Concerning Disappointment With True Detective

 

DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING if you haven't already watched True Detective Season One right through.

**SERIOUS SPOILERS**

I really enjoyed this this show. If you make it to the end of this post you may not think so, but I really did. For the first 3 episodes I thought True Detective was the best thing since sliced bread. I was willing to excuse the poor female characterisation and problems with the treatment of the rape, paedophilia and murder tropes as a matter of course – this was never going to be a deconstructionism or a revisionist exercise. Then Rust's skill set starts to become a little too broad, a little too convenient to fit the demands of the plotting, taking the dramatic edge of the character. Due to the acting and craftpersonship, however, we’re still basically walking on water. 

Then episode 6. This was always going to be a tough one. There can be no help from “The What?” here as the two time lines converge and all the basic plot points for this episode have been clearly telegraphed. All that remains is “The How”. Which the creators largely pull off, because the unfolding is edgy without slipping too far into melodrama. There is a nice take on the "Detective sleeps with his partner's wife" trope. A bit more multiplicity in “The Wife”^TM motives may have breathed more life into her character. But see above.

Then episode 7. It’s weak. O.K., fair enough. We are in the present now, the fun and games of juxtaposing unreliable narrators with "reality" are over. There has to be a certain amount of setup necessary to carry us to the conclusion. And it's satisfying seeing Rust and Marty reuniting. But for the first time, I’m feeling concerned and surprised at my concern. What can the creators do at this stage to wrap up this so far transcendent T.V experience in a satisfying way? Hmmm. Perhaps nothing.  Are the procedural components all the show has left to offer? These were never the show's strong points for me. And if so, by the end of the episode they haven’t left themselves a lot to play with. But the show has excelled at making the tried and true feel fresh, and cramming content into episodes without seeming too forced, so perhaps….  Hey, if the finale is great, episode 7 will be wholly redeemed.  A pause to draw breath, a calm before the storm, etc. etc.

Then episode 8.  Drawn out, disjointed, stuffed full of a succession of bottom of the barrel tropes that the show has thus far to its credit avoided, capped with the most undeserved melodramatic payoff since Seven. In this context episode 7 is dragged down even further and the pair seem like a tuxedo-clad version of the two part finale from Season 10 of CSI, original flavour. What the fuck just happened?

Some tropes are weak because they’ve been overused. With care you can put the shine back on them. Some are weak because the behaviours involved are contextually nonsensical outside of severe intellectual impairment. Great care must be taken with these tropes – polishing such shit with pretty camera shots and great acting only succeeds in, well, getting your fingers covered in shit. To get mileage out of them you have subvert them, perhaps by artfully flinging them at the wall. True Detective takes itself too seriously for that to work, even had it tried. If character interaction is (deservedly) the crux of your tale and you have no desire to come up with innovative procedural elements, then why not take the next step and have the courage to jettison them completely?

Others have systematically broken down the disappointing plot and story elements, so most of own issues have already been canvased. Never fear, it won’t hold me back from generating my own list of fuck ups in the way things were concluded. I’ll furnish it at the end as a kind of appendix. But first I have a few other things to note:

I wasn’t demanding twists or the tying of loose ends. After two and half decades of romance with audio-visual narratives, (chiefly movies to begin) the twists would have to be pretty fucking impossibly spectacular to wow me anyway. And loose ends are marvellous.  I prefer it when some things are left understated and ill-formed. It’s what my imagination is for. It facilitates my elevation from a simple consumer of spectacle to a participant, a co-creating viewer, and hence increases my investment.

I wasn’t demanding dark.  Personal redemption doesn’t have to be saccharine and I could see one way or another it was on the cards. Hell I even loved the Xmas special ending of the original The Office, and that was really, really fluffy.

I wasn’t demanding anything particularly novel thematically. Here I invoke another fine procedural, The Wire. The show, in its 5^th and final season, became fat and more than a little silly.  A large portion of its parting moment is a rumination on the old chestnut “...the more things change, the more they stay the same”  but it was done in such a way that this dead horse stretched its legs and galloped stylishly. The experience was both affirming and involved conformational change.

