Thursday 31 May 2012

Prometheus - Review

Contains some plot spoilers


When I found out that Ridley Scott was returning to the Alien franchise, 30 years after the original 1979 movie, I could hardly contain my fanboyish glee.  

The Sci-fi-horror masterpiece has long been a favourite of mine and so of course I made sure that I had tickets to the midnight screening and was at the front of the queue an hour before the film was due to start.  

Expectations were high.  I didn't expect to see any xenomorphs, as Scott had already quashed that in pre-release interviews, but I did expect horror. 

So the phrase, "I am disappoint" has never quite been so apt for me as I sit typing this out, deflated and much poorer for the experience.  

There are some quite epic scenes in the movie, all of which are in the trailer, the other two and a half hours are mostly filler, with superfluous characters who pad out the film and contribute nothing to the plot.  The film answers maybe two questions about the franchise and raises about 50 new ones.  Michael Fassbender is wasted - his character is the only interesting one and pretty much the only one who seems to push the plot forward.

There were one or two nice little character moments scattered throughout the debris, but they were overshadowed by confusing character decisions and out-of-nowhere plot developments.  

The nods to the franchise and new design work from HR Giger gave me some squee moments, and had this movie contained absolutely no connection to the Alien franchise (some with minor plot point changes) it might have been a truly epic Sci-fi adventure.  As it stands however, it falls flat and completely failed to excite me.  
 
If you've seen all the trailers, you've seen almost all of the interesting parts of the movie.  There are a few threads which fascinated me, but they are dropped quickly after they are introduced and never spoken of again.  The beauty of Alien was in it's simplicity, a monster, a ship, a small crew, horror ensues.  Prometheus seemed to be tripping over itself to introduce wild ideas and bizarre technologies, but didn't seem to want to develop or explain anything it introduced.  It seemed very much riding the coat tails of, "Hey look, Ridley Scott is back of the Alien franchise!"  

The rest of the audience at my showing trudged out of the cinema, tired and disappointed with two young men, perhaps being desperate to find the positive after shelling out close to £12 to see the movie, gave it a review of "it was ok" before leaving.  Theirs was the only positive thing I heard from my fellow movie-goers.  Perhaps though we were an audience of Alien franchise fans, coming with high expectations, others may find this a completely enjoyable and exciting film. 

I do genuinely hope other people find this movie more enjoyable than I did, but I personally won't be re-arranging my dvd collection to slot this in next to the Quadrology boxset on my shelf of favourites.

4 out of 10 - as an Alien film
6 out of 10 - as a stand alone Sci-fi

8 comments:

  1. For a refreshing and different review of Prometheus, go to http://www.davidmurph.wordpress.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree, David (Fassbender) was totally underutilised. And it raises a whole heap of questions - but I even found the questions that were being asked to be a bit off the mark.

    Lindelof is great at writing great moments - and there are plenty of these. But it doesn't somehow translate to a great overall story. Kinda like the whole of Lost.

    All of that said, I still found it all quite entertaining. And STUNNING.

    My review's at http://choctop.com/reviews/must-see-movies/prometheus-review/

    ReplyDelete
  3. The promotion for this film made it look freakin’ awesome but also, a lot like Alien and I think that’s the big problem with the film. It’s pretty much the same formula used over again and even though Scott tries his hardest to get our heads past that, it’s too obvious, too quick. Good review Ben.

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