Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About

Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About
cavalorn.livejournal.com

Instead, they poured an immense amount of design skill into the sets and backgrounds to make a wonderfully beautiful movie. And they built up this tremendous premise and a fantastic universe. And they populated it with several truly deep and rich and wonderful characters. And they had those characters acted by outrageously talented actors (Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Guy Pierce).

And then they pissed it all away with a shoddy plot and incompetent direction.

Spoilers follow:

The engineer turns out to just be a dime store monster. Nobody's actions are interesting, meaningful, or seem to flow from any significant motive other than to conform to the plot. One of the most dramatic scenes in the movie (when Janek decides to commit suicide by ramming the engineer's ship) comes off as completely anti-climactic because it comes out of nowhere. Similarly, the major revelation of the movie of the planet being a biowarfare research station comes out of Janek's mouth but it is so out of place and out of character that you can almost hear the clanking boilerplate of dreaded exposition falling into position. Perhaps the most interesting character of the entire movie, David, remains nothing more than an automaton throughout the movie with only a gnat's whisker of a hint that he is anything more.

Prometheus the fictional spaceship is a "trillion dollar" mission which is unaccountably staffed by a handful of incompetents, fuckups, and pseudo-villains who throw away their lives for the silliest and least meaningful of reasons. It is an apt metaphor for the movie itself.

Spoilers:

It seemed to go downhill as soon as Elizabeth found out she was pregnant and escaped the room she was in to have that machine remove it. Shortly after, Janek is telling Elizabeth about the planet being a research station without acknowledging what happened to her at all. From what I can remember, not one person mentioned it. She even had to knock out people to escape the room, if I remember correctly.

What Prometheus is "actually about" is sucking dollars out of moviegoers' wallets.

For many years Ridley Scott resisted the calls to revisit the "Alien" universe, and when he finally gave in he produced a shallow, overly-marketed, slickly commercial film that looks great but lacks a soul. We've seen this before: the Star Wars prequels (which disappointed fans also tried to analyze and criticize into something more meaningful).

Prometheus was a dud; let's just accept that and go watch "Alien" on Blu-Ray.

That's a good "dud".