And for me this was what True Detective had going for it in the first place… So, why didn’t  its own reductionist synthesis, perhaps: “…any gain in the war against darkness is a victory”, fly? I mean it could have. As of episode 6 I had assumed it would. For some of you it probably did. But for me? Not so much. Even if it were possible to excuse the abrupt nosedive into lazy storytelling (which it isn’t), all the acting chops and cinematographic brilliance in the world couldn’t save the show from its apparent emotional bankruptcy. I never felt like the characters earned their personal redemption in spite of a 17 year journey through the heart of darkness because while I could see it on paper, I never felt like these transformations were particularly coupled to the characters’ ordeal.

A final, tenuously connected aside: In some shows (you know the ones?) especially late in their runs when they are dependent on current issue of the week episodes, there are those uncomfortable moments when some unconventional point of view on a socio-political topic is raised, usually in an incredibly forced way, for the sole reason of another character, aligned to our gaze and the socio-politics of the show creators, to summarily slap it down from a perceived position of authority. Well I enjoyed greatly that Rust’s nihilism was presented as an alternative, coherent, albeit bleak world view worthy of consideration. At the end to find its purpose was to allow for character development through an overly melodramatic reversal was … disappointing, to say the least. Any content therin was devalued and dismissed in the revelation it was all a rogue grief–coping mechanism. That the world view was a coherent philosophical position ends up being neither here nor there. Any vaguely intelligible psychobabble along the lines of Hannibal’s (frequent) weaker moments [mostly season 1] would have sufficed.

My List:

