Re: Alien Prequel Killed by Prometheus

I think you are spot on. I really wanted to like this movie because the idea of exploring the origins of the alien creature should provide plenty of material for a fascinating movie...but it doesn't. As I watched the movie for the second time, I got the distinct impression that Ridley made this movie for the same reason Lucas made Ep 1: not because he had a great idea for another movie, but just because the suits in Hollywood were clamoring for another entry in a popular franchise. So he whipped something up (really, hired two mediocre script writers to help him whip something up). As is his modus operandi, Ridley mined material from another source. Just as Gladiator is a superior remake of Samuel Bronston's (producer) The Fall of the Roman Empire, and just as Kingdom of Heaven is an inferior remake of Bronston's masterful El Cid (Ridley apparently had a thing for Bronston films), Prometheus is just a shabby attempt at making Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness into a film with a tacked-on Alien spin (no doubt to reassure nervous producers who hate to try anything new). Such a recipe, especially a prequel recipe, was bound to fail without masterful attention to detail. Sadly, reports indicated that Ridley's heart was never really in this project, so....

As I've written before, one of the reasons why I am watching fewer and fewer movies all the time is not because they are bad, but because they are incompetent. Like you said, I can tolerate a bad movie that was just too ambitious, or suffered from a lack of budget, or an inexperienced direction. But what I cannot tolerate are movies that fail because the writing never rises above the level of fanfic! The scripts that are getting made into big budget movies these days are really embarrassingly bad. The writing is just awful on every level. Dialogue is a joke (and increasingly illiterate), action sequences are so unbelievable that they become cartoonish (like Shaw's Wild E. Coyote-esque run from the ship), the driving theme to a plot is either entirely absent or, if present, usually immoral or narcissistic, and the acting is perfunctory at best (usually the "good performance" is only good by way of contrast). The state of cinema, and increasingly literature, is just horrible. I guess this is why I am finding myself watching AMC, TCM, and other channels that show films from the 30s-50s more and more frequently. There is a reason why this era is called the Golden Era of Cinema. Even the low budget films had style, snappy writing and great acting. Ironically, it was this period that operated under the oft-maligned MPCC. Interesting, that....
 

Scott Tortorice

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Re: Alien Prequel Killed by Prometheus

What was I just saying?

Noomi Rapace talks Prometheus 2 and hints at the film's new antagonists!


So who could the new antagonist be in Prometheus 2? Well, Noomi doesn't lend any specifics however she does hint at a few possibilities, "God" being one of them.
:rolleyes:

To be fair, after watching the vid she seems to be just blathering, so this is really just misleading nonsense.

Found this interesting:

With 15 drafts of the script having been written and modified, it's unclear when Fox will announce the release date for the highly anticipated sequel....
15 drafts? Yeah, this is gonna work out just fine....:)

And "highly anticipated" by who? MTV? :D
 

Dr Zaius

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Re: Alien Prequel Killed by Prometheus

I don't think there's a vision behind this project at all. It isn't like they have a grand vision and are just struggling to shoehorn all the good ideas into something that can be paired down into a coherent 2-hour film. On the contrary, it's seems the writers have been told to "write something" loosely related to the original movie, which itself was largely incoherent and nebulous. The end result it likely to be more astounding visuals and hints of good ideas cobbled together into another unwatchable pie.
 
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