Prometheus 2: The Secret Of The Ooze!

It's been a week since I saw Ridley Scott's Prometheus with my best pals Titus and Ky. A week since I watched all of my cinematic dreams go up in a puff of smoke on an IMAX screen.

That's just hyperbole. Prometheus is not the worst movie ever made. The film didn't shoot my inner child in the face. I'm not even really upset, if I'm being honest. Just disappointed.

Because this movie could have been great. There are some really interesting ideas in the film. It's a feast for the eyes, with some astoundingly beautiful imagery on display. But Prometheus is a complete fucking mess, and I find it difficult to believe that Ridley Scott looked at writer Damon Lindelof's final draft of the screenplay and thought it was suitable for filming. Because that's where the problems lie.

Script? What script?

I don't want to be the nerd who forces a direct comparison to 1979's Alien, but Sir Ridley already did that. Not only with the numerous theatrical trailers that worked very hard to echo the promotional materials from the earlier film, but also with the final product that is Prometheus.

When you break it down, Alien is basically a slasher film in space, with the titular beastie picking off the crew of the Nostromo one at a time, Ten Little Indians style.

Original writer Dan O'Bannon (my hero) and his partner in crime Ronald Shusett came up with the brilliant concept of having the unkillable monster being a product of intergalactic rape. The facehugger forcibly impregnates hapless Kane, and their progeny tears its way through his ribcage in a sequence that became a source of deep unease for every man who has ever seen the movie.

It's the kind of violation nobody had ever seen before, and that alone would have made Alien iconic (or at least infamous) in the eyes of many film fans. But subsequent rewrites, along with H.R. Giger's disturbing/erotic concept art, a fantastic cast, and relative newcomer Ridley Scott's keen directing skills combined to transform Alien into a masterpiece.

Prometheus has the concepts. It has the hook: a journey through space to find the possible origins of the human race. That has the potential to be amazing. The Potential. But it's missing everything else.

The creature designs are lazy and uninspired. The cast ranges from merely good to mediocre. The script is dull and unimaginative. And the Ridley Scott of 2012 just doesn't have the same fire in his belly as the man who directed Alien in 1979. He used to be a young man with something to prove; a maverick of sorts. These days he's part of the establishment, a director with some skill who has been coasting on his earlier successes for years.

I don't think Ridley Scott is a capital G Great director. I think his first three films, The Duellists, Alien, and Blade Runner, are Great films. Nothing after that comes close, at least in my eyes. I'm still rather fond of Legend, although it is greatly flawed. But the imagery on display in that movie is often breathtaking, which helps me overcome many of my problems with the narrative.


Did I leave the iron on?



After that, I have no great affection for any title in the man's filmography. I own and enjoy Black Rain, Gladiator, Hannibal and Black Hawk Down, but they're not in the same league as that trilogy of amazing films Sir Ridley directed in the beginning. There's just something missing.

But Kingdom Of Heaven is another matter. I never saw the film in theatres, so my introduction was on DVD. The theatrical cut is good, but the director's cut is better than good. It's not quite Great, but it comes damn close. Everything after that, I find, has been varying shades of mediocre. And if you're familiar with this blog, then you probably know my feelings on his last theatrical outing.

So I didn't enter that giant IMAX theatre expecting something on par with Alien. My expectations were tempered, to say the least. Like I said in my previous post, I just wanted something good, a film that didn't insult my intelligence. I didn't get that. No, what I got was an inspid creature feature with delusions of grandeur. A film that thinks it's like, really deep, man, but is as shallow as the kiddie pool I used to splash around in when I was five years old.

And I think I get more enjoyment out of that kiddie pool than this movie. At least the pool never annoyed me with any of its bullshit "theories" about the origins of humanity.

Take a seat and let me blow your fucking mind.

I'm not going to subject you to an in-depth critique of Prometheus. There are plenty of outlets on the internet if that's what you're looking for. I'm not up in arms about this movie, so I can't muster the strength for any NERD RAGE, either. I'm just going to mention a few of the things that I think Prometheus did wrong, the things that disappointed me, causing me to dismiss a movie I never expected that much from in the first place.

*Why would the crew of the Prometheus, aside from the two lead scientists and Vickers, have no idea where they were going or what they may be required to do when they arrived on this mysterious planetoid? They're not even briefed on the mission until after they've landed, and they act as though they've never even met before this moment.

That's not a good way to start your voyage of discovery, with a completely unprepared and perhaps even unqualified crew who have no idea what they're getting into.

