Watched Prometheus recently, was basically what you’d expect: endless character inconsistency, cheap reuse of memes from Alien and Aliens, terribly stupid Damon Lindelof screenplay that was a complete trainwreck and made no sense. Characters you don’t feel for or care about all with apparently sinister countervailing objectives. This felt like three or four movies all mashed together with no real idea of where to go or why.
Worst of all, from my perspective, the plot itself ends up being essentially the plot from the Halo series of video games, indicating the long arm of Microsoft’s influence over media matters these days…
I presume this was to normalize the events of the movie in the minds of the viewers who, already conditioned to be familiar with the monolith (forerunner, grand galactics, “engineers” etc) alien meme and galaxy destroying Flood won’t have to think about anything while drooling over the special effects which aren’t that special because almost every scene is an effect…
All of which points to the undeniable fact that this movie was made on the fly to appeal to the lowest common denominator popcorn munching Yuppie demographic- superficiality, fake complexity, “deep” message that is really irreverently silly.
As expected, R. Scott has indeed sold out. It seems he’s just going through the motions these days. The last movie he made with any kind of redeeming qualities was Kingdom of Heaven- seven years ago. His other films since then (A good Year, body of lies, Robin Hood) have been Russel Crowe vehicles, and really nothing special. Although I’m perhaps being unfair because these movies have been obscenely profitable.
Shockingly, he’s now working on another Blade Runner movie. Let’s all hope that doesn’t happen.
OP August 2012
Alexander's Movie Reviews 