1.  Artful hicksploitation is still hicksploitaion. 
2. The decaying heart of ruling class? For this to work you need more coupling of the body and its decay within the diegesis, otherwise: well crafted window dressing (see also: the use of nihilistic philosophy). Instead we actually get the opposite – marginalisation and partitioning of these two elements, which is good for heightening... the hicksploitation aesthetic. 
3. If the Evil Rich Dudes were willing to kill a high profile public figure for something that someone may connect them to via a theft they made sure nobody knew about, why not just do away with a degenerate fuck who is seriously threatening your shit with publicly staged ritualised sex crimes? Remove a suspect mole, but leave the obviously cancerous tumour be? Huh? 
4. Open your final procedural components by employing a dead end narrative stall drowning in overwrought self-importance and mild Deus ex machina which calls to mind the finale of a recent beloved series where the moment was sillier, less plausible but still far better crafted. 
5. Green ears = green house paint from 17 years ago. O.K. I didn’t mind this too much, it had to be something after all. But it could have been a bit more interesting. Or plausible. 
6. Oh great, Papania is back - to emphatically restate a sceptical position we’ve already heard him say, more than once, which no longer has any associated mystery element to make it dramatic, serving to pad out and dramatically justify a scene that’s required purely for plot mechanics. 
7.  O.K here we go, they start to come thick and fast. Detectives who have travelled and worked in remote Louisiana for over a decade succumb to “no cell reception”.  As a plot mechanic its particularly egregious because it’s so unnecessary – they are right out the back of beyond it would still take long enough for backup to arrive that shit could go down. And in addition it creates the need for the show’s mother of all handwaving moments (see: 15). For. No. Reason.
8. Detectives split up and charge off alone into extremely threatening environments. Hence rendering them more vulnerable. For no particularly good reason due to either plot or character psychology. 
9. 7&8… again… because they are distracting from the incredibly creepy atmosphere of Carcosa.
10. Wasting  the psycho’s creepy taunting by using it as exposition … forced exposition that’s so completely fucking obvious its pointless: “…this is Carcosa”, “..those two assholes were my acolytes”, etc.
11. Cohle finds his way to the heart of the *enormous* maze-like Carcosa maze pretty much without pausing by following a disembodied voice which doesn’t give directions that are *that* clear
12. Hart finds Cohle in giant maze-like psycho lair by following disembodied sounds 
13. Two trained detectives, and quite smart people at that, *pull the knife* from a brutal stab wound. A big deal is made of this and it would certainly have killed Rust. Oh... this was probably what he was aiming for, right? But then why wouldn’t Marty try and stop him? And sure, for Rust to live and have to find purpose afterwards is a much more challenging ending with lots more dramatic possibility –but then why have him succeed in pulling the fucking knife out? He’d have almost certainly died in minutes due to basic human physiology. 
14. While we’re at it Marty’s wound was pretty suspect right? Oh fuck it, I’ll let it slide. 
15. So, no cell phone and we don’t move from the “centre” of Carcosa. The crazy sister-wife is handcuffed to the banister and there is no phone there anyways. Who calls in the cavalry? 
16. So, say it’s due to all the packages that get mailed out – we know this happened thanks to the news broadcast (see: 17). But that is supposed to be 24 hrs later. It's night when Marty and Rust are rescued – thanks for that beautiful shot of the flare BTW, so that would mean they would have had to be there an *additional full day*. Rust would certainly be dead, and Marty too for that matter. 
17. The expository news broadcast. After it was clear there would be an epilogue I was like Christ, please don’t do an expository news broadcast, because at this stage you can’t carry it. And there it was. At least the presenter had that “authentic” X-factor that so many fake broadcasts lack. Small mercies at this stage… 
18. Awkward, failed lampshaping of the finer details of hickslpoitation. Too much, too little. Confounded with more of the redundant cops who I don’t care about and don’t serve any purpose. Except that they were important earlier so I guess they have to be here now too.
19. Marty’s family-forgiveness walk-on. As has been said, the creators may as well have had a Ring girl walk in front of the camera with a placard reading “forgiveness”. All this well-crafted, subtle writing is beginning to wear me out.
20. The beautiful shots trawling over the landscape, going backwards past all the iconic locations of our journey until we come back to the solitary tree, where it all began. That means... absolutely fucking nothing because all the procedural particulars and thematic iconography are ultimately irrelevant, remember. 
21. …and back to the hospital, again. I’m beginning to get an uneasy ROTK vibe here. Oh, but wait, there’s more, so perhaps the last shots are actually a visual motif that functions as an important repositioning for this scene ... and no. It’s about something completely different. And here, have some Rust-as-Jesus iconography. Amen.
22. The pay-off. Which should work. But doesn’t. In terms of pacing we’ve been distracted by a news broadcast, some badly written, hospital-based emotional shoehorning to wrap up a season long character arc, more pointless exposition and pretty shots of the Louisiana landscape. At the very least this shit should have gone down in Carcosa, under the night sky. Hey, I know, why not use a flare, briefly lighting up the darkness then fading gently, to provide punctuation? And then give us the pointless tracking shots.

In a way having such an awesome show spectacularly squander its promise in the final episodes is kind of interesting. It makes True Detective the Anti-Christ of Twin Peaks, whose season long degeneration was given a violent 180 fuck-you with its masterful finale.

 

Early January Round-Up

Gangster Squad

Back from Gangster Squad and I can’t be bothered writing much about it because I don’t have that many ideas. Yes, it’s that fucking unmemorable. So I will simply reiterate the qualms of other commenters with whom I agree: the direction and scripting were for shit – paint by the numbers dreadful.  As a result all the characterisations were either utterly flat (Brolin) or hysterical (Penn). No, I can’t remember many of their names. Yes, this is a bad sign. Much of everybody’s dialogue and other delivery came across as stilted (I single out Brolin's voice over as bottom of the barrel). Not that he had much to work with. His character is so fucking stupid it lacked the tactical nouce to bust out of a paper bag, much less effectively challenge a crime syndicate. A good thing those gangster foes were afflicted with stormtrooper syndrome and their own form of mental retardation. Maybe the bronzing lotion and foundation everyone was caked in were lead based. Set design elements were all kind of perfunctory and uninspired. Oh well the cinematography was great and there were a lot of pretty people strutting around in nice clothing. I frequently enjoy the performances of a fair number of those BP’s involved too, so I’m glad they are getting work to fuel their coke habits or whatever floats their boat.

