Prometheus sucks bigtime

Some years ago I heard about the planned prequel to Alien (1979) and I thought it would be awesome if Ridley Scott would direct it and allow his idea of the Space Jockey to bear fruit on a cinema. Sadly this would not be the case. He tossed that idea (with the usual pushing from commercial production retards) and set forth to direct a spin-off, namely Prometheus, which would tangent some elements of the Alien universe but not have the Alien creature actually in the movie. The synopsis is pretty lazy and are common ideas from older sci-fi, that humanity has been created from alien intervention, and evidence of that thesis is found in ancient dig-sites on separate places on Earth, showing a starmap to a distant planet. Scientist is sent to this far-away location in space to discover if these aliens were the ones responsible for creating humanity, and if so, ask them what the purpose of human existence is.

The end result? Pretty bad.

The movie had a budget of 120 millions USD. From that money stack you’d at least expect some well-thought and well-analysed script, character development, environment process and universal brainstorming to be made. But no, that’s not the case. With the amount of time the film crew has spent on this, plus the big budget, the following mistakes, flaws, sloppy handwork and overall amateur-like storytelling is beyond my comprehension.

The characters are, in 9 out of 10, quite stereotypical and shallow. Everything is served on the Hollywood smorgasbord, from the geeky scientist with glasses (Millburn), the bad boy with a Mohawk haircut and tribal tattoos (Fifield), the black captain working as a comic-relief (Janek), the strict businesswoman who plots for corporate power (Wickers), the pretty boy scientist (Holloway), and the weak, emotional female (Shaw).

When entering the planet atmosphere, the crew immediately finds what they seek for - alien structures, resembling buildings. No orbital scanning or similar necessity in order to pinpoint the location needed?

When entering the alien structure, the crew scans the atmosphere on the grounds, concludes that it’s breathable air, and takes off their helmets, Did they ever stop to think about airborne viruses or bacteria?

Millburn has to pat an alien creature, because it’s sooo cute. Imagine if that was a mistake. Once again the fuzzy scientist, who relies in raw data and Darwinism, dies first. Reprise of an older movie scene, perhaps? Also, with Shaw, being the single “survivor” AND a true believer of higher purpose (God, anyone?), this moves towards the notion that the faithful will earn success while the disbelievers will fall. More Christian infiltration in the media?

At least one of the crew has to freak out at a minor accident (Fifield), when they are all supposed to be experienced and has a professional payroll from a multi-billionaire company. Sounds feasible, no? I don’t think NASA would hire these amateurs.

Fifield, who is supposed to be a geologist and is mapping the alien structure, has no clue where his instruments are leading him when they are stranded in the alien structure because of bad weather. At the same time, no one monitors their situation from the space ship. Sounds like a bunch of professionals?

Shaw gets impregnated with alien DNA. The schizoid android David therefore restrains Shaw and has set his mind to freeze Shaw into stasis to analyze her, but she lures him that a sedative is working on her, so David leaves her alone. Shaw then breaks free and gets the alien DNA inside of her, which is a squid-like creature, surgically removed herself, staples her stomach wound and runs away from the operation table. No one follows her. She unexpectedly meets up with the old Weyland, who funded the scientific space trip and secretly tagged along, along with his personal watch and David. No one comments on her wounds or trials. Is this some kind of joke on inconsistencies, plot holes or just bad script writing? Anyone? I’m still baffled on how illogical and extremely irrational everything gets from this point on, at the same time keeping in mind that this is fiction and not reality. But come on, some coherencies would be nice.  

When you see a space ship comes crashing down, falling towards a specific location, you would do well to try and move away from that location. In Prometheus you obviously don’t. Wickers get (assumingly) crushed when she tries to run a straight line, the same line the shadow of the falling ship is casting on the ground.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Many other important flaws have been pointed out on IMDB, but if I would point them all out it would be a novel in the end. It’s that bad.

The movie is over 2 hours, yet it fails to focus on the story itself. Once again Lindelof is set loose to fuck up a generally decent idea of story and go Frank Zappa on everything, too much mad-hat ideas that I barely understand how the fuck Ridley Scott would hire someone like Lindelof, let alone allow himself to divulge in these kind of confused, schizophrenia behaviour in the story. Dozens of ideas are created, but nothing is followed up. I know the script style of avoiding answering too many questions, to leave some scenes out to public speculation, but this is far beyond that. Not everything has to be explained, but to constantly create more questions than answers are just the poor work of an amateur. 

This movie had more style than substance. A poor balance of production, and once again proves that a big budget doesn’t mean shit if you have hacks that are allowed to run amok with the script.

So, there’s too much idiotic behaviour from an already flawed script. Shame on you, Lindelof, you are truly overrated! Refrain from doing any more scripts ever and stick to production only! Do not direct either, who knows what you would let slip pass the radar!

2/5 in review. It's not as bad as Avatar or Alien vs Predator at least, but not far from it.