Moisture on Top

It looked really nice, I'll give it that. The command deck, the buggys, the suits, they all made me want to daydream about space travel. The production value is at an unbelievable level; nothing looks at all fake or computer-generated (except that opening scene).

That opening scene will be telling of the rest of the two odd hours you'll be spending next. Not exactly in terms of underscored poignancy but instead in noticeable slowness and slight confusion. This scene contains a humanoid being who runs up a cliff and in a sort of solitary ceremony drinks something. Ugly things happen to him quite soon, and he falls down the falls by the cliff and decays in seconds. Maybe this is explained later but I did not get it.

The thing is, it's not exactly bad, that scene, but it's not very good either. Things happen for no reason. It's as if the editor was on strike. We have Idris Elba and Charlize Theron suddenly flirting. We have Idris Elba sort of making a half speech to a Noomi Rapace who is dressing. We have a Noomi Rapace who is just back from surgery (a ceasarian by all accounts), and hobbles away, and runs away from the frackas without much problem only a little while later.

There are a multitude of problems. Is Logan Marshall-Green likeable? Not at all. He quickly sulks and drinks and dies. We are happy with his death. There is Michael Fassbender who is quite a creep, totally has no bedside manners, and seemingly didn't have someone to program in some common sense in his manufacture? What if those vases were actually bombs? What if there were destructive things behind those doors? What was the point of the infestation (though I imagine it has something to do with some good old male jealousy, making him even more of a creep). His being inorganic is not a case of the vampires and the zombies in The New Deadwardians. Guy Pearce is massively under-utilised here and he totally fails as a character by not invoking any emotion or care from me.

The problem is that everyone is more or less stupid. The ship did not fall in half a second. It was actually quite a slow, dragging flow down. Whatever happened to those frequent looking back you exhibited moments ago? Why did Idris Elba not lead the lost crew back to the mouth of the dome, so they could be retrieved easier after the storm?

And even more than that, you just don't care for any of them. You almost despise them.

Another problem is how it mimics Alien. Besides not being a huge fan of that, it's never a good idea to ape something. There's the common themes of some guns-for-hire, an android, the pregnancy, the infestation(s). Etcetera. They work in a sense. For example the android has some nice new touches, and lends a little philosophical complication (but a little too much of a trifle, I think). The pregnancy was a nice bout of body horror. The guns for hire was under-used so much (who were the seventeen, I only knew that a couple of them died almost instantly as we saw them). Outside those too familiar plot points, there isn't much to gain from this. What Fassbender told the engineer piques my interest, as does why the engineers wanted to kill us.

But two interesting points at the end of a movie does not make a recommendation. It comes too late, at the back of dreg at that. I can't say I was totally at attention at any time.

(Prometheus - Ridley Scott)