One other criticism that keeps cropping up is how overused the plot elements were. And it’s true, the script was built over the bones of several long, long dead horses. But in itself this doesn’t have to make for a completely unenthusiastic viewing. The plot elements of another recent gangster flick Svatur Á Leika were more than assorted pickings from the boneyard, they were cribbed (via the source novel?) entire from other fictions - but the film still felt fresh and energetic. The miserably uninspired reworking of Goodfellas' coke-fuelled gun sales/family dinner/drug muling sequence was a washout though.

In Brief:

Justified is back and two eps in I’m not disappointed, so hallelujah.

The Future:

The Master has finally arrived. I have thus far successfully resisted acquiring a small screen version of Lawless in lieu of its February release date so I’m hoping for some big screen cinematics.

Retro:

Inspired by Ray Winstone delivered dialogue in the dire 2012 Sweeny feature (“Yaaw niiicked yeeew fuccking slaaggg!”), I revisited Scum which has only kind of stood the test of time. The sledgehammer comes out often and is frequently wielded with too much abandon for my tastes. The use of rape as a kind of “crown jewel” of debasement and brutalisation now seems lazy and left me uneasy. Within the context of the film entire, Archer’s character was an authorial intrusion too far, although I had this response to previous viewings also. His polemic to the guard over tea felt particularly artificial. On to Boys from the Blackstuff next, I guess.

Marie Antoinette has aged well. It amused and later inspired a short fit of wiki-browsing vis-à-vis French Revolutionary happenings and character bios.

Found my self in need of new boat (= commute = engaging but not demanding) movie yesterday and found an Unforgiven DVD for $9:00 bucks that hit the spot. By the time the Ned, Will and the Schofield kid were meandering across the plain towards Big Whiskey I'd had my fill of the tepid soundtrack, but otherwise my enjoyment hadn't diminished much. True, the film has some (very) weak dialogue, which transforms scenes that could have been mood enhancing into dramatic filler. True also many of the supporting roles are standard tropes without a lot of added interest. Three of the principles, however, all have something a little more interesting going on, particularly Hackman's Little Bill.

Poor dialogue and "before" characterisation of the Schofield Kid combine disastrously to under power his emotional turn about/reveal and therefore one of the films big thematic cards. Another thread that falls flatter than it should is the "sex workers unleash more destruction than they expect when they turn to a power they don't understand and can't control". This was explored much more effectively and with greater emotional impact in The Dark Knight thanks to an earnest and absorbing bit of speechifying by Alfred. Even there we were later sold short by the films need to sell toys to the 12-year olds.

The thing that keeps me coming back to Unforgiven every so often is the somewhat contradictory interplay of two sequences - on one hand the myth busting interactions between Little Bill, the biographer Beauchamp and English Bob in the jail; On the other, the climactic saloon shoot out. In the  former the gunslinger myth is deconstructed and inspected, in the later reconstructed.

But to what effect? Read one way Munny's epic saloon slaughter be viewed as an illustration of Little Bill's sermon on the roll of chance and a level head vs. speed. Munny himself comments to Beauchamp how he's always had luck when it come to killing folks and the hasty bullets of his opponents do indeed go wild. Past sequences also constantly reinforce how past his prime Munny is and that he walks away unscathed is as much due to others incompetence as to his own skill.

But in Munny the reconstructed gunslinger is a perfect storm: a fast and accurate individual who's sociopathic (in Munny's case alcohol fueled) ability to remain calm under extreme pressure hasn't dimished with age; Little Bill's cynical depowering of the role played by individual prowess in survival only serves to heighten the sense of awe at Munny's achievement when he guns down five men.

Perhaps the most important question being asked is: "What kind of person is it that's able to remain calm under such circumstances?"

As for Unforgiven  being the final word on, or ultimate revision of, the Western genre? Weeeel, I feel The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has something (a lot) to say in reply to that claim. But really, the full stop won't come until someone stuffs Terrence Malick, Bruno Dumont and Takashi Miike into a telepod together and the emergent chimera adapts Blood Meridian.

