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?