Free Spirit said: The Core is more believable than the people, places, and events in this movie.
Well let's get down to brass tacks: this film is hilarious. Guy Pearce in an old man suit appears out of nowhere, says "i want immortality," and then gets bludgeoned to death with Michael Fassbender's still-conscious severed head. This is funny. No, it's the funniest film I've seen in theatres since District 9. Weyland's death is a stock ironic comeuppance played for extreme camp. The film glosses over it because it know that this is a trope. The glib speed with which it dismisses the search for immortality is the same with which it dismisses all the other characters' motivations. Dude say he wants money? DIES. Dude says he wants friendship? DIES. These aren't random deaths. They are equated by this same tone and attitude. Humans are stupid and die because they're stupid. David reads Liz Shaw's dreams and then tells her straight up: you are a shallow character. Her dream looks like a hallmark card. "Your entire motivation is that you're infertile and your dad died of Ebola. I just summarized it in two sentences." The moral: robots don't have souls, and neither do people. But the robot is smarter because he understands this. If you've seen Blade Runner, you know what the warm-toned recording of the dream of a happy family means. It means she's a replicant. "It's a quote from a movie I like." Look at the specific quote from Lawrence of Arabia: 'the trick is not minding that it hurts'. David's character feels everything the humans feel, but he doesn't mind it. He's built up his ironic distance, he constructs his own identity and puts on an incredibly campy performance. The whole film aligns with his POV. As I said in general chat, Prometheus is a masterpiece of straight-faced camp. The very first shot is quoted from 2001 (it's a quote from a movie I like). Prometheus is transparently Scott's grand statement on Science Fiction as a genre. It's not 'hard' science fiction. It's "Science Fiction", deeply embedded in quotation marks. The Prometheus/Pandora myth is like Scifi 101, first day of class. It's THE example of mythological proto-scifi. It's referenced in Frankenstein, the first piece of Science-Fiction literature. Alien references it. The films that Alien references reference it. The films that reference Alien reference it. So the characters fly into space seeking all the answers to their questions, and what do they find? A rational, promethan man locked in an unending struggle against a irrational, pandoric vagina monster. Just slapping against eachother until there is a literal, onscreen shuddering climax and postcoital release. Again: this is funny! You can imagine people staring at this scene and saying "hmm... what does this all mean?" Or, better yet: "how did the squid monster grow so big without a food source?" - just angrily looking for logical clues in this prolonged sequence of a vagina and penis locked in combat. Scott's grand statement on sci-fi is to issue a moratorium. The point of Prometheus is that these stories pretty much always boil down to the same basic archetypal conflict. The humans are painfully mundane - they are all artificial. Only David sees through the guise and understands that he's a character in a movie. This is a loving ode to gleefully bad sci-fi. Important scene: Naomi Rapace looks at some bleeps and bloops on a screen. Two bar graphs allign. "This is it," she cries. "This is everything!" We cut back to the bar graph, and watch it bleep and bloop a while longer. Wow, what an impressive bar graph. Next scene, it turns out she just wants to get fucked. There are two distinct scenes in the film of wacky dames who just need a good deep-dicking. One gets an abortion, the other crushed by a huge black protuberance. A guy smokes pot and then dies instantly. This is Friday the 13th logic. The class conflict in Alien is notably absent. All these people are rich idiots, so we're not supposed to cheer for them. Idris Elba, the closest thing to a 'lower class' character puts on a Southern Accent, says YEEHAW! and rockets his ship into a wall to save the day. Michael Bay would give an approving nod. Why is there a zombie scene? Because it's wonderful slapstick. He gets shot like fifty times and his head gets run over. I couldn't stop laughing. But more importantly, the 'zombie' exists to shows us what Charlie was turning into. For a second, I though it was Charlie, back from the dead. Again, this treats the characters as slightly interchangable. There are at least two shots lifted straight from Luigi Cozzi's (in)famous Italian Alien ripoff Contamination. Prometheus owns.
judge_raz said: That is probably the worst argument that could be brought to the table of discussion on a SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE. Jesus Christ. Do we argue about the implausibility of the events and places in the Star Wars Trilogy? I agree that there are more than a few decisions made by the human crew on the Prometheus that leave me scratching my head, but using the 'unbelievable' card on a genre that is entirely based on the unbelievable is just beyond ludicrous.
Free Spirit said: Fantasy is about the unbelievable and the implausible. Sci-fi is specifically about the believable and plausible. It's the very definition of the genre. Star Wars is a bad example. It's a blending of fantasy and sci-fi, more like the newer Final Fantasies than a real sci-fi movie. Besides, Star Wars is a sci-fi story that is about a story, not about the sci-fi. There's a difference between that and Prometheus, where the sci-fi elements and questions are the things that drive the story. Star Wars is a movie that happens to take place in a futuristic setting. Prometheus is a movie about a futuristic setting. Look at it this way - when watching Star Wars are you on the edge of your seat, waiting to see how hyperdrive works, what the true nature of the force is, whether robots really think and have feelings, why technology doesn't seem to progress even over thousands of years, where did all the humans come from, which galaxy far, far away is this, and how far back in time is it? No. These are questions that could be asked, if that's what Star Wars was about. But it's about the story, the characters, the struggle between the good guys and the bad guys. Nobody cares about that other stuff. Nobody even thinks to ask those questions while watching the movie, because the way the movie is set up, we don't want to ask those questions, we don't need to know any of that stuff to understand and appreciate the movie. They're not the point of the movie. Prometheus, however, does focus on questions like that. They're the basis for the movie, they're why we keep watching, hoping things will be explained, hoping questions will be answered, and hoping the things that just don't make any damn sense logically will turn out to have a logical explanation after all. It fails on all those accounts. Really I can sum up all my anger at the movie's bad sci-fi with the problem of the premise again. The Prometheus going straight to LV223 with humans without any sort of preliminary investigation and no backing by the entire world, and no attempt to explain why there is no preliminaries or global effort is apalling to me. It is an archaic way of thinking from a hundred years ago, and science has progressed past that point. Sci-fi can't just ignore already established scientific method, without a reason. Sci-fi is about pushing the envelope, using what we already know and going further, or at the very least deconstructing what we already know. The Prometheus flying off to an unknown world the way it did is literally the same as the crew being fired by giant cannon into the eye of a cheese-covered LV223. It's that bad to me. But I still like the movie, so make of that what you will. Oh, and I loved the Red Letter Media video. That's exactly how I felt walking out of the theater, and exactly what I was doing as I drove home. I wish that thing was an hour longer.
Zophycakes said: Protip: Promethus is a fantasy film :O
