**SPOILER FREE REVIEW**
My experience of seeing
Prometheus ended thusly:
The final scene finished, cut to black. A few audience members chuckled. I sat there for a few seconds, processing what had just transpired in front of me for the last two hours, before rising from my seat and making my way toward the exit. I bumped into an older man in business attire--I must have looked as crestfallen as he did, because the first thing out of his mouth when we made eye contact was "Jesus, wasn't that
awful?" I nodded in agreement, not really sure what to say. As we staggered out of the cinema together, my companion continued "I love Ridley Scott, but that really was his worst film. I can't believe how
bad it was."
I wouldn't say it's Ridley Scott's worst film, but it definitely is a disaster.
There was a point about twenty minutes into this film when, despite all my reservations, my fannish adulation welled up and I was fully prepared to love this film. I was handing myself over to Ridley Scott on a silver platter, desperate to love it. The scenes introducing David were wonderful (minus the clunky Shaw dream bit). The score was better than I had given it credit for, with lots of excellent passages not featured on the terribly assembled soundtrack album. I suddenly felt a rush of hope from it all.
I don't feel like I can accurately assess
Prometheus, because I don't think what I just saw
was Prometheus. What I saw was an extended two hour
trailer for
Prometheus. This film features the worst edit job I have ever seen in a theatrical film. It has clearly been brutally hacked to ribbons--entire scenes are obviously transplanted from elsewhere in the narrative, sliced apart, and haphazardly thrown into the midst of other scenes without any thought toward narrative whatsoever. Shots jostle against one another seemingly at random, and the entire film is without any sense of momentum or dramatic tension.
The script is serviceable at best, awful at worst--merely a line for Ridley Scott to hang his stunning visuals upon, but even those cannot be enjoyed due to the madly rushed pacing; we are not allowed to absorb ourselves into these gorgeously production designed corridors or alien spaces, because Scott refuses to let a single shot last for more than two seconds. And to think I had myself all worked up over the film's story! There
isn't one. Characters are wholly uninteresting or outright idiotic, and Elizabeth Shaw is so pathetically conceived that despite her eye-rollingly cliche Hollywood backstory, this Ripley expy amounts to nothing more than Noomi Rapace running around looking winded for most of the runtime. The only cast member who makes a solid impression is Michael Fassbender, whose work here is stellar.
For all the ludicrous plot points (many of them alarmingly reminiscent of
AVP) and silly mythology, the best thing about the film is how completely inconsequential it is--it provides no direct link to
Alien, and therefore spares its masterful forebearer any ill aftereffects by association. "There is nothing", says Peter Weyland when he finally meets his maker, another one of the script's faux-profundities that does not so much say anything for life itself, as it does more accurately sum up the film around it.
