Film Summary DLVII (Prometheus)


Re-watching Prometheus and I'm reminded just how disappointed I was in this film. I had seen it in theatres originally.
Even then in the comfort of a fairly decent chair, the massive screen, high quality visuals and fantastic surround sound. I still couldn't get over all the flaws and weird character motivation.
Not to mention the sometimes very questionable acting and lying delivery.

I think Prometheus is a fantastic looking movie.
And I will never put it down for that. But it's story just doesn't match up with its overall ambition.
I almost wonder if the film would have done better if it wasn't associated with aliens at all.
If it was able just to stand on its own two feet not have to mix itself in with all the references from other movies.

Personally I would have preferred if it was just a movie about the cyborg on the ship alone.
Having to monitor over all the humans in cryo-sleep while trying its best to learn and accept human behaviour*.
As we see the Robot watching movies, playing basketball and doing a few other fun and amusing things.
You even have the ability to enter people's dreams. You could break up the monogamy of the ship with personalised dream sequences of all the characters in cryo-sleep.

The opportunity for an incredibly well-made character-driven movie with ridiculous over-the-top visuals and extreme character-building are all here.
But instead we devolve back into a group of idiots finding an strange alien substance and handling it's in the worst way.
All with a Sinister backstory of a company that's not letting on with a grander plan.
Which is just asinine given that we're supposed to be answering questions from the original Alien movie. But they were bringing up 20 more questions in this movie revolving around even more distrust and dec-communication.

I just sit here and wonder why they wasted all of this. There's so much potential in this movie and we alternatey just end up with this mediocre science fiction story devolveing into farcical action and silly character moments.
I can easily go into a million issues with the film but that's already been done by a thousand other people and at this point I'm just tired of it all.
I'm more upset by this movie that I am Alien Resurrection or the Alien versus Predator movies because they were all kind of cheesy and dumb at the core. Anything good that came out of them was more of a by product or a happy accident, where as
 here it feels like we have a fairly good film be weighed down by pointless crap.

And I think the worst part about all this is it annoying chunk of the fan base that goes what the movies made by the original director therefore it was always the intended view.
forgetting that one peoples direction and overall views on life change with time and secondly (this one's more important) Ridley Scott is not the key inventor of Alien he's just a director.
He's incredibly important for the outcome of the actual film and why everything mixes together so well.
But he didn't write the script for the original screenplay that honor belongs to other guys* and the concept for the monster was created by other people too.
Therefore the alien doesn't belong to Scott or anyone else.
It's a creation of multiple people and at this point is just kind of its own thing.
And we sit here trying to answer questions that no one really asked.

Yeah it's interesting to think about the weird space monster at the beginning of the film and what its struggle was before the humans got there.
We all know the real reason it's there. They give us a slight glimpse into what's going to happen to the humans once they encounter the alien creature.

* Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

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