Review of Prometheus (2012) by Fritz K — 12 Jan 2014

I really want to start this review with something along the lines of, it's got hella nice visuals. Cause it does. Honestly. A tiny ship soaring against a background of a giant ringed planet. A bleak desolate landscape. A waterfall. A gooey, slimy, wet interior of an alien structure. The cinematography has heft, weight to it. The soundtrack not bad either. A little bombastic, but I think such movies need some good boom in their music.

With that said, I have grown tired of complimenting a movie on its visuals in the same way that I have grown tired of watching movies with beautiful visuals and terrible stories.

So let me just say it straight: if Prometheus is an emerald of CGI visuals, it is the pyrite of story. Er. Wait. That wasn't straight at all. Let me try again: Prometheus' characterization, script, and plotting are awful. AW-FUL. FULL of aw! ...fulness.

People keep bringing up this notion of how the film explored questions of the origin of human life. Well, yes, but not in any serious, palatable way. There was potential, certainly.

But there were so many mis-steps at a fundamental movie-making level. Insane leaps of logic, absurdly convenient timing (and stupidity of characters), inconsistent characterization, off-kilter pacing, a failure to provide any momentum, and on and on. How the plot played out was so transparent - possibly the most transparent of any movie I have ever seen. It's like, in the beginning of an action movie, they show this news report of this nuclear power plant opening and it's like GEE, I WONDER IF THE FINAL CLIMACTIC BATTLE MIGHT OCCUR THERE? Yeah. The entirety of Prometheus is like that.

Final Say: Prometheus just didn't know what it was. Was it an action movie? A horror film? A sci-fi space thriller? An existential exploration into the origins of human life? No, it was a cobbled-together mash-up of genre conventions and previous Alien movies and it simply didn't make sense.

How to Watch It: Well if you see it, you should go in a IMAX 3d. But IMAX 3d is expensive. $17 a ticket where I live And the other elements of the movie simply don't warrant such an expense. So how to watch it? Harsh but here you go: Never.