Prometheus

We had to go to Canada to pick up my dad from the Vancouver airport, so my mother and I went up a few days before to be touristy. One day, I decided to go see a movie, however the selection was limited. Avengers and Brave I've already seen. Don't care about MIB 3. Ted and Amazing Spider-Man were sold out. ON TO PROMETHEUS!!!



Honestly, I've never seen an Alien movie until now, so I'm going in completely blind (for the most part).

So the movie starts off with a crew of "scientists" going to an unknown, un-excavated place to hopefully find something that would be considered a revolutionary find. The reason I'm being fairly broad with describing the plot is because I just realized that this is a pretty common plot found in sci-fi/adventure fiction. The two examples I can think of right now are Atlantis: The Lost Empire and H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, both of which involved pre-existing civilizations, as does this movie. Odd.

Granted, the overall goal in this film was to find life forms that created the human race. Basically God. While this is one of the major themes that is brought up frequently throughout the film, it's not fully explored. You can't just pose a question and hope that the audience will discuss it later, you have to engage the audience with a discussion and the audience will go from there in the car ride home, or in the Vlog that will be posted the following day. And to be honest, the only time I was ever really "engaged" and somewhat immersed was whenever Michael Fassbender was on screen.

He plays an android named David. Very often in the movie, the humans point out that, since he's an android, he is incapable of experiencing emotions. Funny, considering one of Ridley Scott's most famous directing jobs, aside from Alien, was Blade Runner. Anyway, when the humans point out his "lack of emotions", he certainly seems to be feeling annoyed with them. And at the beginning of the movie, we see him passing time (waiting for the crew to wake up, cryogenics and all that) by watching movies and quoting his favorite lines, playing basketball on a bicycle, and learning languages. Only one of these activities are crucial to "the mission".

One of my favorite scenes from the film was where Fassbender interacts with a holographic recording (just go with it) where the "engineers" look at star maps. The holographic effects, the atmospheric music, the innocent curiosity on Fassbender's face all come together to create a beautiful scene reminiscent of a similar scene in Treasure Planet. And there is no dialogue.

Other than the effects, the wonderful cinematography, and Michael Fassbender, the rest of the movie is just not that good. Characters do weird things for no explained reason. Things are brought up and never discussed. Not to mention, how the Xenomorphs (the aliens) come to be is just plain weird, I don't want to explain because I'll probably end up confusing myself.

So...not all good.