Went to Prometheus on Friday with my partner, the splendid Dave Gullen. Having stayed up rather too late dissecting it, we decided to do a joint review. So here ’tis.
Prometheus, dir. Ridley Scott.
Dave & Gaie: As the credits rolled, we just sat there. We said ‘Hmm.’ Then we both got up and left the cinema. That says it all, really. However…
Dave: This was a film I was really looking forward to seeing. I love the first two Alien films, and I’m a big fan of Scott’s work: Kingdom of Heaven (you have to see the director’s cut), Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, and Body of Lies.
Gaie: Me too. I love one, three and four of the Alien films: admittedly I loathed Gladiator, but I do adore a lot of his stuff. When he gets it right, he really gets it right. Here, though…
Dave: Overall, the film is incoherent. OK, I trained as a biologist, so the wilful science bollocks got to me:
Q: Are we throwing away three hundred years of Darwinism? (The biologist character asks early on.) A: Yes, we are, apparently. Anyway, under your spacesuit is a RED SHIRT, so it doesn’t really matter what you say.
This hand-waving was the real problem – trying to paper over the cracks results in drawing attentions to the flaws.
Gaie: Yes, If you’re going to have pseudo science, do it. Don’t try and jam it together with real science. I’m no scientist, and even I was going, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, that makes no sense.’
It would be far better to just use the unobtainium, and go ‘it just does, guys, the interesting stuff is over here, look!’ instead of trying to rationalise a massive logic fail.
Dave: Absolutely. With explanation, less is always more, in the same way scenery is always better on radio. More is always too much. Imaginatively, it doesn’t leave anything for the audience to do.
Gaie: Exactly. And one of the great things about the first Alien film was the way the monster was seen only in terrifying glimpses; your own mind supplies the rest, and it always knows what scares you the most. But this? I had heard there was supposed to be some sort of subtext about invasive penetration, etc. etc. But there was no ‘sub’ about it. It looked, at points, like tentacle porn – and judging by the giggles coming from the row in front, I wasn’t the only one wondering if they’d bought some of their monsters from the local branch of Lovecrafts.
A shame that Scott didn’t take his cue from the first film and keep things mostly hidden, rather than almost literally slapping us in the face with a big wet penis; (a particularly startling experience in 3D). Or, for that matter, smothering someone with what appeared to be a starfish blessed with a ring-a-rosy of vaginas. Was this last an attempt at gender-balancing the whole monstrous sexuality thing? It’s the only feeble excuse I can possibly muster. Anyway, it was mainly just rather icky, in a faintly amusing way that I can’t imagine was intentional.
Dave: Each scene in Prometheus works pretty well, but that doesn’t mean when you string them all together you’ve got a film. There were too many references to the oeuvre that Prometheus seemingly felt obliged to pay homage to, or subvert – the eggs, the space jockey, the Alien itself – while also denying it was a real prequel. Some of these are in the film, some are not, but it felt like this stifled creativity and originality – these references had to be in there and each and every time they killed the great thing that SF does so well by refusing to explain the unexplained: Sensawunda. So they went ahead and explained it, inconsistently and nonsensically.
Gaie: The whole thing felt like a sort of closed loop; like playing a video game where you can’t get past this particular door, and however pretty the scenery, eventually you get bored and go play something else.
Dave: Actually, the actors are pretty good – Idris Elba plays a believable, pragmatic, and, in the end, heroic, jobbing space captain, Michael Fassbender a sinister, malevolent Jeeves of an android, and Noomi Rapace is a very human female lead – who goes through hell, and back (but more of that later).
Gaie: Yes, Rapace was good; it was a shame she was given such wildly improbable things to do. I ended up unable to concentrate on her acting because of the words, ‘You what? You’re kidding,’ ringing through my head. Fassbender was also excellent; potentially far scarier than the monsters. And as for Elba, his was the best-realised human character of the lot, to my mind; a shame he wasn’t foregrounded earlier.
Dave: I also thought the characters behaved inconsistently. The biologist, at first sight of a dead alien, takes fright and runs away, leaving it to the archaeologists. Then, when he sees a slimy little worm creature he plays with it – and guess what, bad things happen, not because he’s an idiot, but because the script says he has to. He’s also part of a very uncomfortable comedy duo with the geologist, the brittle dislike they have for each other disappointingly turns into half-baked silliness as the script throws them away.
Gaie: Yes! This is the first biologist ever to see an alien and he’s going, ‘lemme out of here!’. The collection of characters on the ship seems to be there not because anyone had given any real thought to who might be on this sort of expedition, but in order to have someone to drop in a plot point or get nastily messed with by a slimy sex-toy.
None of the character interrelationships felt properly built or worked out; but then, neither are the majority of the personalities. The interactions seemed to be between bits of scipt, not between people. The potentially interesting characters were generally the more minor ones; but they hardly got a chance to shine. Charlize Theron can do ice-queen in her sleep, which is exactly what this felt like; Dr Shaw’s partner (Charlie/Logan Marshall-Green) actually struck me as a bit of a jerk. Poking other people about their beliefs is a tad adolescent, and just because David is an android, there’s no excuse to be unpleasant to him when you don’t even know he may have a hidden agenda.
Dr Shaw herself (Noomi Rapace) seemed little more than a bundle of angsty survival instinct held together (in the end literally) with surgical steel. She tries to save her lover, she tries to save herself, and only when poked in the spine by the plot does she attempt to save anyone else. She lacks the sense of someone who will take the right moral choice, even when it’s tough, that made Ripley so appealing.
Dave: Only Idris Elba’s character, the ship’s captain, does that. And the relationships between the characters are at times wincingly clichéd.
Gaie: Agh. The Star Wars style revelation moment was the dampest of damp squibs; like a badly chosen Hallmark card left out in the rain.
Dave: Overall, it’s all done by the numbers – the prequel, the setup, the team of disparate souls with secret agenda all fractiously rubbing along. The shock actual ending after the ending, just when you , yawn, think it’s safe. They even had the, admittedly alien, limb slapping the window. Bang! Ooh, scary! This is ripping tropes out of teen-horror, and is sadly derivative. There were too many moments that broke me out of the film with a mental ‘Hang on…’
In particular, one absolutely laugh-out-loud moment during possibly the most traumatic scene in the film.
Gaie: Yes. It should have been utterly grim and scary, but first, the horribleness was undercut by a really weird design choice, and I have no idea what sort of reference they were going for there, but what I got was a ‘huh?’. And, from that moment on I was going; no. No, sorry, that person, in that condition, couldn’t do that. Or that. Or that and certainly not that. I don’t care how good surgery is in the future. Just no.
Dave: So what was good? Cinematically the film is impressive, the design is great, and it’s very beautiful in parts.
That’s it.
Gaie: Yes. Much of it was very, very pretty; and the sense of scale was at times wonderful. But…I needed people in that fantastic landscape I could care about, and they were sadly lacking.
Dave: In a word? Disappointed. In a sentence? Oh my God, Margaret Attwood was right – it is all squids in space.
Fin.
