Prometheus

The special effects are great, the scenery and photography is lovely but the film is as a whole a big disappointment. You would have thought that with such a budget they could have hired some guy to make a basic sanity check of the script but obviously that wasn’t in the budget for this one. I do not know if a lot of Hollywood people are idiots or think the audience are idiots or both but for Christ sake, how difficult can it be to come up with a plot that holds together and are at least half believable? A trillion dollar expedition to discover the “makers of mankind” and they put together a band of asocial morons for crew where not even the scientists among them seems to have met each other before the wake up millions of miles from Earth. Almost everyone behaves in a completely unbelievable way. Yeah, it looks okay so let’s remove the helmets for instance? Right, apart from the immediate danger to your own health, what about quarantine procedures…idiots? Why did the robot put the mutagen in the drink? It’s just illogical and never really adequately explained. Speaking of robots, robots have a power source and it’s not spread all over them. If you rip their head of they do not continue to talk like nothing had happened. In the original Alien they at least had to hook him up to something. It goes on. The entire film is just a jumble of illogical acts one after another. Then we have the ending. What a joke. Apart from the fact that Elizabeth’s actions are just ridiculous, how does she expect to live on a alien ship without food or any other supplies? This film had good promise. The idea of getting to know the origin of the aliens intrigued me and the basic plot idea was cool. However, the film was really ruined by a script obviously written by total morons.

Isn't "Elizabeth Shaw" the woman who makes the Christmas mints? Anyway, here she's been persuaded by "Meredith" (Charlize Theron) to diversify into the intergalactic travel game with a trip aboard the eponymous science vessel. She (Noomi Rapace) is travelling with her boyfriend "Charlie" (Logan Marshall-Green) to a remote moon where there might be the glimmer of a clue as to the origins of not just our species, but of life in general. Their team, augmented by the android "David" (Michael Fassbender) arrive on LV-223 to discover clear evidence of a civilisation - well of engineering effort, anyway. Thing is though - has anything survived in the bleak and hostile environment and if it has - is it friend or foe. Now the visual effects are excellent across the board; the use of darkness, shadow, intermittent light and some marvellous creativity from Neal Scanlan and Conor O'Sullivan really do make this at times a menacing and compelling adventure to watch. Sadly though, it all takes far too long to get going, it recycles a little too much from it's parent film ("Alien") and there's just far too much chatter cluttering up the closing stages. The acting is competent, no more, and it could easily lose twenty minutes of preamble and ramble and just focus on the "can they survive" bit. This has got to be seen on a big screen. The 70mm print I saw showcases what this film is really about - a scary looking sci-fi horror that we've all seen in some guise before, but maybe not quite this technically proficient. Is it a reboot or a reimagining? I'm not sure we really needed either.

What? Seriously...WHAT?! I don't understand what I watched. Alien was a monster movie in space. It was a great movie, it was scary and you could taste the tension....but it was just a monster movie in outer space. It was really just a merger of horror and science fiction. Aliens was a fun movie. But it was just Space Marines v Monsters. It was just a merger of action and science fiction. We can go on and on and on but, I think Scott is buying the fanboys that are reading too deeply into the Alien franchise. It's not "Chinatown" it's just the Alien movies. Prometheus was just too much for the franchise, FAR TOO MUCH. Watching it felt like that moment when you realize that the top came off of the salt shaker and now you're going to have to just bare threw the mess bite by bite. There was so much that, in the end, there wasn't really anything at all. Everything that was good about Alien and Aliens was totally forgotten here and you were left with, well, pretentious ramblings. This is a monster movie that thinks it's "Taxi Driver." It's putting on airs and you can see straight through it.