Why the movie "Prometheus" Fails

2012-06-21T04:51:00.001-07:00

Mr. Scott is from the same era as I, (Telling my age) in that he was influenced by the great masters like Sir Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the great Sci-fi classics such as "Them", "It came from Outer Space", and let us not forget "It, the terror from beyond Space" from which the movie Alien was influenced. The 1950's, which was the heyday of many early Sci-fi classics, many of which came from the works of even greater Sci-fi and fantasy writers. The fans of these writers were not stupid. They were the first of the modern forward thinkers of our time. Many of them found that writing these stories was the only way to put out if you will, what the United States government was not releasing in regards to what it really knew about flying saucers and aliens from space. Yet before I digress too much, you now get my point; movie goers back then weren't dumb by any stretch of the meaning. For example, Alfred Hitchcock didn't have to spell out why birds all of a sudden acted as one with deliberate and malicious intelligence toward mankind, only that they did. He left the conjectures, which were many up to the audience. The audience of Alfred Hitchcock was far more prone to using their imaginations and own thoughts than the audiences of today. Today's movie-goers have been dimmed down. Through no fault of their own, it has just been the fault of what Hollywood has been fishing out in this era of remake, upon remake, upon Hollywood remake. That well oiled machined has run out if fresh ideas and rather then get new talent is it easier to steal the work of others and or dumb down previous or more advanced works of writers from afar. This is no degradation toward Mr. Scott, it is not his fault the movie audience has changed so much from the first release of "Alien" back in 1979. I can remember going to see that movie with my best friend five times, and one of those times I had to stand up to watch it. Today, movie must be 80% eye candy, and 20% story. Our society has become more visual and visceral than cerebral. Yes, paper books have given way to digital ones with pictures, and that has forever changed who we are and how we now assimilate the world around us. This greatly anticipated movie has been long awaited by many fans of Director Ridley Scott. From his past work from everything from Aliens to Blade Runner, he has a huge and loyal following. Yet in this lowly author's own personal opinion, this movie in particular failed because it vacillated back and forth too much for two types of audiences. "Prometheus" was written it seems for both the audiences of the original Alien, the critical thinkers, and for today’s audience, the lovers of eye candy. Hey, I love eye candy with the best of them, but then that's why I also still watch cartoons. With Prometheus a critical thinker found themselves watching an embarrassing hodge-podge of jumbled technology with little to no discipline behind it. The critical thinker also found the influence of the Ancient Alien Astronaut Theory done well, but with a conclusion sad enough to leave one's mouth agape. Here are my points; 1. The story does not lend credence to whether or not it took place before or after the original Alien movie. The technology points to it taking place afterward, and if so, did not the records from the Nostromo’s catalog a warning about this planet, especially the alien ship's structural configuration? We only learn at the very end which time frame we are in from the birth of something particularly nasty. 2. David, the ship’s Android, is the next problem. Okay this Android has an unwavering devotion to his decrepit owner, and yet he risks said owner by 1, bringing onboard the ship a heretofore unknown alien substance, and 2, then administers said substance to a vital crew member WHILE on board the SAME ship as his benefactor-Owner. This should be a clear conflict of interest for the android, since his main reason for him being there is to find a way to extend what little limited life his aged owner has left. David’s actions clearly jeopardize the ENTIRE mission. One does not have to subscribe to Vulcan logic to see how illogical that was. 3. The most disturbing, you have a crew travel two years through hyperspace, thaw, only to find the ones who created our human race and when the remaining member of this race is found, he says nothing, NOTHING. He disappointingly turns out to be a hulking brute. REALLY? Now, in that segments defense this is what I meant about most of today’s audiences as not being the critical thinkers they once were. For instance, I can understand from my own deriving that the crew members expecting to get the respect of an answer from such a being would have been tantamount to a Grasshopper asking ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) why they are spraying their home with insecticide. The answer may not have been a pretty one and could have been as simple as "I don't like things that look like you playing on my food." Think about it, how many farmers have you ever heard tell stopped in their busy work of farming to have conjecture with a grasshopper? Also, the beings they encountered could have all merely been drones, beings bred specifically to carry out their given function. So anything seen impeding that function was viewed as a failure, and unacceptable. Hey, we would be mad too if we awoke from what was supposed to be a short nap, (That turned out to be 50 thousand years) and found out the grasshoppers we were supposed to exterminate are now flying around in spaceships and asking us why did we try to exterminate them. 4. The fourth and final reason had me laughing so hard at the end it caught me by surprise. It was the scene where we are to believe two highly intelligent and technical people, In the form of the two remaining women at the end are run down by a tumbling donut-shaped spaceship. Really? This reminded me of the old "Tom and Jerry", "Deputy Dog", and "Looney Tunes" cartoons I watched as a kid. You know the classic scene, where someone chops down a tree and the intended target runs away, but only in the direction the falling tree will take, and the character still gets creamed seconds later. Did these two women travel two parsecs and not understand basic physics? Maybe if they watched more Woody Wood Pecker cartoons they would have known to just run a couple of paces to the left or right and they would have been fine. Well, the end really sends you, as the lone scientist manages to repair the android and they commandeer another alien ship and surmount the colossal feat of operating it and where do they decide to go? Not to earth, that would have been too easy. They head out to the home planet of the creators. You know, the beings that already have them on their extermination/start-over list. Maybe in some way the scientist figured she could argue her point for mankind's salivation. Well, I suppose it was more noble for them to do that rather than return to earth living in the fear these beings would one day figure out they have an entire planetartly outpost that is WAY behind schedule. In all of that I will submit that I will definitely buy the DVD when it becomes available, hey, the Prometheus is in my opinion one of the baddest-assed spaceships I’ve seen in along time.

Why the movie "Prometheus" Fails.

Why the movie "Prometheus" Fails