Prometheus: Cosmic Embarrassments

I'll come right out and admit this from the start: I'm a minor fan of the Alien/Predator mythos. I've read some of the books and been disappointed by multiple films in recent years. Predators was a pleasant surprise, and so I was quite hyped for Prometheus in a desperate hope that the series could be on a roll. The film was disappointing to me, but that view may be colored by fandom.  It was, for the most part, an average film, so if you're not expecting anything special you should be able to enjoy it as decent stupid summer fare. I walked in with higher expectations.

With that out of the way, here are some (spoiler-free) good aspects of Prometheus:

Fassbender was good. I wouldn't call his performance stellar, but it's certainly one of the most solid in the film and David is acted very well to the point that his was the only character that interested me.

Idris Elba is fantastic as usual. Just because he's Idris Elba. Also, he's trying to pull off a country accent, which is absolutely hilarious.

The premise is interesting. Ancient aliens are in these days. It's an interesting idea to consider, particularly from my religious perspective, and that the subject is dealt with in a summer blockbuster rocks.

The film looks and sounds fine. I saw Prometheus in 3D, and I didn't notice the 3D, which is basically the best you can hope for in a time when everybody's jumping onto the 3D bandwagon and often executing that piss poorly. The film certainly was 3D, but in an artful way rather than a "Look, Ma, me too!" way. The visual aesthetic itself was pulled off well, if nothing particularly special. While horror movies are generally shadowy affairs, Prometheus is fairly bright and clean. The film sounded fine, as well. None if it seemed stellar, but in an age of shinies it's pretty hard to pull off stellar.

So, like most movies, Prometheus is not without its good sides, and they are genuinely good sides. The rest of this is going to delve into heavy tone and plot spoilers, so SPOILER WARNING HERE. If you read beyond this point, you have no right to complain about spoilers in particular (you're still free to complain about everything else). 

It's time to deal with the numerous and intertwined bad aspects of Prometheus:

It was not advertised well. The trailers sold this film as a horror movie. Strobe editing, foreboding and tense music, characters clearly running from some horror: these are the signals that you're going to be expecting horror when you walk into the theater. But even my family, who are more easily frightened than most, walked out of the film talking about how scary it wasn't and how disappointed they were with that. To give you an indication of just how easy we are to scare, the first time we watched Signs we had to watch it in the reflection that it cast on our sliding glass door, wrapped up in blankets to hide our eyes. Signs isn't even really a very scary movie, but we were horrified that first time. While we've grown since then, some of us are still that easy to scare. And Prometheus did not scare very well.

So what is the film, if not horror? I'd call it a science fiction adventure film. But this is also problematic. Usually when you're dealing with solid science fiction some of your characters are reasonably intelligent. Not so with Prometheus. Characters take their protective helmets off within minutes of discovering that the air is breathable and contains no KNOWN contagions, which are clearly the only potential problems when we're on an alien planet, right? They reach out toward clearly aggressive critters in the hopes of making peaceful contact. The team's geologist and mapping expert breaks off to return to base... and gets lost? This despite the fact that there is a readily-available digital map of the entire structure they're exploring back on the ship, which he has a direct line of communication to. Despite every indication that every being around them is going to be hostile as all heck, the team still travels to meet one of the Engineers right in its own home. 

In horror films you expect a degree of stupidity, but generally you're still not dealing with quite this much. As I've established, Prometheus is not much of a horror film. But if it's supposed to be science fiction, it's not doing a great job of that, either, because of how completely idiotic all of its characters are.

Another problem is that we're not really given enough time to observe much development in many of the characters. Noomi Rapace goes from an outburst of crying because of her infertility to the next Ripley in a matter of minutes with no real growth to get her there. The shift is sudden and unbelievable. Her boyfriend never gets beyond the annoying skeptic stereotype before he's snuffed out. Side characters like the geologist and biologist obtain basic character traits over a period of 5 minutes and then abruptly become incredibly stupid alien food. Charlize Theron never goes beyond ice queen boss. Fassbender and Elba probably have the most development, and those character arcs were oases in the dry sand.

My favorite science fiction tends to ask big questions and seek answers to them. Prometheus asks some very big questions about creation, aliens, and God/gods. In an attempt to answer those questions it posits cosmic horror. From what we glimpse of them, the engineers are above and do not deign to communicate with their creations, opting instead for senseless bloodshed and a heavily destructive form of willful creation. But they're not a cosmic horror unless they're vastly powerful, and neither these sentient beings nor their monstrous creations seem all that powerful throughout the film. They are, by and large, handily dealt with by the film's incredibly stupid human beings. Even the greatest of them are easily pitted against one another toward mutual death, from which springs the birth of a small, slimy, bipedal black dog with two mouths that's clearly supposed to be a Xenomorph predecessor. If you ask me, that doesn't work for cosmic horror. Cosmic horrors need to appear omnipotent and implacable to really work well, and neither feels true here.

That Xenomorph predecessor is an entire problem on its own. Its development throughout the film from black goop to slimy dog makes very little sense and seems forced as a prequel plug more than it is a valid thread of Prometheus. 

If you can reasonably explain that thing's development to me, feel free to do so in the comments and prove me wrong here. I'd also love to hear any of your own thoughts on the film and responses to or critiques of my own.