The Flaw

Rating: 6/10 (10 June 2012)

It doesn't seem that anybody's got it yet, so let me explain why all the disappointment with "Prometheus." It's that the climactic sequence is arbitrary; i.e., it is not expressive of the ideas of the movie. For an hour and 50 minutes, the film has teased us with provocative whispers along ancient alien lines (Erik Von Dannekin, call your lawyer!), suggesting that life on earth was a kind of experiment by a superior human type with really good abs, who donated a key bit of DNA to the compote that would become life on earth. Not new, but always fun. But at a certain late point, Sir Ridley can get no more thrills out of it, so the movie turns, arbitrarily, into a low vaudeville form that might be called "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" and watches while two Chicken Littles try and avoid being squashed by a rolling piece of space junk. It's exciting as spectacle but meaningless as drama; it has nothing to do with the issues evoked and everything to do with sociopathic gravity. It the space junk had kerplunked to earth a hundred yards this way or that, (spoiler) the ordeal by rolling steel donut would have been avoided and if one of the little chicks had run 50 feet to the left instead of continuing 200 yards on the straight ahead, she wouldn't have ended up as part of the asphalt. The movie can be likened to a '78 red Saville ragtop with the engine of a Corvair. All dressed up and it goes 22 miles an hour!