Dark Knight Rises

***WARNING - SEVERE Spoilers Contained Within -WARNING***

I’m not a huge fan of either of the first two films in Nolan’s trilogy.  There are structural problems with both narratives. They suffer from similar excesses in the form of  grating minor character tropes, poor (bombastic) sound design and Nolan’s inability to handle character drama without resorting to melodrama. Or perhaps his inability to tackle melodrama well - melodrama can be very emotionally gratifying when handled with a deft touch as Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrated with Magnolia. In addition I have a litany of separate issues with each individual film.

So why might you ask, would I bother with The Dark Knight Rises in the first place? The simplest answer is that I am a very big fan of many archetypes emerging from The Batman universe, and their narrative potential. Like a tarot deck, I’m always on the look out for beautiful designs that resonate. The thing that I  enjoy immensely about Nolan’s vision of Batman is his aesthetic interpretation of elements from Gotham’s menagerie (both its confines and denizens), balancing a spare kind of realism with just enough elements of fantasy to be visually compelling. Note that I apply the term “realism” here only to the way they look. A notable exception is the disappointing Two Face make-up in The Dark Knight (TDK) whose cartoonishness severely diluted the psychological impact of Dent's scarring for me and made it difficult to take his physical pain/inner emotional turmoil seriously. 

Anyway, Overview.

Do you, gentle reader, remember your reaction to Inception when the crew arrived in layer three (Eames’ dream) of the dream/heist - the snowy landscape with the fortress? I do. I found it kind of boring. Not terrible, just bland and a bit uninspired, certainly in comparison to the first two layers, particularly the second (Arthur’s Dream).

Well that was my overall reaction to The Dark Knight Rises.

The first half of the film is an accelerated phantom menace thread in which antagonists are successively introduced and then promptly peeled away like the layer of an onion; exposed as hench-persons of yet another higher up. This is dropped by the middle of the film to be picked up on again briefly for one final reveal at the arse end of the final act. The second half is an extended ticking clock sequence that telescopes by way of a shift in tempo; the first phase takes place over months with heavy reliance on montage, the second phase over a period of hours, comprised of action set pieces punctuated by very standard stalls. 

Even given three-hours to play out, this composition is realised in an unwieldy way (it may have seemed a lot better on the page and in conversation). That it works at all is a testament to no small amount of skill on Nolan’s behalf in his role as a focal point for the project. Nonetheless, the pacing is all over the show with a post-prologue, accelerated first act crammed full of rushed introductions for largely redundant characters (Stryver, Daggett [Ben, you still rule], Foely). The film fails to generate any tension, a matter not helped by the fact a lot of emotional big-guns get fired off too early (to the tune of scoring so bombastic it could drive the actual climax of several films at once). Alfred does so much hand wringing and emoting at these early stages you’d think these scenes were lifted from the immediate post-peripeteia of the previous instalment. 

And then, after what might constitute as The Dark Knight Rises’ major reversal occurs at roughly the half way point, the film becomes fairly ponderous. While the pace eventually picks up enough (but not too much) in the films final scenes for the action sequences to play out smoothly, the antagonists’ character arcs are completed in a flurry of exposition after which they are simply tossed out of the narrative so we can focus on The Batman’s transformation into Jesus. That being said the interplay between the characters results in a surprisingly coherent narrative progression and while I never experienced any profundity, at least its doesn’t feel like a superficial graft (aka the forcedness of The Joker’s hospital flipping of Harvey over to Two-Face, a low point for me in TDK’s storytelling).

There are plenty of other things to write about, such as how well the film is fits with the rest of the trilogy to form an overarching story; how it negotiates the self/other balance in this regard (It shares more problems with The Matrix Revolutions relating to its ability to stand alone as a film than devotees may be psychologically comfortable with). There are a range of sociopolitical discussions to be had also, but these things would require their own 1500 words to adequately treat. Anyway, I offer a few extra random observations below.

The rest, in bullet point form.

