Because complaining is fun and makes us feel better about ourselves. At least I’m not as bad as the thing I’m complaining about.
So, I walked out in the middle of Prometheus last night, nauseated. That movie is completely disgusting. What on earth is wrong with you, movie people.
(Here’s what happened before that happened:
Boyfriend: Back from Vegas! Wanna go to Prometheus and then get some dinner?
Me: What’s Prometheus?
Boyfriend: Oh, my God, are you serious? It’s, um, science fiction. It’s the movie I’ve been talking about seeing for weeks and weeks? I’ll just go by myself.
Me: No, I like science fiction! And Greek mythology! Sounds like a fine time!
BF: Have you not even heard of this movie?
Me: Well, you. And people on Facebook are, like, talking about it. I don’t remember what they said. Let’s just go! [thinking about restaurant dinner])
I tell you this because I want you to know that I walked in with no expectations and a cheerful and open mind, not knowing it was a prequel and not remembering any positive or negative criticism from my peer group. Other than that my boyfriend was excited to see it, and that I respect his intelligence. It had already been ham-fisted, nonsensical, lazy, phoned-in, and godawfully acted from the start, and I whispered as I cowered into my BF’s shoulder, “I hate this movie! This movie is a dick!” when the dude had the space cobra emerge from a river of cave oil, break his arm, and dive down his esophagus. But when it got to the surgery robot thing, I literally became light-headed and was like, “All right. I’m not gonna let this movie abuse me anymore. I have to leave this relationship, movie.” And I told my boyfriend I had to go pass out now, and I left.
To be fair, I think I was already full-blown pissed within the first five or ten minutes at Chopin’s “Raindrop Prelude” playing on an endless loop while people did random shit on the ship. That’s my audition piano piece, and it’s a beautiful piece that I love, but it was just the first passage ON A LOOP. “Hey, it’s in the public domain! Free music! We’ll just massacre it to suit our purposes.” I mean, I guess it’s Ridley Scott–he pulled that same trick in Hannibal with Bach’s Goldberg Variations. (I guess the Goldberg Variations were in the book, though.) So there was probably no turning back for me at that point. But then there was so much dumbness to follow. What was up with the cyborg guy bleaching his roots? Why would a cyborg have hair that grows at all, and why would he then choose to BLEACH it? Is he a child’s doll? Why did they choose the cartographer, the least likely person out of all of the people, to get lost in the caves? You know, the guy who can be like, “There’s an unknown life form on the map somewhere west of us, so let’s just go east, because I intrinsically know which way east is here on this foreign planet in outer space.” Why, most of all, whenever they discovered some new alien life form, were these supposed Ph.D.s standing around with no masks on and their fingers in their mouths and their goddamn eyeballs resting on the specimen? Not dangerous at all, right? It’s not like this head of a person who died two thousand years ago is moving right now. How did the cyborg just somehow know that when he poisoned the boyfriend doctor, he would definitely go sleep the girlfriend doctor that very night? To implant the alien spawn in her body? And that he’d do it in the narrow window before he died? “Oh, well, he’s a cyborg, so whatever he does, it’s because he’s a cyborg. He’s all-knowing or whatever. Doesn’t need to be explained.” Lazy, lazy, lazy.
Then I wanted to fricking cry when the dude quotes (what I later found out was) Lawrence of Arabia and you just knew it was some high-minded piece of litera-chah and you’re being gigantically winked at and/or tested. Ugh. Punishing. I was much happier to find that I didn’t know what it was from.
Re. acting, it was all unpleasant, but Charlize Theron was unforgivable. I used to like her, too. Not that she had much of a chance with that stupid metallic dialogue, but she did about as badly as possible with it. Pretty sad when your best performance was as a mentally retarded person on a sitcom.
And then, you know, they had to make sure to kill people in the most revolting, horrifying ways possible. Plenty of heads exploding. This, of course, partially ties into my hate for horror movies in general and how I think it requires a depraved mind to enjoy depicting people’s heads exploding and them dying in maximum agony. (And another depraved mind to enjoy it.) Prometheus was just glorying in it, though. “Look how unhappy this character is right now! Let’s drag it out as much as possible. Yeah. Feels good to watch ‘em suffer.” You have to really hate human beings to call that art, whether you’re the artist or the spectator.
That said, I can appreciate a well crafted, well written horror movie with new ideas in it. This one was just, like, written by Beavis. “AND THEN ALL THEIR FACES EXPLODED. No, I don’t see any reason why it needs to make sense.”
You know, can I talk about the abortion machine again? Because in her negotiations with it, Girlfriend Doctor actually calls her desired procedure a “Caesarean!” Which pertains to a live birth, not an abortion, FYI. At no point does she or the cyborg dude ever say the word “abortion.” We’ll show people’s faces exploding, but talking about abortion would be crossing the line of good taste. Even if it’s in reference to an alien squid baby. Simply not done.
Also, do these people actually know what a Caesarean section is? And how it works? I’m not a doctor of medicine or anything, but I’m pretty sure you don’t just make a shallow slice in the woman’s epidermis and then the fetus is hanging out right underneath her skin and you can reach in with the robot arm from the stuffed animal claw game at Denny’s and pluck it right out, without accuracy or precision. There’s this whole thing called a uterus. I also feel like this is really accessible, easily had knowledge. I, for example, learned about how babies grow inside women’s bodies in, oh, the 6th grade. I suppose “completion of the 6th grade” isn’t a requirement for writing a screenplay, but imagining you didn’t have the same getting-to-go-to-public-junior-high-school privileges I did, I’m still willing to bet there’s a wiki on Caesarean sections. Caesar’s mom had one. They’re famous.
Just a fantastic failure of a movie. I’m a huge cheapskate too, so if I walk out of a movie, you know it was bad. Because I, apparently, have to be physically nauseated before I’ll cut my losses. I think the last movie I walked out of was Bulworth.
I have more to say on this topic, I’m sure, but for now: Prometheus is obscene, gross, and insultingly stupid. Fuck everything about it. Don’t see.
megvanhuygen
