Prometheus (Film Review)

[selenak]

This was another film which deeply divided my flist into nays and yays..  As it finally was released in Germany yesterday, I watched it myself, and am firmly among the yays. It's an individual reaction. You may not share it.  But let me explain why I loved a great deal of what I saw.

Comments

[likeadeuce]

Glad you enjoyed this -- I could see the flaws many people found in it, but I ultimately didn't care because there was so much I enjoyed.

Let us know if you find interesting fic. . .I'm certainly intrigued by Shaw & by the odd Weyland family dynamic.

[selenak]

Same here. Of course it's flawed. But I loved it anyway. I'll put up a rec post for the stories, promised.

[ide_cyan]

Didn't the holographic map remind you of "DNA Mad Scientist"?

Also: the movie calls it a c-section, not an abortion, and it's emphasised by the alien fetus not dying.

[selenak]

No, presumably because I haven't watched the episode six or seven years.

If we want to get technical, the movie says the machine can't perform a c-section because it's programmed for male users only, Shaw then tells it to regard it as a hostile parasitic body, and while it survives the operation, she does her level best to get it killed via sterilization. That it survives is due to the established rules of the 'verse (short of being sucked into vaccuum, Aliens survive anything), not to her intention, which is to kill it. Ergo I don't think metaphoric abortion is too much of a comparison.

[leviathan0999]

I've got to say, while I liked Fassbender and his performance, I thought the movie as a whole was a pretty abject failure.

That in itself is no big thing. Sure it basically reproduces the beats of "Alien" to no greater effect, but that's no great crime.

What is, in my opinion, is the way that, if you allow it into your "Alien" canon, it cheapens the original Alien by retconning many of the coolest, most original concepts into something gigantically more bland and ordinary. When we see the holographic recordings of perfectly human shapes running around with "Space Jockey" heads, my guts just plummetted, and when, by the end of the movie, we were told that that fascinating, non-human, biomechanoid creature who was somehow a part of his starship was really just a big muscular bald guy in a suit of nonsensically-ugly armor, I wanted to throw things.

I will say that the set design and realisation of the future world in which the story takes place were stunning. But when I'm watching a movie, and thinking, That's really impressive set

[ponygirl2000]

The early scenes with David alone and watching Lawrence of Arabia were my favourite in the film. Now I know you love the messy family dynamics but how do you feel about Lindelof - and I really do think it was him because of the Lost echoes - bringing Daddy Issues to a franchise that as you note has always been about motherhood? That really annoyed me, because it feels like such familiar territory, for Lindelof and for movies in general - I did appreciate that Shaw went instantly for the abortion without any waffling though.

[selenak]

Oh, I'm sure it was Lindelof. Rich old lousy dads playing favourites are right up his alley. However a) it wasn't the dominating plot line - I mean, it formed how David and Vickers interacted with each other, yes, but we saw David interacting with Shaw and Holloway mainly, so I didn't have the impression it was all about Dad for him as much as it was about being surrounded by his creators, plural, who themselves were searching for their creators. What I'm trying to say is, I guess, it felt organic to this particular film rather than forced on it. If this had been Alien V. and we'd suddenly hear Ripley has daddy issues, now that would have pissed me off. Here, it felt okay in the amount it was there and connected with all the other issues.

[selenak]

Also, I thought the Lawrence of Arabia thing brought up some interesting connections between colonialism and creationism, and how both involve an entirely unjustified belief that something very powerful will also be benevolent.

That, and Lawrence of Arabia is very much about identities built up and discarded/destroyed, one by one. The Lawrence of the film is in one way a liminal figure, between worlds, and while that for a while works to his advantage in the end it also leaves him unable to belong to either world and unable to keep an identity he can be at peace with. It's also very much a product of the 60s, with a scriptwriter/playwright (Robert Bolt) and a director (David Lean) who both were deeply interested in neurotic, broken characters.

thought it was interesting how it used the two hot-button issues that code someone as a certain kind of religious - abortion and creationism. Elizabeth begins by denying evolution, and David attempts to do a really horrifying forced birth. Though the later is the Ur-nightmare of the entire