The Good:

• Bane looked great, moved great, projected menace through his physicality and for the aircraft hijacking scene at least, his intellect. Hey, maybe it’s just all that training from David Milch’s gloriously convoluted, speedily delivered, Shakespearean-esque dialogue, but I didn’t find Bane hard to understand. I really liked both the mask, the sound of the voice and the way the stifled mouth keep forcing my attention to the characters eyes. Tom Hardy pulled off some great crazy-eyes acting courtesy of the stasis around the mouth.
• Catwoman was a really pleasant surprise. Her interactions with The Batman and Bruce Wayne made for my best moments. A little bit of moral ambiguity goes a long way – if for no other reason than it give a character a place develop from, as well as to.
• Christian Bale actually had something to do this time around when the mask was off– Bruce Wayne’s character had an arc of sorts.
• Wonderful Craftspersonship. Sweeping (literally) IMAX shots of urban landscapes from the air. Thrilling sense of motion in the chase scenes.
• The “Pit” and the climb to freedom/”rise”, associated for much of the film with Bane, had a pleasingly mythic feel to it. It made a good for a good emotional centre to the second half of the film, thematically connecting three of the important characters. Sadly, like a superb wine not given sufficient time to breath, it could have been a lot, lot better.

  The Bad:

• Bane didn’t have a hell of a lot to do. His elucidation as a threat, particularly through interactions with The Batman, was sub-standard: Two talky fist fights and a gloating scene that doubled as a more or less incoherent justification for the plotting in the second half – meh.
• Bane again. As a close friend pointed out "foxy creation-myth deception" can be awesome (linked to comments about the pit above), but reducing him to a henchman completely depowered the character - suddenly he's not even a mere fanatic, just a love-lorn pet.
• Dialogue [paraphrased]. What is worse than incessant unnecessary exposition of events clearly shown visually, often in the previous shot, or spelled out/clearly telegraphed for the audience in a previous bout of exposition? A few incidences of the same in what is an otherwise absorbing/entertaining film – they jar even worse.
• “The city’s safe, the bomb detonated over the bay” JUST AFTER we saw this happening. For FUCKS SAKE!! Though not quite as egregious as the “Paradox!” line in Inception. That was unforgivable

• Trying to realise the Islamic terrorists League of Shadows’ mission as something other than the hysterical scheming of an eco-ninja illuminati = epic fail. When something is that silly and incoherent to begin with, trying to imbue it with “gritty realism” just increases its stupidity.
• There are trade-offs when trying to tailor elements of your film for 12-year-old boys. Bloodless and otherwise sanitised warfare isn’t just dull, it’s somehow crass.
• “Enough is ENOUGH! I have had it with these Motherfucking terrorists on this Motherfucking plane”! Pun intended. Its all just too parochial for this non-American. "Everybody strap in - we're about to open some fucking windows".

 The Ugly:

• The politics. Its one thing to utilise a nation’s sociopolitical backdrop to evoke a mood, a zeitgeist of fear. Unfortunately it’s quite another to expect that an actual political stance won’t emerge from such a practice and then, if you haven’t really thought out a coherent political position for your film, what you end up with is a naive and muddled embarrassment.
• Bane as Osama Bin laden, hiding out in desert Tunnels Gotham’s sewers? Anyone? Anyone?
• Islamic terrorism is somehow fused with the Occupy Wall Street movement and populist renderings of the French Revolution - that all ultimately wasn’t about insurgence or grass roots political struggle, but about revenge-tempered sadistic nihilism? What The Fuck?
• Greed (global financial institutions) and deception (the patriot Dent act) are bad, but were necessary evils, those good ol’ boys were just doing the best they could, and thank The Batman Jesus for the boys in blue and philanthropic billionaires - they will sort the resulting shit out. Seriously, What The Fuck?

• Dialogue [paraphrased]. Daggett to Bane: “you are pure evil”. I mean what the fuck? It comes out of nowhere, too early in the piece.  As an audience we had barely encountered Bane except in his role as a kind of military commander. Yes the dude had crazy eyes, and was ruthless, but even so. For that pronouncement to evoke the gravity its striving for, I  first need to come to that conclusion myself - as a witness to action, and then have it confirmed by other characters as a point of identification. Not have it force fed to me.
• In complete, confusing contrast this scene provided the best sense of Bane’s physical power – it was chilling. Just beautifully done. Why couldn’t fights with The Batman do the same?

