Prometheus (2012)

Synopsis

The movie was very “gay”. I believe it should have been called probe-etheus. The film was about discovering that god is actually a tall ripped clean shaven naked dude and he is haunted by giant vagina monsters with vaginal dentada. (Even the penis-looking snake monster from the beginning was a vagina when they pulled back the foreskin)

Review:

Prometheus was… Okay.

I found the movie to be very preachy, arguing the purpose of life, proving over and over again the point that there is no point.

What’s aggravating about this is that they act all proud of themselves, for arguing a paradox that will never be solved… because it’s a paradox. And they act all proud, thinking they are really intellectual and creative.

What they should have done is come up with a better philosophy, stating something like: “it doesn’t matter where we come from, we should appreciate what and who we have now. Now fuck these aliens that are trying to eat us, lets go home.”

For 2 hours, they were calling the kettle black while I kept thinking: I don’t care what color the kettle is, give me some frakin tea!

What they were so preachy about was that humanity is all we have, and our ability to feel, is what makes us human and not robots. That our ability to be offended makes us human… not robots.

“I am a human, and u r a robot. We have emotions and u don’t. does that hurt your feelings? Oh wait, no it doesn’t cus you’re a robot.”
Really? I had no idea? Why don’t you spell it out for me a little more? Can we watch this closed caption when it moves to Netflix?

What bothered me about the film was that it told us everything opposed to showing it to us. A much better read is Hunger Games or anything that Asimov wrote. They know how to say things without outright saying them.

As for structure, it was decent, you can tell they used a stencil to write it, but the set ups and payoffs were lame, there really isn’t much plot to talk about and a whole lot isn’t revealed. Instead the just had a couple somewhat clever plot twists that slowly released more information, that was factual about aliens and yet still vague and I found myself thinking, what’s the point?

The information sucked and it was very straightforward.

(Not to be such a negative nancy, but if you want to see a good movie, watch megamind, or how to train your dragon those fit structure well and actually release good information as the characters develop. Also, anyone can enjoy it.)

Thematically, it was extremely preachy about creationism and pointing out how close we are to knowing exactly where we come from while also saying about how curiousity killed the cat. That was its most redeeming quality structurally for the story.

For 2 hours they tempted the question of god, but it didn’t have any answers and it didn’t stimulate any thought in my head about existence. It was existentialist without any insight or, well, any existentialism either. It was a waste of my time.

What really bothers me is that its about going to a new planet, when a movie does this, there is so much potential to create a whole new world with laws, physics, religion, and a whole balance of how the planet works. This being a movie like that: they had so much potential, but they squandered it.

It’s essentially a superhero movie, but they didn’t have any powers or any weaknesses, and everything just seemed flat, uncreative, and boring.

Watchmen sets up the world rules extremely well, which takes place on earth in the 60’s. Prometheus is in a whole other galaxy, but is basically Egypt on earth, except there is no reality bar, and it’s a lot more boring.

The set ups and payoffs didn’t stack up to anything great. It was like, lets do this, then lets do this, and then find a way to link the two in post. It was like, 6 unrelated plot points spread out loosely throughout the film.

 (im excuited to see dark knight rises, Christopher Nolan has great set ups and payoffs where onepayoff leads into another setup, which in cause and effect, grows the movie and makes it more exciting as it builds, plus there’s like 130 plot points instead of 6)

Moreover, how it was written:

If the movie had a love scene, this is how it would have went:

“I really really like you”
“I really really like you as well”
“Let us consummate our liking eachother”
“Okey doke”

zip

Except, (SPOILER ALERT) it didn’t have a love scene it just had a big black guy bang the cold-hearted captain (Played by Charlize Theron)

Another thing that I thought was lame was the robot who turned on everyone was a complete Aryan Nazi:

“Okay, lets build a perfect human being, except he’ll be a robot. So he’ll be perfect in every way except he wont have a soul. Lets give him blonde hair and blue eyes, and while we’re at it, lets give him a British accent, so he’s not entirely a nazi. Besides, it will make him seem more advanced because everyone in the future has a British accent.”

It was also dispointing to find that there was no comic relief. The movie took itself very seriously. Way too pretentious.

Music and lighting was cliché, following trends. I found it interesting they paid tribute to 2001 a space odyssey a couple times with the music, not the dance of the blue Danube, but it was like violins humming, when there’s the obelisk, they do that once or twice in prometheus.

As for the lighting, it was mostly made of midtones. A lot of films have been doing this lately to try and replicate film on digital. What’s interesting is that DP’s have been trending to light the characters eyes with eye lights then softly fill their faces, but the ratios are always 1:2 ratios the entire time.  This is VERY different from the original Alien movies.

The original Alien and Aliens had midtones on all the humans and super harsh ratios (1:8) on all the aliens, and the music did the same, which was cool. Now everything with Prometheus was very flat all in all. The cool connection between the two was that the lights were built into the set design so the actors could be blocked around the set really well, except the blocking in aliens is amazing and Prometheus blocking sucked. A couple cool shots looked cool and those are all in the trailer. Everything else was medium shots basically, which would have worked if the writing was better.

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