*How would the geologist with the devices that mapped the ancient cave system, who has access to these maps on his wristpad, ever possibly get lost in this very cave system? How does that fucking happen? And how did he MacGyver his suit respirator into a bong? For that matter, why does he even have marijuana in the first place?

Dude, what the fuck is a "map"?

Was there no drug screening when the Weyland Corporation was screening potential candidates for this incredibly important, trillion dollar mission?

*Nobody notices that the pothead geologist and his dippy biologist pal were missing until after they get back to the Prometheus. That doesn't make sense. Would it kill these assholes to do a fucking head count before heading back to the ship?

*The aforementioned idiots lost in the cave were freaked out when they encountered a pile of corpses a few moments earlier. That's why they bugged out early to go back to the ship; they wanted no part of this freaky shit. So why does the biologist, when confronted with a pale dildo-worm with a throbbing pussy for a face, suddenly act like he's in an episode of My Little Pony?

He wants to pet it, and love it, and take it home with him so he can place it in a terrarium under a heat lamp and feed it crickets and call it "Mr. Pussyface". It hisses at him repeatedly, and he still approaches the cock monster like they're gonna be best pals.

He just wants a hug.

So of course it crawls down his throat and proceeds to make violent love to his internal organs, because it just wants to get its swerve on.

And its acid blood melts Mohawk Man's helmet to his face, and he falls face-first into a river of what Egg Shen calls "black blood of the earth". This sequence completely contradicts the previous actions of these two characters, who pissed their spacesuits when they stumbled upon a pile of dead aliens no more than five minutes beforehand. Where's the consistency?

Also: what the hell is Gracie Law doing here?

Makin' a sandwich.

*Android David wanders around the caves, pokes a bunch of marshmallow Peeps on some console, which activates a holgram record that shows a bunch of "Engineers" running around like chickens with their heads cut off, illustrating that something terrible happened here around 2,000 years ago, which led to the deaths of everybody in sight.

This is a cheap storytelling method, because it only thuddingly reinforces what we as an audience had already inferred through everything else we'd seen in the caves up to that point. It's only there to make sure that the idiots sitting in the theatre understand that bad shit went down and killed all the Space Jockey dudes, because they can't be trusted to understand that through more subtle means, like finding a pile of corpses with giant holes in their chests.

*Our brilliant scientists find a severed Space Jockey head and take it back to the Prometheus, and decide the smartest possible thing they could do with this amazing discovery is hook it up to some jumper cables and make it ride the lightning.



Give 'er more juice! It ain't wigglin' enough!

Um... why? What was the ultimate goal here? Did they think it was going to tell them the secrets of the universe? Or maybe it was going to explain that the final season of Lost was actually amazing television and not complete garbage? Instead it just twitches like a head with electricity coursing through it, then it explodes.

SCIENCE!!!

*Holloway is depressed because he never got the chance to exchange phone numbers with E.T., so he tries to find solace in the bottom of a vodka bottle. David shows up, giving Holloway the perfect opportunity to act like a complete and utter dick to his synthetic friend for absolutely no reason.

David spikes his drink with some black oil direct from The X-Files, and it travels right to his scrotum. Holloway tracks down his ladyfriend Shaw, whines like a petulant child for two minutes, then Shaw blurts out in a very heartfelt scene that her womb is as barren as the surface of Yul Brinner's head. This acts as a huge turn-on for both parties, so Holloway decides he wants to put his evil inside of her.

One off-screen sex scene later, Everybody goes back to the caves to search for their missing companions. Within five minutes, Holloway is stumbling around like a blind person, probably because the little worms wriggling around in his eyes are obscuring his field of vision. He's totally sick, bro!



This guy has a shitty optometrist.

So they escort him back to the Prometheus, and Vickers blasts him with a flamethrower because she'll be damned if she's letting this mutating motherfucker on her ship. This is a smart decision. Shaw is devastated.

Until the next scene starts, then everybody acts as though this horrific event never happened.

*David tells Shaw that she's having a baby and Shaw's like soooo confused because her uterus is a graveyard, but David's like "uh huh you're totes preggers LOL!" and he busts out some "It's A Squid" cigars. Shaw loves Jesus, but she thinks he'll understand that in this case an abortion is the right call.

So she crawls around the ship looking for the amazing automatic surgery table that she spied earlier in Vickers' private quarters. She tells the damned machine that there's a monster growing in her gut and she needs to cut it out, schnell!!! The motorized M.D. slices open her abdomen and yanks out the wriggling little squid, then just staples Shaw back up. No biggie.

