Lost Opportunity

Rating: 2/10 (12 April 2013)

In honor of Roger Ebert's recent passing, I'm going to quote one of his reviews, for a different movie ("Tommy Boy"), because I feel like it's just so appropriate to Prometheus: "... is one of those movies that plays like an explosion down at the screenplay factory. You can almost picture a bewildered office boy, his face smudged with soot, wandering through the ruins and rescuing pages at random. Too bad they didn't mail them to the insurance company instead of filming them." The plot of Prometheus is just so riddled with inconsistencies - with cause and effect nodding strangers, at best - that you can never really get involved with the movie. It's pretty to look at, but you'll never feel the primal and suffocating fear, the mounting horror that you felt when, for example, in Alien, the crew of the Nostromo was being stalked by a relentless and pitiless fate.
David's actions, in particular, are completely inexplicable. Other than the obvious "why bother to wear a helmet when he doesn't breathe?", why did he poison the doctor with some black liquid he found leaking from a canister? Because it's "organic?" And he could determine that, how, exactly?
Here we have an interstellar-capable society - and they don't have any kinds of tools to analyze what the substance was, and what it might do? "I know", thinks David, "I'll slip a mickey into the doc's drink and see what happens. Serves him right for mocking me." Why did he randomly turn on various alien gadgets, and how did he understand the symbols, not to mention language? I know, they try to imply that somehow, the Engineers taught us language or "their" language. But seriously, why would they teach us hundreds of languages, all of them their own? W
hy would the aliens leave a roadmap to their non-homeworld? And recall, those were planets, not stars on the map - not only would they not be visible from Earth, but they'd be constantly in motion. Even if they were stars, think 5 stars might move dramatically in thousands of years? Basically, that's like finding 5 grains of sand on the beach, and saying "Ooh, I've seen that pattern before." Imagine spending a trillion dollars to send an expedition on such weak "evidence."
And really, this advanced (Earth) civilization, which can master interstellar travel, designs a surgical machine that's only calibrated for *men*? What's the matter, not enough RAM?
Apparently, the cylinders were all packed with kind of mutagen, that created random "things." So, what, this ancient, super-advanced (and apparently ultra-violent) society doesn't know how to create a container that doesn't leak? Anyway, an advanced society millions of years old would certainly have the technology to create a weapon to wipe out humanity with a weapon or virus or at least something that they could avoid spilling and killing themselves. And geez, some dark dirty caves? What an awesome place to design and manufacture biological weapons.
And, what, some single guy offing himself and dumping his DNA into a waterfall in ancient times would result in dinosaurs, fruitbats, organgutans, trees, fishies, oh, and humans, too?
The behavior of the "biologist" "Here, snakey, snakey" was ridiculous - and really, the behaviors of all of the scientists - "Ooh, look, some unknown cells are growing - let's plug some electricity into this mummified head and see what happens."
I thought "Alien", with their rather blue-collar crew, spoke to the commoditization and routine of space travel - basically, they were like merchant marines. In Promentheus, these were supposedly scientists, but their illogic and rash actions were anything but "scientific." Like taking off your helmet in an alien environment that could be (and should be) crawling with unknown organisms - remember the leaking canisters?
Just absurdity after absurdity.
On the plus side, Michael Fassbinder delivers a great performance as David; think a less overtly violent, but equally treacherous Roy Batty, from Blade Runner, meets Peter O'Toole's "Lawrence of Arabia" - (not that the movie leaves you in any doubt about the latter model.) Cool, chaotic, he had the best lines in the movie (not that there were many.)
And Noomi Rapace (this movie's "Ripley"), always commands attention when she's on the screen. There's just something about her ...
Visually, it was nice, but it can't overcome the lack of a properly edited script.
Poor Idris Elba, I think he was supposed to be modeled on Sgt Apone (from Aliens 2), but that accent was just ridiculous.
Finally - is it me, or was Weyland the spitting image of Keir Dullea's "Old Man" sequence in 2001?
In concept, this movie had tremendous possibilities. But the illogic of the script and cookie-cutter characters left me badly disappointed.