Friday 8 June 2012

Prometheus





Prometheus - 2012, Ridley Scott

Prometheus is bad. What a shame.
According to Wikipedia, about three years ago Ridley Scott decided he wanted to make a prequel to Alien. He hired a screenwriter called Jon Spaihts who at that point hadn’t had anything he’d written made into a film but was apparently a ‘“go-to-guy for space thrillers" … his science fiction romance Passengers was included on the 2007 Black List of unproduced high-value screenplays’.

Ridley later brought a guy called Damon Lindelof on board who wrote a few episodes of Lost and has produced a few films. The three of them proceeded to talk themselves out of the idea of making a prequel to Alien and instead making something that could be considered a parallel film, or some such lunacy. So what they ended up with is a film that isn’t explicitly part of the Alien story, and yet, it’s full of stuff from the first Alien film. This means that anyone who is familiar with Alien (I am very familiar with all four Alien films which is why I have such problems with Prometheus, more on that later) will recognise all the  H.G. Giger  inspired designs. Gigers ‘look’ was and is unique in cinema and is intrinsically linked to Alien. Prometheus is full of Giger inspired stuff, a lot of it lifted directly from Alien. If Ridley Scott wasn’t involved people watching this film would say “hang on, they’re completely ripping off Alien”. But Ridley and 20th Century Fox are involved, so it seems as though Spaihts and Lindelof have used the desire to make an official prequel as an opportunity to try to create their own saga: 

‘Lindelof suggested that the other parts of the script were strong enough to survive without the Alien hallmarks, such as the Alien creature which he believed had been "diluted" by the exposure it had received since, and the burden of "all the tropes of that franchise with Facehuggers and Chestbursters". He offered that the film could instead run parallel to those films, such that a sequel would be Prometheus 2 and not Alien, and submitted an idea for how such a sequel could work.’

So Prometheus was doomed to fail when it was hijacked by a couple of self serving writers who had their own agenda, but an equally big problem is with the direction and production design.

Like I said, I really like the Alien films.  They form part of ‘The List’. You’ll recognise them:

Alien
Aliens
Termanator
Termanator 2
Blade Runner
John Carpenter’s The Thing
And whichever others a film fan born in the 80s may wish to include, personally I rate Scanners, Predator  1 and 2 and Alien 3 just as highly.

It’s boring to listen to people go on and on about these films but they all share a special place in the hearts of at least three generations.  For a period of ten years or so a collection of Sci Fi films were made that took themselves seriously (admittedly Predator isn’t exactly Hamlet) and so everyone who acted in them portrayed their characters as believably as possible.

What makes the first three Alien films (and to a lesser extent Alien: Resurrection, but that one’s a bit of a turd and I don’t like to talk about it) so good is that the performances by each actor are completely believable. One of the many revolutionary aspects of Alien was the way the characters were portrayed as ‘truckers in space’. Sure they were travelling beyond the stars in a space ship, but to them it was work and they weren’t happy about it. They weren’t the doe eyed, awe struck, adventure-scientist-astronauts  of Star Trek or the Space Opera Heroes of Star Wars, they were regular people being bored at work. The best horror films are the ones where the characters react realistically to unrealistic situations. The characters in Alien reacted to their mission with contempt and to the creature by shitting themselves, until then end when Ripley was steeled by the fact that the she was the last one left.  Aliens and Alien 3 were the same.

Prometheus is full of good actors acting badly. Stringer Bell from The Wire is in it, The Original Swedish Version Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is in it, Guy Pierce is miscast as an old man in it (just cast an old man for crying out loud), Charlize ‘won that Oscar remember’ Theron is in it, Sean ‘you’ll recognise me from other films where I’m really good’ Harris is in it and they all do very badly. Only Man of The Hour Michael Fassbender comes out smelling of roses bit that’s only because he gets to play an android (clearly Lindelof didn’t feel the artificial humans of the Alien franchise were ‘a burden’) but Fassbenders camp turn still isn’t a patch on Ian Holm’s Ash or Lance Henriksen’s Bishop.

All of these A-Listers are acting like they’re in a summer popcorn blockbuster rather than a film that is unselfconscious enough to be earnest. Its soap opera stuff.  The script is partially to blame; while the events may not be contrived , each character’s motivation for their actions is very hard to swallow.

The hammy performances betray the big secret behind Prometheus; it is a sequel after all. Forget any attempts by Ridley et al to convince you that this isn’t. Of course it’s an Alien sequel, it’s a $130 million summer blockbuster that has to live up to contemporary franchise behemoths like Spiderman and Batman and Star Trek and The Latest Marvel Whoever.

Consider this: in 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released, as was Alien. Both films were produced as a direct result of the success of Star Wars.  Star Trek was already a franchise (although back then ‘franchise’ meant something different to what it means today) so they spent $46 million on the film version. Alien was the only Sci Fi script that was ready to go into production at Fox so it was hastily given a green light. Like so many films, Alien is good because of the lack of expectation, Ridley’s artistic vision was unclouded by the pressure of financial success. Prometheus however is bad due to excessive expectations.  I don’t just mean the expectations of po-faced  Alien fans like myself, I mean the expectations of a Studio demanding  the film be a guaranteed blockbuster and the resulting motivation for the writers to do something unexpected for the sake of it.

I won’t provide details as I’d like to avoid spoiling it for you if you have not seen it yet , but for every good bit there are two bad bits. I’d also like to think I’m wrong, so if you’re planning on watching it, try to keep an open mind. I’ll definitely rent it and watch it again in 3 months time and see if I change my opinion.

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