When CGI takes over a film production

Rating: 3/10 (9 December 2012)

Prometheus in some ways reminds me to Batman and Robin. Both movies placed its main focus to something which it should not have. In the case of Batman and Robin, they made the world longest toy commercial instead of a movie, mainly because they wanted to sell toys. While in Prometheus instead making a movie with cgi, they made a cgi eye candy wrapped in some story. There's nothing wrong with using CGI, while You keep in mind its just a tool, like: make up, lighting, camera angles...etc. (And to be fair beside its focus error, "Prometheus" and "Batman and Robin" can not be matched together, sure its bad but not as bad as that toy commercial.)
The movie often feels like it was driven by CGI. For example:
The opening scene where the big-bold-alien dude drinks the black slime. Why the hell he would do that? They are advanced enough to make stuff which trigger evolution, but not advanced enough to synthetically mix it with there DNA. "Okay we have the stuff, this will create life, the only problem that its needs some DNA from us. How about one of us drinks it and die with horrifying pain?" Somehow I don't find the logic in this. Except if I look at it from outside the story. "Lets make one of the bold guys drink the black slime. So we can make some sweet cgi scene where his body starts to break down, and we can go inside its body and show how his cells mutate and all that stuff. It will look cool!" And there You have it cgi taking over story telling.
Or when they found the head. People-a: Oh my god, this can be the biggest discovery of humanity, and probably the only intact remain we will found from our creators, how seams to instinct long time ago.
People-b: So we gonna preserve it and carefully study it?
people-a: Nah lets just poke it with electricity till its blow up. It will be fun.
Seriously? I bet from 1000 scientist, 1000 would not react this way. Except when the filmmakers go "Oh lets make them blow up the head it will look awesome"
And the movie goes on with a series of similar events, which gives us nice created cgi scenes, but You just cant ignore that the characters and story are literally stupid or unbelievable.
The movie could get some credit for the idea that humanity was created by an alien race.
However this part quickly gets swapped in the background, and its kinda only gets mentioned when its reveled that the bold-alien dudes wanted to destroy us. But in the end this two facts just briefly mentioned and no explanation given.
And the second one fails even more if You think about it. Why on Earth would the bold-alien dudes create a biological weapon which could whip them out as well. Instead of simply bomb us down, or make something which only attacks humans. They probably had the technology. But nope, they went for the biological specie thing which got out of hand and kinda whipped them out.
And on top of this, the idea of humanity was engineered by aliens not a new idea. Its kinda a rip off from one of the episodes of Star Trek - Next Generation. Even the alien race which made us are kinda similar looking. Plus in Star Trek, they give a correct reason why they did such thing. (in short that race where explores, how discovered there are no other similar species in different planets. So they started evolution on countless planets, so they will not be alone in the universe, or if for some reason they get extinct, there still be similar live in the universe.)
And there's the backbone of the alien story's, the dark side of humanity, that they want to profit, explore, exploit things which they cant control, understand or simply not ready to confront jet. This is kinda in Prometheus too, with the old dude, how wants immortality and only financed the hole thing because of this. But this part is tiny, not explored and fail short.
if You happy to see cgi in its glory and don't want to bother with things like story and characters You probably will like Prometheus since the visual effects are eye candy.
But if You want to watch a movie, furthermore a GOOD movie, than go watch something else. Prometheus is a b-category Horror film, where most people only there to die in a gross way. The story have its weak not developed sparkles, and only exists for the death scenes, and cgi graphic. So its watchable once, and the the visual effects might make You enjoy it, but I would not watch it twice.