• Terrible craftspersonship. Overwrought jarring flourishes: Foley’s beatific, bloodless dead-swan shot like something out of 16^thC religious iconography.  The dreadful scene with the school bus on the bridge as Blake tries to convince the authorities to let them across. Not only disruptive to the concurrent action and a clunky, crude way to develop the Blake character (perfect for a 12-year old's attention span, maybe), the set looked cheap and under populated. Where were all those good citizens the plucky Gotham orphans had gone off to roust?
• The “featured extras” reminiscent of Studio films from the classical era (1920s through the early 1960s). Keystone Cops and Business men getting their shoes shined are gifted dedicated shots at the expense of key players and contextualisation. Some of them don’t even have dialogue. And during action sequences too. Fucking amateur hour.
• Batman-as-martyr flying off into a nuclear sunset. Amen.

Feedback and counterpoints welcomed but no death threats, thanks.

Prometheus. What a waste of talent

****WARNING: lots and lots of spoilers, many of them mood killers*****

I wish to inaugurate this blog with a few words about the film Prometheus. 

I have been out of the theatre for less than 20 minutes, so the bitter ash cloud cloaking my mind is still greasy enough to lend the forthcoming invective weight.

So. Some truly captivating and breath-taking scenery to open (it was astounding), followed by an intriguing juxtaposition with technology - that quickly degenerated in a crass, effect-laden attention grabber. How much of a misstep was this?

From a plotting perspective, huge. As the story establishes itself, the characters we align our gaze with are presented with a mystery, a hypothesis. They embark on a journey of discovery. En lieu of some exceptionally clever sleight of hand (not forthcoming) that mystery is over for us before it starts. The answer has been served up in a CGI orgy. Was this overplayed hand exploited for tension after some good old-fashioned Hitchcock styles, where an informed audience watches the characters grapple vainly with a puzzle we already know the solution to? 

No.

Hot on the heels of the title came a passable but standard opening that made me feel I was watching a slight re-jig of Jurrassic Park. And the acting by Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green, telegraphed to be two of the main players, had a worrisomely forced feel to it. Hey, early minutes yet eh? Perhaps this was just a touch of ‘rushed character introduction’ syndrome? Were these roles laid out with monotonic initial notes to allow room for transformation during the forthcoming adventure?

No.

And then, miraculously, for a while all was forgiven. Forgiven and more. The film became quiet and sparse; foreboding but tempered with a gentle melancholy. Fantastic sets, yet another spellbinding performance from Michael Fassbender. Would all be redeemed? Was the film now on course for status as a flawed masterpiece? 

No, and No. 

This largely exquisite sequence was as good as the film ever got. (Exquisitely constructed, yes. Novel? No. I’m going to say name word five three times. I know the makers of this film certainly did. Kubrick, Kubrick, Kubrick).

Sure the rest of the sets were well designed. And the costumes. And aspects of the cinematography. The central themes of the story were indeed complex and rich. But...

These themes were not well mined. Even the title itself had an ill metaphorical fit to the film's thematic content. A more appropriate moniker would have been Pandora or Epimetheus (brother of Prometheus, husband to Pandora, dumb as a sack of hammers). Or even Pygmalion if the writers had exploited the Engineer-human, human-David angle to better effect.

Prometheus was a god who brought forbidden technology to humans. In his mind he "engineered" the course of human development, not life itself. In the mind of Zeus he gave humans a technology that would one day permit them to challenge the Gods. Therefore to the Olympians Prometheus was basically an arms dealer (though perhaps with better motives than most in some versions of the tale). Its conceivable that the initial alien was meant to represent Prometheus - sacrificing her/himself to further life (although brief agony as you disintegrate down a waterfall is a picnic compared to being chained to a rock while an eagle tears out your regenerating liver every day). Of course this must have been in defiance of the other evil aliens who then hatched a plan to offset the act with biological warfare. But the film wasn't based on any of these stories. It was if while preparing Pandora's Box, the Greek Gods accidentally opened it on themselves and years later some human beings venturing to Olympus for the first time discover the aftermath.

