2012 - The year in review 1 - Prometheus

This piece contains plot spoilers. You have been warned.

Of all the disappointing movies in 2012 none were more so for me than Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" which arrived brimming with promise and stumbled across the finish line leaving me feeling like I'd just had a great dinner and then got food poisoning from the desert. Back in May I saw it several times in the theater and was of a mind that it was a very good movie that could have been a great one.

With the end of the year (and the world?) staring us in the face now seemed like a good time to begin my year end reviews by revisiting the one movie I had truly high hopes for. I'm going to expand on some of the things I mentioned in my initial review and try and touch on other things I either didn't have space to discuss originally or which only became apparent to me on repeat viewings. To aid me in my quest I watched the DVD a couple of times this past week. 

Let's start at the beginning shall we? It's 2089 right? Are you telling me they don't have some sort of communication device Shaw can use to notify Holloway that she found something in the cave? Here we are 77 years behind them and I think most grammar school kids today would know to simply send him an SMS. Not these future folks though. They stand on the mountainside and scream.

Moving on we come to the matter of one Fifield. The most poorly conceived, poorly written character in major motion pictures this year. All those responsible for this character seeing the light of the big screen should get a special Oscar for "WTF of the year". Every second this nasty clown is on the screen the film is substantially diminished. Fifield is the kind of character that might work for a week or two on "Survivor" or "Lost" but has absolutely no place in a serious sci-fi motion picture. You can get away with things on TV you simply cannot get away with in the theater. If "Lost: featuring Fifield" comes on the tube a viewer can just turn the station and watch a Simpsons rerun. In the theater though that same viewer has only 2 choices: either put up with it or leave, and no one wants to walk out of a movie after just plopping down hard earned cash for their seat.

Next we come to Vickers. Right up front I should say I like Charlize Theron. She's a damn fine actor. Here however she's wasted; told to stand in the shadows and sneer or stand in the foreground and sneer. Her character has not a single redeeming quality. Even the revelation that she's Weyland's long ignored daughter (a fact which is apparently at the heart of her loathsomeness) lands flat because it comes out at the same time she's making a public pitch for the old man to die so that she can get her hands on his money. The scene made modest allusion to the confrontation in Scott's "Gladiator" where Commodus vents at his Emperor father for his years of neglect yet it carries none of that scene's power. Imagine if Commodus had said his famous "I'd slaughter the world, if you would just love me!" and then let slip "Oh, and will you hurry up and die so I can have your sandals?"

There are myriad other problems with the film and they almost all come down to writing. More specifically characterization(s). Among these problems are: trained scientists who repeatedly do the most bone-headed things imaginable. Crew members who decide on the spot to sacrifice their lives with little more than a light-hearted chuckle. Janek and Vickers who go from adversaries to lovers to adversaries without even a "how could you?" There's the engineers who, for absolutely no apparent reason are filled with naught but seething hostility for their progeny. Charlie Holloway who goes from excited kid to depressed boozer in a matter of minutes without even a quick shot of him frowning in between. And Janek, who spontaneously changes from disinterested skipper of the Minnow to an analyst for Jane's Defense Weekly.

Here's a few other things that don't add up for me:
Exactly how did the homocidal engineer know that Shaw had left his ship and gone to the lifeboat?
How is it that the xenomorph at the very end is born full-size?
How did the union of Shaw and Holloway produce a land-based carnivorous octopus? The goo by itself is not life but a kind of steroid. Holloway ingested the goo which should have changed him into something more aggressive, (like it did with the worms) then when he mated with Shaw they should have produced some kind of mean-spirited hyper offspring. But a room-sized, Octobaby-facesucker? Where did the DNA for that come from?
Let's not even talk about Shaw's winning the Olympic decathlon minutes after having her mid-section sliced open and stapled back together.

I honestly cannot think of another film where the disconnect between the pictures and the words are so pronounced. Prometheus is both a stunning visual achievement and a narrative mess. The picture people knew how to utilize every square inch of the movie screen to breathtaking advantage. The sound people (writers and composer Marc Streitenfeld) thought they were writing for TV where mistakes can be glossed over or buried in an avalanche of episodes and insipid scores are de rigueur. The score, in fact, is so cheesy, small and inappropriate that, even if the writers hadn't suffered from their extended brain cramps, Prometheus might have failed to get off the launch pad because of it.

Prometheus had no business being as confusing and inexplicable as it was but it was a modest financial success and plans for a sequel are well under way. As such it is my most heartfelt wish that Ridley Scott purge his sequel crew of anyone that had anything to do with the script for this film - as well as the composer - and start fresh. Restraining orders should be taken out on Damon Lindelof and Marc Streitenfeld ordering them to have no contact of any kind with anyone involved in the production of the sequel and all the reality show castoffs who died in Prometheus must stay dead. The last thing a sequel needs is a Vickers clone.

There were enough things afoot at the end of Prometheus to provide for a rich and satisfying sequel that could make us forget about film 1's shortcomings. For that to happen though Ridley Scott will have to leave many of his crew from Prometheus on LV-223 as he follows Shaw and David into the unknown and focus on storytelling - not just ass-kicking visuals - next time around.