Prometheus

Ridley Scott takes a huge dump on the illustrious legacy of a series he was largely responsible for creating with this prequel/remake/reboot/what-ever-the-fuck-it-is of the exquisite 1979 sci-fi/horror classic Alien. Working from a pretentious, misguided, and insultingly hackneyed script by Lost creator Damon Lindelof and space-thriller-it-guy-screenwriter Jon Spaihts, Scott has created a monster; a total abomination and a prime example of how bankrupt Hollywood event movies have become.

Like most prequels, the film does nothing to expand on the world imagined in the original film and only succeeds in making that world smaller. But Prometheus is guilty of far greater sins. It strips all the mystery out of the images in the original film, replacing that mystery with simple-minded pop-philosophy of the most insipid kind.  Gone are the authentically relatable “truckers-in-space” or “soldiers-in-space” characterizations that gave Alien and its first sequel, Aliens, their humanity and relatability. Instead, we get generic, two-dimensional characters that no one over the age of ten could find convincing.  The visceral responses elicited by the earlier films' logical narrative choices and credible sci-fi scenarios are swapped out for scenes engineered to provoke the most basic knee-jerk reactions but never effectively stirring anything remotely emotional. And Prometheus's 3D planetarium graphics are a far cry from H.R. Giger’s organic and mechanical sexual imagery, which was at once both stimulating and repulsive in Alien.

One of the things that made the 1979 classic so powerful was the palpable sense of terror it induced in its audience.  We felt the same dread as the team of scientists landing on a strange and hostile planet.  Prometheus, on the other hand, provides no sense of the magnitude of the mission undertaken by its utterly disposable protagonists, and they seem to have no fear at all about landing on a spooky unknown world, nor any sense of discovery or wonder at the artifacts they find there. These supposedly serious scientists and explorers behave like 22-year-olds on a reality TV show,  self-consciously acting out for the camera and reciting the clichés they know are expected of them. The characters are supposed to believe they are on a mission to discover the origins of mankind, yet they act as though they are going to buy beer at a 7-11.

Many critics have praised the visuals in this film, but COME ON! There's nothing more visually dynamic and surprising here than those screensavers you can choose for your laptop. And the film’s ostensibly shocking “self-surgery” scene is yet another false, high-concept idea of the sort that we see in so many contemporary films. It is intended to be “the most grotesque and shocking thing we've ever seen,” but it is utterly disconnected from any tangible reality and registers only as a idea that we're supposed to find so horrifying.

Prometheus would rate a zero-star rating from me were it not for the presence of my favorite actor of the decade, Michael Fassbender, whose depiction of the Lawrence of Arabia-loving android in this movie is nuanced and funny. But Stanley Kubrick already gave us a film about the origins of humanity in which the most interesting character was a machine. (In 2001, however, the machine wasn't the character that went through the Stargate in the end.) Prometheus has nothing to say about the nature of humanity, or man’s quest for God, or even what’s scary.  It is simply a patchwork of ideas from many other vastly superior movies.