Easily Avoidable

Rating: 5/10 (17 June 2012)

Prometheus follows the same formula as 'Event Horizon' and a thousand other sci-fi horror flicks before it. Incautious scientists discover alien life. Shady corporate interests get involved. A dormant evil is released. Characters make poor decisions and get picked off one by one. A lone hero survives -- queue ambiguous ending. It's difficult to follow this recipe and deliver something that is both exciting and plausible. Unfortunately, Ridley Scott fails on both counts.
It's a shame that the man behind 'Alien' and 'Blade Runner' has sunk to such mediocrity. Scott makes beautiful movies but needs a good writer to pull things together. Collaborating with Damon Lindelhof doomed Prometheus from the start. Not since 'The Matrix' has a dying franchise spewn so much pseudo-intellectual drivel. Prometheus is little more than an absurd collection of clichés masquerading as a 'deep' film. It seems that no one could agree on the characters' motivations or even a consistent set of rules for the alien lifecycle. In the end, they just threw together a bunch of slick-looking nonsense and called it a day. That Lindelhof is the deranged mind behind 'Lost' explains a lot.
I don't expect complete believability but Prometheus is a bridge too far. In addition to making mockeries of biology, physics and chemistry, the movie infuses no logic into its characters' behavior. The handling of the most important discovery in human history is just stunningly incompetent at every level. If we ever send such a collection of morons as interstellar emissaries, the human race deserves to be exterminated. It's not just that the cast seems unfamiliar with basic safety protocols or simple contingency planning. Rather, they seem to be actively pursuing catastrophe. As Prometheus' crew stumbles from one easily avoidable disaster to the next, the viewer is left wondering "what did they think would happen?" In this movie, death is rarely the result of unlucky cascading failures or unpredictable turns of events. Instead, characters' demise is simply the most likely result of their own reckless actions. Everyone in this movie has a death wish.
'Prometheus' is similar to 'The Thing' and 'Star Wars' prequels. In each case, directors take a beloved classic and try to fill in the blanks. Not only do the new movies fail but they also suck the life out of the original films by ruining the mystery of it all. Someone needs to take the Alien franchise out back and put a bullet in its head. It's the humane thing to do.