This is why you shouldn't de-fund Planned Parenthood.

Shaw injects some unmarked painkillers and downs a bunch of pills, so she's good to go, leaving her love child dangling from a pair of tongs in the blood-soaked medical bay. She never tells anyone about this, and nobody ever asks why she has a bunch of giant staples in her belly.

*It's revealed that old man Weyland, who everybody assumed to be dead back on Earth, was hidden away in the Prometheus the whole time, waiting for David to confirm that one of the Space Jockeys was still alive, sleeping the centuries away in suspended animation. This is treated like a huge, earth-shattering revelation, but it just lands with a wet thud, flopping around like a dying fish on the beach.

Who gives a shit? Why is this supposed to be a big deal?

Why would he go through all the trouble of convincing the crew that he's dead, just to pop up in the third act? And why does he look like "little old basket case on wheels Lo Pan" from Big Trouble In Little China?


INDEED!!!

Man, that's three Big Trouble references. I don't know why I keep doing that. I was hoping that Weyland Pan would force the freshly awakened Space Jockey to undergo the trial of the burning blade, so that they could get married and have babies in space.

Sorry, I'm getting off-track here.

*Weyland eases into the suit that Carl Lumbly wore in M.A.N.T.I.S. and sets off to shake hands with his creator. His plan? Ask the Space Jockey if he can bestow everlasting life on his feeble ass.

Wait, what? He's pulling a Roy Batty? What the fuck is this happy horseshit? He just blindly assumes that this tired giant will make him a Highlander? I thought this guy was a genius?



Don't fuck with Rutger Hauer.

Needless to say, things don't go well. David mumbles some gibberish to the Space Jockey, and the big guy yanks his head off and beats Weyland to death with it. This is hilarious.

Shaw, who just had traumatic invasive surgery, bugs the fuck out as the Space Jockey prepares to take off. Oh that's right, the cave is actually a spaceship that looks exactly like the one from Alien but isn't. And he's gonna fly it back to Earth and drop a payload of mutagen from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon on the human race because we're all a big disappointment.

I guess we forgot to send the Space Jockeys a Father's Day card.

*I kept wondering why the Space Jockeys would want to destroy all life on Earth. Apparently 2,000 years ago, something changed their minds about their creations, and in preparation for a tar monster apocalypse somebody fucked up and everybody died before they could launch their assault. But what was it?

Then I remembered reading an interview with Ridley Scott some time ago where he alluded to what that monumental event may have been. Apparently Jesus was a Space Jockey, and when we killed the dude that pissed off our alien overlords, who decided to smite our asses but good.

Yep. Jesus was a Space Jockey.



That statue in Brazil is actual size.

That's not in the film, but that was in the script at some point. It's stupid on a multitude of levels, but it's so fucking crazy it should have stayed in the movie. That brand of madness is just what this film needed. Instead, the motivations of our creators are left distressingly vague. I needed something. Anything.

What I got was nothing.

*Kentucky Fried Captain Idris Elba tells Vickers that he's going to crash the Prometheus into the Space Jockey ship to prevent it from making its intended rounds, because it's a good day to die.


Idris Elba parties like a Klingon.

Vickers flips out, but KFC tells her that if she wants to live, then she needs to hightail her ass to an escape pod, because he's jettisoning her private quarters, which can act as a lifeboat of sorts with enough food, water and oxygen to sustain her for two years.

I don't understand why she didn't just go strap herself down in her lifeboat. Wouldn't that make more sense than escaping separately in an escape pod?

So the Prometheus slams into the Space Jockey Croissant which comes crashing down on Vickers and Shaw. Shaw, who I must remind you again had a space abortion no more than thirty minutes prior to this event, manages to outrun the falling spaceship, while fit as a fucking fiddle Vickers gets crushed like a vindictive little ant.

She's fine. Let her walk it off.

Why bother having her escape the Prometheus if she's just going to die less than two minutes later? And why in that manner? It seems like this moment is meant to be her comeuppance, the moment where the evil corporate bitch gets what she deserves. But she wasn't a villain. She was just pragmatic. In fact, she seemed to be the most level-headed member of the entire crew.

She didn't deserve this fate, so why was it forced upon her? It feels so meaningless.

*The Space Jockey survives the crash and comes gunning for Shaw. Why? Does he somehow know that she's the one who convinced KFC to suicide slam his space pastry? Why doesn't he just go to one of the other buried ships and use that to get out of Dodge?