But then why name the spaceship Prometheus (and by extension attach the metaphor to the human crew)? That's just plain confusing. They are going after their own illumination, aka questing for fire. A better name for the vessel given where the writers took the story would have been Bellerophon (Greek mythology's version of the tower of Babel).

But, but, but, but.  Where to begin next? 

The characters were generally very poorly drawn and the drama arising from their interactions was therefore unsatisfying. The scant drama on offer was forced and overbearingly melodramatic, much like the films score: irritatingly tepid at best, obnoxious at worst. The why (or how) of it? No character was given enough screen time to transcend caricature. This lack of focus on one or a select few characters also meant we had no developmental arcs to piggyback as we were drawn through the story and therefore nothing to give the film an emotional centre. 

Into the second act and the dominoes start to fall en masse. Seldom in large budget films does the narrative collapse arrive so early on. The underlying threat was ill-defined and not in a good way. It wasn’t a loose, shadowy invitation to imagination but inconsistency exploited to trigger action set pieces as required. And worse still, while mentioning plot furtherment: antagonism via utter, mind-fuckingly numbing stupidity anyone?

 

The plotting was an absolute fucking disgrace.

The lack of decent character arcs and no consistency of threat meant as soon as we left the set-up behind and some sort of narrative direction was mandated the film stumbled from one isolated, clichéd horror set piece to another without any investible thread to connect them. This episodic, disconnected experience resulted in the single biggest crime for a psychological horror - lack of tension. 

An aesthetic corollary: heightening this lack of tension were poor choices in (virtual) location. A disappointment common to the realisation in Terminator: Salvation of Kyle Reece’s (v 1.0) post-apocalyptic flashbacks. Where was any sense of claustrophobia?

Additionally, in brief:

Dialogue: The film committed one of the great sins of dialogue, repeatedly. Incessant exposition elucidating action that is clearly presented visually. David and Meredith are talking via a communication channel – David cuts off communication. Charlize does a bit of acting by way of a response – great. But then, as if she were a CCTV presenter with an electroshock weapon aimed at her head from just outside the frame, she speaks: “He cut me off”

Arrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhh! 

No sign of the word “terrorist” – all well and good. But wait for it… “weapons of mass destruction’.

Arrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhh!

Why hire the great Guy Pierce to play an old man in dreadful makeup? Why not just hire another equally great older performer and give Guy a decent role?

Its official: Noomi Rapace is a shockingly bad actor. The Millennium Trilogy was a flash in the pan for her. Evidence: Janek and Meredith Vickers were as much gross caricatures as Elizabeth Shaw. However, Idris Elba and Charlize Theron respectively managed to imbue them with interest because they can actually fucking act.

And what of the atrocity that was Elizabeth Shaw? What was she supposed to be? A theologian? An archaeologist? A geneticist? An astrophysicist? A sociologist? An anthropologist? All of the above? She puts R2-D2 to shame. Invoking Hitchcock again, for a while I thought they might pull a Janet Leigh, that Shaw would turn out to be a pseudo-Sigorney taken down the Marion Crane route. No such luck. She sailed off in the fucking sunset trailing dire voiceover behind her. Made more egregious by the fact the filmakers dropped a piano spaceship on Charlize.

I guess those who sped home from the final scenes of Revenge of the Sith in need of urgent, orgasmic release might love the way this film dotted the T’s and crossed the I’s in an effort to adhere Prometheus to Alien. Unfortunately for me, I enjoy it when my cinematic experiences are tempered with a little occlusion. By way of example, I like the mummified pilot (space jockey) in Alien because its mysterious nature enhanced the eeriness of it all. I wanted to know more – but it was precisely that desire that led me to invest in the proceedings. Now one of the most iconic images of my film going youth has been depowered.

And replaced with what?