I certainly had my issues with Prometheus, but I also must admit that it does strike a nerve. There are isolated sequences of sublime beauty or wrenching tension, but they’re not held together by anything substantial. I think the movie is stupid, but it’s at least interesting stupid, which is why I think the film has become so divisive. It’s got such a well calibrated sense of stupid that it actually makes you want to talk about it, which most dumb movies don’t manage. Even if you’re just cataloging the movie’s many flaws, you’re still engaged with it in a way you don’t with regular bad movies.
This movie is a special kind of bad, and as such, there’s a lot of interesting discussion surrounding the film. As I mentioned in my previous post, it seems like everyone is talking about this movie, even folks I wouldn’t normally expect. For instance, every podcast I listen to on a regular basis has devoted a segment to Prometheus, even the ones that aren’t solely focused around movies. Extra Hot Great, Filmspotting, /Filmcast, Reasonable Discussions, Slate Culture Gabfest, NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour, The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show, and probably a bunch of others have all done so. But there’s a ton of other discussion surround the film that I also wanted to point to, in case you were jonesing to read about the film, which I admit is kinda fun, even if I didn’t love the movie:
- Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About – So this guy on Livejournal (!?) has a pretty thorough discussion of the movie and it’s philosophical and mythic underpinnings. Lots of interesting stuff here, but as is the case with a lot of things, I’m glad a lot of this is subtext:
From the Engineers’ perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren’t entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.
If you have uneasy suspicions about what ‘a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago’ might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:
Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?
Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Let’s send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.” Guess what? They crucified him.
Yeah. The reason the Engineers don’t like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that’s not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That’s RIDLEY SCOTT.
As I said, I’m pretty happy this wasn’t explicitly referenced in the movie, but it’s fun to read about it on some dude’s blog like this.
- The Science of Prometheus – a review, containing a lot of spoilers – With a title like that, I was expecting this to be a bit dry, but it’s actually a lot of fun:
Seriously guys? Cinema trips with my pals are better prepared than this. No one thought to ask what they’d be doing when they signed up for a 4 year round trip to a new planet? The money must be really good. …
As we’ve discussed, this is probably the most slap-dash, ill-prepared scientific mission ever. No one really knows what to expect, and they only carry out atmospheric analysis on arrival to let them know if they can step out onto the surface without dying instantly. On the upside, they have gorgeous space suits to go out in (costume designer and long-time Scott collaborator Janty Yates deserves high praise). Holloway is the spitting image of Commander Shepard of the Normandy in his suit, which I liked for no clever reason.
There’s lots more and it’s very good.
- Film Freak Central Review – Another review that sorta craps on the movie, but in an interesting way:
It’s time, probably long past time, to admit that Ridley Scott is nothing more or less than Tim Burton: a visual stylist at the mercy of others to offer his hatful of pretty pictures something like depth. If either one of them ever made a great film (and I’d argue that both have), thank the accident of the right source material and/or editor, not these directors, whose allegiance is to their own visual auteurism rather than any desire for a unified product.
That’s a bold statement… but I can’t really fault it.
- SMS dialogue between Noomi Rapace and an Engineer – Heh. “All will be revealed in James Cameron’s PROMETHEUSES”
Well there you go. Interesting stuff. Stay tuned for some Redshirts action on Sunday.