Holy Scott Free! I sprinted to the theater last night to see Prometheus 'cause I've been pretty much DYING for this one, and left Regal with these three words spinning like a gyroscope in freefall through my head: Jumped. The. Shark.Yeah. I know.Ever been to a movie that felt like the screenwriters had gathered for a pre-production brainstorm, wrote down a list of say, a hundred plot points and events, threw them all in a hat, picked the first 25-50, and said, "All right. Let's lay these out in random order and just fill in some basic information in between to make it seem like they all cohere into a more-or-less comprehensible *cough* story, shall we? Oh, by the way, Set and Effects Departments, could you make sure that there's something pretty happening on the screen so the audience will at least feel like the 3D glasses were worth the extra two bucks? Yeah, that would be great."There will be a number of spoilers ahead because I really don't feel like this movie could be any more spoiled. Just so you know.Let's start with characters and character development. No really, Ridley, let's have some. We'd appreciate that in our big screen entertainment. Otherwise, this aimless collection of people walking around sharing bits of disjointed dialogue that frequently has nothing to do with what's actually occurring in the movie is a bit hard to make sense of and not in the least engaging. Let me see if I can sum up for you: two scientists, one of which is more of a dudemanguybro than an actual archeologist, who wish to meet an alien life form who they postulate created humans because, well, how cool would that be? A tough-as-nails, bitchy ship commander who...spends two hours being a tough-as-nails, bitchy ship commander. A gaggle of "scientists" who, in their minimal screen time, behave like a bunch of petulant ten-year-olds who woke up on the wrong side of the bed and fail to actually perform any scientific activities before encountering slimy alien-beings (which, in a totally unsurprising turn of events, promptly attack and destroy). And some ship crewpersons who...crew the ship.That about it? Oh, there was Idris Elba, the wry, pragmatic, hardbitten-but-in-the-end-heroic ship captain. And let's face it, I could watch Idris Elba play a man in a coma and be content for hours. If the movie had been two hours of Idris kicking alien ass and taking tongue-twisting alien names, there might have been a chance it wouldn't have sucked. Might have been.Then there was Michael Fassbender's character, David, the sinister yet necessary (and compulsory, given this being essentially a prequel to Alien) android. Or is that artificial human? In any case, Fassbender pulls off his role with acceptable believability. But would someone please give that man a meatball sandwich? After making Hunger—a stunning film about the hunger strike by IRA-activist Bobby Sands—he apparently didn't get the memo that it's okay for his size-to-weight ratio to be within normal human range.Finally, there was the star of the movie, Noomi Rapace, who plays Doctor Elizabeth Shaw. In the annals of movie stars, I am absolutely certain there's never been another actor who matches her amazing range of distraught chin-quivering. Which is about all she does throughout the film.The moment where the film completely lost me came about forty minutes in. After the sinister robot infects the dudemanguybro with some alien goo, and dudemanguybro and Shaw have an emotional moment about her being unable to reproduce followed by having steamy space sex, Dr. Shaw winds up, gasp!, pregnant. Apparently, this is what the bad robot had planned all along, but how he could have known this would be the result of the goo-laced champagne he gave dudemanguybro is anyone's guess.That's not what lost me, however. Here's where things go from corny to worse. Dr. Shaw learns of this illicit pregnancy and decides to have the extremely handy all-in-one surgery performing booth (which the audience was introduced to early in the film in a moment of totally in-your-face "foreshadowing." Really, it would have been more entertaining if Ridley had just made a cameo appearance during that scene and said something like, "Listen up everyone, this cool piece of tech is going to come in handy later. Wait for it. Waaaaaaaait for it.") give her an emergency C-section with only local anesthetic. The one thing us gore-lovers did get to enjoy was a gritty close-up of this massive open wound, the subsequent removal of the alien baby (which resembled a large wad of phlegm more than anything), and Noomi getting some well-aimed stomach staples.You caught the part where I mentioned this was only forty minutes into the film, right? That's important because after this major abdominal surgery, our heroine gets to run around and fight baddies for another hour and twenty or so. Let me repeat: jump the shark. And for some super questionable script writing, not a single one of the other characters even asks her why she's running around the ship in her bloody underwear with a bunch of staples in her stomach. 'Cause, yunno, apparently in Ridley's imaginings of the near-future, there's nothing strange about that. People have random abdominal surgeries all the time, right? And are more than capable of going for a few laps around the perimeter moments later, right? Right?Let's move on to theme, of which there were a few running through the movie: thwarted mommyhood being the most blaring, which, again, is apparently compulsory in any Alien-derivative piece. There were threads of Freudian parenting and psychosexual development theories, along with touches on the Cassandra Complex, but these moments keep bumping up against sequences of alien attacks and nasty alien viruses causing people to explode. The overall experience was to leave the audience awash in a daze of discomfort and confusion.In the end, the film was simply unsettling. As mentioned, the visuals and some of the tech were quite an achievement. However, they were lost on Prometheus. Too many pointless characters, short bursts of action, and conflicting themes all tumbled around on the screen in disconnected fragments. In a simile that perhaps Ridley would approve of: after all of Prometheus's hype and promise, the experience was somewhat like having the Corporation's drone try to stuff a rolled up magazine down your throat. Some things just don't work out well.Bechdel Test status: Passes. Barely.UPDATE: Another review of Prometheus that is absolutely spot on. Delves more deeply into the vag symbolism (um, should one ever use the words "delves deeply" and "vag" in the same sentence? You be the judge.)
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