The best pro-choice movie this year

Rating: 6/10 (16 August 2012)

Prometheus is a movie with big ambitions, aiming to super-size the Alien universe while at the same time making a grand statement about man's relationship with God. And it's worth giving it some credit for trying so hard to be a good film when just about every other blockbuster is content to coast on brand value and studied mediocrity. Which is what makes Prometheus's failures so heartbreaking.
Things go along pretty well for the first hour. The visuals are, of course, great, a strange combination of the blue-collar sci-fi ugliness of Scott's most revered films and the cosmic grandeur of 2001. The plot goes along at a nice clip. The characters are broadly drawn, but not so much as to seem unreal, with Michael Fassbender's ambiguous android especially standing out. It's a set-up for, if not greatness, at least a solid film.
And then comes the second hour, and things more or less go off the rails. The overall impression I got was that there were four different plots happening simultaneously, and none of them were willing to admit the others existed. In one scene Noomi Rapace's character emerges from a traumatic improvised abortion, dripping blood, and calmly plays her role as a minor exposition-seeker in another plot line. As far as I could tell one of the threatening aliens is forgotten about and never appears again. What's more, in the attempt to expand the mythos with a number of genetic mutations, Scott loses the mythic clarity of the first Alien film and ends up with a bunch of stuff happening.
Still, it's a consistently entertaining film, and one that manages to raise some genuinely interesting questions -- would finding humanity's maker, as the visionaries behind the project, really give us a sense of meaning, or just lead us on a chase for a yet higher power? There are plenty of good aspects of Prometheus, so I'm not ready to junk it as quickly as most critics are. If nothing else, it deserves points for trying.