About halfway through Prometheus, I got this terrible sinking feeling in my gut.
“There is no way the film is going to answer half the questions it asks,” I thought to myself.
And I was right.
After leaving the theater, I turned to my friend. “What the hell did I just watch for two hours?” I asked.
Before she could answer, someone behind us chimed in.
“Yeah, what was the deal with the aliens? So they created humans, but then they wanted to destroy them. Then they were destroyed, except that one of the aliens survived….”
I’m still thinking about the movie, but only because it made me so mad.
According to the Wikipedia entry, Director Ridley Scott said that the film “does leave you with some nice open questions.”
This is part of what makes me so mad.
Reviewers might praise the film for its beautiful imagery, the interesting performance of one of its characters, etc., but whatever happened to just making a solid all-around good movie that ties up loose ends?
Maybe I’m “old fashioned.”
Maybe I just don’t “get it.”
But seriously, the plot of the movie didn’t make any sense.
I didn’t understand why the characters behaved the way they did, I didn’t understand the various types of aliens or what their motivations were, and I didn’t appreciate the ridiculous jumping-running-climbing adventure the Noomi Rapace character goes on after getting her abdomen surgically stapled shut.
I’m all for big explosions, epic themes, aliens, heroic feats, etc. And yet in trying to present all of these things to the viewer, I feel that Hollywood frequently ignores something important: a well-crafted story about interesting characters.
Prometheus is my new case study in this unfortunate phenomenon. Good thing it only cost $1.75 at the dollar theater; it was barely worth even that.
I’ve noticed a theme like this in more and more movies or TV shows (Inception, Lost and Heroes come to mind) that gain followers because of their mystique and need to answer every question with another two or three. Prometheus left me wanting more too.
I thought Prometheus was quite enjoyable, not really great though. It left a lot of questions, but what pissed me off more than anything was when they were running lengthwise away from the rolling alien ship and didn’t just run out of the way. Honestly seemed like a cartoon.
Hahaha yeah, I remember that part. What a joke. I remember thinking, “Why doesn’t she know how to run sideways???”
My husband and I went to see Prometheus. One of us is a fan of the original Alien; one of us is a fan of Michael Fassbender. I won’t say which is which. Neither of us got what we wanted from the film.
You mean Fassbender as a talking, decapitated head for the last 15 minutes of the film wasn’t as mind-blowing and artful and weird as Ridley Scott obviously thinks it ought to be? For shame.
Pingback: Stats Tab Snark | the living notebook