Because there are other buried ships. Shaw uses one to escape at the end of the film. No, this inscrutable being from an ancient god-like race decides he needs to kill the girl with the dragon tattoo.

He corners her in the lifeboat, but Shaw's unwanted baby bursts out and hugs him to death, allowing its mommy to retrieve Michael Headbender and take off to the Space Jockey homeworld. Because she wants answers.

Yeah. Answers.

She's going to the homeworld of a species that wants to annihilate the human race. For answers. I could have saved her the trouble and told her we shouldn't have killed Space Jesus.

*The dead Space Jockey got knocked up by the sarlaac-in-training, and a spindly blue monster with a slimy double-dolphin head pops out of his torso, hissing at nobody because everybody's already dead or blasting through the stars on a flying pastry. Then the movie ends.

*Why would the Space Jockeys leave invitations on the walls of ancient caves that point not to their homeworld, but to what is essentially a bio-weapons facility? These invitations are more than 2,000 years old, so the crucifixion of Space Jesus hadn't happened yet.

*After more than three decades of dedicated fans dying to know more about the infamous Space Jockey from Alien, he's finally revealed to be a 12 foot-tall albino with ripped abs.

He must have watched Pumping Iron like 100 times.

That's it? And we learn nothing else about them. Absolutely nothing. What was the point?

To be fair, I don't think anything would have lived up to 33 years of fanboy expectations. But really? This was the story you were dying to tell?

*The only actor who manages to turn in a genuinely good performance is Michael Fassbender, but that has nothing to do with the script, which paints him as a confusing character with fuzzy motivations who seems to do shit only because the plot demands this shit gets done.



ACTING!

His David 8 is poorly written, to say the least. Yet he's the most interesting character in the film because Michael Fassbender is a really good, charismatic actor. Everybody else just sucks.

The characters are either poorly written in the case of the rest of the principal cast, or just... just there in the case of the rest of the cast.

Charlize Theron is a good actor. She deserved better than the two-dimensional "bitch" character she was saddled with. I know that she was initially set to play the lead character of Shaw, but had to bow out due to a scheduling conflict. When her schedule cleared up, Shaw had been recast and the role of Vickers was apparently written just for her.

She was flattered at first. At first.

I say "apparently" because I'm not convinced Damon Lindelof wrote much of anything for her. It's a terrible and ultimately pointless role.

And who thinks Noomi Rapace is a talented performer? I thought she was just okay in the Swedish Dragon Tattoo movies, and she was shit-awful in the Sherlock Holmes sequel. She's not much better in Prometheus. Her line delivery is consistently wooden, and I was never sold on her being terribly bright.

Shaw is supposed to be a brilliant archaeologist, but I never believed it. She loves Jesus, and she wants answers, even though those answers may completely contradict her religious beliefs. Oh nevermind, she chooses to believe either way. I don't understand this.

God works in mysterious ways.

A better movie would have at least attempted to give Shaw a crisis of faith at some point in the movie. Not Prometheus! The only human being to survive this ordeal is a closed-minded idiot, and she's going to make first contact with the aliens who want to wipe out the human race.

*But I guess they're not aliens, because the movie tells us that our DNA is identical to Space Jockey DNA. What? WHAT?! Not even 99.8% identical, but 100% identical. That doesn't make any fucking sense whatsoever.

We have no genetic differences to a species of giant hairless bodybuilders with black eyes.

It's like looking into a mirror...

Um... fuck you?

Prometheus is beautiful garbage. It wants to trick you into thinking it has something on its mind, but its head is as empty as a balloon animal. The film is filled with inconsistency and pseudo-intellectual masturbation. In the final analysis it adds up to precisely nothing.

There's no deeper meaning here, no brilliant core to reveal. It's just a half-assed prequel to a much better film. It doesn't make me mad, because I wasn't expecting much. It just leaves me disappointed because it didn't give me anything.


It certainly didn't give me this.

On that note, allow me to introduce an audio tidbit for your listening delight. This little podcast is called Pod-Metheuses!, and it's just a short supplement to our previous alcohol-fueled discussion.

We talk not only about Prometheus, but also Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, as well as the films Coneheads and Dude, Where's My Car?

It's a good thing. Confusing and ultimately unnecessary? Maybe, but so is Prometheus.



More to come, Dear Imaginary Reader. Always more to come.




For no good reason.