Devastating and Funny Review of Prometheus
David DiSalvo's funny review of Prometheus which contends that the tremendous effects don't make up for the horrible plot. Excerpt:
Where Scott & Co. have innovated on these stolen ideas is by making their characters — who are all bizarrely unfazed by the philosophical weight of their mission and discoveries — do ridiculously dumb things. When they see black alien ooze, they touch it. When they find a giant severed alien head, they bring it on the ship and perform inexplicable experiments on it in an open environment with no protective clothing. When the answers Charlie seeks are not immediately offered by the alien temple — which would be an earth-shattering discovery in its own right — he foregoes further inquiry and gets drunk. When members of the science team are lost in a gigantic, danger-filled alien structure, the mission leaders all go have sex. When a giant wheel-shaped object is rolling toward a couple of characters, they don’t run right or left, but stay directly in its path, like the security guard and the steamroller in Austin Powers. There isn’t a moment in the film where the human characters do something that humans would actually do, and the laughter of the audience in the screening I saw confirmed this.
But, the humans aren’t the only dummies here. The aliens–who all resemble buffed, albino Woody Harrelsons–are just another version of the brutish, humanoid killing machines we see in garbage like this year’s Battleship. You would think that aliens who engineered human beings–and who have some unstated reason for wanting to wipe us out–would be smarter than the Xenomorphs from the Alien series. They aren‘t. Apart from having spaceships–and technology that conveniently shows pixilated holographic recordings of their fate to people who happen to drop in and push the right buttons–there is nothing advanced about them. They weren’t even smart enough to keep their deadly bio-weapons safely locked-up, choosing instead to keep them in jars on the floor. This is the equivalent of keeping buckets of poisonous snakes, viruses, and toxic waste in your family’s minivan. What advanced race would be that careless?
Yeah, noticed the whole jars on the floor thing in the trailer and I thought--what's up with that?
No review I've read claims that the plot is coherent. Coupled with the information I learned in Michael Medved's review that the film "features the first self-performed abortion in film history" with the rest of the gross-out material, I feel like I'm armed with enough evidence that my time would be better spent doing something else other than watching Prometheus in the theater.
